Best Ways to Do Market Research For Your Business

In their book Write Your Business Plan, the staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc. offer an in-depth understanding of what’s essential to any business plan, what’s appropriate for your venture, and what it takes to ensure success. In this edited excerpt, the authors discuss the whys and hows of conducting market research.

Market research aims to understand the reasons consumers will buy your product. It studies such things as consumer behavior, including how cultural, societal and personal factors influence that behavior.

Market research is further split into two varieties: primary and secondary. Primary research studies customers directly, whereas secondary research studies information that others have gathered about customers. Primary research might be telephone interviews or online polls with randomly selected members of the target group. You can also study your own sales records to gather primary research. Secondary research might come from reports found on the websites of various other organizations or blogs written about the industry. For your plan, you can use either type of research or a combination of both.

The basic questions you’ll try to answer with your market research include:

Who are your customers? Describe them in terms of age, occupation, income, lifestyle, educational attainment, etc.

What do they buy now? Describe their buying habits relating to your product or service, including how much they buy, their favored suppliers, the most popular features and the predominant price points.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

Why do they buy? This is the tricky one, attempting as it does to delve into consumers’ heads. Answers will depend on the product and its uses. Cookware buyers may buy the products that offer the most effective nonstick surfaces, or those that give the most pans in a package for a given amount of money, or those that come in the most decorative colors.

What will make them buy from you? Although some of these questions may seem difficult, you’d be surprised at the detailed information that’s available about markets, sales figures and consumer buying motivations. Tapping information sources to provide the answers to as many questions as you can will make your plan more convincing and your odds of success higher. Also, the business plan software programs have detailed research included and online research available. Utilize this functionality if you’re using such software, and add additional data you find elsewhere. The reason to add some of your own unique material is that everyone using the software program is tapping into the same database and you want your business plan to differ from that of the last entrepreneur in your field.

You can also find companies that will sell you everything from industry studies to credit reports on individual companies. Market research isn’t cheap. It requires significant amounts of expertise, manpower and technology to develop solid research. Large companies routinely spend tens of thousands of dollars researching things they ultimately decide they’re not interested in. Smaller firms can’t afford to do that too often.

For companies of all sizes, the best market research is the research you do on your own. In-house market research might take the form of original telephone interviews with consumers, customized crunching of numbers from published sources or perhaps competitive intelligence you’ve gathered on your rivals through the social media. You can gather detailed research on customers, including their likes, dislikes and preferences, through Facebook, and use Google Analytics to sort out the numbers as they pertain to your web visitors. People are researching and making their opinions felt through their actions on the web, so you can gain a lot of marketing insight by looking closely at what is going on electronically.

You’ll also want to do your due diligence within your industry. When looking at comparable businesses (and their data), find a close match. For comparative purposes, consider:

Plugo, e-commerce platform for D2C brands

Singapore-headquartered startup Plugo has secured $9 million in a Series A funding round. The company offers a complete spectrum of e-commerce support services for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, from making a website, setting up a payment system, and managing marketing to handling shipping, warehousing, and logistics. In other words, Plugo enables D2C merchants to focus on their products and supports other processes.

The Series A round was led by Altos Ventures, with participation from BonAngels Ventures Partners, Access Ventures, Mahanusa Capital, Prodigy Investment, and Pearl Abyss Capital. The company did not disclose its valuation when asked.

The startup plans to use the proceeds to beef up its R&D team and hire more engineers, Plugo co-founder and chief executive officer KyungMin Bang said, adding that it currently employs about 30 people.

Bang founded Plugo two months ago with five founding members. Approximately 200 D2C brands have already started using Plugo’s beta service in Indonesia. The Singapore-based startup with offices in Indonesia and South Korea intends to launch its service officially in Indonesia in the first quarter of next year.

The company wants to focus on the Indonesian market, one of the largest markets in Southeast Asia, for the next 12 months, then expand to other Southeast Asian countries, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, Bang told TechCrunch. It has partnered with an array of logistics companies, including Indonesia-based JNE Express, SiCepat and J&T, and a payment outlet such as Nicepay Indonesia, Bang noted.

