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New year, (kind of) new us. Over the last few months, we’ve had some fresh talent join the design team in the form of Simon, Ellie and Dylan, and welcomed our newest developer, Donny. Plus, our oldie (but goodie!) team mate, Alistair, has moved into his brand new role as Development Team Lead.

Read on for a brief intro to the gang – in their own words.

I once worked for a latex fetish brand. They kept sending us NSFW products to display in our (very central) Manchester city centre office. I also did work for a pillow printing start-up, who used to send us printed pillow gifts of our faces blown up on them. So we had loads of our staffs faces on pillows around the office for a while.

We once threw a Christmas party in our (recently kitted out) office. Our boss MASSIVELY underestimated the amount of damage 60+ employees in their mid 20s would cause to the office, which resulted in a very expensive tidy up bill afterwards!

Career wise - my move to Series Eight! Lots of opportunities and I’m very thankful. The team’s also great.

Project-wise - even 3 years down the line, I’m still very proud of my work with PlayStation. A brand like that doesn’t come around often, and it was one of the rare projects I got to give my ‘all’ to. I also had some insanely generous feedback from some key decision-makers at Sony!

AI and automation design. It’s already grown massively over the last 12 months, so it will be interesting to see where it goes in the next 12.

Back in winter 2016, I climbed Norway's iconic Trolltunga. Near the summit, there’s a sign that says "If you're here between September to December, do not climb. Danger of death." The date was October 4th. But, I figured I couldn’t turn back at this point, so pushed on – and nearly slipped off – but the views made it worth it in the end. 

Has to be Better Call Saul, with Breaking Bad being a close second (even named my two dogs Hector and Gustavo). Third place, I’d go with The Last Dance (the story behind Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls). More of a docuseries, but definitely one that sticks in my mind.

I've been lucky enough to see some amazing artists in concert, starting with Skrillex when I was 15. Since then, I've seen Kendrick Lamar, Coldplay, Post Malone, Ne-Yo, and more. While they were all fantastic, Kendrick Lamar stands out as the best, with Coldplay close behind.

You’ll probably find me playing board games in one of the local taprooms, watching crappy reality TV (looking at you Below Deck), or trying to walk my dog round the streets of Leith. He’s ridiculously small and weird/cute looking so we get stopped by literally every other person asking ‘WHAT IS IT?’ (

read in a thick Scottish accent for authenticity

Probably one of my current clients at Series Eight – a sex toy company. Definitely some of the most fun I’ve had working on a project and never thought I’d feel so at ease chatting about vibrators and lube with my boss. 

Sustainable design creeping into digital. It’s still pretty new and there’s not been very much research put into the area, but there are already so many things we could be doing to create more sustainable (less energy-greedy) websites. As brands try harder to be sustainable, reach B-Corp status or greenwash themselves, I think they’ll pick up on this newer trend.

You’ll probably find me binge-watching videos of my favourite bands or just staring at my guitars…hoping one day I’ll magically be able to play them. Failing that, I’ll be nerding out over a science or history documentary, kicking a football about, or gaming.

I actually used to be a chef. I learned the ropes working in a flame-grilled steakhouse before working in an Indian restaurant. I’d secretly always wanted to be a pastry chef. But looking back, I’m definitely glad that food didn’t become my day job!

Professionally, I’d say the fact that I’m completely self-taught. I started coding as a hobby when I was 14, so I feel really lucky to have turned something that I love into a career. Personally – without a doubt, becoming a dad.

I worked in Scotland's largest ski resort for almost a decade. I spent my days sorting out ski hire, selling tickets, running lifts, and ended up doing a bit of everything. By the end of my stint, I was a qualified ski instructor and determined that was going to be my career!

It was in an old converted whisky cellar in Edinburgh’s old town called The Caves. It is ridiculously atmospheric and cool, which made seeing ‘The Japanese House’ there amazing. Other gig highlights include The Shins, De Staat, Yumi Zouma and Another Sky.

I'm probably walking up a Scottish mountain in the middle of nowhere, shouting into the wind. Or I'm out skiing – also shouting.

My biggest web development prediction for 2023

Legislation will sneak up on the industry. There are a handful of laws coming up that concern competition on the web and accessibility requirements that could have huge consequences for building websites.

New year, new teamies

Vote for us

That’s right, the people at awwwards have shortlisted us as one of the 40 best global web agencies in 2022. And to say we’re over the moon is an understatement.


