Global Nerdy

Welcome to another featured Shopify app article, where we put the spotlight on one of the many developers building apps for Shopify. We’ve approached the people who build Shopify apps and asked them a few questions about what their app does, what its features are and why shopowners should use their app.

The plan is to do this for every app in the Shopify app store, to make sure that shop owners know all about the apps that are available and how they can extend their shops’ capabilities. We also hope it’ll make rock stars out of the developers who build apps on the Shopify platform!

Today’s featured app is ShopLogic. It’s also the currently featured app on the App Store.

What does ShopLogic do?

ShopLogic provides a powerful promotions platform that increases sales and social referrals for your ecommerce store. We make it easy to launch, manage, and optimize promotions.

Right now, during the beta period, the app is free. Get it now; you can be up and running in three minutes!

What are ShopLogic’s Key Features?

• ShopLogic lets you target promotions to specific shopper profile segments, like “loyal/repeat” or “new visitor” shoppers. It makes sure that the most effective promotion is being offered to the right shopper. You can also choose to run a broad offer and target everyone.
• ShopLogic supports social promotions, which incentivize shoppers to share with and refer friends through Facebook or Twitter. It’s a great way for shop owners to increase their social media presence while also increasing sales.
• It’s simple. You can choose from our selection of pre-defined promotions or customize to suit your needs.

Why should shop owners use ShopLogic?

ShopLogic increases sales and conversion rate for shop owners’ stores. We enable them to offer the right promotion to convert browsing shoppers into paying customers. Also, we let shop owners encourage shoppers to share on Facebook and Twitter, thereby driving additional social referral traffic to the store.

Shop owners can get a free trial of the app and it’s easy! – they will be up and running with promotions in just 3 minutes.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

ShopLogic is a venture-backed startup company based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2011, they provide optimization technology for ecommerce sites to increase sales. The Shopify app is the first of other compelling products to come.

You can find us online in the following ways:

• On our website: www.goshoplogic.com
• On Twitter: @shoplogic

How long did it take for you to build ShopLogic?

We built an initial version of the app in about 2 months. There is a lot of sophisticated technology going on in the background that allows us to offer targeted promotions to specific shopper profiles in real-time and to provide the analytics about promotions’ effectiveness.

The Shopify API is quite robust with great documentation so overall we have had a very positive experience partnering with Shopify.

Where can I find out more about ShopLogic?

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

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Update, Tuesday September 20th: If you’d like to come to this event, please RSVP on the Facebook event page so I have an idea of the number of people and can make arrangements with the restaurant accordingly!

It’s a Toronto tradition that’s gone neglected for far too long: the monthly dim sum lunch at good ol’ Sky Dragon. It’s time to bring it back!

Although it’s short notice, I don’t want to delay its return any more, so I’m declaring one for THIS WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21st AT NOON at the usual location: Sky Dragon, the dim sum restaurant at the top floor of Dragon City Shopping Mall, located on the southwest corner of Dundas and Spadina.

This is not formal at all: no agenda, set topics or presentations: it’s just local people who build software and sites getting together to share a nice lunch. You don’t have to be a developer to attend; if you somehow take part in the activity of writing software, building web sites or just like hanging out with the very nice people who make up Toronto’s very active tech scene, please join us!

We all pitch in on the final bill, and for the past few dim sum lunches, it’s worked out to about $12 a person, tip included. It’s a pretty good price considering how much food you get.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The BarCamp Tour Continues!

As I write this, I’m packing for my next trip on the BarCamp Tour. Next stop: Omaha, Nebraska!

The BarCamp Tour is a group of five startups who actively participate in BarCamps taking place across North America, providing sponsorship and more! We help BarCamp organizers ensure that they’re holding the best possible events, we host a party for BarCamp attendees and we bring along some really nice swag. Shopify is a member of the tour, along with our startup friends Batchbook, Grasshopper, MailChimp and Wufoo. It’s a great way for us to get up from behind our workstations and get to meet our customers, whether they’re current or future ones, as well as to help build strong tech communities.

We’d Like to Meet You!

We’re taking advantage of all this travel by making sure we get to meet our customers wherever we go. If you’re a Shopify shopowner, developer or designer and we’ve got your contact info, we’ll be contacting you and letting you know we’re coming to town. We’d love to take you out for a bite or the beverage of your choice and pick your brains: find out where Shopify’s working for you, where it isn’t and how we can make things better. If we don’t have your contact info and you’d like to catch up with me while I’m in your city, drop me a line, either via email or Twitter!

Where We’ll Be

Here’s the travel itinerary…

BarCamp Omaha: Friday, September 9th and Saturday, September 10th at Nomad Lounge. BarCamp proper takes place on Saturday, Friday evening is the pre-party.

BarCamp Tampa Bay: Friday, September 23rd and Saturday, September 24th at KForce Campus. BarCamp proper takes place on Saturday, Friday evening is the pre-party.

BarCamp Milwaukee: Saturday, October 1st and Sunday, October 2nd at Bucketworks.

Barcamp Philadelphia: Saturday, October 22nd at Huntsman Hall on the Wharton campus.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Bow chicka wah-wah!

