Our recent conversation with e-commerce growth guru James sparked a napkin note idea. James is an Abra merchant who runs growth for over ten e-commerce brands at an agency, and we caught him red-handed, in the best way possible.
He was already using Abra to dynamically update prices, but wanted to do more on his storefront when running a promotion. He wanted to enhance his promotions with new content everywhere— in the announcement bar, as a floating CTA, even as a tag on his product page. So he took matters into his own hands and hacked twelve pricing elements on the product page instead of the two we set as the default. It got us thinking, why not empower customers like James to customize anything on his site? This was the genesis of building the Abra SDK: a developer’s toolkit for running promotions on Shopify.
Developer tools are in our DNA
At Shopify, our team worked on everything from TikTok marketing extensions to Shopify’s theme kit. Most memorably, Daniel launched the JS Buy SDK, a toolkit that enabled headless commerce on Shopify for the first time. The biggest takeaway? He says: “if you know you’re solving a big problem, there’s probably more than one solution to it—so build a good API”. That’s our hope with launching the Abra SDK, sharing the same building blocks we used to create Abra so developers like yourself can surprise us. Let’s dive in.
The mundane everyday promotion
Let’s start by illustrating the current reality of running promotions on Shopify. Most merchants create bespoke landing pages for their promotions that are difficult to scale and personalize. Additionally if they wanted to reflect the new discounted price across their storefront, merchants would need to manually update their catalogs. To do anything remotely custom means editing prices on your store, line-by-line. Now imagine trying to repeat this 10 times for 10 different promotions—it’s every developer’s worst nightmare. This is the problem we are solving at Abra, making promotions personalized and scalable to boost your store’s conversions.
Introducing the Abra SDK
Enhance your storefront experience for any promotion by loading our 20kb Javascript package into your theme and customizing it. Best of all, Abra manages all your promotional content in one place. Developers can focus on building, while marketing teams can own content management using our admin dashboard.
The capabilities you unlock
By using our SDK to power your store’s promotions, you can:
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Securely activate and deactivate promotions. Eliminate leaking codes through full visibility and control over your promotions. Manage all your promotions in one place and easily track the number of offer uses to calculate success metrics for your campaign.
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Programmatically control promotional elements. Choose how you want your storefront to look for each promotion by customizing our promotional elements with semantic HTML and CSS. Show components such as banners, upsells, and even recommendations. Temporarily hide away anything from email popups to other/irrelevant promotional banners.
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Dynamically update prices to match the promotion. Apply your discount so customers can see the new discounted price on your collection, product, cart, and checkout pages. No more “Hey the discount code didn’t apply”. Instead build a customer loyalty engine, giving them a seamless store experience every time they purchase.
What will you build?
Looking to get inspired? Here’s just a glimpse of what you can do with the SDK to increase your conversions.
Eliminate distractions and remove conflicting offers
Do you ever access a promotion code from your inbox only to be greeted by a popup that shows a completely different promotion on the website? Eliminate the confusion for your customers so that they only see the promotion in your Abra link without popups or extra banners. See this in action with a Klaviyo popup:
Capture new customers with an auto-applied popup promotion
Popups are a great way to capture net new customer emails and convert them with a welcome promotion. The Abra SDK lets you automatically apply your welcome discount to the customer’s session after they’ve added their email. This instantly boosts conversions and lowers cart abandonment as they no longer need to leave your store to access your promotion. See how to set it up with a Klaviyo popup here:
Change the presentation of your storefront for each offer
Let’s say you wanted to add a headshot of your partnered influencer on your website. Or maybe you wanted to change it to hot pink for a Barbie-themed campaign. Well, it’s all possible with the Abra SDK. Customize the colors and images of your website for each Abra promotion you create. Let your storefront be the canvas for the most memorable promotion your customers have ever witnessed.
Let’s make the promotional campaign of your dreams come to life.
Whether you are an agency that works for fast-growing merchants, or a merchant with your own technical team—this is for you. We can show the ropes of our SDK to your team and help you build the first version of your dream promotional experience. Together let’s make the impossible, possible.