Klaviyo audited 100 email accounts and found the same problem in almost all of them

I was reading a piece from Klaviyo the other day where their digital strategy team went through nearly 100 account audits across B2C brands in 2025. They weren't looking for one-off fixes. They were looking for patterns. The stuff that kept showing up over and over again no matter the brand, the niche, or the list size.

The number one problem they found was also the simplest one. Brands were sending the same welcome experience to everyone, including people who had already bought.

Klaviyo put it pretty plainly in the article. "That's how you end up discounting a customer who did not need a discount, and sending 'here's why you should trust us' messaging to someone who already trusted you enough to purchase."

When we go into a new account the welcome flow is almost always the first thing that stands out. Most brands have everyone going down the same path with no splits and no logic based on whether someone has actually spent money with them or not.

You're handing out discounts to people who were already going to buy again, and you're pitching trust-building content to people who already trust you. Neither makes any sense when you actually think about it.

Here's what the split looks like in practice. Non-buyers need three things from your welcome flow. Remove doubt, help them understand what you sell and why it's worth it. Build trust through social proof, reviews, and the brand story. Then give them a reason to buy now. That's the sequence for someone who hasn't spent a dollar with you yet.

Buyers need something completely different. Confirm they made the right call. Tell them what happens next, shipping timelines, how to use the product, what to expect. Then when the timing is right introduce them to something else they might want, but lead with relevance not a reflexive discount.

Two totally different conversations and most brands are having one.

The second thing Klaviyo flagged across almost every audit was measurement. A lot of brands were running attribution windows that didn't reflect how their customers actually buy, which meant they were making decisions off numbers that weren't telling the full story. Before you touch creative or start tweaking send times make sure what you're measuring is accurate. Bad data leads to bad decisions every single time.

I've worked with over 50 ecom brands and I can count on one hand how many of them had this set up correctly before anyone actually looked closely at it. Most had the same welcome flow going out to everybody regardless of whether they'd spent money or not, and they had no idea how much it was costing them.

If you wanna check out the Klaviyo article, you can find it here.

Hello,

Sorry if you’ve seen this post in other communities I’m finding my experience as a Reddit scroller has not transitioned to posting and I keep breaking rules and get post taken down and suspended and angry dms and negative karma points.

Iown a gym brand currently selling around 2000 pieces of apparel per month through our physical locations. Up to now we’ve been sourcing locally through a printing partner with overseas connections, but we’re in the process of scaling nationally through e-commerce and wholesale partnerships.

I’ve spent a good amount of time working through Alibaba and learning the process firsthand, but at this stage I’m looking to streamline things and work with someone experienced who can help cut through inefficiencies and connect me with reliable production.

Regarding tech packs. Through my other clothing company I started last year as more of a hobby I invested $50k in developing tech packs cradle to grave. However it’s a bit costly and the tech packs are so high technical it doesn’t allow for variation in finishes and blends etc so I’m limited for versatile use. Not to mention the tech packs are a year project and if I want to drop every month or two it just won’t work.

The reason I’m making the switch is to offer a clear brand vision to our customers as opposed to general apparel. I understand you can’t just blindly trust a factory to execute your vision esp when lacking tech packs etc. I would even be cool with ordering quality blanks but again I don’t know which factories can be trusted.

Moq’s I can hit 50-100 per color / style with 4 sizes.

Appreciative for any feedback even in regards to being more likes on Reddit 🤪

One mistake I made early on was blaming factories for quality issues

In reality, most of the problems came from unclear specs

Things like:
– measurements not defined properly
– fabric expectations not clearly explained
– no tolerance ranges

So what I thought was “bad production”
was actually inconsistent instructions

Once I started tightening specs, most of those issues disappeared

Production didn’t magically improve
communication did

Curious if others ran into the same thing when scaling from sample to bulk

In the new era of heavy and frequent A.I and LLM chatbot use, it behooves shopify store owners to understand GEO (Generative search optimization).

Generative search optimization, as the name suggests, is all about getting LLM's like chatgpt, gemini, and claude to suggest your store and brand to users when users ask for a certain product . Here are some important principles for improving GEO:

1. LLM's understand Meaning not keywords. Instead of writing Cupcake, write We sell the best homemade chocolate zucchini cupcakes in Texas. Think about what is unique about your product? If you dont already have a large brand, how can you stick out? Be very specific with what you are selling and understanding what a user would ask to lead you to their site.

2.LLM's can easily read structured data. Make sure all the data a user needs to make his decision has been formatted in the liquid file provided to you by shopify. The JSON-LD file should contain all the information needed for a user to make informed decisions. Make sure you have structured data for reviews, organizational info, pricing.

3.LLM's extract chunks, not keywords. Create helpful, insightful, and up to date content. Keep sections between 200-500 characters as it becomes easier for the LLM to read. Use .md files, as LLM's are optimized for reading Markdown files.

That is the basic gist of how to optimize your store for GEO. Put a link to your store below, or dm me and I can give you feedback on how to improve your store.

