from Google Analytics and SEO to international shipping and TikTok advertising
Also on YouTube: youtu.be/LZlbfPiEYYY
This week, Kurt and Paul tackle a series of questions from real Shopify merchants. The specter of Black Friday is upon us, but the message is clear: prepare, don't panic. The conversation shifts to the pros and cons of one-page checkouts and dives deep into the world of Google Analytics. If you're an international seller, the topic of duties and taxes will be of particular interest. And for the bootstrappers out there, the episode closes with indispensable advice on growing without a hefty ad budget.
Google Sales Channel
Elevar
Duties and import taxes
DHL Duty and Tax Calculator
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
September 2023 AMA
Kurt Elster: I don’t have a decent cold open. I just… I make content and I jam on my tools with Shopify, and that’s-
Paul Reda: Jam on your tools?
Kurt Elster: Jam on the tools. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Paul Reda: My daughter says a new word incorrectly every day. It’s the best. It’s just the best.
Kurt Elster: Give me one.
Paul Reda: She goes… Well, like those things that we draw on the whiteboard with, that’s a markder. Markder.
Kurt Elster: Markder.
Paul Reda: And on Sunday when I was watching her, we had a new one with was cumuner, which is cucumber. That’s cumuner.
Kurt Elster: That sounds like a delicious seasoning.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Cumuner. And she has Minnie slippers that she wears all day long and she says MinNIE shoes, and that is the exact intonation, because she has her own special intonation on words. MinNIE shoes. My wife and I just… We just say things. We just say words she says to each other all the time.
Kurt Elster: You’re gonna be at that for a while. Just the hilarious crazy stuff kids say.
Paul Reda: Well, and when she done with things, she goes, “All D. All D.” When she doesn’t want any more, she’s done, and now she’ll be in bed, and it’ll be like 10:00 at night, and we’ll just be like, “I’m all D. Are you all D? Yeah, I’m all D too.” We’ll have adult conversations and then just say all D in the middle of that conversation.
Kurt Elster: About two years ago my six-year-old invented her own contraction and still uses it, and we’re like, “You know what? It’s fine.” No, I am’nt.
Paul Reda: Am not. Yeah, sure.
Kurt Elster: Am not. No, I am’nt. I’m like, “All right, it’s consistent with English.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. You can’t argue with that.
Kurt Elster: It’s not your fault that grammar is a tool of oppressive devils with arbitrary rules.
Paul Reda: Well, you need to understand. Dictionaries are descriptive. They’re not proscriptive. Which means that the dictionary is meant to document the way people are using language in the real world. Dictionary is not, “Here is the right words you’re supposed to use.”
Kurt Elster: Language evolves. And so, so does the dictionary.
Paul Reda: Yes.
Kurt Elster: And so, I’m just… You’re saying how long do I gotta wait until, “No, I am’nt,” appears in there?
Paul Reda: It’s coming.
Kurt Elster: All right. Along with cuminer.
Paul Reda: I know in business conversations you and I have both used the word cromulent many times and people have understood what we’re saying, and you’re like, “That’s a 25-year-old Simpsons show word.” That’s a word that was used in the Simpsons 25 years ago as a joke and now it’s just an established part of the English language with a recognized definition.
Kurt Elster: It did end up in the dictionary officially. Cromulent. Cromulent is a good one.
Paul Reda: A crazy amount of ones that are like, “Oh yeah, that was from this word that we just use all the time. That’s from a comic strip in the 1920s.” There’s just so many of those.
Kurt Elster: So, Black Friday is around the corner.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: You got 2 months. 65 days. Assuming you’re listening to this at the correct date.
Paul Reda: And if you’re listening otherwise, you’re wrong.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Just assume it’s 65 days before Black Friday when you’re listening to this and then we’re good. Also, no matter what, just panic that you haven’t gotten started yet. So, we’re gonna do… If we’re both here it’s because we’re probably gonna do an AMA, and ask me anything, and we’ve got questions from our Facebook group, Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders, and real merchants with real questions. That’s what we’re gonna go over on this fine day. Shall we begin?
On the topic of Shopify’s one-page checkout, which… Still rolling out. I have not seen this. I’ve seen this I think in one client store.
Paul Reda: Oh, I’ve seen it. I saw it yesterday. I don’t know whose store I was on, but I got it.
Kurt Elster: I saw it on Spycraft.
Paul Reda: I don’t know if I was on Spycraft.
Kurt Elster: You saw it, though?
Paul Reda: I saw it yesterday. Couldn’t tell you where, though.
Kurt Elster: It’s the same. It looks the same except instead of a continue-
Paul Reda: It looks the same. It’s just one big, long page.
