Reasons to Integrate

Amazon, with its vast customer base and advanced logistics network, offers unmatched visibility and accessibility for your products. On the other hand, Shopify gives you complete control over your online store’s appearance, brand narrative, and customer interactions. Integrating these platforms allows you to leverage the strengths of both: Amazon’s vast reach, combined with Shopify’s customization capabilities.

You can manage both platforms from one dashboard, centralize inventory and order management, and save time by automating various processes such as listing items for sale or updating pricing and stock levels. Ultimately, integrating Shopify and Amazon can streamline your operations, boost your brand exposure across multiple channels, and increase revenue streams.

Challenges and Solutions

However, the integration process can present some hurdles. First, there’s the issue of SEO and keyword optimization. Unlike Amazon, which incorporates a keyword-based search algorithm, Shopify does not have a built-in keyword feature. This means that your product listings on Shopify might not align perfectly with Amazon’s search environment, which could potentially downgrade your rankings on Amazon. To counter this, consider using Shopify apps like Plug in SEO or SEO Manager that can help you optimize your product descriptions and meta tags.

Another challenge pertains to the product images. Amazon has strict guidelines for main product images (white background, covering at least 85% of the image frame etc.), whereas Shopify provides more flexibility, allowing you to implement lifestyle or in-context images. When integrating it’s crucial to ensure compliance with Amazon’s rules to prevent any disruption in your Amazon sales. One solution could be to use an image editing tool or hire a professional to ensure your images fit Amazon’s criteria.

It’s important to remember that as much as Shopify boosts the creativity of your brand, Amazon’s competitive landscape requires strategic optimization. You may need to adjust your product titles, descriptions, and search terms to match high-performing sellers on Amazon. Amazon’s “Brand Analytics” provides insights into competing products and high-conversion search phrases to help you optimize your listings.

Lastly, keeping the pricing consistent across both platforms might seem challenging due to the referral fees on Amazon. However, strategic pricing tactics and the careful calculation of profit margins can help keep the pricing inconsistencies to a bare minimum.

To conclude, integrating Shopify and Amazon does present some challenges, but with a thoughtful approach, they can certainly be overcome. The benefits of increased brand visibility, centralized operations, and potential revenue growth make it worth the effort. By familiarizing yourself with each platform’s distinctive features and capabilities, you can maximize their potential while mitigating any drawbacks, positioning your e-commerce business for multi-channel success.

One major factor that can impact the accuracy of Google Analytics data is cookie blocking. Cookies are small pieces of data that are stored on a user’s device and used to track their browsing habits. Some users may block cookies in their browser settings, which can prevent Google Analytics from tracking their website visits. This can result in underreporting of website traffic, as the data only reflects the visits from users who have not blocked cookies.

Another factor that can impact the accuracy of Google Analytics data is changes to iOS that block tracking information. In 2017, Apple released iOS 11, which introduced a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). ITP uses machine learning to identify and block third-party cookies, which are used by many tracking tools, including Google Analytics. This can result in underreporting of website traffic, as the data only reflects the visits from users who are not using iOS devices with ITP enabled.

There are also other factors that can impact the accuracy of Google Analytics data. For example, some users may use ad blockers or privacy extensions that block tracking scripts, which can prevent Google Analytics from tracking their website visits. Additionally, some users may use VPNs or proxy servers, which can make it difficult to accurately track their location and demographics.

It’s important to be aware of these limitations when using Google Analytics and to consider other sources of data when analyzing your website traffic. While Google Analytics is a valuable tool for tracking and analyzing website traffic, it’s not the only source of data and should not be relied upon exclusively.

In conclusion, Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking and analyzing website traffic, but it’s important to be aware of the limitations of the data it provides. Factors such as cookie blocking and changes to iOS that block tracking information can impact the accuracy of the data. It’s important to consider other sources of data when analyzing your website traffic and to be aware of the limitations of Google Analytics.

But CloudFlare does other things than just deliver copies of your network. It also provides protection against various forms of attacks, and it provides a fast nameserver service for your website – a nameserver is what allows visitors to find your site.

Think of a Content Delivery Network (or CDN) as basically a chain of outposts for your website with location all around the world, and your name on the door.

But my website works fine – isn’t that enough?
No, it’s not really nowadays. The days of hosting a static website on a server in a corner of a data center is over. With the current speed of mobile/cell phones, and internet connections people expect a rapid website. Now, if you’re a local shop owner in – say – Santa Barbara – and your provider is just down the road, it might very well be enough, and nothing else is needed. At least until someone takes a run at your website and either tries to crash it, or even worse – hack it. You see a CDN does more than just provide faster service. It also protects against a DDOS attack, and can provide Firewall rules. Even if you have your own Firewall, they can protect your site from ever being reached. You can actually hide your website completely behind a CDN so nobody can see where it is.

