1. Shopify Reviews

Apr 11, 2019  As the owner of this massive eCommerce platform, Shopify is obliged to provide its customers with some free themes to use on their stores. Although we hoped that Shopify’s market of free themes would be bigger than it is, at the moment there are 11 unique Shopify themes available for free installation, all of which offer 3 different choices of style. Atlantic is a versatile, powerful, responsive Shopify theme. It features a mega-navigation menu, homepage slideshow, and tons of space for featured content. How to make Slider AutoPlay in atlantic theme of. How to make Slider AutoPlay in atlantic theme of shopify?

It all started with an Instagram ad for a coat, the West Louis (TM) Business-Man Windproof Long Coat to be specific. It looked like a decent camel coat, not fancy but fine. And I’d been looking for one just that color, so when the ad touting the coat popped up and the price was in the double-digits, I figured: hey, a deal! The brand, West Louis, seemed like another one of the small clothing companies that has me tagged in the vast Facebook-advertising ecosystem as someone who likes buying clothes: Faherty, Birdwell Beach Britches, Life After Denim, some wool underwear brand that claims I only need two pairs per week, sundry bootmakers. Perhaps the copy on the West Louis site was a little much, claiming “West Louis is the perfection of modern gentlemen clothing,” but in a world where an oil company can claim to “fuel connections,” who was I to fault a small entrepreneur for some purple prose?

Several weeks later, the coat showed up in a black plastic bag emblazoned with the markings of China Post, that nation’s postal service. I tore it open and pulled out the coat. The material has the softness of a Las Vegas carpet and the rich sheen of a velour jumpsuit.

The fabric is so synthetic, it could probably be refined into bunker fuel for a ship. It was, technically, the item I ordered, only shabbier than I expected in every aspect. I went to the West Louis Instagram account and found 20 total posts, all made between June and October of 2017. Most are just pictures of clothes. Doing a reverse image search, it’s clear that the Business-Man Windproof Long Coat is sold throughout the world on a variety of retail websites.

Another sweatshirt I purchased through Instagram—I tracked down no less than 15 shops selling the identical item. I bought mine from Thecuttedge.life, but I could have gotten it from Gonthwid, Hzijue, Romwe, HypeClothing, Manvestment, Ladae Picassa, or Kovfee. Each very lightly brands the sweatshirt as its own, but features identical pictures of a mustachioed, tattooed model.

That a decent percentage of the brands are unpronounceable in English just adds to the covfefe of it all. All these sites use a platform called Shopify, which is like the Wordpress or Blogger of e-commerce, enabling completely turnkey online stores.

Now, it has over 500,000 merchants, a number that’s grown 74 percent per year over the last five years. On the big shopping days around Thanksgiving, they were doing $1 million in transactions per minute. And the “vast majority” of the stores on the service are small to medium-sized businesses, the company told me. Shopify serves as the base layer for an emerging ecosystem that solders digital advertising through Facebook onto the world of Asian manufacturers and wholesalers who rep their companies on Alibaba and its foreigner-friendly counterpart, AliExpress. It’s a fascinating new retail world, a mutation of globalized capitalism that’s been growing in the cracks of mainstream commerce.

Here’s how it works. Rory Ganon from his Shopify video (youtube/) “What is up everybody?!” a fresh-faced man with messy brown hair shouts into the camera. Behind him, two computers sit open on a white desk in a white room. By the looks of him, he might not be an adult, but he has already learned to look directly into the camera when delivering the ever-appealing gospel of Easy Money on the Internet. “In this challenge, I’m going to take a brand new Shopify store to over one thousand dollars,” he says. “So I invite you to follow along with me as I take this brand new store from 0, literally 0, to over one thousand dollars in the next seven days.” In the corner of YouTube dedicated to e-commerce, these videos are a bit of a phenomenon, racking up hundreds of thousands of views for highly detailed explanations of how to set up an e-commerce shop on the Internet. Their star is Rory Ganon.

Though his accent is Irish (“tousand”), his diction is pure LA YouTuber. He’s repetitive, makes quick cuts, and delivers every line with the conviction of youth.

He appears to live in Ratoath, a small Irish commuter town about half an hour outside Dublin. His Facebook page describes him as a 17-year-old entrepreneur. His success finding an audience seems predicated on the fact that when he says he’s going to show you everything, he really is going to show you everything. Like, you will watch his screen as he goes about setting up a store, so anyone can follow along at home.

