Our popular 'Ask Us Anything' series continues
In this Ask Us Anything episode, we discuss new features and answer your burning questions.
What's new at Shopify:
And your questions:
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
5/24/2022
Kurt Elster: So, Mr. Reda.
Paul Reda: Huh? What?
Kurt Elster: How are we opening this podcast?
Paul Reda: Well, I guess the standard opening is always like what shows did you watch. What are your shows? What are your shows?
Kurt Elster: You know what? I have been enjoying the warm weather. I just sit on my porch listening to dad rock. That’s what I’ve done all week.
Paul Reda: I love Steely Dan.
Kurt Elster: Steely Dan. Last night, I just did a deep dive into Paul Simon and discovered how weird he is. I had no idea
Paul Reda: All right, take it down one notch.
Kurt Elster: I had five cups of coffee today because I wasn’t keeping track and now I’ve been shot out of a cannon.
Paul Reda: Yeah, I know. I’ve been here for several hours. I love Steely Dan. Steely Dan. Donald Fagen’s first solo album, The Nightfly, I include that as part of the Steely Dan canon. Steely Dan’s great.
Kurt Elster: You know, as I get older, and I discovered yacht rock, it took me until like age 38 to realize I love soft rock.
Paul Reda: My very good friend Rob is also super into soft rock, ‘70s, ‘80s soft rock, but has been since he was like 16, so that was weird, but he’s really grown into it now that he’s like a 40-year-old dad.
Kurt Elster: He was just setting himself up for success. So, we have an AMA episode. These are always fun. We get to do a lot of riffing, a lot of discussion, and I want to go over some new features today. We got a lot of feature-related questions, some strategy questions. I think this is gonna be a good one.
Paul Reda: Yeah, we got some cool stuff including a thing that we used to do secretly that is violating the Facebook terms of service that-
Kurt Elster: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Paul Reda: Oh. Yeah, we never did that, that Shopify now lets you do legally. Not legally. Legally is a weird word because it’s like, “Oh no, I broke Facebook’s rules. Cops are gonna come get me.”
Kurt Elster: Oh no, Zuckerberg!
Paul Reda: Yeah. Oh no, Zuckerberg’s mad. Who cares?
Kurt Elster: This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster. Joining me is my cohost, Mr. Paul Reda, and today we are discussing Shopify features and strategy in this ask us anything episode crowdsourced from our listeners. Wow. But first, some housekeeping items.
Paul Reda: Crowdsourcing is such a great way to just say like make other people do the work.
Kurt Elster: Oh, it’s crowdsourced.
Paul Reda: It’s like, “Oh yeah, we used crowdsourcing.” Oh, so you just had a bunch of people that you didn’t pay do the work for you? Awesome. Well done.
Kurt Elster: Every spring, our homeowner’s association crowdsources cleaning up the nature trail that we share. Yeah.
Paul Reda: Your homers association?
Kurt Elster: My homers association.
Paul Reda: Is that like also the opposite of the no homers club?
Kurt Elster: The HOA. The homeowners association.
Paul Reda: Sorry. No homers.
Kurt Elster: So, these new Shopify features, oh my gosh. Shopify Audiences, this is kind of neat. So, our big fear lately is what do you do when you can’t buy traffic from the traffic store, when your Facebook ads are less effective, when there’s less ROAS? Poor return on ad spend, poorer ROI than in years past. So, they recently announced this feature called Shopify Audiences. It’s an app available to U.S. and Canadian and merchants, and you gotta be on the Plus plan, but this thing is nifty. It's essentially, “Hey, here is we’re all going to get together and pool our custom audiences from our Facebook and Instagram ads under Shopify in an anonymized exchange network.” And then you can… As long as you participate and share your custom audience data, you can then leverage all these other stores’ custom audience data, so in theory you all get collective access to a pool of people who are very likely to make online purchases.
Paul Reda: But don’t they slice it even thinner in that it’s really creating lookalike audiences?
Kurt Elster: That’s what… Yes. From what I read, you could use it to create a lookalike audience.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: As opposed to just like advertise straight to it, you could mix it with your other data, I think. I don’t know. You know what? I have no idea.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Because like if we’re selling car t-shirts to 20-year-old goons in Southern California, that’s a different lookalike audience than if we’re selling clothing to seniors in Denmark. So, we gotta slice the audience salami so they look alike, and that’s what those are called. Those are called lookalike audiences where you take a thing in Facebook… It’s been years since I’ve done a Facebook ad campaign, but you would give it your list of actual customers and then Facebook would give you a giant block of people that’s like these people are like the people that have already bought from you, so you could keep advertising to the same demographics.
And so, I feel like this is a methodology for making lookalike audiences stronger.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Looking at the Shopify, the page about it, Shopify.com/audiences, and the help docs are up too. You can get a lot of info in there about it. It’s got an FAQ section, as well. But the idea is, “Hey, we’re gonna take the purchasing audience, so our high intent buyers, pool those together, and then you can run lookalike audiences against that.” And one of the things we’ve had success with is mix Facebook’s algorithm with your own knowledge of your network. So, I’ve got this audience, this pool of high intent. I could make a lookalike audience of that. Can I then, if I know my own demographic data for my buyers, split or do more laser-focused targeting on that lookalike audience?
