w/ Kurt & Paul co-hosting
The 9th installment of our popular AMA series.
In this Ask Me Anything episode sourced from our listeners, we discuss...
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
October AMA
Kurt Elster: Man, I love this time of year.
Paul Reda: It’s better than August, the worst month.
Kurt Elster: What’s wrong with August?
Paul Reda: It’s too hot.
Kurt Elster: It’s like brutally… Yeah, by August… In May, you’re excited about summer.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You’re sick of summer by August. Holy crap.
Kurt Elster: August, maybe September you’re done with it.
Paul Reda: Well, September is my birthday, so it’s like my birthday month, so everything is fine.
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay. And then October rolls around and then it’s like October, boom, I got all the fall stuff happens all at once. I get pumpkin spice, I’m carving pumpkins, it’s just like we switch to eating nothing but baked goods. Everywhere has baked goods. Then November, we’re putting up Christmas décor by the end. You’re starting that Christmas shopping. And you got Thanksgiving, which you have as the annual subscription fee to having a family. That’s from this season of Rick and Morty. People are gonna know that.
And then I got Christmas is after that, then new year’s, and then it’s just like 60 to 90 days of winter hellscape if you live in Chicago.
Paul Reda: Yeah. October is bullshit. It’s just like it’s the preamble to the holiday season.
Kurt Elster: The preamble.
Paul Reda: It’s like get me to the good stuff. Come on. Let’s go.
Kurt Elster: No, I got married on Halloween.
Paul Reda: I know.
Kurt Elster: I love the Halloween décor. I like that kind of macabre stuff.
Paul Reda: I will say I was excited for the classic horror movies that were added to Criterion this month because I love old movies and there’s nothing better than just like an old movie from 1931 and you’re in and out in like 80 minutes. That’s what I’m looking for.
Kurt Elster: I do appreciate that older movies are shorter.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so I’ve been watching the Frankensteins, or as your daughter has told me, Frankum’s Time.
Kurt Elster: We went to Universal Studios, and she came back and told a friend about it, and they were five. The five-year-old had also been to Universal, so they were conversing about Frankum’s Time.
Paul Reda: I love… Every time I see him, I’m like, “It’s Frankum’s Time.”
Kurt Elster: In my head now, yeah, he’s Frankum’s Time. All right, but the moment that Halloween fall season hits, that’s when you know like, “Oh, Black Friday’s coming. Holidays are coming.” And a surprising percentage of people start their shopping and some even finish it, supposedly, in October.
Paul Reda: It’s an insane number. Is it like 25%? Like 25% are done by November 1st.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We’ve had the stats before and I’m sure I could Google them, but it is… And it’s gonna depend on the year, but it’s somewhere like 15. 15, 20.
Paul Reda: Oh, okay.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And it’s self-reported, so like I’m sure they’re like, “All right, well, I finished shopping,” and then there’s all the people I forgot about for November.
Paul Reda: But also I bought five more things afterwards.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, but my point is you could start doing promos now and be making sales. Because we’ve mentioned before on this show, by November you’re really… Part of Black Friday, you’re getting a lot of sales, but you’re also… A lot of those are deferred sales from September, October.
Paul Reda: I was just gonna say, isn’t the Moneyball smarty boy move now to be like, “No, you have no sales, because everyone’s looking for sales, so they didn’t buy anything in September and October because they’re waiting for the November sale, so that was sales we were gonna get anyway, and you lost money.”
Kurt Elster: You know, if you’re REI, I suppose. But REI is just like, “We closed the stores. You go buy online.” I don’t know. I think people, they want the… We all know what’s going on. Just give me the excuse to buy. I think it’s just like take every opportunity you can to be top of mind for people who need to buy gifts, and maybe they’ll spend that money with you.
Paul Reda: Or maybe make it like 5% off and be like, “This is the best you’re getting, sucker.”
Kurt Elster: See, that’s a turn off. I don’t think I would do it. I think you either make a big statement about how you’re intentionally not having sale prices, I like bundles, I like free gift with purchase, I want free upgraded shipping. I don’t necessarily love like discount, discount, discount. But people are more receptive to discounts currently than in years past.
Paul Reda: You should definitely call them suckers in your emails, though, right?
Kurt Elster: I’m gonna go with if that’s your brand voice, then sure, but I think for most brands that’s gonna be a no. Yeah. Just a no.