He’s a Bob Ross of e-commerce. These techniques work the same for him as for Gucci. Some Instagram retailers are legit brands with employees and products. Others are simply middlemen for Chinese goods, built in bedrooms, and launched with no capital or inventory. All of them have been pulled into existence by the power of Instagram and Facebook ads combined with a suite of e-commerce tools based around Shopify.

The products don’t matter to the system, nor do they matter to Ganon. The whole idea of retail gets inverted in his videos. What he actually sells in his stores is secondary to how he does it. It’s as if he squirts hot dogs on his ketchup and mustard. What Ganon does is pick suppliers he’ll never know to ship products he’ll never touch. All his effort goes into creating ads to capture prospective customers, and then optimizing a digital environment that encourages them to buy whatever piece of crap he’s put in front of them.

And he is not alone. The touchstone investigation into this world—“”— was conducted by an artist, Jenny Odell. After a visitor to Oakland’s brought a watch that was “sold” “free” online, Odell endeavored to seek out its origins. The watch was sold by Folsom & Co, one of a constellation of nearly identical companies selling nearly identical watches. These companies are distinguished primarily by their loose relationship with the truth about themselves. The information they provide about the brands is almost certainly fictional. While Folsom & Co claimed to be from San Francisco’s Soma district, SoFi coastal claimed to be from Miami.

Both were probably from somewhere else. Another site creates the barest sketch of a supposed founder named “Bradley” who “had a constant desire to present himself well but didn’t believe fashion and style should come with such a high price.” Bradley probably doesn’t exist. Of course, this is merely a hackneyed version of what all branding does, Odell points out. It creates stories that pump up the value of products. What you can charge depends on the story you tell, which on Instagram means well-lit photos in coffee shops lead directly to higher prices, especially if they feature an “influencer” with a lot of followers.

These new retail sites are also creatures that could only exist in our current economy. They are a reshuffling of the same fast-fashion infrastructure that powers H&M and Zara. West Louis and Folsom & Co are a new a front-end for the Asian factories that make stuff. Stumble onto one—or more likely—find yourself targeted by such a brand’s ads, and you open up one of many highly disposable faces of the globalized economy. It’s just that with companies like West Louis, the seams show, literally and figuratively. Ganon’s videos are particularly fascinating in describing the mechanics of digital advertising through Instagram and Facebook.

In the tutorial, he briefly discusses finding a niche for the products in your store, and he uses some business school powerpoint terms. But when he actually selects a niche, it is Lions. That’s right: Lions, the animals. A screenshot from Rory Ganon’s video (Rory Ganon) His reasoning, is twofold. One, there are plenty of “Instagram influencers”—which is to say popular accounts—who he can pay to run an ad for his store because there are a bunch of “naturey” sites. And two, when he looks at Facebook’s Audience Insights tool, he (and anyone else) can see how large Facebook estimates the audience for certain interests might be. When he types in “lions,” “Facebook says I have 5 to 6 million monthly active people I can target,” he says.

“But if I add in wildlife, you can see I have 10-15 million monthly active people I can show my ads to. So, if my store is successful, I can scale my store to thousands of dollars per day.”. So, he has his audience, now he needs his store. He calls it Lions Jewel, pulls in some lion pictures, copy and pastes Shopify’s default privacy and return policy boilerplate, and he’s up and running with the empty store. For products, he turns to, AliExpress, the Alibaba company. The key to the whole scheme is that he doesn’t have to hold any inventory, so he can start up the business with no capital.

And AliExpress has many companies that are willing to do what’s called “dropshipping” direct from wherever the item was manufactured or warehoused. That’s why my coat showed up in a China Post package. There is an app that plugs directly into Shopify called Oberlo, which allows anyone to pull products directly from Aliexpress. Click a button and something that was manufactured in the Chinese hinterlands and marketed in a suburb of Shanghai becomes an item for sale on an Irish kid’s website. Oberlo’s marketing claims that have been processed through the system. Ganon searches out some lion-themed objects, including the one that he anticipates making the most money from, a gold-plated lion bracelet that he puts on sale for $0. He gives some tips for finding popular dropshippable items, too.

