Grind had 11 brick and mortar stores in the UK before they dove into ecommerce on Shopify. It was not until the COVID lockdown that they moved from strictly brick and mortar to the ecommerce ecosystem. Before then, only half of a percent of their business was online! After they added subscriptions and built a data stack to inform the launch of new promotion methods, the business scaled to 50x revenue in just a couple of months. THE CHALLENGE Over the years, Grind built an incredible brand through their popular brick-and-mortar stores and newsletters, going beyond coffee to become a part of their customers' lives in a meaningful, authentic way. Grind is gaining awareness not just in their local region of London but celebrating subscribers from around the globe. After losing their offline (physical location) business practically overnight, Grind needed to quickly pivot to ecommerce and get an accurate picture of their online customer lifetime value (LTV) for “one-time” and “recurring” orders. They needed to see and report on customer behavior happening on their Shopify store to improve the checkout flow, build ideal customer profiles, retarget the right customers using dynamic social ads, and make crucial decisions using accurate data at the core of these efforts. THE SOLUTION Littledata's Recharge connection made it easy to get accurate sales data and marketing attribution across the subscriber journey. This smart technology connected Grind’s Recharge checkout with Google Analytics for accurate data about subscription revenue, including first-time payments, recurring transactions, and subscription lifecycle events. They were able to see LTV by channel and—critically—to predict where high- value subscriber growth was most likely to happen. It all came down to “measuring the difference in LTV for subscribers versus one-time purchasers” says Grind CMO Teddy Robinson. “Subscription revenue and return on ad spend (ROAS) were really the biggest top-line metrics for us.” RESULTS Subscription selling has created an exciting opportunity for the Grind ecommerce store to unlock potential revenue, build long-lasting relationships with their customers, and create a community among consumers. Building on their existing loyal customer base, Grind’s introduction of sustainable at home coffee pods— and tracking checkout events accurately with Littledata’s Recharge connection—Grind saw massive subscriber growth across paid and organic channels. They went from £10k to £500k monthly ecommerce revenue, and are have expanded internationally. A few takeaways of what Grind accomplished with Littledata: • 50x Subscription revenue in three months • 100% Recharge orders captured in Google Analytics • 28 Event types tracked in the checkout

With the sunsetting of Universal Analytics (UA) right around the corner, we're especially excited to announce that Littledata now tracks the Recharge checkout in GA4 and Facebook CAPI. It's a super easy way to get accurate, granular subscription data in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which powers better reporting and Google Ads performance, and Facebook Conversions API (CAPI), which powers better Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads. Recharge was one of our first app integrations after we launched the main platform integration for Shopify in 2017, and it's still one of our most popular data sources. With complete attribution data and LTV tracking that accounts for recurring orders, Littledata's server-side tracking is the secret to how successful Recharge brands improve engagement and conversions on organic channels like Klaviyo and ROI on paid channels like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Data-driven brands like Grind Coffee and Geologie use Littledata to make better decisions every day. And with full support for GA4, Facebook (Meta) and Instagram Ads, it's now even better. What's new in this release: Recharge checkout steps tracked in GA4 Subscription lifecycle events tracked in GA4 Support for both Shopify and BigCommerce checkouts Option to send subscription events to Facebook Conversions API (CAPI) If you're using Recharge connection we recommend tracking in parallel in GA4. That way you'll automatically have historic data, plus a chance to start playing around with the new platform. Plus you'll save your team a lot of headaches when July rolls around. With GA4's powerful reporting in your hands, you can use Littledata to get a single source of truth about your subscription sales and marketing, from one-off purchases and first-time subscriptions through refunds, subscription updates and recurring orders. Eliminate the guesswork and find your most profitable channels for subscriptions. The updates to our Recharge integration focus on checkout tracking and subscription lifecycle events because our merchants have found this to be the ideal combination to combine data for analysis with data for action (more effective audience building, retargeting, and -- for our Segment users -- marketing automation). We've also made it super easy to automatically send subscription events to Facebook CAPI; brands that do that are cutting their acquisition costs in half! Not using Littledata yet? Get going today with a free 30-day trial. No strings attached. [note]Did you know that Littledata can track headless Recharge setups too? See how[/note]

