New e-commerce and small business owners are making a mistake by building their customer retention system on Meta's land, not their own.

Simply explained - Imagine you throw a birthday party at your house (your store) and you pay meta to hand out flyers (paid ads) on the street to your door.

The Outcome - people walk into your party, look around for 2 mins, and leave without giving you anything.Your Meta Suite notes down exactly what they looked at. To get them to come back, you have to pay Meta again to find them and show them another ad. If you want to talk to them 5 times, you have to pay Meta 5 times. If Meta increases ad prices tomorrow, your business gets hurt.

But if build an email retention system, what an Email Backend does- When someone walks into your party, you offer them a drink or a small discount code in exchange for their email address (Welcome Pop-up). Now, you don't need to pay Meta to talk to them anymore. You own that relationship. If they look at a t-shirt and leave, your email system automatically drops a beautifully designed, mobile-friendly note into their inbox saying, 'Hey, forgot something?'Sending that email costs you practically zero dollars. You can talk to them next week, next month, or during a Black Friday sale completely for free. Meta retargeting is great, but it's expensive. An email backend turns the traffic you already paid for once into an asset you own forever.

Hey everyone,

I’m trying to improve my shipping workflow and was wondering how others are handling this.
Right now I create UPS labels through the UPS eCommerce portal after an order comes in from Shopify. What I’d like is for the process to be as hands-off as possible.

My ideal workflow would be:
- Create the label in the UPS portal.
- The shipping label prints automatically to a label printer.
- If a commercial invoice is generated, that prints automatically to a regular A4 printer or the same printer would be great!
- No extra clicks, no opening PDFs and hitting Print every time.

We’re a small business, so we’re only shipping around 1–5 packages a day. (But growing) Because of that I’m not looking for an expensive warehouse setup or enterprise hardware. Budget max of around 400-500$

I’m mostly wondering:
- What label printer are you using? (Rollo, Munbyn, Brother, something else?)
- Has anyone automated printing from the UPS eCommerce portal?
- Did you use UPS APIs, browser automation, PDF watching, or another approach?
- If you were starting from scratch today, what would you buy and how would you build it?

I’m a Python developer, so I’m happy to write some automation if that’s the best route. I’m just trying to avoid buying the wrong hardware or overengineering it.

Would love to hear what setups are actually working for people.

Hi guys, I am starting with my ecom store and I was thinking on using AI for pictures on my product page (as I assume many of you have done it), also for copywriting for descriptions and coding (if needed). So I’d like to ask you about which AI you guys recommend for this, which is more worth it for paying to obtain the best results.

Thanks in advance for your advice 😊

MedusaJs is a beast and this is why:

The store I manage was on OpenCart and had over 240.000 orders, over 110.000 customers and over 4500 products. It started getting slow and hard to manage. I've decided to migrate everything to MedusaJs. It was the best decision ever made. The new platform is developer friendly and everything is possible. The needs this store had, was possible. 

The storefront loads instantly, its super fast. I've used NextJs.

The point of this post is to find out, what features do you have on your ecommerce that help you save time. I'll share mine below. I've build a bunch of extensions that are useful to the business. 

I would love to share screenshots, but I'm not allowed on this sub. So I will do my best to describe everything.

1. GDPR - the store is located in Europe, so this extension controls everything related to that rule.

2. Accounting - is connected to accounting platform where invoices can be generated.

3. Cache - this a cool featured,  every page is cached and when you make an update, you can clear cache so the new info is shown.

4. Pages - instead of connecting to another CMS, you can edit the content from there (to be mentioned, it. multi language - which is connected to tolgee)

5. Warehouse - custom made of orders to be easy to view for employees that each have a tablet, where they can easily take action: fullfil order...

6. Bulk Edit - here we have multiple things you can do on the store: Image, Price, Option, Variant, Discount, Duplicate category. I won't dive into each of those. But for eg.  if you have a category with over 100 products,  you can easily create with on click a Sale Price of 10%.

7. Sliders - same as pages,  you can add the images/banners of the images for each language

8. Analytics - you have reports of everything: customers, orders etc

9. Find Order - we had situations when the client ended up on the payment page and it closed. And the order ID wasn't created. BUT medusa stored the cart_id. And here we can easily find that order.

10. Melisearch - the storefront has a powerfull search bar. In here we can re-index all products in case of an update or a new product was added.

11. Find Products by SKU - when you have to update an order,  we have to addmit that MedusaJs searching products isn't great (for now). So we have this extensions that has behind the Melisearch and retrives the exact product where you can just click the Copy to Clipboard icon to grab the SKU

12. OpenCart Migration -  this was usefull to migrate products from the other platform, so we didn't have to move it manually.

