The vape industry is booming. Demand is not likely to die away soon with bans on smoking across the globe. If you sell e-cigarettes or e-liquids online, you know the competition is ruthless.

Probably the biggest problem in the industry is not the different laws regulating it in different countries and states, but the denied access to paid search and Facebook ads for vapes and related products.

How do you grow your vape shop if you can’t advertise?

Having a community of power users and brand advocates around your products is awesome and stimulates customer loyalty. I wanted to dive into what it takes to build such a community, where to start, and how it impacts retention rates and referral marketing.

I had the chance to talk to one of the coolest Shopify experts – Jonathan Kennedy of HeyCarson.com, an agency helping Shopify store owners with small tasks on their sites.

What makes a successful brand community?

• Shared interests and value among members and the brand
• Lead with authenticity and honesty
• Bringing other like-minded brands in, too
• Build it when you have a good, stable product
• Fueled by brand advocates
• High activity
• Keeping it clean, pleasant and not spammy

Preparing to go with your new eCommerce venture on Shopify? Shopify is easy to use – but it’s not THAT easy to navigate all the different options, apps, and eCommerce possibilities out there.

If you’ve decided this is the platform for you – here are some Shopify pro tips from a Shopify agency that you need to know. Use these tips to get the most out of Shopify and propel your eCommerce business to new heights in 2017.

In eCommerce, every customer counts. Probably the best converting technique has been and still is social proof.

To learn more about the psychology behind it, why it works and what the future of marketing for ecommerce businesses looks like, we talked with Ryan Kulp, founder of Fomo, a social proof plugin for online stores.

Having marketing, UX, and coding experience, Ryan started Fomo to give store owners the credibility they deserve and help customers make better buying decisions because that’s how both parties win in the long run.

Importing new products and editing the existing in Magento sucks. It’s ok, you can admit it.

I doubt anyone enjoys exporting and importing files back and forth. It takes SO MUCH TIME.

It’s a huge and dreary task, yet you can’t do it sloppily – SEO, customer experience, conversions, all depend to a large extent on product descriptions and details.

How great holidays are for online stores! In fact, only Americans spent $19.7 billion shopping online last Valentine’s Day.

With that in mind, we sat down to help a client with his holiday strategy to get more sales.

It’s a quick and dirty strategy using minimal resources to put him in the holiday game on time. So we thought, “Why don’t we share that with others?” More of you selling on WooCommerce could actually implement it to reap good profits this Valentine’s Day.