Ask us Anything: August 2022 Edition
Our popular 'Ask Us Anything' series continues
We open with news of a ponzi scheme, then answer your burning questions.
We discuss:
and more_!_
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
August AMA
Kurt Elster: So, I’m going to L.A. this week.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. My brain’s not ready.
Kurt Elster: Your brain’s not ready for manufactured banter?
Paul Reda: My brain… Well, the banter’s not manufactured. The first line is thought up ahead of time, like independently, and then the person that thinks it up just yells it out, and then the other person has to react. You obviously beat me to it and my brain’s not ready to react.
Kurt Elster: I like that we have broken down the anatomy of a cold open.
Paul Reda: That’s literally how they go, like when we sit down and you’re setting up all the cameras, I’m kind of like, “Ooh, I’m gonna say this when he starts recording and that’s how we’re gonna start the show.” And then I say the thing and we just roll from there.
Kurt Elster: You know what my favorite cold open is?
Paul Reda: What?
Kurt Elster: I sat down. I said, “All right,” I hit record. You said, “Are we recording?” I said, “Yeah.” And you said, “So, I stuck my hand in baby vomit this morning.” And I knew that that was both true and it really caught me off guard, and I was in the same position where I’m like, “I can’t follow up with that.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: I got nothing.
Paul Reda: I mean, you’re going to L.A. Great.
Kurt Elster: Gotta go to L.A. for an eCommerce day.
Paul Reda: Tried to think of a funny thing to say but you know, I don’t really have anything.
Kurt Elster: In and out. Quick adventure.
Paul Reda: You’re speaking at an eCommerce thing?
Kurt Elster: I’m speaking at E-Commerce Day.
Paul Reda: Is that something that you’re well versed in?
Kurt Elster: eCommerce?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Do you feel comfortable talking about that?
Kurt Elster: I still have that imposter syndrome.
Paul Reda: But you know, fake it till you make it. I mean, I get it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I figure I’m 10 years into this. Eventually, I’ll stop feeling like an imposter.
Paul Reda: Oh. All right, all right.
Kurt Elster: Someday.
Paul Reda: Well, you know, the late Vin Scully… RIP, he died yesterday, who was the play-by-play announcer for the Dodgers for 65 years, Kurt, largely regarded as the greatest announcer of all time, Kurt, who doesn’t know who Vin Scully is.
Kurt Elster: I am so glad to pretend to not know sports as an audience surrogate so you can explain it gently to the people who don’t know, who aren’t me.
Paul Reda: When he announced his retirement he said he had to retire because he felt like eventually people were gonna figure out he didn’t know what he was doing. Even though he’s regarded as the greatest baseball person who ever lived.
Kurt Elster: So, even the people with decades of experience who are the absolute number one best at what they do, top of their game, who’ve received many accolades, awards, and Wikipedia entries-
Paul Reda: A Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Kurt Elster: … are still like, “You know, I don’t know. Eventually, people are gonna catch on that I’m just faking it.” I love those stories. Because you know imposter syndrome, it’s in your head. And by virtue of fearing that you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s what makes you strive to be better. Where you get into trouble is where you’re like, “I absolutely know what I’m doing and no one can tell me otherwise and I don’t need to figure out anything else, because I already did.” That’s when you’re in trouble.
That’s like, “All right, now you need to go look up Dunning-Kruger.”
Paul Reda: Do you want to talk about your sneaker arbitrage that is tangentially related to Shopify?
Kurt Elster: Man. I read this article. Nicekicks.com, which is a sneaker blog, did this incredible expose about… was it Zadeh Sneakers I think was the name of the business? In Oregon. The guy was preselling and reselling sneakers through a backdoor deal on a Shopify store.
Paul Reda: Yeah. He clearly had someone inside at Nike that was feeding him thousands of rare Nikes before they hit the market.
Kurt Elster: In that industry that’s not an uncommon thing. It drives people nuts.
Paul Reda: As well it should.
