Blog

Our blog features a combination of eCommerce and paid media advice and guidance, from various members of our team. Our content has also been featured on the following blogs and sites.

Filter Search:

Mar 2023

Affiliate Marketing for Luxury Brands - The Basics of Building & Nurturing a Program

The affiliate channel can be low cost, low risk and full of opportunities, offering the chance to partner with publishers globally across all stages of the marketing funnel. The evolving industry has birthed new publisher opportunities to increase key metrics, help accelerate Influencer activities, create stronger and more mutually beneficial partnerships with editorials and ultimately, increase sales.

Mar 2023

Performance Marketing Conferences: The Value of Attending Conferences & Events to Watch

Over the last 12 months, we’ve attended a range of large and small conferences, and seen many talented people talk passionately about some fascinating topics. Where is the main value in attending conferences and how should you be prioritising your time? What are the most interesting conferences you should be attending?

Mar 2023

What Is Media-Mix Modelling (MMM) and How to Apply to Paid Media

Businesses need to be able to understand the impact of different marketing efforts in order to make informed decisions when it comes to strategic prioritisation and budget management. Media mix modelling can act as the solution for this, but what is it?

Mar 2023

Pros & Cons of Global-e for Cross Border Commerce

Founded in 2013, the proposition of Global-e is a compelling one to retailers - localising shopping experiences for customers and providing tools for the business to easily manage taxes, compliance and local regulations. Global-e themselves market themselves as a way for businesses to expand internationally with simplicity and are used by some of the biggest global brands including Marks and Spencer, Hackett, Kärcher and Nespresso.

Mar 2023

6 Examples of Build-Your-Own Ecommerce Product Configurators

Having a configurator on-site to showcase your products in 3D (potentially with AR) is an avenue many online brands are actively exploring, with many solutions making this easier and more accessible than ever. This blog post details some of our favourite examples that we have encountered in recent months with a particular focus on what makes these great; be it personalising your product, being able to try on with AR or simply having the freedom to view your product of choice at all angles and up close in high definition.

Feb 2023

Headless Shopify - Hydrogen & Oxygen Pros & Cons + Alternative Routes

Revealed as one of the major announcements at Unite a year ago, Hydrogen and Oxygen combined are Shopify’s answer to a headless commerce stack. This came off the back of around 18 months of the headless trend gaining momentum, and a growing number of high profile brands strongly considering or taking action to move towards that architecture.

Feb 2023

8 Pros and Cons of In-Housing Paid Media Teams

It’s crucial to have a paid media team that not only understands your brand’s goals and visions but also harnesses new trends and technology and enables your business to scale. But businesses are often faced with the question of “do I build an in-house paid media team or choose to work with an agency”.

Jan 2023

Black Friday 2022: Key Creative Takeaways, Solutions for Rising Costs and Strong BFCM Campaigns to Be Inspired By

Each year Black Friday approaches faster than the last, and the period synonymous with deals and Christmas gifting is by far still one of the biggest shopping periods of the year. And with the macroeconomic events of the last twelve months that affected consumer behaviour and spending, there was some level of uncertainty around which way it would go.

Dec 2022

Vervaunt Black Card: Creating a Web3 VIP / Membership Proposition

We’ve been looking at Web3 a lot this year, around real world use cases and making sense of what is hype, and what is genuine usable innovation. As part of our Pulse Ecommerce Summit ‘22 in November, we were keen to do something interesting and hands-on inline with the Web3 panel in order to provide a “learn by doing” experience.

Nov 2022

15 of the Best Blogs from Ecommerce Brands

Blogs and content creation can be a challenging marketing channel for any ecommerce brand - with varying viewpoints on the value of a blog, who owns the blog, what the purpose of a blog is, and how essential a blog is. This article will guide you through some of the reasons brands choose to have blogs and what the arguments are against having a blog. It will also share some outstanding blog examples from a breadth of brands in the ecommerce industry.

