r/shopify_geeks

I keep getting messages from two Shopify partners who I have worked with in the past. Things related to my theme/app that can affect speed and visibility over time, backend configuration and validation elements not being aligned or properly enforced, need for cookie categorization review, compliance functionality testing, backend validation, etc. the messages are fairly frequent which suggest they may really need the business, or are just flat out annoying businesses.

Both partners have been removed as users, so I am not too sure no they can see the things they claim need to be worked on. Is this standard stuff that I need to have done as a Shopify user on a routine basis?

Thank you for any insight anyone can give me. My biggest issue with things like this is that I cannot really see what actually needs to be done and I’m not paying someone to do anything that could potentially be BS and just a money grab.

I just made a new shopify store, i've been editing it and need help/suggestions/criticism if its looks good or not. Please let me know what i need to do to make it better.

Heres the link --> https://dervia-3.myshopify.com/

*DISCLAIMER* NOT AN ADVERTISEMENT SIMPLY JUST TRYING TO GET HELP

I’m trying to improve how I manage my store daily. Curious what experienced store owners look at first every morning on Shopify, conversion rate, sessions, abandoned carts, revenue, ROAS, etc. What metric matters most to you?

Hey everyone,

Today I uploaded one of my most personal and thought-provoking videos yet.

For years, society has been pushing the idea that success means constantly moving, traveling, changing places, and chasing freedom…

But then I started thinking about Warren Buffett.

Why would one of the richest men in history stay in the SAME house for over 67 years?

In this video, I break down:

• The hidden power of stability
• The psychological disadvantages of the digital nomad lifestyle
• Why constant movement can destroy focus and peace
• What modern entrepreneurs are getting wrong

This video is deeper than business.
It’s about life, mindset, clarity, and long-term success.

🎥 Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/uYR2we1E8P4

If the topic resonates with you, leave a comment on the video — I read them all.

https://preview.redd.it/cl2bvmqyzr1h1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=2be06a502d2ea67d44f49435a3c046edbb593529

— Marouane Rhafli

Hey!
I’ve designed a new hydration tracking water bottle.
I’m starting to run Instagram ads but have 0% conversion on ad spend, how would I increase it? Please be brutally honest. What could I change?

https://dropplebottle.com/

Wholesale on Shopify looks simple from the outside.

Then the first few real B2B customers show up.

One buyer needs different pricing. Another wants Net 30. Someone else should only see certain products. A distributor wants bulk pricing by quantity. Then you need to hide prices from regular visitors, approve wholesale accounts, set order limits, and somehow keep the normal DTC store working.

That is usually when discount codes stop being enough.

Wholesale Gorilla is one of the more well-known options, and for a lot of stores it does the job. But if I were comparing alternatives, I would not just ask “which app is cheaper?” I’d ask what type of wholesale setup the store actually needs.

These are the 5 I’d compare.

1. SparkLayer

SparkLayer feels like one of the stronger options for serious B2B workflows. If a store is already doing meaningful wholesale volume and wants a more mature B2B buying experience, this is probably one of the first tools I’d check.

Good fit for stores that need a more polished wholesale portal and have enough volume to justify a deeper setup.

2. BMT B2B Wholesale Pricing

BMT is interesting for stores that want wholesale pricing, customer-specific pricing, tiered pricing, hide price or login-based access, registration forms, approvals, and order rules without stacking too many separate apps.

The reason I’d compare it is simple: a lot of smaller wholesale stores do not need a huge enterprise build. They need something that handles the core wholesale problems clearly: different buyers, different prices, hidden pricing, quick ordering, and basic rules.

I’d check BMT if the store is moving from manual wholesale orders or discount-code hacks into a proper B2B setup.

3. BSS Commerce B2B/Wholesale Solution

BSS Commerce comes up often when people need B2B features around pricing, registration, and account-based rules. It is worth checking if you want a broader B2B toolkit and are okay spending time on setup.

Good fit for stores that need more than just tiered discounts and want more control around wholesale customers.

4. Wholesale Club

Wholesale Club is one of the simpler names people compare for wholesale pricing. I’d look at it if the store does not need a very complex setup and mainly wants to offer wholesale pricing to tagged customers.

