To host the roadshow, Wave Commerce organized a special Spring edition of the Shopify Ecommerce Summit following overwhelmingly positive feedback from our first edition in December.

250 people were present at the event held on April 27th, at Blueprint Taikoo Place! We’re honored that due to the massive registration interest from enterprise and retail leaders, Shopify sent a strong 14-person team! Definitely, the largest team they have ever had on-site in Hong Kong, and we are certain that brands, whether on Shopify or not, gained a lot of value from the 1-1 consultations with the Shopify Plus Merchant Success Team as well as the overall agenda.

The event was opened by our emcee and host, Peter Jobson, Marketing Lead at Wave Commerce, who welcomed guests before handing the stage over to the wonderful speakers.

At a glance (key takeaways and breakdown expanded in the article below):

• Tony Jiang, Senior Partnerships Lead, Greater China at Shopify, presented the latest trends in commerce for 2023
• Woon Lan, Senior Merchant Success Manager at Shopify, presented the latest Shopify Plus features and roadmap which merchants can use to grow their business as well as top lessons from the world’s most trusted brands and how they found success in 2022
• Aries Sze, General Manager at Logitech HK, TW, Macau, shared the brand’s DTC and omnichannel journey and strategic insights
• Jessica Chan, Head of Omnichannel at Wave Commerce, gave insights and recommendations from Wave Commerce’s decades of experience in building omnichannel strategies and successful DTC brands
• Vivek Manglani, CTO of LANE EIGHT, shared the trending brand’s ultimate omnichannel tech stack for global expansion
• Joel Tregoning, Strategic Partner Manager at Gorgias presented about how retail brands can use customer support to drive revenue growth and gave the ins and outs of Gorgias’ new WhatsApp integration for Hong Kong merchants

During the networking time, guests enjoyed the exciting Shopify Merchant experience zone - a gin-tasting station with freshly made Gin & Tonic from exotic worldwide gins supplied by Mango Store and Second Foundation, a local Hong Kong Shopify Merchant. The gamers in attendance were able to try out Logitech’s latest products as well.

Key Takeaways

See our detailed breakdown of the key takeaways and highlights from each session below!

Shopify Plus Commerce Trends 2023

Tony Jiang, Senior Partnerships Lead, Greater China, Shopify

Interviewing 900 business owners, and correlating data from 10,000 Shopify Plus merchants, the Commerce Trends 2023 report is the most comprehensive insight into the trends for the coming year.

Retail spending is up 15% since 2020, and Shopify Merchants earned US$3.36 billion on Black Friday in November - a new record! But almost all consumers are now concerned about inflation.

Tony broke the findings down into 3 top-level trends with key takeaways and actionable tips.

Trend 1: Strategies to cut costs during inflation - that also raise customer loyalty

• 35% of Shopify Plus merchants are reporting smaller than average cart sizes at checkout
• There is a 5-20% chance of attracting new customers, vs 60-70% chance of purchases from returning customers
• Merchants should price strategically to avoid charging for shipping
• Offering discounts with product bundles and adding subscriptions or memberships are proven strategies that promote loyalty and spending
• You can reduce overhead costs with automation, especially with Shopify’s native features

Trend 2: The supply chain crisis forces brands to accelerate long-term growth plans

• Future-proof your logistics network:

• Hold more inventory and diversify product sources, including finding new suppliers in multiple markets + sourcing raw materials closer to home

• Shrink returns rates by improving customer confidence

• Brands lose an average of $29 for every customer they acquire—a 222% increase in the last eight years
• Boost confidence with detailed product descriptions, 360-degree product previews, customer reviews, augmented reality, live streaming shopping

Trend 3: Brands overcome third-party data woes through collaboration

• Google's paid search cost per click rose in every category year over year in Q3 2021
• Open avenues of collaboration with influencers and creators

• ⅓ shoppers say recommendations from influencers are more important than from friends and family
• User-generated content is 8.7x more impactful than influencer-generated content

• Rethink your loyalty program

• Identify brands that resonate with your customer base and offer a complementary product or service
• Invite another brand's fans into an offer, special discount, or early access to a drop or a collab
• Expand your ‘collaboration network’ over time to encourage repeat purchases and give customers a reason to keep accessing the program

Growing with Shopify Plus: New Features & Best Practices

Woon Lan, Senior Merchant Success Manager, Shopify‍

Flying in from Singapore, Woon Lan is a Senior Merchant Success Manager (MSM). The MSM team is a dedicated support team and coaches for Shopify Plus merchants to help them unlock new features and growth tools.