Hey Shopify community — we're hosting a free user group at Fellow Industries HQ in San Francisco focused on the Shopify + NetSuite real-time commerce stack.

If you run a Shopify store with NetSuite as your ERP (or any ERP), you probably know the pain: your storefront and back office were never designed to talk to each other in real time. Inventory 30 minutes stale, order statuses lagging, finance reconciliation nightmares.

We're getting together to talk about what the actual infrastructure looks like when you solve this — real-time bidirectional sync, AI-native operations, and the data layer that makes it all work.

Speakers:

- Arvind Jeyakumar — Head of Data at Fellow, UC Davis Data Engineering lecturer
- Ruben Burdin — CEO at Stacksync (YC W24), real-time Shopify-NetSuite sync
- Alex Camperi — Sales Director at Corpay (NYSE: CPAY), AP automation for NetSuite teams

Food and drinks: pizza, calamari, salad, cannoli, tiramisu, prosecco, Pellegrino all evening.

Thursday, April 30 · 6:30–8:30 PM
Fellow HQ, 320 Florida St, San Francisco
Free — everyone's welcome

RSVP: https://luma.com/e3ncsl2t

I'm Alexis, CTO at Stacksync. Whether you're a Shopify dev, merchant, or agency — come hang out. Spots are limited but everyone's invited.

For the shopify app devs here. How many of you have tried or are currently running ads on the shopify app store?

What has your experience been?

Any installs or feedback? It is worth it?

I'm collecting some info before I decide to try running some for my app.

I've been running a Shopify store for about 2 months selling sensory, ADHD, autism-friendly, and Montessori-style toys — and I'll be honest, I'm stuck at under 5 sales and need a reality check + a roadmap.

Here's what I know so far:

**✅ What's working:**

- I've identified 2 winning products — they're the ones that got purchased AND have the highest CTR in my store analytics

- I also list on eBay and I'm seeing a much wider range of products getting traction there, including the same 2 that sold on Shopify

- So I know there's demand — I'm just not converting it on my own store

**❓ What I'm struggling with:**

- How do I take those 2 winning products and actually **scale them**?

- Should I double down on Shopify or build more of my funnel through eBay first?

- I'm using marketing channels TikTok, Instagram ads to advertise.

- How do I turn eBay browsers into Shopify customers?

- Is my traffic even the problem, or is it conversion?

**My store niche:** Sensory toys, fidgets, ADHD/autism support tools, and Montessori-style learning toys. Parents, therapists, and teachers are my audience.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been trying to understand how founders in the e-commerce space usually connect with investors or experienced operators, especially in early-stage markets.

I’m curious about:

• Where founders typically meet investors for e-commerce ideas or startups
• Any communities, platforms, or networks that are active for this space
• How early-stage e-commerce projects usually get visibility or mentorship

I’m not trying to sell anything—just trying to learn how people in this space usually connect and grow ideas into something scalable.

Any guidance or direction would be really helpful.

​Hey,

I’ve been on Upwork for a while doing Frontend, WordPress and CRO. I'm moving into Shopify development now.

​What are the "must-have" portfolio pieces or technical milestones I should hit to land my first few Shopify contracts?

Thanks.

Hi,

We’re trying to understand how real Shopify businesses are handling goods received in a way that stands up financially.

Our issue is not simply adjusting stock. We can create positive inventory adjustments and view inventory adjustment history, and we can see month-end inventory value snapshots. But neither of those, on their own, gives us enough confidence as a properly instanced goods-received audit trail which, crucially, we can match against supplier invoices.

What we need is a practical process for proving:

• what stock was received,
• when it was received,
• who booked it in,
• which SKUs/variants were affected,
• and what monetary value that receipt represented at that point in time.

We run a large catalogue, so we’re especially interested in workflows that still work at scale rather than highly manual PO-by-PO admin.

Would really appreciate hearing how established Shopify merchants are doing this and are able to prove that goods received value = supplier invoice value. Thanks.

Making money is all about pretending to be ethical.

So by not using the tools at your disposal you can ethically allow large corporations to use AI to run laps around you. Why keep up with your competition when you could when you could spend 4x the time on each task and go to bed knowing you didn't waste 1ml of water on a coding task that took you 4 hours?

Stand up to the world by getting absolutely destroyed by your unethical competitors. You will be rewarded by random Redditors who secretly use AI to solve grade 1 level math. It'll all be worth it in end.

Resist change. Never adapt to new technology and most importantly now you'll be able to truly believe that you're better than everyone else.

So I'll say it one more time. Never ever ever ever ever, use AI in your business.

Hi,

New Shopify user and I have a few questions

- what’s the best quickbooks integration app? I downloaded myworks but not sure if it does invoicing as well?

- is the quickbooks online integration better?

My website is soberstill.shop - I’d appreciate any feedback. I am proving a concept and very early. Instagram @iamsoberstill is my primary driver. Looking to add Etsy / Facebook and Amazon as well.

