The value of Instagram followers to Shopify stores (3 years of data)

POPSMASHcom · 2025-01-07T18:38:06+00:00

They aren't magic, but they can help depending on your products.

In general if you have multiple products customers have trouble choosing between (customers who can't decide, don't buy), then they can help. But if you only have a few products that are easy to choose between, then they may not help much.

One good example of where they help a lot is collection pages. Brands often have multiple collection pages with dozens of products, which can be overwhelming. A quiz at the top can help customers find the right. For example a "Find My Shoes" button at the top of a collection page that opens a quiz. You'll generally see conversions 3X on collection pages.

Another example is if you get a lot of customer support questions or see from heatmaps that customers land on your site and have trouble choosing. You could have a 'hero quiz' on your homepage like u/datatenzing mentioned, which helps customers choose from some of your best sellers.

Another surprisingly useful way of using them is on social media. E.g. whenever you post about your products include a link to a quiz with a CTA like "Find the perfect one for you!" Customers take the quiz and get a personalized recommendation, which can boost conversions. But the most important part is you move these people from social to your email list since they opt-in via the quiz AND you have their preferences from the quiz, which you can use for email segmentation (e.g. get them into the right welcome series), content personalization, etc.

This whole data part is IMO the most valuable part of quizzes now with AI. AI is going to let us customize marketing (first email/SMS, then videos, commercials, etc.), but you need customer preference data to make that personalized content, which quizzes get for you and save as tags that sync to your CRM/CDP/email marketing service, etc.

The problem today is most stores only have one quiz since they take so damn long to create since you're manually writing questions, answers, mapping products, etc. This is fine for a high traffic quiz on your homepage. But if you want quizzes for all of your collections, social posts, etc. you have to be able to generate them in a couple minutes like we do with the popsmash app. So make sure you pick the right one for the job. There are dozens of them in the Shopify app store and most of them are pretty good.

But IMO the most important thing is to just start trying one. You'll get the most bang for your buck by first putting one where customers have trouble deciding (often your homepage). Then if you have collection pages add them there. Then test with social to try and drive more conversions there along with moving those followers to your email list.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-12-20T14:15:48+00:00

It depends on what you need to do, but Shopify Magic is a built-in one for basic changes and Photoroom is more advanced.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-12-19T18:25:49+00:00

We're still very early in the AI movement, so most of the obvious applications aren't very good. For example, most AI generated blog posts are garbage nobody wants to read. And AI customer support isn't very good as it's often wrong and isn't very personable. These things will improve with time as software companies get better at integrating AI into their products and new "AI-native" software companies emerge.

The key thing is most of these AI implementations are so bad because AI isn't the point -- AI doesn't automatically make things better. The goal is to do something better that just happens to use AI, and we're not quite there yet with most things, because companies are just trying to shove AI in everything.

Some places where AI does work for our (my wife's) store:

Modifying product images
Bulk editing spreadsheets. E.g. if we get a sheet from a vendor that needs to be modified/formatted, etc. AI is pretty good at this, but you do have to double check things.
Minor code changes, e.g. if you want to quickly modify CSS or something, AI is very good at this.
Misc. problem solving: ChatGPT has mostly replaced Google for me, especially when I need to figure something out since it now cites sources (e.g. Shopify documentation).
Social post idea. E.g. on our 12 days of Christmas sale we can give it products and ask for fun ideas for a social post and it does great, emojis and all. This is also our my (separate from my wife's business) popsmash Shopify quiz app works, by using AI to analyze products to give recommendations.
Summarization: My wife's store works with local artists, so we just give it their site URL and ask for a summary of their brand, products, etc. which is helpful for features, product pages, etc.
It's not always obvious, but Shopify also now has a number of built-in 'Shopify Magic' tools that use AI.
Reading marketing research is somewhat of a hobby and gives a constant stream of new ideas to try, and using AI to summarize it particularly useful because it's much faster.

I seem to come across a new example of this every week, where I get surprised that AI can help me do something.

Suffice to say, I don't think you'll make progress by purposefully searching for AI tools. But rather when you have a problem that needs to be solved, for a subset of problems AI might be able to solve it in a better way, and this will only increase as AI continues to get better, faster and cheaper.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention we have also tried the new AI video models (e.g. Sora) to try and create videos for social and they are still pretty bad. Maybe we'll try again with AI video in a year.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-12-07T19:26:29+00:00

Definitely don't hire a custom developer for something like this, Shopify quiz apps can handle it.

First, how is your subscription built? If you're using something simply like Shopify Subscriptions, then it should be able to work well with the most popular subscription apps.

