All about
In retail, you wouldn’t do a renovation of your store while customers are still walking around inside it, right? Yet lots of eCommerce brands are making changes to their online store while customers are shopping on it, and sometimes those changes break their customers’ experiences and cost the merchant thousands of real dollars.
Whether it’s publishing a product with no image, a broken link on the homepage or in the navigation, or any one of a million different “oopsie” moments that you and I have both done to our stores at one point or another…
Any down time for a store can cost you big money.
Rewind Copy helps you instantly create a duplicate instance of your store that can be used as a testing environment, a development environment, or a staging environment.
Install the app on your live store, set up a second store on Shopify (Plus merchants can use one of their 10 expansion stores), you can do this through buying another instance of Shopify (starts at $29/month) or by signing up as a Shopify partner and creating a developer store.
Typically, you want your staging environment to mirror your live environment, so there’s a simple checkbox in their backend to automatically sync this in Rewind Copy.
From there any changes to the main site sync to the development site. You can test out new products, tools, pages, test out new apps like review tools, upsell tools, pop-up tools, live chat bubbles, personalization tools, etc. and make sure the apps aren’t slowing down your page speed load time. Then push the developer site to the live site whenever you are ready.
Sadly, Shopify does not create this sort of testing environment for you. They allow you to preview a theme but not preview really anything else with your store.
Developers, agencies, and your eCommerce team are going to love this new store where they can test, tinker, break things, and generally “figure it out,” without the worry of ruining conversion rate or sinking the customer experience. Work faster, get changes and updates pushed live faster and with more confidence.
Also, this is huge for running Conversion Rate Optimization test changes to make sure they don’t break the site.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Rewind is the market leader in Shopify store copying and store staging. They have a very scalable platform and can be trusted by merchants of all size, big and small. They have a straightforward pricing model, a large team who is moving quickly and staying on top of changes to Shopify, the Shopify API (which is very important for this type of tool). They also have their other tool, Rewind Backups, which helps ensure that any changes you do make to your site can be rolled back, preventing any mistakes that do get through to your live site, to easily be undone.
Honestly, the biggest competitor to Rewind Copy is doing the job manually. This hands down beats that process.
If you have Rewind Backups already (or sign up for both at the same time), you can get 10% off the unlimited plan.
Rewind Copy will save you thousands in missed revenue from situations where you make a mistake and push it to the live site. They also speed up development deployment times meaning that all those positive changes you are making to the site will go live faster, thus making you more money.
And most importantly, by helping to put in a Quality Assurance process by testing out your site in a dev/test environment first, you will keep more customers happy. They’ll have less issues with your site and therefore be more likely to buy and come back again.
Most of the time the person vying for Rewind Copy is the lead website developer. This tool helps them instantly have a staging environment which is perfect for making changes to the site before rolling out to the main site. Secondly, your head of eCommerce or merchandising team may really want Rewind Copy for any type of changes they need to make to products, collections, marketing components on the site like pop-ups or flash sale banners, etc. They all need a place to test things without worrying about killing the site, and that’s what you’re really getting here.
Agencies are also a big fan of Rewind Copy. You can easily show the work you’re doing without setting it live, get approval from the client to push live (get payment if you need payment), and then push the changes live once the client has agreed to the changes.
It won’t take more than 5 minutes to get fully up and running with Rewind Copy. Buy or setup your second Shopify store instance, install Rewind Copy in both Shopify instances, and sync it up. Done.
It can take between a few seconds and a few minutes to make the copy. Larger stores with something like a larger product catalog can slow this down slightly, but it’s almost always going to be nearly instantly.
They do limit the copy to 100,000 products, but you can talk with their team if you have an insane amount of products.
Rewind Copy is going to be for anyone serious about not breaking their storefront, which tends to lend to larger teams, brands with a larger amount of traffic (because let’s face it, breaking a storefront that does $100 a month in sales isn’t the end of the world, but breaking a storefront that does $100k/month is detrimental), brands with a dedicated developer team, and brands that are making a lot of changes to the store on a regular basis.
Rewind Copy is even better and easier to implement for Shopify Plus merchants because you have these 10 extra destination stores that you get for free with Plus, and you can simply install Rewind Copy and get it synced up so that you always have a testing environment.
Rewind Copy is only for Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants, so if you’re hoping to get this working on your BigCommerce store, I’m sorry, it won’t work. Rewind Copy can honestly be used by all merchants big and small.
Even starting stores should strongly consider using Rewind Copy to create that staging environment and avoid any breakage to the store. That said, Rewind Copy is going to make/save more money for merchants doing more volume. The larger you are, the more it pays for itself, through increasing your speed of execution and preventing any poor customer experience changes from hitting the live site.