Bang, a serial entrepreneur, was inspired to offer an end-to-end management system for D2C brands and merchants in Indonesia to set up online stores after realizing Indonesia’s D2C market, which accounts for less than 1% of the total e-commerce in the country, is nascent but growing fast.

Indonesia’s D2C market is expected to have a vast potential to grow, with the fourth-largest population size, including the rising young population in coming years and rapid penetration of smartphone users in the country, Bang pointed out.

“Local businesses [in Indonesia] have accelerated their adoption of digital technology due to innovation in the e-commerce ecosystem and dynamic changes in consumer behavior,” Bang said. In Indonesia, D2C platforms have become a new trend in the e-commerce industry from business-to-consumer (B2C) platform that has predominated the e-commerce market over the last decade, Bang explained.

The startup looks to challenge e-commerce players like Shopify in Southeast Asia. “I believe we have enormous potential because there is still much room for growth and huge gaps [in the D2C business] that big e-commerce behemoths like Shopify couldn’t address yet [in Southeast Asia]. For example, we can offer customized services, particularly for small merchants like MSMEs in the region, and empower them to sell online,” Bang said.

“We believe the timing is perfect for the birth of Plugo as the e-commerce landscape is experiencing turbulence that will nurture positive disruption, benefiting both aspirational sellers and consumers,” said Charles Rim, founding and general partner at Access Ventures, said in a statement.

Bang previously exited two startups: Indonesian e-commerce enabler TokoTalk operator CodeBrick which Singapore’s e-commerce Sea bought in 2021 per Pitchbook, and Korean PC online game J2MSoft (J2M), which Electronic Arts acquired in 2008. (According to a report by Tech in Aisa, Sea has shut down the TokoTalk service since October in an effort to reduce costs amid broader economic uncertainty.)

“Plugo’s mission aligns with our own mission of creating significant economic value while contributing positively to society,” Moon-Suk Oh, partner at Altos Ventures, said in a statement. “Plugo offers an unmatched suite of digital capabilities that will transform the future of e-commerce in Indonesia.”

Google Analytics 4 Rolling Out Built

Google Analytics 4 Rolling Out Built-In Landing Page Report

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is rolling out built-in functionality that allows users to generate landing reports.

Used to determine the effectiveness of landing pages, these reports collect data about visits to a site, allowing webmasters to test and optimize their landing pages.

Officially released in mid-October 2020, GA4 is the replacement for Universal Analytics (UA), which is being sunsetted in July 2023.

Before this update, which is being rolled out to users gradually, landing page reports had to be manually constructed. This was an unintuitive process, which required multiple clicks.

Landing Page Reports Available in Dashboard

You can find the landing page report in the Engagement section of the left navigation in your GA4 dashboard.

The default, automated report includes metrics for Views, New Users, Average Engagement Time per Session, Conversions, and Total Revenue. However, these fields can be changed and customized to each webmaster’s individual needs.

Creating custom reports is a straightforward process:

1. Click the “Custom Report” icon in the upper right corner.
2. Click “Metrics” and add or remove the ones you want in your report.
3. Hit “Apply” and generate your report.

4. GA4 Provides More Functionality Than Past Platform

   One of the major upgrades from UA4 to GA4 was the ability to combine both web and app data into the same property. Google’s previous analytics program tracked screen views separately for mobile-specific properties.

   GA4 added a new “Event” segment while also adding new metrics, including “Engaged Session,” “Average Engagement Time per Session,” and “Engagement Rate.”

   Whereas UA offered a wide range of standard reports, UA4 has far fewer. Analyzing data in GA4 has generally required additional work, either via the creation of a custom “Exploration” report or by exporting the data. Overall, the functionality of GA4 seems to be geared towards collecting and monitoring events on a website rather than tracking pageviews and sessions.

   GA4 Focused On User Data And Data Sources

   Another significant change from UA to GA4 was in data collection and privacy. Unlike its predecessor, GA4 does not collect or store IP addresses.

