Josiah

Jokes aside, I think the endless discounting and lack of pricing research are no different behaviours to how many Shopify merchants run their businesses though...

#Shopify #eCommerce #AI

In short, the AI lost money consistently but Anthropic believes this showed AI business managers are coming soon, as long as people put in better guardrails.

I wouldn’t mind if Woolies/Coles (supermarkets in Australia) used this AI right now and have everything on discount t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶c̶e̶s̶ 😂.

What it did well:

• Found suppliers efficiently (even for weird requests like a Tungsten alloy cube)

• Adapted to customer demands (Started stocking similar items to the alloy cube when it noticed there was a sales trend for this product category)

• Resisted attempts to make it misbehave

What Claude got wrong:

• Ignored a $100 offer for $15 worth of products

• Sold items at a loss without researching costs

• Got manipulated into endless employee discounts

• Hallucinated fake payment accounts

• Never learned from its mistakes

Anthropic let Claude AI run an office store serving real customers (their employees) and dealing with real money for about a month. The results were mixed.

Your B2B customers probably don't expect you to have all the answers to their questions immediately. But what they do expect is your willingness to understand their business needs.

PS. If you're looking for deeper insights into your pre-order performance and inventory forecasts, you should pair it with a dedicated software like Profit Peak for advanced analytics.

(Their founders David and Carla are super knowledgable in #eCommerce profitability and inventory forecasting.)

Our reporting features still have much room for improvement, but for now we’re focused on delivering the best pre-order experience for both our merchants and their shoppers.

What other campaign use cases come to your mind? 🤔

Then on the reporting dashboard, you can:

📈 Compare product revenue

📊 View sales breakdown by units sold per variant

👀 Track pre-orders, shipping and deferred payments at a glance

🌞 Deposit-based pre-orders for high-ticket items and services (e.g. solar installation, tattoo bookings, nutritional consulting)

🕯️ Weekly or monthly pre-order campaigns for products made in batches (e.g. consumables, hand-poured candles)
👕 Pre-orders when sold out (e.g. books & apparel)

But like all startups, our customers showed us what and how they'd use it for their BAU business-as-usual:

🏄‍♂️ Pre-orders with long shipping times for high-demand products (e.g. collectibles, bikes, surfboards)

🛋️ Unlimited pre-orders for made-to-order products (e.g. custom jewellery & furniture)

Our campaign builder was inspired by my time running Meta ads. Instead of a never-ending scrolling UI just to toggle your "Add to Cart" to "Pre-order Now", we designed it for structured, new product launches.

A screenshot of shopify preorder app early bird campaign reporting dashboard showing orders with partially paid statuses.

But this is one of our biggest differentiators and our merchants have shown us just how beneficial it is for their sales and operations.

A shopify app store 5 star review for early bird preorder app by The Orry Mill shopify store in the UK.

"We have been using Shopify and associated apps for 6 years now and Early Bird has been one of the best to date." ★★★★★ 5 stars out of 5

...I haven’t talked much about our pre-order campaign functionality (since features aren’t really defensible moats for #Shopify apps these days).

That, on top of their ads agency and Klaviyo Partner driving quality traffic to the Earlwood preorder product pages efficiently, led to most of the stock selling out before they've even arrived at the warehouse.

It really does take a good team to execute a campaign perfectly.

#eCommerce

...You can get discounts everywhere, but you can't get reliability and service many places these days, and that's what I've built the brand around. The family feel we also have is just the icing on the cake. :-)"

"Earlwood (Equine) is a trustworthy brand, with a quality product, and I like to think excellent customer service. THAT is what gets people coming back again, more than discounts...

A screenshot of a 5 star app review for Early Bird Shopify app by Earlwood Equine, an equestrian brand in Australia.

Recently we worked on some pre-order campaigns for an equestrian brand here in Australia - I love the founder's quote on why sales came in instantly after the campaigns went live:

✔ Has solid knowledge about their best selling products (i.e. which ones to advertise more of.)

✔ Doesn't rely on discounts to sell pre-orders (otherwise, how much cash flow are you actually securing earlier)

✔ Customers are happy to pay in full upfront

Occasionally we meet merchants who's got it all sorted already:

✔ Understands the importance of distribution (driving traffic to the pre-order pages)

✔ Brings their marketing agency, Klaviyo partner, and our team together to work towards the same outcome

Typically we have to make it clear to #Shopify merchants they need to have their marketing and distribution channels sorted out before setting up their pre-order workflows.

Otherwise, they're making the eComm equivalent of the classic SaaS mistake..."Build it, and they will come."

A screenshot of Early Bird Shopify app's preorder campaign setup for fulfillment.

We're not the first preorder app on the Shopify App Store, but I dare say we're one of the few who heavily invests in learning how to provide an amazing user (merchant) experience. 😎

This has been well-received by our merchants since it saves their warehouse and packing teams time to investigate and track each order (also other apps tend to just set their pre-orders simply as "Unfulfilled")!

🔒 "On Hold": For certain types of stores, customers tend to prefer to wait for all items to be shipped together. "On Hold" status indicates that the items in their order are reserved, but not ready to be fulfilled yet. Also commonly used for mixed cart orders for unknown fulfillment dates.

📦 "Unfulfilled": These are still pre-orders, but indicates to that the order is ready for fulfillment soon or immediately. Usually for pre-orders where the stock is arriving within a week or two. Commonly used for mixed cart orders (i.e. when a customer orders an in-stock item and a pre-order item).

⏳ "Scheduled": These are pre-orders with a future fulfillment date. Usually more than a few weeks away. This indicates to your warehouse teams that no immediate action is required, helping them focus on orders that need fulfillment right away.

An example of how it has translated to the merchant experience in our app:

When you setup a preorder campaign in Early Bird, you can choose to have your preorders marked as "Scheduled", "Unfulfilled", or "On Hold" statuses.

A meme about needing to learn about a merchant's fulfillment workflow before being able to run preorders for them via our Shopify preorder app Early Bird.

When we help #Shopify merchants setup pre-orders, inevitably we chat about their inventory management, cash flow, shipping and fulfillment workflows.

So we've been investing time into learning about these aspects from the get go. Mostly the latter two.

So would you rather take ownership of that once and for all, or keep letting someone else decide it for you?

This is what has kept me going so far.

#Founders #BuildInPublic #Entrepreneurship

Of course, you're now responsible for every decision you make and it'll directly impact your financials.

But in an FTE role, you don't have control over the management making your role redundant multiple times anyway.