The 8th installment of our popular Ask Me Anything series
In this Ask Me Anything episode sourced from our listeners, we discuss...
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
4/5/2022
Paul Reda: Because I hate myself, I went to Domino’s last night and-
Kurt Elster: The pizza place?
Paul Reda: Yes. The pizza place. They have a very… and they had a drinks fridge, like you can get your whatever, your bottle of Coke out of, and the Coke-
Kurt Elster: And your bottle of our cola?
Paul Reda: Shut up. And the Coke fridge was very fancy, and I took a photo of it and texted it to my brother and was like-
Kurt Elster: Who’s a Coke dealer.
Paul Reda: Yes. This is not for the podcast. I’m just having a conversation with you right now.
Kurt Elster: Oh, damn it.
Paul Reda: You don’t have to play it up. And I took a photo. I was like, “This is real fancy.” And he was like, “That is the number one most stolen piece of equipment is the Coke fridge we give to Domino’s.” Because it’s so nice looking, you could put it in your house, and it would totally work.
Kurt Elster: Now I gotta go to Domino’s and check out this fridge.
Paul Reda: I’ll send you the photo.
Kurt Elster: Are we gonna go with that as the cold open or something else?
Paul Reda: We can I guess. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: You know, commerce. You bought a pizza.
Paul Reda: I just ate. I’m slow. I had a Domino’s last night, so I’m like-
Kurt Elster: And you’re still processing?
Paul Reda: Yeah. It was a bad choice.
Kurt Elster: It’s a lot of carbs.
Paul Reda: I have a baby and things don’t work out a lot.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Meals and self-care go out the window.
Paul Reda: Well, she does a thing. She’s doing a thing where she will not sleep anywhere other than directly in my wife’s arms, so it’s pretty much I say hi to my wife when I come home from work, we spend some time together, and then at like 6:30, 7:00, it’s like, “Okay, goodbye. You’re going in the black pit to hold the baby for the rest of the night so the baby will sleep.”
Kurt Elster: Do you normally refer to the baby’s bedroom as the black pit?
Paul Reda: I just refer to it as a bedroom with all the lights off and all the shades closed.
Kurt Elster: I’d call that the chill out room.
Paul Reda: Oh, okay.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s better than black pit.
Paul Reda: Yeah. All right, fine. I don’t know, it’s great, because then guess what? Daddy gets to go in the basement and watch the Bulls game and maybe play some Elden Ring and no one talks to him. It’s great.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re like, “All right, baby. You hold her hostage.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. “Baby, you handle mom. I’ll get the stuff.” That’s every night. It’s great.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so what are you complaining about? While bingeing on a Domino’s pizza and admiring your stolen fridge?
Paul Reda: Last night, I literally went to Domino’s, got a Domino’s pizza, carried the box directly into my basement, sat on the couch, and ate Domino’s pizza out of a box while watching wrestling. I’m 12.
Kurt Elster: It was the watching wrestling, I’m 12, just… Yeah. No, that’s good. Let’s go with that as the cold open.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I am 12. I have a mortgage, I have a child, I have a wife, and I’m 12.
Kurt Elster: And a love of wrestling.
Paul Reda: Only AEW. None of that other one.
Kurt Elster: This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And I’m joined by my business partner and show producer, Paul Reda, and today we’re discussing your burning eCommerce questions. But before then, we have some housekeeping. Shopify Flow, officially available on the advanced plans, so if you’re on the Shopify advanced plan, or Shopify Plus and you don’t have Flow yet, go on the app store, search Flow, install this thing and play with it. It’s free. It’s an automation engine. No reason not to check it out. Even if you don’t use it, it’s like it doesn’t do anything on the front end, so it’s not gonna add load time to the site. Just go get your free toy and play with it. I like it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Generally, what it gets used for the most, at least that I see, is we’re having a big sale on, I don’t know, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, that just happened. We’re having a St. Patrick’s Day sale and we have all this St. Patrick’s Day content, and so we got that all pre-set up in a different theme, and then we will use Shopify Flow that on St. Patrick’s Day that theme will automatically publish itself and be up for that day and then unpublish itself when the day is over and no one’s gotta be there to monitor it.
Kurt Elster: You just described perfectly Shopify Launchpad.
Paul Reda: God damn it.
Kurt Elster: Launchpad, extremely nice for exactly the scenario you described. Only available on Shopify Plus.
Paul Reda: Damn it.
Kurt Elster: Shopify Flow, I don’t know if you really play with that one. It’s this rules automation engine. And so, we’ve used it for like checking for fraud scenarios and then it can flag the order, send an email, send a Slack message to be like, “Hey, someone needs to check this for fraud.” Or items came back in stock, we could publish those items. They have a whole bunch of templates they give you so it’s hard to say like, “Use Flow for this,” when it’s so open ended. It could do so much. I say just try it, play with it. It’s cool. If it’s available to you.
Paul Reda: So, yeah. Just don’t listen to anything I say for the rest of the podcast.