Oct 2022

Social Remarketing - A Guide to Audiences, Strategy & Creative

New customer acquisition is a key focus for many ecommerce brands, and whilst prospecting campaigns on paid media need a lot of care and attention, so do your remarketing campaigns if you want an effective, holistic paid media strategy.

Aug 2022

TikTok & Ecommerce - Inspiration for Successful Ecommerce Campaigns on TikTok

TikTok has been on the rise since 2018, after its official launch in 2016 with Chinese startup ByteDance. The platform was originally known as Musical.y, a video streaming and service app that generated over 200 million users before moving all of them over to TikTok in August 2018.

Aug 2022

Pulse Ecommerce Summit '22 - A New Ecommerce Conference

In November, Vervaunt is hosting our biggest event yet - our Pulse Ecommerce Summit '22. We have hosted some amazing events this year in the form of roundtables and seminars under our Pulse umbrella, and we're ending the year on a high with one of the newest ecommerce conferences.

Aug 2022

An Overview of YouTube Shorts: How Brands and Advertisers Can Maximise Success

If you’re not already, it’s time to start taking advantage of YouTube Shorts - Google’s answer to TikTok’s short-form video format. Since May 24th, Video Action and App campaigns have been automatically scaling to YouTube Shorts, enabling advertisers to expand their reach to the short-form video space.

Jul 2022

Premium Lifestyle: Brands to Watch

The luxury and premium fashion market has been a growing industry for many years, with post-pandemic times seeing considerably increased demand. The goal of this ‘Brands to Watch’ magazine whitepaper is to highlight inspirational premium lifestyle brands who have seen growth across the globe and to provide benchmark data for those in premium or luxury markets.

Jun 2022

Getting Global-e Multicurrency to work with Google Shopping & Facebook Feeds - Shopify Plus + Other Platforms

Over the last few months, we’ve had various issues raised with clients or other people that are using Global-e to handle international pricing, primarily around multi currency and pricebooks (managed via Global-e) for their Shopify store.

May 2022

Considerations for Ecommerce Product Photography - Format, Style & Best Practice

It can be frustrating as a customer to see a brand with great promise displaying their products with poor photography and lack of communication of their product’s look and feel. No matter how great the product is, bad imagery can immediately break trust and discourage you as a customer.

May 2022

Post Purchase Surveys - Ecommerce Best Practice on Gathering Customer Feedback

The growth of digital has undoubtedly led to more opportunities for merchants to collect data and understand customers at a macro level, building up a picture of the average customer profile and their value. However, it has become more difficult to gain insight on a micro level of customer satisfaction, where day-to-day feedback may have naturally been given within an in-store, brick and mortar environment.

May 2022

Chinese Payment Methods on Shopify - Offering AliPay, UnionPay & WeChat Pay via Shopify Checkout

Offering a broad range of payment options, particularly to cater for international markets is of growing importance for online merchants. This blog post has a specific focus on China with a more in-depth analysis and guidelines for offering Asian payment methods on a Shopify store.

Apr 2022

12 Inspiring Health and Beauty Brands - Immersive Brand Storytelling, Interesting Loyalty Programs & Innovative UX

The global eCommerce health and beauty industry experienced a significant gear change during the pandemic, as consumers avoided consumption of colour cosmetics in favour of hardworking, solution-focused skincare products, leaning into wellness and self care.

Mar 2022

Taking Control of Paid Media Feeds with Shoptimised - An Overview

Shoptimised is one of the top examples of feed management software that gives advertisers full control, with its built-in audit capabilities and advanced features allowing for enhanced optimisations. How can you take control of your paid media feeds with a tool like Shoptimised?

Mar 2022

Launching Paid Media In New Territories - Considerations, Common Issues & Top Tips

With the acceleration of DTC eCommerce during and after the pandemic, retailers have seen huge growth in online revenues from core markets - with many seeing major opportunities in looking across borders and growing into international markets. Entering new markets is never easy, however.