Essentially we just have a new data source for our audiences. But it’s such an outside the box idea. It’s very clever. I love it.
Paul Reda: Well, and it fits more into the whole Shopify itself is a platform type thing, like the same thing with Shop Pay, where it’s like, “Well, if you’re logged in on one Shopify store, you can be logged in on all the Shopify stores.” It’s creating… Every merchant out there is actually just one arm of the Shopify octopus.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah. You start to see network effects where we’re able to leverage and assist each other. It’s neat. Does this… Is this an indication that five years from now they have their own advertising network and ad platform?
Paul Reda: What are the buying ads on?
Kurt Elster: I don’t know yet.
Paul Reda: It’s like where are the eyeballs?
Kurt Elster: I think it’s certainly… That’s gotta be a discussion that has been had internally.
Paul Reda: But where are they getting the eyeballs?
Kurt Elster: That they show it to?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know. Google Ad Network.
Paul Reda: That’s on Google.
Kurt Elster: And?
Paul Reda: Where’s Shopify? There’s the Facebook Ad Network that shows ads on Facebook and Instagram. There’s the Google Ad Network that shows ads on your Google results. Where’s the Facebook network showing ads? Other people’s stores?
Kurt Elster: Well, there’s a Google Ad Exchange, so you could get into that and run your own ads through Google’s Ad Network. They have a display network.
Paul Reda: That shows up on other websites.
Kurt Elster: Yes. I’m just spitballing here.
Paul Reda: Who’s buying ads on websites?
Kurt Elster: You know, my wife makes a fair amount of money from ads on her site, so somebody. Yeah, Shopify Audiences, if you’re on Shopify Plus and you’re already running Facebook ads, I don’t see why you wouldn’t try Shopify Audiences.
Paul Reda: Oh, no. I think it’s a great idea. Especially if you’re a Facebook ads type store that’s buying those.
Kurt Elster: The second new feature we have here, estimated delivery dates at checkout. This is nifty. It’ll give you a window that says like, “This order will be delivered in this date range.” And so, they call it the processing time feature, so in your Shopify reports you can see hey, this is my median time to fulfill an order, and here is my median time for that order to be delivered. It combines those two times for that shipping rate because it has historical data and then for the customer, shows them hey, this is when your thing is probably gonna show up. I think that’s really neat.
I love this idea of delivery promises where we’re able to start telling people now using data, “This is when you’re gonna get your stuff.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. People really want to know that.
Kurt Elster: And why shouldn’t I?
Paul Reda: I mean, yeah. No, it’s perfectly reasonable. It’s a great piece of information that’s gonna help store owners. I just bought a big ticket item from Slovenia and the confirmation email I got from them was just like, “We’ll send you another email when we ship it. Not telling you when that’s happening.” So, that was a good three weeks, I think, two, three weeks, and then they shipped it and DHL told me when it was coming, and it came on that day. DHL had it completely correct on the day it was gonna show up once they had it. But the Slovenians, man. I didn’t know when that thing was gonna get out of there.
Kurt Elster: For the heck of us, tell us what you bought, because it’s cool.
Paul Reda: It’s not up yet but I bought a 32-inch E Ink display.
Kurt Elster: So, you bought the world’s biggest Kindle.
Paul Reda: I bought the world’s biggest Kindle. Well, in the firmware there’s indications that there’s a 42-inch out there somewhere, but I want that, but there’s a 32-inch Kindle E Ink display that I’ve seen other dorks do projects with, so I bought one, and I turned it into a giant info board pulling APIs that’s like, “Here’s the date, here’s the weather, here’s the five day weather forecast, here’s all the stocks you own, here’s the top six articles on the New York Times right now, here’s the shows that are gonna be on TCM tonight, here’s the next three Bulls games, when they’re starting.” And stuff like that. And it’s been the thing I’m fiddling with since I beat Elden Ring.
Elden Ring was the thing I fiddled with for a good three months and then I’ve put a couple weeks on this thing.
Kurt Elster: It’s pretty sweet. I saw it and I was like, “That’s awesome.”
Paul Reda: No, it’s really… I love E Ink. I wish E Ink was way more available and used in products. I think it’s super cool.
Kurt Elster: It’s just such a… It’s a neat, practical, energy efficient, high… It just has so many advantages.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so it’s like a thin smart poster that hangs on my wall that changes and I need to charge it once every three months.
Kurt Elster: It’s so cool.
Paul Reda: It’s so cool.
Kurt Elster: I’m jealous is the short answer. All right, so our third feature, if you go in a Shopify store, you’re just on the front end of a Shopify store, and you say, “Oh, I need to grab this logo.” This is like a thing that happened. “I need to grab this logo. I gotta upload it somewhere.” And you hit save as on that. What happens?