   It also simplified the process of deleting data while providing users with options regarding how long their data is stored and if their location is recorded.

Top 5 search marketing trends, 3 must-haves for 2023

Here’s a look at significant search, digital marketing and consumer trends, along with the must-haves for digital marketers in 2023. 

As we prepare to say goodbye to 2022 and welcome 2023, it’s a great time to review notable changes to search and consumer behaviors and plan our key digital marketing initiatives for next year. 

In this article, we will discuss the most significant search, digital marketing and consumer trends, along with the must-haves for search marketers in 2023. 

Search trends: Experience and relevancy

First, let’s understand the biggest changes in search this year and what we can expect next year. 

Google released several algorithm updates in 2022. These algorithm updates can be classified into three broad categories. 

• Core updates: Updates released to make search better and safer. 
• Helpful content: Updates released to make search results useful and relevant. 
• Experience: Updates released to make user experience across all devices better. 

Clearly, Google wants to reward websites that offer excellent user experiences.

That means your content must be relevant to their query. In other words, experience and relevancy are key to winning in search today and beyond. 

As we write the perfect recipe for search marketing strategies and must-haves for 2023, let’s keep these two critical ingredients in mind. 

Consumer trends and insights: Reevaluating priorities 

As we reviewed this year’s top search query data and helpful insights shared by various organizations, we realized how critical it is for brands to win the trust of their customers. 

While many data points and trends are being discussed, we are focusing on five of the key consumer insights you will need to remember while creating your search marketing strategies for 2023.

• Privacy and peace of mind: Consumers are concerned about privacy and look to brands to ensure their data is not shared. 
• Advertising with a purpose: Consumers are gravitating toward brands including sustainability initiatives as part of advertising and marketing efforts. 
• Personalization: Google Shopping is a great example of personalizing experiences based on location, preferences, search history, etc. 
• Direct to consumer: A more visual and interactive experience is critical to engage the consumer. 
• Predictive analytics: Making informed decisions based on several data points is also critical. 

When we understand consumer trends and insights, we are better equipped to evaluate marketing priorities – giving us peace of mind that our advertising is purposeful, personalized and helpful for consumers.

Next, let’s dive into five key marketing trends and then how to leverage these trends in 2023. 

Top 5 search trends for 2023 

As we begin a new year of marketing, we must step out on the right foot and shift our mindset. Long gone are the days of keyword density and the concept that content is solely king.

“More” is no longer “better.” Quality over quantity is the name of the game. We need to re-evaluate our priorities and rise to our customers’ expectations. 

After reviewing search queries, consumer and search insights, and the biggest releases of 2022, below are five key trends and the three must-haves to consider for a successful 2023. 

Trend 1: Multisearch – helping you search outside the box 

Consumers typically spend more than 82% of their time on discovery. Google launched multisearch and released several supporting algorithms this year posed to change the way we all do discovery and receive information. 

Google constantly tests different formats to display relevant search results coming from diverse sources, which reflect how people are exploring myriads of topics. 

The good news: We can now search between various assets, including videos, images, PDFs, text, languages, etc.

Multisearch has opened the biggest untapped opportunities for marketers and we can see the direct benefit. Consumers can take any image and use Google Lens to explore everything about the image. 

By leveraging entity data along with high-quality, relevant and contextual images, Google can get to the most relevant search results faster. 

In 2023, we will see savvy search marketers leveraging all types of assets, Google Vision API and entity data to provide the most relevant and qualitative assets. 

Futureproofing your digital assets for discovery is your key to unlocking doors and winning in 2023. 

Trend 2: Helpful content – relevant, qualitative, accessible, authoritative, experiential 

Google recently updated its quality raters guidelines and helpful content system. The easiest way to evaluate whether your content is helpful is by covering critical touchpoints and micro-moments.

Helpful content is content that is readily available for your customer across all the digital touchpoints, minimizing the need for them to search somewhere else. 