Kurt Elster: It just goes longer.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I like it.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so John’s question is will the one-page checkout mean fewer abandoned carts? I don’t have any data on that.
Kurt Elster: Hey, according to the people selling it to us, yes.
Paul Reda: Yes. But-
Kurt Elster: Wasn’t that part of Shopify Editions? Wasn’t it like hey, a consulting firm says yes, this is good?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Something to that effect.
Paul Reda: In terms of just it makes sense to me that it would.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think it tracks.
Paul Reda: If you were to ask me if it would, I’d be like, “Yeah, I bet it would.” I’m betting heavy that it does. Because you know, it’s just less actions. Less user action. You want to reduce as many user actions as possible.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s a conversion rate truism. Reduced steps reduces friction. You’ll get more conversions. I think it makes sense.
Paul Reda: I think it makes complete sense. And I mean I feel like Shopify would not do it, because Shopify makes money anytime anyone buys something, so if the one-page checkout means more abandoned carts, Shopify has just cost themselves hundreds of millions of dollars.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I don’t think at some point they’re gonna be like, “You know what? Let’s just shoot ourselves in the foot.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. I’m guessing they tested it before they rolled it out.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And it’s not a difficult thing to test for them. Follow up to that, and I see this a lot, is how does one-page checkout affect capturing information, meaning-
Paul Reda: They’re never hitting submit on a button until the final submit where they charge your credit card and the things get shipped and it’s over, so-
Kurt Elster: So, can I send abandoned checkout emails?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I want that email.
Paul Reda: Yeah. What if they fill out the email and then never hit submit? Do you still get the email?
Kurt Elster: And so, the absolute first time I found a one-page checkout when it was still in beta and very few folks had seen it, the first thing I did, type in my email and then hit close on that tab, and sure enough I got the abandoned checkout email. And I’ve seen this confirmed. You don’t have to take an action. If you type in the email and then click out of that field, it is now stored.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It sends the email along to Shopify as long as there’s an email in there when the field is exited.
Kurt Elster: It’s pretty good. So, no fears there. It seems like this is kind of a no brainer. If it’s available to you, try it. See what it does. It’s funny. It’s one of those things people always want it, like, “When are they gonna get one-page checkout?” Then as it becomes available they’re like, “Wait a second. Is this any good? Is this gonna mess up my abandoned carts?” That’s how it always goes. I want it. I want it. Wait a minute, now it’s here.
I grouped these questions together a little bit, and so there’s some Google ecosystem questions.
Paul Reda: I’m just gonna go get a sandwich because I don’t know the answer to any of these and will not be paying attention to your answer.
Kurt Elster: Well, you’re gonna be our audience surrogate, so just as they aren’t paying attention, they’re just letting the words wash over them, go ahead and read this question to me.
Paul Reda: Oh, damn it. Can you break down how Google’s different tools work with a Shopify store? GA, GTM, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager. Isn’t GTM and Google Tag Manager the same thing?
Kurt Elster: Oh, those were my notes, and yes, I totally wrote Google Tag Manager twice.
Paul Reda: What’s the first Google tool a new Shopify store owner should set up?
Kurt Elster: Google Analytics so you could log that data, I assume.
Paul Reda: All right, well, first let’s break down all of the Google tools, Kurt. You clearly know what you’re talking about here.
Kurt Elster: You know, it’s not because I wanted to know how to use these tools. I’ve been forced into it. All right, the basic one, Google Analytics does what the name tells you. It’s collecting analytics but it also becomes a requirement for a lot of other tools and other things will plug into it. And you probably want that historic data, so if I’m picking the first thing you should do, you want to install Google Analytics. And fortunately, installing it in Shopify now, fairly straightforward. There is the Google Sales Channel. You add the Google Sales Channel. It’s official. That will ask you to connect to your Google Analytics account and then it will install itself. It will add that, the tracking, the data layer. You don’t have to add any script or worry about it. It is just done.
It will then ask you to take step two, set up Google Merchant Center. Google Merchant Center is the thing that lets you do Google Shopping. It pushes your product feed into Google. And then some associated info, like shipping settings, so we got that.
Those are really the two most people are gonna run. There’s also Google Search Console. I almost never go into Google Search Console. I would recommend you set it up once just to verify, hey, my website is indeed indexed in Google. Google Search Console is the thing that lets you submit your sitemap file to Google, and it’ll help you get your site indexed faster as you add new products.
So, those are the three I would use. The other one I see commonly is Google Tag Manager, which if you’re like, “What is it? Do I even need it?”