Jan 2022

19 High Growth DTC Fashion Brands to Be Inspired By

The margins for what defines a brand, especially DTC in fashion, are ever evolving. What are the best in class brands doing in order to stand out and innovate? Some of our favourite brands are embracing ecommerce in inspiring ways, whether it’s by collaborating with others, creating an immersive on-site experience or acclimatising to trends like the Metaverse and NFTS.

Dec 2021

NFTs & Smart Contracts - Their Potential Impact on eCommerce

2021 has definitely been the year of the NFT. If you have spent any time whatsoever reading tech magazines, or reading the latest tech based happenings on Reddit and Twitter communities then you will no doubt have at least heard of them.

Dec 2021

Creating a Performance Culture in eCommerce Businesses - Avoiding a Site Speed Blame Game

I’ve been meaning to write this article for a number of years, having seen different brands and retailers struggle with performance due to operating in certain ways (but still blaming developers). Contrastly, I’ve also seen the opposite, with brands and retailers building strong processes and layers of governance to retain quality and keep site speeds optimal.

Nov 2021

Introducing Census, By Vervaunt Labs

I’m delighted to write this article to introduce the first publicly available Vervaunt technology / tool; Census - a Shopify and Shopify Plus app that allows users to ask a series of strategic questions post-purchase.

Nov 2021

Preparing for a UAT Period - The Importance of Prioritising UAT for a Replatforming Project?

UAT, also known as User Acceptance Testing, is a fundamental part of any project. A UAT phase could take an infinite amount of time, with endless testing possible - but, based on our experience, covering the aspects we will talk about in this guide will be thorough enough to make a decision on passing or failing line items.

Nov 2021

How Borough Kitchen Tripled Ecommerce Growth in Lockdown

Borough Kitchen is a London-based cookware retailer with an online shop and four brick and mortar locations, three of which include a cook school. The brand opened their original store in Borough Market in 2013 and they have seen tremendous growth online and instore over the last few years.

Oct 2021

15 Inspiring Examples of Cart Upsells - Intuitive, Unique and Clean UX Design

Finding the balance of good UX design in cart upsells can be a challenge for retailers. Many eCommerce platforms only have simple out-of-the-box templates and building bespoke designed solutions can be expensive.

Sep 2021

Google Trends 2021: Smart Bidding, Changes to Exact Match, New Discovery Led Formats and More

Google and all of its entities are continuously evolving, and the way in which we run our performance marketing channels through these channels has changed considerably over the past year. These changes align with the stark changes in online behaviour brought on by the pandemic, but with the continual roll out of new features, online advertising is more accessible than ever.

Sep 2021

eCommerce Landing Pages for Paid Media - Examples & Best Practices

I’ve wanted to write this blog post for a long time, as I see landing pages as one of the most under-considered areas and missed opportunities in performance marketing - with one of the biggest opportunities being to drive more value from prospecting campaigns.

Aug 2021

Building a Marketplace on Shopify - Pros & Cons + Overall Suitability

Over the last few years, the number of online marketplaces has increased considerably, due to various market changes and a number of high profile success stories. We’ve worked with a number of marketplaces over the years and, although it’s a great business model when done well, it’s a very complex area of eCommerce.

shopify-unite-2021-announcements-dawn-min

Aug 2021

Shopify Unite 2021 - Takeaways from the Virtual Conference

Shopify Unite was hosted a few weeks ago now, and we’ve had time to digest the announcements and understand what sort of effects they’re going to have on our agency and the brands we work with. This year was certainly more development focused than previous conferences, but we still got some insight into Shopify’s roadmap and future functionality.

Aug 2021

No More Audience Insights Tool - Building Prospecting Audiences for Facebook Advertising

Facebook’s Audience Insights tool is being removed from the platform in July 2021, and as a result many advertisers will see their main source for targeting inspiration disappear. How can you build prospecting audience lists for Facebook advertising without the Audience Insights tool?