Good fit for stores that want something more basic and do not want to rebuild the whole buyer experience.

5. Bold Custom Pricing

Bold has been around the Shopify ecosystem for a long time. I’d consider it if the store mainly needs custom pricing or different customer groups and already uses other Bold tools.

Good fit for stores that want customer-group pricing and are comfortable with a more established Shopify app ecosystem.

My take:

If wholesale is becoming a serious revenue channel, do not choose only on price.

Check these things first:

Can different customers see different prices?

Can prices be hidden from logged-out users?

Can wholesale buyers get a faster order flow?

Can you set order limits or quantity rules?

Can you approve buyers before they see pricing?

Will it work with your theme and normal DTC checkout?

Can the team actually manage it without asking a developer every week?

The best app depends less on the name and more on whether your wholesale process is simple, growing, or already complicated.

For a small store just starting wholesale, I’d compare BMT, Wholesale Club, and BSS.

For a more mature B2B setup, I’d compare SparkLayer, Wholesale Gorilla, and maybe Bold depending on the use case.

[supprimé]

I noticed that many people are buying Alex Hormozi books, here is my verdict as an ecom expert :

1- His books are subjective, the strategies won't work for you as a beginner
2- Alex Hormozi has almost no experience in ecom, he is just selling wind for his own profit
3- The guy is using his wife as a marketing figure = this guys can prostitute for money; just like Andrew Tate

If you want to lose your time and your money buy books from a dishonest puppet !

For people running Shopify/e-commerce stores:

What’s usually the first operational sign that something is going wrong in your business before it becomes a serious problem?

Not necessarily revenue dropping, but earlier patterns like:

- refunds increasing

- margins shrinking

- certain products slowing down

- weird order trends

- cashflow feeling tighter

- sales becoming inconsistent

Interested in the warning signs experienced store owners actually pay attention to.

Hi, i've got a brand in The Netherlands and 70% of the people on my website are bots from Iowa United States. They sent so many bots to my website for whatever reason. Does anyone know how i can get rid of them?

With kind regards

Do business owners actually move away from Shopify to custom ecommerce websites, or is Shopify still the clear preference for most?

If switching, what usually makes you consider it? Monthly fees, customization limits, performance, ownership, something else?

I’m asking because I’m deciding whether to keep focusing on custom ecommerce builds or pivot to a different service/market.

Hi everyone,

I'm using the Dawn theme on Shopify and facing an issue with product images not filling the full width properly on the product page.

All my uploaded images are 1:1 ratio (square), but they still appear with extra spacing/empty margins around them instead of fully filling the container.

I already tried:

• forcing aspect-ratio: 1/1
• changing media fit settings

But nothing worked.

Here’s what’s happening:

• The product gallery container is square
• The image itself looks smaller inside it
• There’s visible empty space around the product image

I'm using the latest Dawn theme.

Has anyone fixed this before?
Is this caused by Dawn’s media wrapper, image metadata, or the actual uploaded image spacing?

Any help would be appreciated.

january through june 2024. same products. same prices. tracked by channel with separate UTMs, separate inventory allocations, and a rigorous attribution model that took two weeks to build and was worth every hour.

shopify direct: $44,200 average monthly revenue. CAC $58. repeat purchase rate 34 percent. average LTV at 6 months $218. margin after platform fees and fulfilment: 48 percent.

amazon: $28,400 average monthly revenue. CAC technically zero but fulfilment costs, amazon fees, and PPC spend produced an effective acquisition cost of $34 per customer. repeat purchase rate from amazon customers to our shopify store: 4 percent. margin: 31 percent after all fees. no customer data owned.

own website outside shopify: $8,100 average monthly revenue. attempted to test a custom-built storefront. conversion rate 0.8 percent versus shopify's 3.1 percent. checkout abandonment significantly higher. abandoned after month four. the shopify checkout infrastructure is worth more than most people account for when they consider building independently.

the insight from six months: amazon produced volume and margin compression and zero owned customer relationships. shopify produced lower volume, better margins, owned relationships, and LTV that compounds. our own infrastructure produced a lesson about why shopify's checkout is a moat that is genuinely difficult to replicate.

the decision: double down on shopify. run amazon for product discovery with explicit strategy to migrate customers to direct. abandon the custom infrastructure entirely.

the owned customer relationship on shopify is an asset that appears on no balance sheet and determines most of what matters long term.