Kurt Elster: But the fact that sneakers became their own weird investment class of assets somewhere around 2019 is what has caused this. I mean, there’s just so much money in it. But no, this guy was running a legitimate sneaker resale business. It was a Shopify store. Until it wasn’t and he was just borrowing to make up for refunds and sales he could not have possibly fulfilled. And now he’s got federal charges.
Paul Reda: Yeah. He was selling more sneakers than he had, then was scamming other people to get money to do the refunds for the sneakers he didn’t have, and then he was like forging loan documents, and now he’s probably gonna go to prison.
Kurt Elster: For the amount of money stolen and the amount of people who got hurt, I hope so.
Paul Reda: Got hurt is a relative term.
Kurt Elster: Well, I was reading, there was an excerpt in there, because people would buy sneakers and resell them and make money, and then so they’d say, “Oh, this works. I trust this guy.” And then they would pool their money, like there was one guy who… He sold his house and took the proceeds of that and bought sneakers, and then of course once he made the big purchase, and it was like $750,000, or a million, then he never got the sneakers. He was out the money. And it’s not like… When it’s a wire transfer there’s no credit card gonna protect you. PayPal often would not help these people because they’d say, “Well, you’re a reseller so it doesn’t count.”
I’ll link to it in the show notes. We should dedicate an episode or part of an episode to discussing this because it really… It was interesting and fascinating. Did you know… I learned from this article Shopify gift cards have a $9,999 hard cap on them. That’s the max you can issue a gift card for.
Paul Reda: Well, I was gonna give my mom a $15,000 Shopify gift card for her birthday but now I can’t.
Kurt Elster: Well, so you have to give her two.
Paul Reda: Oh, okay.
Kurt Elster: You divide it across two. And that’s what this guy started doing before switching to a third-party gift card app.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Instead of giving people cash refunds he would give them refunds on a Shopify gift card, which is against the Shopify TOS.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The Shopify… Had they known, they would have shut his store down.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And part of that scam was he’d say, “Well, you know, yeah, you want a refund, but if we give you the refund we’ll have to ban you from ever buying again. But you can stay a customer and we’ll give you a gift card for 110%. You get 110% refund but it’s store credit,” is essentially what they did. And so, it kept the scam going. Another variation on Ponzi scheme, but this time with sneakers and something like $70 million.
Paul Reda: My main thing is if you acquire a Lambo due to crimes, don’t post pictures in your Lambo online. All crime-related things-
Kurt Elster: Don’t document your ill-gotten gains on Instagram stories?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Don’t do that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, because that’s always just gonna end up as evidence in your trial.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: All right.
Paul Reda: We did it.
Kurt Elster: We did it.
Paul Reda: My brain didn’t work. We primed the pump. Now it’s going.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We worked out a cold open. Very nice.
Paul Reda: Show’s over. Nice talking to you folks.
Kurt Elster: This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster. I’m joined by show producer Paul Reda and today-
Paul Reda: Tech Nasty!
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And today, we’re discussing your burning questions as sourced from our Facebook group, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. Any other news items, housekeeping items? Oh, I got one. Shopify invested… TechCrunch reported this, invested $100 million in Klaviyo. And Klaviyo is now officially the, “This is our recommended email provider for Shopify Plus merchants.” What surprised, when I saw this going around, a common sentiment was people saying-
Paul Reda: It wasn’t?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Hold on, Shopify hadn’t invested in them, and they weren’t the go-to solution? That’s how natural that pairing is. That’s like peanut butter and jelly.
Paul Reda: We don’t know any… We don’t have any clients that aren’t on Klaviyo.
Kurt Elster: I’m sure there’s like one, and it’s probably because they migrated from something else, and it’s like a legacy decision. But yeah. No, that’s like 9 out of 10. I like it. It’s nice.
Paul Reda: So, what do we think, Shopify owns like 10% of Klaviyo now?
Kurt Elster: All right. I looked up Klaviyo’s… No, Klaviyo’s valuation, nine and a half billion.
Paul Reda: What?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Okay, so they own not 10% of Klaviyo.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. But you know, good news to see those things tightening the relationship.
