Ecom Almanac is a working reference desk for online sellers: currency and country codes, image sizes, fee math and pre-launch checklists — in tables you can bookmark and trust.
All reference pages are dated and revised on a fixed schedule.
This article settles what a VAT rates table actually requires from a merchant's platform rather than listing country percentages nobody measured here, because the only verified numbers on hand describe platform cost and the share of EU firms selling online, not tax rates themselves.
Most lists of country dialing codes online are copied from each other with no source attached, and the actual measurable facts a merchant can check before shipping or billing internationally come from postal and statistical filings rather than from any phone code registry.
This reference settles what the available e-commerce figures can and cannot tell a merchant about cross-border duty limits, because the only measured facts on hand describe EU online sales behavior, not duty tables, and the usual shortcut of quoting a flat threshold number for every country misleads anyone who has not checked a customs source directly.
The usual answer treats Black Friday as a single global date, which misleads anyone shipping across borders because the only hard numbers available right now describe how enterprises sell online, not which calendar day any country observes.
Merchants searching for a theme usually ask how many options exist in total, but the number that actually shapes a shortlist is the size of one category, and those sizes range from 60 to 260 depending on where a store sits.
Merchants assume a postal code field either accepts anything or needs a strict per-country regex, and the actual state of checkout accessibility and error rates shows the real failure point is somewhere else entirely.
Merchants searching for a state abbreviations list usually want shipping math, but the documents that actually govern parcel cost are postage percentage tables, not a two-letter code chart.
Most store owners copy a generic privacy policy template and assume it covers both European and Californian shoppers, when the two laws name different thresholds and different rights and a template that ignores either one leaves gaps a regulator or a plaintiff's lawyer can find.
Most people guess at what a triangle or a crossed-out circle means on a laundry tag, and this reference settles the ambiguity by sticking only to what the symbols actually specify, not what a shopper assumes they specify.
Merchants keep resizing the same clip for four platforms on guesswork, and the only numbers that can actually be checked right now come from postal rate documentation rather than any social platform, which settles far less than most guides pretend to settle.
Break-even ROAS is a single division problem, so this piece settles what actually feeds it and why store owners misjudge it by borrowing a sitewide conversion rate instead of the price-segmented one that matches their actual order.
A single domain's DMARC archive shows 39 reports from 7 organizations over 18 days, and the usual habit of summing every report's counts overstates the mail because 27 day-and-source pairs got described twice.
Merchants assume the product CSV template is one fixed grid of columns, but the accessibility and browser data around ecommerce publishing shows the real risk sits in what gets typed into those columns, not in the columns themselves.
Every preset, category and feature in the Fuse theme by UTD BV, laid out as tables: which of the five storefronts fits clothing, beauty, footwear or bags, and the complete list of what ships in the theme.
Merchants search for a single hard number on discount code limits, but the honest answer is that the ceiling most stores hit first is not a code count at all, it is the accessibility and rendering gaps on the page where the code gets typed in.
Merchants assume a single ring size number converts the same way across US, EU and UK systems, and this reference settles what a size chart page needs to carry and why accessibility gaps on that page are the more common failure.
Toys is the smallest category in the Shopify Theme Store — 24 themes — and the most gift-driven business in retail. Gift wrapping is missing from more than half its top themes, pre-order from most, and back-in-stock from nearly all. Here is the checklist, and the table of who passes it.
Merchants keep asking which crop ratio is correct, but the theme code shows the real question is which of a handful of preset ratios a given section even offers, and Dawn and Horizon do not offer the same ones.
Merchants searching for an HS code lookup usually expect a single official database to hand them one correct number, but the accessibility and browser data available for storefronts shows why the surrounding checkout and product pages that display those codes often fail before the code itself matters.
Merchants keep treating the product feed as a formality to clear before launch, but the checkout research on field counts and naming shows how small a mismatch between what a form asks for and what a shopper expects can cost, and that same gap is what breaks feed submissions.
A postal rate notice and a set of ecommerce conversion benchmarks settle what a free shipping threshold actually costs and what it earns back, and the usual answer of picking a round number misleads because it ignores both sides of that ledger.
Merchants assume a single favicon file covers every browser and device, but the accessibility and mail-industry data used here to illustrate measurement practice shows how often published specs drift from what actually gets checked, so a favicon guide that only lists one pixel size is already out of date.