It had some of the sillier plots and ideas to come from popular sci-fi, full of bad acting and even worse special effects, mired in some (but not all) the norms of 1950s and 1960s television, but it still somehow managed to influence pop culture and a lot of technologies – from the “flip” design of earlier mobile phones to Uhura’s Bluetooth earpiece to the iPad, to name a couple — and find a place in many a geek’s heart, including this one’s. It was Star Trek, now known as Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short, and it made its debut on this day 45 years ago: September 8th, 1966.

There are a lot of ways to pay tribute to Star Trek and its spin-offs, but here’s a way a lot of people won’t point you to: some very well-made fan films that I’ve found rather enjoyable – in fact, in some cases, they’re a little better than the original series.

If there’s an ultimate Trek fan, I’d have to say it’s James Cawley, who used the money from his Elvis impersonator gig to fund his fan series titled Star Trek: Phase II. There are some pretty good episodes in this series: some interesting storytelling, some better acting, and far improved visuals. Here are the episodes…

In Harm’s Way: The Doomsday Machines have screwed up history, but Spock has a plan to fix it, with the assistance of the Guardian of Forever:

To Serve All My Days: Captain Kirk needs his best weapons officer on the bridge, but Lt. Chekov is incapacitated with a debilitating disease that is causing him to age rapidly… a disease for which Dr. McCoy can find no cure. This one has special guest star Walter Koenig, the Chekov from TOS and was written by D.C. Fontana, who wrote episodes for TOS:

World Enough and Time: A Romulan weapons test goes awry and snares the Enterprise in an inter-dimensional trap. Lt. Commander Sulu returns to find himself 30 years out of place and the key to saving the crew of the Enterprise as the precarious grasp on their own dimension begins to slip.This one has special guest star George “Just Say” Takei, the Sulu from TOS:

Blood and Fire, Parts 1 and 2: This one’s got it all – a two-parter, a big space battle, survival horror with Regulan bloodworms, gay ensigns and Denise Crosby from Star Trek: The Next Generation playing an interesting role.

Enemy: Starfleet: The USS Eagle, lost eight years before, is now in the clutches of a woman who bends starships and their captains to her will and has been reverse engineered into a fleet that is bent on domination and genocide.

Finally, there’s Of Gods and Men, a fan film featuring some of the New Voyages sets and cast and a whole mess of “real” Trek actors, including Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), Walter Koenig (Chekov), Alan Ruck (Captain John Harriman, from Start Trek: Generations), Tim Russ (Tuvok from Voyager), Ethan Phillips (Neelix from Voyager), Robert Walker Jr. (“Charlie” from the Charlie X TOS episode) and cameos by actors from other Star Trek series:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The shops that I’m most loyal to, whether they’re in the real world or online, tend to be smaller, boutique ones. I find that they tend to focus on the quality of their products, their staff is knowledgeable and the customer service is better. In particular, if something I want is out of stock, these small, boutique-y places will often go to the trouble to place an order for me and get my contact info so that they can call or email me as soon is they’ve got the item back in stock again. That’s the sort of service that our friend Gary Vaynerchuk talks about in his book The Thank You Economy (a worthwhile read that we recommend to anyone with a Shopify shop).

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some automatic way to provide that same sort of service to the customers of your online shop –  to notify them when an item they want is back in stock?

That’s what Back in Stock is for. We asked its developer, Matthew Smith-Stubbs, a few questions; his answers are below.

What does Back in Stock do?

Back in Stock allows store owners to automatically notify customers of new inventory available to order.

With Back in Stock installed on your shop, when your customers visit one of your product pages with zero inventory, they’ll see a registration form. They can enter their email address on that form, and when you restock that product, they’ll be automatically sent an email informing them that the item they wanted is back in stock. It’s a simple but effective way to increase store sales.

What are the key features of Back in Stock?

• Back In Stock is easy to install, and runs automatically in the background.
• It provides you with information on what your customers want to buy, even when an item is not available, which is great for reordering.
• It’s not useful not just for out of stock products, but also for evaluating customer demand when expanding your product range.
• The email template and customer registration form can be customized, so it works great for shops in any language.

Why should shop owners use Back in Stock?

Shop owners work hard to attract visitors to their online shop, so it’s important to give those visitors every opportunity to become paying customers.

With Back In Stock installed on your store you reduce the number of customers going away empty handed. It’s a simple but effective way to increase your sales as well as monitor customer demand.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m an independent web developer living in London, UK. You can find me on Twitter at @msmithstubbs, and I have a blog for app announcements at http://blog.backinstock.info. And of course, my Shopify app Back In Stock lives at http://backinstock.info.

Where did you get the idea for Back in Stock?

The idea came from my own frustration trying to order an out of stock item online. A little while ago I was attempting to purchase a Gaggia Classic espresso machine. Unfortunately the store was out of stock, and had to check the website regularly to find out new inventory was available. At the same time I was investigating the Shopify API and decided it would be a useful feature for Shopify stores.

How long did it take for you to build Back in Stock?

It took a week for the initial build, plus two weeks of beta testing. I’m currently developing new features planned for release in the coming months.

Where can I find out more about Back in Stock?

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

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

I’m holding “Open Office Hours” this afternoon at The Roastery at 401 Richmond (near the corner of Richmond and Spadina). I’ll be working all afternoon from there, and you’re invited to drop in and say hello. Whether you want to talk about Shopify, “the industry” or just catch up, you’ll be able to catch me there between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m.. Come on down!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.