All right, an AMA episode in which we ask our Facebook group members what are you struggling with right now. Tell us. And they share, and then we go through, and the ones that we definitely know the answer to, I include. And a few that are above my pay grade, too technically esoteric, I throw out. We’ve got the list. Is Facebook still a viable advertising platform?
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, of course it is. Why would it not be? I understand your ROAS went down. You can’t do the same thing you were doing two years ago and achieve the same results. That’s all that’s happened, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead and you can’t use it anymore.
Kurt Elster: I would agree with that sentiment. Yeah. ROAS went down. I think it bottomed out because it now… Our clients that stuck with Facebook advertising kept at it, were sophisticated, had experience with it, struggled. Everybody suffered with it post iOS 14’s privacy changes. In the last quarter, we see things getting progressively better. And supposedly, all right, people are figuring their way around it. The algorithm is figuring its way around it. It is improving. And for sure, if you could get a 4X ROAS, which is what we’re seeing now, that’s profitable. You could profitably acquire new customers with that.
And so, yes, I think the answer is yes, it is still viable. But digital marketing, it is a fast evolving and changing thing. And so, that advice works now, but that’s different than advice 24 months ago, and that’s gonna be different than advice 12 months from now.
Paul Reda: Where should eCom sites get the most for their advertising dollar? Depends. It depends on what your audience is. What is your audience? Where is your audience? That would be the place where you would get the best bang for your buck probably.
Kurt Elster: Now, I will say I think no matter what, you have to be doing some level of digital marketing. The whole thing is one machine. You have to feed the beast. And so, like Google Shopping, Google Performance Max Campaigns, a variety of Facebook and Instagram ads, that’s like we’ve got our PPC channels. If your audience is on TikTok, people are experimenting with TikTok ads, and I think the… But people are also starting to explore new avenues now. And so, there’s a renewed interest in marketplaces, just like, “Hey, I’m gonna put in the effort and list my stuff and get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible.” I can list my stuff on Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, eBay, Wish. There is no end to the number of marketplaces with Shopify integrations that will happily try and sell your stuff for you, and so we see that, as well.
And then people are starting to look into previously less common things, so like direct mail making a comeback. PostPilot. Plug that. And there was another one I saw. Oh, like people taking a renewed interest in more traditional things, PR and SEO. And so, we’re gonna do an episode, next week’s episode I think, assuming everything goes well, will be how to be your own best publicist.
Peter has a question about your agency, Paul.
Paul Reda: Oh. Would we consider working with a non-Plus retail store, not DTC? We have non-Plus clients. And it’s a retail store that’s selling online?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That sounds good.
Paul Reda: If you sell online on Shopify, you could be our client.
Kurt Elster: I am potentially interested in helping you sell more stuff, more often, to more people.
Paul Reda: That is the only requirement is that you are selling things online on Shopify or would like to start doing that, to become our client.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And then like sometimes things are too esoteric.
Paul Reda: Yeah. But then sometimes you ask for something weird, or like you can’t even spell your own name right in the application form, in which case we might reject you. Or we think you sell baby seal skins. We don’t like that.
Kurt Elster: Sure, there are some exceptions, but for the most part the barrier to entry is are you selling stuff on Shopify or plan to?
Paul Reda: Yeah. If you do that, then we’ll say, “Tell me more.” And tell me more might lead to things that we go, “Get out of here.”
Kurt Elster: Anyway, to answer Peter Roy Barlow’s question directly, just email me, message me. I am happy to discuss it with you. Thank you for asking.
Paul Reda: Best advice for a growing eCommerce company, I guess, when dealing with inventory? How to balance running out of things versus tapping into credit to keep up and expand, blah, blah, blah. Tell me, Mr. I-Have-an-MBA, how do we do that? Because I don’t know any of that shit.
