Written by Derek Aten | 4/22/2022
Each month for the last couple of years, I have had the pleasure of speaking with large eCommerce companies. The majority of the executives I speak with are Shopify Plus merchants. We discuss different marketing strategies, business insights, and challenges that we face in the industry; the most common being scalability and extensibility.
Here at Killer Merch, we have large merchants that utilize flash drops in order to pull high levels of traffic onto their stores within a small window of time. In the past, we have had incidents in which Jeffree Star Cosmetics broke the Shopify platform. For Killer Merch, it is critical that we align with partners who assist in scaling our business and consistently provide us with excellent customer support.
In June 2021, Shopify released an upgrade to their platform called ‘checkout extensions’. This upgrade allowed us to use marketplace applications that directly integrate with Shopify applications. Checkout extensions were Shopify’s solution for merchants that requested a customized checkout experience. In return, they removed access to ‘checkout.liquid’, where merchants previously added their customizations.
In November 2021, Killer Merch implemented post-transaction offers using ‘Rebuy’ on Danny Duncan’s website (www.dannyduncan69.com). Post-transaction offers are displayed after a customer places their order before they arrive at the ’thank you’ page. This offer provides customers with a last-second option to add additional products to their order. For Danny Duncan, we offered a $6.00 lanyard; 50% off the retail price. During November, 10% of all customers added the lanyard to their order via the post-transaction offer. This was a fantastic opportunity to increase AOV.
The campaign was extremely successful. That is until we received a call from operations. A handful of orders containing the discounted lanyard were on ‘hold’ within Shopify, unable to automatically download into our order management system. Here’s what we discovered: if the second payment was declined or failed to process, Shopify would send an email to the customer requesting payment. Each order remained in ‘hold’ status until the customer responded and completed payment. For small businesses, this is a great opportunity to increase sales and secure a second payment. For large merchants that use automation to process orders, this payment flow would wreak havoc on the operating systems.
I contacted the Shopify engineering team, and they explained that this was the architecture implemented to capture additional revenue. From there, I was able to connect the Rebuy and Shopify engineering teams. After a multitude of architectural discussions, we agreed on a temporary payment flow. The new payment flow increased awareness to the customer, informing them that the second payment had failed. Once again, the customer would immediately receive an email requesting payment. The customer was given one hour to complete payment, otherwise, the product was automatically removed from their order.
The process of modifying the payment flow took roughly five months to complete. In May 2022, Killer Merch reimplemented post-transaction offers on our clients’ stores. So far, we have seen that 5% to 10% of all orders contain post-transaction products.
One of the main challenges Shopify continues to experience is developing for both small and large merchants. When selecting software applications, make sure each application has a strong team behind it that is willing to go the extra mile. Rebuy took this project on in order to enhance the customer experience. In the near future, Shopify will improve its processes and provide a long-term solution.
A warm thank you to Duc Pham, Matt Kanfer, Nick Hein from the Rebuy team, and Sarah Schroeder from the Shopify team for driving this project home. I appreciate the hard work and look forward to maintaining a great partnership.