Geologie is an award-winning DTC brand that has set a high bar for using only clean, safe, and clinically-proven ingredients in their skin, hair, and body care products. Don’t just take our word for it—they have over 6,000 five-star reviews! But an impressive product line and dedicated customer base were just the beginning. Sometimes you need to be inspired by data. Like many skincare brands online today, Geologie sells by subscription. With a large subscriber base, it was vital for them to find a solution that would send accurate, unified data from all of the tools they use to a central data destination. Littledata’s out-of-the-box solution gave them visibility to their recurring payments and the lifetime value (LTV) of their customers, directly in Google Analytics. The Challenge: Getting unified data out of siloed tools The team at Geologie needed key customer metrics to help grow their subscription business. Founded in 2018 to improve well-being through dermatologist-recommended products, Geologie offers personalized routines focused on their skin, hair, and body needs. This hyper-personalization is perfect for creating a subscription program. Still, they needed to track these customers’ recurring payments and ongoing LTV (adjusted for recurring orders, returns, subscription upgrades, and other changes). When Geologie’s Head of Growth and Head of Ecommerce banded teams together to look for a solution to this tracking issue, they realized it would take extensive work. A noteworthy pain point was the time and energy it would take for their development to learn Shopify’s API in detail, not to mention developing a complete tracking solution, implementation time, and deploying ongoing maintenance. [note]Download the full case study to see how Geologie unlocked data-driven growth [/note] Like many fast-moving DTC brands, their desire was for core metrics to be clean and accurate without the ongoing costs of maintenance. The rollout of Google Analytics 4 did not make things easier; the sunsetting of Universal Analytics created another roadblock! Geologie needed to set up GA4 to continue tracking and sending events to Google Analytics, and was hoping to find a way to track in parallel, sending complete data to both Universal Analytics (the old version of GA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) at once. The Solution: Setting up Littledata's Google Analytics and Recharge connections Geologie leveraged Littledata’s plug-and-play Recharge integration to capture recurring payments in Google Analytics and pull in additional user data from Shopify — unified data they did not have before. Stephen Racano, Geologie’s Head of Growth, was at the helm of this implementation. Racano says that Littledata was extremely easy to install, and the customer support provided from start to finish was exceptional. Since they were early to GA4 thanks to Littledata, Geologie will be able to conduct year-on-year analysis in the future. They can also start building custom free-form reports in Explorations using this data. This connection also allows them to warehouse and send data to BigQuery and track Cohort Performance in real time. Results: More subscribers, higher retention, and three years of over 150% growth Since implementing Littledata, Geologie has successfully grown its subscription business with three consecutive years of 150%+ growth without seeing an increase in customer acquisition cost. In addition, their data-driven strategy has simultaneously helped improve retention rates by 25% year-over-year. With accurate data flowing and correct data being sent from Shopify and Recharge subscriptions to Google Analytics, Geologie now has a complete picture of attribution, recurring orders, and LTV from customers. [subscribe] “I had always looked at Littledata as a temporary solution," said Racano. "But given the complexity of bringing the development of our analytics in-house compared to the pricing and high level of support of Littledata, that really wouldn't make sense”. Racano estimates that by implementing Littledata, they save over 50 hours per year in analytics implementation time. Sometimes automation is a good thing ;) About Littledata Littledata is the top ecommerce data platform for modern DTC brands, tracking the entire customer lifecycle, unifying touchpoints across tech stacks, and sending data to the most popular data destinations. Connect sales, marketing, and customer data for action and analysis. [tip]Are you tracking subscriptions correctly in Google Analytics? Learn how by downloading the complete DTC Guide to Subscription Analytics[/tip]

