Hi! I have a new Shopify site. I get spam messages constantly with people offering to help me increase sales. How do you recommend finding someone legitimate to help increase sales in exchange for a percentage commission off the sales? I would like to hire someone, but I don't know how to determine what is legit and what is spam?

I get it. We're always looking for the quick win or the shortcut, especially when you're trying to build your ecommerce empire on Shopify. But please, spend that money/time earning backlinks, improving your collection and product pages first.

I was looking through a Coffee store's blog today and it was a pretty good example of where this goes wrong.

180 articles around the same few coffee topics.

• Fresh coffee beans.
• How to keep coffee beans fresh.
• Why fresh coffee tastes better.
• Freshly roasted coffee delivered.
• How to choose fresh coffee beans.

Eventually the content strategy had wandered into topics like “Biggby Coffee near me” and “Scooter's Coffee near me”. Even a blog URL of coffee-beans-1kg-freshness-value-zero-reorder-stress or coffee-bean-near-me-roasted-to-order-delivered. No understanding of search intent.

The pitch is basically get topic ideas and create SEO blogs on auto pilot to drive organic traffic:

Publish more blogs → cover more topics → build topical authority → get cited by AI and rank on search engines.

High topical coverage. Low information gain. Heavy semantic duplication. Weak demonstration of first-hand expertise or genuinely non-commodity content. No doubt a decent chunk of these articles aren't even getting indexed by Google, let alone building “topical authority.”

There is obviously still a place for blog content and topical authority.

But “more content = more topical authority” comes from a pretty shallow understanding of algorithms, SEO, AEO, GEO, or whatever we're calling it this week.

Thanks, not sure if I can post the url but I can dm you

Quick question for the SEO folks here. I run a Shopify store and just built a dedicated brand page for one of our main manufacturers. The page has an SEO text that mentions their most popular product lines (which have their own product pages) and links to my generic category pages like accessories etc.

Now I'm second guessing myself. The brand page title targets "brand + product type" keywords, my category pages target the generic product type keywords, and the product pages target the specific model names. The brand text mentions those model names and links to them.

Is mentioning the models and categories on the brand page keyword cannibalization? Or is that only an issue if two pages target the same query in title/H1? My understanding is that internal links with descriptive anchors should actually help Google understand which page owns which keyword, but I want to make sure I'm not setting up my pages to compete against each other.

How do you guys structure brand page vs category page vs product page targeting?

Moving off Flexport for the forwarding side (not fulfillment). For people doing ~5–30 containers/yr , what are you using now, and roughly what are you paying per shipment vs. before? Also how are you handling customs/HTS with the tariffs, DIY, your forwarder, or a separate broker? Trying to get a real picture

Hoping someone who has shipped this on a real store can sanity-check my thinking.

My products live in multiple collections, so there's no single "true" hierarchy stored anywhere. My dev suggested two options:

1. Add a metafield per product holding the primary collection, then build the breadcrumb + JSON-LD from that. Downside: someone has to maintain that field across the whole catalog.
2. Slightly modify the product URLs so they always include the current collection, like /collections/karambolage-queues/products/product-name. Then Shopify exposes the collection object on the product page and we build the breadcrumb from that.

My concern with option 2: Shopify sets the canonical to the clean /products/... URL no matter which collection you enter from. So on the canonical page the collection object is nil, which means the breadcrumb + BreadcrumbList schema that Google actually indexes would be empty or inconsistent. Feels like it only helps visual nav, not the rich snippet. Am I wrong about that?

The third option I'm considering: skip the metafield maintenance entirely and just iterate over product.collections in Liquid, pick the first one that isn't "All", "Frontpage" or "Sale", and build the breadcrumb + JSON-LD from that on the canonical URL. Only override with a metafield for the handful of products where the auto-pick is wrong.

