Posted on No Comments on Show your products for free on the Google Shopping tab (US only)

Show your products for free on the Google Shopping tab (US only)

On 21st April 2020, Google announced its plan to make it free to sell on Google. Search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings.

For Shopify Stores, it means that your products can be shown to more consumers even you don’t pay for Google ads. You can get free exposure. Initially, the plan will be opened to the US before the end of April. And it will gradually expand to more countries before the end of 2020.

If you are an existing user of Merchant Center and Shopping ads, you’ve already opted into the program. There is no further step for you. For new users, please continue the reading.

According to the requirement, merchants must submit a feed through Google Merchant Center and meet the additional eligibility requirements for enhanced listings to appear in these results. 

Luckily, Shopify has made the process simple. With Shopify’s Google Shopify App, it will help you to sync, submit, and optimize your products to the free listings.

Install Google Shopping App to your store: https://apps.shopify.com/google-shopping?itcat=blog&itterm=384225345570

Shopify’s official announcement: https://www.shopify.com/blog/google-shopping-listings

Posted on No Comments on Share your story to boost SEO for free!

Share your story to boost SEO for free!

Since Dec 2016, SPO has been helping niche sellers to improve organic traffics and social presence. Nowadays, the world is in a serious crisis that everyone has to change our daily lives and many of us even lose our life. The logistics are down. You can’t ship the product from your supplier. There are fewer buyers to shop online. I know that it’s a tough time for all of you. As an indie maker, I’ve been thinking about how I can assist more online stores to survive during lockdowns, border closures, etc. Though we are small companies here, it doesn’t that we cannot help other people who are suffering from the CoronaVirus now.

Read more Share your story to boost SEO for free!
Posted on No Comments on How is the Coronavirus affecting your Shopify business?

How is the Coronavirus affecting your Shopify business?

Since Jan till now, there are more than 100K confirmed cases of Coronavirus all over the world. How many of you have Coronavirus business contingency plans? Feel free to leave a comment below.

In my home town Hong Kong, everyone is wearing a mask as a precautious measure. The business is really hard here. Luckily, there are not many cases here, just 170 (with 7.5 million population) at the moment of writing. Obviously, the global economy is severely impacted by the virus. If you are in Europe / US, I am afraid you’re having a hard time now.

During the downturn, I hope all of you stay safe and keep your faith in the hard time. According to my SARS experience (17 years ago), Ecom will be boosted temporarily since everyone cannot go out. So just think of it as an opportunity. As a tech guy, I work all day in front of a computer. TBH it doesn’t affect me very much. For me, I will take a sabbatical to think about my next move. Probably just listen to podcasts, hack something cool and stay open-mind about new opportunities. As a maker, I hope I can build lifeboats for the people who lose their jobs. Though I don’t have any concrete idea now.

Just remember:

What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger!

Posted on No Comments on SPO v1.9 update – Introducing Bulk Edit Product Link Preview

SPO v1.9 update – Introducing Bulk Edit Product Link Preview

Hi SPO users,

Since some users are requesting bulk edit regularly, I’ve been secretly working on this feature for a month. With bulk edit, you can

  1. input your title and description with a template
  2. select the product image to be used as the link preview image

For more details, please refer to a new tab “Bulk Edit” in SPO.

At the moment, this feature is pretty simple. We are trying to roll out to stores with less than 300 products. If the experiment is successful, we may consider supporting stores with more products. As the feature keeps our server occupied for a long time, it will only be reserved for our paid users under the Basic plan. Otherwise, our server will collapse very soon. If you are interested in more options under bulk edit, feel free to submit a feature request. We’ll consider implementing the most popular options in our future releases.

Just leave your comments here or email me. We’d be happy to hear from you!

New

  1. Bulk edit product link preview

Fixed

  1. Cannot accept Chinese for title & description in the store tab
    .
  2. Link previews not updated with custom templates for pages including collection in the name
    .
  3. When there are less than or equal to 10 products, tab view in the dashboard will be broken

 

Posted on No Comments on SPO v1.8 update – Responsiveness Improved

SPO v1.8 update – Responsiveness Improved

Hi SPO users,

Happy to see you in the new year! Since my last blog post, I’ve been upgrading SPO to make it more stable and responsive. As usual, here is the summary of the changes:

New

  1. Support Page (in-app and via admin link)
  2. TinyMCE html editor has been upgraded. It can support <script> tag. Other shopify apps may put some codes into your product / page content. Our editor can be compatible now.

