Global Nerdy

One of the 100-plus apps in the Shopify App Store is Custard, which lets your customers talk – as in voice, not “chat” as in typing or email, but actually talk – to someone in your shop. Custard lets customers start a voice call using only the computer they’re using to browse your shop without the need for a phone or extra software. They just click the “Click to Call” button. Sometimes it’s nice to hear a human voice, and being able to talk to someone and ask questions can be the difference between your customer heading somewhere else and making that sale.

We talked with the people behind Custard and asked them a few questions about their app, and we’ve shared their answers in this article.

What does Custard do?

We created Custard because we want to improve the buying experience online. In brick and mortar stores we are used to having sales reps at our disposal to answer any of our questions, but when it comes to e-commerce we can feel pretty isolated. Sometimes email and text chat is just too slow. We want to eliminate loneliness from e-commerce sites and make it super easy for stores to connect with their customers in a fast and effective way. With Custard, your store comes to life and your visitors can get the instant gratification they want at the click of a button.

What are Custard’s key features?

• Click to Call: 79% of your visitors prefer phone support over anything else.
• Widget Customization: You can customize your Click to Call widget to your liking and place it where you want it on your store.
• Call Recording: We allow you to record each call so that you can review and improve your sales process.

There’s a a new feature called Custard Connect. Visitors to your store are extremely valuable and we want to help store owners extract that value. We also want to provide a seamless user experience. With Custard Connect, you can watch people navigate around your store in real-time right from your dashboard. With the click of a button you can initiate a call with your visitors and help them find exactly what they are looking to buy. We think this will be a great way for ecommerce stores to get more sales and to effectively engage with their customers like never before. Custard Connect will be rolling out this week.

Why should shopowners use your app?

79% of your store visitors prefer phone support over anything else. With Custard "Click to Call" we help you increase sales and improve customer satisfaction. We also believe the telephone is one of the best branding mediums out there. Not only can you instantly answer questions, but you have customer’s undivided attention. The customer remembers the experience you provide for a long time and tells his or her friends about it. The instant gratification you can provide with Custard has very positive returns.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

We are a fresh startup based in San Francisco, CA. We want to maximize the value of customer conversations for online businesses. There are some really interesting developments we are making in the sales and support space so stay tuned :). You can find us on twitter:

• Christian Fernandez: @chriszf
• David J. Phillips: @davjphillips
• Robbie Trencheny: @robbie

How can I find out more about Custard?

You can find out more about Custard on its page in the Shopify App Store.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

If you go into certain elevators, you might notice an indicator on the panel that reads “Help is on the way”. In the event of an emergency, someone at the other end lights it up to let the passengers know that assistance is forthcoming.

Assistly, one of the 100+ apps in the Shopify App Store adds a customer service help desk to your Shopify shop so that customers can easily reach you when they’re having problems, and so that you can reassure them that help is on the way. We had a Q & A session with the people behind Assistly about their app and we’re sharing their answers in this article.

What does Assistly do?

Assistly helps you deliver better customer service, which is critical to online retailing. It’s a free-to-start customer-service help desk that gives you everything you need to set up and deliver world-class customer service in minutes. With Assistly, customers can contact you through your website, email, Facebook, Twitter, phone and live chat and it’s all integrated for your team inside Assistly so no customer falls through the cracks. Start by installing Assistly through the Shopify app store and signing up for a free account. You can be wowing your customers in very short order.

What are the key features of your app?

• We’re built for your social customer. Assistly brings in all your support requests and comments from traditional channels (email, chat, phone) and social channels (Facebook and Twitter) and collects them in a single, collaborative desktop where nothing falls through the cracks.

Pictured above: Assistly’s agent desktop.

• We make you more productive — and faster. Our tools are user friendly, so you can take care of business efficiently and quickly.
• Assistly comes with an out-of-the-box Help Center for your customers to find answers on their own. Add content as you grow, and watch your service requests drop.

Pictured above: Assistly’s out-of-the-box Help Center.

• We do the heavy lifting. Assistly is entirely “cloud-based,” which means that you don’t have any costly IT infrastructure. Everything is managed on our end.
• We’re priced for small business. Assistly has fair and simple pricing (every account gets one FREE full-time seat!), and part-time “flex” users can participate for only $1 per hour of use. This means that if you only need one agent, Assistly will be entirely free for you. We are betting that great service will help you grow, and we will be there to support your success.

