Hi guys, Tony here and this time I’d like to recap PageFly’s recent business trip to Singapore and Manila. What’s hot in the region and how eCommerce is expanding here from two Shopify meetups. The end of the year is a busy time for both merchants and Shopify partners. The holiday season is warming up[ day by day and the peak is closing in with Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
First Stop. Shopify Singapore Meetup November 7.
Just me myself and I landed a day before the meetup. The location for Shopify Singapore meetup was WeWork in Suntec city. Very nice place to host over a hundred participants with a great atmosphere.
This Shopify meetup was brought to the Shopify community by Hoolah and 360&5 Shopify experts.
You know….. year after year we recommend when one thing when Black Friday and Cyber Monday season starts to come around - the BFCM Checklist by Shopify. This checklist is updated every year to give merchants relevant and actionable content.
Introducing Shopify Email
Yes! Shopify Email is finally almost here :) Sarah Tan shared some key things about this brand new feature from Shopify. At present, there is limited access for merchants, but you can apply for early access with Shopify Email. From what I have seen it’s definitely a powerful tool to support Email Marketing to 1,000,000+ Shopify merchants.
The big surprise for me was to meet one of our customers at the meetup :) He’s the owner of an agency that provides Shopify services. He’s been using the PageFly App for his own portfolio website and for his clients as well. If you’re curious as to who he is, meet Travis from https://www.itscleave.com.
There are definitely more opportunities behind these doors, but, it’s the time to review the business trip and preparation for the next city, Manila, Philippines.
Biggest Shopify Meetup in the world so far. 362 people counted!
By November 9th, over 300 merchants, agencies, and partners gathered in the same room with one interest. eCommerce and the desire to build businesses and make money.
The Filta company organized the Shopify meetup in Manila, Philippines, and based on Shopify it’s the biggest meetup in the world so far. About 2/3 of participants are merchants, from that group there are sellers who have Shopify stores already and some of them plan to open theirs. Throughout the day I had a chance to meet with some agencies and app providers.
Around 9am, with huge help from Nerissa and her team at Filta we had space for a booth setup. From PageFly there were 4 people including myself. We had two standees to raise brand awareness. The first one was to catch the attention of attendees in the walk path.
… and at our location with space to do consultations.
Free Bearie swags and keychains! They were free for anyone who came to our booth.
And free t-shirts for those who joined our Shopify Merchant Survey. We collected over 200 results about Shopify and plenty of insights from the local community.
The concept was simple. In order to get a T-shirt, an attendee had to scan the QR code or visit our survey page directly through a bit.ly link. This was we made sure that even without a QR code app participants could still access the survey page. Lessons learned.
Me, consulting with a dropshipping business owner in the Philippines. He’s been in the dropshipping business for several years and now partners with some sellers to build landing pages for dropshipping products with Shopify.
Most questions are related to Google and Facebook ads tracking. If you didn’t know, PageFly has settings to fire Google Analytics and Facebook events. This way you can tell Facebook and Google more about user behavior and create an audience for remarketing.
The winner is a smart and inspiring lady.
The usual flow for picking a winner is related to using the online service and letting it pick randomly. But this time we decided to craft 10 questions related to Shopify, Shopify partners, and content presented in the community.
This way, the winner would be based on correct answers and response reaction times. She was fast and most answers were correct. We believed she could inspire other merchants to work smart and try harder to build their business.
Here’s an example of questions we used and covered 228 people to join. This concept has been used each time we organize knowledge-sharing events at the company for local communities. I would personally recommend other Shopify meetup organizers to use such a concept to increase audience engagement.
Ok, so not only did we give away an iPad Mini but, we also contributed one of the topics at the meetup. We had an opportunity to serve 25,000+ active Shopify merchants so far and wanted to share lessons learned with local merchants through the topic “Maximize sales with landing pages during the holiday season.”. We shared the mindset of looking at the “landing page” as one of your best-performing pages on your Shopify store.
I waited patiently until the end when we could all have free beers ;) and great conversation, of course. Get in touch with Nerissa if you want to join Shopify Philippines meetups. She is a very active and proactive Shopify partner who you can rely on.
Photo Album from Shopify Manila meetup by Filta
The best way to “feel” the atmosphere of this meetup is to view the photo album :) The link to the album is below, so feel free to check it out.
Wrapping up...
If you’re a seller, developer, or maybe just a business person, Shopify meetups are a great opportunity to connect with like-minded eCommerce enthusiasts. You gain more insights and people around you will serve as a great inspiration to build your own business.