Paul Reda: Isn’t that like the rich data stuff, right?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Google Tag Manager, it works with Google Analytics. You can do fancier stuff, like add custom events. But what’s neat about it is you can just take other people’s random snippets and pixels and then have Google load that, as well. So, it’s like one single snippet does everything.
And that overlaps with Shopify now is doing a similar thing. They call it customer events. But the idea is like an eCommerce website has so much tracking stuff stuck into it now, right? It’s like Bing, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, every single site. It’s like, “Hey, we got this pixel. You gotta copy paste that in here.” Well, pretty soon you got a ton of the things, and they’re all loading separately, so Google Tag Manager lets you just put all that in one place and have it load through one single snippet. So, that’s the only one that’s like you may or may not want to mess with Google Tag Manager. But the other three, probably.
There’s also Google Data Studio, which you probably don’t want to mess with it. I love the idea of a business intelligence dashboard. I’m super technical. I struggled. I never got it to work right. Maybe I’m not smart enough. But the chances of getting Google Data Studio to work like you want consistently… Just hire somebody to do it if you really want this.
Paul Reda: So, we’re saying it’s Analytics, Sales Channel, maybe Search Console, and then once you’re beyond that you gotta hire a guy. You should be hiring a guy whose job is to do that.
Kurt Elster: If you want to mess with GTM and its data layer, there’s apps that’ll do it, or hire somebody to do it for you. For sure, Google Data Studio, don’t even touch it. You’ll make yourself crazy. If you have to go, “Is this right for me?” It’s probably not. Because I thought I could do it. I didn’t even get close.
But no, really, GA is the one you want, and Google Search Console lets you sleep easier at night. Just set it up once. But no, just install Google Sales Channel in your Shopify store and just follow the instructions. You’re good to go.
Paul Reda: Also, one more question. How can I make shipping charges sync better with Google Merchant Center?
Kurt Elster: So, I thought I knew the answer to this, and I looked it up to make sure. Google Sales Channel does this now for you. It’ll automatically sync those shipping settings into Google Merchant Center. Easy. Just Google Sales Channel is the answer.
Paul Reda: I’m enthralled.
Kurt Elster: Oh my gosh.
Paul Reda: This is the stuff that I live for.
Kurt Elster: You know, anything that makes setting this stuff up less painful is exciting.
Paul Reda: All right, got a question here from Kurt Elster?
Kurt Elster: This was me. This was me asking my own question.
Paul Reda: I don’t even know how to pronounce it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced Chris Ulsler.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You spelled Kurt wrong, too.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Paul Reda: He wants to know, “Are SEO agency retainers a scam or worth it?” Scam! They are a scam. Whatever Kurt says, he’s gonna say a lot of stuff. I know he’s gonna disagree with me. I know people listening to this are gonna disagree with me. Just you’re talking in the wind, buddy. SEO companies are almost all scams and monthly SEO retainers are triple scams and you’ll never convince me otherwise. That is my personal opinion. Don’t sue me.
Kurt Elster: Or leave us a one-star review.
Paul Reda: They’re snake oil salesmen.
Kurt Elster: Where I have seen value from SEO agencies-
Paul Reda: I can see… If you told me I hired an SEO agency to do an audit on my site and run through the things I’d been doing wrong, and what I needed to do differently, and fix the shit I did wrong, good. Great. Spend that money. I’m on board. I have an SEO agency that’s doing SEO for me every month that I pay them money for? Get out.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Yes. I agree with that distinction. I mean, we’re doing a big site migration right now, and it’s for an existing site, it’s got international sites in there, and for them, they hired an SEO agency to do an audit and just make sure we’ve got all our ducks in a row, and there’s no issues, and we’ve captured the full value of past SEO efforts. And after that, like once they’ve ensured that, that’s the end of it. One and done. We took care of it and will implement their recommendations and we’re good. That, I have faith in, and I know that agency. I know they know what they’re doing.
Where I have an issue, because we see this with smaller merchants. They’ll get signed up for some kind of SEO retainer that they think they’re supposed to have.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, I gotta hire this company, and they’re gonna get me higher ranking on Google, and then if I ever stop paying them, my ranking is gonna go down. Like the month I stop paying them, my search results are gonna plummet.
Kurt Elster: But then what does that company really do?
Paul Reda: Nothing. They do nothing. They take your money. They maybe make up some bullshit. Or maybe they’re just like, “Oh yeah, we’re down in the SEO mines. You gotta keep paying us money so we keep working in the SEO mines for you every month.” And then they cash your check, and they don’t do shit.
Kurt Elster: It’s usually an automated report with… It’s either like, “Everything’s okay…” If that’s what you’re getting month after month, this report that’s just an automated report and goes, “It’s okay. It’s fine.” What’s the value in that? Or if they’re gonna put in a little more effort, there’ll be just random nonsense make work in there about like, “Well, that H2 tag needs to be an H3 tag.” You’re like, “What?”