Kurt Elster: Well, that Domino’s is just slowing you down.
Paul Reda: I don’t know why I was just like, “I want pizza but it’s gotta be garbage.” I don’t know. It’s just like the death drive. It’s just in me.
Kurt Elster: The death drive?
Paul Reda: Yeah. You know, I’ve already spawned, so my time here on this planet is no longer needed.
Kurt Elster: So you’re swimming upstream?
Paul Reda: Yeah. I’m done. It’s over.
Kurt Elster: Oh, boy. Who’s gonna edit this podcast? He’s gonna be in a pizza coma.
We launched a new site that I think is very cool. oVertone Hair Care.
Paul Reda: It’s impressive.
Kurt Elster: oVertone.co. Ezra Firestone, who does the Black Friday episode every November with us, he and some other folks, like Drew Sanocki, who’s been on this show before, they bought this thing. They bought oVertone Hair Care, and it was Shopify but on a headless site, so it’s like the back… Everything is done on Shopify but the online store itself runs on a different platform. That’s headless. And it was like a hot trend where people were chasing headless, and for various reasons, and in this case when they bought the site they said, “You know what? Let’s just go back to Shopify core, make our lives easier, simplify our tech stack. Kurt, can you do that for us?”
And so, I did not personally do it. A newly hired member of our team who I’m quite impressed by, Tom Siodlak-
Paul Reda: We’ve worked with Tom for years. He’s great.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And we’re-
Paul Reda: And we liked him so much, he now works for us exclusively.
Kurt Elster: Full time.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Feels great. Should have done it sooner. He did a phenomenal job and this oVertone Hair Care site, entirely on Shopify. It’s a custom theme. It’s really cool. I think it looks really neat. I like it. And so, now I get to do… I get to take over. I’m gonna start doing some split testing. Google Optimize, I love you.
Paul Reda: So, like split testing, you just like… Once you get like six or seven, you know what wins, right?
Kurt Elster: Six or seven what?
Paul Reda: Like samples? You know, you show it to like seven people. It’s called a focus group.
Kurt Elster: All right, not quite like a focus group. I appreciate the setup here knowing that you’re quite skilled in statistics. Did it hurt you to make that statement?
Paul Reda: No, because I-
Kurt Elster: To play dumb like that?
Paul Reda: In my brain it was so absurdly stupid that it was funny.
Kurt Elster: Ooh, so there’s like 30% of the population that’ll just take that at face value. That’s what we know.
Paul Reda: No, you were just pissed at me because… pissed to me, not at me, because every time you tweet something about or say anything about split testing, people always just pop in and they’re just like, “Yeah, but did you test it with this? And is this statistically significant?” It’s like, “No, idiot. I looked at it 10 samples and I said good enough.” Like what do you take me for?
Kurt Elster: I did. Look, I went to college. I took two statistics classes and I got like a C in both.
Paul Reda: All right, that’s passing.
Kurt Elster: Hey, Cs get degrees, all right?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Cs get degrees.
Kurt Elster: So, no. All right, statistical significance in split tests is an issue, and so you wanna… Really dumbing it down, a lot of these tools now, especially like Google Optimize, will try and stop you from doing something stupid, like it’ll tell you, “Hey, you gotta run this longer. Hey, don’t edit this while it’s live.” It will try and keep you from screwing up your own test. But if you really want to screw up your own test, it’ll let you. And really it’s you gotta run the test long enough, so 14 days really is our minimum here, like two weeks, so that we get some pay cycles in there. And we need a large enough sample size. Google Optimize, it’ll say like probability to be best. When it hits 95% probability to be best and you’ve got that 14 days, and you have a sample size in the thousands, suddenly that’s something I could be confident in.
But if it’s like, “All right, we showed it to 100 people and it’s like a 60-40 split,” that’s just noise. But I think ultimately when you see these tests and you find them interesting and you go, “I like that idea, that sounds good to me.” Just run that test yourself. Google Optimize is free and it’s not that hard to use.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s the main thing. I feel like people take you being like, “Check out this split test and look what wins. Crazy, right?” as you telling them how they’re supposed to lay their site out, but it’s not. You’re just saying, “Check out this split test I did. Crazy, right?”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No best practices. I think with split testing the hardest thing is coming up with the ideas. And so, I like sharing the tests and then the results and then seeing like, “Hey, will someone else run this too and come back and say hey, we got the same result.” And so, never have I run a test and then like five people are like, “We ran it, and we got the same result!” Occasionally, you’ll get one person who does it. But if we could get like multiple people to run similar tests across separate stores with different audience, okay, now you start getting toward like maybe this is a best practice. Good clarifications to be had. Should we jump into our Q&A?
Normally, in our Q&A, our AMAs, we try and come up with a theme.
Paul Reda: We’re not. We’re just ripping through these.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s no theme here. These are just-
Paul Reda: The content hole needs to get filled, so we’re just filling the content hole until we’re tired.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s Tuesday and we’re just gonna… You’re gonna drink from the firehose of our experience here.