Paul Reda: Well, it saves the file out. Your browser will save the file out as the file it was given, which is a WebP file. This is a more advanced image format than JPEG or PNG and you didn’t give your Shopify store a WebP file. You just gave it a JPEG or PNG file. Shopify then helpfully turned it into WebP, so your store runs faster. Thank you, Shopify. It was great.
Kurt Elster: High efficiency file format for faster load times. Got it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Wonderful. So thankful for it. But then when I downloaded the image it would just be in a WebP file, which a bunch of shit won’t load, and Shopify won’t take. So-
Kurt Elster: That’s the funny part. If you try and upload WebP to Shopify, it won’t do it.
Paul Reda: Let’s walk you through this. I gave Shopify a JPEG, they turned it into a WebP file. Thank you. I needed the file back; they give it to me as a WebP file. Okay. And then I want to reupload it somewhere else on the store, can’t do that. Shopify doesn’t like WebP files. But you made it. You made the file.
Kurt Elster: The advantage to that, though, is it keeps people from getting some really crusty files where it’s like you’re just resaving, reuploading, reencoding, over and over and over. It breaks that cycle.
Paul Reda: I mean, I guess it could say if this file is already WebP, don’t mess with it.
Kurt Elster: The new feature they added, original image download. So, the other issue was all right, if I need this file for a legitimate thing and I need to get it, I should have access to the back end of the store. In the past, those were also WebP. They changed it. They call it original image download. The download button in product media and in settings files will let you download the original file again, so I’m pleased to see that as opposed to getting the optimized version that I then can’t upload back to the store.
Paul Reda: Yeah. This is not as big of a thing for merchants, but it’s a big deal for us.
Kurt Elster: It was just like a regular annoyance for us, so they fixed it.
Paul Reda: It was so annoying.
Kurt Elster: So, thank you. I appreciate it. All right, let us move forth to our AMA questions.
Paul Reda: Anthony wants to know why should you upgrade your Shopify plan, Basic versus Standard versus Advanced versus Plus. From my understanding, it pretty much is transactions rates that make it worthwhile, but are there other features between each plan that make it better? I’m still on basic because I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade to advanced yet.
I don’t know. What’s Basic and Standard? All I know is Plus versus non-Plus. And as we learned three weeks ago, I don’t even know that when I completely misstated what one of the Plus things was.
Kurt Elster: All right. It goes Basic is 29 bucks a month.
Paul Reda: Do they let you sell things on Basic?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Oh, okay. Wow.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I don’t know if there’s still… There’s a plan below Basic that you never hear about called Lite.
Paul Reda: I think I saw a thing that wasn’t that only available in India or something?
Kurt Elster: I don’t know. I have yet to encounter a Lite store.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: But all right, so it’s Basic, Shopify, which… Okay, that’s the Standard plan is called Shopify. What plan are you on on Shopify? Shopify. Good luck Googling that. And then that goes Advanced. I think this is where most of our clients fall is Advanced.
Paul Reda: Oh, really? We mostly have Plus clients, I thought.
Kurt Elster: If I scroll through the stuff we’ve been working on it’s like all Plus, but you know, soft spot in my heart for Advanced.
Paul Reda: Because we’re that badass. Shut up.
Kurt Elster: And then the enterprise version is Plus. And I think there’s something telling in his question. I’m still on Basic as I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade yet. I think that’s true of any of the plans you’re on. Almost always it’s going to be I run into a pain or problem and there’s a feature on the plan above me that solves that. That’s what makes you upgrade. Just upgrading to get maybe nice to have features… If you’re not gonna use them, what’s the harm in staying in the lower plan?
Paul Reda: I know that there’s a straight math answer to if you make more than X, if your store makes more than X dollars, you need to upgrade plans because the amount of money you pay in the upgrade plan, you’re making more in the reduced transaction fees.
Kurt Elster: Aha.
Paul Reda: So, there’s just a number that occurs that you just should do it, otherwise you’re dumb.
Kurt Elster: You’re right. This is true. So, this is assuming you use Shopify Payments, and you probably do, because it’s insanely convenient. As you go up each plan the transaction fee goes down. And so, at 15, $16,000 a month, U.S. dollars, the basic plan costs the same as the Shopify plan.
Paul Reda: Wait, wait. Are we using U.S. dollars?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. USD.
Paul Reda: I’ve been doing all this in Australian dollars. Fuck.
Kurt Elster: I was using Canadian up until like 20 minutes ago. I like to switch them up.
Paul Reda: Oh, man. That’s why my paycheck was so big because it was doing it in Australian, I thought.
Kurt Elster: That’s right. I have no idea what these exchange rates are.
Paul Reda: Australian dollars I think are like… It’s like two bucks for every American dollar. It’s way higher.
Kurt Elster: It’s probably that-
Paul Reda: I might be wrong, though.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, we’re gonna get angry emails. Oh yeah? No, at 16,000 it just ends… With that processing fee reduction, you end up paying the same for Basic and Shopify.