Kurt Elster: Well, all right, so two things. Traditionally, there’s two things that are gonna help you here. A, inventory forecasting, which as far as I can tell is look at the previous period’s numbers and make an informed guess based on that for your prediction, and then combine that with hey, most businesses, especially ones that have to manufacture or purchase inventory, have lines of credit with a bank. It is a… You’re never gonna regret having a line of credit available to you, even if you don’t use it. So, that is often the case, but then there are also easier options now, like Shopify Capital, and there’s a lot of online services that’ll give you capital.
I think if we want to be creative here presales, preorders are a really great way to try and get that cash up front for the inventory you need and to help predict this is how much I’m gonna need, because I’m gonna need however much to fulfill the presales and then some. And so, I like that idea.
But I’m not an expert at this one and this question has come up before, and I’ve asked around, and the answer is it’s hard. It’s hard. You’re probably gonna screw it up more than once.
Paul Reda: I stupidly watch a lot of those business shows that I know are technically still reality shows, and thus not real, but there’s so many stories of people who are like, “I totally screwed up my inventory. I bought too much shit. Or I didn’t buy enough shit. And now I can’t fulfill my orders and then everyone canceled, so because I couldn’t fulfill the orders I lost all this money.” It’s a scary thing. It’s one of the reasons we’ve never gone into, even though we’re sales geniuses, obviously, we’ve never gone into selling a physical good, because we’re too scared of the manufacturing and shipping process and inventory management.
Kurt Elster: I know. The nice part about being a eCommerce consultant is like I get to stay in my lane.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s like, “Well, we’re gonna do the part that we’re smart at, and the smart that we’re not smart at, that’s not our problem.”
Kurt Elster: There’s another question further down the list that I want to jump to that I think builds on that. Michael Poulsen asks, “Maybe not quite up your alley, but how would you go about building the “perfect” team around a Shopify store? Roles, responsibilities, tasks. I know it’s one of the hardest things for many stores scaling up their business.”
Paul Reda: See, I think that’s again, it all just depends on your business.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: And how it’s structured, and who you have around you, and you know, who has what skills. But I think it should be you shouldn’t try to force people to do stuff they’re not good at.
Kurt Elster: You’re right. So, the number of people you hire and who you’re hiring, I think that is so dependent on exactly what you said. The size of your business at that time, what you’re selling, what your existing skills and resources are, how you’re selling it. So, I think a broader answer would be, “Well, let’s look at this in terms of roles and departments.” I think it’s customer service, fulfillment, marketing, a owner role which ideally is both president and CEO, so like you are figuring out the forward thinking vision that you’re moving toward, like what the goals are, and then also responsible and overseeing everything as president.
But yeah, we’ve got so like marketing. Who’s gonna bring in new customers and sell the stuff? Fulfillment, we gotta get the stuff to people and handle returns and exchanges. Customer service, we gotta be able to answer questions. All these people have to talk to each other, so we need like a regular… They’re probably all remote, potentially, so we need like a regular weekly meeting for these folks, and then you still have new product development. Who does that fall on? We have to come up with the product ideas, then we have to develop them, and get them manufactured, whatever that process is.
So, that’s potentially a fourth one. Those are the siloes I think you have. And then you start there, and with growth, you’re gonna add people to those teams and then start breaking those teams out. But like how big and how crazy a team is, dependent largely on the size of the business, but then also somewhat on like how you want to run it.
Paul Reda: Flipping back, Braedon wants to know is there a way to add a link inside a single or multiline metafield text field? Yeah, why not? Can’t you just add an anchor tag?
Kurt Elster: That’s the thing he didn’t know.
Paul Reda: Oh, you can’t just add. Oh. Okay. I was like wait, does it escape out all special characters, so the anchor tags don’t work?
Kurt Elster: No. You should be able. So, the answer is you have to type to HTML in.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You have to type a… Google anchor tag and that’s what you gotta put in. That’s how you make a link.
Kurt Elster: Less than A, space, href, equals, slash. Yeah. You gotta type it in yourself. And that’s if you’ve never dealt with code, that sounds scary, but HTML is a markup language, so there’s not a lot to it. Just find an example, copy and paste it, fill in your stuff, it’ll work. I swear. And you’ll feel like a real badass if you’ve never done this and you write your first anchor tag.