Woon Lan shared some of the latest features from Shopify Plus which merchants can use. Some highlights:

Customer Acquisition

• Shopify Audiences - built by Shopify, the free Audiences app delivers high-intent audiences for digital advertising that convert higher and help your ads perform better (currently available for merchants with a BR registered in US/Canada)
• Shopify Collabs - an all-in-one creator management tool that helps you find new creators, build authentic communities, better manage relationships, and track affiliate sales (available for all merchant plans)
• Shop App - an all-new sales channel. Shoppers can browse Shop App like a marketplace to find and discover new products, with sales going via your Shopify Plus store

Conversion

• Checkout extensibility - checkout extensibility makes it easier for Shopify Plus merchants to customize their checkout in a way that’s app-based, upgrade-safe, higher-converting, and integrated with Shop Pay
• One Page Checkout - all-new, one-page checkout. Inspired by Shop Pay’s proven conversion, it’s faster, higher-converting, and exactly what your customers expect

Multi-channel Sales

• B2B on Shopify - a suite of powerful B2B features built directly into the core of Shopify, exclusive to Plus merchants

Logitech: Direct-to-Consumer and Omnichannel Acceleration with Shopify Plus

Aries Sze, General Manager, HK, TW, Macau, Logitech

Logitech is a globally renowned brand, but even then, they have evolved their product offering and style over the years. Most notably about 10+ years ago they sat down and decided on 4 key areas of growth that were unknown at the time, but those 4 key areas paid off incredibly well - especially during covid.

• The Rise of ESports - is expected to be the largest collection of spectator and participant sports in the world
• Video Everywhere - video calls will replace audio calls overtime
• Work and Learning Anywhere - where we work and learn will increasingly spread outside the “office” or “classroom” even as we continue to work in those places
• The Democratization of Content - most of the content we engage with will be created and streamed by the millions of our peers rather than directly by brands

Aries shared that these trends didn’t seem obvious when they first called them, but they have been driving the business for many years.

Aries then went on to discuss Logitech Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau’s DTC journey. He shared how they went through and spent time evaluating different enterprise ecommerce platforms before settling on Shopify Plus. They partnered with Wave Commerce, a leading Hong Kong-based Shopify Plus partner, due to their enterprise expertise, unmatched technical capabilities, and omnichannel success stories.

Logitech’s DTC online store in Hong Kong is Logitech Club - a customer-centric loyalty-driven experience, with an OMO strategy combining third-party resellers. Wave Commerce also supported Logitech in launching their own DTC offline stores, using Shopify POS to create a seamless shopping experience online and offline.

With Shopify POS, Logitech could use OMNI by Wave Commerce, an omnichannel / OMO customer loyalty solution enabling Logitech to create a single customer identity across all points of sale, with points earned and redeemed wherever the customer shops. OMNI also empowers Logitech’s staff to have insights on the customer’s points, purchase history etc at the in-store Shopify POS terminal so they can better support the customer.

With this connected experience, shoppers can buy Logitech products online, at distribution partners, 3c partners, and 1000+ other retail locations and receive the same branded experience - as well as buy online/pick up offline at all touchpoints.

Logitech also leverages OMNI’s customer management feature, which allows Logitech to offer exclusive discounts to students and employees of select partners.

Aries shared that Logitech leverages its online DTC store for B2B sales, with partners able to log in via their business accounts to place orders on the B2B store page with wholesale prices. This B2B process has its own support staff to ensure quality B2B specialist support.