Paul Reda: It’s like I promise you Google does not give a shit about your header tags. They don’t.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Does the page have an H1 tag? We’re good here.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I mean, if they’re not making content for you, they’re not building links for you…
Paul Reda: Yeah. The money you pay the SEO company, how about you just pay a writer to write blog posts for you?
Kurt Elster: There you go. Content marketing.
Paul Reda: Way better.
Kurt Elster: That’s SEO. All right, now that we’ve enraged the SEO community, let’s move on.
Paul Reda: Who cares? Like we care. Also, if they’re enraged by that, then they need to settle down.
Kurt Elster: Years ago I had someone go… I didn’t even know what they were mad about. They emailed me and they were mad about something I’d said. They’re like, “You know what I do? SEO. Maybe I’ll just take you down a few pegs for fun.” We got spammed with backlinks to the agency site, to Ethercycle dot com, only the anchor text was like cheap Viagra, cheap ED meds shipped to your door, no prescription Cialis. And so, then I had to go disavow all of that, and you know what? I fixed it all myself. Didn’t need to hire an SEO company.
Oh, and the tool I used for that was Google Search Console. There you go.
Paul Reda: Oh, there you go. That’s a good use of Google Search Console.
Kurt Elster: That’s like the one time I had to use Google Search Console and it was valuable.
Paul Reda: We were talking about a guy, and we didn’t like him, and we thought he was weird and gross, and then nine months later on Christmas Eve he did a giant tweet thread about how we were losers, and I was like, “You’re mad about a podcast from nine months ago about how we were like that guy seems shady, and then you’re spending Christmas Eve tweeting about it instead of being with your family.”
Kurt Elster: I believe it started with, “I live rent free in their heads,” which is the funniest thing.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We spent… We literally talked about you for 10 minutes as being like, “That guy’s an asshole. I think that guy’s an asshole.” And then that was it. Yeah, we’re really rent free in your head, buddy.
Randy Green would like to know, “Should you focus on blog content or backlinks to build authority?” I don’t know anything. I’m going with blog content.
Kurt Elster: I think both. I don’t think one’s necessarily better than the other.
Paul Reda: Backlinks just feels so 2004 to me that I just can’t conceive that it would still be useful.
Kurt Elster: It’s tough to go, “I’m going to build backlinks,” unless you have content that is worthwhile to link to.
Paul Reda: Good point.
Kurt Elster: You need the content and then you’ll just get the links.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Julie has some random article, my wife on her Disney blog, that’s like, “Here’s where to meet the princesses at the Magic Kingdom.” That’s been linked to more than once by newspapers, right? You built the backlink by creating this incredibly narrow, deep, specific piece of content.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so what you’re saying is if you build it, they will come.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: You gotta build the content and then the backlinks will come.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think… You know, and going back to the SEO retainer, if the statement of work is, “We’re going to create content and we’re going to get backlinks,” then it is probably worthwhile.
Paul Reda: I would check that content.
Kurt Elster: Make sure it’s not just like ChatGPT.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s like ChatGPT wrote 100 blog posts.
Kurt Elster: However, finally.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Money, please. All right, Adrian wants to know, “What’s the best way to keep my custom theme up to date?” Well, you got a custom theme, so there’s a problem there.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s now one of one, buddy.
Paul Reda: I mean, is it fully custom, like from the ground up? Or is it built on top of Dawn? Or did you take a different… You know, we used Maestrooo themes. There’s too many Os, so I assume it’s Maestrooo that we built on top of. For a long time, we built on top of Turbo, and we made modifications to it. So, if it’s fully custom, the answer is go to the guy that made it, or gal, and say, “Update this for all the new stuff that Shopify released.” And then they’re gonna charge you a pretty penny for that.
If you have an old theme that has been customized or modified, you can run those theme updater tools, the Out of the Sandbox theme updater tool works, and generally what they do is it runs the update on any… And it can pick up on some changes, some things being moved around maybe, styles being added, that sort of thing. But eventually it will give you a list of here are the files I couldn’t update because something… They’re too different from what I expected there, so I’m not touching it. I’m not gonna break it.
So, what they do is they leave it alone. Generally, what they do is they take… They do a raw new version of the theme and then you have your old version that’s been modified. And so, the way to do it is you hopefully have someone on retainer, or someone that works for you that sets up your store, and they would just compare. They would say, “Here’s the updated one. Here’s the one that you have modified.” It’s called a diff in code language. You see the difference between those two files and then you integrate the changes into the modified one. And I mean, depending on how custom the theme is, that could be one hour, or it could be 10 hours. It could get really screwed. It all depends.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard to know, especially… It’s tough to know… The complexity of the customization is as important as the location of it I’ve noticed. Sometimes simple one-line things, if they’re in a weird spot, it’s not gonna know what to do with that.