Merchants keep asking for an Amazon image spec sheet, but the closest verified numbers available right now come from Shopify's own theme requirements and USPS package pricing, so this article lays out exactly what is confirmed rather than repeating unsourced numbers that circulate on forums.
Merchants keep asking for a single canonical list of ad dimensions, but the more useful question is whether the page hosting those ads is even accessible, since the errors that break screen readers and the errors that break banner rendering come from the same sloppy markup.
The theme store looks static because most shoppers only ever see the top of the ranking, but a count of all 13 category listings shows roughly 43 new themes landing every month, which changes how anyone should think about timing a purchase.
Merchants search for a terms and conditions template built into their theme, but no such document exists inside a Shopify theme's own files, so the real question is what the theme store actually requires and where a store owner gets the legal text instead.
Shoppers assume a shoe size number describes the shoe, but the reference data shows it describes a last built with 13 to 25 mm of extra room over the actual foot, which is why the same labeled size fits differently between brands.
A generic return policy template mostly copies boilerplate about restocking fees, which misleads merchants because federal shipping rules and the actual scale of retail returns matter more than any clause about who pays for the box.
Merchants who ask how many Shopify themes exist usually get quoted a stale round number, when the store actually holds 1,099 themes split across 13 categories with new listings landing faster than old ones disappear.
Merchants usually pick a theme by its demo speed or its price tag, but field data from actual store visitors shows the gap between the best and worst theme is wide enough that the choice can decide whether a store passes Core Web Vitals at all.
A Shopify store's conversion rate only means something next to a benchmark, and the usual advice to chase a flat 2 or 3 percent ignores that mobile, desktop, and food and beverage stores each sit on a different curve.
Merchants shopping the shopify themes list before Black Friday assume price tracks quality, but the market's 329 themes show a $100 to $500 spread sitting on top of a median 4.53 rating, and the settings inside individual sections tell you far more than any price tag does.
Merchants search for a single hard cap on variants and staff accounts when the real limits sit inside plan pricing and theme section code, and this reference lines up what is actually documented against what the market's theme code shows.
The usual advice to just upload a big photo and let Shopify handle it misreads what the Theme Store actually requires and what theme code actually does with an image once it lands in a section.
Merchants search for country-by-country gateway lists but the actual limits sit inside theme code and Shopify's plan tiers, which is where this piece looks instead of inventing regional rules that were never measured.
The standard flat-rate packaging of the three US carriers in one place: USPS Flat Rate box dimensions inside and out, UPS Simple Rate cubic-inch tiers, FedEx One Rate packaging, plus a calculator that tells you which tier your box falls into.
The dated reference for planning a store's promo year: Q4 2026 from Halloween to Boxing Day, then the full 2027 season through Cyber Monday. Sortable table, days-away countdown, every date verified against a calendar source.
A 45-point SEO checklist for an online store, built only from Google Search Central documentation and the Shopify manual. Every point cites the page it came from, and you can tick items off as you work.
Standard UTC offsets from UTC-12 to UTC+14 with example cities, plus which markets move their clocks for daylight saving and which stay fixed.
Women's and men's size conversion in one place: US, UK and EU numbers next to the actual bust, waist, hip and chest measurements in cm and inches, plus the reason the EU number is never quite the same twice.
All 183 two-letter ISO 639-1 language codes in one table, for hreflang tags, store translations, product feeds and Accept-Language headers.
What GTIN, UPC and EAN actually mean, how many digits each has, which barcode carries them, and where retail POS ends and case logistics begins.
Standard shipping label dimensions in inches and millimeters, the carriers and printers that use each, and why 4 by 6 is the one to buy.
Margin and markup are not the same number. This page explains the difference, gives a conversion table and an interactive calculator you can run with your own cost and price.
A working pre-launch checklist for a new online store: storefront, legal pages, payments, shipping, SEO basics, analytics and the tests to run before you announce anything.
What a store pays per order on each Shopify plan: subscription rates, processing formulas and an interactive calculator you can run with your own numbers.
The official Shopify limits for product photos, video and 3D models in one table: maximum pixels, file sizes and formats, straight from the Shopify Help Center.
The image dimensions a store actually posts in one table: feed posts, Reels, Stories, pins and link previews, checked against each platform's official documentation.
Every active ISO 4217 currency in one table: alphabetic code, numeric code and currency name, for checkout settings, product feeds and payment APIs.