Last year turned out to be a pretty big year for us. We designed, dev’ed and launched a record number of sites, collab’ed with some incredible brands, and pushed the boundaries (and ourselves) further than ever before.

We even scooped a couple of awards in the process – ‘

’ for our very own Series Eight site. But to even be nominated for Agency of the Year, by a team as prestigious as the awwwards jury, hasn’t just made our day – it’s made our decade.

We can’t let something like this go by without saying a huge thank you – to the team, our community, and all our clients past and present. Without you, we wouldn’t love doing what we do. And it’s moments like this that make us feel all the more grateful.

We’re up for Agency of the Year!

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Whatever you need these days, you can bet Figma has a plug-in for it. So whether you’re looking for shortcuts that will generally make life easier – or want to level-up your design work – here are 10 that come top of my list when it comes to web design.

Quickly resize images/shapes into specific aspect ratios.

 Staying as consistent as possible makes things easier to manage content-wise during the web build.

figma.com/community/plugin/739222456238688882

 You get an instant example without having to play around with X, Y & Blur values.

figma.com/community/plugin/1068595505353552645

 Quickly generate button states and styles.

 Helps you spend less time manually creating the same states for every project

figma.com/community/plugin/891833918736503296

 Input your chosen colour and generate a range of complementary palettes/shades based on Material, Atlassian, Orbit and Ant Design.

figma.com/community/plugin/1024452006068794933

 Get a library of editable handy components.

 Allows you to drop useful pre-set components and states in your design system.

figma.com/community/plugin/944200797696370948

 This tool lets you instantly convert logos/icons to vector format within Figma.

figma.com/community/plugin/735707089415755407

 Great for when you need to display sizes for documentation such as design systems/guides.

figma.com/community/plugin/739918456607459153

 Good practice when it comes to preparing for dev handover.

figma.com/community/plugin/739106292828562948

 A great way to make sure accessibility is taken care of when it comes to colour palettes, branding and design systems.

figma.com/community/plugin/732603254453395948

 Quickly and easily scale all your typography for branding docs, web designs, and more.

figma.com/community/plugin/739825414752646970

10 Figma plug-ins all designers should know about

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We’re wrapping up 2022 as a team of 22. We’ve designed stuff, developed stuff, even won some stuff. Some of us managed to meet up for the first time, too.

From the brands we’ve collabed with to the people we’ve met, there’s one thing we can all agree on – 2022, you’ve been a blast.

It’s been a busy year for go-lives. We’ve designed, dev’ed and launched a total of 24 sites in the last 12 months – the most we’ve ever done. Go team!

6 visual identities and 11 brand voice projects

We tackled everything from total reinventions to quick nip and tucks, collaborating with teams in California, London, and plenty of places in between.

First up, Bobbie (our first full-time copywriter), then Project Manager, Jack, and designers, Ellie and Dylan. Dom joined our dev team and then we welcomed Design Director, Simon. And, last but not least, Jaxon joined the gang (and the world) on 10th November 2022.

’ for our very own Series Eight site. Big shout out to all our clients – and the entire team – for making us look good.

We went back to basics to rediscover what makes us, us. After a few months of hard graft, we went live with our new brand identity back in February. Go check out 

We had our biggest and best team retreat ever

In September, we all headed to Europe’s Surf Mecca to hang out IRL. Four days of fun in the sun and more Portuguese custard tarts than we could manage. Read the 

2022 in numbers

The busiest shopping season of the year is almost upon us. And with more and more of us choosing to tackle our Christmas shopping from the comfort of the couch, how can you ensure you’re as prepared as possible on the fulfilment front?


We recently caught up with ShipBob to chat about seasonal shipping and how to stay one step ahead.

And by this, we mean delivery times. Offering the fastest, cheapest delivery may be a great way to capture those last-minute Christmas shoppers, but there’s no point in overpromising if you can’t achieve it. Be clear in the way you communicate delivery times and highlight cut-off dates that align with your deadlines. Some people may be more than happy to receive their order later than planned, but with customer retention more important than ever, it’s not worth taking the risk.

It sounds obvious, but all areas of your business need to talk to one another. Predicting sales peaks is going to be essential for keeping up with demand, so ensure everyone’s aligned when it comes to campaigns or PR activity. If you’ve got products that are selling faster than others, slow promotional activity and readjust your ordering. If you know your biggest sellers are being held up (because of bad weather or general shortages) then add messaging around when users can expect a restock and prioritise replenishment ASAP.

