Ecommerce is booming right now because the world is changing, and a core part of that change is everyone and everything finally getting online.
The world is changing, and a core part of that change is everyone and everything finally getting online.
Ecommerce is booming. Let's talk through it:
Kurt Elster: Well, welcome back to the… Oh, boy. There we go.
Paul Reda: What are you trying to do?
Emily Clinard: Make a chai.
Paul Reda: Make a chai! You’re ruining the show!
Emily Clinard: It’s like the toddler that went in, that danced through the-
Kurt Elster: Oh, boy.
Emily Clinard: … chai.
Kurt Elster: On today’s episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, everyone’s finally getting online! So, we’re gonna discuss all the data we found in Shopify’s recently released Q1 2020 financial report. Hint, it’s good news! We also, we’re gonna talk about what we’re working on right now. This is topical. We have shipped so much stuff in the last month. It was possibly our most productive, most profitable month ever. If you are in eCommerce, be glad. It is a booming industry at the moment. And we’re going to make predictions and discussions about Shopify’s newest features, so we’ll get into that.
And then as long as we’re there, we’ll give you my favorite ads tip that I picked up from a man who frequently spends up to 30 grand a day on Facebook. Profitably. He’s not just doing it for fun. And if we have time, we’ll slide an Allbirds tear down in there. Whoa! This is going to be a value-packed, exciting episode. Mr. Reda, do you agree with my assessment of what we’ll be discussing? I don’t know.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: I was just… I couldn’t… I was on a roll.
Paul Reda: Yeah, if I didn’t agree with your assessment, this is gonna be a real bad episode, because I’m just gonna be like, “All right, so I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek Voyager. Let me tell you about my favorite episode so far.” And you’re gonna be like, “Financial results!”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Let’s just you work from a different outline, and then let’s see what we end up with.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You know, I think Janeway is really underrated.
Kurt Elster: You know, I agree. In retrospect, Janeway is underrated. We didn’t appreciate her at the time. So, did you have a chance to look at these financial results?
Paul Reda: I didn’t. I assume they’re banging, because I know the stock is completely banging. In fact, my brother, maybe like three months ago, my brother was like, “Oh, man. Do you think I should buy some Shopify stock?” And it was trading at like… I don’t know, 450, 500. And I was like, “No, no. Don’t do it. It is literally at a 52-week high right now after one of the craziest runs ever. Do not buy this stock. It is only going down from here.” But he didn’t listen to me and then he bought it, and now he’s made a ton more money.
Kurt Elster: See, I think the best stock tip is don’t listen to stock tips. Just go with your gut. Go with what your heart says is a good investment.
Paul Reda: Well, you know what? That’s true, and that’s actually what I have been doing, and I’m a… I’m right on the line between millennial and Gen X, depending on your definition. I’m one or the other. But I’m a millennial with a retirement account, so it’s worked out so far.
Kurt Elster: It’s true. Well, so do you have that… Here, let me drop the PDF link in front of you. Boom. There you go.
Paul Reda: I can just Google it. All right. Here we go. First quarter revenue grows 47% year over year. It’s up 50% over last year.
Kurt Elster: It’s pretty wild, right?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. So, and part of it, listen to this, it gets better. New stores created on Shopify grew 62% from March 13th to April 24th compared to the prior six weeks.
Paul Reda: All right. Oh geez. So, yeah, everyone’s getting online.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Everybody, they don’t have a choice. eCommerce is now is the lifeline. Businesses that were not previously online can now get online, or are forced to get online out of practicality, out of a need to survive. And on top of that, that drove Shopify to add some new features, like there’s a curb, like a pickup delivery feature, like pickup in store feature built into the online store and the point of sale now, which helps a lot of people. And laws are getting relaxed around certain categories, so like I talked to a large national brewery, brewer, and they said, “Hey, well, the laws got relaxed. We can ship beer in some states for the first time ever.”
So, you have brands that literally could not legally go direct to consumer before, now making that jump to direct to consumer. It’s quite the sea change. It’s exciting.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You know what? I gotta say, and I feel a little weird about it, because, and this sort of ties into the absolutely insane busy six weeks we’ve had, is everyone is… Everyone’s going through this thing right now, and it’s a real hard time for a lot of people. I mean, this is Thursday. The jobs report came out today and they think that there’s 20% unemployment, and we’re having perhaps the best month we’ve ever had as a business, and things are going really good. And it’s like I feel bad about it. I feel really weird about it.
Kurt Elster: 100%. I have what feels like survivor’s guilt, because yeah, I see people struggling. It’s like at least one in four households have someone who’s unemployed right now. We have record unemployment. I’m sure in there we’re not counting people who are underemployed. And here we are like, “Oh, look at our success! Look at this industry! It’s just exploding! And oh my gosh, we’re tied to this rocket ship called Shopify that just had this phenomenal quarter. And we just had these amazing last six weeks.” Well, you know, the part we’re leaving out is the first several weeks there of that run were utterly horrifying. And for a lot of people, they’ve never left that space. They stayed in like total abject terror mode.
So, yeah, I know, I do… I think it is important to note that we’re grateful and certainly our success does not take anything away from other people’s struggle and suffering. I’m just expressing my gratitude.
Paul Reda: Yeah. No, I know. It’s just… Yeah, it’s really weird to have your greatest success being occurring during literally one of the worst times in American history. And it’s like it’s lined up to play in our favor, like we’ve banked in hard on eCommerce. That’s literally all we do. It’s all we care about is eCommerce and online selling, and then there is a slowly unfolding national disaster that just funnels a bunch of money into eCommerce. It’s just… It’s wild.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s not like through any malicious act on anyone’s part. This is… We’re just lucky to be… A lot of success is luck, and we were lucky to be in the right place-
Paul Reda: Timing.
Kurt Elster: … at this time, to be able to provide a service. And you know, speaking of that, we were talking about that, oh, we had this amazing success. Yeah, suddenly… We went from like no leads to… which is scary for me, where I’m used to getting multiple leads every day, and like no leads at all. Like one a week. And I’m like, “Oh boy. Gotta come up with a backup plan here.” To suddenly now, and this isn’t just us, this is like all Shopify agency partners that I’ve talked to, tons and tons of leads coming in in the last, especially the last two to three weeks. Which reflects kind of the… reflects the numbers that are in this financial report.
But, like you know, different projects than we’ve ever seen before. Brands that we would not typically see before going online. And to our own work, it was a lot of like… March was slow, and then suddenly in April, we had all of our projects that… They were going, but not at some extraordinary pace, it was like everyone lit a fire underneath all of these people all at once, and those projects just got knocked out. The last three weeks were probably the busiest we’ve ever been. It was quite extraordinary.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah. Well, because we were in like the home stretch on three different giant projects. Like possibly the three-
Kurt Elster: Four.
Paul Reda: Possibly the four, yeah, possibly the four biggest projects we have ever worked on, or like all of them are in the top five, and we entered the home stretch on all of them all at the same time.
