ShopOps weekly

Hello there,

One from us: we're rolling out a Confidence Score on shopexperts listings this week.

It's a score out of 100 built from public signals about an expert's reputation outside shopexperts, plus their profile completeness and track record on the platform. The point is simple: when you're comparing three developers and they all look similar on paper, you should have more to go on than a star rating.

Every element of the score is visible and explained — no hidden algorithm, nothing that can be gamed. It's collapsed by default on each listing, so expand it when you want the detail.

A few other changes landing at the same time: each listing gets a unique shopexperts summary, and anyone can now leave a review directly from a listing (moderated and verified, same as invited reviews, and clearly labelled by source).

If this was forwarded to you, subscribe here 🔓

Shopify Updates You Can't Miss

Shopify shipped two new theme features this month. One's a real improvement. The other has developers debating.

1. WhatsApp marketing is now built into Shopify Messaging

You can now send WhatsApp marketing campaigns directly from Shopify Messaging, alongside email and SMS. No third-party app, no separate list.

Why it matters: WhatsApp open rates make email look sleepy, and across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia it's how people actually message businesses.

What to do: Check if it's live in your Shopify Messaging. Start with one campaign to a small engaged segment – WhatsApp is personal, and tolerance for over-messaging is low.

2. Shop Campaigns expanded to the UK, Australia, and more markets

You name what you'll pay for a new customer, Shopify buys the media against that number. No creatives, no pixels, no audiences. You're charged when a sale converts, not per click.

New markets run on the Shop app for now, with Meta and Google coming. US and Canada get the full roster including Meta, Google, Pinterest, and ChatGPT.

What to do: Work out your actual maximum acceptable cost per new customer before enabling it. That number is the entire strategy here.

3. Shopify is reportedly in talks to acquire Faire

Nothing confirmed, but worth thinking through if you sell wholesale. The real question isn't the marketplace – it's who owns the retailer relationship. Right now logins, order history, and net terms all live on Faire, which makes migrating those accounts to your own B2B store a hard ask. If Shopify owned Faire, that wall has no reason to stay up.

What to do: Nothing yet. But if you're evaluating a separate wholesale platform, the landscape may shift.

Also worth knowing: → Multi-currency payouts no longer cap at 8 currencies – one bank account per payout currency
→ UPS return labels can now be created from your Shopify admin for US domestic orders
→ Apps can now annotate your analytics charts, tying launches and campaigns to data shifts

Quick Tip: How Exposed Is Your Store to a Single App?

Earlier this month, Fast Bundle – a bundling app with over 2,800 five-star reviews and thousands of paying merchants – was pulled from the Shopify App Store after detecting a security attack on its systems.

Fast Bundle resolved the issue quickly and reported no evidence that merchant or shopper data was exposed. Shopify removed the app and paused live widgets anyway, as a precaution while it was reviewed.

For merchants relying on it, a core piece of their storefront stopped working overnight with no warning and no clear timeline.

This isn't an argument against apps. It's an argument for knowing your exposure.

Here's a 15-minute audit:

1. List every app that injects something into your storefront. Bundles, upsells, reviews, cart drawers, quizzes, subscription widgets. These are the ones that can visibly break a page.
   

2. Rank them by blast radius. If this app vanished at 9am tomorrow, what happens? "A review widget disappears" is very different from "customers can't add bundles to cart."
   

3. For anything in the top tier, know your fallback. Could you switch the section off cleanly, or would the page break? Ask your developer to check that critical app blocks fail gracefully rather than throwing errors.
   

4. Export your data on a schedule. Anything living only inside an app – bundle configurations, loyalty balances, subscription setups, review content – should be exported periodically. Most apps offer this; almost nobody uses it.
   

5. Avoid single points of failure in checkout and cart. This is where an outage costs the most and where you have the least room to improvise.

None of this takes long, and it's the kind of thing that only feels urgent after it's too late.

👉 Find a Shopify developer to audit your app setup

Shopify Plus Brands: These Two Projects Are Looking For You Specifically

Most research projects want any merchant. These two want operators running real volume – and they pay accordingly.

→ Sales tax compliance at scale ($200, 30 min)
For founders, finance leads, and ops managers who handle sales tax.

They want to understand how Shopify Tax holds up as you expand into new states, channels, and product types – product categorization, exemption certificates, nexus tracking, and where it starts to strain. If you've hit friction here, that's exactly what makes you valuable to them.

→ Amazon-style delivery date promises ($150, 30 min)
Specifically for ecommerce managers at Shopify stores doing $5M–$40M annually.

You'll get a screenshared demo of what delivery date prediction and shipping cost optimization would look like on your checkout and product pages – their A/B tests show a 5–8% revenue lift. Worth the 30 minutes for the demo alone.

Both are through app store research, where over $1 million in incentives has been paid to merchants. Sign-up takes under a minute.

👉 Sign up as a brand & participate in research

€3M to €10M in Four Years. Here's What Actually Had to Change

Most stores hit a ceiling somewhere between €2M and €5M. Not because demand runs out, but because the operation stops keeping up with it.

A Paris-based ear jewelry brand hit exactly that point at €3M. The fix wasn't one project – it was rebuilding the whole e-commerce function:

→ Retention became a system – Klaviyo, WhatsApp, and loyalty built to work together, not bolted on separately
→ Operations restructured before scale broke them – supply chain and inventory workflows rebuilt, back-end processes automated, product creation and catalog sync templated
→ Growth work ran continuously – CRO backed by real analytics, technical SEO, and coordinated launches instead of improvised ones
→ The team was built alongside the systems – 2 people to over 20, with training treated as part of the work
→ Then retail – multiple physical locations with in-store services and integrated online booking

Four years later: over €10M in annual revenue.

The lesson isn't "hire an agency." It's that the jump from a few million to eight figures is rarely a marketing problem. It's an operations problem wearing a marketing costume.

👉 Read the full case study

Top Listings

This week we're highlighting two agencies for brands ready to bring in serious help.

❋ Maukau – Shopify Growth Agency · Paris

• France's first 100% Shopify-focused agency, operating since 2016

• Embedded operating-partner model – they own the e-commerce function, not just individual projects

• Klaviyo Gold Masters: CRM, retention, and loyalty built to compound

• Operations and automation: supply chain workflows, inventory sync, back-end process automation

A strong fit if you've outgrown project-by-project help and need a partner who takes ownership across operations, retention, and growth at once. (See the case study above.)

❋ Muhammad Asad ullah baig – Theme Developer · ⭐ 5.0 (10 reviews)

• Shopify Certified Developer with 10+ years and 100+ brands across fashion, beauty, food, fitness, and electronics

• Custom theme development from Figma or Adobe XD into clean, maintainable Liquid

• Speed and Core Web Vitals optimization, plus technical SEO fixes

• Custom features: bundles, upsells, subscriptions, loyalty, and third-party API integrations

A strong fit if you want a developer who asks whether a build decision actually helps the business grow – and who clients keep coming back to for the next project.

Know an agency that belongs in the directory? Send them our way.

❤️ Quick Pulse Check

This week's question: Has an app ever broken something on your store?

A) Yes – and it cost us real money
B) Yes – but we caught it quickly
C) Not that I know of

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

Last week we asked:
"When you bring in outside help, how do you usually pay?"

Fixed-price project work leads, which makes sense – it's the easiest to scope and the easiest to stop. But the 26% on retainers are usually the ones building compounding improvements rather than fixing things one at a time. And a third doing everything in-house is higher than expected. That works well until it doesn't: the most common thing we hear from brands that finally brought in help is that they waited about a year too long.

See you next Friday,

– Jon & the shopexperts team