Paul Reda: Frankum’s Time. I just keep saying it. I love it. She’s got a big, long story. She’s like, “I went and told my friends about Frankum’s Time, and they knew about Frankum’s Time too,” and I’m just like, “Keep saying it. Keep saying it. I love this.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and who? I’m not familiar with this character. Who was it? Just started… What was it? Frankum’s Time? She’s very sweet. All right, who are we? Why are we here? What are you listening to? This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: I am joined by, who is this guy? I’m joined by show producer Paul Reda, and today we are answering your Shopify business questions, so let’s jump into that. We’re not going to. There’s two free resources I want to highlight first. Number one, and if you’re in our Facebook group or you follow me on social media, you’ve seen posts about this. If you sign up for a Privy account and register at Privy.com/ultimate-bundle, privy.com/ultimate-bundle, and that link is in the show notes, you’ll get their Black Friday calendar and a video call with a Privy coach to get you started. Privy.com/ultimate-bundle. I’ve gone through the thing. I got to review it. I gave them a few things to add to it like 60 days ago when they were working on it. And I think it’s really good. I think it’s a really helpful resource.
The other one I wanted to highlight, I was on The Quiet Light Podcast, and they’re a business brokerage, and they’ve got the EXITpreneur’s Playbook. There is a 0% chance that anyone could consistently spell this, let alone pronounce it. EXITpreneur.
Paul Reda: EXITpreneur is such a dumb, made up word. They’re like, “Well, we’re gonna make this into a thing.” No, you’re not.
Kurt Elster: All right. Well, regardless of the name’s spellability-
Paul Reda: I’m sure the playbook is good. It’s just it’s dumb. That’s a dumb name.
Kurt Elster: It’s known as the ultimate guide to selling an online business. But if you’re buying an online business, this is the other team’s playbook and a must read. So, Joe, who hosts the Quiet Light Podcast, and who wrote the book, said, “Hey, I’ll give a way five free copies to you or to your audience for every one of your episodes that you plug it on.” I said, “You know what? It’s a good offer.” I’ve got a copy of the book. I flipped through it. It seems good. And I love being able to provide free stuff to our audience, so it’s exitpreneur.io/kurtelster. You can grab the playbook. They also have an eBook version. You can get that. And I will put that in the show notes, as well, because the chances of you consistently spelling EXITpreneur… All right, you write entrepreneur, which I always screw that one up, let autocorrect fix it for you, and then that beginning, entre, you switch that to exit. That’s how you do it.
All right, let’s move. Let’s move to our AMA. Let’s do some discussions. Would you please open with our first question? And this time, I tried to group them loosely by topic.
Paul Reda: Anthony W. wants to know what’s the biggest thing you’ve learned this year in business. Uh, I don’t know. The thing that’s surprised me the most is the extremely short time horizon everyone seems to be thinking by and that they’re just like, you know, during the biggest days of the pandemic all these online sellers, we were all making hay. We’re all just having Scrooge McDuck money baths. And now, things are just reverting back to normal or reverting back to the trend line where they were supposed to be before the pandemic, or flat, and they’re like, “Oh my God. The sky is falling. We’re entering a recession. Everything’s terrible.”
It's just like no, you just had a once in a lifetime influx and now it’s over. Did you not think that was a once in a lifetime influx? Did you think that it was just gonna rain money off the money tree for the rest of your life?
Kurt Elster: What shocks me are the retailers, like Target specifically, who went, “Well, this will never end,” and screwed up their own forecasting and bought so much inventory that they’re like, “We literally have run out of space to put this stuff.”
Paul Reda: Freaking Peloton. Peloton was just like, “Yes, a thing where no one will ever leave their house ever again and only exercises inside their house? Yes, that’s exactly what the future will be like. We’re just gonna prepare for that future.” Are you idiots?
Kurt Elster: All right, so your biggest surprise was the discovery that people are myopic.
Paul Reda: Just that level of myopic, where it’s just like-
Kurt Elster: But yes, at all levels of business.
Paul Reda: It’s like you just made a ton of money over the last three years. Did you save any of it? No? Why not?
Kurt Elster: Because it’s too much fun to buy stuff. My big surprise was discovering, accepting, and moving past a limiting belief. I really was very resistant to hiring full-time employees.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: And that was… I wish I had figured this out sooner because now that we’ve grown our team this year, things have been absolutely fantastic. It’s just a delight.
Paul Reda: Well, and it’s funny, because we’ve answered that question for other people before, and we’ve always been just like, “Yeah, once a piece of the business gets too annoying that you don’t want to deal with it anymore, hire someone to deal with it.” But we never did that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Do as I say, not as I do.
Paul Reda: And now we did it and we’re like, “Oh, that’s great. Whoever thought of that is a genius.”
Kurt Elster: Wow. Yeah, getting someone who’s better than me at doing these things to do it? Oh, amazing. So, Byron Myers, he has a question. How many pitches do you get from people each week that want to be on your podcast? What advice would you give to someone who is trying to be a guest to get your attention?
Paul Reda: You know how many pitches we get a week.
Kurt Elster: So, I actually don’t, because they all go to my wife, who then she’s the gatekeeper, and the good ones she forwards to me.