Paul Reda: You could have that report that the theme updater generates, it might be listing out 10 different files and you’re like, “Oh, man.” But then when you go look at it, it’s all just easy, quick little pop-ins that you just gotta pop a couple lines in and it will all work again. When you start customizing themes, you’re entering into the big boy world where you’re paying people on a consistent basis to do things on this theme for you. It’s not difficult to handle but you probably can’t handle it.
And also, it depends on how long until the theme’s been updated. I mean, if you had someone make a customized theme four years ago for you and you’re like, “Well, I want to keep this theme. I just want to run the theme updater on it.” It’s like buddy, that’s probably not gonna work out.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think Shopify’s been making changes that make theme updating more realistic more often.
Paul Reda: Yes. Yeah. They’re slicing… I feel like especially with Dawn and the way a lot of the themes that have been coming out that have been based on the Dawn model, they just keep slicing the salami thinner and thinner. Like, “Well, now there’s 20 different CSS files because each snippet has its own CSS file it uses,” which is very annoying to me. And you know, all these things, so everything is just becoming more and more striated into different little pieces. So, when you make theme customizations, instead of being a giant file that has 50 different changes in it, you might have 10 different files, but each of those files only has one line being changed because all the pieces are so separated it only… Fewer total objects ended up getting modified instead of one thing that got modified a ton.
Kurt Elster: So, keeping a custom theme up to date, plausible. It depends. And there’s gonna be some effort there.
Paul Reda: Well, you know, it depends. I come down on the side of how we’ve been doing things generally is we do a whole big project where we do whatever customizations are required, and then you just leave it alone. You don’t update it. And then four years later, things have changed. There are new things around that you didn’t have before. And we just… You just do a new one. You just do a whole new-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Rebuild it. Start over.
Paul Reda: It’s been four years. Let’s refresh it.
Kurt Elster: We just did that with Harney.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We did that with Harney. This is our third theme with Harney, I think?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And it keeps… We now know this is the layout that works, this is the features, this is the look, so it isn’t too terrible at this point to go, “All right, here is our latest and greatest theme with all the new features that we want. Let’s make those upgrades.” And it’s usually.. We’re looking for like there are a few new features that we really, really want and would be easiest to just get a theme that already supports them and then make our customizations into it.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You go the other way, where it’s like, “All right, I want this one new feature and I could back port that into my old theme,” but it gets messy.
Paul Reda: That gets real scary. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Yeah, like when they added product media, and we had a lot of people on old themes that are like, “Well, I want to upload product videos that’ll work on the old thing.” It’s like, “All right. Well, we could try it,” and they’re like, “Yeah, because we don’t want to pay for a new theme. We just want full video and 3D support in the image area.” It's like, “Okay.” And it never really worked, or kind of worked.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It works but it’s never quite right. Because the theme wasn’t meant for it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Yeah. And what it would have taken for you to pay us to fully integrate everything and have it work, like everything working in tandem, it’s like you should have just gone with a new one.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah, like pretty much have to rewrite it. Joe asks, “What happens if I downgrade from Shopify Plus to Advanced? Will I lose features?”
Paul Reda: Yes. That’s what happens. That’s what downgrading is.
Kurt Elster: Well, I stopped paying my cable bill. Will they shut off my television? Probably. Yes. Yeah, you’ll lose the features and for me, the two that I’m using the most right now, B2B and checkout extensibility. I like those. I’d be sad to lose those going from Plus to Advanced. And your transaction rate in Shopify Payments goes up if you drop from Plus to Advanced, so consider that as part of the cost there. But you know, if it’s not worth it to you and the features aren’t there, then why keep paying for it? I understand that.
So, you know, not tough to find a table or feature comparison list online, or just look at what you are or aren’t using. Yeah. I wonder if there’s more to that question.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I kind of want to know…
Kurt Elster: It’s like come on, it wasn’t that simple. There was something else there.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s like you know what you would lose if you downgrade, so is that important to you or not? It might not be.
Kurt Elster: And then Joe had a follow up. He said, “Is server side attribution tracking better than client side? And is it worth the cost?” As nerdy as this one is, and this relates to Google Analytics, I’ve been diving deep on this, and I think the answer is yes.
Paul Reda: But it’s Shopify, so what… We don’t have access to the server.