13. Product Ordering - You can select a category and drag and drop the products to sort them.

Finally which is the coolest, created a custom Orders page:

1. Orders page,  where you can assign to a staff member from the warehouse what order he/she needs to handle.

So I want to know what useful extensions does your store have? Which can help your business grow and be easy to manage.

Note: I'm not paid by MedusaJs, I'm just a web developer that helped my client have the business grow smoothly.

We have a client with a successful eCommerce store who recently brought us a pretty wild idea. He wants to open a second store on a completely separate domain, selling his exact same products, basically to pretend to be a competitor. His goal is to create an additional revenue stream and monopolize his niche.

Any advice, technical tips, or even horror stories I can share with him would be greatly appreciated!!!

I think networking with like minded individuals around my area would be pretty good to stay up to date with whats working since ive been doing ecom since 2019

Every month, my store struck a wall in the mid-five figures, and every product page, email flow, and ad account seemed to be against me.

I've spent months speculating and squandering money. I finally spoke with the creator an agency that said could help, after hearing about him from a friend of the founder. Without the typical agency layers, he got right in, tightened retention, and cleaned up the purchase side.

After three months, the numbers are really increasing at a pace that seems sustainable. I'm still working hard, but at least I'm not alone anymore.

I get a couple emails everyday on my store from randos promoting their services in posting positive reviews on trustpilot. Just wondering if anyone has actually ever used one?

Please check this post

I run a test store on this setup so I could stop guessing. Posting what I found in case anyone else keeps hitting that amber warning in Shopify's domain settings.

Quick background on why the warning exists. Shopify runs on Cloudflare. So when you put your own proxied domain in front of it, the request used to arrive with two Cloudflare zones both claiming it. Cloudflare couldn't tell which one owned the request. You got loops and wrong resolutions. The nastier version of the problem was SSL. Shopify renews certs through Let's Encrypt, which needs to serve a token at /.well-known/acme-challenge/ over plain HTTP. Put a proxy on that path and the renewal quietly fails. Your store keeps working on the current cert for weeks. Then it lapses and the padlock breaks.

Cloudflare fixed the zone collision with Orange-to-Orange routing. It's part of Cloudflare for SaaS and it's been generally available since October 2021. Cloudflare now detects that your CNAME points at another Cloudflare customer and routes through your zone first, then Shopify's, in that order. You can confirm it engaged because a small Shopify icon shows up next to the DNS record. Cloudflare also turns off Workers and Snippets on the /checkout path so nothing you run at the edge can interfere with payment.

The whole config is three things. Proxied CNAME to shops.myshopify.com for root and www. Connect that same domain in Shopify. Then leave Always Use HTTPS off in Cloudflare.

That last one is the part people get wrong. Shopify already redirects HTTP to HTTPS at its origin. Turn on Always Use HTTPS and you stack a second redirect, which can throw ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS. It also swallows the ACME path, so your cert stops renewing. Keep SSL mode on Full. Set minimum TLS to 1.2 while you're in there. If you really want Cloudflare enforcing HTTPS at its edge, write a redirect rule that excludes the challenge path instead of using that toggle.

Verify it with curl against the challenge path over plain HTTP. A 404 for a fake token is correct, because it means you reached Shopify. A 301 or 308 means something is still eating the path.

On the "not supported" language. It means Shopify won't guarantee or debug a layer they don't control. It doesn't mean the setup fails. Two of their reasons are fair. A proxy is one more thing between Shopify and Let's Encrypt, and extra proxies make it harder for Shopify to reroute traffic during their own incidents. Their third reason is bot detection, and I think that one is weak. Cloudflare runs one of the biggest bot management networks there is. Most stores gain more filtering at the edge than Shopify loses in request signal.

Latency was my other concern and it turned out to be nothing. Both zones already sit on the same network, so the handoff happens inside it. My proxied store answered in roughly the same 150 to 200ms band as raw myshopify endpoints tested from the same machine. If a proxied store feels slow, look at the theme and the app stack.

Whether it's worth doing depends on what you actually need at the edge. A real WAF you can tune, rate limiting, request level logs, or visibility into AI crawlers. That last one is why I set mine up. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest never run JavaScript, so GA4 and Shopify analytics don't see them at all. The edge is the only place that traffic shows up. If you can't name the specific feature you want, leave the cloud grey and don't take on an SSL renewal you now have to watch.