Global Nerdy

There’s nothing like word of mouth to drive customers to your doorstep. Consider the following:

• Over three out of four shoppers read reviews before purchasing online (Jupiter Research).
• Over one-third of shoppers say that reviews are the biggest influence on consumer electronics purchases (BIGresearch).
• According to Internet Retailer, user reviews can increase conversion rates by as much as 75%.

If you run an online shop, you’d do well to harness the power of word of mouth, and Yotpo, one of the apps in Shopify’s App Store, is a great way to do this. We talked with Yotpo co-founder Tomer Tagrin about his company’s app and we’re sharing what he told us in this article.

What does Yotpo do?

Yotpo is the first social micro-reviewing app. It enables your customers to read reviews from his/her friends and provides a quick and elegant way for them to write social reviews through the your shop. Our app uses patented software to build a social graph of your customers and provides social data on your top customers and leverages it to to increase your sales and customers’ experience.

What are Yotpo’s key features?

Yotpo’s key features are:

• Builds a social report on your customers, improving sales and engagement.
• Enables customers to read and write reviews using their social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Foursquare.
• Provides an analytics tool for each reviewer, which draws customers to come back to your shop and check their reviewer analytics regularly.
• Improves your shop’s SEO using social data.
• Builds a social graph of your shop’s the site social graph of customers.
• Full customization capabilities.
• Stays in touch with your customers: after making their purchase each customer is automatically emailed and invited to review the items he/she bought.

Why should shopowners use Yotpo?

If you’re looking to make more money, Yotpo is for you! Yotpo gives your shop an easy, beautiful social review system to engage your customers, bring them back and buy more.

If you want to get a clear view of your shop’s top customer, Yotpo is for you! It establishes the social graph of your shop’s customers and lets you know who your top customers are.

If you want to give your customers a reason to come back, Yotpo is for you! Yotpo entices customers to make return visits to check their reviewer analytics.

Tell us a little about yourself.

Yotpo is an 8-person machine based in Tel Aviv. We’re divided into R&D, sales, marketing and customer service and got an $800K investment in early 2011. We’re big believers in providing quality content to our customers. Check out our blog; we have even an article from Shopify’s CEO!

We’re going to disrupt the way users read and write reviews. We’re working on taking reviews into the social space by both providing e-commerce sites a true social solution and by building customers a fun, influential way to read and write reviews. We’re working on being a cross platform solution for shopowners and customers.

Feel free to reach us at through our social networking profiles on Twitter or Facebook!

Where did you get the idea for Yotpo?

Me and my co-founder Omri got the idea from just being internet shoppers. We were frustrated with the way reviews worked on ecommerce sites. Many of them carried very cool products that I wanted to review but the writing process was bad — really bad.

We wanted to enable customers to write social reviews and influence their social graph. We also talked to many online shopowners saw that they weren’t using reviews to establish a true social graph of their store.

If you think about it, the review space isn’t all that different from the social netowrking revolution. Yotpo is just that: a true social, fun and influential way to read and write reviews among friends.

Where can I find out more about Yotpo?

You can find more about Yotpo, along with over 100 other apps to add features and functionality to your Shopify shop, at the Shopify App Store.

This article also appears in the Shopify Blog.

On Black Friday – for those of you outside the U.S., that’s Friday, November 25th, they day after Thanksgiving and the biggest shopping day of the year – most of the Pragmatic Bookshelf’s books, PDFs and screencasts will go on sale for 40% off. Only a few titles, such as The SPDY Book and Exceptional Ruby, will be exempt, but everything else will be available at a 40% discount.