I work in ecommerce/warehouse operations. One recurring problem: hold orders, cancellations, address changes, and other exceptions get announced in chats, then buried while orders keep moving.
So I started building an internal tracker/dashboard focused on one workflow first: holds.
Current features:
Create hold
Prevent duplicate holds
Track aging holds
Resolve/release holds
My goal isn’t another dashboard—it’s catching exceptions before bad shipments happen.
Ops people: what would break first in your environment? What am I missing?

First Shopify app shipped last week. Approved on the App Store, listing is live. 3 installs since approval, 0 reviews, 1 confirmed uninstall within an hour. Solo dev, working from Poland.

The app scans a merchant's catalog and scores each product 0 to 100 on signals that show up in AI shopping results: ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. The honest framing is that 11 of the 14 rules I check are classic SEO (title length, alt text, description depth) and only 3 are actually unique to AI surfaces (GTIN/barcode, Shopify standard category metadata, structured metafields). I am not pretending the 11 are AI-specific. The score is a combined snapshot, and I am still tuning the weights.

Stack is Remix template, Polaris, Prisma over SQLite, Docker Compose on a single Hetzner VPS. GPT-4.1-nano for the AI rewrites, one bundled call returning title plus description plus SEO copy as JSON. Embedded admin via App Bridge v3.

Three things I learned the hard way this week:

1. authenticate.webhook() from u/shopify/shopify-app-remix with expiringOfflineAccessTokens: true tries to refresh the offline token AFTER validating HMAC. For shop/redact webhooks (which fire 48h after uninstall) the token is already revoked. The library throws Response(500) on the failed refresh, and Shopify retries 9 times over 48h. My partner panel was full of red. Fix was to bypass authenticate.webhook in compliance routes and verify HMAC manually with crypto.timingSafeEqual against SHOPIFY_API_SECRET.

2. Concurrent AI fix requests can race past the monthly limit if the counter check and increment are not atomic. SQLite handles this fine if you wrap in prisma.$transaction(async tx => ...) because it uses BEGIN IMMEDIATE under the hood and serializes writers.

3. The default catalog scan loops productsConnection.first(50) until hasNextPage is false, with zero cost awareness. Standard plan has a 2000 point bucket. A 250 product scan can burn 1000 points easily. Two concurrent scans hit THROTTLED. The fix is reading extensions.cost.throttleStatus.currentlyAvailable after each call and sleeping if low. The floor needs to scale with maximumAvailable or Plus stores end up sleeping at 97 percent full.

Things I am still unsure about:

Pricing. Free tier is 20 AI fixes per month right now (was 100 until yesterday, that was too generous, the one real merchant uninstalled in an hour without burning one). Paid is 9 and 29. I am wondering if this should be unlimited with a catalog size cap instead. Merchants think in catalogs, not in fixes.

Whether app/uninstalled belongs in [webhooks.subscriptions] of shopify.app.toml or registered programmatically. Template defaults are ambiguous and merchant sessions linger in my DB after uninstall.

How others handle the 30 day GDPR clock for compliance webhooks. I ACK 200 even when internal cleanup throws, to avoid retry storms, but there is no alert path if cleanup silently fails repeatedly.

What did I miss? What is the obvious thing I will regret in 3 months?

Most men are exhausted because they’re trying to win inside systems designed to consume them.

“The Sigma Architecture” isn’t about being a “lone wolf.”

https://preview.redd.it/93w4w1on0p0h1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc11b599ec2e45a465dfc71bf5fb17164c7ee23a

It’s about:

➡︎ building systems instead of chasing luck

➡︎ mastering strategic solitude

➡︎ engineering leverage

➡︎ creating income that survives without your constant presence

➡︎ thinking in 3rd-order consequences

16 years. 5,000+ businesses. One philosophy:

“Luck is a ghost. Systems are the steel.”