In the DTC world, subscription ecommerce used to thrive mainly on Shopify or custom solutions. But times have changed. Although Cyber Week was flat or down for many online retailers, BigCommerce merchants saw a year-over-year GMV increase of 15%. We're excited to announce that Littledata's BigCommerce app for Google Analytics now includes a plug-and-play integration with Recharge, the leading subscription payments solution. The new connection makes it easy for subscription brands on BigCommerce to get granular data about online orders, marketing channels and subscriber behavior in Google Analytics. The subscriptions analytics connection for BigCommerce lets you: Track browsing behaviorTrack shopping cart events, orders, recurring orders, and refundsImprove marketing attributionDifferentiate one-off orders, first-time subscriptions, and recurring orders in Google Analytics Data-driven growth has to start with accurate data. Littledata's magic combination of client-side and server-side tracking works behind the scenes so you can get back to business. We're here to help subscription analytics be less complicated and more useful. Recharge is now used by over 15,000 brands around the world. Our Recharge integration for Shopify is one of our oldest — and most popular — integrations at Littledata. We're eager to keep helping Recharge merchants get accurate, actionable data, whichever ecommerce platform or custom setup they might be using. Tip: The BigCommerce Recharge integration works automatically without any extra setup steps (if you're using Recharge and BC, we'll automatically track subscriptions for you). Try it for free today! For the data geeks out there, we've also added data pipeline settings such as a domain linker and IP Anonymization (or IP masking). And yes, Littledata works with custom themes and headless BigCommerce setups! Adapting to the new world of first-party data and hurdling obstacles like iOS changes and Facebook Ads' switch to a Conversions API becomes much easier with the powerful server-side tracking of Littledata's analytics connection. The app is designed for Universal Analytics (UA), but coming soon for GA4. Not sure where to start? See 5 things that change in Google Analytics when you install Littledata.

Want to learn from DTC founders and entrepreneurs shaking up their industries? Check out the other entries in our Lunch with Littledata series. Lunch with Littledata is back! This time, we sat down with Charlie Bowes-Lyon, co-founder of natural deodorant brand Wild. Founded by industry veterans, Wild became a Littledata customer early on to supercharge their growth. Through savvy market moves and a strong growth vision, Wild became the biggest brand in the UK natural deodorant market. They’ve added more than 140,000 customers in just two years after launch, with plans to build on their impressive growth. In our Q&A below, Charlie shares his thoughts on choosing growth channels, going global, and which data points are crucial for any DTC business to be on top of. Tip: Learn how to track every order on your subscription store and tie them to your marketing campaigns with our guide to complete ReCharge data in Google Analytics. LD: Wild has grown a ton since you signed up. When we first talked it was right after you’d closed the funding round. CBL: Yes, I think it was when we were launching International, right after we'd raised funding. So it was early days last summer. Back then you just had one country store? Yeah! It feels like a long time since then… (laughs) Are you mostly reliant on paid spend for growth strategy overall? Yes, we're very performance-led as a business. We operate over a variety of different marketing channels and, as a result of those channels, gain brand awareness. We've also operated a very community-centric and “social first” approach. So, when we initially designed the product we made sure that, at least from our point of view, we were creating something that was very shareable over channels like Instagram. Something that people would really want to talk about and show off to their friends. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Wild (@wildrefill) And I think we achieved that in quite a good way. We've managed to grow on social pretty quickly. In the space of a year and a couple of months, we’re coming up to about 115,000 followers on Instagram. The other side of that approach is nurturing the community. So we have VIP Facebook groups for people who really want to stay involved and be a part of the decision making. For example, we often have polls on things like what scent we should put out next. I think that's been big in helping people to feel like they're involved in decision making. So, it's not just us guessing what customers actually want. It's based on a more data-led approach. A lot of our customers at Littledata want to build those communities, but it’s hard to get the initial traction. Are your engagements mostly coming