Paul Reda: Let’s not get crazy.
Kurt Elster: I’m a real badass because I’ve wrote an anchor tag.
Paul Reda: No. David, “Shopify’s share price is tanking like many other tech companies. Do you still see it as the best eCommerce platform going forward? Any concerns at all?” Well, the share price has nothing to do with whether it’s a good platform or not. The stock market’s completely irrational, so who cares?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think you have to decouple those things. They’re not… They’re related but not in the way a sane person would think they are.
Paul Reda: It’s like is Shopify still a viable company? And will it still be an eCommerce platform over the next… I don’t know, five-year timeline horizon? Yes. Okay, so I’m fine. I will reassess later. It’s like what are we gonna move to, Magento? Barf. What else is there?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so the short answer is yeah, absolutely, it’s still a viable platform.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And the stock price thing, so, you figured this out. You noticed this. So, when we were really deep in the throes of the pandemic, before that, eCommerce had been growing at what, 2% a year?
Kurt Elster: I don’t remember the exact percentage.
Paul Reda: All right. Let’s call it 2% a year. So, every year eCommerce’s share of total commerce went up by 2%.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It was a steady-
Paul Reda: It was like it was 30%-
Kurt Elster: It was consistent year-over-year growth.
Paul Reda: … then it was 32%, then it was 34%, or whatever. I’m throwing those numbers out of nowhere. Then, when the pandemic hit, it jumped up to like 8%.
Kurt Elster: It hockey sticks.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It goes into like 8% to 10% in 2020. It does another 8% in 2021. So, everyone was kind of like, “Oh, holy shit. We just made 10 years of eCommerce advancement in 18 months.” So, what a lot of these companies did and what the market did was they said, “Well, where we were gonna be in 10 years, we gotta get there right now, because that’s where we’re at. Everything jumped by 10 years.” Only it turns out what’s happening is all of that has now flatlined, and so obviously this is helpful for the video, but if it was going like this before and then it hockey sticked up like that, it’s now going like this, on the old line. The old 45-degree angle that it was gonna be, it’s now flattened out and it's going over to where it should have been. So, it’s not… We didn’t go 10 years. We did jump 10 years and now we’re not gonna grow for a little while it’s looking like until it goes back on the trend it was at before the pandemic.
So, what Shopify did was they said, “Oh, shit. We gotta be where we’re gonna be in 10 years,” and then it stopped being like it was gonna be in 10 years. So, they had to let some people go, unfortunately, it sounds like, and none of that sounds good to the market.
Kurt Elster: They laid off 1,000 people.
Paul Reda: Which is what, 5%, I think?
Kurt Elster: It was 10%.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: So, they went from 10,000 head count from 9,000. But in 2019 they didn’t have nearly that many people. So, they staffed up hugely on the belief, the bullish belief, and I thought the same thing, was, “Hey, eCommerce adoption, conservatively, just got accelerated by five years.” And maybe more. And so, we’re gonna staff up to meet that demand. And then 2022 comes around, and lockdown is lifted, and now people start going back to stores and shifting spending to things, to a lot of travel, record travel this summer, and so that reduced our eCommerce adoption rate. And the U.S. Census Bureau gives us these statistics. They’ll track eCommerce dollars as a percent of total retail spending.
And so, we’re not pulling these out of thin air. It’s from a government-
Paul Reda: I was pulling my actual numbers out of thin air.
Kurt Elster: You were making them up.
Paul Reda: But the sentiment is the same.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The sentiment is the same. And so, on that news, that hammered the stock price, unfortunately.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And that we’re just gonna get zero growth in order to make up for all the years, for the two years we had 8% growth.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And so, I would… What I appreciated about it was that other CEOs may have said like, “Well, you know, the losses would have been way worse if someone else had been running the company. Good thing I was here.” Whereas Tobi said, “I was wrong.” Those were the three magic words in his announcement. I was wrong. He admitted to it, and I think that makes all the difference.
Paul Reda: But everyone was wrong.
Kurt Elster: We were all wrong.