Get prepared by looking at sales numbers from previous years and supplier restock times. If you use a 3PL for shipping, ask them to calculate and relocate your inventory. Having the right stock in the right warehouses will help reduce your shipping costs and, more importantly, help ensure you don’t run out of your best sellers. Plus, forecasting busy periods ahead of schedule means your warehouses can bring in seasonal staff and increase their courier networks to keep up with demand.

If you’re looking for a way to ease the pressure on your fulfilment channels, why not push gift vouchers this festive season? Black Friday offers on gifting, as well as last-minute e-delivery messaging during the countdown to Christmas, are both great for driving sales. You can still cash in on buyers, but you won’t incur the same costs or require the manpower needed for packing and posting orders.

High numbers of returns will follow any big sales period. Unwanted gifts, impulse buys – all on top of the regular returns you’ll receive in any given month. Review your returns policy as soon as possible. Think about who pays, offer exchanges instead, and source the most competitive rates on couriers. Even introduce cut-off dates – or consider charity donations instead if it’s more sustainable and cost-effective. And finally, make sure your up-to-date policy is super clear on your website. You’ll then have the chance to crunch the numbers and review the reasons behind returns once the dust settles.

Seasonal shipping: how to be Christmas and Black Friday-ready when it comes to fulfilment

Selling to shoppers outside the UK is a no-brainer for growing your e-commerce business. But expanding overseas is easier said than done – especially when it comes to fulfilment. We caught up with ShipBob to discover why – in today’s marketplace – offering localised shipping is such a big conversion driver.


Fewer delays at customs = more repeat custom

Since Brexit, a big hurdle for businesses selling outside the UK to overcome is the red tape at customs. Not only are additional duties costly, but the entire process of shipping across borders can also be incredibly time-consuming. Being in both locations helps prevent anything from being slowed down. And the more reliable your delivery times, the more likely your customers are to buy – and keep buying again and again.

Staying local keeps your shipping costs down. If you’re already based in your buyer’s region, there’s no need to navigate exchange rates. You’re also avoiding any carrier surcharges and cutting down on the fuel costs associated with getting your goods from A to B. And with your profits taking less of a hit all around, you’re more likely to be able to offer the holy grail of fast, free shipping – something that’s essential at a time when customer expectations are at an all-time high.


Eliminate any uncertainty at the checkout

Don’t underestimate the power of “what you see is what you pay”. Tell a customer that they may have to pay additional fees because they’re based overseas and they’ll definitely think twice about buying. If you’re shipping locally and can offer delivery duty paid, then your sales are guaranteed to soar. In fact, according to ShipBob, conversion rates are four times better when you offer this type of service.

Offering local fulfilment isn’t just great for slashing delivery times and costs. It allows you – and your customers – to personalise the shipping process further. Instead of offering just home delivery, you can make use of pick-up points and collection lockers – the preferred choice for buyers in the Netherlands, France and Germany. And let’s face it, if your customers can choose to collect (and return) their orders in a way that works best for them, they’re more likely to commit in the first place.

How localised shipping can help drive conversions

Whatever your ecommerce business needs, you can bet that Shopify has an app for it. But when it comes to adding wholesale functionality to a site, we found that the third-party apps out there - to put it politely - could be a whole lot better. Here’s why:

We had to wait for the app developer to manually install the app on our store

Random generated discount codes were being generated

So instead of continuing to subscribe to something that simply doesn’t work, we set about figuring out what Shopify's discount code feature had to offer. From here, we utilised this feature with our own custom code to provide a better solution.


Read on to discover how we hacked it and learn how to create a Shopify whole account without a third-party app, too.

The easiest way to assign a discount code to many customers is by creating a customer group. The discount will also automatically apply to any future customers who are later added to the group.

To get started, simply add a tag to your customers, for example: “trade”.

Next, on the customers listing page, perform a search by filtering by the tag you added in the previous step.

Once you add the filter, a custom search will be performed and a list of your tagged customers will be shown. Whilst in this custom search view, click “Save segment” to create a new group.


You’ll be prompted for a name; this can be anything you like and will only be shown in the Admin panel.

You should now see a new, easy to access tab at the top of the customers panel.

To set up a unique discount for our “Trade Customers” group, head over to the Discounts section in Shopify’s Admin and create a new discount code.