Jun 2021

Launching New Products on Amazon - Paid Ads and Organic Listing Optimisation

When you launch a new product on Amazon, you want to optimise your listing and take advantage of all marketing channels in order for it to be a successful launch. How can you maximise your Amazon sales with your new product launch?

May 2021

Creating Combined Reports for Multiple Shopify Stores Using Google Data Studio

As some of you may or may not know, Google data studio is Google's free data visualisation platform. You can use a selection of prebuilt dashboards to help visualise data from places like Google Ads, Search Console and Google Sheets without any third party integrations, as well as creating more bespoke reports from a variety of data sources. Google Data Studio is brilliant for scenarios like this where we want to take multiple sources of data and report in a simple, digestible way.

Apr 2021

Taking Shopify Mobile - A guide to native eCommerce applications

In this definitive guide Technical Ecommerce Consultant, Liam Quinn demonstrates how brands are shifting from a web-browser based mobile experience to a native application using Shopify.

Apr 2021

Top Examples of Sustainable & Eco-Friendly eCommerce Brands, Websites & Content

Sustainability is a key word for most businesses big & small right now, this article looks at great examples of innovative ways to bring this into ecommerce.

Jan 2021

Creating Bundles & Product Builders with Shopify & Shopify Plus - The Definitive Guide

In this definitive guide Technical Ecommerce Consultant, Liam Quinn, demonstrates how businesses can create product bundles within Shopify, whilst simultaneously highlighting the platform's limitations.

Dec 2020

Most engaging & Best-Designed DTC eCommerce brand websites

In this article, we look at the DTC eCommerce sites that are leading the way in design and innovation.

Dec 2020

Shopify Multi-Currency Feed Issues - Forcing Currency & Preventing Shopping Feed Disapprovals

This article is designed to help people overcome issues with different Shopify currencies causing issues with shopping feeds.

Dec 2020

Recommerce; Deconstructing the Reselling Phenomenon in eCommerce

In this article we look at how fashion brands are responding to the ever-growing trend towards sustainable and eco-conscious living, with recommerce.

Nov 2020

Should I go headless on Shopify / Shopify Plus? Pros & Cons of Headless

In this article Technical eCommerce Consultant, Liam Quinn, discusses the pros and cons of choosing a Headless approach to Shopify.

Nov 2020

Preparing for Peak: Actionable Paid Search, Shopping & Social Optimisations to Drive More Holiday Sales

The peak shopping period leading up to christmas provides significant revenue opportunities for all retailers. In this guide Josh demonstrates actionable tips to optimise campaigns in order for retailers to reach target consumers amongst the heavy competition.

Oct 2020

Planning Paid Advertising For Black Friday And Cyber Monday

It’s never too early to start planning your Black Friday Activities. It’s one of the few times of the year that you can make trading decisions in real time as you make adjustments to pricing and media spend in response to performance, competitor activity and product availability. However, to do this effectively you need to have a solid plan that everyone can work off and we hope the below can help guide you with this.

Oct 2020

Localising Theme Content in Shopify - Changing Content (Based on IP) Using Geolocation Services

In this guide, Liam talks about how Shopify and Shopify Plus users can adapt theme content using geo-location services. Liam provides detail around different third parties and Shopify's own geo-location capabilities.

Oct 2020

Magento Google Shopping Best Practices - The Definitive Guide

This guide was written by Josh, to help Magento users understand best practices for creating and optimising shopping feeds, the pros and cons of different feed tools, optimal account setup and much more.

Sep 2020

5 of The Best Sports e-Commerce Sites

Sports retailers need to showcase their products just as well as fashion retailers, and make it easy for customers to shop. This guide takes a look at five of the best sports eCommerce stores.

Sep 2020

Internal Search - Optimisation and Data Use

Online retailers often underestimate the power of internal search, but tapping into the data it reveals can really help with optimisation, personalisation and even buying and sourcing decisions.