Google’s helpful content update is a machine learning algorithm that keeps getting trained based on search result datasets. It is a sitewide signal, so if too many pages of a domain are low quality (e.g., duplicate, thin or created solely to rank in search engines), there is a serious risk that your organic search performance could suffer. 

In 2023, search marketers must ensure that discoverable content is relevant, informative, qualitative, authoritative, and experiential.

Search engines will reward businesses for sharing high-quality and informative content. Brands should enhance online visibility significantly by sharing topical entity-first content. 

Content strategy should include all types of content, including videos, product review information, FAQ, relevant images, PDF, and expert advice.

Brands must also map current content across the customer journey touchpoints and strive to fill all the content gaps. 

Trend 3: Omnichannel experience 

Most consumers shift between various devices, so a consistent and unified experience across all touchpoints is important.

Centralizing critical information about the business and distributing it across all marketing channels is necessary for a seamless omnichannel experience in 2023. 

The speed of change across channels builds trust with consumers. For example, website information should change right away when, as a business, you decide to change your Google Business Profile or social profile information. 

With the release of Google Analytics 4, Google is gently training marketers to focus on customer behaviors and attribution from various channels across the customer journey rather than the last-clicked channel. 

Discovery of content, good website user experience, and site health will also become must-haves for 2023. 

If information cannot be crawled and indexed, it will not be available to consumers making it useless. As the economy slows and budgets become tighter, search marketers must prioritize technical SEO initiatives to yield good results. 

Trend 4: Personalization and localization

Consumers are looking for information based on interest, location, and other known and unknown factors. Online shoppers are likelier to buy from brands with a strong local presence and engagement with their consumers.

We must ensure our global search marketing strategies are customized for location.

Google matches images to searcher intent because today, approximately 36% of a mobile screen is occupied by images. As a local business, consider:

• Responding to frequently asked questions.
• Providing relevant local information and images.
• Ensuring awesome omnichannel experiences for consumers. 

Local search continues to be highly strategic for Google, according to local SEO expert Greg Sterling. But the search engine is shifting away from local search as a moneymaker (ads driver) and focusing more on product search. That means even thinner support for local SEOs and local businesses. 

Google will further develop and build out product search and SERPs to better compete with Amazon and drive more product-search usage. Retailers are the number one advertiser online and Google wants to keep and grow those dollars. We’ll see more real-time local product inventory online, including from smaller retailers. 

While localization is super critical, I also think that for 2023, personalizing information based on consumer preference will become a must-have. Using customer data platforms to secure preferences and create content and campaigns based on customer data is also key in this area.

Trend 5: Influencer marketing and expert community building

Influencer marketing is growing rapidly and even faster than social media marketing.

Savvy consumers curate information and follow expert opinions from influencers they trust before making purchase decisions.

We’re already seeing various social channels posting information around expert reviews /community and interactive videos are doing well. 

In 2023, brands will benefit by:

• Building an expert community of influencers.
• Providing the most informative, helpful content in the most interactive format.
• Aligning various KPIs such as engagement and clicks to measure success. 

Sterling noted that some of Google’s SERP changes are driven by TikTok’s popularity, including the push to make search more visual.

Accordingly, we will see Google emphasize more visual content and potentially de-emphasize reviews (though not for ranking purposes.) 

Google will intensify its recent crackdown on review fraud, which will continue to catch “innocent” reviews on its net.

Local marketers will need to keep a continuous stream of Google reviews coming and simply be prepared to lose a percentage of reviews to Google’s AI filtering.

Top 3 strategy must-haves to stay ahead

Next, let’s discuss the top focus areas in our strategy to leverage the above trends. 

1. Business intelligence

The global economy is showing slow down. Deriving business insights and actions from the most relevant data points will become critical in 2023.

Keep an eye on market trends, competitive benchmarking, customer behavior, channels and goals prioritization, among others. 

More savvy businesses will pivot toward business intelligence to find the most critical information, prioritizing quality content and assets and basing those decisions on what is most critical based on real data. 

2. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/Ml) 

In 2023, AI/ML will become a must-have strategy to solve complex marketing problems. AI-generated content (e.g., ChatGPT) has become a much bigger feature of digital and content marketing, including for local search. 

Google is also leveraging machine learning to auto-translate any language quickly. From visual search to auto-generation and translation of content, we will see several AI models, such as GPT-3 (soon GPT-4), used excessively to solve complex problems. 

3. Your success plan

Last but not least, less will be more in 2023. 

The key to winning will be defining and aligning your business objectives, key drivers (channels), important metrics to track, and the solutions that will help you get to those metrics. 

Email Marketing For Small Businesses

Marketing to customers via email is an art, but it’s one any small business can master and use to achieve impressive ROI.

Most forms of marketing are expensive.

Direct mailers can cost up to $1 per target, while billboards could run you $14,000 apiece in major cities. And television commercials can run into the millions, once you include the cost of production and placement.

Let’s face it: most small businesses can’t afford that.

But what if there was a way to reach your desired audience for much less – perhaps as little as $9 a month?

You don’t need a fairy godmother. You just need to harness the power of email marketing.

Why Use Email Marketing For Your Small Business?

When it comes to reaching new audiences, heating up cold leads, or staying top of mind with existing customers, there’s nothing quite like email marketing – and not just because it’s cost-effective.

The main reason you need to be using email campaigns is that they’re extremely effective.

The average open rate for marketing emails in 2021 was a whopping 21.5% – a growth of 3.5% in just one year. That makes it by far one of the most effective ways to advertise.

Professional marketers know it works – that’s why 41.5% consider it a very critical factor in their company’s success.

In 2019, email marketing provided a return on investment (ROI) of an unbelievable $52 for every dollar spent. That means you can’t afford not to use it.’

While price and effectiveness are two key selling points for running email marketing campaigns, one that tends to appeal to busy small business owners is that it’s something you can do yourself.

You don’t have to outsource your email campaigns to an agency or hire someone in-house.

With a little elbow grease and the information you gain here, you’ll be able to create and launch your own effective campaign in no time.

Ready to get started? Let’s go.

How To Start Email Marketing For Your Small Business

1. Choose The Right Email Marketing Platform For You

Having the right tools is an essential part of any job, whether it’s carpentry or marketing. And for business marketing, that means selecting the right email marketing software.

You could forgo this step and build all of your lists and campaigns manually in Gmail, Outlook, or whatever other email service provider you’re using, but you have a business to run.

Manual list building is a tedious, time-consuming process that takes your attention and energy away from other areas.

Plus, an email platform gives you the opportunity to personalize your messages while collecting performance metrics. These things alone make it worth the investment.

When deciding between the dozens of programs available, you need to find one that has the right functionality for you.

Some features you should consider are:

• Personalization features – Targets are 26% more likely to open personalized emails. Look for a platform that can parse your list for names and automatically insert them into emails.
• Custom branding – Your customers associate your small business with certain colors and a logo. The software you choose should make it easy for you to customize your emails with your brand.
• A/B testing – Version testing is one of the pillars of modern marketing. You should select a platform that allows you to try different subject lines and other content to find what works best for your field.
• Drag-and-drop – If you don’t know how to code, you’ll want software that lets you create great-looking emails without a thorough knowledge of HTML or CSS.
• Responsive design – 81% of emails are opened on mobile devices; Make sure your email builder automatically scales them to different screen sizes.
• Segmentation tools – To get the best results, you’ll want to target different groups with different messages. Look for a platform with a segmentation tool that allows you to divide your list into smaller groups.

Some of the most popular email marketing platforms include:

• Constant Contact
• HubSpot
• MailChimp
• Aweber
• Sendinblue

2. Build Your List

Successful email marketing depends on getting your messages in front of the right people. To do this, you need a good marketing list.

There are a few ways you can get one.

The first is to build it yourself.

Go through your contacts, pull out the business cards you gathered at industry conferences, and comb the internet for the contact information of the people you want to reach. This can be time-consuming.

To expedite the process, add a signup form to your website. This makes it quick and easy for interested visitors (who are hopefully hot leads) to get on your mailing list.

