Imperfect optimizations can yield benefits for your Shopify store

One side of our house has a good-sized garden.

During spring and summer, it gets a ton of sunlight and heat which helps everything grow well.

In winter though, the sun drops to a low angle and basically goes away behind the neighbor's house. This makes growing anything during the winter really difficult in that location.

To make better use of it I ordered three fruit trees. These trees will grow and produce fruit during summer while the sun in shining and drop their leaves and go dormant over the winter. Plus they'll grow taller than vegetables would so they can get some sips of sun into late fall.

Ideally that spot would get full sun all the time but that's not reality. Using that spot for fruit trees and summer vegetables is the optimal use case.

Lots of advice you'll pick-up will tell you the optimal things to do for your Shopify store.

A/B test every change.

Create personas for your main customer groups.

Use data to drive every decision.

While well meaning, they aren't optimal in every case or for every store.

You have to take all advice and consider how it might work for you. Including my advice too. Sometimes it's best to use an imperfect idea and get some benefit, than to hope reality was different.

That's why I planted fruit trees in the middle of a vegetable bed.

Customer segmenting is an idea that can work for most stores. How many customers you have will define how many splits you should make.

Even the smallest stores with only dozens of customers can make two segments (one-time customers, returning customers). Larger stores can get by with dozens of segments and finer-grained tactics.

That's why Repeat Customer Insights uses multiple segmenting algorithms. It can give you 2, 5, 30, or 125 segments. Just pick the one that fits your store size the best.

Eric Davis