CloudFlare also provides a fast, free DNS, which is always a plus.

It also means you can save $$$ on your hosting plan, since you can have a small server behind the CDN as they provide the horsepower for serving the data to the world.

Benefits:

• Firewall
• DNS service
• DDOS protection
• Content Serviing

The best part of CloudFlare is that the basic Tier is free. As in zero dollars. There is no sensible argument for NOT using them, even IF you’re a local shop, and once you go from local to regional, national or worldwide it’s an absolute must.

Try to go to amazon.com – see how fast it loads. Despite having thousands and thousands (millions by now?) of products, their website loads very fast.

Does your site load as fast? It should, and it can. Especially if you run an ecommerce website.

How much does it matter. Research is showing that once you pass 2 seconds load time, people start abandoning your website. Two seconds. Count them… One… Two… And your revenue starts dropping. That is not a lot of time. Think about it – have you visited a site where the pages are slow and thought “COME ON” – we all have, and that is not good for business.

The load speed has a psychological effect, same as in a store – how quickly do you get service? Nobody likes to wait. Quicker service feels psychologically more professional.

But this is not something that happens by itself. Most ecommerce shops on WordPress runs WooCommerce. If you install this, and run a simple shop from there your load times might be as much as 4-6 seconds per page. This is too slow. It can – and should – be made faster. There are multiple techniques to reach this.

First you need a good host. Running a store in a shared environment with other shops is not recommended. You need a proper dedicated instance which only hosts your website. Preferably a scalable one, where you can scale up the power available as your business grows.

Second you need to have a cache module installed in WordPress itself. A cache modules basically combines resources on your page, and serves them as one, and creates faster, static copies of pages.

Finally you need to use a Content Delivery Network such as CloudFlare which can service your website even faster since they have a local copy of it.

Neither of these things need to be expensive, but they do need to be set up and implemented properly. The load speed also need to be monitored over time, as WordPress is a bit of a slob, and the database can slow down if not cleaned from time to time.

Recently on one of our sites we had the issue that the server periodically was massively overloaded, and the website slowed to a crawl. The server had a load factor of over 75 – full load was 4 (yes, four), so it was overloaded with almost a factor 20. The reason? A bad bot. A specific bot was trying to index the site at a ferocious speed. This was enough to completely overload the otherwise proper sized webserver for the client.

Bots such as Semrush Bot, MJ12 Bot and DotBot just needlessly slow down your website.

216.244.66.242 - - [01/Oct/2021:10:11:51 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 255 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)"

But aren’t bots good? Yes, most are. We all want our sites to be included in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo etc, however there are some indexing services which are NOT being used for search indexes. Instead the data are being used internally for their customers to show comparative data and in order to provide a service to their clients. This means that unless YOU are their client, you have absolutely ZERO benefit from this. One might even argue that you have a negative benefit, as it might allow competitor analysis on your site from your competitors.

So – why allow it? There is NO benefit to doing so for you, and you really should block them.

How to block them.

There are 2 simple methods (we recommend using both) to blocking them completely. One is to block them on your server itself. In order to do that, you can change your .htaccess for apache to prevent them (we can help you do that).

The other method is to block the site in CloudFlare (or whichever other CDN you’re using. You are using a CDN right?). You do this from their Firewall settings.

Once you have done this, you’re no longer providing free data to another company, and lower the change of your website being overrun by bad Robots.

The two biggest platforms are Shopify and WordPress (with WooCommerce). But what is the difference? Is one more expensive than the other?

There are some major differences between how the platforms work.

Shopify is a dedicated ecommerce platform built for that purpose. They’re not meant to host regular websites (it wouldn’t make sense), and they provide a complete integrated platform for ecommerce.

WooCommerce is an ecommerce extension built on top of WordPress. WordPress is the worlds most used Content Management Platform and there are almost 50mio websites hosted on WordPress.

What do we recommend? This certainly depends on the purpose and content if your site. If your site is a pure shop-only website, you can use either. It might be quicker to get started with Shopify, but it also carries a monthly cost, which can add up if you need several modules. If you’re running a site with a mix of content and ecommerce, you absolutely need to do it on WooCommerce.

If you’re selling subscription services, it tends to get more complicated. Those are available on Shopify, but are somewhat expensive, and due to Shopify’s integrated platform, they are built externally. This means you are no longer using the Shopify platform entirely, and it can get a tad messy from our point of view. This can be solved easier on WooCommerce, but it does require additional modules, but has not extra transaction cost.