Kurt Elster: All right. With Google Analytics, with any of these pixels I’m throwing into my theme, whether I’m loading that into the theme, into Google Tag Manager, or with Shopify’s customer events, it’s just JavaScript that fires in the customer’s browser, gathers the data in which we’re like, “Here’s everything we know about them,” and then uploads it back to the server. So, if they’re running an ad blocker, it’s not gonna go. If they leave the page before it’s sent, it’s not gonna go. There’s a whole bunch of scenarios in which it never happens. Server side tracking, you get more complete data more often because those scenarios go away. It’s faster, better, easier on the customer’s device because it’s no longer having to do that stuff. That’s just less for the customer’s device to do. So, now all right, more performance, better data, big advantage to server side.
And number three, if you get this thing set up fancy like, where you can enable a feature called session enrichment, you essentially make these services talk to each other a little bit more and then you can gain more data. But that is dependent on the implementation. And this is really my plug for Elevar, which I love, because we’re just implementing this.
Paul Reda: You’ve been on several calls with Elevar this week.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We’ve been working on getting Elevar’s data layer implemented. But Elevar, you plug in, you give it all your stuff, you’re like, “Here’s my GA account. Here’s my TikTok pixel. Here’s my Facebook Capi pixel. Here’s all my stuff into Elevar.” It makes all those things talk to each other and work better than before. Like previously, Capi is like you can only tell a returning customer after seven days. Well, with Elevar, I can detect that same returning customer for months longer and then report that back into Facebook. And now, I can combine that data into Klaviyo, and now… So, they get this extra customer data profile is in Klaviyo, so now I’m sending more browse abandonment emails.
And so, by moving all the stuff server side, assuming… If you’re just starting out, don’t bother. Just hit the skip button. Don’t waste your time with this. But if you’re already… You’ve got all these channels going and they’re successful. If you switch to server side tracking in theory they all perform a little better. So, it’s worth a bump. A boost in performance.
Paul Reda: So, if I want to explore the world of server side tracking on my Shopify store, is my only gateway through Elevar?
Kurt Elster: No. It’s the one I like the most. So, for me, yeah.
Paul Reda: Well, but I’m gonna say I know Elevar is pricey. Our very large, very rich client that might be using Elevar was reticent about the price.
Kurt Elster: It’s based on order volume, and so for them, at this time, it was $750 a month.
Paul Reda: Which is not that bad when you think about it, given their amount of revenue.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If I’m doing 20, 30, 40 million dollars, that’s really… Drop in the bucket.
Paul Reda: But I’m asking is there cheaper options? Do you know other options that you can also throw out there? Who’s the budget pick?
Kurt Elster: Implementing it directly into Shopify customer events, but you need a developer. They have to know what they’re doing. So, again, it’s like you’re right back to you’re hiring someone to do it for you, and now it’s missing all these other features. I tried to do it through Shopify customer events, and I was like, “You know what? This is beyond me. I’m not messing with this.”
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: What else we got here? Oh, I had to do some research today about international sales and tax. Are you familiar with how duties and taxes work?
Paul Reda: Seinfeld likes to shop at the duty free shop. That’s all I know. Well, I know there’s like VAT. VAT is kind of like sales tax in the EU and it’s fairly large. It’s like 20% or something nuts.
Kurt Elster: So, if I’m shipping, I’m in the U.S. and I’m shipping internationally, I’m sending something overseas. The person who receives it has to-
Paul Reda: Pay duty. Yeah. Pay an important duty tax.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If I’ve not paid duty, they have to pay duty.
Paul Reda: Doodie.
Kurt Elster: I was thinking it. I was like, “Ha, ha, ha. Doodie.” And oftentimes if you’re getting into international, you’ll get customers who are mad. They’re like, “Wait a second. You didn’t properly warn me that on top of what I paid you, now I gotta pay duty.” It’s because when you set things up a particular way, you end up paying duty as part of the shipping label. And so, you pay an inflated price on your shipping label, but now duty is paid for, and now the person can just receive their package.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Now, to set it up in Shopify, you gotta put the country of origin on the product, and you have to put an HS code. HS code. It’s a six-digit code. It’s called harmonize system, but it describes the product’s type so that they know what taxes and duties to apply for tariffs.
Paul Reda: Oh, so you gotta put in like the ISO code for this is what indicates this is wine, and this indicates this is-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, like there’s some six-digit code that’s like, “This is wine.” And then you set the country of origin. From France. And it’s coming from U.S. and it’s going to Great Britain. Now that I know all that, I can potentially get my shipping carrier to deal with it with a thing called a DDP label. Duty paid.
Paul Reda: Diamond Dallas Page?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Exactly.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If you don’t pay the duty, he hits the diamond cutter on you.