Paul Reda: So, yeah. Once you hit 16 grand a month, just go to normal.
Kurt Elster: When you’re at $32,000 a month you could just jump to the Advanced plan and you’re really paying about the same for any of them. And then beyond that, I think there’s a much higher threshold, I would think, where you can make the switch to Shopify Plus. But I think with Shopify Plus it’s nearly always there’s some real annoyance we have that like Shopify Script Editor or being able to edit the checkout solves.
Paul Reda: Yeah. There’s several stores that we deal with where it’s like we need checkout editing in order to do this thing you want to do, so you gotta get on Plus. And also, I’ve made this argument multiple times. It is worthwhile to get on Plus to get Shopify Scripts, because with Shopify Scripts you can easily run promos, BOGOs, free gift with purchase so easily, and all of those will totally jack up your average order value. And the jack up of average order value will pay for Shopify Plus. Not if you’re making 10 grand a month, it won’t, but if you’re making over a certain amount it definitely will.
Kurt Elster: I do so much Script Editor work these days, both for hey, let’s power this complex promotion, or I just built out a team store for someone where it’s like you have to have access, and then either you’re a sponsor, an influencer, or an employee, and depending on what level you’re at, we used Script Editor to change both your discount and the max amount you’re allowed to spend. Or like, “Oh, there’s this weird edge case where there’s one shipping rate we can’t offer in this one scenario.” Scripts could solve that.
So, it’s basically like all these oddball checkout issues that you could just solves with Scripts that I greatly enjoy. All right, so Script Editor is exclusive to Shopify Plus, so certainly there are features between these plans that change things. And I think on Advanced you get some nice ones, like third party carrier calculated shipping rates. That’s a big one that you see people want a lot. And now on Advanced you can get Shopify Flow as just part of the plan, so that’s a bunch of eCommerce automation tools. That’s a really nice to have. There’s others. I’m not gonna give you a dramatic reading of Shopify’s pricing page, but if you’re feeling the pain, like you have some problem that it could solve, that’s probably when you want to upgrade. Or if you’ve just hit that revenue threshold where it’s like it’s just gonna save you the money, or it’s a lateral move, where it ends up breaking even.
Gabe has a question for us. Gabe says, “I’ll be releasing a new style of my product soon. Do you think it’s better to do a buildup of it, like show sneak peeks, tease it, et cetera, or just kind of surprise launch it? I’ve heard conflicting bits of advice, i.e. build up the excitement so that people can’t wait to get it and you have a good launch day versus people want things now and don’t have the attention span, so don’t give much or any of a heads up.”
Paul Reda: Kurt, do movies come out on Friday and they don’t tell you about the new movie until the day it comes out?
Kurt Elster: Well, you know, when I really want something to be successful I keep it a secret.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then I hope people notice and care.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Exactly. That’s like when you’re launching a new store, you just don’t tell anyone and then one day you turn it on, and then that store just… It becomes a huge hit right away. That’s how things work. No, you dufus. Tell everyone about it. Hammer your email list. Sneak peeks, trailers, hidden shots where it’s just like hidden in shadow. You could just see the outline of it. Tease these people.
Kurt Elster: Or include them in the process of developing it so they’re like emotionally… No matter what, it’s you’re trying to get me to open my wallet and part with money, so you need to get me emotionally invested. And if it’s just like, “Surprise! New product!” That’s more like impulse purchase. Versus if I went along on this journey with you or you just drove me crazy with marketing foreplay in the form of teasing this thing forever, being like, “You can’t have it. Look at this thing. You want it? Can’t buy it.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. You’re one of the dumbasses that take part in sneaker drops.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’m a real idiot.
Paul Reda: Does the sneaker drop… It just happens one morning? They hope you’re looking at the app on the morning it happens to be dropping? Or did they tell you for weeks in advance that the sneaker drop is happening?
Kurt Elster: All right. First, there’s leaked releases through newsletters and like a whole social media community around that. And then they’re gonna tease it for me in the app with like push notifications, emails, and then they’re gonna be like, “Hey, sign up to be notified when you could join a raffle to maybe get it.” Yeah. I will have gotten a dozen touch points, whether that’s notification, email, et cetera, before I ever have the opportunity to actually try to give someone $200 for a pair of shoes. Maybe. They’re like, “We might take your money.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. And that’s another part of it. You’re launching a new style of product. Hope you can get it. Maybe I won’t have enough.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Scarcity.
Paul Reda: You better buy it right away because it might run out.
Kurt Elster: Human psychology is just immediately like, “I might not be able to get that but someone else will have it? Now I have to have it.” It’s like our brains are broken, but this always works.
Paul Reda: I hate that crap. I’d rather wait a month for my stupid board from Slovenia than try to buy a pair of shoes that I end up not being able to buy.
Kurt Elster: In my defense, it’s been nine months since I bought a pair of stupid shoes.
Paul Reda: Oh, wow.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Whoa! I think last summer was the last time. Maybe a year. I don’t know.
Paul Reda: When was the last time you were on a Disney property?