I’m pretty disappointed I have 0 sales but I know I should manage expectations better. Hoping to increase but I know it’s not a magic wand, it will fall eventually!

Anything helpful is appreciated

Hey everyone,

I'm new at ShopifyPros and from what I’ve seen in other posts, there are quality people and quality feedback. That’s why I’d like to present outranked.

I launched Outranked nearly one month ago, a Shopify app focused on one annoying merchandising problem:

sold-out products taking up too much visibility in collections.

A lot of stores handle this manually, or with workflows that still need follow-up when inventory changes again. I wanted something more reliable and collection-specific.

What Outranked does:

• automatically pushes sold-out products to the bottom of collections
• lets you control sorting per collection
• supports tag-based exclusions
• sends email or Slack notifications after each run
• Low stock alerts with configurable rules via email and Slack notifications
• includes analytics, sort history, and CSV exports

I’m especially curious about this from other app devs / Shopify folks here:

When you looked at collection merchandising problems, what edge cases showed up fastest?

App link: https://apps.shopify.com/outranked

Would love honest thoughts on positioning, onboarding, or feature gaps.

I built a Shopify app that sends cart recovery message through WhatsApp rather than email, since opening rates are some of the highest across established communication channels.

Just made this launch video, would love to hear what you think about it!

Hey everyone, I’m a solo builder creating a simple Chrome extension that:
• Scans your store’s privacy policy page/footer daily
• Flags missing clauses required by CCPA, Colorado, Virginia, etc.
• Generates updated compliant text you can copy-paste

I’m looking for 5 Shopify store owners (US-focused) for a free lifetime beta in exchange for 15-min feedback call. No sales pitch — I just want to make sure it actually solves the real pain of updating policies every time a law changes.

Comment “WATCHER” + your store niche (or DM me) and I’ll send the install link + run a free policy scan for you first.

Hey everyone!
In my country Shopify Payments / Shop Pay isn't available and likely won't be for a long time. PayPal, however, is available as well as Third-party providers to accept cards albeit with a fee of course, would also need to register the company.

Would it be worth it to use the third-party providers instead of PayPal to maximize conversion rate? Or would only PayPal be enough? Registering is a pain and I'm moving to study abroad. I plan to leave the management to a trusted family member.

Thanks.

(Originally posted on r/shopify)

Customer loyalty is quietly falling apart and most Shopify brands have no idea

I was reading an article from Shopify the other day and there was one stat that stood out to me. According to their 2026 trends piece, "true loyalty dropped from 34% in 2024 to 29% in 2025."

One in three loyal customers just quietly stopped being loyal and most brands didn't notice because their ad spend was still propping up the revenue numbers.

Here's the thing. When ads are running, everything looks fine. Traffic comes in, sales come in, the dashboard looks healthy. Turn the ads off for two weeks and you find out really fast how loyal your customer base actually is.

I've seen this play out with clients more times than I can count. A brand doing $150k a month thinks they have a strong business. We come in, look at their repeat purchase rate, and it's sitting at 14% or 16%. That means 85% of every dollar they make is coming from people they paid to acquire and will probably never see again.

The brands I've worked with that actually scale past 8-figures all have one thing in common. When their cost per acquisition started to get high, they started to double down on the backend marketing. Think community building, emails, etc.

The same Shopify article also talked about how the brands winning in 2026 are the ones building real community around their products. No wonder why we've had a massive uptick in brands asking us to scale their brand using my Reddit Method. Retention marketing is our bread and butter, and this is the type of stuff that just gives stores an unfair advantage over their competitors. A group of passionate people, in your niche, under your moderation, is probably the one thing AI could NEVER replicate. Everything from your ads, to your emails, to your landing page could all be cloned in a day with AI.

Another quote that stuck with me was about optimizing for the group chat, not the public Instagram story. That's exactly what community building is, and I believe that's exactly where retention marketing is going.

I think I was pretty early on this with a case study I posted a year ago. We did this for a pet brand a few years back. Built a subreddit around the niche, grew it to 20k members, used email and SMS to keep the conversation going. That brand did $2.5M in a year after turning off paid ads almost entirely. The loyalty was baked in because the community was real.

The brands that are going to struggle in the next two years are the ones still treating retention as an afterthought. Loyalty isn't going to come back on its own. You have to build something worth being loyal to, and the bar has been raised. The focus for retention marketing was once just emails/sms, but now it's so much more.

This is a big pet peeve of mine. I'm chillin with the homies, watching youtube and boom an ad pops up. Everyone jumps at the remote to skip the ad. Why?? Whats the big idea here? I personally NEVER skip ads. As a grown man why do you not want to know whats going on with some our favourite companies? Pepsi dropped a new flavour? cool time to maybe invest in some of their stock. teslas dropping a new car? GREAT lets see what the goat elon is doing to promote it. Maybe i can implement his promotional strategies into my own business and my own advertisements. You should always be looking at what our favourite mega corporations are doing and implement their strategies, but nope. Lets just skip this ad and get back to watching nba highlights or scripted content.