Kurt Elster: What? No. Delivery duty paid. DDP. And so, some international carriers can support this and handle it for you, like APC Logistics. We have one client who uses them who does it. Or I looked at the Shopify app store. There’s a DHL app, as in like DHL, the shipper. They have an app and I think it was 90 a month that will handle all of this and works with any international carrier. You don’t actually have to ship at DHL if you don’t want to.
Paul Reda: Huh.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so if you want to go international and you want this really nice experience for people, and you’re sick of getting the complaints of like, “Wait a second. You didn’t properly communicate this to me.” You can take care of it. There’s just a bunch of setup involved up front.
Paul Reda: Also, I’m just looking at the wording of this question. How can I clearly communicate duties and taxes to EU customers? Communicating the duty to me feels like, “I ain’t paying this duty.”
Kurt Elster: All right.
Paul Reda: So, you need to put a lot of messaging both in the cart, but you can’t really in the checkout. You probably gotta put it on the product page and in the cart. To be like, “We will not be paying any duties.” Or something.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Trying to get the messaging but have it only show to these international customers is tough.
Paul Reda: It’s rough.
Kurt Elster: Maybe use geolocation messaging to do it. You could have it as a note, like I can edit the labels of the checkout to try and sneak it into the checkout, but it’s gonna show to everybody.
Paul Reda: We can’t do the… The checkout thing doesn’t work anymore that we would do for prop whatever.
Kurt Elster: Prop 65.
Paul Reda: Prop 65. Where stores would want a Prop 65 California cancer warning, but they only wanted the people who lived in California to see that.
Kurt Elster: Well, even then, you had to have access to checkout.liquid.
Paul Reda: You did, but even then, now you can’t even… Because we would just sniff if the state field got changed to California.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Can’t do that.
Paul Reda: And you can’t do that anymore. It doesn’t work.
Kurt Elster: So, you need a checkout extensibility app, like Checkout Blocks is a good one. That could probably handle something like this. But if I’m going through that much effort-
Paul Reda: I was gonna say, is the best outcome here you just eat all of it? You just throw it into the price and the EU tax, the VAT or whatever you end up adding to the final product price, Shopify handles that. That’s sales taxes, I think. I assume. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: And then the duty, you just roll that up into the shipping cost, and you just gotta him them with a big ass shipping cost in the checkout.
Kurt Elster: And you can get all of this calculated dynamically assuming you’ve got the product set up right with the HS code and you have a DDP carrier that’ll support it so it can calculate it and include it. But then for VAT, do I have to submit that? That’s the part I don’t get. Or is that rolled up into the shipping label, as well?
Paul Reda: No, I thought it was added as… It’s like if you pay $100 for it, if your price is $100, people in Oregon are gonna pay a different sales price than people in Skokie because of the taxes, the different sales tax amounts, so doesn’t Shopify-
Kurt Elster: But as the retailer, I’m still the one who has to submit to the different states the sales tax I collected.
Paul Reda: Oh, that’s true. Yeah. That’s like a-
Kurt Elster: So, with international…
Paul Reda: I mean, I just guess that’s just part of your reports or something?
Kurt Elster: Send a money order to Norway at the end of every month?
Paul Reda: Yeah, I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Or does it get rolled up in a label? That’s the part I don’t know.
Paul Reda: I know VAT, value added tax, is not technically a sales tax. It’s different.
Kurt Elster: Just straight up paying the sales taxes in the U.S. and outside the U.S.-
Paul Reda: Already sucks.
Kurt Elster: It’s painful. Definitely, it is probably everybody’s least favorite part about running an eCom business.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We should probably just go national with that and then have it be redistributed to the states. Because that’s how local municipalities get revenue.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That would make life a lot easier as opposed to like, “All right, here’s the 35 states you have nexus in. You now have to register with them and pay them.”
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That’s painful.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That sucks.
Kurt Elster: And then, “Oh. Well, you missed that one? You didn’t do it.” And now they can come after you? That’s rough.
All right, last question. Robert Charles Bond asks, “What are proven tactics for bootstrapping a Shopify store?” I think they really all fall under one umbrella. If it’s bootstrapping, I don’t want to pay a lot for it, so we’re not doing ads. That means get in front of other people’s audiences. I think everything is gonna… If you’re bootstrapping, get in front of other people’s audiences.
Paul Reda: Do you know how you get in front of someone else’s audience?
Kurt Elster: Jump in front of it?
Paul Reda: You buy an ad.