Paul Reda: That’s how many pitches we get. So many, we made someone else handle it.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah. I was like, “I can’t sort through this anymore.”
Paul Reda: The advice I would give to someone who’s trying to be a guest to get our attention, and the advice I would give to anyone who’s trying to get anyone’s attention about something, is think about what’s in it for them and then make a pitch that makes it really worthwhile to them. Just sending an email that’s just like, “Hey, I think we should connect on this.” Why? Who the fuck are you? Why would I want to connect with you about this? What are you talking about? Delete immediately.
Kurt Elster: We do get… This happened this week, where someone was like, “Hey, you own this domain name.”
Paul Reda: And I own the Ethereum domain name.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, the Ethereum TLD.
Paul Reda: And he didn’t say enough said, but that was it. He was just like, “I own the Ethereum one.” Good?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that was the whole… So, then you’re like, “All right, what do you want?” And he’s like, “Synergy.”
Paul Reda: He was just like, “To connect on this.” And it’s like, about what? I was like, “Write a sentence.”
Kurt Elster: Couldn’t do it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. He just can’t. No one wants to give a pitch, like it’s apparently giving a pitch that tells me what’s in it for me is like gauche or something. Just tell me why I should do this.
Kurt Elster: Tell me why I should care.
Paul Reda: How will it make my life better? You can’t? Goodbye.
Kurt Elster: So, for a podcast pitch specifically, ultimately I am not the target market. There are 3,000 people a week.
Paul Reda: For the podcast, it’s how will it make things better for our listeners? Are our listeners going to learn something useful? Are you giving them a coupon code for your cool service that will definitely make them more money? Give us something. Just being like, “I am a rich person. I would like to talk about how I became rich.” Don’t care.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I run those interviews, whether it’s merchant, service provider, whatever, expert, it starts with okay, what’s the theme? We have a theme. Great. Do you have three to five points that we can make that fit within that theme? Fantastic. And now do we have a hook? Do we have an intro? Do we have something that in 10 seconds I can make that theme sound interesting? If you can give me those things and it's applicable to the audience, it’s eCommerce, 100% I’m putting you on the show.
All right, 99% I’m putting you on the show. But honestly, that’s what I’m looking for there. And really, it’s like if I can get the theme and the hook, great. We can figure out the rest. Get me two of those three things that I described and then we’ll figure it out from there.
Yeah. What do we got next?
Paul Reda: Chris Z. wants to know our thoughts on upsell apps. “We are seeing competitors getting away from these annoying popups and just showing a cleaner build, like in suggestions underneath the product. We have tested turning ours on and off recently and not even offered upsells on newer items. It looks like people will still buy the other items. We haven’t A-B tested it. Are these apps going the way of Wheelio or do you find these add to sales?”
Kurt Elster: Wheelio was… That was spin to win, wasn’t it?
Paul Reda: Was that spin to win? Spin to win!
Kurt Elster: Spin! To win! Yeah, what’s interesting about marketing gimmicks…
Paul Reda: Well, I think the thing is, having not tested it, just pulling this out of my ass, I think it definitely makes you more money, but the problem is how do you execute it? If it’s like he said where I click add to cart and now I want to check out with the thing I bought, and all of a sudden we’re throwing a popup in your face that’s going, “Buy this other stuff too!” No, because I’m just clicking close because so many sites just throw up roadblocks when I’m trying to buy something and I’m like, “I’m trying to buy. I’m trying to buy. I’m closing this. Leave me alone.”
Kurt Elster: I know. Sometimes you get on these eCommerce sites and it’s like there’s so many sticky widgets everywhere.
Paul Reda: Oh my God.
Kurt Elster: That I’m like, “I just… I can’t even click the button I want.”
Paul Reda: So, that right out. If it’s a thing where you have a drawer cart and underneath the item in a drawer cart is like a little banner that’s like, “Hey, also buy this cap that goes with the jacket you just bought.” I think that’ll work wonders.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If it’s a contextual offer.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If it’s just a popup that barfs like, “Here are three bestsellers, also buy them.” That doesn’t work.
Kurt Elster: And the way he described it was like he’s like, “We’ve tried turning our popups on and off.” But then they also have the frequently bought together ones, where that’s not a popup, it’s a widget that’s like, “Hey, you’re looking at this item. Here’s this item plus two others people buy together.” And let’s say it’s like well, you’re looking at lounge pants, I got my sweatpants for maximum dad appeal. Well, don’t you also want the great tube socks to go with that and the stained grey sweatshirt to go with it, too? Yes, absolutely I do.
Paul Reda: I thought it was gonna be like an impact wrench or something.
Kurt Elster: Ooh. Yeah. Well, I buy most of my clothes at a hardware store.