Kurt Elster: And I want to talk about those a little bit, but one of the ones that was interesting is… I think we’ll have launched by the time this episode goes live, so I’m taking a little bit of a gamble on mentioning it. But Proven Winners, the plant brand, it’s a garden nursery center in Michigan who makes… They grow and sell plants and some accessories, like potting soil, and they sell in Home Depot. And they sell on Amazon. And they, for the first time, have… They literally called it Proven Winners Direct. It is their direct-to-consumer online store, and we’ve got this really cool story for it. But that’s one of those examples where this was a brand going direct to consumer for the first time, and they just happened to… It was a project that started before the pandemic, and then everything froze. We went, “Uh, what should we do?”
And then suddenly it was like, “We gotta finish this right now.” And sure enough, we met every single day until that project was done and ready to go live.
Paul Reda: Yeah. This is a great way to shame them, because if it’s not up by the time you’re listening to this, they just didn’t pull the trigger. We don’t know what’s going on. Come on, guys.
Kurt Elster: Oh! I know. Well, for us it’s very easy to be cavalier, like, “Oh, launch it. If there’s anything wrong, we’ll just fix it.” If you’re on the other end of that, where like you don’t, aren’t well versed in Shopify, especially like it’s a new platform to you, plus it’s a new sales channel, all these things are brand new, I get where you want to have all your T’s crossed and your I’s dotted before you go live with it. Because they don’t have… If you’ve not done that before, you don’t have the experience to know like, “Uh, it’s not life and death. There really is nothing that can go that horribly awry here.”
Paul Reda: Yeah, and that’s the thing. We say that a lot. When they’re always like, “Well, what if.” A lot of store owners are like, “But what if there’s an emergency and I need to get ahold of you?” And it’s sort of like, “Okay, well, no one’s gonna die, so it’s not truly an emergency, like there could be a problem, but it’s not an emergency.”
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Things can be broken for a tiny bit of time. It’s okay.
Kurt Elster: We’ve had… Yeah. In 10 years of doing this, there has never been a true emergency. There have definitely been things that like, “That needs to be fixed urgently.” Or, “Oh no! All of AWS went down and it took your payment gateway with it.” And that’s just like nothing that we could do anything about that.
Paul Reda: Yeah, but I don’t know if you want to circle back. Shopify’s earnings, they’re crazy. They’re making a ton of money. Everyone’s jumping into eCommerce and eCommerce money is through the roof, because that’s the only way people can shop.
Kurt Elster: Well, listen to this. There’s a stat here about that. Gross merchant volume through the point of sale channel, so like the literal, like the terminal, the physical terminal in a store, declined by 71% between that same period. March 13th and April 24th. Relative to the comparable six-week period. But retail merchants managed to replace 94% of that lost volume with online sales over the same period. So, really, like in total, yeah, if you had an online store and you had a physical store on Shopify, what they’re saying is your overall total combined sales only dipped 6%. It’s very little. Certainly, that should not put anyone out of business.
But it’s the shift went almost entirely to online from point of sale.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, it’s a gold rush right now. It’s an unprecedented moment where going by those numbers, like 70% of dollars that were being spent inside stores has moved, just shifted completely into online. Like online, by doing nothing on its own, is increased by 70% over the span of six weeks. Like, “Holy shit.”
Kurt Elster: Well, and listen to this. In that same period, local orders more than doubled in their English-speaking geographies. I guess this was not the case in non-English-speaking countries, but in… Essentially, they’re saying in the US, local orders doubled. So, it was like orders where I would have just driven over to whatever store to go pick up a thing now just got moved to online. Like yeah, I know it’s three miles away, but just ship it to my house.
So, all good news, and I think the takeaway is like if you were considering an online store, if you were thinking about it, well, it seems like there’s no time like the present, especially now.
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. What’s the line? The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago, and the second-best time is today.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: I mean, it’s the same thing. The best time to start your eCommerce store was 10 years ago, but today will also work.
Kurt Elster: So, I wanted to circle back, like some of those projects we’ve been working on that I’m proud of, and I think will launch this month, a super secret, super cool thing for automotive lifestyle brand Hoonigan, in which I cannot wait to share that one.
Paul Reda: That’s still secret?
Kurt Elster: It’s still secret.
Kurt Elster: They like quietly rolled it out to people.
Kurt Elster: If you are in their loyalty program and you are a VIP, so like the top 50 customers, they got the sneak preview. That’s a cool way, like if you’re launching a new thing, to do that. To go about that. That’s literally how we’re beta testing it. We showed it to staff first, then the top 50 customers, and then like on down the line. It’s pretty cool.
Also in automotive, CORSA, who if you want a really amazing sounding aftermarket exhaust, and you want a premium… You’re like, “Look, I don’t want to spend 100 bucks having Velasquez Brothers weld on just like an $80 cherry bomb muffler, which that’s actually a local shop I use, is Velasquez Brothers. You will spend the four figures, potentially, on a CORSA performance exhaust. So, it’s like a premium, high-end exhaust brand, and I did the theme design myself on this one, and it’s really cool, and we’ve got this year-make-model selector that we’ve built into it that was a real challenge, and this really cool product detail page. That one is cool. Should be live. New theme should be up and out there when this goes live. We’ll see. There’s always stuff that… Best laid plans of mice and men.
And our friends at KeySmart also getting a new theme. That should be… That one, I think we pushed the envelope. Tell me if I’m wrong. We may have… That may be the most technically complex theme you’ve ever built.
Paul Reda: It’s-
Kurt Elster: Because you did the development on that one.
Paul Reda: Well, it’s one of the harder things I’ve ever worked on. It’s just that they’re very… They’re very specific. You know, if you think about Shopify, it’s really on a templating system, where it’s like, “Well, every product page is generally the same stuff.” I mean, the content inside the boxes changes, but the page itself is pretty much the same. And it’s like, “Well, not on KeySmart.” Because they are sort of a… They have like a penumbra of different products, like they sell a keychain holder, but they also sell a backpack, but then they also sell wallets, but then they also sell these lights, and all these different types of products, so then all of those products-
Kurt Elster: They have really nice flashlights.
Paul Reda: They do.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, they got a couple pocket knives, flashlights, the key organizer is the core product, but there’s like 10 versions of that, and they have these amazing bags. We have those bags. They’re really good.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah. That backpack’s great.
Kurt Elster: Wallets. Yeah, you’re right. Now that I… I never thought about it because it got rolled… When we started working with KeySmart years ago, they were one of our earlier clients, it was only the key organizer, and then they really expanded out the catalog, but it was obviously not all at once. I never thought about it. You’re right, it’s fairly disparate, but it’s kind of around the commonality is-
Paul Reda: It’s everyday carry type-
Kurt Elster: It’s urban lifestyle. It’s like a more modernist take on everyday carry.
Paul Reda: But yeah, so anyway, those wonderful gentlemen over there, in scare quotes-
Kurt Elster: Andy. Andy Bedell.