Omnichannel Tools for Customer Growth

Jessica Chan, Head of Omnichannel, Wave Commerce

Jessica spoke about how Shopify has rolled out more ways for merchants to be an omnichannel leader and conduct sales on any and every channel - more than any other ecommerce platform can provide. Jessica highlighted Shopify POS, TokTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Spotify, Walmart, JD.com, Twitter, Ebay, Google as but a few examples.

With so many channels to sell your products, Jessica said, an omnichannel strategy including backend - platform and technology, and frontend - customer experience, is crucial. She highlighted stats from the Commerce Trends Report that found 54% of shoppers will look at a product online, and buy offline, while 54% will look offline, and buy online - and 73% of shoppers will browse on multiple channels (3 or more).

This raises questions, such as how to track what channels a customer uses? And how to track offline or online channel contributions to purchases made on other channels? Wave Commerce often hears from brands wanting to know if their high street flagship store is contributing to online sales, but they are unable to track the data.

Jessica presented a solution to these common questions. Being an omnichannel brand means unifying sales channels, platforms, operations, and communications/marketing - with a single customer profile/identity.

This is achieved with OMNI by Wave Commerce. Jessica introduced the innovative solution at a glance, highlighting how OMNI:

• Drives omnichannel customer acquisition and loyalty
• Unified customer data for Online Merge Offline (OMO) experiences
• Integrates with popular marketing tools for better personalization
• Designed for excellent staff and customer experience

In terms of customer acquisition, Jessica shared a case study of how OMNI has been proven to double customer databases in less than 1 day. The case study involved a beauty brand that partnered with Wave Commerce and leveraged OMNI for an innovative campaign where shoppers can register online for free product samples at dozens of participating third-party retail outlets, then book a consultation, and redeem their appointment via a QR code sent to their phone.

Using a fast and simple registration process for loyalty memberships, QR code-driven redemptions, and automated offers - the brand doubled its CRM in 12 hours.

Jessica highlighted how retail brands are often struggling with plenty of inaccurate or outdated customer data, or shoppers registering multiple accounts to receive extra discounts/special deals. To combat this, OMNI provided OTP verification integrated with Shopify, so accounts are tied to verified mobile phone numbers to prevent cheating and inaccurate data or fake users.

Additionally, Jessica shared, with OMNI merchants can connect online stores with every POS and pop-up shop, creating an omnichannel loyalty program with VIP tiering. OMNI also supports multiple languages, especially Traditional Chinese, which other major loyalty programs don’t offer. Through OMNI, brands may achieve 15% YOY growth in return customers, and 3x ROI.

On top of that, OMNI incentivizes in-store staff to sign customers up to their loyalty program by tracking all sales of the customer online and offline, which acknowledges the staff members’ effort. It also enables merchants to track the role offline stores including pop-up shops play in online sales.

Jessica then shared several case studies, including Logitech, Ms. Chu Soap & Beaut, and Swisse. She highlighted the powerful integration of OMNI with Shopify Flow, WhatsApp, and marketing tools for automated triggers, redemptions, thank you messages, and reminders.

Using this automated approach with increased personalization, OMNI contributes at least 28% growth in revenue from traditional automation flows.

To learn more about OMNI for your business or schedule a demo, visit here.

LANE EIGHT: Our Journey into Omnichannel Shopify

Vivek Manglani, Chief Technology Officer, LANE EIGHT‍

While Aries shared about Logitech’s omnichannel customer experience strategy, Vivek gave fascinating insights about LANE EIGHT’s omnichannel tech stack for global expansion.

LANE EIGHT is a performance footwear brand founded on the idea of challenging traditional performance footwear and elevating activewear for everyday athletes. Vivek shared that their mission is to create truly versatile performance gear that goes beyond the traditional categories of performance footwear and meets the real-world needs of Everyday Athletes.

As a homegrown Hong Kong brand that is well known locally, it has begun expanding its retail presence offline in Hong Kong, and internationally with partners and online stores.