Paul Reda: Oh, it’s Tuesday when they’re listening to this.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Okay, because today is Wednesday.
Kurt Elster: Well, look. My kids are on spring break; therefore, time has lost all meaning.
Paul Reda: Dude, I have a baby. What do you think I know about time losing all meaning?
Kurt Elster: You’re trying to sleep train a newborn, there’s just like AM and PM don’t even mean anything anymore.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Tomasz Pasko-
Paul Reda: Tomasz.
Kurt Elster: Tomasz. Yeah. Given that we grew up in Chicagoland, I really should have gotten that right.
Paul Reda: Tommy Pasko. Tommy Pasko wants to know.
Kurt Elster: I’m so impressed by your Chicago accent. That Cicero accent, it’s so good.
Paul Reda: You should meet my cousin Dave. It’s not even a bit with him. That’s Dave.
Kurt Elster: He’s just like, “Ah, three sausage sandwiches.”
Paul Reda: He’s like, “Hey, you talked to my grandpa. We went huntin’ the other day.” I’ve introduced friends from out of town to my cousin Dave and he’s like, “Oh, nice to meet ya.” And talks to them for a while and then leaves and they’re like…
Kurt Elster: He was making a shocked face. Shocked and excited.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It works for radio.
Kurt Elster: Read this question.
Paul Reda: “What do your clients use to track performance besides Google Analytics? We all go blind with iOS 14.5 changes.” Don’t think that’s true. “I know people are raving about Triple Whale.” Sure thing. That’s a thing. “What about your clients?”
I don’t know. What do you use besides Google Analytics? I don’t know. Aren’t they changing Google Analytics like next year? Everyone’s mad about it?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They’re forcing everyone into the new version, but like if you don’t upgrade by X date, you’ll lose old data. I didn’t look too much into it because the consensus among marketing Twitter was people were really quite surprised that Google was forcing this, and it was like the feeling was this wasn’t quite ready for prime time. And so, I asked our rep at Shopify. I said, “Hey, what’s the official stance here?” And they said, “We’re aware of it. We’re working on it. We’ll come up with the best path forward and when we have it, we’ll give you a timeline and an SOP, action steps, whatever.” So, I think the answer currently is sit on your hands and wait as far as that Google upgrade works unless you really want it. Then I’d get someone smarter than me to do it.
But as far as tracking goes, this is kind of a mixed question in that he’s both asking… I think he’s simultaneously asking about too like, “Hey, what analytics do you use?” And also, attribution. So, those 14.5 changes, it’s really like when a purchase occurs, who do we attribute the revenue to? That’s the thing we lost. Analytics otherwise still work largely the same. And so, today, in time passed, honestly I use Shopify Analytics the most just because it’s right there. Every store is running it, so that’s always been my single source of truth. If I want something fancier, where I can really… And honestly, as Shopify Analytics evolves, I use Google Analytics less and less. But if I can’t find it in Shopify Analytics, I go to Google Analytics.
And outside of that, if I want something fancy, like where I’m trying to build reports out of order and customer data, then I might use Better Reports has a really good app. He mentioned Triple Whale. We do have a client running Triple Whale and it is really nice and their support is really good. Last time I looked at it, I think it was invite only. It was like an invite-only beta.
Paul Reda: Oh, I was just about to ask. I was like, “Is it really expensive?” What’s the catch?
Kurt Elster: I haven’t looked, so last I know in the past it had been like you had to have an invite to get into it. But it is, it’s nice. I don’t know. If this question is about attribution, I like using post-purchase surveys to try and figure out attribution, because just ask the person when they buy. Hey, how’d you hear about us? And yeah, they’re not always gonna be right, but there’s KnoCommerce. K-N-O, which that one, KnoCommerce, I was on the board of advisors for that, which was cool. No longer since they got sold to WeCommerce, but that one will do what you want. EnquireLabs is the other one, will do it as well. And the Triple Whale, they claim to have like some pixel replacement that can get the attribution, but truthfully I don’t understand how it works.
Paul Reda: Well, it’s good that you admit it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’ve seen other people ask on Twitter like, “How the heck?” And then I read the explanation. I didn’t get it. You know, first party data handwaving. I’m sure there’s a solution there.
Paul Reda: You know, algorithms.
Kurt Elster: Algorithms. Machine learning.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Modeled data.
Paul Reda: It’s big data, machine learning. Machine learning, big data, NFTs.
Kurt Elster: I hope that rambling answer was super helpful.
Paul Reda: What’s your take on TikTok? All Facebook gurus went to TikTok right now. Do you advise your clients to move there? I mean, what does it mean to move there? You’re just like, “Everything else, over. Only TikTok. Nothing else.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s the implied mutual exclusivity.
