ShopOps weekly

May 22, 2026

Hi there,

Jon here.

Busy week. A few things that are bigger than they look on the surface.

  • Native SMS automations land in Shopify Messaging — abandoned cart, checkout, browse. Built in, no third-party app needed

  • Universal Commerce Protocol opens to all developers — what it means for where your products show up

  • Cumulative analytics in Shopify — the one toggle that makes goal tracking actually useful

  • Quick win — how to audit your Agentic Storefront in 10 minutes and fix what's hurting your AI visibility

  • Brand story — he was annoyed by ugly pet gear and built a $500K/month brand from it

If this was forwarded to you, subscribe here 🔒

Shopify Updates You Can't Miss

1. SMS marketing automations are now native to Shopify — no extra app needed

Shopify Messaging now supports SMS automations. Abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, and browse abandonment are available as pre-built templates, or you can build your own. Set up from Shopify Messaging → Automations, manage your spending threshold from Shopify Messaging → Settings.

Why it matters: SMS has consistently higher open and click rates than email — and until now, getting automated SMS flows meant paying for a separate tool, integrating it, and maintaining it. That barrier is gone for the core recovery sequences most stores need. It's not a Klaviyo replacement, but for stores that don't have SMS set up yet, this is the fastest path in.

What to do: Go to Shopify Messaging → Automations and enable at least abandoned checkout recovery. It's the highest-ROI starting point. Review the pre-built templates before customising — they're a solid baseline.

2. Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol is now open to all developers

Since January, UCP has been powering how AI platforms like ChatGPT and Copilot access Shopify's product catalog. This week it opened to every developer — meaning any app, any mobile platform, any AI agent can now tap directly into Shopify's network of millions of merchants and billions of products.

For merchants, nothing to set up. If you're on Shopify, you're already in the catalog. Every new experience a developer builds on top of UCP is a new potential place for your products to appear.

Why it matters: This is the infrastructure layer behind AI commerce. The more developers build on UCP, the more places your products can be discovered — inside apps, AI assistants, content platforms — without you doing anything. It's the Shopify bet that commerce shows up wherever people are, not just on your storefront.

What to do: Check your Agentic Storefront dashboard (admin.shopify.com/agentic) and make sure your product data is clean. UCP surfaces what Shopify Catalog has — if your data is thin, your visibility across all these new channels will be too. See the Quick Win section below for a 10-minute audit.

3. Cumulative metrics in Analytics — the toggle that makes targets useful

There's a new Cumulative toggle in the Analytics Visualization panel. Turn it on and your time-series chart switches from showing daily values to a running total — making it much easier to see whether you're on track to hit a monthly or quarterly goal.

It works standalone, alongside the new Targets feature (showing your running total vs. a target line), or layered with a prior-period comparison so you can see this quarter's trajectory against last year's.

Why it matters: Daily revenue charts are noisy. A bad Tuesday looks like a crisis; a good Friday masks a slow week. Cumulative view smooths that out. If you set a $50K month target and you're 12 days in, a cumulative chart tells you in two seconds whether you're ahead or behind pace.

What to do: Open Analytics → Reports, pull up any time-series chart, and flip the Cumulative toggle. Pair it with a Target (set at Analytics → Targets) and add it to your home dashboard. It's the closest thing to a real-time goal tracker Shopify has shipped.

Your Store Speed Has a Revenue Number Attached to It

Every second of load time has a conversion cost. Most stores know this in theory — few have actually run the numbers on their specific setup.

Erick Kagai's Speed Audit does exactly that. A full diagnostic using Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, Core Web Vitals ranked by revenue impact, and an app-by-app performance review covering how Judge.me, Klaviyo, GA4, Meta Pixel, and other common installs are affecting your load times. The output is a prioritised implementation roadmap — not a generic report.

Recent example: an apparel brand on Impulse theme had a mobile score of 7 three weeks before Black Friday. After identifying render-blocking JavaScript, unoptimised images, and excessive app scripts, the score jumped to 65 — protecting an estimated $18K+ in holiday sales.

The audit fee credits toward full implementation if you proceed.

He Was Annoyed by Ugly Pet Gear. Now He Ships 150,000 Orders a Year.

Frederik Simonsen looked at the pet products market and couldn't find a single brand that took design seriously. No identity, no storytelling — just product shots on white backgrounds and the same gear everyone else sold.

So he built Staey from Denmark with a Facebook community, live shopping events, and a relentless focus on people over product. Today it's a multi-brand house doing $500K/month — and still almost entirely in-house.

The way he thinks about building systems that scale without breaking is worth the read.

Want your story featured? Submit it here.

Get Paid to Help Build the Tools You'll Actually Use

Most merchants find new apps reactively — when something breaks, or when a problem gets bad enough to Google. It's not a great system.

App store research flips that. You join short paid calls with founders building early-stage tools, see what they're working on before anyone else, and get paid for your time. The merchants who use it regularly tend to find better tools earlier — and occasionally end up with their direct feedback built into something they now rely on daily.

App store research has now paid out over $1 million in incentives to merchants through the platform. That's app developers investing real money to understand how stores like yours actually operate.

Open projects right now:

  • Affiliate program attribution — cookieless multi-touch attribution + AI fraud engine catching 5–15% of fraudulent commissions ($250)

  • Returns → Exchanges — how D2C brands convert returns into exchanges instead of refunds ($250)

  • Fashion & apparel bundles — smart bundle widget built specifically for apparel, activewear, lingerie, and swimwear brands ($90)

  • High-volume customer support — for brands handling 1,500+ support tickets/month ($150)

Takes under a minute to sign up. You pick the project. You pick the time.

👉 Join as a Brand & Apply (sign up <1 min)

New Expert Listings

❋ Lautaro Climent — Front-End Developer · ⭐ 5.0

  • High-converting Shopify stores with clean, well-structured code

  • Custom theme development and Figma-to-Shopify builds

  • Performance optimisation and mobile-first UX

  • App integrations and bespoke section/component development

A strong fit if you want a developer with 5+ years of Shopify focus who treats conversion as part of the build, not an afterthought.

❋ YourStoreMatters — Shopify Growth Agency · ⭐ 4.9 (7 reviews)

  • High-converting store builds and platform migrations from Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce

  • Email and SMS marketing via Klaviyo — typically driving 30%+ of total revenue

  • Subscriptions and loyalty via Recharge and Love Loyalty

  • CRO, A/B testing via Visually, and checkout optimisation

A strong fit if you need a full-stack growth partner — one that handles both the store build and the retention systems that make it compound over time.

Know someone who belongs in the directory? Send them our way.

❤️ Quick Pulse Check

This week's question: Have you seen any AI-driven traffic or sales to your store yet?

A) Yes — noticeable already
B) A little, but it's growing
C) Not yet
D) I'm not tracking it yet

Reply with A, B, C or D. 
(We read every response)

Last week we asked: "How are you currently driving new customer acquisition?"

Close to an even three-way split — which is unusual. The paid ads group is the biggest, but only just. The organic third is notable: those brands tend to have stronger margins and more loyal customers, but slower top-of-funnel growth. The mixed group is probably the most honest answer for most stores at scale. As AI becomes a meaningful acquisition channel, the mix is about to get more complicated.

See you next Friday,
— Jon & the shopexperts team

Let us know how we did today (one click 👇)

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.