You can name this code anything you like, just note that this will be shown to customers at checkout and on their orders.

Next, fill out the discount as per your own needs. You can use any discount type (percentage, fixed amount, etc), add minimum orders — whatever your needs are for this customer group. Do note that this post will be referring to the percentage discount type with no minimum order, therefore certain code snippets might require significant tweaking to meet your discount rules.

The only requirement is that under Customer eligibility, you select “Specific customer segment” and then select your customer group, eg: “Trade Customers”.

You can check the discount summary at the top right of the page. If you’re happy with the discount rules, click save (note: you can come back and change these details at any time!)

You are free to edit your theme’s code via the Shopify Admin, or using a code editor and using a tool like Themekit or the Shopify CLI to push your changes.

Please note that since in our example we’ve been using “Trade Customers”, we’ll continue to do so in the code snippets below, feel free to rename any files and variables as you need — just make sure to stay consistent throughout this section.

Head over to the cart.liquid template/section. Here we’ll need to do a few things, firstly we’ll automatically apply the discount code if a user has a trade account, using the following snippet. Make sure to paste it between the opening and closing <form> tags, since it is a hidden input, the user won’t see it on the page.

Note that if you named your discount code something other than “TRADE_DISCOUNT”, please update the value.

So at this point the discount will automatically be applied if a Trade Account user is logged in and submits the Cart form, they will see the discounted prices on the Checkout page.

Let’s continue with some more code snippets which will calculate the product prices based on a few editable discount rules.

Please note that the following example doesn’t take minimum requirements into consideration (min. quantity of items, or purchase amount). While it is technically still possible to implement this Trade Accounts technique using minimum requirements, it requires much more custom code which is outside of the scope of this post.

Apply the discounted price to the product

The easiest place to start applying the conditional discount is the Product page since we only have one product price to worry about.

We’ll be creating the snippet in charge of calculating product prices; this snippet will likely need some editing to suit your use case, so read the snippet titles carefully and make any changes necessary to follow the rules of your discount code.

Create a new snippet called calc-product-price.liquid and paste the code snippet that most closely resembles your discount code rules:

1) If the discount applies to the entire store and is a percentage type discount:

Edit the first line as needed, the above example is for a 20% discount.

2) If the discount applies only to a particular (or multiple) collections and is a percentage type discount:

Edit the first and second line as needed, the above example is for a 20% discount applied only to the collections within the pipe-delimited list (make sure to use collection handles).

The qty variable will make more sense a litter later.

Now head back to the product.liquid template/section and we can update the product price! In the template/section find where the price is getting output eg {{ product.price }}, and replace this with our new snippet:

Notice we pass in the product as a variable, this will become useful when the product object isn’t available on other pages.

Remember, this variable will automatically fall back to the regular price if the current logged in user isn’t a Trade Account or if the product isn’t in a discounted collection, so no need for an if statement.

If you’d like to conditionally show the original price, perhaps with a strikethrough, to indicate that the discount is being applied, add the following:

Most of the hard work was done in The Product section, so we can reuse the snippet that we created earlier.

Next we’ll need to find where the collection products are getting looped, we need to make sure to include the snippet inside the loop so that the price can be recalculated each time. In most themes the actual product info will be included to keep collection template clean — this will look a little different per theme, so check for something that looks like this:

In the above example, we need to look for a snippet called product-item.liquid. Inside the product item snippet, we can include our calculation snippet to render the trade price.


In the product-item.liquid snippet find where the price is getting output (eg: {{ product.price | money }}), and replace this with our calculation snippet:

Please note that the variable used is still product which allows us to use this shorthand syntax, if the collection products loop used a different variable name like prod, we’d have to update the snippet like so:

Once again, you can include the earlier snippet to show the original price here too.

Apply the updated price to the cart (again)

Now that the Product and Collection pages have been updated, it’s time to come back to the Cart page and apply the discounted prices and totals here.

We’ll need to apply the discount to each line item in the cart, keeping the quantity in mind too. Find the line that starts looping over the items in the cart, it should look something like:

Once you find the price, replace it with our calculation snippet, ensuring that we pass in the line item’s associated product, e.g:

Remember the qty variable I mentioned earlier? Before showing the trade price this time, we need to multiply it by the quantity of the item:

Our last step is to calculate the cart total price:

Next, in the cart.liquid template/section find where the cart total price is getting output (eg: {{ cart.total_price | money }}), and replace this with our new variable:

The Cart page should now reflect all the discounts that are offered to the Trade Account users, while regular users will continue to see the normal prices.