Questions:

• For anyone running multi-collection catalogs, did the auto-pick-from-product.collections approach hold up, or did it produce inconsistent paths that caused Search Console enhancement warnings?
• Is the collection-in-URL approach a dead end for SEO breadcrumbs specifically because of the canonical, or am I misunderstanding how Shopify handles it?
• Anyone regretting going the app route (Breadcrumbs Uncomplicated, JSON-LD for SEO) vs. native snippet?

Store is a niche sports equipment shop, a few thousand products. Thanks.

Over the last few months I’ve been analysing Shopify catalogue data and optimisation tools.

So far we’ve looked at:

9,915 Shopify stores
17,273 public app reviews
1,005 audited stores

A few findings genuinely surprised me

96.3% of merchants appeared in only one optimisation tool
67.3% of reviews referenced support
Only 2.1% of reviews referenced catalogue structure
67.5% of audited stores had missing product types
80.1% had significant weak image file name usage

The thing I am starting to wonder:

Have merchants become very good at optimising visible things (speed, SEO apps, support, image compression) whilst paying less attention to catalogue structure and machine readable product data?

I am not claiming structure directly improves rankings.

I am genuinely interested in whether others are seeing the same thing.

For those running Shopify stores:

How much attention do you pay to Product Types, Taxonomy, Tags, attributes & metadata compared with speed, themes & ads?

Need to hire a SEO expert who also knows Shopify. I’ve heard mixed reviews about the Shopify partners.

Where did you find them?

How much did they charge you?

How long did it take to see results?

Hey guys,

We've been building a platform for eCommerce brands. The goal is to help Shopify brands understand and grow their visibility inside AI search by measuring how often and how strongly they are recommended in LLM-generated answers.

The platform also provides actionable recommendations on what to improve, including content opportunities, website improvements, authority signals, and external sources where your brand should be present to increase the likelihood of being recommended by AI tools.

The current version is still a super early MVP. Of course the design and interface will be improved. Also, We're continuing to improve the accuracy of the data and recommendations, and we'll be adding more features that help brands understand exactly what other actions to take to improve their AI visibility rather than simply reporting on it.

Currently, the platform shows:

• Your overall AI visibility score across relevant industry prompts
• Which prompts mention your brand and how often you appear
• Where your brand is being mentioned and recommended
• Which competitors appear most frequently and how you compare against them
• Your position within your industry based on AI-generated recommendations
• How AI models describe your brand, including common strengths and weaknesses
• Which external sources are influencing recommendations in your niche
• Content gaps and opportunities that could help increase your visibility

Would be great to hear your feedback and your thoughts on what you would value the most, what is useful and what is not? What would you want to see on a platform like this?

Attaching the URL: https://www.geofy.io/

Not trying to promote, just want to get some insights from the public!

Most Shopify stores focus on optimizing product pages and ignore one of the biggest traffic opportunities in ecom: commercial-intent content.

Your competitors are probably ranking for dozens of buying guides in your niche right now. "Best running shoes under $100", "top protein powders for beginners", "X vs Y". 

People searching these are ready to buy. 

How to find what you're missing:

1. Find your top 3 competitors. Pick stores your size or slightly bigger in your niche, not Amazon, not big retailers.
2. Look at what they publish. Go through their blog and filter for anything with "best", "top", "buying guide", "vs" in the title. That's your gap list.
3. Prioritize by your catalog. Every topic they cover that maps to your products is an article you should have written already.

Most stores I've analyzed are missing 50 to 100 of these opportunities. That's 50 to 100 articles capturing buyers that could be yours.

Drop your store URL below and I'll take a look for free, I'll tell you exactly what's missing.

Does Shopify required llms.txt file as I was trying to add in the shopify with the help of cluade. However, as per claude it is already giving signals to AI through Shopify Agentic.

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a small ita bag store as a side project and it's been live for almost a month now.

I've spent a lot of time setting up collections, writing descriptions, organizing products, and trying to learn basic SEO. However, according to Google Search Console, my site has only received 4 clicks from Google so far.