Improved 

  1. App responsiveness in the listing page. Faster paging.

Fixed 

  1. Keyword search volume may not be able to display occasionally
  2. Review pop up cannot be disabled
  3. Admin link to edit collections & pages. You can directly “jump” from your product, collection, page & blog post detail page to SPO 

New Planning

Currently, we are planning for new done-for-you service packages or features:

  1. Keyword research and product content optimization
  2. Customized blog posts writing to boost SEO and good for social sharing
  3. bulk edit feature for SPO, probably editing link previews (requested by some users)

Please feel free to leave your comments here or email me. We’d be happy to hear from you!

Posted on No Comments on Merry X’mas to all SPO users!

Merry X’mas to all SPO users!

Dear SPO users,

Thanks for your support in the year! Over the year, there are more users joining SPO. Hopefully, the growth will accelerate in the new year. We’ll continue to improve our service to serve you better.

What’re we up to?

2 weeks ago. We’ve added the support for Page. To be honest, I didn’t realize landing pages were useful for holiday promotions, therefore, I overlooked the part. Fortunately, I can add this part within a few days to support your before Christmas rush promotion campaigns.

Since some users are not satisfied with the performance of SPO, I am trying to upgrade our server & code base to make it faster.  But it takes tremendous efforts to review every part to make it work like the current version. Also, the code base is a bit old. I hope the first upgrade can be deployed before the end of 2019. After finishing this post, I will continue my work very soon.

What’s next in 2020?

First of all, I will try to fix the bugs remaining. For new features, I am considering bulk edit of link previews. If you wanna raise a feature request, feel free to leave a comment here, fill in our survey or simply drop me a mail.

Merry X’mas to all of you! Hope you’ll enjoy X’mas with our loved one! 🙂

Posted on No Comments on SPO v1.7 update – Performance Improved

SPO v1.7 update – Performance Improved

Hi SPO users,

I’ve updated SPO again. This time I am more focused on performance improvement.

Changes:

  1. Collection and blog articles will be loaded on clicking the tab. The original design is loading together with products, store, and other information. In the new loading, page navigation will become faster
    .
  2. Commonly used variables will be loaded on our server instead of fetching from Shopify.
    .
  3. The page navigation at the bottom left-hand side is adjusted

While the changes may be a little technical for you to understand, please let me know if you find any issues or raise any improvements. Some users emailed me to report that the Facebook link preview section was not responsive and the submit button was not working. Unfortunately, I can’t duplicate the issue in my test app. Please let me know what information you inputted if you find the issue. I would be happy to fix it.

At the meantime, I am looking for a new problem to solve in Shopify. Feel free to ping me and I am happy to offer you to be my next forever-free users! 😉

Posted on No Comments on SPO v1.6 update – Support Collections

SPO v1.6 update – Support Collections

Dear SPO users,

Thanks for your continuous support for the last 2 years. Some of you may be asking for the support of Collections. I guess you may occasionally want to promote a whole product category instead of a single product. Hope the new feature is useful for your X’mas promotion!

Now, you can optimize your collections just like your products. While we have done basic testing to cover general use cases, it may still have glitches since this change has affected many existing functions. Please let us know if you find any issues. We’ll try to fix them asap.

If you like our App, please leave us a review on our Shopify App Store listing page! We’ll need your support in order to continuously improve the app.

Merry X’mas! Have a wonderful Christmas with your loved one! 🙂

Posted on No Comments on Book a Skype session with Benny

Book a Skype session with Benny

Since SPO launched at the end of 2016, we have been helping our Shopify store owners to solve problems regarding social marketing and SEO.

It’s time to do more for our valuable customers!

I decide to have a chat with you if you find any pains in SEO, social marketing or content marketing. I may not be able to help you solve your problems immediately. But I’ve been in the software business for 10 years. (If you are curious about my company or my professional background, take a look at SillyCube or my personal blog). I might probably solve your business problems before.

In my opinion, some of your problems may be more about the business instead of technical stuffs. If you are one of the SPO users, feel free to shoot me an email to book a timeslot. Though my normal work hour is GMT +8:00, 10:00 – 19:00 Mon – Fri, I will try to make it possible.

I can only be available in Dec 2018 since I will be quite busy in the new year.

p.s. If you’re a US user, please speak slower so that I can better understand your accent.