He sorts Shopify-hosted sites by traffic with myip.ms, and then digs below the most popular stores, which generally sell products they make themselves. Deeper into the top 1000 stores, there are dropshippers reselling Aliexpress goods, just like Ganon is, so if he can ferret out what products are selling at high-performing stores, he can siphon off some of those dollars. All he’d need to do was do reverse image searches to find the listings in Aliexpress, suck those products in with Oberlo, and he could effectively clone the store in a few minutes. But for the video series, he was focused on just the lion stuff. With his shop loaded with a handful of products, his next step is to get people to see the merchandise. First, he creates a Lions Jewel Instagram account, posting a smattering of pictures with a link to his store. Then, he taps an Instagram account that posts pictures of nature, and brokers a sub-$20 deal that pushes some hundreds of people to his site through Lions Jewel’s Instagram account.

When they hit the site, there is a countdown clock telling them they are running out of time to grab the free bracelet deal. This is, of course not true. But it creates that “sense of scarcity,” as Ganon says, that leads to purchases. That clock is just another app for Shopify, Hurrify. It is supposed to increase conversions 2 to 3 percent, Ganon claims.

As one is shopping this kind of site, occasionally a screen will pop up saying, “Alexis in Oakland just purchased the West Louis (TM) Business-Man Windproof Long Coat.” This effect comes courtesy of yet another app, Sales Pop. Ganon and the appmakers say these pop-ups provide “social proof,” which is, again, designed to increase conversions. One would expect that such an app would show actual purchases, and it can do that.

But it can also show “” so that you can create fake customers who are supposedly buying things. Pick some cool-sounding names, pick some cool locations (“London,” “Paris,” “Mexico City,” “Oakland”) and it does the work of combining them into robo-social proof. Given the array of behavioral tricks arrayed against your average Internet user, some of them take the free lion bracelet deal.

But for those that don’t, merely by visiting his site, they’ve been tagged in Facebook’s system because Ganon has installed a standard Facebook tracking pixel. That means Ganon can now re-target those people who visited but left without purchasing anything through Facebook. And he spends a lot of time designing and testing ads that will bring them back for the purchase.

There’s nothing unusual about this in digital marketing. In fact, it’s a completely common practice. But employed so baldly, it shows the strangeness of our current commerce model. I like lions, so I follow an Instagram account that posts pictures of them, they post an ad, so I go to a webpage, and now I get ads chasing me all over the Internet advertising a lion bracelet.

It’s enough to make you long for the days of going to the mall or buying stuff out of a catalog. Ganon says he creates blogs for his sites, too. So maybe for his lion store, he’d cobble together “fun facts about lions” by looking up the most popular lion content on the site,. Once you hit that page, he could retarget you. This is one major purpose of “content marketing.” For example, a company could have someone ghostwrite its CTO some blog posts about cloud storage topics that only people deep in the industry could be interested in. Because of that hyperspecificity, anyone who lands on those pages is likely to be a prospective customer.

So, even if the prose is unreadable, it doesn’t really matter beause by the time you’re staring at the words, the content has served its purpose already. Just by arriving on the page while logged into Facebook, you’ve placed yourself in a custom audience that can be targeted on the Facebook back end.

This is a: it works for any demographic, from Chief Executive Officers to white supremacists to lion lovers. The last step in a Ganonite store process, then, is to do the actual fulfillment of the orders.

This means entering names and addresses into AliExpress, so the Chinese companies can send out the stuff. But Ganon doesn’t like to waste time on things that don’t generate revenue for his stores. “There’s only 24 hours in a day,” he writes in a slide, underlining this text, “Why waste money on things that don’t make you money?” So Ganon “automates” the order fulfillment by hiring digital workers on the platform, UpWork, for 3, 4, 5 dollars per hour. When I searched through the platform last week, there were 275 open jobs listed for dropshipping, 200 for AliExpress specifically, and 132 for Oberlo—though there was considerable overlap among all those ads. Ganon’s video series opens by promising that he’ll get his store’s revenue to $1,000 in the first week. Spoiler alert: that does not happen. That’s probably because it’s harder than he made it sound.

But there was something else going on, too. Ganon posted the videos in real time. So, as the first video began to circulate, other people—following his instructions exactly—began to create shops also selling lion bracelets.

In general, it’s hard to know how much actual profit anyone could make from a store that does even substantial transactions. AliExpress products are cheap, but not free. Facebook and Instagram ads are effective, but cost money. That “Make a thousand dollars in a week!” promise is very easy to whittle down. But as hypermodern economic entities, they are fascinating.