from current customers or from new customers too? It's both. Referrals account for about a third of all of our sales. So, it's about nurturing that community, being very genuine with them, and really involving them in everything we do. Then as a result of that, people are happy to share and recommend us to their family and friends. That's the organic growth side of it. But at the same time, we're constantly building growth heavily into our CRM. We have landing pages, and we do ads to push that growth along. Do you offer a gifting option? We're not big on gifting, to be honest. In our referral program, if you refer a friend, they get a free case. So it’s really an intro offer. Yes, essentially. Because it can be expensive for people who haven’t heard of our brand to pay £12 for a deodorant. So, letting them see what the product's all about and test it first is a good way. Then we rely on the product being high quality and good enough to retain them as customers. “We rely on the product being high quality and good enough to retain(free trial users) as customers.” Hopefully the ReCharge tracking add on has been helpful to you. Yeah! Without it, we can't see anything on Google Analytics or anywhere. So yeah, it's pretty vital. Who on your team uses the data that Littledata sends to GA? Well, it's used across a variety of things. Myself and the marketing team use GA for top-line statistics and data on different marketing campaigns and so on. It's also hooked into our analytics platform, so a lot of the data that they gather obviously comes from GA as well. That’s being used for things like measuring LTV, but also looking at the operations side of the business and working out different cogs and margins on products we’re selling. Have you built one core dashboard, or is it more of an ad hoc process where you dive into the data and build reports as needed? Yeah, there's a couple of different dashboards we use. Generally, we've got pretty good oversight of data. And Littledata definitely connects that bridge between Shopify and ReCharge for us, which when it's off everything goes completely wrong and doesn't work. So it has been quite important for us. Tip: Learn how to connect ReCharge with Google Analytics for accurate data about your recurring transactions. Wild has focused on sustainability since the beginning. I've had a lot of talks with founders recently here in the US who feel like they're having a hard time. Sustainability is definitely a buzzword here, but putting it into practice is a whole different story. Some DTC verticals have caught on, but in a way Europe in general is more progressive in terms of customers backing that commitment up with their purchasing behavior. Yeah—it's a funny one because I think you're right in terms of sustainability. I think Europe and the UK are ahead and people are a little bit more aware. It's a bigger subject that we're constantly focused on, both in politics and our wider society. There's been a lot of quite good changes that have been made. But likewise, in the US with the likes of Elon Musk and Tesla, for example, there's a lot of companies that are doing some quite good awareness around it. On the flipside for us, the US has had good natural deodorant companies for four or five years. We were the first one in the UK launching just over a year ago. So the US market is probably a bit more developed when it comes to what natural products are and why they might be better. It’s all still pretty new for us over here, so that means we have a lot more education that we have to do for potential customers. Whereas potentially in the US, that piece of education's already been done to some extent. And was that part of the impetus for choosing this concept as your brand alone? Yeah, definitely. We saw some successful companies in the US who had done a great job with a fundamentally good product (i.e. natural deodorant that worked). But outside of that, their packaging was very simple and plastic. The brand was pretty bland. We looked at it and thought: “we can add in sustainability and create a better, fun-looking product.” Do you have a community of other brands and founders doing similar things that you personally interact with, or are you more lone wolves? Yeah, we speak to a lot of different people every week really. Both my co-founder Fred and I are lucky that we have pretty good networks from our previous jobs. We certainly get really good oversight of what other companies are doing and how they're doing it and what's working for them. Sometimes, though, what works for others won't work for us and vice versa. It's an interesting time at the moment. I think to be honest, we've probably just been through the best year of ecommerce that anyone's going to see for some time. And I imagine that the next year is going to be quite difficult as a result because, you know, everyone's coming out of lockdown, iOS 14 updates on Facebook, all these kind of small things are adding up to