It may be useful for customers to know or be able to double check whether they have been given a Trade account. Using our trade-account-check.liquid snippet, we can output an extra line on the Account page:

And there you have it - wholesale functionality without the bugs, or the cost, of a Shopify app.

How to create Shopify wholesale accounts without an app

Unless you want the hassle of updating assets across multiple Shopify themes manually – not to mention all the issues that come along with it (and, believe me, you don’t) – then you’ll need a single repo for all stores.


But Shopify multi-stores and GitHub don't exactly play nicely together out of the box. Now that we’ve got the CLI and GH integration, it's a lot better. Not perfect, but with a little bit of dev work, it can turn out fine – for the most part.

Here’s how we’ve made managing multiple Shopify stores a whole lot easier. All it takes is a simple setup and a couple of changes to the theme management process.

The problem with the GitHub integration on Shopify is that things change on both sides. Apps inject things, assets are added, the list goes on. But the prime conflict culprits are JSON templates.


JSON templates are basically a flat file structure approach to the CMS. Every change you make to a JSON template is saved to the store files rather than a database. This is normally fine, and pretty handy most of the time because you know that any changes your client makes to the store customiser are automatically backed up to GitHub. Plus, it's super easy to then get those changes locally just by pulling the theme branch.


Where it gets tricky, however, is multi-stores running off the same theme. For instance, when both of those stores use the same file to load their contact page address, but they need to have different text, that's conflict territory. Not where we want to be.


So this is where things begin to get tricky. We want both stores to save their data to the repo, so everything is backed up, yet we want them all to run from the same theme so that when we add new features, it's sent to all sites and we don't have to copy code from one theme to the next. I've worked on sites with a repo per store, it's not fun!


Well, there's a solution that we're using at Series Eight and it's working pretty well for us so far. It's quite simple to do, too – just a little bit of setup on GitHub and some common practices when adding new features or working with Shopify themes.

First, you'll need to consider how your repo is structured. What we've found works best is working with a main branch, and then when new stores are needed, we create independent branches for those stores. For example:

Each of those branches is the live store theme connected via a GitHub integration. Now, clients can edit those stores' customisers individually and everything is backed-up. Problem one solved.

Now, imagine we're working on a new feature. We start by branching off the main branch. We'll do our thing then PR or merge our feature branch into the main branch, so that main is always in line with the latest codebase. From there, we can merge the main branch into each of those store-specific branches and our new feature is now on each of those branches too. Problem two solved - well, almost.

There are some small issues still, and doing this with one or two sites is fine. But what happens when there are five? Or 13? (Yeah, that's been a thing). That's a lot of merging...

Apps inject things. Random things. Lots of random things sometimes. Those apps are sometimes specific to one store, or use unique IDs. I'm not sure if there's anything clever you can do about this. With some apps/IDs, you can offload to CMS fields in the customiser (Header Scripts, Footer Scripts, GA ID, App Section embeds, etc.). Other times, a simple conditional will have to suffice.

Slight issue #2: Working with store-specific JSON templates.

Pretty rare, and super slight, but if you're trying to debug an issue with content-specific to one of those stores' JSON templates, you're not going to have access to that content on the main branch. You could branch off the store branch, but if you end up changing template code, you're going to want to merge back into the main branch to fix it on the other stores, too. There are probably a few ways to deal with this. The simplest way I've found is to just copy-paste the contents of the JSON file from the production theme file editor into the Shopify Development Theme file editor. This way, your "local" development environment can match any of the store's content and you don't have to worry about accidentally adding something on the main branch because it isn't part of your codebase/PR.

Slight issue #3: Merging all those branches.

It depends on how many stores you're running, but this can get old real fast. There's a pretty simple solution for you though, and it comes in the form of GitHub Workflows. The one below, for example, will take any push/PR to the main branch and auto-merge the main branch into the specified store branches. It purposely won't merge any changes to JSON files, you'll have to do that manually as we don't want to risk accidentally overwriting content. But otherwise, it should save you a job. All you’ll need to do to use the workflow is change the appropriate branch names and add them to your `.github/workflows/` folder.

Slight issue #4: Clients changing the published theme.

Some clients like to adjust their theme privately, on an unpublished theme, either to test things out or to get the store ready for a new product launch or sale. This is kind of a problem with the GH integration, as duplicating the store and publishing a duplicate theme will break the GH connection. We don't want that.