Paul Reda: It’s like it’s another path.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s no reason… I think the answer is you should always, your marketing budget should be like 80% let’s double down on what works, 20% let’s just keep trying some new stuff and see if we can figure it out, and I think that’s the reality of where people are with TikTok, is like they know Facebook ads aren’t performing as well because of the previously mentioned iOS 14.5 privacy changes, so they’re going to the next new big platform. Seems to be TikTok. And then they all fall flat on their face is how it sounds.
Paul Reda: Well, because you gotta relearn it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: It’s a different language. It’s a different visual language. It’s a different way of communicating with people.
Kurt Elster: Yes. If you’re trying to take your Instagram story ads and then apply those to TikTok as TikTok ads, and then you’re not seeing results, and this is your first effort at it, it’s probably because you’re just not versed enough with TikTok. It’s so… It’s fast moving. It’s like Twitter for video, the speed at which it goes, and it kind of involves its own language.
Paul Reda: Vine?
Kurt Elster: I miss Vine. I loved Vine.
Paul Reda: Vine was great.
Kurt Elster: So, I think it’s worthwhile to explore TikTok, but I wouldn’t say like, “All right, we’re giving up on everything else.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. We advise our clients to do everything. Just do everything. And then when something works, do it twice as hard. And if it doesn’t work, I don’t know, maybe try again or maybe give up.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I feel like my-
Paul Reda: Up to you.
Kurt Elster: My catch phrase may be the only way to know is to try.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It’s like because in eCommerce and business, there is no one right perfect path forward.
Paul Reda: And in life?
Kurt Elster: In life. In everything. And so, you just explore and find what works for you.
Paul Reda: Finally, how’s your Tesla doing?
Kurt Elster: Oh, last Thursday it tried to kill me. I was turning left out of our neighborhood onto a street with a speed limit of 40, which means people do like 120, and so I’m turning left onto this street. I go forward, turn left, I merge into traffic, and as I do it I discover that my steering wheel feels like it’s in park, and it’s because unexpectedly… And then on the screen it says like, “Auto lane assist may be unavailable.” You don’t say! My power steering had failed. Yeah, and in a 5,000-pound car that normally has electric power steering, not having your power steering is like you better be Arnold Schwarzenegger if you’re gonna turn that wheel.
And so, there was no accident and by Monday morning they had fixed it for me and it’s back, it’s fine. I drove it to work today. But I would rank that two places behind having your brakes fail on the highway as far as like exciting things go.
Paul Reda: Oh, exciting.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It was definitely… woke me up. And what was fun, since it happened right near our house, my wife from our bedroom window while sipping her coffee got to watch me execute like a 15-point turn in a parking lot across the street, because I just… I couldn’t turn the wheel far enough, so I was just like backward, forward. Backward, forward. I got home. It was fine. And they fixed it. But other than that, I’ve not had issues with the car. I like it. So, there you go. There’s your exciting Tesla vehicle ownership update on this podcast about eCommerce.
Paul Reda: My 2015 Ford Fusion is doing fine.
Kurt Elster: Flawless!
Paul Reda: It’s flawless. It drives. It has no fun… It has no Easter eggs.
Kurt Elster: No Easter? What?
Paul Reda: And it has no hidden secret things inside of it that no one knows about. I would think that’s bad in a car, but apparently some people think that’s cool.
Kurt Elster: You know, it’s about what you’re looking for. I like the excitement of is it going to kill me? And so, I’ve selected three vehicles based on that premise.
Next up, I’m gonna get a motorcycle with no headlights and see how that works out. Yeah. Should be fun.
Paul Reda: Julie would never let you drive a motorcycle.
Kurt Elster: No, and it’s for the best.
Paul Reda: Yeah. No, you shouldn’t. I’ve seen the other choices you’ve made in your vehicles. I would not trust any motorcycle you bought.
Kurt Elster: I took and failed the motorcycle test.
Paul Reda: What was it, like don’t fall over?
Kurt Elster: Well, the motorcycle… No, it’s a for-real skills test.
Paul Reda: All right but wait. When you do the motorcycle test, is there a guy sitting on the back seat wrapped around you? Or does he give you like a sidecar?
Kurt Elster: No. It’s your choice. If you bring the sidecar, the instructor sits in the side car. But otherwise, they sit behind you and hug your waist tightly and whisper in your ear. That’s how the motorcycle test is traditionally performed. Yeah. Just for the 30% of people who take everything at face value, that’s not true.
Trevor-
Paul Reda: Trevor Cotts wants to know, “What are the people (your clients),” I just thought like the people of America, “that are thriving right now doing differently?”
Kurt Elster: That’s such an open-ended and yet good question.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: What do the people who are successful, like really just outrageously successful, do differently?
Paul Reda: What do the people that are not doing… All right, here’s the problem. We don’t know because we don’t have any clients that are really screwing it up.