Paul Reda: Have a different page, has a different page for every kind of product, and all those pages have like bundlers, because it’s like you need accessories, and like we’ll give you a deal on the accessories, but you gotta pick them, and then you pick all the different accessories and it all gets dumped into your cart and the price changes depending on how many you buy, and all the-
Kurt Elster: That’s, listen, that’s a team-
Paul Reda: The buying process-
Kurt Elster: … who cares about average order value, all right?
Paul Reda: No, they do wonderful work. They do very well financially, I will say. And because of their selling proposition and how all that works, I’m just saying in terms of my job and what I have to do, I want to kill myself for the last three months.
Kurt Elster: Oh my God. Don’t do it, I need you. We’ll be together soon, I promise.
Paul Reda: I’m so lonely here. All I have is my wife!
Kurt Elster: You’re wife’s like… I was gonna say, your wife’s like 20 feet away, isn’t she? She’s off camera crying quietly.
Paul Reda: She’s actually… She’s in the bedroom with the door closed, trying to not make noise.
Kurt Elster: Tune this out? Yeah, I’m on the first floor of the house, and when I’m recording, just my wife’s not… She’s on the second floor with the door closed. Hmm…
Paul Reda: I’m excited, because the basement of our house is finished, and the office in the basement will be my lair, so if this… If we’re not allowed back in the office for the rest of the year, at some point I’ll be broadcasting to you from my secret basement lair down in deep 13.
Kurt Elster: Well, I’ll be mailing some acoustic foam to you. I did. I end up putting, in the home office, I put acoustic foam in to try and kill some of the room noise, and it worked. I think, anyway. So, one of the things that we have missed because of the quarantine is Shopify Unite, the annual partner developer conference that only Shopify partners, no merchants allowed, where they announce their… They do new features, and rally the troops, and it’s really… It’s a good time. I always… I’ve looked forward to it ever since doing the first one. Look forward to going to it every year.
This year was gonna be at this wonderful venue that both… You’ve been to. We both like that a lot. Brick Works.
Paul Reda: Yeah, I was really looking forward to it. The Brick Works one was my first Unite and I had a great time. The weather was beautiful. I liked… I’d been to Toronto before. Toronto’s a great city, and you got a face to face with Tobi. You interviewed him. I got a photo of you. You look like a million bucks. You’re like-
Kurt Elster: I was so thrilled.
Paul Reda: “Look at me!”
Kurt Elster: He has beautiful blue eyes in person, okay?
Paul Reda: You were so excited, and you were like… You were freaking sweating. You were like, “I hope Paul’s taking photos of this.”
Kurt Elster: I’m always sweating! I’m just a sweaty man.
Paul Reda: Yeah, because you’re wearing a sweater indoors.
Kurt Elster: I’m sorry. Listen, I know that you operate on… It’s like shorts 320 days out of the year. I can’t do it. I got stupid chicken legs, so I like to wear long pants. I need to. I’ve got these very nice jeans now from a Shopify merchant, Aviator. They sent me these. They feel like sweatpants, because they’re like 80% spandex, 20% denim. I exaggerated that, but they’re fabulous. Check them out. Aviator. And the… Free plug there.
And I’ve got this… I’m wearing a fleece sweater, because it was supposed to be 45 degrees today, and now I’m hot and sweaty. This is a Chubbies sweater, it’s another Shopify store. I’m decked out, full Shopify.
Paul Reda: Are you wearing Allbirds shoes?
Kurt Elster: I am not wearing Allbirds shoes. I’m wearing North Face camo slippers. Hold on. This is on brand but does not match my outfit. There. The YouTube version gets to see my shoes.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I’m wearing my fuzzy flannel slippers. I think the flannel lining is truly underrated. You don’t want the sheepskin or whatever. You want the flannel.
Kurt Elster: A quality house shoe is critical to maximizing your home chillin’, all right?
Paul Reda: Your home productivity, I think. Anyway, I just want to circle back to something for one thing. You truly do have chicken legs, and it’s wild, because you have-
Kurt Elster: My wife stares at them and goes, “We should switch.”
Paul Reda: It’s like because you have a giant barrel guerilla chest.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I’m a freakish man.
Paul Reda: And then it tapers down into tiny, skinny chicken legs.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yes. I look ridiculous.
Paul Reda: You’re very top heavy.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: You’re the opposite of a Weeble.
Kurt Elster: Yes. I’m quite a top-heavy man. I’m six feet tall with a lot of hair. I’m just a ridiculous-looking individual.
Paul Reda: Yeah, that’s true, and then your outfits just take it off the top.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and then I dial it up on wearing these Chubbies outfits. So, we were talking about Unite before we went off on quite the tangent there. Look, if you’re not into the tangents, just give up on the show, because this is what we do. So, Shopify Unite, yeah, but really the big thing, the thing we love about Shopify Unite is the community, and the networking, and the face to face, but the thing that we take away from it, that we then turn into content, is the product announcements. That’s the exciting thing for the merchants is, “Hey, what’s coming down the pipeline?”
And for the developers, it’s like, “Hey, what’s that thing we gotta figure out?” Right? There’s always a little bit of trepidation when you’re listening to those announcements if you’re a developer. You’re wondering like, “Is this gonna undo my app? Am I gonna have to pivot?” And last year they announced a whole bunch of cool stuff. This year let’s take some guesses at what they’re gonna announce. Oh, the other thing Shopify… Did I mention this? They’re doing a virtual version of the keynote, the announcements, called Shopify Reunite. It’s a webinar. It’s virtual. Anyone can register for it. I’ll put the link in the show notes. And of course, we’re going to watch it and recap it for you if you don’t want to watch it. But would you like to take a stab in the dark at what they’re announcing? We don’t know. This is pure guesswork. No one’s told me. They don’t tell me anything, just so we’re clear.
Paul Reda: That all the stuff they announced six… All the stuff they announced last year is now six months away?
Kurt Elster: That sounds like a joke, but it’s not. I mean, there were a bunch of announcements and there were two big ones that I think we’re still waiting on. Sections everywhere, which is still in development, and the checkout integrations. Can you walk me through what the heck those things are?
Paul Reda: Sections everywhere is a thing where if you’ve interacted with your homepage, your homepage has sections on it, where it’s like you got all the logos of the places that gave you good reviews, or you have like an embedded product, or you have an embedded collection, or you have a piece of content, and then you can move those all around on the home page. And then there are certain product pages that have that, too, like if you’re using Turbo, I think it’s called product.detail, and that’s just… That’s what we call them internally, is we call them detail pages.
But those all live within a template, so if you’re set up with one product detail template, and you put all the sections in it, you get it all set up and nice, any other product you give that template to is gonna look exactly the same, because the section can only live in that template, and when you apply that template to different products, it just repeats itself with the same content. Now, sections everywhere is a section can now be placed in whatever template you want, and then can be different depending on what template it’s in. So, we’ll go back to the KeySmart issue. KeySmart, every product page is different and has a bunch of different elements on it. This necessitated creating a different template for every single product. It was a nightmare. And it’s horrible to upkeep, because if you want to change something sitewide, you gotta change it 30 times.