Even the idea of a “supply chain”—the system for using cheaper labor and global logistics networks to increase profit margins for companies with the wherewithal to do global business—breaks down. There are just suppliers and retail-front ends connected loosely by e-commerce sites and apps. “Amidst the shifting winds of Alibaba sites, dropshipping networks, Shopify templates, Instagram accounts and someone somewhere concocting the details of ‘Our Story,’ a watch was formed, like a sudden precipitate in an unstable cloud,” the artist Odell writes.

Shopify Reviews

Which suggests a name for this phenomenon of jumbled up global capitalism that uses Silicon Valley ad tools to arbitrage cheap goods from Asia: the Supply Cloud. As for my coat, in the end, there was no real mystery to it. It was too cheap to be true, and no matter how much technology changes, you get what you pay for.

B eneath the bland veneer of supermarket automation lurks an ugly truth: There’s a lot of shoplifting going on in the self-scanning checkout lane. But don’t call it shoplifting. The guys in loss prevention prefer “external shrinkage.” Self-checkout theft has become so widespread that a whole lingo has sprung up to describe its tactics. Ringing up a T-bone ($13.99/lb) with a code for a cheap ($0.49/lb) variety of produce is “the banana trick.” If a can of Illy espresso leaves the conveyor belt without being scanned, that’s called “the pass around.” “The switcheroo” is more labor-intensive: Peel the sticker off something inexpensive and place it over the bar code of something pricey. Just make sure both items are about the same weight, to avoid triggering that pesky “unexpected item” alert in the bagging area. It’s a shame that the standard way of learning how to cook is by following recipes. To be sure, they are a wonderfully effective way to approximate a dish as it appeared in a test kitchen, at a star chef’s restaurant, or on TV.

And they can be an excellent inspiration for even the least ambitious home cooks to liven up a weeknight dinner. But recipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it.

This means that for most novice cooks, kitchen wisdom —a unified understanding of how cooking works, as distinct from the notes grandma lovingly scrawled on index-card recipes passed down through the generations —comes piecemeal. Take, for instance, the basic skill of thickening a sauce. Maybe one recipe for marinara advises reserving some of the starchy pasta water, for adding later in case the sauce is looking a little thin. Another might recommend rescuing a too-watery sauce with some flour, and still another might suggest a handful of parmesan. Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization: There are many clever ways to thicken a sauce, and picking an appropriate one depends on whether there’s some leeway for the flavor to change and how much time there is until dinner needs to be on the table. The clinic permitted Paul Manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears.

“Apparently he sobs daily,” his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she texted Andrea. His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship.

The much-anticipated but much-delayed produced any number of Beckettian diversions over the last week, and for a good portion of the day on Thursday, attention focused on FBI Director Chris Wray and whether he might resign. In the wake of the FBI’s highly unusual public statement opposing the release of the memo (and placing it at odds with the White House), The Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky an in which Wray was ready to resign over Bush-era surveillance overreaches, along with—wait for it—James Comey and Robert Mueller. CNN that White House aides were afraid Wray would resign if President Trump released the memo. Then NBC’s highly reliable Pete Williams cold water on it, saying Wray had no intention of stepping down. SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.—This community was still reeling from the recession in 2012 when it got a piece of what seemed like good news.

Amazon, the global internet retailer, was opening a massive 950,000-square-foot distribution center, one of its first in California, and hiring more than 1,000 people here.“This opportunity is a rare and wonderful thing,” San Bernardino Mayor Pat Morris told a at the time. In the months and years that followed, Amazon dramatically expanded its footprint in and around San Bernardino, a city 60 miles east of Los Angeles. The company now employs more than 15,000 full-time workers in eight fulfillment centers (where goods are stored and then packed for shipment ) and one sortation center (where packages are organized by delivery area) in the Inland Empire, the desert region bordering Los Angeles that encompasses Riverside and San Bernardino counties. This expansion provided a lifeline to the struggling region, creating jobs and contributing tax revenue to an area sorely in need of both. In San Bernardino, the unemployment rate that was as high as 15 percent in 2012 is now 5 percent.

On Friday, the House Intelligence Committee, which is chaired by Republican Representative Devin Nunes, released a four-page memo alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI. Earlier this week, Republicans on the committee to make the document public. The classified document has drawn criticism from Democratic lawmakers, who argue it is misleading, as well as from law enforcement officials. In a rare statement, the FBI against the document’s release, saying it had “grave concerns” about its accuracy.