Why should shopowners use Assistly?

Today’s social customer expects to receive a high-touch and personal customer experience. Assistly turns customer service into Customer Wow. It coordinates all of the different ways your customers may try to reach you, and ensures every customer gets the service they deserve. Especially important for online retailers with a seasonal product line: Assistly is flexible, so you can easily and affordably add part time help, adjusting for your busiest seasons.

Assistly is designed for the online retailer who wants a quick and affordable way to provide spectacular customer service. Online retailers wear many hats and shouldn’t have to bother with complicated, expensive software that is hard to learn and difficult to use. Assistly is easy to use and affordable. Since time is your most valuable commodity, we make every product decision with your workflow in mind.

Tell us a little about yourself.

Assistly, now a salesforce.com company, is a pioneer in the new world of instant customer-service help desk applications that can be set up in minutes. The application provides an all-in-one customer support system that turns customer service into Customer Wow.

Now even small and mid-sized companies can face massively complex support challenges. With Assistly, customers can request support from anywhere—website, email, phone, live chat, Twitter, and Facebook—and companies can deliver that support instantly, and in real time.

Here’s how you can get in touch with us:

• Our headquarters address: 171 2nd Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94105
• Phone: 1-877-226-9212
• Email:
  • info@assistly.com
  • sales@assistly.com
  • support@assistly.com
• Assistly on Twitter:
  • @assistly
  • @assistlysupporto
  • @assistlyops
• Assistly on Facebook

How can I find out more about Assistly?

You can find out more about the Assistly app (as well as over 100 others) at the Shopify App Store.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

What is Shopify Experts?

Shopify Experts is an online directory of ecommerce experts who can help you get started with your Shopify shop, make it look and work better and get the most out of it. It’s where you can go to find designers to build themes, developers to make custom apps, marketers to boost your sales and other people with the skills, know-how and experience to help you with all things Shopify.

With over 16,000 shops powered by Shopify and more and more being added to that number each day, it’s not surprising that a community of experts who’ve mastered the in and outs of designing, customizing, running and promoting an online shop has grown around Shopify. Shopify Experts makes it easy for shopowners to find these people and tap into their expertise.

I want to hire a Shopify Expert to help me with my shop. What do I do?

That’s easy: just go to the Shopify Experts site at experts.shopify.com and start looking around! We’ve designed the site so browsing through experts, whether designer, developer, marketer or something else, is as easy as browsing through a Shopify shop’s catalog.

You can browse through our entire catalog of experts or search by area of expertise, geographic location and price…

…and you’ll see a listing of experts that tell you who they are, what they do, where they’re located, thumbnails of their portfolio and a rough figure of how much they charge.

You can click on any expert’s View Expert Profile button to get a more in-depth view of what they do, see their experience with the Shopify platform, read reviews from shopowners who’ve hired them, see more of their portfolio and contact them.

Right now, you can find designers, developers and marketers in Shopify Experts. We’re going to expand the categories soon to include photographers, accountants, legal assistance and more.

We’re making it easy to find the help you need to make your shop successful.

I have design/development/marketing skills and want to be listed in Shopify Experts. What do I do?

To join Shopify Experts, you need to:

• Be a registered Shopify Partner. To find out more about becoming a Shopify Partner, visit the Shopify Partners site and then sign up (it’s free)!
• Have proven Shopify experience! You’ll need to show us some of your previous Shopify work, whether it’s a theme you designed, an app you developed or a shop whose business you kick-started or improved. Your level of Shopify experience is a major factor in determining your acceptance into Shopify Experts.
• Apply to be listed in Shopify Experts. Go to the Shopify Experts site to get the process started.
• Once approved, pay the fee: It’s $1000 per year or $100 per month.

I’m thinking about becoming a Shopify Expert. Is it worth it?

We think it’s worth it. Everyone at Shopify, from the development team to sales and marketing to support and Gurus, treat Shopify Experts as the go-to people. If you ask any of us for a recommendation for a developer, designer, marketer or other person to help you with your shop, we’ll direct you to a Shopify Expert. It only makes sense: Shopify Experts are by definition people we’ve vetted and have proven track records.

Shopowners think it’s worth it. In Shopify Experts’ four-week beta period, which we ran quietly, without any marketing, there were nearly 1,000 shopowner-to-Expert communications. Shopowners want your expertise, and Shopify Experts is how they’ll find you.