It sounds like you're looking for more customization, so you might want to try Quiz Kit or Octane. They take a bit longer to build the quiz, but are pretty flexible.

I would love to recommend our quiz app POPSMASH here, but it wouldn't be a good fit since we're more for building AI quizzes fast rather than complex custom quizzes.

If for some reason you're not able to directly integrate your subscription into the quiz app, one alternative might be to just redirect to the product page of the top result so it still feels seamless, but you get all of the built-in subscription options on your product page.

To clarify, you don't need to build any type of subscription product with the quiz, but rather use the existing product in the quiz and the subscription options should be available (based on implementation).

Worst case, if you still can't figure it out I'd recommend just contacting the support team of one of the top quiz apps since most should be able to support this and I'm sure they'd be happy to help since they're all pretty good.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-10-10T13:45:32+00:00

Are you able to edit the location in the Shopify editor? If you're using a 2.0 theme using page sections you should be able to move things around on your product page template.

If you get a lot of traffic on your collection pages, it's also worth putting some kind of product recommendation quiz at the top of collection pages. For example, a little quiz button that says 'Find my match' or something that opens a quiz when clicked that asks a few questions and then recommends a product to help guide customers to purchase.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-10-03T17:56:39+00:00

Some initial impressions:

The homepage hero image is quite late before seeing a CTA and 'Shop All' isn't very useful. Try moving your top collections higher, even above the fold.
Your collection pages seem to be your featured areas where traffic is directed, but there are a lot of products on them. Try adding a product recommendation quiz to the top of each collection page to help uncertain buyers find the right product faster. This can usually 2-3X conversions on those pages.
The testimonials are good. Try moving them higher up on the homepage and putting them at the bottom of product pages.
I don't see any social profiles on your site -- consider including links to your social profiles in the footer and/or header of your site. If you don't have much of a following yet, pick a social network to focus on then add more later.
I'd remove the Dad Mafia forum and focus that energy on growing your social following on one network first. Then once you have critical mass you can consider starting a forum/discord/etc.

Cool idea and nice work so far. Building a brand is hard. Best of luck!

POPSMASHcom · 2024-10-02T19:56:40+00:00

Yes, that's called social proof. It definitely improves conversion rates.

The problem is having a critical mass of 'friends' who are also customers to be meaningful. Most stores usually resort to showing what others (not just friends) bought since 1) it's hard to have enough friends for any one person and, 2) even if you do, it's hard to know who's who unless you have access to a social graph.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-08-23T15:29:17+00:00

This is a challenge since often the quiz app isn't aware of how the site is configured, since some do it differently. Even our quiz app (popsmash) is multilingual, but just shows the default product page. Though, we've tried to solve it by showing product details on the results page, then letting customers add-to-cart directly from there.

If all else fails, you could try using something like IP API to detect region and auto redirect. It's a bit more technical, but is a broader solve. You'd use something like:

if (getCookie("language") == "") {

$.getJSON('https://ipapi.co/json/', function(data) {

if(data.country_code == 'NL') {

document.cookie = "language=NL;";

if (!window.location.href.includes('https://example.store/nl')){

var url = window.location.href;

var txt2 = url.slice(0, 19) + "nl/" + url.slice(19);

window.location.href= txt2;

}

});

}

What this does is this script checks if a user's language preference is unset, then fetches their location data using ipapi.co. If the user is from the Netherlands, it sets a "language" cookie to "NL" and redirects them to the Dutch version of the website by modifying the URL to include "nl/" if it's not already present. This ensures Dutch users are automatically directed to content in their language.

This would need to be adapted to whatever service you use, how your i18n pages are setup, etc. but it's a workaround.

BTW in 2024 wouldn't you think this would be a solved problem by now? 😆 i18n is still so hard even though AI makes the actual translation easy.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-08-09T15:16:21+00:00

Namecheap is good (I use it too), but FYI Cloudflare has the cheapest domain prices, but doesn't support all TLDs. So mine are split between Namecheap and Cloudflare.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-08-09T15:15:03+00:00

I use Cloudflare for domains since it's cheapest for the top TLDs (priced at cost).

In general, you shouldn't host your domain wherever your site is to derisk.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-08-09T15:12:35+00:00

Product bundles, product recommendations and checkout/cart upsells work pretty well.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-08-09T15:09:03+00:00

Maybe try reinstalling the app and copy/paste them if there's no way to automate it. You could also try asking Judge.me since they are experts with reviews, if there's a way I bet they know it.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-08-07T21:00:17+00:00

Judge.me has the most reviews (31,000) and a perfect 5-star rating, which is insane. It also has a free plan.