make life a little bit more difficult. And people are heading back into traditional stores as well. So, it'll be interesting to see what happens. But in a way, it's a good thing for us. We see it as hopefully a competitive advantage if things get a bit more tricky and we're able to execute better than others. Tip: Use Littledata’s guide to GDPR cookie banner compliance to ensure your store isn’t hit with a non-compliance fine. Do you expect the business model to change at all, maybe to pull in wholesale? Yes, we've just gone live about a month ago into retail in the U.K., and we're now Sainsbury's. I think it's been a really good start so far. Potentially that will be a big channel for us. But really, we're very focused on two things. One is delivering the best natural deodorant we can and always iterating on that. The second is diversifying both our marketing channel mix and our strategy by going properly international. We're already in Europe, but we're dabbling in the US and Australia as well and testing other markets. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Wild (@wildrefill) I think the danger that’s present for ecommerce companies at the moment is that we could see a channel just stop working one day. Something like Facebook, suddenly people's customer acquisition costs could double on Facebook. For example, the UK has had really high adoption of the iOS 14 update from Facebook. I believe it’s somewhere around 30 percent of people (in the UK) are opting in for ads, whereas in Europe it's closer to 60 percent of people opting in. But because we have that diversification of countries we can advertise in, we can immediately move some of our advertising spend to Europe and we'll probably get better customer acquisition costs as a result. Being in Sainsbury's and hopefully other retail outlets in the future just gives us another channel where we can focus, spend on marketing, and diversify. And I think as well, to be honest, once we can, we'll probably do a lot of events and try to get out and get to offline channels. It just gives us another angle of approach. Is the goal that in-store shopping will be the first touchpoint for new online subscribers? Not necessarily, no. We're fairly channel-agnostic. So we don't really mind if someone's online buying from us or shopping in brick-and-mortar retail. “We're fairly channel agnostic. So we don't really mind if someone's onlinebuying from us or shopping in brick-and-mortar retail.” Wild offers a slightly complex product where some explanation is required to kind of understand who we are and what we're doing. And often if you go into a retail store, you're not really looking for something new. You’ve basically got a second where you glance at the products on a shelf. So it's hard to know. But I do think that the brand awareness we've created over the last year has massively improved the retail results that we've had today. Plus, they both will just feed off each other. Some people don't like to order online, or they forget about it. They might want to just go into the shop and grab a refill. Likewise, some people might make their first purchase in a shop and then sign up on the website and get an online subscription. I think the key is just giving customers options. Do you plan to expand globally? And if so, do you plan to hire specific country managers? There are lots of subtle things that can make a difference. Yeah, massively so. We're barely touching the surface of the potential in Europe. And there's a huge market in the US and Australia for us as well. That said, we plan to choose a couple of markets, focus in on them, and make it work there before trying to do too much at once. We’re hiring a German country manager at the moment, so that's going to be our starting point. Quick links Littledata's partner program for Shopify Plus agencies and tech partnersHeadless Shopify tracking with LittledataEnsuring GDPR cookie banner compliance for your ecommerce storeCalculate customer lifetime value for ecommerce using Google Analytics data

It's hard enough for Shopify stores to get accurate sales and marketing data. And if you're selling by subscription, this can seem even more complicated. In fact, 88% of Shopify stores have Google Analytics setup incorrectly, leading to a throughput of less than 90% (for every 100 orders in Shopify, 12 or more go missing in GA). I hate to break it to you, but for subscription merchants the reality is even harsher. Many brands can't even segment out first-time purchases from recurring orders, let alone tie them back to marketing campaigns! Luckily there's now a better way. Top subscription brands use modern data stacks to get the data they need to make informed decisions. This means understanding your checkout flow, yes, but also product lists, subscription bundles, discounts, returns, subscription lifecycle behavior, and top marketing channels for higher LTV customers. In this new ebook on ReCharge analytics, we show you