ShopOps weekly

Hello there,

Quieter week for headline news, but a genuinely useful one if you have video on your storefront – there's data this week that'll surprise you.

• Shopify is running its biggest-ever Shop app holiday push, starting now

• The POS channel page got redesigned around what you actually need to see

• Tip of the week – why video is quietly wrecking your page speed, and what just changed

• Case study – how one B2B store cut a 30-minute wholesale order to under 3 minutes

- Jon

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Shopify Updates You Can't Miss

1. Shopify is pushing the Shop app hard this holiday season

Shopify is running a multiphase Shop app campaign from now through December – the first time it's pushed the app this aggressively into the holiday season. The reasoning: the season is much longer now, with pre-Black Friday sales starting in October, so a single campaign burst doesn't fit anymore.

Why it matters: Shop started in 2020 as a package tracker. It's now a customer acquisition channel with AI search and a shoppable feed – effectively a marketplace, whatever Shopify calls it. A major consumer campaign means more shoppers browsing inside the app, and your products are either well-presented there or they aren't.

What to do: Check how your store appears in the Shop app – your brand page, product imagery, and how your catalog is organised. If you've never looked, do it before the campaign ramps up. Free visibility is only free if you're ready for it.

2. The POS channel page has been redesigned

The Point of Sale channel page in your admin now opens with a live preview of your actual lock screen, customer display, and receipts – with one-click access to edit any of them. Below that, a new analytics section shows gross sales, orders, discounts, and returns for today, the last 7 days, or the last 30, filterable by location.

There are also direct links to manage staff and locations, and a QR code to download the POS app if you haven't set up a device yet.

What to do: If you run retail, this is now a genuinely useful home screen rather than a settings menu. Staff need analytics permissions to see the analytics section – worth checking who has them.

Tip of the Week: Video Is Probably 75% of Your Page Weight

Some numbers from Shopify's performance team this month that are worth knowing.

About 20% of Shopify storefronts have video on their homepage. On those stores, the median serves 12.5MB of video – 75% of total page weight on mobile. Over 80,000 mobile pages ship more than 5MB.

The cost is measurable:

→ No video — 7.2 seconds
→ 2–5MB of video — 12.0 seconds
→ Over 5MB — 14.6 seconds

Twice as slow, purely from video.

The counterintuitive part: this doesn't show up in LCP. Across every video-weight bucket, LCP stays roughly flat at 4.2–5.1 seconds. A page with 50MB of video has about the same LCP as one with 500KB.

Two reasons. Most heavy videos sit below the fold, so the LCP element is a hero image or heading that paints at the same speed regardless. And even when the video is the LCP element, LCP measures when the first frame paints – not when the file finishes downloading. A 5MB and a 50MB video hit that point at roughly the same moment.

What video actually damages is Speed Index – how fast the page visually fills in. A multi-megabyte download hogs bandwidth, starving the above-the-fold images, fonts, and CSS the shopper is actually waiting for. The page looks unfinished for longer.

What just changed: Chrome now supports native lazy loading on video elements, and Shopify's video_tag filter sets it automatically for videos in sections further down the page. This is already rolled out. No theme changes needed.

The real-user results after rollout: 75% fewer page views load video up front (18.5% down to 4.6%), and 1.23MB less video transferred per page view – a 78% reduction.

What to check on your store:

1. Are you using video_tag? If your theme renders videos through Shopify's video_tag filter and doesn't explicitly set a loading value, you're already benefiting. Nothing to do.

2. Does your theme hard-code loading="eager" on videos? Any explicit value overrides the automatic behaviour. If a developer set this at some point, below-the-fold videos are still downloading up front.

3. Never lazy load a video above the fold. This is the one that bites. If your hero video is lazy loaded, it doesn't start downloading until the page has already rendered – making things slower, not faster. The automatic rule already avoids headers and the first sections, but if anyone set loading: 'lazy' manually on a hero, remove it.

4. Autoplay still works. A lazy-loaded autoplay video plays when it scrolls into view rather than on page load. You keep the effect and stop paying for it before anyone can see it.

5. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and look at Speed Index specifically – not just LCP. That's where video weight shows up.

If you've got multiple videos and aren't sure how your theme is handling them, this is a quick thing for a developer to audit.

👉 Find a Shopify performance expert on shopexperts

A 30-Minute Order, Cut to Under 3 Minutes

If you sell wholesale on Shopify, this one's worth reading.

A Canadian distributor of sustainable products had a problem hiding in plain sight: their B2B customers were placing repeat orders with dozens or hundreds of SKUs, and the only way to do it was clicking through product pages entering quantities one at a time. A typical bulk order took 30 to 45 minutes.

Nobody complained loudly. They just ordered less often, and some ordered elsewhere.

The fix was a custom CSV bulk order uploader. Wholesale customers download a pre-populated template with every active SKU, edit quantities in Excel or Google Sheets, and upload the whole order in seconds. It validates stock in real time, handles partial fulfilment when something's short, and works with existing checkout and promotions including BOGO offers.

Built as a custom Shopify app – Node.js backend, real-time inventory validation via the Shopify API, drag-and-drop upload, stock alerts. Handles orders up to 500 line items. Twenty-one days from concept to launch.

The results:
→ 90% reduction in order placement time – 30+ minutes to under 3
→ Average order value up 28%, because bulk ordering stopped being painful
→ Cart abandonment on bulk orders down 65%
→ Wholesale clients now prefer their platform over competitors

The broader lesson: friction in B2B ordering rarely announces itself. Your wholesale customers won't email to say the process is annoying – they'll just order smaller, or less often. If you sell B2B on Shopify and haven't timed how long a real order actually takes, that's the diagnostic.

👉 Read the full case study

👉 Find a Shopify B2B and custom development expert

Top Listings

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

❋ Deyan Chernogorski – Front-End Developer · ⭐ 4.9

→ Theme customizations, setup, and upgrades across all major frameworks
→ Custom functionality development and fixing broken functionality others gave up on
→ App integration and customization, checkout extensions, custom metafields and metaobjects
→ UX audits, A/B testing, and customer event pixels

A strong fit if you want a developer who responds fast and closes projects – one of the highest client conversion rates in the directory, which usually means the scoping conversation is as good as the work.

❋ Has Merit – Shopify Agency · ⭐ 5.0

→ Conversion-driven storefront design and custom development
→ Brand identity and visual systems built for recognition
→ CRO audits and UI/UX improvements grounded in data
→ Strategy, design, and development all in-house – no handoffs between teams

A strong fit if you're planning a redesign and want a team that treats brand and conversion as the same problem rather than two separate briefs.

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

❤️ Quick Pulse Check

This week's question: How long does it take a repeat customer to place a typical order on your store?

A) Under a minute – it's basically frictionless
B) A few minutes – fine, but could be smoother
C) Longer than I'd like, honestly
D) I've never actually timed it

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

Last week we asked:
"Have you actually changed anything based on what your Agentic dashboard showed you?"

The gap between looking and acting is the whole story here. 44% have seen the data and not moved on it – which is understandable, because "improve your product data" isn't a task, it's a project. The 19% who have acted are working with a genuine advantage right now. The window where that's still an advantage rather than table stakes is closing.