Paul Reda: We thought it would go back to just chunking away at 2% but now at a higher level, but now it’s looking like it’s just gonna be zero for a little bit.
Kurt Elster: It looks like it’s normalizing back to the same adoption rate it would have had had that outlier-
Paul Reda: Had the pandemic never happened, it’s just… It’s going back to the old line is what it’s looking like.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: So, it’s like still growing. It’s like whatever you thought-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so it’s still growing.
Paul Reda: Whatever you thought of Shopify in 2019, that’s what the same thing is it’s gonna be. It’s just that where we’re… The fantasy realm where we’re all just swimming in Scrooge McDuck money banks, turns out that’s not gonna happen.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Okay. I think we adequately answered that.
Paul Reda: I own stock in Shopify, so you should buy it. You have to issue disclaimers.
Kurt Elster: We are both Shopify shareholders.
Paul Reda: Shopify shareholders. Also, if it goes down, we can’t make our mortgage payments and our lives will be destroyed.
Kurt Elster: That’s not true. Here’s an easy one. Do you need to create a landing page to capture email, SMS, texts, from a Facebook ads campaign, or how could we do this? I’m looking to grow our lists as they’re a significant source of our net profit.
Paul Reda: You don’t need to, but it sounds like a great idea.
Kurt Elster: So, you probably want to send it to its own landing page.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: If you’re using a popup builder, whether it’s like Privy will do this, Klaviyo, you can have a… In addition to just the popup on your website, you can use that to make a dedicated landing page or embed it on a page, but yeah, ideally you want it in a landing page that’s like, “Hey, give us your info. This is what you’re gonna get.” And then you immediately deliver on that promise. You could also try, and these work with mixed results, but a lead ad campaign. It’s one of the ad types in Facebook where people don’t have to leave Facebook. They could just say, “All right. I agree.” It auto fills and it’s like, “Do you want to give up your email and phone number to this brand?” Yes, done. And then it just goes into your whatever email flow, and then ideally you have an email flow does the selling for you. So, if that is one of your goals, that’s at least certainly something worth trying.
So, the answer is you don’t have to do a dedicated landing page, but you probably should, and since it’s just a form builder, it’s not gonna be that hard.
Paul Reda: I said that already.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: What did you add to that? Nothing. Nothing.
Kurt Elster: You weren’t talking about lead gen ads.
Paul Reda: Scaling up your business by entering new markets. Run multiple stores and deal with… Michael just likes issuing statements. He’s not actually asking questions.
Kurt Elster: He’s suggesting topics.
Paul Reda: “Run multiple stores and deal with the issue of syncing stock and managing products and content for each country or run it all on one store? To my knowledge, Markets is not quite there yet.” I don’t know. Whatever you decide is less of a pain in the ass if you don’t want to use Markets, which is the thing it was made to do.
Kurt Elster: I must restart these cameras.
Paul Reda: I saw… I was driving home yesterday; I was behind a pickup that had a giant Fuck Hoonigan sticker on the gate. I wanted to get next to him and be like, “Hey! I win. You bought that from me.”
Kurt Elster: I was leaving Best Buy and a guy in the car next to me goes, “Hey, nice wrap.” Referring to the vinyl wrap. He had this big Hoonigan sticker on the side. And I said, “Hey, are you a big Hoonigan fan?” And he got this look on his face. He’s like, “Yeah.” And I just said, “I built their website.” And then I left. And I heard him on… As I’m getting in the car he was on speakerphone with someone. He goes, “This guy next to me in a vinyl wrapped Tesla just said he built Hoonigan’s website.”
I’m not sure if he thought I was lying or not.
Paul Reda: Does the vinyl wrapped Tesla make you more or less trustworthy?
Kurt Elster: Oh, I don’t know.
Paul Reda: That’s a good question.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. After we were just like, “All right, so when you’re committing your Ponzi scheme scam, don’t post all your stuff on Instagram.” That’s always like as soon as someone’s engaged in fraud, step one is they’re like, “All right, I’m going to buy an absurd car and watch collection.” Is that the target market for ultra-high-end premium brands is just fraudsters?
