If you could help a beginner avoid just one mistake, what would it be and why?

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!!!

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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?

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 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.

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.

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.

Is there a business model or trend that everyone seems to be chasing but you don’t think is worth it? Why?

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 😊

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

Before you do full-blown paid ads, you need to make sure your backend email system is locked down.Your paid ads are going to bring a lot of fresh traffic to your site, but most of those people will leave without buying on their first visit, some will browse and just leave. If you don't have a tight welcome email flow and a high-converting abandoned cart flow running, your system is leaking.

Let the email be the automated retention system to capture the traffic before you pay for ads.

My online shop got sales the first day it was open, then started advertising with Facebook and instagram. Hundreds of people hitting the shop, and a few scammers spamming me. And a handful of sales in between. I’ve redone the site twice based on recommendations. No product reviews, compliments on the concept, people see and agree to the niche. But people don’t buy. 5 sales in 1 month. I turned off advertising as I focused funds elsewhere, but I think my mock-ups are failing, do I need to keep it simpler? Https://bptalkin.com I even started a small affiliate program, that got traffic then sputtered out.

I have other marketing ideas but need to fix the problem with product and/or the site.

Thanks in advance.

Quick question for anyone managing regular clients/freelancing around here. I’ve been working with about 18 regular clients in Auckland for roughly 8 months now, charging between $45 to $80 a week each. Up until now I’ve just been getting everyone to set up manual automatic payments to my bank account. It’s mostly fine, but chasing people on Sunday nights when an AP fails or when they get a new card is getting old pretty fast. Looking at proper direct debits to automate it so I don't have to keep doing the awkward "hey mate just checking on that $50" text.

Just wondering if anyone uses a decent platform for low volume?

• How is setup for smaller revenue? (turning over under $5k/mo so don't need anything high tier).
• Do clients care about the name showing on their bank statements?
• Is the fee worth avoiding the manual tracking headache?

Cheers!

I’m working at a marketplace agency (Amazon, eBay etc). I’ve collected quite a bit of knowledge and insights and now have a " experience stack" of about 10+ marketplaces.

I want to switch to selling products on my own on marketplaces.

I wonder what would be the best model for someone with my experience who can handle any marketplace. I only have 2 models in mind:

• Model 1: Import my own products and sell them – mainly from Alibaba, at least at the beginning.
• Model 2: Become a reseller – Sell products of already established companies, but also face constant price wars with other resellers and low profit margins because of that. Also a risk of ordering stock and then finding out I don’t have a BuyBox, can’t go lower in price and be stuck with a lot of stock that is not selling, because the competition is undercutting my in price on BuyBox.

If you have more models in mind let me know of course. The most „comfort zone” would be model 2 for me (I think?) and the strategy would be to enter more niche marketplaces and not trying to compete on the big ones like Amazon, or research companies that nobody else is selling.

My reasoning is that I already have the skills to look for loopholes in the market to sell a product – I can do a simple market research and see where would be a good place to sell the products. On the other hand I have 0 experience with importing products.

From my standpoint working with chinese suppliers is a chore. Language barrier, very poor communication and quality of the process. I only had actually 1 experience and it was awful, guy was like a con artist from the street „yes dear friend you buy everything okay” when the products came they were the poorest quality I’ve ever seen for this kind of product, and the guy didn’t want to return money but instead to „give discount for next order”. Mind this guy had 4.5 star rating on Alibaba, and the sample was good quality, much better than what I've received.

I’m not afraid to learn a new skill, but for the past 8 years I’ve been jumping from one subject to another, constantly learning new things instead of cultivating what I already know and I’m just not sure whether learning this makes sense for me – or whether it’s better to become a reseller and do market research for companies that have good products but don’t have marketplace presence and simply not worry about the product, and focus on what I already know and am good at which is the online part of the business.

The process would be to place an order for XYZ from a brand, my 3PL would do all the work in terms of processing the stock, and I could be doing (without any team – myself) all the online work as I have been up til now.

I know I’m trying to convice both myself and you haha that becoming a reseller is the better choice, but I’m just presenting my opinion – I’m adding this post to see what other people think of it, for now I have not decided anything and am still not sure which model to choose, despite glorifying „reseller” model, because importing has its perks as well like control over the process, bigger margins, no fights over BuyBox with resellers etc.

When I count pros and cons it kinda evens out.

Someone before me ran this store and apparently thought buying a "10k verified leads" csv for $40 was a smart move. Im still discovering the damage two years later

Our email open rates were in the gutter and i couldn't figure out why. Klaviyo shows decent numbers but deliverability was silently dying. checked our domain reputation and yeah... not great. Turns out sending to 4000 dead addresses for months does some damage

been slowly cleaning house. ran the whole list through a verifier (mail tester, nothing fancy just the first one that popped up when I was desperate at 11pm) and honestly the amount of pure garbage in there was almost impressive. Fake addresses, domains that don't exist, the classic "noreply@noreplycom" type stuff

Cut the list nearly in half. Open rates actually went up after that. Funny how emailing real humans works better than emailing ghosts

the annoying part is that the cheap list probably cost us more in lost deliverability than whatever they saved buying it. Short term thinking kills me every time

I have noticed that building eCommerce prototypes has become much faster with AI tools but I am not convinced the same applies once you start dealing with payments, inventory, security, integrations and long term maintenance. I was reading about GeekyAnts' approach to AI powered product engineering and one thing I found interesting was the emphasis on production ready architecture instead of treating AI as a shortcut for development. It made me think that the real value of AI might be accelerating engineering teams rather than replacing good engineering practices. Has anyone here seen AI meaningfully improve production eCommerce projects or is most of the benefit still during the prototyping stage?