With sections everywhere, you would not have to do that.
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah, the goal is to… Sections everywhere is a time saver. It solves all these… Saves you a whole bunch of extraneous development that currently we have to do.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s an attempt to make the theme more modular, so you could pull a thing off the home… It’s like, “I have that on the homepage, the code is all set up, I can plug it into a different page on the site and write different content in it, but the section itself is generally the same in terms of how it’s laid out and how it works.” Whereas, you can’t do that now.
Kurt Elster: If you’ve messed with… If you have a theme that supports sections, and at this point, you probably do, and you’ve messed with sections on your homepage, now imagine if those sections… And then you look at a different, like a product detail page, and it has different sections. This, the idea is, those sections would be universal across the theme. If a section works on a homepage, it’ll work on a product page, it’ll work on a blog page, and I think it also solves that issue where like we have to duplicate the templates over and over. I don’t know if that’s the case or not.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I think… Yeah, that’s the-
Kurt Elster: Okay. It does.
Paul Reda: That’s the thing that… To me, that’s the thing that sells it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and there would be an API for it, where apps could write sections in automatically, so you install an app, instead of having to deal with theme code, boom, it’s just got its own section you can drop in any page to show you where you want that widget. And that would be cool for our Crowdfunder app. Really, like any of our apps. All four of our apps are just… It’s a widget. A theme widget. It would be great for that.
And I think there was also like a larger push to further separate style and substance. So, get all of the content out of the theme as much as possible, which then makes theme upgrades, updates, and theme changes much easier. But, so they announced it last June.
Paul Reda: They announced it last year. It’s in like beta, where you can use the API-
Kurt Elster: Super beta.
Paul Reda: Like to mess with it.
Kurt Elster: It’s in alpha.
Paul Reda: But yeah, no person who’s running an actual Shopify store has it. No theme that you can get right now has it.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s been a year, it’ll have been a year since they announced it. We’re assuming… That’s such a big deal, I think it’s a safe guess that we’re gonna get an update on that.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We’re gonna get an update on it. But, I mean, and I was snarky at the top of this, but I mean it’s truly a re-architecture of the entire theme system and how it works, so it’s a big project. It’s huge. My snark was just sometimes Shopify announces things a little early when perhaps I would have waited.
Kurt Elster: At the same time, though, people always want to know, like what’s Shopify working on? What are the new features? What’s coming down the pipe? And then when they’re like, “Okay, here. We told you what we’re working on.” Then they’re mad that they can’t have it. So, Shopify can’t win. It’s either like we’re mad that you told us, and we have to wait, or you’re mad that we don’t know what you’re working on.
Paul Reda: Well, it’s kind of like Blizzard, where it’s sort of like, “Yeah, we’re making Diablo four, but it’ll be out in maybe 2023. Maybe.” But you know, and they have to announce it early, because there’s a whole ecosystem. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars of people out there who rely on Shopify’s ecosystem, like us, like theme developers on the sandbox, app developers, all those people, so they need to be ready for when Shopify makes this gigantic change within their systems, so they’re ready for it and they can serve their customers.
Kurt Elster: Essentially with that, if you’re a theme developer and Shopify made that announcement, as a theme developer, you simultaneously went, “That’s awesome. Oh God, don’t make me do this.”
Paul Reda: Yeah, because-
Kurt Elster: Essentially, you have to rewrite your themes.
Paul Reda: Pretty much all the work that you’ve done in your business is now obsolete and trash. That’s what they stood on stage and was like, “Yeah, you know your life’s work that you’ve done so far? Throw it out.” It’s like that. That’s pretty horrible.
Kurt Elster: Listen, we’re telling you how we’re enabling you to that much more awesome. See? Glass half full.
Paul Reda: No. I’m just gonna get up on stage and just be like, “You’re fucked.” And then turn around and leave.
Kurt Elster: All right, for the next one, theme developers, you’re going to want to take the Xanax, and then wait about 45 minutes, then the app developers, you’re next. You take your Xanax. As everyone walks in, they pass out Xanax to-
Paul Reda: We do like a two-hander. I just stand up there holding a microphone going, “You’re fucked.” And then Harley bounds across the stage and tells us how great it is, because Harley’s one of the most positive mans I’ve ever met in my life.
Kurt Elster: He is a delight, isn’t he?
Paul Reda: Harley’s like, “This is why you being fucked is great!”
Kurt Elster: No! Take it back! We gotta give somebody a hard time. Well, and the other ones were multistore, so one of the pain points with Shopify Plus that it solves is hey, if you’re running multiple stores, so you’ve got like a store for wholesale and your consumer store, that’s a really common example. Shopify Plus will let you clone under, like at no additional cost you can have 10 additional clone stores I think it is.
But there’s not a simple way to just manage all of them in one place, like there’s third-party ways to do it that are okay, but there’s no just like, “This is your centralized Shopify dashboard.” And that was one of the things they announced last year, and so I’m assuming we’re gonna get a date on that rolling out.
The fulfillment network got announced last year. That was massive. And we actually know a guy who used it, so it’s real. Yeah, Brent Doud from Tosso, he used it and shared his experience in our Facebook group, so we know that thing, that’s not vaporware. It’s out there.
And recent… The other thing they announced was the improved media uploads, where like normally I could only upload photos, now I can upload what other things, Paul?
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah. HTML5 video and AR, virtual reality stuff.
Kurt Elster: You could put a 3D model in, and then-
Paul Reda: Yeah, a 3D model.
Kurt Elster: And then iOS will like natively, if you’re on an iPhone, you could do augmented reality where you see the object in your house. And we saw the demo of that in person. It was really cool. That’s now live. That’s out there.
Paul Reda: That’s for real. Yeah, and every single person I’ve showed that to has been like, “What?” Like it’s real-
Kurt Elster: Actually, I mentioned Brent Doud from Tosso is like an early Shopify fulfillment network adopter. He also is the first guy I’ve seen who used the native AR tool, and he has a collection on his website that’s just… tosso.com, I think it is. It’s got, you could do the AR models from your iPhone. It’s really cool.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and the last thing was the checkout, where… And Shopify… Shopify really views the checkout as like their baby.
Kurt Elster: That’s hallowed ground.
Paul Reda: That’s what the business is, is Shopify, because they handle the money, they handle the checkout process, the addresses, setting up your back end, that’s what Shopify truly views as like, “Here’s the special thing we have. That’s the thing we control. That’s our thing.” Now, in the course of all of that over the years, different apps have grown that do things in the Shopify checkout, and I think the kind of official story is Shopify is sort of like, “Okay, we understand that those apps are needed, and people like them and use them, but also we kind of don’t like that.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Stop hijacking our checkout! That’s our thing. Well, and I get like… It’s weird for them. So, you’ve got like an app… For an app to replace the Shopify checkout, it essentially has to clone it. It has to look like it. So, now you’ve got essentially like Shopify is a brand. You have these, your official partner apps, making clones of your core product experience, and you’re really hoping that it lives up to the same standard. But it fundamentally can’t, because there are some limitations there, and that like… I understand where that could be concerning if you have to maintain this brand image, and user experience is extremely important, and that checkout is like the defining moment that determines if you get that purchase or not from a customer.