Shopify Experts think it’s worth it. Here’s what some Experts who participated in our beta program had to say:

“Since the day Experts soft-launched I’ve received at least a handful of enquiries a week. All of them have been excited, about setting up their online presence, and about using Shopify to do it. I’ve been loving it! I have one full project done and paid, two more are mid-way through and I am discussing several others.”

“Connecting shop owners with Shopify experts is yet another brilliant idea from Shopify. Experts bridges the gap, making it that much easier for shop owners to find help and for contractors like myself to find Shopify projects. In the first few weeks of it’s release alone I was contacted 50% more than usual through the experts website. As always, I love everything about Shopify and this is just another feature that customers will benefit from as well as designers, developers, etc.”

“Shopify Experts has brought about a significant increase in enquires since the beta launch. I have received approx 30 requests for quotes, ranging from small theme updates to larger projects that cover branding, design and quite complication integrations. I have closed on several projects already, generating in the region of $18,000 worth of business. Not bad for a 4 week beta(!)”

Sign up now!

Shopify Experts is now out of beta and in full swing. If you’ve got expertise that Shopify shopowners need, sign up, get listed and get found!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Although the video below is from 2006 (it’s from the first Railsconf), it’s still pretty representative of the Ruby on Rails development world: most of it seems to happen on Macs. From the Supreme Overlord DHH down to the newest newbie typing “rails s” on the console for the first time, it looks as though most Rails projects out there start their lives on computers with Apple logos:

(That’s me going “Mac…Mac…Mac…” as I tally each laptop. I can’t be certain, but I believe that the guy in the brown zip-up sweater at the 0:09 mark is Tobias Lütke, Shopify’s CEO and the guy who offered me my current job. Strange how things work out.)

It used to take a fair bit of jiggery-pokery to set up a Rails development environment on Windows. That’s not the case anymore, thanks to RailsInstaller, a single double-clickable setup program.

RailsInstaller installs the following on your Windows machine:

• Ruby 1.9.2-p290
• Rails 3.1.1
• Bundler 1.0.18
• Git 1.7.6
• Sqlite 3.7.3
• TinyTDS 0.4.5
• SQL Server support 3.3.3
• DevKit

I used RailsInstaller to set up my Windows laptop for Rails development this weekend, and it worked like a charm. I took some screenshots along the way and present them below.

Double-clicking on the RailsInstaller executable gives you a familiar welcome window:

Blah blah blah legal stuff. Just give me the software and I’ll worry about compliance later, okay?

By default, RailsInstaller installs all its software into the C:\RailsInstaller directory, creating it first if necessary. I broke away from the default and instead specified that the software should go into a new directory called C:\Rails, a name that I thought made a little more sense:

And we’re off!

Less than two minutes later:

And finally:

With the install wizard complete, we get kicked into command line mode to set up git and SSH:

And that’s it! I checked to make sure it was working by creating a new Rails app:

…we have lift-off!

The first time you run Rails on Windows, you might get a message from Windows Firewall asking if you’re cool with Ruby communicating with the outside world on private and/or public networks. I said “yes” to both:

So far, Rails on Windows, as installed by RailsInstaller, has been working like a charm for me.

Links

• RailsInstaller.org: Site for the all-in-one Rails-on-Windows installer. They say they’re working on Mac and Linux versions, which they hope to release in the future.
• The RailsInstaller 1.1.1 video: A screencast showing RailsInstaller in action.
• The RailsInstaller Google Group: Having trouble with RailsInstaller? Talk about it here.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

The deadline for submissions to the Shopify Fund passed at the stroke of midnight, and in the end, over 100 Shopify app proposals were received and two dozen developers threw their name in the hat to build an app from our App Wishlist. These are better numbers than we expected; thanks to everyone who applied!

And now, it’s our turn. We’ll be spending the next few weeks reviewing all these submissions, choosing the apps that we think will best serve Shopify shopowners and development teams whom we think will best be able to build apps from our Wishlist. If you submitted an app or offered your services to build something from the Wishlist, we might be contacting you shortly to ask for more details about your app submission or credentials.