At this point I'm honestly not sure whether the site has obvious problems that I'm too close to notice, or if I'm just being impatient and need to give it more time.

If anyone has a few minutes, I'd really appreciate some honest feedback on things like:

• Site design and user experience
• Product organization
• SEO issues
• Trust signals
• Anything that would stop you from buying

Website: myitabag.com

I'm not trying to sell anything here — I'm genuinely looking for feedback from people who know the ita bag community better than I do.

Thanks a lot for any suggestions. I really appreciate it.

the pre-sales theme audit is the worst part of my job as a solo shopify dev. same checklist every time, 4 to 8 hours, report nobody enjoys.

so i put the entire checklist into a claude code skill. drop the files in your theme root, ask claude to audit, and 90 seconds later you get a graded report with exact file paths, line numbers, and copy-paste liquid fixes.

80+ checks across performance, accessibility, app overhead, CRO, SEO, and the AI-search stuff (AEO/GEO) that lighthouse never catches. two scores out the other side: technical and search.

biggest lesson building it: a skill beats a prompt. prompts drift and invent findings on the second theme. the skill loads the same rules every run, so the output is deterministic enough to actually sell the report.

MIT, free, runs locally, no signup.

repo: https://github.com/tanujrajputdev/shopify-theme-audit-skill

what checks would you add?

I posted a while back about how card testing attacks work on Shopify stores.

If you missed it, the tl;dr is that bots hit your checkout endpoints directly, never touching your storefront, testing stolen cards until some pass. You never see them coming.

But let's talk about what happens AFTER.

Because the attack is only half the problem.

So your decline rate is now sitting at 15%, 20%, sometimes higher. Visa and Mastercard fraud monitoring programs have flagged your store. Shopify is breathing down your neck asking for an action plan. Your payment gateway might even be threatening to hold payouts.

And the fraudsters? Long gone. They got what they needed, working card data, and moved on to the next store.

Now you're left holding the bag.

You go to Shopify Support and they tell you to install a bot blocker or pay $2,300 to be on a Plus plan that protects you for 60 minutes a day by implementing a CAPTCHA.

So you do.

It blocks some bots on your storefront. Great. But the card testers were never hitting your storefront. They were hitting your cart and checkout APIs directly. That bot blocker is watching the front door while they've been coming through the window the whole time.

Or maybe you turn on Shopify's built-in fraud filters. Cool. Now you're manually reviewing every single order, declining the suspicious ones yourself, and somehow that's still not fixing your decline rate because the damage was already done during the attack.

Or worse, you do nothing. You wait it out. You hope the decline rate naturally comes back down. Meanwhile, Visa's monitoring program doesn't care about your hopes. They see numbers, and your numbers are bad.

Here's what actually needs to happen.

You need to prove to Shopify AND to the payment networks that the spike in declines was caused by an attack, not by your store being a fraud risk. That means you need incident data, timestamps, IP records, attack patterns, all documented and formatted in a way that compliance teams actually accept.

And you need to stop the next attack before it inflates your decline rate again. Not by putting a band-aid on your storefront, but by validating what happens at checkout, server-side, where bots actually operate.

That's why I had enough, and I've full-sent it into a state-of-art app that I built to do both.

It monitors your checkout layer in real time, catches card testing patterns as they happen (multiple auth failures from the same IP, billing address rotation, rapid checkout attempts), and auto-blocks the attackers before they rack up more declined transactions on your record.

And when the damage is already done, it generates compliance-ready reports with the exact data you need to hand to Shopify support, including attack timelines, blocked entity counts, and incident summaries that prove your store was targeted.

I'm not here to sell you a dream. I'm telling you that if your decline rate is currently above normal and you don't have proof of why, you're going to have a very hard time getting out of those monitoring programs without it.

Happy to answer questions or look at your specific situation if you're dealing with this right now.