Vivek highlighted 3 main pain points LANE EIGHT was experiencing with their rapid growth:

• Storage & Logistics

• Well above average ecommerce shipping costs
• High storage fees
• Inefficient stocking in warehouses and poor visibility into inventory

• Operations & Customer Service

• Inventory inaccuracies
• Countless band-aid solutions and manual procedures
• Lengthy process of onboarding new operations and CS personnel

• Returns & Exchanges

• For online footwear businesses 20-30% is the norm
• 1 or 2 additional shipments (return pair, exchange pair)
• Restocking procedures and the impact on inventory planning and accuracy

LANE EIGHT was using Woo Commerce, which Vivek mentioned couldn't scale well with the brand. They had a constant need to hire developers and onboard them, the servers were self-hosted and required constant time and effort, and ended up increasing their technical debt. This included;

• Custom integrations lacked comprehensiveness vs their competitors
• Required copious amounts of time for maintenance of each integration
• Sometimes scrapped when switching providers, leading to wasted effort and time

Vivek highlighted how Shopify’s app and partner ecosystem is second to none. Shopify attracts the best talent in terms of developers and experts, and attracts the best software providers to its app store.

Vivek mentioned that every new SaaS/PaaS/IaaS provider for ecommerce essentially needs to integrate with Shopify first as a go-to-market strategy due to its cruciality.

Shopify Plus, with the Expansion Stores feature, Shopify POS, and B2B on Shopify, provides 90% of the essentials needed for LANE EIGHT to efficiently scale. The remaining 10%, Vivek shared, comes from bridging the gap with simple solutions and APIs.

Vivek shared how in April 2022 LANE EIGHT partnered with Wave Commerce to migrate from Woo Commerce to Shopify Plus. Together, Wave Commerce and LANE EIGHT launched 3 stores, in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US. These are under 1 Shopify Plus account, but each are stand-alone stores with its own pricing, content, SEO etc - leveraging Expansion Stores, a Shopify Plus exclusive feature.

In March 2023, LANE EIGHT launched Shopify POS in their Hong Kong retail stores. LANE EIGHT’s previous POS software, while having an out-of-the-box Shopify integration, still resulted in orders being out of sync which required manual processing. Moving to Shopify POS was a logical solution due to the stronger integration, Vivek shared.

Most recently, Vivek highlighted LANE EIGHT’s adoption of B2B on Shopify, a Shopify Plus exclusive feature, which enables LANE EIGHT to manage wholesale and partner orders via their Shopify account. This helps keep better track of inventory, and requires less manpower and expenses for LANE EIGHT to operate.

Vivek then highlighted some of the top Shopify apps and features that LANE EIGHT used in their migration journey:

• Heavily customized Shopify 2.0 theme
• Automated fulfillment w/ 3PL app integration
• Loop Returns for Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA)
• Gorgias for Customer Service automation
• Klaviyo for email marketing automation suite
• Stamped.io for Reviews & Visual Moderation

Following this, Vivek shared about some of the previous tools they had been using before the Shopify Plus migration and why they moved away.

Mostly, Vivek mentioned, they were all enterprise tools with hundreds of features that LANE EIGHT didn't need. Many of the features overlapped, so essentially they were paying twice for features they didn't need. They were also very expensive, with opaque pricing, and costs kept growing as the business grew but didn't necessarily add further value.

Vivek’s approach was 3 fold. Create an internal knowledge base, leverage Shopify POS app “Stocky” for advanced inventory management - free with a Shopify POS subscription, and Shopify API for building scripts to ‘bridge the gap’.

Following Vivek’s closing recommendations and suggestions for tech teams, he gratefully offered guests 30% on their next LANE EIGHT order. Thanks, Vivek!

How to Drive Revenue Through CX (and WhatsApp)

Joel Tregoning, Strategic Partner Manager, Gorgias
Jasper Koolen, Senior Strategic Partner Manager, Gorgias‍

The final session of the day was hosted by Gorgias. Peter Jobson, the host of the event, introduced Gorgias by sharing that when Wave Commerce first started planning the event, one of the first names that came to mind for speakers was Gorgias. As the leading helpdesk for Shopify merchants, Gorgias has the strongest integration with Shopify to empower memorable customer experiences. Most importantly, Gorgias had just announced its WhatsApp integration, which is a fantastic opportunity for Hong Kong-based merchants to unlock a new channel for customer support on Shopify.