Paul Reda: Get everything at Menards.
Kurt Elster: You can get away from upsells and popups.
Paul Reda: You should get away from popups.
Kurt Elster: The thing to watch is your average order value. If I have them and then I get rid of them, does my average order value go down? And you can graph it over time in Shopify analytics. You could figure that out pretty easily. I do like that frequently bought together widget, it’s an app called Frequently Bought Together. We use that on a lot of sites. I like that one a lot. I just set that up today on a site. And that, it’s nice. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. It’s not intrusive. It styles fairly well.
So, I think like, all right, if you’re going to do only one thing, go with that widget approach. And I don’t care how you do it as long as you do something to try and get that AOV up. But as far as the popups go, it’s gonna depend on who your audience is, what you’re selling, et cetera. Use your best judgment, man. It sounds like you don’t like them, so don’t use them and keep an eye on your AOV.
Paul Reda: Mark P. wants to know, “Looking for the best wholesale solution while using a non-Plus plan but still selling DTC on the same site.” We had a client ask us about this today. What are you gonna do about it, Kurt?
Kurt Elster: I had someone ask about it. I asked several friends and got some good recommendations, but the one that kept coming up was Wholesale Gorilla. Wholesale Gorilla, which, memorable name, it had really good reviews in the app store. I looked through it. It could do separate… It can override regular shipping with its own shipping stuff. It looked like it would do everything we want if you want to be able to do wholesale without Shopify Plus. Now, I don’t love apps for doing this, but without Plus you don’t get a choice. On Shopify Plus, we’d use script editor and B2B accounts to do it. Without Plus, I think an app is the best way to do it. Wholesale Gorilla is right now, based on how many people consistently recommended it to me, that’s gonna be my first choice.
Paul Reda: All right. We got Wholesale Gorilla. We got Mailchimp. We got SurveyMonkey.
Kurt Elster: Yep.
Paul Reda: I have our new app. It’s called Upsell Bonobo. And it solves Chris’s problem about his upsells and we have the simian branding that’s needed for any successful app.
Kurt Elster: The simian branding for a successful… Did you workshop this or is this off the top of your head? That’s just phenomenal improv. Wow.
Paul Reda: I’m from Chicago, baby.
Kurt Elster: All right, Wholesale Gorilla and be a primate enthusiast. Moving on. Oh, Rachel L., let’s see. She said, “I know many of you are crushing it with your businesses. That’s so awesome, but mine has dropped and I need to cut expenses. Are there any email companies similar to Klaviyo that are not as expensive?” And she had asked this in the group. Someone else had replied to her and I’m just gonna read their answer. They said, “We switched to Privy and found it to be perfect for us. Klaviyo, in my opinion, is for much bigger businesses. We do under $150K a year, so it works fine for us.” I don’t know if people realize that, like Privy was originally entirely popups. It’s now… Privy is like in the past, if you wanted all right, I want easy, simple email, you used Mailchimp. It’s like you want simple, easy. It does popups. It does email. But it’s a lot more than what Mailchimp used to be. It’s been many years since I’ve logged into Mailchimp.
Paul Reda: Well, and they had that whole fight with Shopify, so probably a lot of Shopify entrepreneurs are like, “Am I supposed to be using this? Does it even work?” I know they made up.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think the official integration is back in the store now.
Paul Reda: Peter W. wants to know, “Cyber Monday is a relic from the days when online stores would have their Thanksgiving sale. Does any-“ Well, online stores have a Thanksgiving sale still, so I don’t know how that’s a relic, but, “Does anyone even care now or is it worth dedicating creative effort into CM branding? Or do we just bundle everything under Black Friday?”
It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you need dedicated Cyber Monday branding.
Kurt Elster: All right, so here’s the thing with Black Friday with emails. There is so many that are going to be going out in people’s inboxes, you just need to be there and be top of mind with a reasonable offer. And so, any excuse to send out a promo email, because there’s like… We’ve got a six-week window in which it is a free for all on inboxes, and so really it’s just be there, try and cut through the noise, which is increased dramatically during this time, and be top of mind, and hopefully you’re there at the right time for someone to make a purchase from you.
And for that reason, look. I don’t care what you call it. Just grab every opportunity you have to send promotional messaging.
Paul Reda: Yeah. But yeah, if you call it your Thanksgiving Weekend sale, or you call it your Black Friday sale that’s still occurring on Monday, no one cares.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You know, if anything, switch up the name. Start inventing holidays. Make it yours.
Paul Reda: Invent your own holiday. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I like novelty. The human brain craves novelty. Just start making stuff up. Amazon’s last week was the VIP, the Prime Day Early Sale. What did they call it? It was essentially they were like, “It’s Black Friday sneak preview.”
Paul Reda: I just bought an SD card on Amazon before we started recording this and it’s-
Kurt Elster: How big was it?