Consider offering a discount to encourage those who are hesitant. You’ll be shocked by how many new emails you can generate just by adding an interstitial to your site offering a 10% discount in exchange for an email address.

You should also leverage the power of your social media accounts to generate subscribers.

Create interesting, relevant content that will attract the right type of people. Put a link in your profile bio that directs to a signup landing form.

People who are following you on social media are probably already at least a little interested in your offering. It’s up to you to get them on your mailing list.

Another option is to buy a list.

Ranging from $100 to $600 CPM (cost per mille, i.e., cost for 1000 addresses), there are a number of places to buy these lists available with a simple Google search. Just be aware that there can be variable quality to these lists.

Furthermore, it’s very easy to run afoul of spam guidelines when you’re buying lists. In some places, it’s illegal to send people emails without their consent.

You may also end up hurting your sender reputation, which, in some cases, can even result in your IP being blacklisted.

If you’re buying email marketing lists, you do so at your own risk.

3. Plan Your Campaign

Now that you have your targets assembled, it’s time to start figuring out what you want your email campaign to achieve.

What are your goals? Do you want to send promotional emails promoting sales and special offers? Do you want to send transactional emails like abandoned cart messages or upsells? Are you soliciting referrals or reviews from existing customers?

Once you have decided what you hope to accomplish, it’s time to create your campaign. There are five common types of emails that will suit most of your needs:

• Blast emails – used for general announcements to a large audience.
• Monthly newsletters – to keep your business top of mind and update your audience about new developments.
• Welcome emails – For new subscribers or customers.
• Promotional emails – offering sales, benefits, or incentives to encourage transactions.
• Reminder emails – encourage targets to complete purchases or make another.

One of the more common sequences consists of a welcome email after initial signup, one or several promotional emails enticing sales, followed by promotional emails or reminder emails.

Email marketing is also an effective way to re-engage past customers or warm up leads who have gone cold.

A typical sequence for this consists of a reintroduction email, reminding them of your brand, followed by a “we miss you” message that offers a discount or other incentive to use your business again.

There are many other uses for emails, too.

Perhaps you’re hosting an open house and want to invite the recipients. Maybe you have a monthly newsletter that helps establish your credibility and authority.

The beauty of this medium is its versatility. All you need to do is customize your messaging to your goals.

4. Create Your Emails

This is where your emails become reality.

A common mistake many inexperienced marketers make is wanting to add too many bells and whistles. Not only does an overly elaborate design distract from your key message, but it also confuses customers.

Keep your design clean and simple. Some businesses opt for plain text emails, which contain no graphics aside from maybe a logo in the signature.

This may be too extreme for you, however.  It’s okay to brand your emails, just make sure you keep them simple.

Once you have settled on a design, it’s time to focus on messaging.

The first battle is getting your message opened, and that means a compelling subject line.

Try to inspire curiosity or offer some other motivation, e.g., “You won’t believe this deal,” “25% off sitewide,” or “Mistakes that can cost you.”

Now that you have your reader’s attention, it’s time to make your case.

Avoid overwriting and keep it simple. Explain what you’re offering or hoping to achieve, then include a call to action (CTA).

Any salesperson worth their salt will tell you, you have to ask for the sale. CTAs in emails and other collateral are the marketing equivalent.

While writing your emails, keep in mind your target demographic and write to them.

Some people find it helpful to imagine writing to a specific customer they know well.

5. Send The Campaign And Analyze The Results

The email platform you selected back in step one should provide you with all the information you want about how your messages are performing – and this should give you an idea of where you can improve them in the future.

Are you not getting enough opens? You could have a bad list or maybe you need to try a different subject line.

Are you getting opens, but no conversions? Try changing your content.

Are you seeing a lot of unsubscribes? You could be sending too many emails and becoming annoying.

If your results are poor, don’t worry. Email marketing is an art and no one gets it right the first (or second, or third) time. That’s why you want to take advantage of A/B testing.