Joel took the stage and highlight Gorgias at a glance, given that it is Gorgias’ first time speaking at an in-person event in Hong Kong.

• All your customer service in one place: email, chat, social, SMS, phone etc.
• Fully integrated with Shopify to track, edit orders, refund etc. and to utilize variables
• Automated responses to reduce response time and increase efficiency
• Gorgias works with 11,000+ DTC brands

Joel then shared that in 2013, merchants would lose $9 on your first order with a customer. But in 2021, you lose $29 on your first order. This is due to:

• the number of brands selling to a potential shopper has skyrocketed
• customers expect an incredibly fast and convenient online shopping experience
• advertising and social media are more saturated than ever before

But the good news is that Gorgias studied data from over 10,000 merchants and found that customers who place more than one order end up generating 300% more revenue. While these repeat shoppers only make up 21% of most brands’ total customer base, they make up 44% of overall revenue.

Joel then asked how many merchants measure LTV:CAC (Long Term Value and Custer Acquisition Cost) ratio. He highlighted how optimizing an LTV:CAC ratio is imperative to ensure you’re spending enough on acquisition whilst still remaining profitable.

3:1 is the ideal ratio Joel shared. Lower means you’re spending too much on acquisition and not generating enough revenue from return customers.

Joel emphasized that merchants MUST combat high customer acquisition costs.

• Firstly, by upselling customers to increase Average Order Value (AOV)
• Secondly, by encouraging repeat orders (Customer Lifetime Value - CLTV)

Joel then shared 5 top-proven strategies on how to leverage CX to drive revenue:

1: Welcome your social media followers with a DM

Go through your followers list on Instagram and send them a welcome DM, with something like the copy below:

“Welcome to [brand] 🙌. We love sharing our story with our community. As a new member, here’s a 10% discount code: [coupon]. Please try out our products or reply here if you have any questions!”

Joel shared that brands that invest time in building an Instagram audience tend to have 40 times more followers than monthly orders. If you convert 0.1% of your monthly followers, that’s 4% more orders for your store.

Then track the discount code usage in Shopify’s “Sales by discount” analytics.

2: Email signature marketing for CX teams

Include an upsell link in the signature of customer support agents. The product link can come from a product the customer has checked previously or that was in the abandonment cart. The agent’s signature is a subtle way to push a product to still-interested shoppers without being pushy.

Get more context and in-depth tips in Gorgias’ article on email signature marketing. Or, check the recipe on PS Macros for step-by-step instructions for this tactic.

3: Collect customer feedback to improve CX experience.

Customer feedback is gold, according to Joel. Go out of your way to request (then tag, organize, and share) insights you get from customers, whether they’re positive or negative.

Use software to dive into the details in a programmatic and efficient way - and these findings can be used to create new products, SKU, personalizations, help articles etc.

4: Incentivise your support team on the Revenue they generate.

Joel shared that on average, 20% of customers contact support. If you can lift your conversion (from support conversations to sales) from 3% to 8%, you'll see an overall 1% lift on revenue.

5: Chat proactively with shoppers with the best-selling product in their carts.

Proactive outreach to customers shopping on your site at the biggest bottlenecks in the sales funnels is a proven tactic to help nudge customers along, by being there to answer questions or show support.

Joel then brought guests into an exciting sandbox environment with their own Gorgias test account on their phones, where they explored key features and highlighted the strong Shopify integration. Best yet - new customers at the event could get their 2nd and 3rd month of Gorgias free.

Stay in the loop

Wave Commerce is the featured Shopify Plus partner for Hong Kong, and we run regular events to engage the Shopify and retail community. Follow us on LinkedIn or Instagram to receive the latest invites and insights!

IG: @wavecommerce

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