Kurt Elster: January 1st.
Paul Reda: All right, so… Because that’s generally like what has Kurt done in the last six weeks? Go to Disney or buy stupid shoes. It’s always one or the other. So, you’ve really… I’m glad. You’ve gotten a hold on your problem.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, mostly I’m just reorganizing my garage these days. Hanging out on my porch. Listening to Paul Simon be weird.
No. All right, so we teased Gabe here, but the answer is you gotta hype it. If you’re not gonna get people excited about it then don’t be surprised when they won’t buy it.
Paul Reda: yeah. What we’re saying here is the people who said keep it a secret and surprise people are wrong.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Just straight up.
Paul Reda: They’re wrong. Dan wants to know if you’re moving a website over to Shopify from another provider, should you try to keep the same URLs and content to keep your SEO ranking? Any other considerations to think about that will ensure organic traffic keeps flowing?
First of all, you don’t gotta do that. There’s a thing called 301 URL redirects which is a thing you could set up in Shopify on the website that you set up a redirect where it says this is the old page, and that now points to this new page on Shopify, and the search engines all support that. Kurt, how long have 301 redirects existed?
Kurt Elster: They were established as part of the HTTP internet spec in 1996.
Paul Reda: All right, so they’re older than all your children.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Quite a bit.
Paul Reda: It’s not older than your cars, though.
Kurt Elster: No.
Paul Reda: But yeah, so for over 20 years you could just do this. Google supports it, I promise. It knows how it works. And it will just map that shit over.
Kurt Elster: I understand the fear. With every single store migration, we’ve done this question will come up early, is hey, what about SEO, and our ranking, and organic search traffic? What do we do? And the answer is your content is gonna stay largely the same and with most migration packages, tools, whatever, they’ll even create the URL redirects for you in Shopify, and if not, you could manually create them with a spreadsheet and upload them. In Shopify, it’s online store navigation and then hiding up at the top is URL redirects, and it’s just what’s the old URL? What’s the new URL? And that’s it. And there’s a status code for it that tells Google, “Hey, 301.” 301 means this has been permanently moved, so recognize it.
And yeah, there will be a little bit of turmoil when the migration occurs, and then it’ll even out and you’ll be fine. And ideally if you’re switching to Shopify and you’re on a nice online store 2.0 theme and it’s got all the rich snippet metadata stuff in there, you’ll end up ahead of where you were once it calms down within weeks to we’ll say two months. It's usually a few weeks of up and down.
Clifford has a Facebook ads question. I feel like this one comes up frequently these days. What’s your take with the businesses you serve? We just dropped all Facebook and redirected money to Google ads and MSN ads. Our Facebook ads dropped off the map for ROI because of Apple. TikTok ads, we could never get an ad approved.
All right, ROAS, return on ad spend for Facebook ads is down for everybody overall. I think on average, in general. If it’s down but still profitable, keep going. Why not? If it’s down and not profitable, at some point why do you want to keep losing money with this thing?
So, I think no matter what scenario you’re in, we need to be exploring other avenues, and so I love that Shopify Audiences is here to try and help mitigate some of this, but that’s a Plus exclusive, and depending on the audience, a brand may or may not work. We don’t have much experience with it yet. But worth a shot if it’s available to you. And other than that, I think I would start exploring other channels.
The one I am biased and bullish about, but I keep hearing positive things about is podcast advertising. And in the past, you had to contact podcast advertisers directly, which was more difficult, and more money up front compared to like, “Hey, I set my budget in Facebook.” But podcast advertising networks that are self-serve, that work in a manner you’re familiar with like Facebook ads, are starting to appear. And Spotify has one. It’s called Spotify’s Ad Studio and that’s self-serve ads. So, that might be a place to start.
I think TikTok is worth exploring but it is… It seems to be hit or miss on if you can get the ad approved, if it’ll work for you, and I think there’s some teething issues there for them as they scale. But no, I really… I think with all… Marketing spend is an investment. All investments carry risk. You can diversify risk by moving to other channels and experimenting.
Paul Reda: Braedon wants to know, “We have been moving much of our product data out of the standard Shopify product description and into product metafields. My concern is will this affect Google SEO? Will the keywords in the product metafields still be read by Google? I’ve looked for this answer high and low and have come up with nothing. Paul and Kurt, PLZ HELP!”
Kurt Elster: You know the answer to this.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s fine. I think.
Kurt Elster: It is totally fine.
Paul Reda: Oh, is it? Okay, good.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: I mean, yeah, because Google, they’re looking at the page. The metafield data, you’re rendering it on the page. So, when the Google robot crawls that page, it’s crawling the rendered version. So, it’s seeing that metafield data. If you got it, if you have it visually there on the page, it’s doing it. It’s handling it.
Kurt Elster: Google has no idea where that data is stored in your Shopify CMS, so where it lives in a database, not only does Google not care, it also doesn’t know. As long as it appears in the HTML content of the page by the time it’s rendered for Google, Google doesn’t care. And so, in this case I can’t… I just straight up cannot imagine a scenario where this creates a problem or really any difference whatsoever.