Read:

The Sigma Architecture on Amazon

👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H1F7GH3V

I’m the technical co-founder for a Shopify store that has moved past the “just get the site live” stage, but we’re still not big enough to solve every problem by hiring more people. That middle stage gets messy fast because the store still looks simple from the outside, but internally, support, marketing, retention, and operations all start pulling in different directions.

For a while, we handled every problem separately. If customers asked shipping or product questions before checkout, we treated it as a support issue. If someone abandoned a cart, we treated it as a marketing issue. If people bought once and never came back, we treated it as a retention issue. If we needed reviews, loyalty, or referrals, that became another app discussion.

That approach slowly created a messy app stack. The tools were not bad, but the workflow was scattered. Every small problem had its own dashboard, settings, notifications, and owner. As the person responsible for keeping the setup clean, I started caring less about feature lists and more about where the customer was actually getting stuck.

The first issue was before checkout. Customers had small questions about shipping, returns, discounts, delivery dates, product fit, and availability. Many of those questions came after they had already left the product page. We could still reply later by email or DM, but by then the buying moment was usually gone.

That made live chat more important than I expected. Not as a random chat bubble, but as a way to answer high-intent questions while the customer was still on the site. We used Chatway here because we wanted something lighter than a full helpdesk, but still useful for live chat, shared conversations, WhatsApp-style support, and mobile replies.

The second issue was follow-up after intent. When someone browsed, added to cart, started checkout, bought once, or disappeared after one order, we needed a better system than manual reminders and one-off campaigns. Abandoned cart, post-purchase, winback, review requests, and basic segmentation became necessary once volume increased.

That is where Klaviyo made sense for us. It gave the marketing side a proper system for email and SMS flows instead of making every follow-up manual or scattered. It did not magically fix retention, but it gave us cleaner lifecycle workflows.

The third issue was trust and repeat purchases. I used to think reviews, wishlists, referrals, and loyalty were mostly marketing extras. I do not think that anymore. A first-time buyer needs trust signals. A returning customer needs a reason to come back. Someone who likes a product but is not ready to buy needs a way to save it.

We looked at Growave for that layer because it combines reviews, loyalty, referrals, and wishlists in one Shopify app. The main reason that mattered was operational. I did not want four separate tools creating four separate admin problems.

The bigger lesson was that our Shopify stack should not be built around random app recommendations. It should be built around the customer journey. Before checkout, customers need fast answers. After they show intent, they need useful follow-up. After they buy, they need trust, reminders, and reasons to come back.

Once we looked at the store that way, app decisions became easier. Some tools stayed, some were removed, and some were replaced. More importantly, every app had to justify which customer moment it improved.

I still do not think there is one perfect Shopify stack. A small store probably does not need much of this. A larger store may need more specialized tools. But if a growing store feels messy, I would not start by asking for app recommendations. I would start by looking at where customers hesitate, where they drop off, where the team is doing manual follow-up, and where repeat customers are being ignored.

That gave us better answers than any “best Shopify apps” list. How do other Shopify operators think about this? Did your app stack grow intentionally, or did it slowly become a pile of tools nobody wants to touch?

Shopify just dropped connectors for Claude and ChatGPT. This means that your AI agent can now connect directly to your Shopify store. Real-time access to your products, orders, customers, and catalog. Live data, not screenshots. This means you can ask an AI to find patterns in your data you can't see yourself.

Try this. Open the connector. Ask three questions:

1. Pull my top 10 products by revenue. Which ones have weak or incomplete descriptions?

2. Look at my last 100 orders. What products are frequently bought together that I'm not bundling?

3. Audit my product titles and SEO descriptions. Which ones look weak or unclear?

In 30 seconds you'll have a list of revenue-leaking patterns worth thousands.

Here's the catch.
The list isn't the work. The sequence is. Knowing which three of the 47 things actually move revenue. Knowing what to fix first, what to ignore, and what comes after.

AI gives you the list. The strategy is still up to you.

The barrier to clarity just dropped. The barrier to action didn't.