But if you put in the work, you’ll get a feel for what does and doesn’t work in no time and start generating the results you want.

Bonus Tips

Here are some additional ideas to help you maximize your email campaigns:

• Focus on quality, not quantity.
• Encourage signups wherever it makes sense (social media, on your website, etc.).
• Segment your list so your messages are more targeted.
• Automate messages where you can. This includes welcome messages, purchase confirmations, and re-engagement emails.

Email Marketing Is A Powerful Tool For Small Business

Email marketing provides the opportunity for a massive ROI, without a lot of upfront costs.

But you can’t just send out messages willy-nilly and hope for results.

Plan your strategy, do the work, track your results and tweak your messages (in other words, follow the tips provided here), and you’ll find your campaigns getting great responses in no time.

Shopify Embraces Rust for Systems Programming

Shopify builds internet infrastructure for commerce to serve the needs of millions of merchants. Doing that requires building both flexible business logic and robust, high-performance systems. In addition to our commitment to Ruby for its flexibility and expressiveness, we have recently adopted Rust as our official systems programming language. As part of this, we have joined the Rust Foundation, and we’re excited about participating in the Rust community.

Systems programming is a demanding area of software engineering, and the language selected for it can have a massive impact on the success and effectiveness of systems software. A language used for these problems needs to be fast, productive, and safe. In addition, Shopify prefers community-driven open source projects when possible.

Rust’s growing industry momentum and Shopify’s expanding base of systems programming projects made this the right time for us to standardize on Rust and join the Rust Foundation.

Shopify builds internet infrastructure for commerce to serve the needs of millions of merchants. Doing that requires building both flexible business logic and robust, high-performance systems. In addition to our commitment to Ruby for its flexibility and expressiveness, we have recently adopted Rust as our official systems programming language. As part of this, we have joined the Rust Foundation, and we’re excited about participating in the Rust community.

Systems programming is a demanding area of software engineering, and the language selected for it can have a massive impact on the success and effectiveness of systems software. A language used for these problems needs to be fast, productive, and safe. In addition, Shopify prefers community-driven open source projects when possible.

Rust’s growing industry momentum and Shopify’s expanding base of systems programming projects made this the right time for us to standardize on Rust and join the Rust Foundation.

Systems Programming at Shopify

Since its founding, Shopify’s primary server-side application programming language has been Ruby. Ruby’s flexibility and expressiveness has allowed Shopify to develop a powerful commerce system that meets the needs of millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of buyers. Ruby was, is, and will be the first tool we reach for when building the server-side components of modern commerce.

For systems programming, such as high-performance network servers or extending Ruby with “native” code as opposed to defining business logic, Shopify developers have historically used languages including C and Go. Recently, we decided to standardize Rust as our systems programming language. Because of this, we’re working to better support Rust in our development and deployment processes, and help Shopify engineers develop expertise in Rust programming.

Systems Programming at Shopify

Since its founding, Shopify’s primary server-side application programming language has been Ruby. Ruby’s flexibility and expressiveness has allowed Shopify to develop a powerful commerce system that meets the needs of millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of buyers. Ruby was, is, and will be the first tool we reach for when building the server-side components of modern commerce.

For systems programming, such as high-performance network servers or extending Ruby with “native” code as opposed to defining business logic, Shopify developers have historically used languages including C and Go. Recently, we decided to standardize Rust as our systems programming language. Because of this, we’re working to better support Rust in our development and deployment processes, and help Shopify engineers develop expertise in Rust programming.

Why Choose Rust?

There are a number of aspects of Rust that make it an attractive choice for our systems programming language. These combine to give us confidence that Rust will be a powerful and welcome component of our software stack. Other companies might weigh different attributes of languages differently and come to a different choice; our evaluation led us conclusively to Rust.

Consistency

Shopify’s systems programming needs to cover a number of domains, and that number will likely grow over time. They include high-performance servers, Ruby extensions to improve performance or bridge to other libraries, and compiling to WebAssembly. We very much want to leverage investment in a single language into those many domains, which means identifying a language that can be used quite flexibly. The relevant types of systems programming will have a strong influence on an organization’s choice of language; we take quite a broad view of the landscape here.