Paul Reda: 256.
Kurt Elster: Oh my gosh.
Paul Reda: And yeah, we’re at like pre-Prime Day. It’s like the Prime Day pre-release or whatever if you’re a Prime member or something. Yeah. Just invent your own thing.
Kurt Elster: Just start making them up. Yeah. Peter sells Tesla accessories, so we call it like Tesla Tuesday Sale. It’s the day after Cyber Monday.
Paul Reda: Well, the app for that is called Sale Macaque.
Kurt Elster: We gotta go on Wikipedia, be like, “List of primates.” Do lemurs count?
Paul Reda: Rhesus monkey. Something with an R.
Kurt Elster: Start just sticking sapien onto the end of things.
Paul Reda: This is a you question. Will F. wants to know, “What are your thoughts on importing orders from other platforms like Etsy, Amazon, and drop shippers? How does this affect your Shopify analytics and your store’s AOV and stuff?” I guess so if you’re also selling on Amazon, can you suck that up into your Shopify? Can the Shopify backend be the backend for your entire sales business in terms of numbers?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Okay. Is that good?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so essentially the idea, so like Shopify, we always think of it as this is eCommerce. This is your online store. But the way it’s really set up is Shopify is a platform and a hub. Online store is just one of the channels you plug into it. And so, I can add point of sale if I’ve got retail, but I can also add integrations with other marketplaces to it, like Amazon, eBay, Walmart. I can plug these things into it either directly if they offer it, or with a third-party connector, and then it’s going to pull in all my order data, customer data, all gets managed in one same place.
Now, what happens if I go in Shopify analytics? How badly does it jack that up? And what I have seen it do is the first card is hey, here’s your revenue, and it’ll be total revenue across all channels, and then it’ll break it down by channel underneath because it knows the sources. In your reporting, you could filter by channel source, so you don’t have an issue. But then that Shopify analytics dashboard, like AOV, store traffic, all those other cards are specific to the online store channel, and so adding these integrations really should not affect that. And we’ve got plenty of clients that run, have got online store and then numerous other channels plugged in, and it does not have a detrimental effect on reporting in any way.
So, it’s a good idea and you’re safe to do it. I say give it a shot. Also, worst case scenario, unplug it. Remove the sales channel.
Paul Reda: There should just be like an overarching app for all that stuff, though, that you could suck it into instead of just integrating to Shopify. There should be like another thing that takes all of them.
Kurt Elster: That’s what Shopify’s supposed to be.
Paul Reda: I know.
Kurt Elster: It’s the hub. And then it pulls everything in. It’s like the platform.
Paul Reda: I thought we could just make one. It’s called like Sooty Mangabey Sales Tracker.
Kurt Elster: Is that a monkey? Well, all right, gorilla was taken. We haven’t done orangutan.
Paul Reda: Oh, damn it. Okay. Yeah. Sales Orangutan.
Kurt Elster: I like bonobo. I thought that was good. Sales orangutan. How do I spell orangutan?
Paul Reda: Oh yeah, that’s a toughy.
Kurt Elster: Matt M. “Anyone have any product of the week examples? Looking to release a product that’s only available for one week and then it goes away forever. Any websites that do this? Looking for ideas on how they promote it.”
Paul Reda: I’m guessing here Matt is a youngin’, or at least younger than me, because the first thing that comes to mind is woot.com.
Kurt Elster: Woot. Amazon bought Woot.
Paul Reda: Amazon bought Woot. But woot.com would have a different product every day that they were selling, just one product on that one day only, but it was a big, crazy sale, and so every day you had to go check Woot to see what was on sale.
Kurt Elster: And they really nailed it.
Paul Reda: I think they still exist, so yeah, go to woot.com.
Kurt Elster: I believe they do. Yeah. I would base this off Woot.
Paul Reda: Well, didn’t… We knew someone who ran like a t-shirt business. Weren’t the t-shirts very limited?
Kurt Elster: TJ Mapes. RIPT Apparel.
Paul Reda: Yeah. TJ Mapes. RIPT Apparel.
Kurt Elster: R-I-P-T Apparel. RIPT Apparel, yeah, did that as well, where it’d be like, “These are limited releases.” And I think it was like this was this run for this week, or this month, and then they would switch. Yeah. It’s the scarcity. You’re looking to create scarcity and urgency so that people have an excuse to buy. It’s why the stupid hype sneaker apps work so well. I just bought Nikes and it was like, “Oh, well, my first choice I didn’t win,” and I had to set a timer. But it works. It gets people to buy because they know they can’t wait. They have to make a decision then. It’s like use it or lose it.