Sep 2020

Content Audits for E-commerce

Strong and consistent content is vital for the success of any ecommerce business. Undertaking a regular content audit will ensure that you stay on track with your content over the long term.

Aug 2020

Fraud Prevention & Protection for Shopify & Shopify Plus

Even the most high-profile of eCommerce stores can fall foul of online fraud, so it pays to put in place some protective measures. This guide explains what fraud protection and prevention tools are available within Shopify and Shopify Plus.

Aug 2020

Paid Social Strategy and Structuring Campaigns

Effective structuring of paid social campaigns is vital if you want to really achieve significant goals. This guide explains how to build a paid social strategy.

Aug 2020

Tactics and Strategies for Increasing Lifetime Value

Identifying customer lifetime value is one thing - but improving it over time is a challenge in itself. This guide provides advice and tips for long-term CLV improvements.

Aug 2020

Lifetime Value

Lifetime value is an important KPI for any e-commerce business. This guide outlines how to calculate it, how to improve it, and how to predict future returns using it.

Aug 2020

Analysing Homepage Performance

First impressions really do count, which is why it's so important to understand how well your e-commerce homepage is working. This guide will show you how to measure homepage performance.

Aug 2020

Customer Account Reactivation & Migration with Shopify & Shopify Plus

Customer reactivation forms a central part of any replatforming project, and this guide explains how the process works in Shopify and Shopify Plus.

Aug 2020

Budgeting for Digital Media

Digital media budgets can often be a source of tension and confusion, but there's no need for this to be the case. This guide will walk through the process of setting up and maintaining and accurate budget for your digital media projects.

Aug 2020

Best Examples of BigCommerce Stores

BigCommerce has really made a name for itself in recent years, with plenty of top retailers choosing the platform. This guide is intended to showcase some of the best BigCommerce stores around.

Aug 2020

The Ultimate Guide to Reporting on Paid Search

Paid Search is only worthwhile if you know for certain what you are achieving. This guide outlines how to create a robust reporting system, for effective and accurate analysis of your PPC campaigns.

Aug 2020

Paid Search Forecasting

In this blog post, we provide a guide to accurate forecasting for paid search campaigns, to ensure your project stays on track and achieves its goals.

Aug 2020

Forecasting Paid Social

For a paid social campaign to meet the expectations of all stakeholders, it's essential to spend time on forecasting. This guide explains how to approach this crucial aspect of your campaign.

Jul 2020

Brand Bidding - Should I Bid on My Brand in Google / PPC

A question that will always be asked of performance marketing teams is ‘should we be bidding on brand terms?’ In the below we'll address when you should and shouldn't consider brand bidding and how you can test if it's driving profitability for your business.

Jul 2020

Bid Management Platforms - Choosing The Right Technology, When They’re Needed & How They Work

Bid Management platforms can be a powerful tool for paid media teams running performance marketing activity at scale. In this piece we will look at some of the considerations about when, how and why you should consider adding a bid management platform, as well as taking a very quick overview of three of the main options.

Jun 2020

Linking Audiences In Display And Social Campaigns

Previously we have examined how to use the customer journey to break down website performance and to prioritise development work, here we look at leveraging audiences within each channel, helping to create value from your display and social investments.

Jun 2020

An Introduction to Social Media Advertising Attribution

In this piece we’re going to address attribution models in social media. This will mostly be focussed on Facebook (and Instagram) as this is where the bulk of social advertising spend goes, but the principles are applicable to other networks like Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn.

Jun 2020

Building an In-House Digital Marketing Team - Roles, Structure & Hiring

Bringing together an in-house digital marketing team is both complex and time-consuming. In this article, we look at how to ensure your team is built on the right foundations, and at how agencies can provide a long-term solution or short-term support whilst an in-house team grows.

Jun 2020

Choosing a Performance Marketing / Paid Media Agency

Selecting a paid media or performance marketing agency is a complex process - get it right and the rewards speak for themselves, but get it wrong, and the result could be serious. This guide should help you to make all the right decisions along the way to choosing the right agency for your project.