So, they said, “All right, look. We’re not gonna wall you out of the checkout. We’re going to give you a pathway to add your subscriptions, and you’re one-click upsells, and whatever it is right into the checkout.” I do know they are actively working with third-party developers on these integrations, and that those folks all signed NDAs, so they won’t tell me anything.
Paul Reda: Yeah, that’s the thing, so we know people that know things, and we’ve asked them many times what exactly is happening, and they refuse to tell us, because it’s-
Kurt Elster: Listen. Snitches get stitches. They can’t say.
Paul Reda: Yeah, right.
Kurt Elster: The fact that someone goes, “I can’t tell you because an NDA,” that tells you, okay, well, at least I know that that’s real and that’s out there and happening.
Paul Reda: I think the checkout thing’s going to come out. I think it’s been long enough, and I don’t know what’s going on there with it, obviously, but I think the checkout thing should happen. They clearly are going to have to announce something that they announced last year is now ready. And I don’t know about the sections thing. I was actually looking around last night on Shopify theme development, and it still seems very beta-ey to me, so I don’t… I don’t know if that’s ready to rock.
Kurt Elster: So, I’m thinking like, all right, now that this AR thing, going a little bit backwards, now that this AR thing is out in the wild, having announced it last year, that there will be like updates and extensions to that, because I really think that is a strong focus for them, because it gives them such a leg up on like everybody else. No one else is doing anything that advanced. But now the question becomes, “Well, if I’m a merchant, how the heck do I get a 3D model?” Well, turns out you could get a freelancer to do it for like 100 bucks. But they’ll… I think we’re going to get tools around that, that AR VR.
Paul Reda: I wonder if Shopify will just jump in and start providing it as a service.
Kurt Elster: Maybe, maybe not. I think it’ll be… My guess is like it’s part of the Shopify partners program, where you have a partner that does this, and they’ll have announced more official ones. I know they were soliciting that like a year ago, two years ago.
Paul Reda: Yeah, yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then finally, the last one, is I think we’re going to get a roadmap for the email that unexpectedly launched in the new-
Paul Reda: Oh, that’s right. Yeah, I think there’s going to be a roadmap. I mean, I think they’re gonna end up making it more robust, because I mean right now, it’s certainly better than nothing, but it’s not on the level of the bigger guns that people are more used to, at least in the space.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know that it’s meant to be, though. But you’re right, like the initial version is you have your store, and your Shopify store has your list of customers who accept marketing, now you have at no additional cost, you have the ability to send those people emails. The initial… I don’t know what features they have or have not added since they launched it. I heard you couldn’t schedule emails. It was like you could send a newsletter, done. That’s its core feature. It does this one thing well. But that’s also part of… Shopify, and really I think Tobi’s vision, in his German way, is, “Hey, this stuff has to work.” You want a precise, reliable, easy to use platform, and so they… If you’ve heard Tobi talk, you know he’s very deliberate. Very deliberate and considered.
Well, that mentality gets passed down into I think the core product itself, so you never see anything sloppy come from Shopify. You will see stuff that is limited in scope and features, but it absolutely will work.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Now that you mention that, having interacted with Tobi a couple times, he’s like the anti-Elon Musk. He’s just the chillest dude.
Kurt Elster: Which is… That’s a true compliment to be-
Paul Reda: No, I mean that very highly. He’s just like he’s an extremely chill dude, and he’s just like, “Well, this is what we’re doing. I’m fine with it.” He’s got a little accent. But he’s very nice and… Yeah, considered is a really good word.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think deliberate and considered. All right, so my advertising tip comes from Andy Bedell, marketer at KeySmart. He has… I know he has spent up to 30 grand a day on Facebook ads in the past, and he laid out for me the system he uses to get winning creative, and this is… He’s used this for years and has really become a master at it.
Paul Reda: I need to interrupt you for a second. 30 grand a day doesn’t begin to cover the insane things that Andy Bedell does. Didn’t he not literally advertise to everyone in America at one point? And thus, could no longer buy ads in America?
Kurt Elster: Well, yes. He is… When you spend 30 grand a day, you exhaust your audience. Yeah. He’s like that level of Facebook involved.
Paul Reda: He was just like everyone in America has seen this ad, I need to move on now to other countries.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yes. And it’s not like that’s a one day… When we say he spent 30 grand a day, that’s not like a one-day thing. That’s like an ongoing occurrence for him. I really… I don’t think I’ve… I think there are very few people on the planet who have managed the kind of ad spends that Andy has. I’m sure people do it for like launches and stuff. I mean, this is just like a regular occurrence for him. So, when Andy gives me advice on Facebook ads, I accept it.
They’ve had a lot of success with video ads, but video, as everybody who’s ever spent three hours editing a five-minute video knows, it’s hard and time consuming. So, the approach he takes is you write down five value props, benefits, features, whatever it is that you think are the selling propositions of your product. You write down five. You make… Turn that into a video slideshow. Shoot some photos, get some stock photos, put some music and some headlines over it. And you run that as an ad. If it’s successful, great. Turn around and produce… That was essentially a storyboard. You then turn that into your proper video ad. And if it doesn’t work, okay, then you iterate on it. Or maybe you iterate on it a few times and then produce your video, and then do like cutdowns of the video, edit it different ways. Repeat that process endlessly.
And it sounds straightforward because it is straightforward, but most people take a shotgun approach, where it’s like, “All right, we’re gonna try this. Now we’re gonna try this.” Which, you know, that gets results too, but not in this very deliberate, nuanced, and easier-to-scale method. That’s the tip. That’s your moneymaking tip.
Now, for the big boy, let us tear down Allbirds.com.
Paul Reda: All right, fine.
Kurt Elster: We’ll do it. Let’s do Allbirds and call it a day. It’s not like I got a lot going on in my house.
Paul Reda: So, I guess as long as you’re not in your car right now, load up Allbirds.com, one word, Allbirds, and follow along. Why shoes are Allbirds. Why are they… Are the shoes birds? Do they fit all birds? Are you the bird? I don’t understand it really. I learned they sell shoes a couple weeks ago. Like a Austin Powers woman, like a bird? Like that?
Kurt Elster: I’ve got Allbirds.com open in front of me. I am also recording it as a screencast so we can add this to the YouTube.
Paul Reda: Oh. So smart.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Mr. Reda, what is your initial impression of the Allbirds homepage?
Paul Reda: I like it. I like the top half of it very much. This top navigation of just like men and women, like that’s great, you’re immediately… I like decision trees, where it’s like shopping is clearly the key. We’re immediately splitting it in half. Men, women. And then when you click on those, you get a dropdown with four more categories in it, and then those categories have little things underneath them, so it’s very easy to find exactly what you’re looking for right off the bat.