We have a client who’s been on the show, Laura Petrielli, Vex Latex, and she does item of the week, but those items… It’s just like, “Well, this item-“
Paul Reda: Laura’s work is very labor-intensive, though, so she’s gotta know how many she’s selling before she starts making it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Everything’s handmade. And so, on her site they’re tagged item of the week, and then that gives it a badge and it says item of the week. That’s like the weekly email goes out, “Hey, this is this item of the week this week.” And it’s featured on the homepage. I think that’s not quite what you’re looking for, like for sure take away the badge idea. You want a badge on the product.
Paul Reda: Oh, you definitely need a countdown timer on the product.
Kurt Elster: 100% you need that countdown timer.
Paul Reda: I would definitely have a thing on there that’s like, “Maybe we’re only selling them as many as we have,” so not only is there the countdown timer, but they could be gone before the countdown timer even runs out, so you better get going right now.
Kurt Elster: I think that’s… I’m going to Woot right now. Let’s see how they do it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. No, that’s how Woot worked. I mean, what Woot mostly was was things that were discontinued in some way. Apple stopped selling a certain iPod.
Kurt Elster: They’d be like, “You want this last generation Roomba? It’s 70% off.” Yes, I do.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You want this thing that was pretty much gonna get scrap heaped because the company that was originally selling it didn’t want to sell it anymore, and so Woot bought it for pennies on the dollar and then resold it to you for smaller dollars on the dollar.
Kurt Elster: I cannot get Woot’s website to load on my phone.
Paul Reda: Uh oh. Too many countdown timers.
Kurt Elster: I mean, it’s still around. It just flat out won’t connect. Picked a bad time to do this, Woot. Supposedly… Matt Rutledge, who sold Woot to Amazon, had a meeting with Jeff Bezos after they bought it, and he blogged about this after he left the company, and he’s like, “So, what do you want from me?” And the place they’re eating at had octopus on the menu and Bezos goes… He said something to the effect of like, “I like weird stuff I don’t understand, like this octopus on the menu. You’re that octopus.” And then was like, “I want to eat you.” Said something just so off the wall that the guy was like, “All right, I gotta write this down.” I’m sure I butchered that story, but I know it involved Jeff Bezos and octopus.
All right. Anyway, I think for this gentleman with his time limited idea, I think it’s a good idea and I think just make it as dead obvious as possible. If you’re looking for a great example, Woot invented the idea and really the answer is like timers, timers, timers.
Paul Reda: The feeling you want to be giving the person on the page is if you don’t buy this right this second-
Kurt Elster: Someone else will.
Paul Reda: … you will never have it. Would you take the car or what’s inside the box?
Kurt Elster: The box!
Paul Reda: Make a choice right now.
Kurt Elster: Is it a monkey? Oh, it’s a howler monkey. Aw.
Paul Reda: You can’t just do the ones that all have monkey. You can’t just be like rhesus monkey. Howler monkey.
Kurt Elster: That’s what I’m doing.
Paul Reda: You’re just like name a nut.
Kurt Elster: Pine nut.
Paul Reda: Macadamia nut.
Kurt Elster: That’s my favorite.
Paul Reda: Yeah, I know. You spend like $100 a week on macadamia nuts.
Kurt Elster: What’s your macadamia budget, sir? Mine’s $1,000 a year.
Paul Reda: It is. You’re not even kidding.
Kurt Elster: Okay, it’s not. For sure, I’ve spent 100 bucks on macadamia nuts this year. They’re $20 a pound. That’s like, “I’m gonna treat myself.” Anyway, that’s what I want for Christmas. Macadamia nuts.
All right. Our next question.
Paul Reda: Pankaj B. wants to know, “Where do you stand on thumbnails on the product page? I’m right now thinking about either getting completely rid of them or replacing the images with dot sliders, at least for mobile. What would you suggest?” It doesn’t matter. I’m going with it doesn’t matter.
Kurt Elster: Thumbnails on the product page. Initially, when I read this, I thought it was homepage.
Paul Reda: No. Product page. Like you got the main image and then you got the thumbnails underneath it.
Kurt Elster: My main image and then what are my thumbnails?
Paul Reda: I’m going with I’m sure you could split test it and it’ll be like, “This way’s better,” but it’ll only be better by like 1%.
Kurt Elster: All right. You could get rid of the thumbnails if the interface is very obvious. It needs to have controls and indicators that are always there. And that’s, he said the dots, I would have an arrow on there. As long as you have the arrows and the dots, it’ll work, and then it should, especially on mobile, I should just be able to swipe through it. Then you could probably get rid of the thumbnails. I’ve seen split tests for like should the thumbnails be on the left? Are they vertical? Are they on the bottom? Horizontal?
