We can't quite believe we've cracked it.

Hey, it’s Alex.

In today’s issue:

• My favourite links from the week.

• Our AI brain will grow your online business.

• UX Recommendations - power ups for PDP.

• and much more…
  

BEST LINKS

My favourite finds this week

🤖 AI

• The future of customer service for ecommerce businesses (LinkedIn).

• Shopify is hiring Chat GPT as your personal shopper (Tech Radar).

• How is Shopify reinventing customer service in a world of multimodal AI (LinkedIn).

📈 Growth

• How Meta wants you to structure your campaigns in 2025 and most brands aren’t even close (LinkedIn).

🔮 Business Strategy

• How 99% of Shopify theme developers are wrong (YouTube).

📘 Books

• Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire (Andrew Wilkinson).

🎶 Music

• TripTideThud (Prada SS22 Menswear Version) (Shopify).

DEEP DIVE

Our AI brain will remove the guess work

Imagine, if you could log into your Shopify dashboard each morning, and see instructions on exactly what to do in order to grow your store revenue.

Now imagine that you don’t need to engage with a developer in order to implement any of these insights, features, or campaigns, in fact, you can do them yourself while you brew your morning cup of coffee.

After a busy few days, you then check in on your results to see increases in revenue, AOV, and profit, with insights on how to improve this further.

Now compound this week over week, month over month.

Sounds too good to be true?

We’ll, we’ve cracked it.

Every product should have a reason for being.

In addition, they should fill three gaps for their target market - in our case - products that service lifestyle brands on Shopify to increase your website conversion, profit, and market presence - all without additional ad spend.

When it comes to software products, we have the three gaps as indicated below - Product, Knowledge and Skill.

If we reframe this for an ecommerce brand on Shopify - it looks something like this:

The Knowledge Gap

How can brands know what to do, and when to do it, in order to achieve their goals.

The Skill Gap

Once the knowledge gap is filled, and a brand knows what to do, how do they implement? Developers? Marketers?

And further to that - when do they know this is working, or needs to be tweaked, improved, or even stopped?

The Product Gap

The product should be the glue here - bringing the tools and solutions for the brand to inform them on what to do based on their goals, and to facilitate the work for them - thereby removing the skill gap.

How we have cracked this with Roadmap

Roadmap is our flagship product at Almond Labs, and we have quietly rolled out a small feature in the form of a dashboard - nothing major at all - but, starting here, you can tick off some key actions and make money from day #1.

What is exciting is where we are going, and the power that will be in your hands within the next few months.

Our AI brain’s diet

Now while this is quite tame, we are currently preparing our dashboard a nutritious meal plan which will turn it into an absolute beast.

Phase #1 (Live)

Roadmap will recommend features and tactics to implement and get your store humming. Coupled with our quarterly 1-on-1 strategy sessions, you’ll be flying. As you complete tasks, more will appear to help you grow and compound results.

Phase #2 (coming soon)

Roadmap will start to recommend features, tactics, and multi-step campaigns, based on your industry, 300+ CRO datapoints, 50+ campaigns, 100+ features, all with integration into your stores metrics.

All actions will take 30 seconds to setup in Roadmap, not hours, days, or weeks.

No developers. No bottlenecks.

Phase #3 (August/September)

One click campaign implementation with automated reports, and pivot recommendations. Industry insights, trends, and aggregated data from top performing stores feeding into recommendations on how to grow your conversion and profit.

No more guesswork.

Don’t get left behind.

This is not a case of if it is possible, it already is.

For us at Almond Labs, it is simply a case of following through on how we can see this working for all the brands we advise.

Imagine yourself with this power - what does your brand look like in 3 months, 12 months? 2 Years?

And where is everyone else who does not have this power?

Want access to our AI brain?

Reply to this email, and we’ll start prepping you for your next phase of growth.

🚀 CAMPAIGN INSPO

VIP Loyalty Boost Campaign

Reward VIP customers with exclusive products and higher-tier gifts to drive more high-value purchases.

Tactics:
Exclusive Member Gifts
VIP-Only Product Releases
Tiered gifts

We have prepared for free, the campaign execution steps here, as well as both the announcement email copy, AND the ending soon email.

🔎 UX INSIGHT

UX Recommendations

Today we’ve got some recommendations for your stores product detail page (PDP) specifically for conversion & AOV tips:

• Scarcity messaging is used near the main CTA (e.g. only 2 left)

• Urgency triggers are used near the CTA (e.g. order by 5pm for next day delivery)

• Relevant bundles are offered with clear value props or discounts

• Bulk buy discounts are presented near the main CTA (e.g. Buy 2 get 5% off, Buy 3 get 10% off...)

• Charitable donations and causes are highlighted on the PDP

• Offer Product Expert live chat or video chat for more detailed enquiries

• Offer a "customise your bundle" option with savings

🤖 AI INSIGHT

AI in ecommerce

Over the last 2 weeks, there has been a some wild predictions on what the ecommerce landscape will look like with the growth of AI.

The latest shakeup has come from the news that ChatGPT has integrated Shopify APIs into it’s chat, so you’ll shortly be able to buy products from the ChatGPT interface.

Some people (in my opinion - clickbait peeps) have been going so far as to say that ecommerce websites will not even be used in a matter of months - yes, definitely clickbait.

From a logical perspective, this does raise the questions of user experience when navigating from Chat GPT to learn more about a brand. These are some of the questions I find myself considering:

• What type of products would somebody buy without know the brand behind the product?

• How will this effect usage and experience with desktop vs mobile.

• Will OpenAI consider bringing in richer experience to chat to complement the experience?

• What are brands doing to ensure that they appear in AI results?

• How will this impact Google shopping?

Want to stay on top of AI in ecommerce? Reply to this email with “yes please” and we’ll add you to our AI classroom in our Almond Labs community.

📣 HAVE YOUR SAY

How did we do?

Thanks for reading!

See you next week.

Alex Murton
Shopify for Lifestyle Brands
Co-Founder @ Studio Almond & Almond Labs.