Paul Reda: Well, I mean, what if there’s a world… Shopify, the template has the stuff all filled out where it’ll be like it’ll have like oh, g: description, and then it’ll have the product description repeated inside there.
Kurt Elster: Oh, my rich data?
Paul Reda: Like the rich data snippets. And that stuff is part of the theme. It doesn’t know what you’ve put in the metafields. So, if you’ve pulled all of the juicy stuff out of the description and put it into metafields, is it not being included in the rich data?
Kurt Elster: All right, so I potentially break my rich data doing what he’s described. You’re right. However, that’s an easy thing to check. And relatively easy to fix, but you do have to mess with the code to make it work.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But it would just be swapping, like instead of product.description, I want product.metafield.mydescription is what I’d pop in there in the code.
No, Google has a tool to preview and validate that rich snippet data, so you could run it through that and just verify that you haven’t broken it. I think that’s not a bad idea. Take you 10 minutes to Google it up, try it.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I had not caught that. You’re right. Ooh, I like this one. Mike asks, “Have you guys ever spoken about how you identify key drivers for eCommerce conversion rate or if you have found which are most important across all your clients?” Good question.
Paul Reda: I’m gonna say something that might destroy our business, but-
Kurt Elster: All right. Please, let me get ready.
Paul Reda: The most important key drivers for conversion rate do not happen on your site.
Kurt Elster: Elaborate.
Paul Reda: Product market fit, product pricing, how you’re doing your emails, how you’re acquiring your traffic, all the stuff you’re doing to get certain kinds of people into your store and interested in your product that occurs before… that controls the people that end up on the store is more important than how the store looks.
Kurt Elster: We can lump all of that under the umbrella of quality of traffic.
Paul Reda: Yes.
Kurt Elster: And so, we have a client where… This is where conversion rate is such a deceptive metric and where comparing between stores is an utter fool’s errand. We have a client who generates a bunch of organic search traffic to a blog post. The problem is that blog post is only semi-related to their catalog. Their top blog post hit doesn’t have anything to do with their top product. And so, it has a fairly high bounce rate, and essentially what happens is that tanks the conversion rate. But has revenue changed? Average order value changed? No, not at all. But because we are sending a whole lot more traffic to the site that has a less than 1% chance of buying, the conversion rate goes down. But the net impact on the business is positive because 0.8% of people do make a purchase.
And so, you can see where it’s very easy to skew your conversion rate way down and start hand wringing about it when in reality it hasn’t hurt you in the slightest.
Paul Reda: It’s so hard to compare across stores and just be like, “Well, what’s a good conversion rate? What’s a bad conversion rate?” I don’t know. It’s like what’s the conversion rate at a car dealership versus what’s the conversion rate at the grocery store for this specific can of beans? It’s two completely different things.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And so, that’s why I think with conversion rate you can really make yourself needlessly crazy with it. That’s where split testing is so valuable. If you can take the time to figure it out, Google Optimize is free, but it’s also not the easiest thing when you’re using it for the first time. Once you’ve run two successful tests, you do it all day. It’s easy. But it’s like just getting over the hump on that initial set up once or twice.
Now, this is a good segue into the follow-up question from Martin, who says, “Based on your experience, what are the most underestimated, unexpected, random, or counterintuitive CRO UX tips and tricks? Anything from a button optimization to search or filtering tricks.”
Paul Reda: Now, I want to reiterate here, the things we are talking about here are little nudges. So, it’s like it’s a nudge that moved the conversion rate by .01%. Now, if you’re doing $7 million a year, that’s a very worthwhile nudge. But it’s not gonna make or break your store, anything that we’re about to say.
Kurt Elster: No.
Paul Reda: But it is fun.
Kurt Elster: It is a ton of fun. And he brought up button color. Button color is a thing I’ve always ignored because that’s like the joke in conversion rate optimization is like, “Let’s split test button colors.” I did split test button colors on a store, and it really was unequivocally one color performed way better than the other. But ultimately-
Paul Reda: But what… Do you remember off the top of your head the amount it performed better?
Kurt Elster: Well, all right. The statistical significance on it was 97% probability.
Paul Reda: But what I’m saying, 97% probability that they would have made an extra $100? What is the usage of it? Do you know?
Kurt Elster: I don’t remember what the value here was.
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: But yeah, ultimately I think in this case it was less to do with the color and more to do with contrast just in that page’s layout.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah. Totally.
Kurt Elster: Which comes back to remove friction.
Paul Reda: It’s not green buttons convert better than blue buttons.
Kurt Elster: It’s stuff you can read.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it’s like green looks better because the background color is this on their store and the text color is this, so green ended up working better with their color palette. That’s why.
Kurt Elster: But I like that he said unexpected, random, or counterintuitive. I think-
Paul Reda: I love removing the price from the collection grid.
Kurt Elster: One of my all-time favorites.