how to do just that -- no developer skills needed! Free ebook on ReCharge analytics best practices Subscription analytics are a beast, and too many brands make one of these three common mistakes: Procrastination. "We know we have a data problem but will fix it next quarter...year...never..."The wrong tools. "We bought a fancy new dashboard, that will solve everything, right?" or "We bought this subscription analytics tool that works really well for SaaS companies. Why isn't it working well for ecommerce?"Completely manual approach. "Excel is my full-time job. I don't have time for data-driven growth." Top brands use modern data tools to tame the beast of analytics. In this new ebook, you'll learn how to get the data you need to accelerate growth. See how to automatically capture data at every turn: Track one-off orders and first-time subscriptionsTrack recurring payments and tie them back to the original marketing channelCalculate customer lifetime value ("CLV" or "LTV") and build more valuable cohortsCapture subscription lifecycle events like "Subscription updated"Get accurate marketing attributionUltimately make better decisions for your store Download the free ebook >>> Learn more about what you can track with Littledata's ReCharge connection. [tip]Advanced users can also now send data directly to Segment (and any connected data warehouse, email marketing platform or reporting tool).[/tip]

Many merchants use Littledata's advanced ReCharge integration to track recurring orders and calculate lifetime value in Google Analytics, but did you know that our ReCharge connection can also send data to Segment? Our Shopify source for Segment makes it easy to push that same customer event data on to hundreds of marketing and data platforms. As an increasing number of top DTC brands on Shopify are building analytics stacks to enable advanced personalization and segmentation in addition to marketing analysis and data warehousing. Subscription analytics has been a core part of our product development since the beginning at Littledata, and the continued development of our Shopify source for Segment has unlocked a new realm of possibilities here. Benefits of integrating ReCharge with Segment Here are some of the ways that Littledata + Segment + ReCharge can improve your event data pipeline and power your analytics. An added benefit from our recent updates (Segment v2) is the ability to improve customer engagement with tags and triggers based on subscriber behavior. Push ReCharge subscription events into your data warehouse Joining your ReCharge and Segment data is a seamless way to get all of your ecommerce data into a data warehouse, automatically cleaned and deduped. Littledata’s Segment connection (combined with our ReCharge connection) syncs a range of common customer events from Shopify and ReCharge to any of Segment’s 34 supported raw data destinations. The events that we send include: Subscription CreatedSubscription UpdatedSubscription CancelledOrder ProcessedCharge FailedCharge Max Tries ReachedPayment Method UpdatedCustomer Updated All of these events are sent with shopifyCustomerId, subscriptionId and other fields to enable them to be aggregated into user-journey reports. So you can build your own data warehouse integration with ReCharge’s APIs and end up dealing with deduplication, high throughput and low latency. Or you can just trust Littledata and Segment’s experience in processing billions of events to handle that for you. Many of our larger customers on Littledata Plus plans are experimenting with data warehouses, and we are happy to discuss our solution to see if it's a good fit with your data needs. Feel free to book a demo to learn more. Track recurring orders and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) on any platform Calculating LTV for subscription ecommerce can sound complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Littledata pushes every recurring order processed by ReCharge into the destination of your choice, so you can run analyses of where the long-term, high-value customers came from - and know if those customers interacted with your brand previously, as well as the original marketing channel or touch point. And it's not just about analysis. Integrating ReCharge with Segment allows for more sophisticated cohort-building and retargeting. Imagine you could spot the common patterns that link your top 100 most valuable customers, and then automatically build a lookalike audience to target 10,000 people just like them. That’s exactly what Littledata + Segment’s Facebook Custom Audiences destination allows you to do! [subscribe] Analyze subscription behavior with Kissmetrics or Mixpanel Kissmetrics and Mixpanel made their name as analytics for subscription businesses, with features focussed on analyzing customer churn and retention. Littledata’s connection can push subscription events to either platform, linking them with all the pre-purchase, pre-registration events to understand how the customer was acquired. Combining Shopify and ReCharge events in one analytics platform gives you the complete picture of the customer journey. [note]Wondering which unique identifier to use for your Segment setup? Confused about Cloud Mode vs Device Mode? Check out Littledata's Segment developer docs for Shopify[/note] Build custom email funnels Segment can also send events to email marketing platforms such as Klaviyo and Iterable. You can use recurring order events, or subscription cancellation reasons, to create highly segmented email campaigns.  