Despite, the White House approved the release of the memo Friday. Below, read the memo in full. January 18, 2018 To: HPSCI Majority Members From: HPSCI Majority Staff. In November 1865—barely six months after Appomattox, and three weeks before the official ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment—the New York Tribune’s front page bore a provocative headline: “South Carolina Re-establishing Slavery.” The story laid out the new system being put into place in most of the former Confederacy—“Black Codes,” criminal laws targeting black citizens, coupling a long list of minor offenses with a schedule of prohibitive fines. If a black defendant could not pay the fine, he or she was to be “contracted out” to work off the “debt” for some white employer.

(In some of the codes, a “debtor’s” black children would also be “apprenticed,” with preference given to the families of their former “masters.”). Europe may have inspired Ernest Hemingway’s writing, but it also fueled his early love of exotic boozes. While recovering from injuries he sustained on the Italian front, hospital nurses and porters for c ognac, Cinzano, Marsala, and Chianti. Eventually, he claimed to be able to ‘‘drink hells any amount of whiskey without getting drunk.” We can’t all hold our liquor like Papa. In fact, one of the main delights—and pitfalls—of drinking is that it allows people to cast off the shackles of normal human behavior.

But some people, as anyone who has been to an overlong wedding reception can attest, change more than others when they’re tanked. For a study recently published in Addiction Research & Theory, researchers questioned 187 pairs of “drinking buddies”—undergrads who frequently drank together and knew what their friend was like when intoxicated. Participants were asked how much they drank and how often, as well as whether they ever experienced any negative consequences from drinking, such as lower grades, regrettable sex, or craving a drink first thing in the morning.

They were also asked to describe what they’re like when they are drunk by using the “big five” personality traits, which are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Their buddies then corroborated (or contradicted) these personality assessments. If there really are no new ideas, as Mark Twain once theorized, and the best we can hope for is a kind of kaleidoscope effect made out of the same old shapes, then Altered Carbon at least renders the resulting impressions in violent, trippy technicolor. Adapted from the 2002 novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan, the new Netflix series is replete with ideas and images from sci-fi works past and present. Can you download a human soul? What are the consequences of immortality?

If you give humans more power, what kind of excesses and atrocities will they be capable of? Altered Carbon doesn’t think about any of these things too hard, which is one of the reasons it never fully consolidates into a work that equals the masterpieces it refers to, Blade Runner and The Matrix among them. Its punch is visual rather than emotional, with scene after scene of vibrant, catalytic fight sequences that spawn yet ever more excess. The show is often beautiful, in a grungy, cyberpunk, chemical-high kind of way, and sometimes electrifying.

But its thrills are cheap, even if Altered Carbon is reportedly.

Shopify's theme store offers a wide variety of choice, whether you'd like a mega-menu, video slide-show or easy to use product filtering, you're sure to have your pick of exceptionally beautiful themes to start with. We decided to do give you a quick run down of our top three themes, why we like them, the features that make them our favourites and how we have customised them for our customers.

So without further ado, here are our favourite themes: #1: Retina About the Design This award winning design knocks our socks off! There is an incredible amount of choice in features with this theme for our customers to take advantage of, while still maintaining a clean and stylish design. Notable Features- Supports high definition product images, making it easier than ever to showcase your products at their best. Highly Customisable sidebar navigation, for product filtering, advertising or displaying contact information. This theme also features incredibly cool video functionality, letting your customers view product videos.

What's Possible Bring out the high definition in your products with Retina #2: Mr Parker About the Design This unique fashion forward theme is beautifully-designed, and has an elegance to it that we don't feel is matched by any other theme. If you want a custom theme to display your products with simplistic ease Mr Parker would be the best starting point for you.

Notable Features- Gallery style display allows visual shopping with product details, visible when the customer hovers their mouse over an image. Product Page Zoom and enlarge options as standard, allowing your customers to get up close and personal with your wares. Custom full screen image viewer to showcase high-resolution product images. What's possible Let customers zoom in on your products with the Mr. Parker theme #3: Atlantic About the Design This brilliantly simplistic theme can be used to create something with style and professionalism.

The multi-tiered navigation menu is especially great for those with numerous departments and products. Notable Features- This theme is equipped with a highly organizable mega-navigation giving customers easy access to all of your pages, collections and products. A robust full-width slide show allowing for thoughtful coordination between images and text. The quick shop feature makes it easy for your customers to add products to the cart without ever leaving the page. What's possible If you like mega navigation this theme is for you Here at Shopifybuilder we offer the best services to fully customise these great themes.

Take a look for yourself. We think you'll agree that they suit every brand perfectly.