This Shopify Agency Spills its Secrets

Happy Monday! Nothing like a new edition of Latino Owned, bringing ecommerce to your inbox. I have been having some amazing conversations with founders and can’t wait to bring them to you soon.

In the fast-growing world of ecommerce, many DTC brands obsess over paid ads or social strategy, or finding the right influencers. But brands are overlooking their one most important asset: their online store. 💻

That’s where Getmore, a Shopify Plus ecommerce agency based in Mexico City, comes in. I had an awesome chat with Alejandro Moreno, from Getmore to talk about what it takes to build a successful ecom store, what most brands get wrong, and the four pillars every DTC brand should master. 👀

What Successful Brands are doing from Day One?

They are tracking two key metrics, Conversion Rate and Profit Per Session.

“All of our most successful clients from day one, track their most important KPIs,” Alejandro says. “Starting with the conversion rate. How was how did it perform yesterday? If it dropped, if it increased, why did it happen?”

Brands need to understand where in the customer journey did customers drop or complete a purchase. The second metric to track from day one is Profit Per Session, and ask yourself “how much money am I making on each of the sessions that I am driving to my store?”

Profit Per Session, gives a truer picture of business health and helps brands understand how much value they're getting from each site visitor.

The Biggest Mistake Ecommerce Brands Make

I think as founders or brand owners it can be easy to build and launch a website, and move on to different areas of marketing. But we forget that our website is actually our biggest real estate. Literally our biggest marketing channel.

“Not optimizing their online store and fully focusing on ads and and marketing is a big mistake,” Alejandro explains. “Brands think marketing will solve the problem when often it's probably something on their site that's getting users to stop from completing a purchase.

Brands turn their head only to the marketing team, and they never go back to the online store to understand what is happening there. Both of them are important and the conversion rate is directly linked to the quality of traffic that you are driving.

If you are driving garbage, then your conversion rate is gonna drop for sure,” Alejandro says.

Marketing and conversion are deeply connected. A drop in conversion rate might be due to low-quality traffic, or it might signal technical issues on the site. That’s why Getmore encourages brands to track both traffic quality and site performance simultaneously.

Design Tips for DTC Brands

Alejandro and the Getmore team work with brands in Mexico and the US. About 50% of their clients are based in each market, with many cross-border businesses looking to expand in either direction. 🇲🇽🇺🇸🛒

They have built some incredible sites across various industries ➡️ supplements and skincare to fashion and CPG brands, fashion and wellness brands.

“I think content is one of the most important thing because you can you can do a custom website, but if your product images and your lifestyle images are not at the same level or with the same high quality as the custom website, it will not perform well, Alejandro explains.

“On the other hand, a really simple, clean, free theme, with amazing product imagery and lifestyle pictures will perform really well.” It’s important to think what types of images and the messages that you are transmitting to your clients visually.

Four Pillars of Ecommerce Success

When you're building an ecommerce site, there's a lot you could focus on, but what actually matters?

1. Product-Market Fit: You need a product market fit. A good store can’t fix a bad product.

2. Technology: Vet and look at the right ecommerce platform for you. Make sure you build a business on one that is solid and has all the right tools.

3. Operations and Logistics: “You need to have a streamlined process of operations,” Alejandro says. “Meaning customer support, answering all the questions from the client as soon as possible, fulfilling the orders right away.” From fulfillment to customer support, backend logistics matter."

4. Marketing Strategy: “Make sure that you have the right strategy in place with the right platforms that you are gonna promote your products. The main goal should be to drive high quality traffic.”

When to A/B Test?

A hot topic in ecommerce is A/B testing, but Getmore advises most brands to skip it, at least early on.

“In my opinion, if you are not a brand that drives 500,000 visits a month to your website, you shouldn't be thinking about doing A/B testing or landing pages,” Alejandro says.

“Your product page and your home page should be a landing page itself. It should answer all of the most important questions. A/B testing really depends on the stage of your website. We always say, A/B testing is like a PhD. Probably your brand is in elementary school or in secondary school or in college.”

Learn more about Getmore, and connect with Alejandro on Linkedin.

Brand Inspo from Polaroids IRL campaigns:

Here is a cool campaign from Polaroid that wanted to push back against the “digital exhuastion” and AI overuse. 📸

Polaroid created some creative messaging out IRL on the streets of NYC and London. They wanted people to hopefully pause and rethink their screen time and associate Polaorid with memories.

Polaroid is hoping to target Gen Z and younger millennials with this campaign and tap into that growing tech fatigue that seems to be hitting a lot of people. This wasn’t just some random campaign. Polaroid is tying in a new product launch with these billboards. It’s a great use of transforming a product launch into a lifestyle movement, aligning with the brand’s purpose and meeting where cultural sentiment is at.

As someone who spends too much time on screens, I thought this was an awesome reminder to be outside or put the phone down more. It also made me want to dig up my old Polaroid cameras from my closet.

Our next edition is all about Rayo, a performance energy gel with an awesome story. 🏃‍♂️

Let me know what you thought of this edition. 🤳 Don’t forget to follow Latino Owned on Instagram and connect with me on Linkedin and email! 📧