Performance

Shopify needs to be able to scale efficiently and sustainably in order to support the world’s commerce. Rust provides us with predictable native-code performance, including fine control over memory usage, which makes it suitable for the lowest levels of our stack. Rust isn’t the only language that can provide or approximate this performance capability, of course. On this basis modern C++ might also be considered, or Go if the garbage collector’s allocation behavior and performance are acceptable.

Of course, while Rust has a high performance ceiling, it doesn’t inherently raise the performance floor. An application or component is not magically fast just because it was written in Rust; a programmer still needs to design and measure for performance, and we need to make sure that Rust developers at Shopify have the necessary tools to do that work easily. That support will be an important area of interest for Shopify as we engage with Rust and its community.

Community

The Rust language and ecosystem are driven by a healthy community, and we intend to participate in that community as we have with Ruby, Rails, React Native, and other open-source projects. Rust’s RFC process and governance structure provide a strong basis for inclusive, thoughtful discussions to drive the future of the language and tools. Our contributions will hopefully not only make Rust even more productive for Shopify’s uses, but also improve things for all Rust developers.

This is why Shopify is joining the Rust Foundation. We want to support Rust’s excellent governance model and maintenance of the “Rust commons”, and to bring our knowledge and perspective into the greater Rust conversation. The Rust Foundation’s work to ensure the health of the Rust community and ecosystem is essential, and we’re proud to join in their mission.

Productivity

In some circles, Rust has a reputation for being hard to learn and use, but developers within Shopify and without have found that—after an initial learning period—they are very productive and comfortable building with Rust. Rust also has a robust ecosystem of libraries (“crates”) and good tools for IDE integration, plus of course really very nice compiler error messages. The power of the type and macro systems allow for very expressive APIs and syntax, focusing developers’ energy on saying what they mean, rather than juggling a lot of state and invariants in their heads. Go also has a good reputation here, C and C++ less so.

Safety

Rust provides many facilities for having the compiler help ensure that programs are correct, including that they safely manage memory, and can be “fearlessly parallel”. As we become more sophisticated in our use of Rust, we will find more ways to use Rust’s type system and safety rules to preserve invariants in our systems. From our initial projects, we’ve found that Rust exposes more errors at compile time rather than runtime, compared to other languages we evaluated. This contributes to the “confident to deploy” sentiment that is often expressed by Rust developers.

Of all the languages we considered, Rust came out strongly ahead on safety elements: not just memory safety in terms of lifetime management, but also eliminating most data races in parallel programs. There is room for improvements even in Rust, of course, such as static deadlock prevention, but that is true of all production languages. We believe that Rust’s commitment to static safety makes it the most likely to further this goal over the years to come. There is already interesting work in this area, such as Ferrocene.

Interoperability

Systems programming often involves interfacing with existing “native” libraries, such as those written in C. Unlike Go, Rust does not have a garbage collector, which makes it easier to plug in anywhere that C can be used. More specifically, Rust has good support for integrating with existing C code with tools such as bindgen, while crates such as rb-sys and magnus allow Rust to safely interop with Ruby. C++ integration is somewhat awkward still, but crates like cxx can help bridge the language barrier. We do not have a large C or C++ code base, outside of things like the Ruby VM proper, but this interoperation was nonetheless an important consideration for us.

What’s Next?

At Shopify we’re at the very beginning of our Rust journey. We have work to do on developing educational resources and our internal tooling, and learn how best to participate in the Rust community and ecosystem. We’re excited to be part of Rust’s mission to empower everyone to build sustainable, memory-safe, efficient software, and grateful to be welcomed into the Rust Foundation.

If building systems from the ground up to solve real-world problems interests you, our Engineering blog has stories about other challenges we have encountered. Visit our Engineering career page to find out about our open positions. Join our remote team and work (almost) anywhere. Learn about how we’re hiring to design the future together—a future that is digital by design.