Kurt Elster: An interesting thing about the dropdown is on hover it does not open. You have to click it to open it.
Paul Reda: Which-
Kurt Elster: And then it stays open until you click it again.
Paul Reda: Yeah, I kind of don’t like that.
Kurt Elster: I realize the advantage to that is it’s less annoying people, but I like when it pops open on hover. I prefer it.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It’s a preference, but if you’re like real into user interface design, the hover could be problematic for accessibility issues. You know, like if you had a hand tremor, and you’re trying to use a hover menu, it’s extremely frustrating.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and I guess it is a little more professional and cleaner. It’s not like popping in and out, and you’re like, “Oh, I moused off of it and now it’s gone.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah, where it does the thing, pops it.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, people always… They always worry about the fold. Well, an interesting thing about this Allbirds site, I’ve got it full screened on my 15-inch MacBook, and it is not obvious at all that you can scroll down. The hero image ends perfectly at the bottom. There’s no like, “There’s more,” link trying to get me to scroll down. It’s just boom, there. And the advantage to this is everything I need to take the next step in the purchase decision is available above the fold. It’s literally like top left corner, because we know we read in an F pattern, top to bottom, left to right, so that’s where the first thing is. It’s going to segment us.
There are only two links in that top corner. Men, women. There’s no Facebook icon. There’s no like, “Visit our blog! Read our live journal!” None of that. Two options. Are you a man? Are you shopping for men or are you shopping for women? Pick.
Paul Reda: Well, and it’s interesting, you know, if you resize your browser window and then reload the page, that main hero image, it’s 100 VH. It is always the full height of your browser window.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s set to always… So, hold on. This extremely successful brand is not scared of the fold?
Paul Reda: No. Well, I guess because their navigation’s so good, it’s fine.
Kurt Elster: That’s a good point. That saves it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They literally have one thing above the fold. “Run hard, tread light. Introducing the Tree Dasher.” And there’s no… It’s not a link. It’s just text over a big, nice image. Then at the bottom, it says, “Explore the Dasher,” which takes you to a sales page for it. But it’s not the most direct call to action, I don’t think.
Kurt Elster: No.
Paul Reda: I mean, it’s tucked in there at the bottom.
Kurt Elster: No. I wish I could click the entire thing. I wish the Explore the Dasher link was like… looked like a button. You know? It’s functioning as a button. I think it should look like a button. And I wish it… Like if it had a solid background, I think it would work. I don’t think it would take anything away from the design. And if you notice, they use an image carousel. But how many images are in that image carousel?
Paul Reda: Two. Men, women. Again. Yeah, just like the top navigation.
Kurt Elster: And then the text doesn’t change. Just the image. That’s cool.
Paul Reda: Their big hero image is the full height of the browser window. The fold is now obliterated. They clearly don’t care if you scroll down or not. When you scroll down, I don’t like this, this tread lighter that shows the carbon footprint and their sustainability approach. It’s like, “Whatever, I don’t care.”
This thing-
Kurt Elster: I care. I like… That’s a bonus for me. If I see that… Okay, they have a net zero carbon footprint, I’m not going to buy because of it, but it’s a point in their favor for me. But that’s… To me, that matters. Even though I think half the time it’s probably made up.
Paul Reda: They have this series, this like collage of like running shoes, engineered with natural materials, and it’s got like a closeup of… I don’t know. Fur, and then shoes, and then a footprint in the sand, and then another shoe, but it’s like all the boxes are different sizes, and the text is over the image, and maybe not perfectly readable. It’s just like… This, to me, is like this just got barfed up there. I don’t like it. There’s no cleanliness to the grid. There’s no single call to action. I just… I don’t like it.
Kurt Elster: There is… I refuse to believe in a universe in which they have not heat mapped or split tested the bejesus out of this layout to get to this place.
Paul Reda: I fully-
Kurt Elster: However-
Paul Reda: I fully acknowledge they are… They hire people much smarter than me, who cost a lot more money than me-
Kurt Elster: And you’re not cheap, to be clear.
Paul Reda: I’m probably wrong. I just don’t like it.
Kurt Elster: You know what’s cool? In their footer, it says you can text them. Under help, the first thing’s their phone number. It’s a toll-free number. Second one is a phone number that says text. How cool. You can text them. I think more people should allow texting.
Paul Reda: 100%. Well, and isn’t that what Kit is for? Or am I wrong?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, Shopify Ping.
Paul Reda: Shopify Ping. There you go.
Kurt Elster: Part of Kit. Shopify Ping will do it. Yeah. And someone told me recently that like either Shopify Ping or some other official, and I may be wrong, but a merchant we’re working with who’s launching a really cool bathing suit for women said like, “Oh, yeah, I found this… They give you a phone number, and people can call it or text it.” I think she was talking about Ping. It was cool.
If I had to design this homepage, this is what I… I would go all in on this landing page concept, and I would strip… On this homepage, below the hero image, and then down to the social proof with the logos and the quotes, I would strip all that out. I just want it to like I land on the site, I want header, hero image, and then still in the viewport at the bottom, I want those social proof logos and that quote, “World’s most comfortable shoe.” And then below the fold, I want the footer. And this thing would be really tight.
Paul Reda: I would want one more. I would want one more men-women split, like maybe that explore fan favorites thing, and then like a men-women split. I just don’t like that I feel like shop men and shop women at the bottom of that are kind of like an afterthought. I would like a better designed way to split you off and get you down the road to finding the exact shoe you want.
Kurt Elster: I could be wrong, but I believe that’s how… The hero image used to be like shop men, shop women. At some point, I think, I believe it was. I’ve not looked at this site in some time. Let’s get off of homepage. Let’s get ourselves some shoes.
Paul Reda: All right. I’m shopping for… I’m clicking men’s top sellers.
Kurt Elster: Men. Oh, okay. And they use a mega menu, but it’s just three simple link lists organized by category. Shoes, socks, accessories. And then we have… The only images are collections. Top sellers and Dasher. So, Dasher is the new product. It’s their featured thing. Top sellers is where I want to know what everybody else is buying. You know, I’m torn between top sellers and boat shoes. I could go for some boat shoes right now.
All right, so I’ve moved to top sellers. Did you see how it renders? I bet this whole… There’s like a loading thing, and then when the page is done rendering, it appears. I wonder if the site is React.
Paul Reda: I didn’t get that, because my internet is fast enough to be fine.
Kurt Elster: Listen. I have many megabits, but I also have three children who are like streaming two 4K HD videos at the same time, each of them. I’ve got no bandwidth left.
Paul Reda: Don’t worry. I’m sure my wife is watching Ladies of London on Peacock right now.
Kurt Elster: I’m so jealous. I don’t have Comcast, so I was not able to get in the Peacock beta.
Paul Reda: The UI and the UX is absolutely horrifying. It’s impossible to use. I’m waiting for it to actually show up on my Amazon Fire TV before I look into it.
Kurt Elster: All right, so on the collection page-
Paul Reda: They interrupt the collection list with these sort of lifestyle images and quotes from people, which is interesting.
