TL;DR
- Shopify has poor image optimization resulting in large file sizes for images.
- Large file sizes, increase load times, which effect ecommerce conversion rates.
- I optimized my store using imgix.com. Waited 4 months for data to collect.
- Results: 56% lift in conversion rates, 39% increase in revenue with 3% less traffic.
Full Story
I’ve been using Shopify for 1–2 years now. I come from a long background working in ecommerce as a developer. Shoutouts to Ubercart my first love ❤. I’ve also long been obsessed with page speed. Shoutouts to Sajal my first love ❤.
I chose it as my ecommerce platform because it’s easy for our back office to use. It was primarily selected over other platforms due to it’s ease of use, and more importantly administrative task speed. This is very important for my company as we have ~5 stores and thousands of SKU’s. It also had a REST interface to easily massively import/edit products programatically.
With all hosted platforms, you lose some flexibility. This was a trade I was willing to make due to the speed of getting our stores migrated from a previously set up platform.
But after a while, with all hosted platforms, this lack of flexibility comes back to bite you in the ass.
We’ve had many problems with Shopify
Can’t order more than 250 products in an order
Supposedly we were the first store to hit the “over 250 line items” in an order problem. We have a wholesale website, where people purchase over 250 different items, something that turns out isn’t actually possible with Shopify. Who knew? Not us. Not the types of orders you really want messing failing. Certainly (and probably still) an undocumented “feature”.
Segment.io / universal analytics issues
Another great one, was when Shopify decided to move over to Segment.io library with out telling anyone. This of course broke my stores, as I was also using it, and there was a namespace conflict.
Not implementing, then poorly implementing Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce
Or perhaps their delayed, then lack luster implementation of Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce. Something you really feel a company which does ecommerce should jump on and do properly. That implementation after many months is actually fairly well fleshed out now.
Suggestion: You guys need to lower case all coupon when sending them over to ec.js so the group properly in the backend.
New Facebook Store breaking custom FB code
Or their Facebook Store roll out which broke anyone using Facebook Custom Audience Pixels initially. That was actually fixed quite quickly after roll out, so not a bad one, but I don’t trust that it won’t happen again.
We’ve had many more issues, but these are the ones I can recall off the top of my head.
But my largest outstanding issues has always been Shopify’s poor handling of images.
Shopify Images Sizes are Too Damn High!
Shopify has always had poor image optimization. They use 90% Quality, Non-progressive JPEGs, in spite of recommending otherwise. If you upload optimized images, Shopify de-reoptimizes them. So there’s really nothing you can do.
Example:
- Upload 60% quality progressive JPEG (365KB)
- Shopify converts it to 90% non-progressive (520KB).
Latency Effects Conversion Rates
For those in the know additional latency supposedly reduces sales. Having most of my pages on Shopify being a couple megabytes each, I assumed was not the best thing for my customers or my conversion rate.
I’ve brought this up with Shopify in the past, and at first it seemed like it actually went up the chain of command, before being denied as such:
We’ve chatted about this and have determined that it’s not a feature worth really supporting.
Sad Face ;(
I gave up after explaining that it probably would be worth their time (as it would save them money on bandwidth, and make them more money as they take a cut of sales on stores)…but silence on their end.
In comes imgix.com
Month’s passed and I eventually came across imgix.com which is a pretty cool “optimize image on demand CDN”…so I said to myself. Pfft. I’ll show Shopify! So I implemented it on one of my stores and let it sit.
I now have 4 months of data since moving my store over to imgix.com and off of Shopify’s CDN.
Results for 4 months on Shopify vs 4 months on imgix
56.79% improvement in conversion rate.
3% drop in traffic, but 39% increase in revenue.
Shopify made $93,254,000 in 2015 from “merchant services”, which I assume is taking a percents off the revenue their stores make.
So any lift in their stores conversion rates will by proxy make them a lot of extra money and more importantly, their customers a lot more money.
So I ask you now Shopify:
Is this a feature worth supporting?