Paul Reda: Well, I mean, our old client who was adjacent to the Rolex luxury watch business, I remember he told us, he was like, “You have no idea how many of these watches are bought purely with suitcases full of cash and no one knows that they’re changing hands.”
Kurt Elster: So, the answer is yes.
Paul Reda: Yes. I mean, that’s the entire luxury goods market, fine art market. It’s all just money laundering, dude.
Kurt Elster: Oh, boy. Back to our Shopify Markets question. All right, so if you’re going to do… if you’re going to do internationalization, so you have a store that serves multiple countries, so it needs to have shipping and fulfillment set up for those countries, currency switching, and language switching, and potentially there’s some cultural things that have to change, as well, you could have a single store and use some apps and theme functions and trickery. You could use Shopify Plus and Shopify Markets. This is a feature set that you could make work with this.
Paul Reda: Well, he thinks Markets is not quite there yet.
Kurt Elster: If he hasn’t tried it, how does he know for his use case?
Paul Reda: I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think if you’re considering it, and it’ll work for you, because like there’s… Each of these solutions always has some limitation to it. And then like sometimes you just get early on with a new feature, someone uses it who had some edge case that it didn’t fit, and then suddenly the narrative becomes, “Oh, it’s just it’s not ready. It doesn’t work.” Because like the first person who used it was incredibly pedantic about something or other. I have not… I have looked through the documentation. I like Shopify Markets. I want to use it. I have not had case or opportunity to use it yet, but I certainly don’t sleep on it. I would consider it.
I think that sounds better than trying to shoestring together a bunch of apps. But the one that’s gonna give you the most flexibility and functionality and make you tear your hair out is you do multiple stores. One store for each localization. And then I have absolute freedom and control. But now I’m managing a network of stores and that… Your overhead goes way up.
And you say, “Oh, I gotta sync orders and inventory.” There’s apps that’ll do that for you, or maybe it just goes into your ERP and your ERP does it.
My answer to this is sure. All three of these solutions are viable. Whichever one works best for you. And don’t give up on Markets.
Paul Reda: I’m gonna be honest. I don’t know if Michael actually has a store yet, but he’s like, “How do you build a team when you have a store? When I enter new markets, how do I do that?” And part of me is kind of like, “Michael, do you have a store yet? Are you game planning out a little too much? Maybe get the store going.”
Kurt Elster: That could be the case here. I really don’t know. But yeah, when you’re… It’s really early, and you don’t know what you don’t know, and so you’re trying to be prepared to reduce risk, it is easy to just go crazy game planning out everything and then really you end up having done nothing. It’s research as procrastination.
Paul Reda: Kurt, have you seen any useful and easy use cases for Shopify Flow that make sense to implement at small volumes of products and with no developer on board?
Kurt Elster: So, absolutely you do not need a developer to use Shopify Flow. That is a no code solution. It’s no code automation. I love it. It is on… It’s a Shopify official app. It’s available for Plus and Advanced plans. That’s new that you can get that on Advanced. And it’s a really cool automation tool and it’s got a ton of templates that it comes with. So, this is a recurring question. It’s like, “What do I use Shopify Flow for?”
Go look through the templates. They give you dozens of example use cases for how you can use it. Do any of those apply to you? If so, try it. Trying to work it from scratch when you’ve never played with the thing is too hard. Start with a template and then once you get a feel for it, you start modifying the templates, and then pretty soon you’re making your own templates. But like here’s an easy one to start with. Let’s say your average order value is 75 bucks. It would be suspicious if a order over $500 showed up one day. So, set up a Shopify Flow such that if an order over 500 bucks comes through, it does not immediately grab it and fulfill it. It instead tags it and sends you an email being like, “Hey, you need to check on this.”
Often, we use it for exception handling, where it’s like if weird stuff shows up, try and flag it with Shopify Flow.
Hana Tea, I don’t know if this is a brand or a person, asks, “If section IDs are stored in JSON files,” super-technical, “then why do the IDs change when you duplicate the theme?”