Paul Reda: Underneath. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I believe when we’ve tested this, sites performed better with thumbnails. Yeah. And I’ve seen conflicting results on the vertical versus horizontal thumbnails on a product page. But the way you’re describing it, 100% you could do it. I don’t think it would confuse anybody because I think you got it right where you said, “Hey, replace it with dot sliders.” Yeah. And the advantage here is it tightens up the layout on the page so that ideally that product form is above the fold on mobile. Really, that would be the advantage to doing this. And that might be worthwhile, increase the add to cart rate. Yeah.
But I think ultimately, like if you really tried to split test this, you would just get insignificant results over and over, where it’s like, “Oh, it turns out it’s just preference. Just set it up however you want.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. It doesn’t-
Kurt Elster: As long as it’s implemented well, it doesn’t matter. That would be my prediction.
All right. Lise B. “What’s your advice for a retail store? (Selling other people’s brands) How do you differentiate yourself and how to maximize profits when the margins often aren’t that great?”
Paul Reda: White label.
Kurt Elster: I like white label.
Paul Reda: You gotta find some cheap garbage that fits in with the rest of your retail store that’s a generic brand that you then invent a generic brand, but that’s just like your house brand, like Safeway Select, and sell that crap in your store for a way higher profit margin.
Kurt Elster: That’s why they do private labels is because it’s a significantly better margin. And then if you can get… Developing private labels, not as hard as you’d think if you’ve got a good relationship with a manufacturer. You can get them to do it. And once you’ve got one, then you ideally… You don’t compete with your existing products. You do-
Paul Reda: Complementary things.
Kurt Elster: Complementary things. And then you sell the whole thing as a bundle. And then, all right, now I’m able to sell that original retail catalog, but I’m also bundling with these higher margin items, and then so my average profit per order goes way up when you do it that way. Or maybe you could find accessory items to bundle and include that have a better margin on them. I don’t know what your category is, but no, I think your white label or private label idea is the way to go. Makes life much easier.
And we got one left. We’re on the last question here.
Paul Reda: Peter wants to know, “Is Shopify still the powerhouse and de facto first choice they were thought to be, or is BigCommerce and others gaining ground?” Personally, I don’t know. I mean, I work with Shopify. Things are going great. The stock price stinks, but who cares? That’s not reality.
Kurt Elster: I don’t… Yeah. I think if you’re looking at stock price, I think you have to decouple the market, which is inherently irrational, like it’s quite emotional, driven off sentiment, from the actual performance of a company. And that’s not Shopify. That’s like everybody. Like Apple will be like, “Hey, here’s all our new stuff, and our new phone, and we’re doing so great,” and some analyst will say something, and the stock will tank. You’re like, “What?” And then you wait a week. It goes back up.
And truthfully, in his question, he had prefaced it with a thing about stock price, and I had just taken that out. Because I think the question works without it better.
So, Peter was on BigCommerce and migrated to Shopify and he’s still on Shopify. And we’ve done several store migrations this year. And when it comes to data, the data migration portion, I will often do that myself. I enjoy it. And so-
Paul Reda: Which means you’re going into the backend of BigCommerce, of PrestaShop, of Magento, of all these other competitors, and seeing what they got going on back there.
Kurt Elster: WooCommerce.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’ve migrated from WordPress WooCommerce, Magento 2, and BigCommerce this year. Those are all… I’ve worked with those platforms and moved stores to Shopify from them. And I have used… I’d used all those platforms years ago, as well. And what really struck me, and this was before he’d asked this question I had noticed this, was when you log into those platforms, they looked the same to me as they’ve always looked. I’m sure there’s subtleties I’m missing it, but it’s like this looks the same as five to seven years ago. Whereas Shopify, dramatically improved with feature set, channels, integrations, interface in the last just two years.
And so, I think there is a momentum and velocity that Shopify has that the others didn’t. Going into the pandemic they said, “You know what? We don’t know what’s gonna happen here.” Staffed up massively and then just cranked stuff out. And other people didn’t. And I think you really see the result of that now if you take these things head-to-head, especially if you’d used them years ago, and it’s like, “Nothing changed here.” That really surprised me. It felt old when I used them. Little clunky.
I think the answer is Shopify is synonymous with commerce.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah. I mean, I get… It’s weird that I hear ads for Shopify on podcasts and stuff.
Kurt Elster: I no longer have to… When people are like, “Oh, what do you do?” I’ll say, “I’m a Shopify partner.” They already know what it is. They don’t have a store on it, but they recognize it. It’s very strange. I mean, it’s cool, but it’s just I’m like, “Oh. All right. You’re familiar.” They’re like, “Yeah, that’s that eCommerce thing.” It’s like I bought… And then they’ll be like, “I bought from this Shopify store.” Like they’ll know. I think it’s cool.
Oh. Actually, no. I have one more question. Let me find it. I got an easy one for you I gotta add.
Paul Reda: Frankum’s Time.
