Paul Denault

Over 460,000+ Shopify stores sell gift cards (source: BuiltWith). Yet, 50% of gift card value remains unused, sitting as a liability for store owners (source: Shopify). That’s because most stores don’t optimize them for success. And that’s wild, because gift cards are one of the few levers in ecommerce that do three things at once: ✅ Bring cash ✅ Increase AOV  ✅ Pull customers back without discounts A brand enables gift cards once. Adds a small link in the footer. Pushes them during holidays. Then forgets about them completely. So gift cards end up behaving like a passive feature instead of what they really are: prepaid revenue with retention baked in. When a customer buys a gift card, you’ve already won the first battle: 💵 You get the money before the inventory even moves 🚶‍➡️ You lock in a future visit 💳 You shift acquisition from discount-led to prepaid loyalty And when that gift card is redeemed? Customers rarely stop at the exact card value. They top up. They explore. They spend more. Yet, most e-commerce brands don’t: - Track redemption behavior properly - Use gift cards post-purchase or post-return - Tie gift cards into loyalty, referrals, or win-back flows with a unified recognition layer - Treat gift cards like a repeatable growth channel. So instead of driving retention, gift cards just sit there… underused. The brands that get this right don’t think of gift cards as a product setting. ❌ They think of them as infrastructure for repeat revenue. ✔️ That’s the gap tools like 99minds are built to close—helping brands turn gift cards into store credit, retention loops, and loyalty-driven growth instead of a once-a-year holiday play. Gift cards already work. Optimizing them is where most Shopify brands fall behind. #ecommerce #Shopify #giftcards #storecredit #customerloyalty #customerretention #customerchurn

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Doing $50K/month in Shopify revenue sounds impressive—but what if your bank account still feels empty? The problem is often not sales. It’s profit leakage. COGS, ad spend, returns, shipping, payment fees, discounts, and overhead can consume 90–95% of your revenue. In one example, $50K in sales leaves just $3,200—a 6.4% net margin. That’s why a strong ROAS doesn’t always mean a profitable business. Before scaling, track your real MER, contribution margin, return costs, and per-order P&L. Because revenue shows how much you sell. Profit shows how much you actually keep. Are you optimizing for revenue—or real cash flow? Learn More: https://lnkd.in/dzpFp5mT

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Two sellers. Same platform. Same year. Completely different outcomes. One spent $8,000 launching a product on Amazon and made $2,000 back. The other is doing $80,000 a month with 53 reviews and zero ad spend. The difference has nothing to do with their products. It comes down to how each one thinks about Amazon's role in their business. The seller losing money was running the 2016 playbook. Launch a decent product, optimize the listing, run ads, and let Amazon surface it to customers. The problem is Amazon stopped doing that. Ad costs have been climbing 22% year over year and organic discovery has essentially dried up for new sellers without existing sales velocity. The seller winning brought their own audience to Amazon and used it purely as checkout and fulfillment infrastructure. They aren't buying Amazon's traffic. They are just paying for Amazon's logistics, and the economics of those two approaches are completely different. Same platform. Completely different game.

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Shopify initially entered the market for merchants and mom-and-pop shops, the sub $1M businesses that just needed an online presence. That’s not who it serves anymore. Here’s how that transformation happened: Step 1: The Perception - Shopify entered the market for merchants. - Think: side hustles, mom-and-pop shops, brands doing <$5M in revenue. - BigCommerce positioned itself as the more sophisticated solution for serious retailers with scale. Step 2: The Investment - Shopify’s market cap hit $199B+. - That capital wasn’t just for show; it went back into the platform. - Enterprise features, developer tools, and performance architecture all leveled up. Step 3: The Outcome - Today, Shopify supports merchants doing $1B+ in revenue. - Same platform that launches a solo founder’s first store now powers: ↳ Global omnichannel experiences ↳ Complex B2B logic ↳ Fully composable tech stacks Step 4: The Contrast - BigCommerce still has a fraction of the enterprise footprint. - Its architecture is capable, but evolution has stalled. - Merchants who once avoided Shopify now realize: it’s better positioned to scale. Step 5: The Wake-Up Call - If you're still thinking Shopify is just for “small merchants,” you’re already behind. - The question for BigCommerce users isn’t “Should we move?” - It’s: “Can we afford not to?” We co-authored the official migration guide with Shopify to lay this out clearly for technical leaders, not marketers. CTOs: how are you thinking about platform risk in 2025?

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The word you pick is the jail you live in. You walk into a sales meeting with "automation" on your deck. The buyer already has a vendor for that. Now the meeting becomes a knife fight over price. You lost before you spoke. To a word you never should have used to begin with. Somebody else wrote that word. They own the category and the benchmarks behind that word. You walked into their building. You slammed the cell shut on your own company. You're now a prisoner to a word. But your product does something the market has no word for. That's why you raised. Instead of naming it, you borrowed a word built for somebody else's product. Someone else's category. Someone else's brand. HubSpot coined "inbound" and made outbound sound like a crime. Gong named "revenue intelligence" and every call recorder looked like a horse and buggy in comparison. The key is a word. Your word. It unlocks things. Like mindshare, revenue streams, and market dominance. Coin it and the category kneels. Use the other guy's word, and you'll spend the rest of your start-up's runway hoping for the guard to drop the keys so you can escape.

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Most Shopify brands lose customers not because of their product, but because of what happens after the order. I see this over and over when I audit new email accounts. Great product. Solid marketing. Decent website. But once the customer hits “place order,” everything goes quiet. One confirmation email… Then nothing until the brand asks for a review or pushes another offer. This silence is where most brands lose trust, repeat revenue, and long-term customers. Now think about how hotels handle the same moment. The second you book: they confirm. Soon after: they welcome you. Before you arrive: they remind you and tell you what to expect. After your stay: they check in. It’s simple, but it makes you feel taken care of. That feeling is why you go back. Ecommerce can use the same approach, and it works extremely well. Here’s the structure we use for Shopify brands: Right after purchase Set expectations clearly. What happens next? When will it ship? Any tips for best results? Before delivery A friendly update. Maybe share something useful customers wish they knew earlier. The day after delivery Show them how to use the product properly. Help them get value quickly. A week later Guide them to the next logical product not a pushy sale, just what usually makes sense. This isn’t complicated. It’s just being present, helpful, and human. When brands fix this part, support tickets drop, repeat orders increase, and customers actually enjoy buying from them. Most brands focus on getting the sale. The brands that grow focus on what happens after.

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That Business model just became outdated. Are you only selling from one Shopify store? Shopify rolled out a new feature that changes everything. Now, your products can be sold inside other Shopify stores, with almost no extra effort. No apps. No clunky integrations. No sales reps. Just a native connection between your store and theirs. → You share your product catalog. → They choose what they want to sell. → You fulfill the orders. This is called 𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞 and it opens the door to real distribution. Here’s what this means in plain English: → You’re a small skincare brand. → A larger wellness store wants to sell your products. → They connect to your Shopify backend and pull in your items directly. → You keep control. They get sales. Everyone grows. This isn’t a partnership that takes months. It’s a few clicks. This is Shopify thinking years ahead. Agentic commerce means your store is no longer an island. It’s a node in a growing, connected ecosystem. Get in early or get left behind. #digicovai

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