Cyber Week is over. The retention window is open
Post-BFCM retention is decided by the parcel, the returns process and the timing of the second contact — not by the discount you send in December.
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Writing from the people doing the work
Specific, opinionated writing on Shopify Plus architecture, migrations and selling internationally — including, often, the argument for not buying the more expensive option.
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Do you actually need headless Shopify?
Most stores asking the question have a theme problem or an app problem. Both are cheaper to fix, and both are reversible.
What a Magento to Shopify Plus migration actually costs you
The catalogue is the easy part. The budget goes on URLs, integrations and the extensions that have no Shopify equivalent.
Shopify Markets or a store per country?
One storefront serving every market is the right default. Here is the short list of things that genuinely justify the alternative.
What peak revealed about your integrations
Peak does not break integrations. It removes the slack that was hiding a design fault, and the failure it produces tells you exactly which one.
Returns surge planning for January
The January surge is a capacity problem with a cash problem attached. Both are forecastable from what you shipped in November, and neither is solved by the returns app somebody wants to buy in December.
After the first big day: reading the numbers correctly
On the Saturday morning there are two analyses available and only one of them is due. Read what broke and act on it; leave every conclusion about channels, cohorts and conversion until the refunds have landed.
Support load during peak, and the content that reduces it
Peak does not bring new questions, it brings the same five at ten times the volume. Every one of them can be answered in October, on the page where it gets asked.
Discount stacking and the promotions that lose money
Nothing on Shopify stacks until you tick a box. The promotions that lose money are the ones where somebody ticked every box and nobody did the arithmetic on the worst basket it allows.
Live monitoring: the dashboard you need for four days
Peak monitoring is not analytics with a faster refresh. It is four signals, a written threshold under each one, and a named person whose job is to say something out loud.
What to do in the last week before Black Friday
Nothing you build in the last week will beat anything you rehearse in it. The work is proving the discounts, the rollback and the rota — and saying no to everything else.
Freezing your integrations before peak
Freezing your own repository is the easy half. The changes that break peak come from counterparties whose release calendar you have never asked for.
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