Kurt Elster: All right. Winiffred asks, “We’ve got some CSS code within style tags on our page and blog post templates on our website to make the buttons on the pages stand out and encourage visitors to not bounce. See example.” And the screenshot is what she described. “My question is should this code be on each page or blog post above the H2 tag? And if the answer is no, where should this code be? My theme is Turbo on Shopify 2.0.” So, Turbo 8.
Paul Reda: Well, if you’re wrapping it in the style tag, technically that’s supposed to be in the head, so it’s in theme.liquid, but I understand it sounds like a style she only wants to happen on buttons on certain pages, so she’s putting the style in those page templates.
Kurt Elster: Okay. All right. Not a terrible workaround.
Paul Reda: Which is “technically wrong” because that style tag is only supposed to be in the head, but who cares? Doesn’t matter.
Kurt Elster: It works, and the browser knows what to do with it.
Paul Reda: It’s gonna work. The browser knows what it’s doing with it.
Kurt Elster: Apps will do crap like this.
Paul Reda: The only person that would tell you you’re doing it wrong is a pedant or someone who’s trying to teach you how to do it in a class, so doesn’t really matter. If you wanted to really be good, go in the theme.css file and then add something at the bottom, and I know those product pages, there’s a way the button is on the product page that you can write a class or a style that it would only affect the buttons on the product pages. Whether there’s like a class on the body tag or something, you’d have to know how to write CSS.
So, the true right way to do it-
Kurt Elster: To get like a CSS selector where it’s only going to impact that page.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Would only happen on the product page. So, that would be the true right way to do it, is to write a thing in the CSS file and just make a very specific rule, but the way she’s doing it, it’s fine. She’s not breaking anything.
Kurt Elster: What if I put it in theme.liquid in the head, so it’s in the right place, but then I wrap it in a liquid if statement that checks to see what the URL is or what my page template is and then applies it conditionally?
Paul Reda: Also a thing you could do. Doesn’t… She could just leave it the way she is. She’s fine.
Kurt Elster: All right. Maybe I was overcomplicating the thing. Any Halloween plans? What’s your Halloween costume, Mr. Reda?
Paul Reda: A guy in his basement.
Kurt Elster: A guy in his basement?
Paul Reda: Yeah. So, this will be the third Halloween I live in this house, and I can tell you the grand number of times my doorbell has been rung by trick or treaters has been two.
Kurt Elster: Oh, no.
Paul Reda: And I live on a suburban street surrounded by other houses.
Kurt Elster: It’s very suburban.
Paul Reda: So, I don’t know why my house is apparently the murder house you’re not supposed to go in. I have outdoor lights on.
Kurt Elster: You have sidewalks.
Paul Reda: The sidewalks. The front door is open, so it’s just like the screen.
Kurt Elster: Nice landscaping.
Paul Reda: It’s just the screen door. For some reason, children refuse to come to my house.
Kurt Elster: Do you put up Halloween décor?
Paul Reda: No. But I mean the lights are on, the door’s open.
Kurt Elster: Carve a pumpkin or something.
Paul Reda: There’s a strange large man looming in the doorway who wants to give you candy.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Hm.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And I put up a sign that said, “Free razorblades,” and no one is coming.
Kurt Elster: Isn’t that a thing that’s never actually happened?
Paul Reda: Well, it has happened, but it’s always like the parent is literally trying to kill their child. It’s like the thing where it’s like, “There’s human trafficking.” It’s like 90% of human trafficking is actually an estranged parent taking the child in a custody battle.
Kurt Elster: I just wanted to have a fun outro about Halloween costumes and you’re like, “Eat a razorblade.”
Paul Reda: They’re gonna learn something.
Kurt Elster: I have a Jedi costume I’ll wear. Pair it with a lightsaber. Walk around the neighborhood. My daughter’s a cat. I like that it’s a non-licensed character. She just said cat. Just done. Cat. Period.
Paul Reda: She’s not gonna be the Bride of Frankum’s Time?
Kurt Elster: No. My wife’s a skeleton. She bought a skeleton jumpsuit. Yeah.
Paul Reda: All I know is for the last four months my wife’s been like, “That should be the baby’s Halloween costume. That should be the baby’s Halloween costume. That should be the baby’s Halloween costume.” There’s been like 20 costumes mentioned. So, I’m interested in seeing what my daughter is on Halloween.
Kurt Elster: Well, I guess we’ll have to hear about that in a future update. We will end it there. This has been a delight and if you would… Let’s see. Do I have any… What sound effect do I want to go out on here?
Paul Reda: Spooky wolf.
Kurt Elster: Spooky wolf. How about spooky wolf and man yelling?
Sound Board: wolf howling and man yelling
Kurt Elster: There we go. All right. Good night. Thank you.