All you have to do to get the discount is use the discount code “turkey” while checking out at the Pragmatic Bookshelf store on Friday, November 25th between 00:00 PST (3:00 a.m. Eastern / 0800 GMT) and 23:59 PST (2:59 a.m. on Nov. 26th Eastern / 0759 on Nov. 26th GMT).  Just enter “turkey” in the coupon code field, then select your payment method to apply the discount to your order.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Why, oh why, didn’t Rob Conery’s guide to setting up Rails on a Mac for Microsofties exist back in May? While I did fine following Cowboy Coded’s excellent guide to setting up Rails 3 on Snow Leopard useful (and hey, prior to joining Microsoft, I did Rails 1.x development), a ‘Softie-friendly guide from the other famous guy to leave Microsoft for the Rails world would’ve been nice. If you’re from the world of ASP.NET MVC development – or worse, plain old ASP.NET or worse still, oldie-von-moldie ASP – Rob does a pretty good job of giving you the background details on all those things that Rails developers use that you probably didn’t – XCode, Homebrew, Git, gems, bundles and so on.

Once you’ve followed Rob’s steps, all you’ll need to truly be a Rails-on-a-Mac developer is a fauxhawk and perhaps a fixie. I’ll refer you to my hipster stereotype coworker Edward for those subjects:

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Curtis Jackson, the rapper better known to the world as “Fitty Cent”, has a company called SMS Audio and they launched their Shopify-based shop today. The shop is called SMS By 50 and it’s the go-to place for premium headphones.

The headphones come in three flavours: wired, wireless and earbuds. They’re currently available for pre-sale and range in price from $129.95 to $399.95, which is “right in line with current market trends” according to this TechCrunch article. SMS Audio recently bought KonoAudio, who’ve been making funky high-end headphones for ages, presumably for their headphone manufacturing expertise, which will be backed by Fitty’s street cred.

In addition to headphones, SMS By 50 also carries shirts and caps, suitable for just plain old hangin’ or hittin’ da club.

If you’re working on your own Shopify shop or designing Shopify themes, give SMS By 50 a look. It’s got a great design whose look and feel works for its audience; it also shows you how flexible Shopify’s templating system is.

Oh, and by the way, if you think you’re not “street” enough to sport “Fitty” gear, here’s something just for you:

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

 

According to the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, there are about 50 million people in the United States with some kind of disability. We also have an aging population, who have their own accessibility issues. And finally, the odds are that sooner or later, most of us will have to cope with some kind of temporary or permanent limitation through illness or injury. People who fall into these categories rely on web accessibility and making sure that they can use your shop isn’t just the right thing to do; it also makes good business sense.

We’ve got over a hundred apps in the Shopify App Store, and Acessify is today’s featured app. It’s a handy tool for checking the accessibility of your shop and helping ensure that customers who use screen readers and other assistive technologies with their computer can use it. We asked Brian Getting, the creator of Accessify, and we’re sharing his answers with you.

What does Accessify do?

Accessify automatically scans your Shopify shop each week for accessibility issues. When accessibility issues are found, it sends you an email report showing which pages had issues, what those issues are and links to more information about resolving them.

What are Accessify’s key features?

• It saves shopowners time by automating accessibility scans.
• It helps shopowners address accessibility issues.
• It provides shopowners with records of their stores’ accessibility status.

Why should shopowners use Accessify?

Shopowners should use Accessify because there are tens of millions of customers with disabilities in the United States alone. Worldwide the number of potential customers that have disabilities affecting their ability to interact with a computer (visual impairments, broken hand, and so on) is staggering, and general the PWD (People with Disabilities) community relies on the Internet even more heavily than the average customer.

There’s also the matter of accessibility regulations varying from country to country, and Accessify can help with documenting accessibility efforts.

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Brian Getting, and I operate Terra Firma Design & Consulting located in Newport, Oregon. We are also the people behind Chimpified, another Shopify app.

Where can I find out more about Accessify?

You can find out more about Accessify on its page in Shopify’s App Store.

Ruth Morton Asks: Can IT Pros Benefit from Agile Metholodologies?