An easy way to prevent this is to make sure the client is aware of the GH integration, and let them know to duplicate the store 

, then publish the duplicated store, whilst making changes to the now drafted GH connected store. Then, when it's ready to publish, it'll keep the GH connection. This doesn't help when changes are being made on both the live and the draft theme at the same time but 🤷.

With the above multi-store GitHub workflow, things have been going pretty smooth. As long as the process is there, there's rarely room for issues to arise. And when they do, they're caught and manually adjusted before they hit production. Job done.

How to manage multiple Shopify themes with a single GitHub repo

From beauty and healthcare to store cupboard essentials, subscription sales are big business. But with Covid kickstarting a wave of cancellations — and the recent rise in living costs only impacting our bank balances further — how can you ensure you’re getting the most out of your subscription sales? Here are six ways to stay one step ahead.

Subscriptions are a convenient way to get what you want, when you want. And while you’re guaranteed to never run out of your favourites, sometimes it pays to keep things fresh. Think about how to add value — whether that be rewarding loyal customers with exclusive offers, introducing new products, or looking at new ways to improve the customer experience. Because when you’re up against cancellations and competitors, there’s no time to be complacent.

It goes without saying that your buyers want efficiency. We’re talking low prices, products delivered on time, and a hassle-free process. But think about how you can go above and beyond on experience. Are there ways you can make unboxing even better? If your products are sold as gifts, can you add notes, gift wrapping, or make things more personalised? Physical aspects like this can sometimes have the biggest impact.

It’s not just your customers that can benefit from adding more flexibility into the mix. Let your users personalise their subscriptions by introducing 2-week, 4-week, or 6-month delivery options. Or optimise your retention rates by adding the option to pause rather than cancel. You can then keep nurturing your paused subscribers with emails or other retargeting activity to encourage them to sign up again at a later date.

You don’t need to drive sales to get more from your subscriptions. Can you streamline your processes by switching deliveries from monthly to three-monthly? Will offering 500ml instead of 100ml product sizes help cut your postage costs? If you’re shipping across borders, it’s always worth using third-party fulfilment to find more competitive rates, cut delivery times, and navigate any red tape around tax and duties.

To drive sign-ups, make sure you’re clear when it comes to giving users a reason to buy. Ensure your reviews are a prominent part of your product page designs. If you offer multi-buy discounts, make them eye-catching. And if you’ve set up 

 programmes, promote them in banners, pop-ups, or follow up emails.

A final way to discourage your subscribers from opting out entirely is a cancellation flow. By pairing persuasive messaging with intelligent UX design, you can keep users on board and deter them from hitting “cancel”. It can work pretty well as a last-ditch attempt to keep your subscribers, but it’s worth seeing how you can engage them in other ways before they reach this stage.

How to maximise subscription-based sales (at a time when everyone's feeling the pinch)

More often than not, growing your business means expanding to bigger markets. However, a recent survey from ShipBob revealed that 1 in 3 business owners are concerned about the post-Brexit red tape on shipments to the EU. Plus, it also showed that almost half of business owners see rising shipping costs as their biggest challenge over the coming year.

When you throw the latest increases in fuel prices, and higher-than-ever customer expectations into the mix, cross-border shipping is becoming all the more complicated. Here are 7 ways your e-commerce business could benefit from using third-party fulfilment to sell in Europe and beyond.

The biggest benefit of outsourcing vs. handling fulfilment in-house is the savings you’ll make in time and resources. If you’re a small-scale business, picking, packing and sending orders can be time-consuming. But when you take into account high stock volumes, taxes and duties, and seasonal staff shortages, things will only get tougher — especially if you have an influx of orders. Third-party logistics take away that pressure, giving you time back to concentrate on sales, marketing and product development. So all that’s left for you to do is focus on growing your business.

Local returns and exchanges: taken care of

When you’re selling overseas, the cost of returns (in both time and money) only multiplies. Plus, local customs charges make returns at a cross-border level a complex business. A third-party fulfilment provider will work with local partners to take care of any taxes and duties associated with returns and exchanges, so you can offer different returns options to customers based on their location. And when it comes to reselling, you’ll have a better idea of what’s coming back into stock as well as turnaround times.