Kurt Elster: Well, I think-
Paul Reda: We don’t have clients that we’re just like, “Those morons, they lose millions of dollars a year.” I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: You know, I think the answer here is the ones who are really successful, it tends to be a larger team of creatives than you would normally see. Like first, they figure out the product, the market fit, the messaging, and being able to fulfill, right? No gods but shipping. If I can’t get the stuff out the door and to people in a timely fashion, it’s a no go.
Once you’ve gotten past, then it’s time to scale, then those teams really rely a lot on their creative teams and being able to provide edutainment in a way where they can share their story. And that keeps… It gets you that repeat customer rate where it’s everything is novel enough that people keep looking at your content and coming back, and it keeps you top of mind, and then it also helps with word of mouth and new customers. I think that’s the thing, is the people who are able to tell a compelling story consistently. Same as where you said the content hole must be filled. We publish an episode every Tuesday no matter what. eCommerce businesses that treat themselves as like small TV stations, as small content producers, the ones that invest in that, I think those are the ones that really move and take off.
Paul Reda: And you know if you have a bunch of people that are really good at creativity and communication, when a new social media ad platform rises, like I don’t know, TikTok, those people generally will be able to have an easier time figuring out how to leverage TikTok.
Kurt Elster: Now, I think of myself as a creative. I enjoy creative pursuits. And so, I think there’s some inherent bias there.
Paul Reda: No, I don’t think you’re wrong in any way whatsoever.
Kurt Elster: And then I think the other thing is being absolutely willing to change and try things, and then also look at something and go, “That didn’t work. Moving on.” So, they aren’t suffering sunk cost fallacy. They’re not like, “Well, we invested that, so we have to keep trying.” They’re like, “Nope, give up. Move on. Next thing.” And also, not necessarily let ego get in the way, and I think with bigger teams that gets easier.
Because like when it’s the brand owner, the founder, doing everything and making all the decisions, it’s your ego. It’s too easy to let your ego get wrapped up in it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And who might have like three or four little underlings, but he’s like, “But I’m the boss.”
Kurt Elster: I’m making the decisions here.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, I think to a lesser extent it’s let go of ego and get out of your own way. That helps. How do you feel the SEO game has changed over the last couple years? Should it still be a focus?
I think for SEO to work, you need to be really good at writing or have someone who’s really good at writing, and so that speaks to that creative aspect.
Paul Reda: Like a creative?
Kurt Elster: But that’s just a tougher thing to do for a lot of people. It just turns into feeling like homework. But if you could create that, like those ultimate guides content, tutorial content, how-to, the stuff that people Google for looking for answers, that’s where you see success with SEO. It’s also another thing where it’s like you just have to keep publishing and then suddenly a year later, whoa, my traffic went up. So, I think the answer is yes, but I just… We don’t see a lot of it for those reasons.
Paul Reda: One thing around the corner that no one is really talking about yet, I don’t know. If I knew that, I wouldn’t be telling you. I’d be investing in it and making money if I knew the next big thing.
Kurt Elster: Hm.
Paul Reda: That being said, we are doing a big site build for someone that I’m working on that hopefully will be done in the next two weeks, and they are investing in AR.
Kurt Elster: Augmented reality.
Paul Reda: Augmented reality. And they sell a backpack. They sell a big old backpack. And I worked with an AR team to get that integrated on the store and it just worked. It’s really cool. So, if you’re looking at it on desktop and just initially going through on your phone, there’s just a 3D rendering that you can swirl it around and check it out, and it looks perfect, and then if you’re on your phone and you hit the AR button, you can see the backpack on a table, or on the floor or whatever, and get an idea of the actual sizing and dimensions of it.
So, while I think that’s cool, I think it’s very cool in a tech demo-ey kind of way, and the fact that it just worked…
Kurt Elster: When you got that to just work on your iPhone and then we tried it in our office, and you put the backpack and it just rendered easily on our table that you’re sitting at now-
Paul Reda: Yeah, and it didn’t-
Kurt Elster: And then we went and got my backpack to check to see if it got the scale right and it did-
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: We were jumping around in here like idiots.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, as a person who has to kind of make these things, I was just impressed that I was like, “Wow, that worked!” Like, “That didn’t run like shit, it totally worked seamlessly!” Incredible. But I think that you could really do something with that, especially when it comes to furniture. I think furniture is really the big-
Kurt Elster: For sure if you sell home goods, you should be looking into augmented reality. I really think that is an easy win and I could almost guarantee implementing it is less expensive than you think.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: The app that we used… Do you remember the name of it?
Paul Reda: I don’t.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Well, I’m sure it’ll come up. We’ll do it, cover it in a future episode, but we looked at the pricing. I looked at the pricing with the client and it really was quite affordable. It was in no way outrageous. And then getting the models made, it uses a .stl file. Yeah. A .stl file, which has become the standard for, “This is a 3D file that everything, and every browser, and every OS understands now.” It’s like we have a 3D file format that’s the equivalent of .jpg now. And so, all these apps, these phones, and people making 3D models are able to just use this one standard, and that really simplifies life.
