Happy Wednesday!
OoOo, weeeee, it's that time of the year that feels so fresh, sunny, and light, and, well, spring is in the air. I know it's a week away, but it's so close I can almost taste it. Can't you!?!? Regardless, the end of daylight savings time is here, and as a day person who thrives on the light, I feel like I've gained two more hours to my day, so yay.
Today's agenda is:
An update on the Shopify category page ads
Reviews on the Shopify app store
Who you gonna call!?
An app spotlight for Shopify Partners
Category page ads
Even Shopify can have challenges when rolling out new features or offerings. I am a fangirl for life, but wowsa, this rollout was messy to say the least.
Round 1: Set up campaigns with the default budget of $10/day at a $5 CPC. That seems reasonable, so I set up a few campaigns to get off the ground and see what happened.
Round 2: Later that day, I went to set up a new campaign, and the default budget was $300/day at a $15 CPC. Some of us were complaining on X, and support told me they were fixing the issue.
Round 3: Support told me the issue has been fixed, but the daily budget minimum is $100.
Round 4: Order is restored to setting reasonable daily budgets.
That's the abridged version, but if you follow me on X, you would have seen the carnage in more detail. The good news is that Shopify listens and isn't afraid to take action on your feedback.
Lesson: As a software-as-service company run by humans, we will encounter mistakes. Things will not always go according to plan. Communication with users and partners is essential. That is where Shopify failed, IMO. Their communication throughout was poor. It's okay to make mistakes or have feature rollouts that are a bit rocky, but we should communicate with customers throughout, no matter what. I did get a DM from them after a failed email attempt on their side. They did communicate with me directly, and I appreciated that immensely.
Shopify app store reviews
I love a bad review from time to time, especially when it doesn't refer to bad service or a buggy or terrible app. If the review talks about the price being too high or something benign and evident to people reading it, those are the best. Having a casual bad review in a sea of 5-star reviews gives the good reviews more weight than if they didn't exist. Customers can see right through the snark and sass from people who hate life and have nothing better to do than complain.
But if the review has legs and is about something that failed on your end—bad service, bugs, something that impacted the merchant's business that you could have mitigated but didn't—what do you do? Do you have a process in place to deal with these reviews both publicly and privately? A couple of episodes ago, we discussed checklists, and this is a place where a checklist process would come in handy.
The goal should be twofold:
Reach out to the merchant immediately! I don't care if it's on the weekend. If your app's negligence is impacting their business, you should make it your #1 priority to communicate with them. Remember what I said above about Shopify?
Mitigate risks of new merchants looking at your app as a potential solution and seeing a scathing review that will damage their impression. You will want to reverse that review to a good one ASAP.
Should you publicly respond to the reviews directly on the app store?
It depends. If the review is benign and they refuse to act reasonably after you contact them to make things right, use your best judgment so long as you plan to stay neutral in tone. If your app is the root cause of their issue and you can fully own it with a plan of action to fix it, you should respond so long as you can do it in a way that sounds actionable, professional, and like you understand their pain.
An app spotlight
Mantle is an all-in-one platform for Shopify apps. It was built by ex-Shopify employees who are incredibly smart and passionate about Shopify. When you book a call with their team, buckle up because the energy is infectious. They are developing the platform nonstop to become even more robust, from which apps can benefit. The pricing is scalable based on your business size and will grow as you grow—we know I love that pricing model.
That’s it for today! Thanks for reading and being a part of my little slice of the ecosystem every Wednesday.
Deb
Follow me on X for the in between the newsletter shenanigans. Sometimes I’m funny. Sometimes I’m insightful. Sometimes I’m snarky. And almost all of the time I’m hungry and thinking about food.