For many consumers, free shipping can sometimes be a deal breaker. But with everyone now feeling the pinch, offering shipping to customers that’s low cost, and as fast as possible, is harder than ever. By outsourcing your fulfilment, you’ll be outsourcing the search for the best rates. A third-party provider pulls together buying power, helping you get the best rates from multiple local partners and passing on any savings to you. They can also advise on how to become leaner with your fulfilment costs, for example, how to make changes to the size and weight of your packaging to save on international shipping.

A better user experience = higher conversion rates

When it comes to ordering online, expectations are higher than ever. Users want fast, low-cost shipping — without the hassle of additional charges at customs. A Delivery Duty Paid service ensures all delivery costs are shown up-front, at the checkout. And a more straightforward path to purchase — paired with faster shipping — means higher conversion rates. Plus, if your product arrives safely on time, or even faster than expected, then it’s a big tick in the customer retention box.

If you’re looking for ways to become more sustainable as a business, then third-party fulfilment can help you get there. If you’re selling goods with an expiration date, they can help you reduce waste by ensuring the right products leave the warehouse first. They can also help you introduce initiatives such as “less than perfect”, where products that may have slightly damaged packaging are sold for a discounted price. Plus, many work with charity donation partners, so you have other choices if you find that reselling returned items isn’t working for you.

Why 3PL is great for growing your e-commerce business across borders

Images can often make or break a sale or conversion. As they say — an image is worth 1000 words!


However, they can have a huge impact on website speed. A majority of the data transferred on website loads turn out to be images — 

about 63% according to the HTTP Archive Web Almanac

. For eCommerce sites, that number is likely a lot higher. If images load slowly, or don't load at all, it won't just make for a poor experience for the user — it will also slow down the rest of the website.


We use Image CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to make it as easy as possible for us to build websites that perform great when it comes to images — without sacrificing the design or imagery.

How image performance is traditionally tackled on the web

We encourage our clients to upload images at the best quality they have, which means a typical image might come from a studio camera and be up to 10MB in size. This doesn't seem like much in a world of MicroSD cards with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, but when it comes to downloading images over a mobile network, it’s huge.


I tested a website with a 2.3MB image on my phone's 4G in a city and it took around 14s to download. The same page on the rural 3G internet (that still covers quite a lot of the UK) took almost a minute! Multiply that by 10-20 for your average, well-designed website and you can guarantee the users won't bother hanging around. Any improvement we can make to how fast images load could be the difference between a user clicking ‘X’ or converting. And this is without taking into account the people on restricted data plans where that image might be 2-3% of their data for the month.


So we need to reduce the size of images on webpages, but we can't just squash them smaller without considering a few things.

Websites are displayed at all sorts of screen sizes, widths and resolutions — the same website might be on a small budget smartphone or a huge desktop monitor! This makes resizing images and decreasing the resolution a bit tricky. Ideally, we should download an image at the size we need it, but how do we know the size?


The web gives us a way to specify lots of image sizes. The browser then downloads whichever one it needs, factoring in screen size and screen density/'retina' displays.


For every image that's a lot of resizing to do!

JPEG, PNG and GIFs are still what most images are saved as. However, new image formats (including WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL) have the ability to compress images by discarding detail that viewers can't see.


I took a demo image in a JPEG format at 3MB and used a JPEG compressor to reduce it to 600kB. But converting it to WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL, it came out as 360kB, 280kB and 240kB respectively. A massive improvement on our original image.


Unfortunately, we can't just use the best one — different browsers and operating systems support different formats. While 


Ideally, we’d offer the best a browser supports. But that means generating even more image files before taking on a bit of a tricky setup.

Mobile and tablet devices (and some laptops) have screen resolutions that are similar to a desktop but are a lot smaller. This means a phone may use an image the same resolution as a desktop when it's not at all needed for the small phone screen. You can find out more about this technique from the post 

"Halve the size of images by optimising for high density displays" by Jack Archibald

 but it's something that's worth considering for a high performing website.

Take it from our people people

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Take it from our people people

New year, new teamies

We’re up for Agency of the Year!

10 Figma plug-ins all designers should know about

2022 in numbers

Seasonal shipping: how to be Christmas and Black Friday-ready when it comes to fulfilment

How localised shipping can help drive conversions

How to create Shopify wholesale accounts without an app

How to manage multiple Shopify themes with a single GitHub repo

How to maximise subscription-based sales (at a time when everyone's feeling the pinch)

Why 3PL is great for growing your e-commerce business across borders

Image CDNs, their benefits and how we use them

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