And so, even in Shopify you could just take an .stl and drop it in a product media and it’ll work.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I remember when Shopify announced that they were supporting it. That was at the… It was at the last Unite we went to, so it was Unite 2019.
Kurt Elster: I think it was 2019. It was a stroller, right?
Paul Reda: I believe it was a stroller. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And they had the real stroller and had the AR one.
Paul Reda: Well, and they already had it working on the Chip and Joanna Gaines store.
Kurt Elster: Magnolia.
Paul Reda: Magnolia had it, like they were in the beta. They were like the test store for it. And I remember coming home from that Unite and being like, “Check it out.” And it didn’t work, and you needed to have a very specific iPhone in order for it to work, and it was like a huge pain in the ass. So, as with most things like that, they announced that they were supporting it. It kind of pretty much didn’t work and now three years later it works great and seamlessly. And that’s generally how those things go.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s the bleeding edge stuff and then, “All right,” support becomes widespread, all right, now it’s safe to use it. I mean, you could have used it then. It’s just a limited audience would have been able to see it and I think in the initial version it was like, “All right, to get this to work it really had to be in an app.” Yeah. That was what it was, like you had to download the Magnolia app to see it, whereas now just the browsers all support it.
Paul Reda: I don’t remember. No, they supported it as product media. That’s what Shopify was announcing.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah, you just take the file and upload it like a picture and it just… It loads a 3D file. How cool is that? Next question from Trevor here. Last question from Trevor. “What are three eCom strategies that just don’t work like they used to?”
Paul Reda: Buying traffic at the traffic store.
Kurt Elster: I.e., Facebook.
Paul Reda: I.e., Facebook.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. ROAS down on Facebook, which we know. It’s been a common thread. And part of it was during the pandemic, we’re shooting fish in a barrel, right? Everybody’s bored at home on their couch with extra spending cash.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I saw a link the other day that was like, “The pandemic eCommerce boom is over.” And you know, all that stuff like that. And it was really, it was like “Cost per click rates have gone up by 10%.” And I was like, “Oh my God! Three cents!” I mean, it was really a headline in search of some data. But I mean I think we’ve seen that, though. It was like if 2019 was 100, and 2020-2021 was like 130, it’s come back down to where it’s like 115 now.
Kurt Elster: We’re still ahead of pre-pandemic.
Paul Reda: We’re ahead of pre-pandemic. We’re ahead of whatever the rate was before. The rate has increased. But it’s not where it was peaking 18 months ago.
Kurt Elster: So, three strategies that just don’t work like they used to. Number one, it used to be a lot easier to build an organic following on social media and now that everyone is so adept and good at social media. There’s just a lot more competition and so that’s a lot harder. And then at the same time, just people in general are much more aware of like, “Well, this is very commercial.” And so, they’re not… They’re more resistant to following those types of accounts.
So, it’s tougher to get an unpaid organic following on social media, regardless of platform. It’s tougher to game SEO. Not that we were ever advocating that, but like it was just easier to get random SEO wins with less content in years past than now as the algorithm evolves, and then third, we’re not seeing the same ROAS numbers and ease of tracking and targeting in Facebook and Instagram that we used to.
Paul Reda: Ronell Cross wants to know, “Should Shopify merchants have checkout in their owned Shopify store or Meta checkout,” which is apparently checkout in Instagram? “I’m in the owned-sales data camp, Shopify checkout all day, but am I missing something by not using Instagram checkout?”
Kurt Elster: We don’t have any clients that are seeing any kind of meaningful results with Meta shops.
Paul Reda: Are they using them?
Kurt Elster: A handful.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: So, I don’t think that… Our experience is very limited here, but we’ve not seen anyone like, “Yeah. Wow, we’re killing it with this.” So, I asked in Foxwell Digital Slack, Andrew Foxwell. Let me see if I got any replies to the Slack.
Paul Reda: Oh, no I didn’t.
Kurt Elster: Oh, no, no. Hold on. I know I did. I have two replies. First says, “We haven’t seen shops work really at all in any capacity but interested to hear if anyone has seen differently.” And then someone else who said, “We have a company that’s got both set up, good to test, and shops is not a huge winner but it’s improving a bit.”
Paul Reda: That’s not selling me.
Kurt Elster: And then in our own Facebook group we’ll get posts and questions that are really seeking tech support about this feature pop up and it’s always like… It’s always some variation of, “Hey, they won’t approve me,” or like it broke, or it got declined, and then support just points fingers at each other. What do I do? And then no one knows what to do. Yeah.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. I’m just generally… I don’t know. Does Facebook give you all the data? Knowing Facebook, don’t trust them. Can’t trust them. But to me, that’s the thing with Amazon, is that like it’s the same as Amazon, where it’s like yeah, maybe if Amazon works, but you’re also not getting any long-term customer data, so you’re on borrowed time.
Kurt Elster: It’s a little odd that they’ve structured it like it’s a marketplace on Facebook and Instagram, and that like if I sell an item on Amazon marketplace, they’re not gonna give me the money until I have provided tracking. That’s how you release the funds.