Jun 2020

Best Practices & Optimisations for eCommerce Product Listing Pages

Not all ecommerce listings pages are created equal - in this guide, we look at various optimisations for listings pages, in order to offer the very best user experience and conversion rates.

May 2020

The Pros and Cons of Smart Shopping Campaigns

In this guide, we explore the pros and cons of Google's smart shopping and look at some of the latest developments across the shopping channel.

May 2020

Creating & Setting Budgets For eCommerce

For any eCommerce project to be successful, it needs a carefully considered budget, with accurate costs and regular reviews and updates. This post aims to guide you on how to prepare a realistic budget for any eCommerce project, and how to handle it when your allocated budget isn't what you'd planned for.

May 2020

A Guide to eCommerce Internationalisation

This guide is designed to help retailers and brands understand some of the considerations around eCommerce internationalisation and the various opportunities in different areas.

May 2020

Magento Segmentation - 5 straightforward uses

This post outlines five suggested use cases for customer segmentation within Magento.

May 2020

Benchmarking And The On Site Customer Journey

This guide is designed to help with one of the key tools in creating and running an ecommerce function - the customer journey and setting benchmarks against it.

May 2020

How To Write A Marketing Brief

As a marketing manager, one of the key responsibilities you have in running marketing campaigns is to make sure that everyone is on the same page. This document aims to bring everything that you need for a campaign together, and allows the various parties - creative, media, operations, customer service - to prepare and propose executions for you all to align.

Apr 2020

Guide to Writing a Paid Media RFP

This guide is designed to help with writing a paid media RfP and was written in collaboration with one of our clients, Damian Koblintz. Damian is an experienced Head of eCommerce / Head of Digital and has run and participated in several RfPs.

Apr 2020

An overview on the impact of COVID-19 on eCommerce Paid Media

This guide provides an overview on the trends we've seen from managing our clients' paid media campaigns, around search demand and the impact on overall performance.

Apr 2020

A Guide to Google Shopping for Fashion Brands

This guide is designed to help fashion brands and retailers understand how Google shopping campaigns should be set up and managed, as well as best practices for on-going optimisation.

Mar 2020

Paid Media Strategies for Luxury Brands - Targeting A High-Net-Worth Audience

Paid media in the luxury space is notoriously difficult, from justifying formats & channels to building the most granular audiences to competing with wholesale customers - this guide is designed to provide suggestions and best pracices around targeting high-net-worth individuals for premium brands.

Mar 2020

Magento Product Types and Examples of When to Use Them

This guide provides an introduction to all of the native product types in Magento and when it makes sense to use them.

Mar 2020

Magento 2 Launch Checklist

This checklist is designed to provide support for retailers looking to launch a new Magento 2 store - detailing areas that should be considered prior to going live, through the project and post-launch.

Dec 2019

Big Brands Using Shopify Plus

A round-up of some of the big names that have chosen this exciting ecommerce platform

Dec 2019

Big Brands using Shopware

A look at some of the leading brands that have chosen Shopware for their ecommerce operations

Dec 2019

Big Brands using Magento

An exhaustive list of big name retailers using Magento as their eCommerce platform

Dec 2019

9 examples of great eCommerce on-site search

In this list we look at examples of excellent on-site search

Screen-Shot-2017-11-28-at-12.13.51-700x394

Dec 2019

Defining & Reaching Your Target Audience Through Paid Media

This post will give a brief introduction into the recent developments of Paid media and also provide recommendations for building campaigns to target your target audience and also High Net Worth individuals. Programmatic buying has allowed smaller advertisers to compete with the larger advertisers to show ads on premium sites etc.

Dec 2019

10 Examples of Luxury eCommerce Stores Using Product Reviews

The frequently omitted conversion tool some luxury brands are finally embracing

Nov 2019

10 Examples of Excellent Luxury eCommerce Product Pages

What makes a good product page?