Here’s an example of how you could use those events in a Klaviyo report: Post-purchase events from Shopify like Fulfillment Updated or Order Cancelled could also trigger transactional emails that match your brand messaging. For example, an email could notify a customer of an upcoming delivery and include the tracking number from Shopify’s fulfillment service. Reduce scripts loaded on the ReCharge checkout Adding extra tracking scripts (Google Analytics, Facebook, etc.) to the ReCharge checkout slows down the pages and increases risk of checkout abandonment. Littledata + Segment allows you to have zero tracking scripts on your checkout (we listen out for checkout update webhooks instead) and yet send checkout step events to any of over over 50 advertising and analytics destinations. [tip]Using a headless ReCharge setup? See our headless Shopify tracking demo[/tip] Working with Shopify unified checkout Are you thinking of moving to Shopify’s new unified checkout for a more seamless customer experience? The events we track will work in the same way - and you can track like-for-like checkout funnel drop-off across ReCharge and Shopify checkouts. [subscribe]

This week, we're continuing our Q&A segment: Lunch with Littledata! We recently caught up with Casey Armstrong, CMO at ShipBob, to chat about the Shopify world, fulfillment, decision-making during COVID, Shopify analytics, and more. ShipBob is a tech-enabled 3PL that fulfills ecommerce orders for DTC brands; their mission is to make Shopify stores feel more successful online by providing reliable fulfillment solutions, warehouses near customers to help transit times, shipping costs, and the overall delivery experience. ShipBob also has a strong Shopify integration. [tip]Check out Littledata's top-rated Shopify app for Google Analytics -- with advanced tracking for Shopify Plus[/tip] Let's dive right in! Q: Has ShipBob’s core market changed during the crisis? Our core market has not changed since the COVID-19 pandemic started, but our core market has grown considerably. The reliance on selling direct-to-consumer and ecommerce has been steadily increasing year-over-year and now everybody who was hesitant or putting it off has to adapt immediately. "The reliance on selling direct-to-consumer has been steadily increasing" In addition, buyers are creating habits and becoming more comfortable buying online. This will impact retail forever. There is no going back to the percentage of retail occurring offline in the US. Q: Are you still seeing a big uptick in AOV when customers migrate to using ShipBob's fulfillment solution? This varies greatly by merchant, but by offering free shipping, fast shipping, or fast and free shipping, we have seen merchants see increases in AOV from 17% and up to 98% in extreme cases. Q: If you were personally to start an ecommerce business in North America right now, what would you sell? Happiness :) Q: What's the most common misconception ecommerce businesses have about fulfillment, or just 3PL solutions in general? The biggest misconception is that they have to be doing a lot of volume. That is not the case. In fact, ShipBob was built to democratize fulfillment for all ecommerce merchants. We have customers that are doing 50 shipments per month and customers that are doing well over 50,000 shipments per month. They both have access to the same fulfillment center network, run by the same warehouse management system, and they see everything in the same merchant application. Plus, we charge $0 for all of our software, including all integrations and our analytics tools. Q: Are a number of your Shopify merchants selling by subscription? Which apps are they using? Yes, we have a lot of merchants utilizing subscription offerings, so they can increase customer LTV and have a more predictable revenue stream. The most common applications we see now are ReCharge and Bold Subscriptions. [tip]See how you can track your subscription data with complete accuracy.[/tip] Q: Any tips for merchants who might be new to ecommerce? Know your numbers: COGS, customer acquisition costs, and fulfillment costs. Sounds basic, but if you don’t know your numbers, you can't efficiently scale your business or know which levers to focus on!   Quick links Littledata's partner program for Shopify Plus agencies and tech partners Free ebooks about how to improve Shopify analytics Headless Shopify tracking with Littledata