Paul Reda: I don’t know. I didn’t write it.
Kurt Elster: I asked Anne Thomas. Anne Thomas, theme developer, and she said… She also went, “I don’t know.” But then she just went, “Hold on,” and she gave me an answer.
Paul Reda: All right. Let me just make up an answer that I think is what it is.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: Because the store is just one big pot of the IDs and when you duplicate the theme it can’t have two IDs in there because it’s all one big pot. Like to the store, it’s not a duplicated theme, so that’s why it has to change all the IDs on the sections so it can signify this is actually a different section in a different theme.
Kurt Elster: All right, here we go.
Anne Thomas: Why don’t section IDs stay the same when you duplicate a theme? So, you may have noticed if you update your theme or if you duplicate it, the section IDs actually change slightly, so the last part usually stays the same, but then there’s this other middle number that gets updated and changed. It’s still referenced as the same in the JSON files, meaning that that new changed ID will be the same, and so your sections will still appear where they’re supposed to. That’s all good. However, this can be an issue if you are targeting that ID with CSS, so it's different styling, or the more common use is navigation.
So, not really sure why Shopify does this exactly. I know that was the actual question. Who knows? Maybe it’s something to do with how the theme editor works. It’s fully built in React, so maybe they… Every time, it just happens to create a new ID for all those section templates or section IDs. They’re being created dynamically, so maybe that’s just something that happens.
The main thing, though, to remember, is that you want to make sure that you’re keeping track of those IDs if you use them in your navigation and update them every single time so that you don’t lose that reference. The other thing that you can do is go in and add a little ID to something that will not change in the Liquid code. So, don’t reference that section ID and instead reference something that’s hard coded, so that way you don’t need to worry about the fact that it changes each time.
Kurt Elster: So, her answer essentially was also I don’t know. You’re not crazy. That is how it works. And the solution is either you gotta remember to always update that, the section ID you’re targeting, or try and add your own separate ID that is hard coded to whatever this element is and then target that.
Paul Reda: I’m just trying to get… Oh, is the use case here they’ve written scripts or CSS files to target a specific section ID, a specific instance of a section, then they’re also a store that’s changing themes a lot and when they change the theme those IDs change?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: And we have a theme that does this.
Paul Reda: And my answer is don’t do that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Avoid it if you can. Otherwise, you’re tearing your hair out.
Paul Reda: Don’t write stuff that’s specific to individual sections.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Or just create your own section that’s gonna change. Create your own copy of that section and then give it a different name. This is the changing video, and that video changes all the time, so that’s… Instead of just being video, that section now is called change video, and then that’s usually written as a class in the section, and then you just… and if that’s the only instance of that on the store, then write your scripts or your CSS to target the class change video, which you’ve created, which you only have one of as its own separate thing that’s swapping.
Does that make sense? Probably not.
Kurt Elster: No. I’m not as clever. I would need to write this down on a whiteboard to follow along. There are more questions but we’re running out of time, so I’m gonna pick one final question here. John Taggart says, “Recently joined the group and loving it.” Thank you. “We’re about to launch our online store at the same time as our bricks and mortar. Don’t want to run discounting to promo, so what other activities should we do to drive engagement?”
If you’ve got… You have a physical store, which means you’re selling more than one item. You probably have quite a variety of inventory. That’s the thing that your customers care about, so I think your solution here is don’t overthink it and you’re sending out two consistent campaigns. Here’s what’s new in the store. You can order it online or come visit us. And here are the top sellers that were out of stock that we have since restocked. So, what’s new, what’s back in stock. And just run those promos over and over. They’re evergreen. They’re great.
And then in there you could weave in some content stuff. I don’t know what your industry or niche is. But yeah, those are the go to. Those are easy. It’s not a discount. It’s just top of mind, here’s what’s available.
Yeah. Keep it simple. All right. That concludes this episode. I think I have to go start packing now. If you have your own questions, please join our Facebook group, Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. We would be happy to hear from you.
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