Kurt Elster: Very cool.
Paul Reda: Something that I’ve done on a store. I wrote a whole thing to do that for one of our clients, and then we showed it to them. We thought it was really cool. We loved it. And then we showed it to them, and they didn’t care and never used it. But I could do that if you want me to.
Kurt Elster: It’s true. Yeah. If anyone wants this, we figured out how to do it, where it’s… Well, you built it. Describe how it works in the collection settings.
Paul Reda: Well, the way that I set it up is it calls the collection… The way the collection template works is it’s like for product and collection products, so they have a collection called men’s best-selling shoes, and then it just iterates through every single product in that listing until it reaches the end. And the way you do it-
Kurt Elster: Cool.
Paul Reda: In the Shopify code, you just have a thing where you go for product and collection products, limit five. And then after the fifth one, it stops showing products, and you could inject whatever you want, and then when you’re done injecting it, you restart the collection listing, and with for product and collection products, skip five. So, it’ll skip the first five. So, you just stop the collection loop and then restart it again after you’re done doing your stuff. And they’re doing it-
Kurt Elster: My-
Paul Reda: I wonder if their… Their system is probably better than mine, because they’re doing it a lot here. They stop this collection four times to pop something in there.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I wonder how they do it. Maybe it’s a block.
Paul Reda: Well, I’m looking at it. I mean, every single box in there has got a style on it called grid item, including the interrupters, but the grid items have a additional class called story card, so those are apparently story cards that are different from the regular product that’s a grid item, is what they’re calling it.
Kurt Elster: We have a name for it now. Story card.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We’re calling that a story card now, by the way.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I like this collection page. I love their story cards. I think this is… I think it really adds a lot to a collection page, which a collection page just has to look good and pretty. Here, I think they’re able to add content and context to it, where it’s really nice, and I desperately wish someone would let us do this for them.
The thing that is suspiciously absent is product review stars. And there’s no sorting. I wish I could sort by… Hey, scroll on down to the men’s wool loungers. I love them. You know what’s really cool is on desktop, that hover effect, where it makes it look… Oh, I love that.
Paul Reda: Here’s a weird thing. You know, go to the wool runners and the tree runners next to each other, and then bop your thing from side to side. What element does that middle white belong to? Because all that is is adding the-
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah, look at that.
Paul Reda: It’s adding a background shadow onto it to make it sort of pop out, but the middle gutter belongs to both of them and is part of the hover state. So, I need to look into how they did that.
Kurt Elster: So, as a CSS nerd, this excites you.
Paul Reda: It doesn’t excite me. I’m just wondering how they did it.
Kurt Elster: Well, I like it. I want it. Give me this.
Paul Reda: Oh my God.
Kurt Elster: Put this on something. I’m very into it. All right, click on men’s wool loungers. Because these, I like. I just… These look nice. I want these.
Paul Reda: All right. Well, the first thing that jumped out at me is I swapped the color, the classics color, and if you look at the URL, it switches the product. This isn’t one of those where it has like variants. They’re all completely different product. They are all different product listings you’re switching between. Which is a thing we’ve seen on other stores that I don’t quite understand how people do that.
Kurt Elster: It’s gotta be written in JavaScript. The thing I noticed is you cannot… The add to cart button is disabled until you pick a darn size.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah. We’ve run into that a lot. People just love adding extra small to their cart, not picking anything.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, if they look at it and go, “Oh, cool. Yeah, that is what I want.” They could just click add to cart without thinking. We’ve got… I gotta turn my notifications off. Good God. Do not disturb engaged. All right.
Yeah, looking at this thing, it is just… It’s very, it’s lovely. They force the size. I like the… They’ve got a size chart. It opens in a modal window. Oh my gosh. If you have anything that involves sizes, give them the size chart. The other really nice thing they do here is right under that add to cart button, what’s my number one fear about buying something? Especially something with sizes? What happens if it doesn’t fit? Well, that’s why they’ve got the size chart to try and reassure me, but then below the add to cart button, free shipping and 30-day returns, no questions asked.
So, now you have just… They have actively busted my objection thoroughly.
Paul Reda: Check out the size chart. When you click on it at the bottom of the size chart, “Still debating? No worries. Our hassle-free 30-day return policy allows you to try us on for size and find the perfect pair.” So, I mean they’re even busting the return objection in the size chart.
Kurt Elster: And, you know, one of the things that I think some merchants wrongly believe is like, “Well, we can only tell you something once.” And here, they’re telling, it’s the exact… You know, it’s the same text in both places on this product page. If it’s important, keep telling me about it.
Paul Reda: This is really stupid, but click on one of the images, the product photos, and blow it up. And then hover over the close button.
Kurt Elster: Oh, the size chart’s X does the same thing. It’s all CSS animation.
Paul Reda: I know. That’s so-
Kurt Elster: I wondered if you were gonna bring that up.
Paul Reda: That’s so minor, but it’s just like, “Oh.”
Kurt Elster: You love that. You love it!
Paul Reda: It’s just a little cute thing. I love it.
Kurt Elster: I think it’s important to have those little UX details. Like recent… On the CORSA Performance site, the add to cart button, you did this. The background of the add-to-cart button on hover changes to carbon fiber, this exotic material they use. I thought that was great.
The other thing they do here that we see on Allbirds that we see a lot, the badges that communicate the core product offerings, and then what’s nice about that is like that kind of becomes a designed language that occurs across multiple products. So, they’ve got like lounger highlights, Merino wool. The downside is you gotta have an illustrator, or you need to be able to… They need to be fairly general things, or generic things, or universal is the right word. Universal elements, where you can find an off-the-shelf icon set that does it.
So, either do that, or if the client will provide illustrations, or our designer is also an illustrator. So, we can get those made. And then they do accordion menus, which I don’t… I’m not in love with. I’m sure they tested the heck out of it. Let me refresh. Like there’s just… I mean, it’s 100 characters. Just leave them open.
Paul Reda: There was a back and forth a couple months ago in the Facebook group about this, where someone was like, “Well, what if…” And I came out hard of being like, “Hey, if you have information to tell people, don’t hide it from them. Put it all out there.” And someone was like, “Well, what if someone’s not… What if it’s not that important?” It’s like, “Well, if it’s not important, then why is it on your product page?”
Kurt Elster: Then why is it there?
Paul Reda: If it’s important enough to be on the product page, which is arguably the most important page on your store, then you should make it easy for people to see. And if it’s so unimportant that we can just hide it from people and they don’t need to look at it, well, why is it even there in the first place?
So-
Kurt Elster: I agree with you.
Paul Reda: I would be… And especially considering the size of these things, it’s so tiny, the amount of stuff in there, just have these all expanded out. Just have… The headers are very nice. They got the little rule above them. Just have them all open.
Kurt Elster: What’s funny is on this page, it does, there are reviews when you scroll down. But they don’t do review stars on the collection page. They have review stars on the product page. I wonder why that is. And then the very atypical thing they do is how the product photos are listed out. They’re in a grad, so there’s no thumbnails. You just see all the photos and you can zoom them in. We did-
Paul Reda: Which we’ve done on Adam’s Polishes.