One of the people with whom I had the pleasure of working during my days at Microsoft was technology Advisor Ruth Morton, who’s based near Microsoft Canada’s headquarters just outside Toronto. While my audience was developers, hers is what Microsoft calls “IT Pros” – the people who set up the machines, install/deploy/update the software, set up and keep the network running and do all those other things that we who write code consider to be Someone Else’s Problem. In addition to showing IT Pros the latest and greatest Microsoft tech, she talks to tech managers about using technology in the service of keeping their businesses running smoothly, to women about careers in IT and to students about their futures in the field of technology. Right now, she’s in Vancouver at the TechDays cross-Canada conference, where she’s running the Security, Identity and Management track.  If you’re in the Toronto area and do sysadmin-y stuff or deploy Windows and Office for a business, you’d do well to get to know Ruth!

In her latest post at Microsoft’s IT Manager Connection blog, Ruth writes about applying agile methodologies in places beyond its original domain of software development. She asks:

Even though the Agile Manifesto was born of a desire to create a mechanism for better software delivery, I see applications outside of that world too. In life, keeping an eye on your goals while planning a little at a time allows you to adjust for change, take advantage of opportunity and be released from disappointment because The Grand Plan didn’t pan out exactly how you anticipated. In desktop deployment projects, applying elements of the Agile methodology should allow you to be more flexible, adapt as issues are discovered and respond to your client’s needs. Less documentation, more collaboration with the customer and being responsive to change.

Cheap Dedicated Hosting.

Now, I’m not out there deploying Office and Windows these days, so I don’t have the opportunity to put my theory into practice. What do you think? Is it possible to be "more agile” in client deployments?

(You might want to take a look at the Agile Business infographic in my last blog post.)

If your line of work is along the lines of “IT Pro” or sysadmin and you’ve got an opinion, let Ruth and company know over at her AlignIT for Infrastructure and Development Managers LinkedIn group.

Go for IT: My “Last Lecture” at Microsoft

In her article, Ruth mentions a presentation I created titled Go for IT: How to Have an Awesome Career and Life. While working at The Empire, I gained a bit of notoriety for building offbeat presentations that veered away from the standard Microsoft template. That, coupled with the fact that I had a good rapport with students, was probably why one of my last assignments was to create a new presentation about career planning aimed at students in college and university.

In making the presentation, I read a lot of Daniel Pink, watched Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture and looked back at some twists that had taken place in my own life. These all served as inspiration for Go For IT, and I’m sharing it with you now. It comes with copious speaker notes; with only a little practice, you too can deliver this presentation to students thinking about going into a technology career and asking themselves “What now?”

If you’d like the original slide deck in either PowerPoint of Keynote format, drop me a line and I’ll send it your way.

The folks at Gist, who make a manage-the-firehose-of-your-communications web application (I’m taking the beta for a spin) have created an infographic titled The Agile Business which covers how agile software development methods are being adapted for running a business today. Here’s a shrunken-down version:

The original infographic is larger and easier to read; you can grab it from the Gist Blog.

At Shopify, the biz dev team have taken the underlying principles of agile development – the focus on individuals and interactions, stuff that works, customer collaboration and responding to change – and applied it to what their work, which involves drumming up new partnerships and business collaborations. Business development processes, which I’ve seen stretch on for months at my last job (a Fortune 50 company; I’ll leave it to you to ratiocinate which one, and it’s not that hard to figure out) take only weeks and are sometimes even pared down to days at Shopify. Harley and his people call it “Agile Bizdev”.

One minor quibble – note the graphic used to depict the gathering of software developers putting together the Agile Manifesto:

I’m familiar with the story of how and where the Manifesto got put together. I’ve even talked with The Pragmatic Programmers’ Andy Hunt, one of the guys who was there, about it. They most certainly weren’t sitting at a round boardroom table; they were at a ski lodge. In my interview with Andy, I asked if the get-together where they drafted the Manifesto was anything like Hot Tub Time Machine, and he gave a quick non-reply and changed the topic. So I choose to believe it was!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.