How We Unraveled the Mystery of Average Spend in Shopify Customer Segments

It all started on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, the kind where the sky seems a perpetually overcast grey and all you want is a cozy cup of coffee and a laptop. My partner-in-crime, Gabby — a fellow Shopify enthusiast — and I were deep into a discussion about the latest challenge a friend of ours had faced with Shopify's customer segmentation. Our friend, let's call her Jane, was trying to pinpoint those golden customers who not only placed at least two orders but also had an average spend of £100. The problem? Shopify, it seems, didn't have a ready-to-go option for filtering by 'average' spend.

But Jane — never one to back down from a puzzle — was not about to let this hiccup derail her e-commerce plans. As we sipped our coffees, thoughts swirling as fast as the milk froth with ideas and half-baked solutions, it felt like an adventure waiting to unfold, right there from our kitchen table.

The Quest for Average Spend

Jane was stuck. As we all know, Shopify is a powerhouse for online selling, yet sometimes it leaves us craving that extra bit of functionality. Her segmentation code included:

orders_placed( count_at_least: 2) = true

Simple, precise, yet missing the 'average' spend finesse. But like all creative folks faced with a challenge, we knew there had to be a workaround. It wasn't our first rodeo with Shopify — where there's a will (and a lot of determination), there's often a way.

Crunching the Numbers the Right Way

We brainstormed until the lights flickered, each idea more ludicrous than the last, until suddenly Gabby had a lightbulb moment, the kind you see in cartoons. "We don't need Shopify to tell us the average," she mused, tapping her pen. "We can calculate it ourselves and use those figures to segment our customers."

It sounded almost too simple, but in this digital world, simplicity sometimes hides the most effective solutions. So we hatched a plan, and here’s the step-by-step guide to how we did it:

Export Order Data: Begin by exporting your order data from Shopify. Navigate to your Shopify admin, go to "Orders," and then use the "Export" function to download a CSV file that includes your customer orders.
Wrangle the Data: Open the CSV in your favorite spreadsheet software (ours is Google Sheets, because it's free and wonderfully accessible, but Excel works too if that's your jam). Filter or sort the data by customer ID to group orders together.
Calculate Average Spend: For each customer, compute the total spend and then divide by the number of orders to find the average. This required a straightforward formula:
```
Average Spend = Total Spend / Number of Orders
```
Set your sheet up to apply this calculation for each customer, noting those magic numbers — like £100, the sweet spot Jane was aiming for.
Identify Your Gold Nugget Customers: Once you have your averages laid out like a buffet feast, filter the spreadsheet to highlight customers who meet your criteria: those with an average spend of at least £100 and who have placed two or more orders.
Create Customer Segments: Armed with this newfound data, you can enter Shopify and create custom customer segments using the email addresses or IDs of your identified customers.

Wrapping It All Up

In the end, a task that initially seemed daunting was transformed into conquering yet another tech mountain — one spreadsheet formula at a time. Jane was thrilled, her business more attuned to her loyal customers than ever before. And we felt a sense of triumph, much like we'd just solved a great mystery of our era, without leaving the warm embrace of our kitchen table discussion over coffee.

Through it all, we remind ourselves: challenges are not roadblocks but opportunities to innovate. Much like friendship, business is about overcoming hurdles together, looking at problems as possibilities, and sometimes, just sometimes, finding solutions over a cup of coffee and a little bit of teamwork. So here's to embracing the complications, the quirks, and the unexpected solutions that make the world of e-commerce ever so intriguing.