Paul Reda: Works. Is better. Every time we’ve tested it, it’s better. Maybe it’s not better for you, but it’s better every time we’ve tested it.
Kurt Elster: There was one I saw where it had a negative impact. I think, though, it’s less about displaying the price. It’s more about expectation and pricing psychology. I see the item in the collection with no price and I need to make a value judgment in my head what I think of it or not. I’m deciding what the probable price on this item is. I see a t-shirt, I go, “That’s probably 25 bucks.” I click through on it. If it’s 25 or less I go, “Wow, that’s a good deal.” If it’s 30 and I really want it, I’m like, “Okay, that’s about what I expected.” If it’s 50, I’m like, “I’m out.”
But you don’t know what’s gonna happen. You don’t know what that person’s expectation is gonna be. But what I’ve found is I think when we’ve run this test, probably like 80% of the time it’s positive. And quite a bit positive.
Paul Reda: It’s so weird. I mean, it’s just like… Yeah, don’t show the price.
Kurt Elster: I think another thing to… Now, when I run split tests, I’ll use multiple goals so you can see its impact on multiple metrics. Google Optimize does this. So, you can figure out, all right, what’s impact on revenue? What’s impact on conversion rate? So, it’s like transaction and revenue. And another good one we ran recently was should you show recently viewed products on your product detail page? And the answer was maybe. It reduces conversion rate a little bit. All right, so because you’re making people click around on the site more. Anytime you make them click around on the site more, conversion may go down a little bit.
It's extra friction. It’s click debt. But average order value consistently went up because they’re seeing it and they’re buying more items on average. So, depending on the store’s catalog pricing, net win. But again, that’s one… It’s like you really would have to test it per store to figure it out. So, I don’t know. I think oftentimes, no best practices.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so what we’re really saying is all we’re giving you is things to test on your store, and feel free to pull something out of your ass and just test it on your store, because there’s no best practice that just works everywhere.
Kurt Elster: For sure.
Paul Reda: I mean, there is, but like you’ve already got that out of the box.
Kurt Elster: I think there are some truisms, like you gotta get people… You have to reduce friction, so get people to products and shopping as quickly as possible. So, like one that I saw consistent was if you remove the hero image on a collection page, it brings the products further up the page. Almost always that will perform better. The hero image looks cool. It’s so neat. I love it. It’s branding. #branding. But it also just shoved all the products further down the page. And so, more-
Paul Reda: Well, and the fact that depending on your store, 80% of the stuff is on phones. 90% of the users are on phones. So, being like, “I got a big, gorgeous, beautiful, 1920 x 1000 splash image.”
Kurt Elster: Looks like garbage on my iPhone.
Paul Reda: It’s on my iPhone. Who gives a shit? It’s not big and gorgeous on my phone. It’s just another thing I gotta scroll by.
Kurt Elster: As web professionals, we are the only people still using desktops.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s true.
Kurt Elster: Everyone else is on their phone. Merchants and web developers are the ones screwing around.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I do this myself, but yeah, it’s like you, me, and the clients. The client’s got the store on their 1920 x 1080 monitor full screen and they’re just like, “It looks a little weird right here.” And it’s like, “Dude, no people on the planet are looking at this store 1920 wide. It’s not. And no one even cares about phones. They’re just like, “Oh yeah, looks great on desktop. We’re fine.” It’s like-
Kurt Elster: That’s where your customers are.
Paul Reda: No one even looks.
Kurt Elster: I know. It’s so strange. Peter White, “Given the announcement that Shopify has acquired Deliverr, and that,” at least to his understanding, “SFN, Shopify Fulfillment Network was “a bit of a hot mess before,”” I’m not saying that, he is. “Does this make it instantly more viable? We’ve been talking to Deliverr about 3PL and aside from the limitations in terms of dealing with larger products,” and I assume… He sells car parts, so we’re talking about quite large when he says that. “Their already tight integration with Shopify and black box inventory placement, i.e. you just send it to one place, and they distribute around the country does make for an interesting proposition.” And so, the question here was does this make SFN more viable. I think the answer is absolutely.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, I hope so. I mean, I feel like I personally feel like it doesn’t sound like Shopify Fulfillment Network lived up to the expectations they had for it, so if they’re acquiring a company that also does that, I would take that as, “We gotta get this thing to work.” And they’re doubling down on putting more capital into it to get it to work right.
Kurt Elster: Well, all right, so this is like… I think we have to look at Shopify Fulfillment Network as like this long-term opportunity in horizontal integration, right? We’re going to add this extra component of the process, like-
Paul Reda: Is it vertical integration because it’s like the next step in getting the thing to the person?
Kurt Elster: You know, I always confuse which one’s horizontal and which one’s vertical, I say as a man with an MBA.
Paul Reda: I think it’s vertical.
Kurt Elster: You’re like, “Oh, geez.” You’re right. It is vertical. You’re right.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And then once they build the Shopify Factory Network that lets you make products that you then sell on your Shopify store, that would also be vertical.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. All right, so we’re in the chain here.