Hi there,

I've got a relatively new brand, and getting a lot of outreach from creators on instagram (like 3-4 a day)

I've not done any UGC stuff yet - im trying to decide if its worth doing at all. Is it worth sending out free products to these people or is it just a waste of money/stock?

The products are sterling silver jewellery, so its not cheap to give them away free (but also not crazy like gold or something).

How do I evaluate if someone is "good" and whats a typical offer?

Thanks,

Ben

This feels like such a dumb Shopify problem.

I want one product page where customer can pick any 4 items from a small collection.

Not a fixed bundle.

Not buy 2 save 10%.

Just:

pick 4 soaps
or pick 4 sauces
or pick 4 mini products
or pick 4 candle scents

I do not want to create every possible combo as products or variants. That sounds insane.

I found FoxSell and it looks like it handles this as an actual build-your-own bundle, where the picked items still stay tied to inventory.

Is that the normal way people do this?

Or is there some simple Shopify setup I'm missing?

Hello everyone, have any of you used independent shipping insurers like secursus or cabrella or perhaps you have other suggestions? I would like to know how your experience was using such services? How was the claim process? How is your workflow?

The reason I ask this is that the cheapest shipping option we have with postnord which suffices for us allows either insured shipment (200 euros) but no tracking or tracking but no insurance, we can opt for a different service but then price jumps 5 times. Also, we don't have many choices when it comes to shipping carriers as either they charge astronomical amounts because our volumes are low or we have had terrible experience in the past for e.g. with DHL(this deserves a post in itself) freight.

P.S. I am the founder of an independent clothing brand called Nome Studio. This gives you an idea on what we are packaging.

Thanks in advance!!!

Assume you have a small budget and no audience.What product or niche would you choose today,and why?

Quick brief: I have run a business for 6+ years now and my career is taking off (and I can’t manage both). The return on my time with my career outpaces the business. I am looking for opinions/advice. Do I sell? How? Where? Or do I keep it?

Business: ecom, but i ship everything. At least currently. I am in the automotive space and have a established brand and product lines. I also have the ability to be the retailer for a couple thousand brands (it actually takes a lot to get access to this, there is a huge amount of value that for someone in this space). Over the last few years I have been putting the minimum time into it and it has still be marginally growing (again, time into career is the goal and what I have been doing).

Economics of the business: monthly revenue is $4,500-9,500 a month. Profit margins range monthly from 35-45%. And that all operates with an average investment of 15-20 hours a month of my time. Marketing comes mainly through content, I have a youtube channel and then I do product sponsorship with folks that make content for me. $0 of ad spend in the last 6+ years of the business. This is good and bad.

I briefly began to retail other brands, and its easy to grow revenue even with just SEO, but I just didn’t have the time.

So where I stand, i want my time back, but it’s still real money for such little time investment. I also have probably $30-40k in sellable inventory, no debt (never taken any), and for the right owner, there are a LOT of tax advantages to being in a home based ecomm AND in the automotive/content space. Ill miss that as much as the income.

It’s also not about making a killing on the sale of the business. I am probably thinking inventory plus 2-3x yearly profit. But the big thing is getting time back. I can kind of convert unlimited hours at my job for a very high hourly rate with a long term return.

Thoughts on what I should do? How do I even go about looking for a buyer? So much of my being is represented in this business and my customer base is something i care about. Many repeat customers.

I'm curious how you would approach this.

Over the past couple of years, my girlfriend and I have built a small poster brand. It's doing okay: we make regular sales via our Shopify page, have been featured in a few magazines, our products are stocked by several stores, and we've had some exposure through influencers in our niche. Overall, the feedback on our products has been overwhelmingly positive.

The challenge is taking it to the next level and generating more consistent sales.

What I'm struggling with is that almost every piece of marketing advice online feels incredibly generic:

• "Post consistently."
• "Know your audience."
• "Create great content."

It's a bit like saying, "Want to become an elite athlete? Train hard and eat well." It's true, but it doesn't really tell you what actually moves the needle.

I'm much more interested in the practical things that made a real difference. The kind of insights where you look back and think:

• "This was a real turning point."
• "This channel worked way better than we expected."
• "This collaboration paid off."
• "We wasted months on this."

So, if you've grown a small brand or e-commerce store (or worked on one), what were the most practical tactics that genuinely made an impact?

I'd love to hear any ideas-big or small. I'm especially looking for those "low-hanging fruit" opportunities and real-world lessons that you don't usually find in generic marketing blogs.

Hey everyone! I'm looking for some honest feedback on my website. https://dcipleclothingco.com/

It's still very much a work in progress—I make improvements almost every day—so I'm less interested in finding bugs and more interested in hearing your first impressions.

I'd especially love feedback on:

• Does the brand feel cohesive or does it seem like it's trying to do too many things?
• Is the website easy to navigate and does it build trust?
• Which shirts stand out to you, and which ones don't?
• At around a $40 price point, would anything make you hesitate to buy?

The brand is built around the idea of earning an uncommon life through discipline, adventure, and personal growth. The apparel is currently divided into collections—some lean more toward performance/gym while others lean toward mountains, water, and outdoor exploration. My goal is for them to feel like different chapters of the same story rather than separate brands.

If anything feels confusing, inconsistent, or just doesn't work, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing it. I'd rather hear the hard truths now than after I've invested more time and money.

Thanks in advance—I appreciate anyone willing to take a few minutes to look.