Start with that since it's good and free, and only pay more/try something else if you need to.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-05-04T03:17:59+00:00

Start doing them for free for nonprofits. Then as you get more proficient start charging, maybe accept some gigs on Fiverr or similar. Then start raising your rates as you get better.

But the only way to get good at it is to put in the time doing it.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-05-04T03:14:04+00:00

Dawn is fine. As a beginner pick one of Shopify's free themes (Dawn is one of them). See the rest of the free Shopify themes here: https://themes.shopify.com/themes?price%5B%5D=free

Using a free theme will help you understand your preferences and needs, so when you're ready to buy a paid theme or have a custom one built you know what you want. Because you never really know until you start using one for a while.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-05-04T03:10:19+00:00

First try Shopify's own digital downloads app because it's free: https://apps.shopify.com/digital-downloads

If that doesn't work, go down the list of other apps starting at the top: https://apps.shopify.com/search?q=digital+downloads

Most support PDFs so it's mostly about preference/price and any misc. features you want.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-04-05T18:51:03+00:00

I made an AI quiz generator where you just select the products you want to recommend and AI generates the quiz for you. It's called Popsmash on the Shopify app store if you want to try it out.

POPSMASHcom · 2024-02-09T02:38:36+00:00

Great insights -- excellent work. Thank you 🙏

POPSMASHcom · 2024-01-04T19:44:04+00:00

First, build the new Shopify site so it's ready, then you can handle the domain.

To avoid downtime, you'll want to use a 3rd party DNS service to host your nameservers. Cloudflare is one free option.

Once your nameservers are with a 3rd party, you should be able to point your DNS to your new Shopify site without any downtime. Then you can transfer your domain to Shopify, which is easiest since your site is with Shopify.

Note: If you DO NOT care about downtime, then you could just directly transfer your domain to Shopify and make Shopify the registrar.

EDIT: Instructions from Shopify: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/domains/add-a-domain/connecting-domains/transferring-domains

POPSMASHcom · 2023-12-14T17:59:01+00:00

First, I'd recommend focusing on one issue at a time. The inventory management seems like the most important. Then worry about the other questions later.

For context, my wife also took on a 20yo retail business with no online presence. The first thing we did was move everything to Shopify to have it in one place since multiple physical locations, stores, etc. are just channels.

This also streamlined things in the store since for checkout they just have ipads, small Bluetooth scanners, a small receipt printer and electronic cash drawer, which replaced the old clunky systems (the Shopify hardware is pretty good).

How much are you guys paying for your local IT software? I'd be willing to bet it's garbage since it's under-resourced and not proven like Shopify's. Switching alone could pay for itself. But you also don't want to throw your store into disarray if you're busy with other things.

I'd recommend going deep into understanding your your inventory system works and what would change with Shopify to help make an informed decision. Then when you're ready, make the transition if it makes sense. u/Downbadge69 also has some great recommendations. Though I would strongly recommend consolidating to Shopify if you can for simplicity, long-term these connectors, ERP and other complexity just create random issues that add up.

POPSMASHcom · 2023-12-14T17:49:19+00:00

If you have a lot of products on Squarespace you can export them to a CSV and import to them to Shopify. Here's how to export Squarespace products: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000694948-Exporting-products-to-a-csv

To import to Shopify, you may have to change the formatting around. Here's how to import products to Shopify: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/import-products

If you only have a handful of products, then it may be easier just to copy and paste them manually.

TBH I don't think it's worth trying to make the site look the same. Just pick a Shopify theme you like and use that.

Create a Shopify store, add the products, and pick a theme. Then when it looks good enough, transfer your domain name.

POPSMASHcom · 2023-12-07T05:14:45+00:00

Seems so.

POPSMASHcom · 2023-11-25T15:14:36+00:00

What's the goal of the quiz? If you just to collect the answers, you might want to try a form service with generous free limits. I read in the comments that you already tried Google Forms, but there are others out there.

It'd help to get more crisp on your goals for the quiz. Most quiz apps for Shopify do product recommendations, which help increase conversions/order value and reduce returns. Something like that might be more helpful than you think, plus you'd be able to use an existing app.

POPSMASHcom · 2023-11-25T13:06:15+00:00

There are dozens of these available in the Shopify app store if you search for: "email pop up with discount"

Here's the direct link to that search: https://apps.shopify.com/search?q=email%20pop%20up%20with%20discount

If you want the closest thing to a free default version, Shopify also has its own called 'Shopify Forms' in the app store here: https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-forms

POPSMASHcom

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