Paul Reda: Tobi told me about that.
Kurt Elster: He did. Oh, I see.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They’re building factories.
Kurt Elster: Oh, boy. None of that is true. Made that up. You don’t talk to Tobi. Stop it.
Paul Reda: Well, we don’t let you know that we talk to each other.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I see. It’s been done in secret. All right, so you’ve got Shopify, and then you’ve gotta fulfill your product. You’re doing that yourself; you’re hiring a 3PL like ShipBob, maybe you’re using Amazon, fulfillment by Amazon, FBA, or the idea is now Shopify could do the fulfillment for you with SFN. But even with that, someone still has to ship the darn thing, and what was interesting about Deliverr, it’s a 3PL, so they store your product, they distribute it around the country, and they ship it. SFN did the same thing.
Paul Reda: SFN. You keep saying VN.
Kurt Elster: Sorry. SFN. And so that, that’s horizontal integration. They are acquiring a competitor. They’re acquiring another 3PL. But the real value and magic of Deliverr is it’s also logistics. They’ll ship it too, so we’ve got another step in our vertical integration. We have acquired a logistics company who can ship two days to over 90% of the United States. That’s awesome. So, if we’ve got that, that’s gonna power a new feature called Shop Promise, where we can guarantee… I don’t know about guarantee, but we can promise people, “Hey, you’re gonna get this in two days.” And we can display that in the store at the checkout. Whoa. Now we’re getting into the real magic and the power here.
Because I think increasingly as people get more sophisticated and more experienced with eCommerce, the delivery promise, am I gonna get this? Yes. When am I gonna get it? Quickly. That’s the big value add that people buy into and trust into. And having that, okay, now we’re at parity or beyond with Amazon Prime. Ooh. It’s getting exciting.
Paul Reda: Cathryn wants to know, “No doubt a how long is a piece of string question,” I like to say how much does a car cost, “but a headless Shopify build. Is it a feasible for a small business cost wise or is it the domain of medium to large? Are we talking five figures or heading into six or seven? Thank you.” If you’re doing under $100,000 a year, do not do headless. Straight up, no. Don’t do that. If you’re doing under a million dollars a year, don’t do headless. Do not do that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. What’s the advantage? What are we trying to achieve by switching to headless?
Paul Reda: That’s the other thing is like I don’t get what headless gets you and I would say the demarcation for headless, if you want to do it, I don’t know why, I don’t understand it, maybe I’m dumb, is are you ready to have an employee of your company whose entire job is writing code for the website? If you are not, if your business is not ready or not prepared to have that level of employee, do not do this.
Kurt Elster: I don’t disagree, but counterpoint, I think a technically proficient, sufficiently nerdy store owner could get by with a more drag-and-drop polished headless solution like Shogun Frontend.
Paul Reda: But they-
Kurt Elster: Because headless could be two things. It could be like-
Paul Reda: But they would still need a team on retainer.
Kurt Elster: Potentially, yeah.
Paul Reda: Yeah, to help.
Kurt Elster: Or at least probably a developer if they’re not a developer.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They would need a developer on retainer still.
Kurt Elster: I really think it is at least currently, it’s something where you really have to want this hyper granular control over the frontend of the website, and because you’re so technically proficient you’re like, “Look, I could do it better than Shopify does.”
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: All right. Good luck to you.
Paul Reda: And I mean we don’t hear the… This isn’t like our sector of the industry, so we don’t know that much about people going to headless, but we know a hell of a lot of people getting off headless. They become our clients.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. oVertone being a good example. Yeah. I don’t know. Even if you could do it, I just don’t know why you would, especially now, this Shopify theme experience with online store 2.0, now that that’s really rolled out and those features have fleshed out both in the editor, and the theme, and with metafields, suddenly I’m like, “This thing’s really sweet.” It does feel quite a bit better, faster, more streamlined than online store 1.0 was.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Leveraging metafields in 2.0, you do have to do a lot of initial set up, like you need to get someone like us to like… When the initial theme’s being set up, to set up all the metafields, and set up how the metafields appear on the pages, and how they work on the front end, but once that’s done the storeowner can definitely maintain it themselves. A low code, drag and drop store owner can do that themselves. They just gotta outlay for the initial setup.
Kurt Elster: The thing that’s rough about headless-
Paul Reda: Whereas with headless, anytime you want to change anything you gotta go call up the dorks in the dork pit to go do it.
Kurt Elster: I think the bigger issue, you give up the app store.
Paul Reda: That’s true.
Kurt Elster: And there’s always gonna be some issue you have, some feature you want, that there’s an app that easily solves. And you’re gonna want it and then you’re gonna be like, “I can’t use it because I’m only sort of on Shopify.” That’s I think a good description of headless. You’re sort of on Shopify.
That was our last question. I think we had some good ones there. I would like to hear these folks’ thoughts on this episode, so please join our Facebook group, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. Come talk to us and we do an AMA every four to six weeks or so, so join. Post your questions because I’m sure there will be another one. There always is. Thank you, folks. Good night.