Product & Traffic Review

Batch quietly soft launched 3 days ago as the app was made listed. While there are still some product polish items to finalize, it's time to start testing channel/market fit and begin investigating which channels we ought to focus our energy in.

PRODUCT REVIEW

A Shopify Plus merchant we've been working with recently made the switch to a drawer based shopping cart, which is a use case we hadn't yet run into despite testing a few themes.

We rewrote the logic that inserts the Batch app into the consumer website and merchants can now drop the button exactly where they want to. This manual insertion will overwrite our automatic one and work seamlessly.

As it were, this also opens up an interesting door as merchants can now place the Batch button wherever they want in their website, including Product pages, the Index, or even in a dedicated "Make an Offer" section or page.

Also did a mobile responsiveness pass. Tailwind generally makes this a breeze, but the challenge is ensuring the CSS of the client website doesn't bleed into the Batch app and, in the opposite way, that our CSS does not influence the website in any way.

While prefixing our CSS (and Tailwind) generally prevents this, we have some elements (radio buttons, range sliders) that are pretty Frankensteiny, and adding an id or a class generally breaks them. This is something we'll need to keep an eye on and improve over time.

We also recently dropped Segment into the app for the first time. We'll work out the tracking plan so we can begin benchmarking the new MVP and check whether we're within the ranges we modelled out when we came up with the business model.

Since the model is transactional (we take 4% of what we generate for merchants), it's important the product performs per that spec, otherwise we will be forced to utilize a more generic SaaS model where we would define pricing tiers, but that would stunt our earning potential and we'll cross that bridge if we ever get there.

TRAFFIC REVIEW

Twitter Ads
We're up to 140 tweet engagements on about $37 of spend, which is still better than yesterday's performance; Aiming targeting at English and Japanese speakers only did increase impressions, but website clicks dropped.

We're at 35 website clicks on $37 of spend. I removed the language targeting to let it collect more data.

This channel has potential but I'm concerned about available inventory.

Twitter Profile
We tweeted 15 times in the last 30 days. We picked up 2 new followers as a result of starting to publish these updates.

Tweet impressions are up 80% to 16.5k thanks to the ads. Profile visits in the last 28 days grew to 111, a 38% improvement over yesterday.

To grow, we need to start following some influential accounts and actively participate, and reply to tweets. We need to think about which audience we want to build, and what that audience cares about.

Tweeting about growing a store would help a lot. I recently replied to a Reddit post that answered a seemingly popular question among merchants. It might make sense to publish the answer as a blog post and/or a tweet storm.

Shopify App Store Ads
Kicked off ads and earned 10 clicks on $30 of spend, 1 install. $30/install is certainly workable, but we need way more data to see if this make sense.

While an ad to install conversion of 10% is not great but workable, a CTR of 0.8% is not going to work at all. We'll need to adjust the name of the app and its headline.

I'd want to hit a 2% CTR at least, if not higher, considering the keywords we're after and the merchants on the platform should perform far better, which means the messaging isn't correct.

To be frank, leading with nebulous features such as "recover carts, clear inventory and increase cashflow" may not be ideal in an App Store where most popular apps' headlines are very clear about the functionality it enables for the store.

Shopify App Store Listing
Last 7 days traffic is at 279. Yesterday's visit to download rate has grown from about 10% to 17%, more than likely as a result of sending more qualified traffic through Shopify Ads.

We earned 3 installs installs from different sources -- but none from referrals. It's definitely going to be worth building a content marketing strategy to kickoff organic and referral traffic.

Based on my findings and the ad CTR, I'm going to put together 10-15 app headline variations and start testing one every two days. I'll use the Shopify App Store Index to keep track of our rankings across categories and whether or not the rankings grows as we change the headline.

Website
Last 7 day traffic is at 77 users. Not currently a focus.

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Until tomorrow!

Eyal + the Batch team