Kurt Elster: Adamspolishes.com, and it works really well. If you’ve got great photos, it’s just a great way to showcase it, and they absolutely did.
Paul Reda: Well, let’s pop over to a different product. If you go back to the collection and go to the men’s wool runners.
Kurt Elster: Okay, what about it? Wow! There’s a video.
Paul Reda: That’s right. There’s a video in the product photos, and if you click on it, it expands out to be a full, giant video. But yeah, so that’s what we were talking about-
Kurt Elster: That’s pretty sweet.
Paul Reda: … in terms of having mixed media within your product photos.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s cool. All right. Well, I’m a size 11. Let’s add this to cart. What happens? And of course, we get a drawer cart, which seems to be the standard now. That’s in vogue. In the drawer cart, they have a free shipping progress bar right at the top, so it says, “Congrats, you get free standard shipping.” And I’m willing to bet if my item was below their free shipping threshold, it would tell me the exact dollar amount I was away from free shipping.
Paul Reda: And we got an upsell in here. We got, “Even better with tubers,” and it tries to sell me some $16 socks, and if you hover over the add thing, the little add plus sign does a nice little rotation that I like very much.
Kurt Elster: You’ve done stuff like that. I’ve seen like that rotation effect on buttons before.
Paul Reda: Yeah, we do a bunch of stuff on Adam’s. We do stuff like that. Yeah. Oh, note this, by the way. This is crazy. What size are your socks that are being offered?
Kurt Elster: Oh, look at that. They are the correct size to fit the shoes.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They’re reading what the size shoe is in the cart and then offering you the appropriately sized sock.
Kurt Elster: So, doing cross-sells, it’s easy. It’s fairly straightforward. Doing cross-sells where the… with multiple variants, okay, now it’s complicated, because you can’t just add it to cart. You need to know, like the person has to make a decision. So, how do you do that in a clean way? And that’s where this custom development really helps. In this case, it didn’t have to bother asking me the size, because it knew. That’s very good.
All right. Let’s check out. Did they style their checkout? Yes! Thank God, they styled their checkout. You would be amazed the high-level stores that don’t style the checkout. The fonts match, they got the logo up there, it looks like there’s a little bit of extra styling done on the thumbnails for the quantity.
I notice they under gift card, the discount code input, they renamed it gift card. Because that’s normally where you would stick a discount code or a gift card. Here, they’ve renamed it. I’m guessing they don’t do a lot of discounting. And then, subtotal, “Expedited orders cannot be shipped or delivered on weekends, holidays, nor can they be shipped to a PO box.” I’m willing to bet that people still type in PO boxes.
Paul Reda: Oh, well-
Kurt Elster: There’s an app that’ll fix it. Address Validator. You can force it to stop people from doing that. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. All right, the Allbirds site’s great. What’s the verdict? What do you think?
Paul Reda: It’s a good site, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: That’s-
Paul Reda: They’re good dogs, Brent.
Kurt Elster: The thing here, though, is like would people go, “I want a site like Allbirds.” They’re not seeing the tremendous level of effort and like coherent team effort that went into it. With it being… It’s like this wasn’t just a designer and developer ran off and did this. This required tremendous support and buy-in from the Allbirds organization in providing content and getting the data and the product information management sorted. And that’s the kind of thing that really, like if you want this level of polish, that’s what makes or breaks you.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They hired many people and paid them a lot of money over the span of many, many months, in order for this to become like this, and-
Kurt Elster: Well, I mean at this point, this has been ongoing for years.
Paul Reda: I know. I mean, we’re talking-
Kurt Elster: I assume the first version did not look this, or didn’t-
Paul Reda: Yeah, we’re talking-
Kurt Elster: It probably looked this nice. I doubt it functioned this nicely.
Paul Reda: Yeah, we’re talking about years of iteration here, but that’s the thing. It’s like you want a store that’s like Allbirds? Okay, cool. You need to give us probably a six-figure amount of money, and then we’re gonna work together over the next three years ago, and hopefully at the end of the three years, there may be something like Allbirds.
Kurt Elster: There’s also a lot of self-restraint.
Paul Reda: But we’re not just giving that to you.
Kurt Elster: There’s a lot of self-editing here, like this site is not covered in weird widgets. There’s not sticky elements everywhere. You know, there’s not a ton of bonus, bizarre content that had to be added. It’s very deliberate.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, to a lot of people we’ve spoken to, and have had to deal with over the years, that navigation and that single, giant homepage image would never have gotten past them. They never would have allowed it. It is too much of a choice. They can’t have something that’s like that confident of a choice be in their store. They’re more worried about covering all their bases and shoveling more garbage on there, to like, “Well, what about this? Well, what about this? What about this?”
Whereas Allbirds is just like, “Here’s the stuff. There’s three things. You’re done.” And they’re confident enough to go with that.
Kurt Elster: 100%. Yeah. It takes confidence. And one of the things that we consistently see is people are often… They’re scared to make bold decisions in life in general, but also in website design, and they’re… We almost always see clients get the equivalent of wedding jitters, wedding nerves, before launching a new design, a new theme, a new store. And it seems like a very normal thing, but you gotta have… At some point, you just gotta press send, right? You gotta send it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I’ve been thinking, you know, it’s sort of like nobody’s favorite movie is a Ron Howard movie. Like no one’s just like, “Man, Ron Howard does it again. So great. So cool.”
Kurt Elster: Swish!
Paul Reda: He does good. See, like he does good, fine work that everyone can enjoy, but it’s like he doesn’t engender the kind of rabid enjoyment, and love, and attention grabbing that David Lynch, or someone crazy, or someone with a more distinctive choice-making style does. And I think that’s kind of what Allbirds does. Not that it’s David Lynch, because you know, there isn’t like a fucking… All the stuff isn’t backwards or whatever.
Kurt Elster: It’s sensical?
Paul Reda: But you know, they make choices, and they stick with them, and they go through it with those thoughts in mind.
Kurt Elster: Well, we’ve gone over an hour. Let’s wrap it up there. The last thing I want to close on is if you enjoyed that teardown and you want to see more of that teardown action, I am joining conversion rate optimization pro Nick Disabato, fellow Shopify agency owner Chase Clymer, and email copywriting enthusiast, Val Geisler, for a virtual Shopify meetup in a couple weeks, and the link is in the show notes. Well, it’s actually… It’s a long, not great link, but it’s a virtual Shopify meetup, presented by Honest Ecommerce, and I… It’s free, so I hope to see you there. The link will be in the show notes.
And as always, join our Facebook group, where I already announced that virtual conference. Anything else, Mr. Reda, before I hit stop?
Paul Reda: No. I need to eat lunch and go back to KeySmart.
Kurt Elster: All right. Enjoy your lunch, and you have work to do, and I will talk to you soon.
Paul Reda: All right, goodbye.
Kurt Elster: See you guys.