Paul Reda: Oh, to show that you’ve sent the item. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Meta Shops works the same way.
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: And so, that could be a frustration for people, so it operates more like a marketplace. But it’s not necessarily providing traffic the way Amazon, eBay, Walmart, those other marketplaces do. So, I don’t know. Again, it’s a thing you could try. Hook it up, see what it does. But my experience has not been… I’ve yet to see anyone really get anything meaningful out of it. That doesn’t mean that’s going to be forever, though.
Ronell continues, “Meta offers very compelling features for IG checkout. IG Live shopping, product launches, custom audiences.” Custom audiences, so we do get the data. “Sometimes with a crazy ad credit to match.” A thousand to $7,500. All right, that sounds pretty good.
Paul Reda: There you go. Take your five grand and see what you get out of it.
Kurt Elster: Like a $1,000 ad credit, all right, I could maybe figure something out with that. The one that… The exciting thing hidden in here, live shopping. The IG Live shopping is interesting. So, you essentially… The people I’ve seen succeed with live video shopping; they’re doing their own QVC-HSN show for their own brand.
Paul Reda: I mean, did you… You watched the Lululemon doc, right?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, Emily was telling me she was just like, “I remember when this was happening on all my Facebook. People would get on Facebook live and live sell Lululemon pants.” That clearly… That was a thing people could do. It wasn’t only the Lululemon pants that made that a possible thing people could do.
Kurt Elster: And so, other people years later have figured that out and are doing it, and it works well. I talked to a guy who sold comic books, like alternate cover limited edition variants of comic books, and they made a killing doing it on live video. I don’t know what platform it was specifically that they did for this. But I’ve now encountered more people than I can keep track of who’ve had success with this live video shopping. And so, I think that’s… There’s a recurring theme in here is like, “All right, well, what’s the next thing? What are we looking for? Where should we be spending time and effort?”
Maybe live video shopping is the answer.
Paul Reda: Nothing is the answer, and everything is the answer. Just try everything. The next thing you should be doing is shit you haven’t done before. That’s the next thing you should do.
Kurt Elster: Yes. That’s concise, and direct, and good advice.
Paul Reda: That’s generally how I roll.
Kurt Elster: Just do some shit.
Paul Reda: Just try it. I don’t know. I got a pizza to eat.
Kurt Elster: Clifford. Frequent commenter Clifford says, “How do you use the new Shopify Customers View section?” And he’s asking about a tutorial.
Paul Reda: I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Kurt Elster: So, if you go in your Shopify admin, it says customers. You go in the customer section, previously in those admin views they just had filters and you could filter and sort it a little bit, and then really if you wanted to do anything fancier than that, you exported it as a spreadsheet and go wild in Excel. They switched it up. It now… It’s got this crazy conditional logic in it, so the easy way to figure it out, it gives you templates. Click the templates button, apply some sample templates that they give you, and then immediately you’ll understand what it is and what you could do with it.
But essentially it’s like a little block of code where you could type in like customer = returning and lifetime value greater than 500, and then you could also do or, so you could have like and/or, so essentially it’s a system to build out customer segments right in that customer audience thing in a more powerful fashion. I like it. I think it’s cool. But for it to make sense, just play with the templates and then you’ll start to see how it works.
Paul Reda: And what are we doing? We’re generating lists?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s rather than try and run, make segments of customers inside your email service provider, now you could do it inside your Shopify Customer Admin. I would normally be doing this same stuff with dynamic segments in Klaviyo.
Paul Reda: So, you’d take that and then perhaps use the new Shopify emails and flows that they’re implementing that Jim MacDonald is about to ask about.
Kurt Elster: Oh, what does Jim MacDonald have to say?
Paul Reda: He wants to know what we think of the new Shopify emails and flows that they’re implementing.
Kurt Elster: Oh!
Paul Reda: And what they are compared to Klaviyo/Mailchimp, but we don’t talk about Mailchimp. Or we do talk about Mailchimp now because they’re friends again, right?
Kurt Elster: Well, I know we don’t talk about Bruno.
Paul Reda: My baby doesn’t watch shows.
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay.
Paul Reda: I don’t watch shows.
Kurt Elster: No, my daughter, my five-year-old, her friends were into Encanto, so now she’s into Encanto.
Paul Reda: Wow. What a sheep.
Kurt Elster: My baby is.
Paul Reda: Your daughter’s a sheeple.
Kurt Elster: When she hears about this-
Paul Reda: She loves me.
Kurt Elster: What do we got here? All right, I have not played with the Shopify email software. I am glad that feature is in there because it’s a lot… If you’re getting started with a store, having that built in is a lot easier than being like, “Oh, you wanted to send emails with your eCommerce store? All right, go get some other software.” But in the past, the reason I hadn’t played with it-
Paul Reda: You couldn’t do the high-level stuff.