Shopify advantages:

• Integrated platform
• Great themes (costs between $100-$500)
• Good statistics
• Payment systems provided

WooCommerce advantages

• Complete control over everything
• Cheaper to get started
• If your website has both regular content and ecommerce you can do a lot more

So unfortunately the answer to “What do we recommend” is – it depends. As much as we hate that answer ourselves, it really does. We do lean towards shopify for ecommerce, since the backend is easier to manage for most non-tech people, and the whole interface feels a lot more streamlined, but it depends on what your goals are for your site.

You can go and buy some very nice themes, which good. These can be pretty cheap, and you can be up and running in no time. But there are a couple of caveats to doing it this way. First of all not all themes are built for fast load speed, and secondly you’re in the hands of the theme builder. Is the theme still being updated? If not, it will likely break sooner or later when a new version of WordPress comes out.

A better way to build a site is with a fast base theme, such as GeneratePress,  and use a page builder such as Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder etc. In our house we use both Elementor and Divi, but prefer Elementor as it’s geared more towards customization, where Divi is focused more on prebuilt layouts. Over time Divi has also become a bit bloated and not as streamlined as Elementor. This might of course change, and Elementor might end up being bloated as well.

If you’re building an ecommerce site, selecting a theme focused on this is advantageous as Elementor and Divi are weak on this point. It will require quite a bit of m a manual coding to layout the cart, checkout and account pages to make them look good. Instead we would recommend WooCommerce’s own Storefront theme which is specifically built for this purpose.

With Elementor (or Divi) you can build the website visually with only a minimal amount of coding involved. Many people are using Elementor to built a site from scratch without having a pre-defined layout first. You can use it either way – having the design done beforehand by a designer, who creates the layout in photoshop, or you can play around and built it without having a predefined layout.

In our experience how to do it depends on the site of the website. If you’re creating a small website with a page or two, you can do that without having it designed first. However, if you’re building a larger site, such as an ecommerce site, we do recommend having it designed first, to ensure there is a coherent layout throughout the website and on all pages. Otherwise the website builder will also have to spend a lot of time while building each page to make sure the layout is coherent.

Rarely would we recommend using a prebuilt theme, as we feel the downsides are too big. But there are many ways to accomplish what you’re after, and it all depends on timeframe, budget and future plans.

You need not just multiple backups, you also need to actually TEST how to restore everything if disaster strikes. Have you tried this? You should. We’ve seen (and experienced) trying to restore a backup only to find it was maddeningly convoluted.

Disasters happen. They can happen at several levels. At the simplest level, someone deletes a post by accident. This is easy enough to recover from the backup. Or is it? The problem is the backup has the entire site, and what if there have been other changes since. Now it’s suddenly not that simple any longer, because if you restore the latest backup you might lose changes since then, or even worse – customer orders.

Let’s take it a step further – your site gets deleted. By accident or by malice, this can happen. What then? How do you get it up and running again fast? If you’re running a WordPress site, you need to set up WordPress again, install the program you took the backups with, and then… Wait, you didn’t save the backups on the webserver did you? If not you can just restore it from your offsite backup (here is where the offsite comes into play), but if the backup was just a copy on the server itself, your site or shop is now basically burned to the ground and gone.

What happens if the datacenter where it’s located burns? Rare, yes, but it’s happened before. So your backup was offsite, but still in the same datacenter? Then your data was burned to the ground as well.

For a multitude of reasons you should not trust a single backup location, or backup program – what happens if the files are defective due to a bug in the backup program, and all your backups are basically unreadable? You need backups at multiple levels, and locations.

It might sound overly complicated, and you might think we’re paranoid. Chances are you’ll be fine, and will never need it. But think of it like insurance. You’ll be really happen you have it, once disaster strikes.

So, how do we do backups in-house?

We do it at 3 levels basically – from the outside we take snapshots of the entire server within our hosting system. We can use those to near-instantly restore a complete site – even elsewhere if needed.

At the second level we do it in the server itself, where we take backups stored both on the server (for a quick restore), and copies stored remotely.

Finally we do it within WordPress (with for example UpdraftPlus) – this takes a copy of your website to 1+ offsite locations, and can do it frequently. This also allows us to do offsite development of a site, where we copy the site to the development server – do the work, and copy it back.

So yes, we use both several belts, and multiple suspenders. Once set up, it runs by itself (we still test it periodically to make sure the backups actually work), and our sites are protected against all but complete armageddon for what amounts to peanuts compared to the cost of redeveloping a site.

It has actually saved our butts more than once (but that’s an even longer story).