Kurt Elster: You gotta provide some… You have to get into collaborations. That’s like get on people’s podcast, find content creators that your audience listens to, see how you can get in front of them, build those relationships. I think you’re not gonna spend money but you’re gonna spend a lot of time.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, you have to somehow give up something of value, whether it’s freebies or whatever. A way of getting in front of people’s audiences is buying ads. You give up something of value, money, to get in front of this television show’s audience with an ad. So, you have to think of that transaction but with something you do have a lot of, which can be product, or your time, or information, or knowledge, and then offer that up to someone else’s audience so you can get access to them.
Kurt Elster: Now, I would assume you’d want to start with like you have at least built a little bit of your own audience so that you have those things in place, like people can follow you on social. They can join your newsletter. They have a store you can go to. And then, all right, now I’m gonna start trying to get in front of other people’s audiences and hopefully I will usurp 5% of those people. And then if you can repeat that process, all right, now we have a snowball effect. We have a system here for building our audience without spending money on ads. And then money starts rolling in. Okay, maybe we can supercharge this whole concept with ads and continuing to do-
Paul Reda: Yeah, but you could do the big ROI ads, like abandoned cart ads, lookalike audiences. Once you have greased the wheels a little bit.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You can move into remarketing.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Remarketing.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Oh yeah. So, we have a-
Paul Reda: We have a client that has a lot of money. A lot of money.
Kurt Elster: More than one client.
Paul Reda: More than one client, but this guy has a lot of money, and their company that makes a lot of money spent $100,000 on a TikTok. That was it. They hired a big time, big boy ad agency that touches an ocean and paid them $100,000 for a TikTok ad, and guess what? It doesn’t perform well.
Kurt Elster: No. It did not do anywhere near as well as UGC or the ads they had made. The difference is… It’s not that it’s bad. It’s the look. It looks like a commercial product. It looks like a TV commercial.
Paul Reda: The whole point of these platforms is users are doing stuff and posting it themselves. So, they can sniff out when crap is just a professionally made ad.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The moment I see that, next.
Paul Reda: You’re like, “Nope. That’s definitely an ad. Get out of here.”
Kurt Elster: I could see those working on YouTube, though.
Paul Reda: Maybe. But yeah, just immediately when I heard that story I was like, “Why would you do that?” Wouldn’t it be better to just make 50 dumb TikToks by yourself and spend a couple hundred bucks on them?
Kurt Elster: I think UGC is the way to go.
Paul Reda: Especially on platforms like that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If that’s the context. Obviously, this ad could perform… I mean, once you have an ad like that, that you spent 100 grand on, you could run that on TV. You could get those Roku ads. Anytime-
Paul Reda: Like a Tubi ad.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I do nothing but streaming for our TVs. We got rid of cable a long time ago. But you can tell that those streaming ads are all eCommerce businesses.
Paul Reda: So, yeah, maybe put that ad on Tubi because you’ve already spent the money on it, but yeah, putting a fully formed, professionally shot, creative agency ad on TikTok, I’m like, “That’s not worth the money.”
Kurt Elster: No. No, it wasn’t. No. That story is great, and it gets people’s attention because of the amount that that ad cost.
Paul Reda: Yeah, because everyone’s like, “What?”
Kurt Elster: But I’ve heard that story so many times, variations of it. It’s like, “Oh yeah, the supposedly awful looking one is the one that gets engagement.” Because it’s real. What do your friends’ content look like on social media? It doesn’t look like a $100,000 TV commercial, does it?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, and how long is a TikTok? How long is this TikTok, do you think? 10 seconds? 15? So, he paid 100 grand for 15 seconds? That’s not what that looks like.
Kurt Elster: Just brutal. I’m never giving up the name of the agency who made it. I don’t care who asks.
Paul Reda: No. We’re not… We’re speaking out of school telling this story, but we thought it was illustrative.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The point is authentic works, and part of authenticity in video is not having that ultra-polished look. I’m gonna really step on the audio for us, just make it sound terrible. So authentic. I can barely hear them.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We should all go to the bottom of a well.
Kurt Elster: Start blowing my nose?
Paul Reda: Oh my God. All I’ve heard all week.
Kurt Elster: Oh, now there’s snot on here. I believe that concludes our episode. Thank you. Thank you to our listeners, our Facebook group members for their amazing questions, and our next episode topic, I don’t know. I don’t have the schedule in front of me.
Paul Reda: Why’d you put that down then?
Kurt Elster: Because I thought I was gonna add it later and I missed it.
Paul Reda: Oh my God.
Kurt Elster: But I’ll just leave this whole thing in.
Paul Reda: See? Real.
Kurt Elster: Because it’s authentic.
Paul Reda: We’re real.
Kurt Elster: So raw.
Paul Reda: Hashtag so real.
Kurt Elster: All right, thank you for listening.