Then, in January, we’ll start funding the first series of apps. If your app gets selected, or if you get selected to write an app from our Wishlist, here’s what happens:

1. At the start of the project, we’ll pay you the first half of the funding, which I like to describe as being “like a literary  advance, but nicer”. Keep reading to find out why.
2. You work on your app. We’ll check in with you regularly during this time.
3. When the app’s done, you’ll get the second half of the funding.
4. Your app goes into the Shopify App Store. Shopowners will be able to purchase and install your app. For every sale of the app, the revenue share between you and Shopify will be 50/50; you receive 50% and we receive 50%.
5. Until Shopify’s total of the 50% share equals the funding given to you, the 50/50 rev share will be in effect. You’ll still make money on each sale!
6. Once Shopify’s 50% share is equal to the funding given to you, the revenue share changes to Shopify’s standard 80/20 ratio for sales in the Shopify App Store: you receive 80% and we receive 20%.

As I said earlier, the deadline for submissions to the Shopify Fund has come and gone, but as always, we like to leave the communications lines open. If you have any questions or comments about the Shopify Fund, feel free to use the form on the Shopify Fund page or drop us a line at fund@shopify.com.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Today is November 30th, the last day for which you can apply to the Shopify Fund. If you’re a developer with an idea for a Shopify app or a developer without an idea for an app but the skills to write one, go visit the Shopify Fund page and sign up! Just do it soon, because the deadline’s coming up quickly.

The Shopify Fund is our way of creating a win-win situation for both Shopify and developers. It lets us pay developers to work full-time on a Shopify app (an application that makes use of the Shopify API to add features to or extend the capabilities of Shopify shops or that integrates Shopify shops with other services) without them having to take on other jobs to pay the bills. In exchange, we get more apps in the Shopify App Store, and with those apps, more features and functionality and in turn, happy shopowners.

Starting tomorrow, the day after the deadline for applying to the Shopify Fund, we’ll review the submissions. We’ll spend the month of December looking at people’s proposed apps or the resumes and portfolios of developers who don’t have app ideas and want to build apps. Then in the new year, we’ll make our final decisions, start funding app development and get more apps into the Store. If you want a more detailed explanation of how the Shopify Fund’s funding works, see this earlier article: The Shopify Fund, Explained.

If you’ve got an idea for a Shopify app or the chops to write one, apply to the Shopify Fund while there’s still time!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Shopify and Twilio are Holding a Contest!

Shopify, the ecommerce platform that makes it easy to set up online shops, is teaming up with Twilio, the platform for voice-over-phone, voice-online and SMS messaging, to create a developer contest where you’re challenged to write an app that makes use of both platforms.

Perhaps it’s an app that phones customers or sends them an SMS message when their order has been shipped. Or voice notification to a bricks-and-mortar store that tells the staff that a customer is coming to pick up their order. With a little creativity, some coding and our APIs, you can write an app that’s both useful and cool enough to win one of our prizes…

The Prizes

First prize is from Shopify: it’s Edward from Shopify’s preferred rig! A hot-rodded 11-inch Macbook Air with 256GB solid-state drive and 1.8 GHz CPU along with a gigantic 27-inch Apple Cinema Display. Small and light for when you’re on the go, a nice big screen for when you’re at home, the office of wherever you decide to keep the display and plenty of horsepower to build apps.

Second prize comes from Twilio and it’s a robot hacker’s dream: a stacked LEGO Mindstorms swag bag with the NXT 2.0, a bundle of touch, light and sound sensors, and a Bluetooth dongle to keep your creations connected. I, for one, welcome our new LEGO robot overlords.

Third prize is a joint Shopify/Twilio effort: a Kindle Fire, the newest multi-touch full-color hotness from the world of ebook readers.

The Rules

We try to keep things simple – it’s about building cool apps, not being buried in regulations!

• Entries must be submitted by 11:59 PM PST Sunday December 11th.
• Entries must use Twilio and Shopify APIs
• Entry cannot be an app that has previously won a Twilio Developer Contest
• Bonus points for submission to the Twilio App Gallery and the Shopify App Store
• Extra bonus points for use of Twilio Client

Okay, How Do I Get In on This Action?

• Find out more about the contest on the Twilio blog.
• Start working on an app!
• Check out the Shopify API documentation and the Twilio docs.
• Enter the contest using by using this form.
• Ask questions on the Twilio forums.
• Ask questions on the Shopify API Google Group.
• Email the Twilio help email address.
• Email me at joey@shopify.com.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.