Kurt Elster: … is that yeah, I couldn’t do automation, right? I couldn’t do flows. And now they’re adding those features. So, as it becomes more feature complete, suddenly I’m more interested, but I also have this legacy technical debt of our clients are all on Klaviyo. End of story. So, I just use that. So, I just… I have not had the occasion to play with it. It’ll happen on its own eventually, so we’ll encounter someone who uses it and I’ll have a chance to poke at it. But no, currently I really… I just haven’t used it, so I don’t have an opinion on it.
Paul Reda: Okay. See, that’s good. Alexander wants to know, “Any updates from Google on how the page speed stuff is affecting anyone?” No.
Kurt Elster: No. It’s kind of interesting-
Paul Reda: Have we not seen any drops yet even with a score under 20? No. Doesn’t affect you.
Kurt Elster: No. No, it really-
Paul Reda: Doesn’t affect you. The worst-case scenario was it was a tiebreaker if you were tied with someone.
Kurt Elster: Yep.
Paul Reda: And when you go back, I actually… It was like, “Hey, you know what? I want to give Alexander new information,” so I Googled a bunch of stuff. I was looking up about it and it’s just like, “Google implements page speed affecting your page ranking.” It’s been 10 years of articles about that. I found articles from 2010 saying that Google is doing that. They probably did. I don’t know, but you’ve been living under this speed matters regime for the last decade now.
Kurt Elster: Speed matters regime.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so whatever it’s been for the last 10 years, that’s probably how it’s just gonna kind of keep going, so you got bigger shit to worry about.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s interesting that-
Paul Reda: The answer is always you have bigger shit to worry about.
Kurt Elster: The Google page speed discussions kind of hit a frenzied peak and then have really disappeared.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Which I’m grateful for. Not because… You know, I don’t want people to have slow websites. It doesn’t help. But a fast website, and a fast website doesn’t hurt, and that’s really the extent of the issue. You know, I always thought it was silly that… the page speed metric being applied to an eCommerce store that’s loading like 50 different JavaScripts to add a whole bunch of file… Why am I getting into this conversation again? I’m not doing it!
Paul Reda: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t understand why you’re talking about it. I don’t really care, so I’m done. It doesn’t matter to these… Doesn’t matter to me, doesn’t matter to you guys. You got bigger fish to fry.
Kurt Elster: All right, final question. What is a good choice for return management app? What would be a good return management app? See, this is stuff that matters, right?
Paul Reda: Yeah. You got a lot of returns.
Kurt Elster: You make your life easier. You know especially if you sell apparel you’re gonna be dealing with returns, like one in three orders is coming back, so how do you deal with that nonsense? And the customer doesn’t want to be emailing you back and forth, right? They just want a simple system. So, use a portal. I just set up AfterShip on a site yesterday. I thought that was really good. I’ve used Loop Returns. That one’s really good. If you want something enterprise scale, I think Narvar is your best solution. And there’s a whole bunch of them, but those three just… That’s what’s top of mind because I Googled this two days ago for someone and those were the three that I was reminded of. I’m like, “That’s what I like.”
But if I left you out, there’s other good ones too.
Paul Reda: So, your answer is, “I don’t know, there’s a bunch of them?”
Kurt Elster: My answer is Loop or AfterShip is probably the one you want.
So, investment news. We invested in Post Pilot.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so we owned a tiny bit of Post Pilot I guess is one way to put it?
Kurt Elster: A fraction of a percent.
Paul Reda: A fraction of a fraction. It’s like when Jay-Z owned the Nets and he kind of didn’t. We put money into Post Pilot. It’s being run by Drew Sanocki.
Kurt Elster: That’s right. And Michael Epstein.
Paul Reda: And Michael Epstein, who are good guys from Auto Anything, and we’ve worked with them on a bunch of projects. And they moved onto something new and we like the idea, so we threw money into it. So-
Kurt Elster: Post Pilot.
Paul Reda: We’re gonna be talking about Post Pilot and every time we do, we’re gonna say we have money in it, but even if we didn’t have money in it, we think it’s a good idea.
Kurt Elster: It’s handwritten postcards mailed to your customers as win back campaigns or otherwise automatically.
Paul Reda: It’s pretty much Klaviyo for snail mail.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yes it is.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Like, you want to stand out from the crowd? Send some handwritten snail mail.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And I think it’s really good, especially for those people that are selling on Amazon. You put that stuff in the box and then you could get the… When you get those addresses, you can contact those people outside of Amazon.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know how Amazon feels about this.
Paul Reda: They don’t like it but screw them.
Kurt Elster: Let’s leave on that. Let’s go out on that note. They don’t like it but screw them. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode, so please join our Facebook group, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders, and talk to us. That’s also the only way that you will be included in a future AMA when in a month I will ask about AMA questions again.
Paul Reda: When we gotta fill the content hole again.
Kurt Elster: We gotta fill the content hole. Thank you and goodnight.
Sound Board: