Real problems from real client stores this month, plus updates on new builds
We're seeing 10x more bots than humans on client stores. Fraudsters are buying your cheapest items to test stolen credit cards. Your SEO agency wants 150 new collections.
This week, we dig into the actual problems hitting Shopify stores right now. Not theory, not best practices, but the real BS we're fixing for clients. We break down why your analytics are lying, how to stop credit card testers, and whether more granular SEO collections are brilliant or idiotic.
Plus: The free Shopify app that caught a critical launch mistake, proof that ChatGPT drives revenue, and beta access to our new Promo Party app.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you instead of your competitors. And 45,000 stores already use it, and it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to get swim. com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com Go ahead and speak on that microphone for me.
Paul Reda
Hello. Hello, sir.
Kurt Elster
That's audio. We have sound.
Paul Reda
There's audio? Oh good. We've added audio?
Kurt Elster
We've added audio to this podcast. Alright. Welcome to the podcast.
Paul Reda
Uh I'm your host, Paul Rita. Uh joining me this week is Kurt. Uh how do you say your name? Most people say Esslor. I believe it's Elster. Oh, okay. Kurt Elster, and he is some kind of Internet guru? Do you make web pages? How much does a site cost per page?
Kurt Elster
Well, I usually sell them by the pound.
Paul Reda
Oh, okay.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Paul Reda
Okay.
Kurt Elster
And it's typical website's about four to five pounds.
Paul Reda
Oh, okay, four to five pounds. Okay, British money?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, and then if it's four to five pounds, it's four hundred fifty an hour.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Actually, that's what it costs to have a a tour guide at Disney World is $450 an hour. I learned this yesterday. Yeah, isn't that wild? Being married to a Disney blogger, these are things you learn.
Paul Reda
I went yeah, I went to Disney World when I was like 12, and you know, because I'm an American and have been brainwashed. I do like the idea of taking my kids there, but it's like everything I'm hearing now is like, this is too involved. Like I just want to go and Walk around and pay money and then you know. No, that's what the guide scores. No, no, no.
Kurt Elster
Four hundred fifty an hour, you skip the line.
Paul Reda
Yeah, that's the problem. And he'll get you some snacks. It's just, yeah, it just feels like endless upcharges and weird bonus fees.
Kurt Elster
Okay, that part's true.
Paul Reda
Okay, yeah. See, I don't like that.
Kurt Elster
So, what are we actually discussing today?
Paul Reda
Oh, I don't know. I just walk in and then you I sit down and then you just start talking and I react to it.
Kurt Elster
We're gonna do a tips episode where I've got four just like four issues that have come up, you know, in the last like sixty days, and then what you do about it. Um, you know, based on like real world things we're seeing. Uh and uh I would love to so rarely do I get to talk about myself on this show. Oh yeah. That's what we need more of.
Paul Reda
Yeah, we don't need anything about you every every week.
Kurt Elster
And so I would love to share just some updates about what we're working on. But I left the notes in the printer.
Paul Reda
Okay. Twelve years of this, folks. This is really helpful. Bots, why? Great. So glad I have this. Kurt, bots!
Kurt Elster
Why? Well there's a lot of bot traffic, isn't there? This is if you spend any time in any like Shopify forum, watering hole, whatever. The topic of bots is going to come up. And I think this is a thing that Shopify is actively fighting. That's what I suspect.
Paul Reda
You I overheard you on a call yesterday. You cited an insane stat that blew my mind that you had personally had collected and seen. This wasn't reported to you.
Kurt Elster
Oh, in so Microsoft Clarity now, the heat mapping software, and they have a Shopify app you just install it, it's great. It will tell you like, oh, here's here's our recording sessions, and here are the bots we excluded. And the site I looked at, great site, big site, 800 bots excluded, 80 sessions recorded.
Paul Reda
So 10x as many bots as real people.
Kurt Elster
That's what it was claiming. Insane. Like don't I we've seen on a lot of stores it's like it looks like traffic's going up and traffic from search engines is going up, but then conversions doesn't. Yeah, because they're not real people.
Speaker 3
Well conversions should go down.
Kurt Elster
Or conversion in conversions go down, traffic, organic traffic goes up. It's bizarre. And so then it tanks your conversion rate. I think this is why. I think it's a lot of bot traffic. But then like what is the bot traffic? What are these bots doing?
Speaker 3
Mm-hmm.
Kurt Elster
And And well I got Another thing that if you hang out on Shopify Forums a lot, you'll notice someone will say, Hey, I keep getting fraudulent orders. And they're always to the same address from the same person with the same email. With different credit card numbers that if you let the order go through eventually get disputed. And it's always for whatever the cheapest item is in the store Now I've lost track of the number of instances of this. In our client stores, in forum reports, in our own Facebook group, someone posted about it, and even in my wife store, where people started buying a four dollar iHeart Tech Nasty sticker, but it always went to the same address. And so the theory I've seen floated online is this is there's a a credit card breach that has occurred somewhere, not w having to do with Shopify. But then bad actors who've acquired those credit card numbers are using uh sh scripts, bots, to find Shopify stores with inexpensive items that aren't gonna get flagged. as a fraudulent purchase and then place the order to warm up and test the credit cards. And then you uh assume the person then goes with the credit cards, gets a report, you know, from their script.
Paul Reda
If the order goes through, they know that credit card's still good and working.
Kurt Elster
And now I can charge a slightly more expensive item.
Paul Reda
Then they go buy a TV.
Kurt Elster
Yes. Yeah. And so what do you do about that?
Paul Reda
I could just say right off the bat from our experiences, you should probably have a mi a secret minimum order threshold on your store. Yeah, why not? Because a lot of times we have stores that sell shipping ins insurance or has free items on the store that's often what the bot buys. Yeah, that become free uh free gift with purchase items.
Kurt Elster
It's like an order for shipping insurance.
Paul Reda
Yeah. So right away There's like the real product on your store. Like the cheapest real product on your store that you would sell that's in a collection listing is you know 40 bucks or whatever it is. You should have a minimum order of $39. Because then obviously the real orders will go through, but anything that's less than that, that's your $4 shipping insurance or your free pin that you include on every order or whatever. Yeah. Those will immediately get stopped. So like, and that'll stop. A lot of this traffic as well.
Kurt Elster
So if you want to implement that, uh free app from Shopify checkout blocks, it can create check out rules like validations. And so one of the ones I did on a store just to stop bad actors, I knew there should never be a free order that goes through. The only time a free order is gonna go through is it's a customer service issue. In which case, like we could process that manually separately. Um it so I just set a minimum of one dollar. Miraculously, these like fraudulent orders stopped coming in when I did that. Or if you know Yeah, in the the credit card test orders, it's all like they they're not even trying. You know, there's the name, the email, and the shipping address, which isn't real, but it's like it's just some person's house who suddenly gets a lot of weird merchandise. Or yeah. Like, what is happening? Can you imagine being that person? What is going on here? Um, you could set up rules to stop it. And so I go twofold.
Paul Reda
Well, first you gotta see it that for yours, first you gotta see it happening. You're like, that's weird. Yeah, and then it'll happen again and it's the same email, and then you know, okay, that that any order with that email, I gotta block it.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, we had a client store where it's they're like, hey, it this guy's placed ten orders and they're all for shipping insurance. Like, could you just make it stop? Because it becomes an annoyance. Um so the app fraud control from Shopify will like give you some analytics about this, but then it lets you make checkout rules pretty easily. And so I just made one that's like block this guy's email address if it matches this shipping address. Just the checkout won't go through. But all right, if by some miracle he manages to get through it, that system fails using Shopify Flow, which is also free on on most plans now. Um, I use that to they have a template library and one of them is cancel and restock orders based off email address. And so even if that order goes through cancel it, restock it, refund it, and just move on. And so like let them waste their time trying to order. They'll just immediately move on.
Speaker 3
But there's no way to preemptively because I mean it's it's a legit credit card, or at least was at one time.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, until it got stolen. Yeah.
Paul Reda
So it's there's no way to preemptively Protect yourself from this. Well, so other than that minimum order value thing, which should clear up a lot of fake fakes, I think.
Kurt Elster
Just in general, you should do that.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Well, there's risk analysis that Shopify does for you automatically and it's good. It'll come back with like low, medium, high risk. And there's a a Shopify flow template you could set up where it's like, all right, if it's high risk, flag that order and hold it. And the chances are you probably just want to cancel it. um or you know at the very least try to verify it. Generally if it's high risk, there's usually a reason. Uh and then medium, you know, you kind of decide based on average order value, like do you want to take that risk or not? And those just like the tools built into Shopify. That'll do it. And those work pretty well. The problem with, you know, these orders that like the where they're testing these credit cards, they're for such low values. It never gets flagged. They never show up as high risk.
Paul Reda
Yeah, you know, what are you gonna be out? $3? We're not gonna yeah, uh obviously a $3,000 order invites more scrutiny than a $3 order. Yeah. Even from Shopify's automated systems.
Kurt Elster
And so, you know, I don't know how that risk analysis tool works from Shopify, but I do know those inexpensive now I can start trying to game it, right? They need to play that close to their chest. The those inexpensive items though, for whatever reason, I've never seen they don't get flagged. They just show up as, you know, uh, low risk. And you know, and it's like a five dollar or less order. Of course it's yeah, you're right, it is low risk. One of the ways I you could potentially stop it, but then it you know, at the risk of uh annoying regular customers is force account require accounts and then turn on uh captcha for account creation. And in Shopify that again these tools are there. Online it's in online store preferences. You could turn on CAPTCHA for account creation and forms. So you're not getting as much spam. But even then, you know, stuff still happens.
Speaker 3
Now for me the bigger you know our clients a lot of times are like oh my conversion rate's down like they're really worried about their analytics And they're try always trying to read the tea leaves on the analytics. They're taking samples of like 72 hours and it's like, oh, don't do that.
Paul Reda
Come on. But the bots are screwing up all the traffic numbers, right? Yes. Is that yes, they are. We've confirmed that.
Kurt Elster
I it's my belief that they are.
Paul Reda
Okay.
Kurt Elster
The other thing you can do, like if you start comparing Google Analytics versus Shopify Analytics versus you know Microsoft Clarity. They're all going to filter bots differently. And so you're going to see different numbers across all of them. And as I'm trying to get the bots out. What I do in Shopify analytics, just to get a cleaner number. I'll do like, you know, all the our stores are are all are majority US. And so I go, okay, filter by country, US. And then I also filter by device type because the bots don't necessarily report it. And so I'll just be like device type is tablet mobile desktop. And then so then by combining those two filters, device type and um country, I just get a lot of noise. A lot of noise goes away. It's like, yeah, I know there's bots in there, but at least I I've improved my single signal to noise ratio here. You know. Okay. And I don't use I don't I really don't particularly use Google Analytics. Um I try to do everything with Shopify Analytics. So I but I the same approach should work in GA. But yeah, so so it's like bots are a problem In that, and by bots we mean there's like people writing automation scripts. And AI can do it for I can tell an AI to write the script for me. And as long as I don't reveal my bad intent, it's just gonna do it. And so that's like I think that's what we're seeing is previously, you know, script kids had to buy scripts from Black Hat forums. Well now I could just have the AI write it for me. Um and then there's also like semi-legitimate bots out there.
Paul Reda
Well, I mean uh you know The Goo Google crawler to crawl your store. That is a bot. Yes. Like, you know, all the search engines, those are real bots.
Kurt Elster
Obviously, so we don't want to block all bots. You know, the search engines, we want those bots. Um the AI bots, we probably want them too, if we want AI search queries to recommend our store and products. So it's like, okay, we can't just ban bots.
Paul Reda
We heard something today. One of our longtime clients got, was it five purchases or five hits? Five orders. Five orders.
Kurt Elster
Where the The UTM source, so the like where it came from, was listed as ChatGPT. And so we know that Shopify and ChatGPT have an integration where Chat GPT can search through the Shopify catalog, like in its entirety. Uh, I believe you're opted into this by default. And so there were, I found instances, and this was the first store I checked. Where he said, all right, show me orders from the last 90 days and show me um where source is medium chat GPT. I think that was how it was phrased. And sure enough, there were at least five orders uh where it had done it. And so, you know, I I don't know what the query was. I don't know anything else about it, but the assumption is like they had asked for some recommendation and the thing went out and found it for him and was like, here's the link, and they bought it. Which okay, cool. I like seeing seeing this thing actually generate revenue for someone for once.
Paul Reda
New ways of getting sales
Kurt Elster
Oh, so the this bot thing. There's another a feature that popped up in Shopify in the last 12 months that was um add-to-cart rate limits. It's on by default too.
Paul Reda
Add to cart rate limits. Yes. So it lot you can only think add things to cart at a certain speed.
Kurt Elster
All right, so it's not a a rate limit. It's a a max limit that you just set globally. So let's say your store typically has, you know, every variant SKU has a hundred items in stock. Shopify will then go, hey, let's just set a max of 50. No one can ever add more than f 50 of one skew to their cart. And they enabled this and then they turned it on by default. Why do you do this?
Speaker 3
Uh I'm guessing so people don't add
Paul Reda
Every single don't keep adding it to cart until it doesn't let you do it anymore. Because if you track and Which then tells you what? Which that tells you how many they have.
Kurt Elster
It tells you exactly what the inventory is.
Paul Reda
Because if you because if you track inventory and you have ninety-seven of something, if someone has ninety-seven in their cart and then tries to add a ninety-eighth, Shopify will stop them. Yep. So then they know you only have ninety-seven of that.
Kurt Elster
Yes. And so then in theory, if you track that over time, I can also figure out what your sales numbers are. And so there's these th third party analytics tools.
Paul Reda
That we're acting that once again are bots. There's no human sitting there being like, all right, 97, write that down. I'll be back in a month to check to see what it's at. They're bots.
Kurt Elster
And yeah, so they go out and they log all that, and then I assume it's like a service and they're gonna resell that information to you as like a competitor analysis tool. Here's a word from our sponsor, Zippify. You know why they call it Black Friday? It's when businesses finally dig out of the red and turn real profit. Want to squeeze every penny from your Black Friday sale? One click-up sale is the easiest money you'll make all season. OCU automatically increases average order value by up to 30%. With AI powered upsells at every step of your customer journey. Plus, there's a new tool built right in, Zippify Post Profit. W Post Profit monetizes your thank you page with brand safe ads from partners like Hulu, GoDaddy, and Disney Plus. Doesn't cost you anything. Just switch it on and get paid pure profit for every view. Automatically, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas. Earn up to 30% more from every order all year long. Don't leave money on the table this holiday season. Go to zipify. com slash curt for your 30-day free trial. That's zi-i-p I FY dot com slash K-U-R-T. But there's a lot of info you could get. Now there's like a nothing really nefarious you could do with it, but if you're just curious or you're troubleshooting that you can get a Shopify store to give you if you know. Like if you just go to the store, go to slash.
Speaker 3
But it won't give you it won't give you the inventory.
Kurt Elster
It's not gonna spit out the inventory.
Paul Reda
No, so that's the only way to fig to figure it out from the outside.
Kurt Elster
And so we don't like Shopify 100% notices these things and then actively comes up with like feature solutions. to mitigate the issue. But so I think my point is like, yes bots are a problem. Yes, this is annoying. Also, I don't really think there's anything practical you could do about it. And I would think that if we just wait, Shopify will solve this for us.
Paul Reda
Well, it sounds like they did have a solution, which is no one can add more than twenty at once.
Kurt Elster
Like great, you guys identified the problem, rolled out the solution, and our lives were better for it as Shopify users. But as far as like the, you know, jacking up your analytics I know there are there are tools out there that will help with this that will try and filter bots. I pro my experience with them, not naming anyone in particular, is just You get false positives. They're a hundred percent for it to be effective against bots, it's gonna throw out people too.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. That's my experience with that one. So if you think you're going crazy with bot traffic, you're not alone is my point. Yeah, we got these darn fraudsters. Just did self-frog control. Take care of this. You know, and it it's a game of whack-a-mole as you go through it. So we have apps.
Speaker 3
Oh, are we doing the apps now? What about Shopify launch checklist?
Kurt Elster
Oh, you want to talk about well launch checklist is an app.
Speaker 3
This is more oh okay. There's a new free app. called Shopify Launch checklist. Yes. And it just launched.
Kurt Elster
It's new last week.
Speaker 3
And it's free, so you can't complain about it.
Kurt Elster
Well, I mean it could be if you're going to complain about it, they'll give you a refund, 100% refund if you're zero dollars.
Paul Reda
Yeah and it looked to me to be just literally a checklist of like stuff that you need to check. before you launch your store.
Kurt Elster
It is yeah. So let's say you're It does what it says on the tin.
Paul Reda
It's a launch checklist.
Kurt Elster
You're migrating from another platform, which we're working through two migrations right now. uh an aftermarket automotive company uh who does Subarus. Ooh, love Subaros. And um a uh tactical parts site And one's coming from WordPress, the other one's coming from Kraft Commerce. And so in both those stores, I installed this app, launch checklist, and then it runs a report. And what's funny is like AI powered, but really it's like here is a a sane checklist of everything you should check and then it's nice, it's semi-automated where Because it's an app plugged in, there's a lot of stuff it could check on its own and just be like, Yeah, you did that. And there's a lot of stuff it can't and it just pops back as manual review. Or like, you know, the store I tried it in first had twenty nine products and five of them were listed as draft. Which was intentional, but it doesn't know that. And so it's like, oh, you gotta manually review your product catalog. It's not ready. It was too ready. Um But no, I ended up using that and it did s one of the on one of those stores, uh, one of the checklist items was like, make sure you style your 404 page. And I almost skipped it because it seems silly. And another one's like, check your fave icon, which people forget that all the time. So I checked, sure enough, our fave icons there are excellent. I didn't miss that. But the 404 page, oh, there was filler content on there. We would have missed it. Yeah, naughty. I don't think that's that big deal. Naughty. Naughty boys.
Paul Reda
I bet the only thing at this point that hits 404 pages is me when I'm doing like SEO crawls on websites.
Kurt Elster
Which there, because you know Shopify's gotta fight these bots and these crawlers, this year my uh my SEO crawling tools all quit working.
Paul Reda
Yeah, because they're bots.
Kurt Elster
Because it's a bot. And it would I would get like a 429 error, meaning like, uh, you got banned for doing too much, buddy. I'm like, okay. And so I really I couldn't use this tool, or if I could, I had run it so slowly it would take like overnight. They just added a feature where you can this is like only relevant to me and the SEO nerds. You could validate your scrape tool on a per store basis to get around the bot blocking that's occurring. The heck were we talking? Oh yeah, launch checklist. No, if you're like if you have a store that you're in going to launch, have not launched yet, there really there is no risk or reason not to install Shopify launch checklist.
Paul Reda
It's a good last-minute Rundown. Because you know, there's a lot of moving parts and you're tracking a lot of things. I mean, we're doing we're not this is not a migration to Shopify. This is just a new theme for someone. for a company and they just keep popping up every day with an email with five more things that they thought about. And it's kind of like, oh yeah, we do have to do that. Like, because they Aren't an old theme and aren't that deep into Shopify and you know, we're too deep in the weeds and we're not used to we're used to kind of a base level of Shopify. Knowledge and experience. So the fact that they're like, well, what about this? And we're like, well, didn't you do that already? Oh, I guess you didn't. I assumed you did. Okay, that's another thing we gotta do, guys.
Kurt Elster
You know, I'm I'm grateful for a fresh set of eyes in the form of a launch checklist. Um so helpful tool there. And again, you know, included as part of the Shopify plan. It's free. I love those first-party apps. Install them. You know, they do they do what they say on the tin, and that's that. On the topic of apps, we've got this app, Crowdfunder, that adds like a Kickstarter style widget. You're very familiar with this. I've never heard of this. No. Yeah. What? This is you're my audience, Sarah.
Paul Reda
That's not possible. How do you how could you even do that?
Kurt Elster
Uh liquid and JavaScript is the answer.
Paul Reda
Man, if a guy wrote that where you could have a kick a Kickstarter like crowdfunder widget on your Shopify store, a guy that figured that out, he'd be a genius. He'd be one of the smartest people you've ever met in your life.
Kurt Elster
But it's not obvious he he was the one who came up with the answer. But uh in the Shopify app store, there's that badge built for Shopify. And last I I read on Twitter today, I don't know if this is an official number, but it's 900 apps have that out of the like 10,000 or so. That's not exact number either. I'm ballparking this. 10,000 apps, get that built for Shopify designation. And when I'm looking for an app in the Shopify App Store, I now also look for that built for Shopify badge first. Cause for me it means like, oh, someone from Shopify vetted that this thing is not going to be a bunch of annoying nonsense. Like it they because they make sure it fits in that interface.
Paul Reda
Well, and even just that it it's still supported. Like, you know, there's someone here that's not it's not a zombie app that's just collecting your money still because you need to reapply the Shopify rechecks that we have to go We have to re-up every year, I think, to get built for Shopify status.
Kurt Elster
I mean the one the review we just went through was referred to as our annual review. So I'm suspecting that this is now a something every 12 months. And we still we ended up with quite a few change requests from them.
Paul Reda
It's very annoying. It's extremely annoying. I can't deny that in the end, the app is better for it. Both things are true. It is annoying.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, both things are true. If someone just drops it in your own box and they're like, guess what? Here's the new work you're doing on your app. You got sixty days. Have fun. Okay. But then you know when you're done with it, uh and you know, they're very reasonable about it. Uh Uh when you're done with it, then you know the app works better. And for us it was like they identified uh a couple bugs we didn't know we had. No one told us. And so great, those are gone now. Uh, and then everything else is just about like keeping it unified to that Shopify admin experience where when the the person drops into it first time It's just a lot more obvious how it works because everything's where you expect.
Paul Reda
The contextual save bar, all the various things.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. And to really fight with that thing.
Paul Reda
Yeah, yeah. That was that was fun.
Kurt Elster
The contextual save bar.
Paul Reda
And we and we're also implementing the concept contextual save bar in our new app.
Kurt Elster
We're doing another app. Yeah, promo party. Free gift with purchase. My favorite kind of promo.
Paul Reda
Yes. And We are entering beta testing with promo party right now. I think it was on once we're done poking at it internally because our eyes have just glazed over because we've seen it too many times. Yes. So we're just like, yeah, that works. That's fine. And we need new eyes. We need new eyes that are not jaded by this app. So uh if you would like to beta test our app. And it might not work, but you could try it and tell us if it works or not. You should contact us.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, just go ahead. Uh, you know, reply to my newsletter if you get it or DM me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Happy to help.
Paul Reda
Uh and so what it is is You can do a free gift with purchase promotion on your store. It could be triggered by a product. It could be triggered by a certain card value. You know, you just set it up. If someone has $100 in their cart, this product automatically gets added to their cart for free.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Paul Reda
And it could be a variant, it could be one specific product. If they buy a shirt, they get a free pair of pants. You know, however you want to set that up, you could have multiple ones running at the same time. All it is is a method methodology for you to automatically add Discounted products to people's carts. And it'll do the discount, it'll automatically add it, it'll all set it up for you. All you got to do is promote it.
Kurt Elster
I've run so many of these promos and have so many exper so much experience on the ins and outs. They kill. They kill. They're great. And they but, you know, I also know where they can go wrong. And so I really went through and tried to idiot proof this thing. Whereas like I am the biggest idiot here. How many times have I screwed this up and in what ways? And now let's like try and check for those conditions, flag it, you know, make it as obvious as possible. Um, but I also run complex ones where I might have like 10 different promos going to maintain, you know, one larger promo. And so we added, you know, made sure that like multiple campaigns are easy to manage and you could duplicate campaigns to edit them. So I'm pretty proud of, you know, this very utilitarian promo tool that's going to do one thing really well. Um and shout out to uh Carl Meisterheim from Liquid Weekly. And uh SDA, the Shopford Developer Alliance. Yeah, he's our partner on this. And he's been doing doing the development. Uh so. So if anything doesn't work, it wasn't us. It's Carl's fault, actually.
Paul Reda
Carl. Yeah. We're just the guys that sell it to people. Carl is the one that's messed it up.
Kurt Elster
Oh god, Carl. No, no. Carl's been great.
Paul Reda
But yeah, think about it. You said it, say, hey, if you spend 50 bucks, we'll give you a free enamel pin. That enamel pin costs you one dollar. And if someone's paying 40 bucks, they're gonna find an extra a way to spend an extra 10 to get that free pin. And now you've they've given you an extra $10 for a $1 pin.
Kurt Elster
Well everyone knows like I run if I run a promo or sale, I will have more sales during that period. But if I'm always discounting everything, then people learn to wait for the sales. And so I think free gift with purchase is the ultimate compromise. You still get to do you're running a promotion, you know, the person is getting that win, that like the fun of I got a a discount, a free thing, but then you're not devaluing your catalog because it's the gift. is the thing that was made free. And ideally the free gift is only ever available as a free gift. It's not like part of your general merchandise. But you could do it that way too.
Paul Reda
And you could set the cost of the pin to be a hundred dollars so bots don't buy it, and then the app will automatically discount it to zero when people Fulfill your requirements.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, definitely. That's where people go wrong. They make their free gift, they price it at zero, and then the bot finds it and just starts buying it.
Paul Reda
Not the even just people.
Kurt Elster
Like people do it too. Yeah. Yeah. The That was on the Lego store, which Lego store, you know, hey guys, come on, get on Shopify already.
Paul Reda
Yeah, the Lego store is a little annoying to traverse. They have like too many collections.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. The Lego I get that's a difficult catalog. It is. I think they could do better.
Paul Reda
Oh dude, they got the Star Trek license.
Kurt Elster
They got the Star Trek license. They just get the Death Star coming out.
Paul Reda
I need I I need I oh Lego I know you listen to this Lego everyone in everyone in the Netherlands I think they're in the Netherlands I need I need like a maybe I need like a four to five thousand piece Deep Space Nine. You know, I'm gonna need some runabouts docked at the docking base. I'm gonna need maybe you can like pull off like a little piece of the top and like ops is in there. And it, you know, everyone's everyone's there. I need I need a minifig. I need a chief O'Brien minifig. I need everyone. That's what I need. I'm pretty sure they're doing an a giant enterprise D is their coming out party.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I mean that would make sense.
Paul Reda
What you need to buy for your treky wife.
Kurt Elster
You know, I'm a big we're both big uh next gen fans. Yeah. Captain Picard is is my starship captain. The well it yeah, I brought up Lego because they always run free gift with purchase and they make it it's a always an exclusive Lego set. And so I was just on there l last week looking at this. And it was like you had to hit some purchase threshold and then they would give you a Sega Genesis controller was really like Lego set was the current
Paul Reda
It was the classic Sega Genesis controller with the three buttons. And on the back of it is a little vignette that's like a screenshot from Sonic. It was really cool. That like you built. It was very abstract, but you could obviously tell it was like a it was like a little sonic.
Kurt Elster
That's cool. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, you want that? Okay, well now your order needs to hit the minimum threshold. I think it was 150 bucks. That sounds about right. Yeah, it's usually Yeah, I've don't want to know how much money has been spent on Legos in my household between three kids and my wife, who just did the Uh the last one she built was uh the home alone house, but she does the LEDs now.
Paul Reda
At Christmas time, you guys wheel out a fully lit up home set up Home Alone house and it looks sick.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, yeah, the the Home Alone House with the LEDs. That's your next level Lego dork once you start putting the LEDs in it. Ever had a customer cancel an order because they were shopping? Well hi, or because they broke up with their significant other. Those are real reasons customers could cancel, and they're a real headache for both you and your customers. Why should they have to email support to change, cancel, or update an order? Enter Cleverific. With Cleverific, your customers can edit their orders themselves through a self-service portal. That means fewer support tickets, faster shipping, and fewer returns. Everybody wins. Peter Manning New York cut their order support by 99% with Cleverific. Now it's your turn. Listeners of the unofficial Shopify podcast. Get 50% off the pro plan. Just $49 a month. Go to Cleverific. com/slash unofficial and use promo code Kurt50 at checkout. It's less hassle, happier customers with Cleverific. Well, all right, I want to leave us with one last tip for folks. One of our retainer clients uh is working with an SEO agency, and the SEO agency's idea for you know like their first round. You know, they were doing like catalog cleanup, but they said, we're gonna try and match, get exact match keyword phrases to the site. by adding a bunch of collections based off product attributes. And then I, you know, I'm on the email chain, so I'm going through this stuff because I'm curious. There's 150 collections they're adding to a store that had like a thousand kit products in it, maybe. And it'd be, you know, let's say it's an apparel store. There'd be a collection that's like men's shorts, size, you know, waist thirty-six, and then another collection, men's shorts, waist thirty eight, and then like men's polos, si color red, size large. And so you can with the way Shopify filtering and collections work now and smart collections, you can make really granular dynamic collections. in in that store and then try and target these long tail exact match keyword phrases that um you know that in theory that could be beneficial.
Paul Reda
I I want to see if that works. Because all I feel like you're doing is making your Shopify store really messy.
Kurt Elster
But we're not, you know, we're not necessarily linking to those in the menus.
Paul Reda
I understand that, but I just think on the back end And like I could see those getting screwed up really easily.
Kurt Elster
Well, that's why I want I want them to definitely be automatic, not manual. But yes, there's p there's a little bit of disaster potential here.
Paul Reda
Oh, always a good sign when you do admit that.
Kurt Elster
The no, I think the only risk would be uh crawl budget. Like I you make so much stuff, you add so much stuff to the site That Google just goes, look, we're gonna we're gonna index 20% of this right now. And then, you know, the next time we index your site, we'll get the other two.
Paul Reda
Can't you get dinged if you have like too many
Kurt Elster
pages of just being like I don't think duplicate content of it's just like I don't think this site is real.
Paul Reda
Like it's just all spam like this site is literally spam.
Kurt Elster
It could be uh considered low quality content It could be considered duplicate content. You know, I was thinking it's it's you could get around the duplicate content thing fairly easily because the products in the catalog in each collection probably change materially, I hope.
Speaker 3
And then No, they wouldn't.
Kurt Elster
I mean if you have like if it's like men's sort of size thirty six.
Paul Reda
Yeah, you have short you have say you sell ten pairs of shorts.
Kurt Elster
You're right, those ten collections would be would be all in the
Paul Reda
Ten pairs of shorts and they each come in five sizes. Well, we've now made five bonus collections that all have the exact same identical content. And then between the All they have the only difference between these identical collections is their title.
Kurt Elster
We'd have to change title and and then generate a unique collection description. Yeah.
Paul Reda
In size thirty yeah.
Kurt Elster
And then like delight.
Paul Reda
In size thirty-eight.
Kurt Elster
In the collection description, ideally, then you like link to the other collections to add internal links. Gross. Yeah. That's how you would have to do this. But I mean this is a work in progress. We'll see what it does. But then on another store I was working on, I thought this was interesting. Different SEO company, different store, big catalog of similar products, and their focus was on Crawl budget, they ha I've never done this. They told me to no index, meaning do not allow Google to see this, the collection slash all page. Collection slash all dumps out all of your products. Yeah. And then it's also paginated.
Speaker 3
of them.
Kurt Elster
And so that's like, all right, we're trying to optimize for crawl budget. We don't necessarily want this very generic page getting indexed. So I don't know, I'm getting Increasingly this is conflicting.
Paul Reda
These are conflicting recommendations.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, they're different stores with different approaches and different catalogs. I think the you know I think both approaches are correct for their given stores. But yeah, I'm definitely interested in technical SEO is a thing I enjoy and I've been fascinated by watching, you know, these various SEO companies approach it differently. Because everybody's guessing, right? They're just like kind of theories you try.
Paul Reda
There's they should just sell you a nerve tonic, these SEO companies. Like it helps your humors. Oh, okay. Mm-hmm. It's all just patent medicine. Put the pep in your step? Yeah, it's all just patent medicine from these guys.
Kurt Elster
Is there anything that'll put the color back in my beard? So it's been been busy around here. What have you been working on, big eye?
Paul Reda
Oh well, a lot of things. Well mostly Mostly whatever comes over the transom from our retainer clients and longtime clients of ours. I sweep up the stuff. Tom's been doing a lot of our big builds.
Kurt Elster
Designer developer Tom.
Paul Reda
Yeah, exactly. You know, I had a baby. I had a baby. It was a junior situation. Uh in July. Yeah. In July. Danny DeVito delivered it. Uh and so I've kind of been in and out for the past two months. But now I'm back, baby.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, welcome back.
Paul Reda
And I'm ready to I'm ready to rock. Uh so I'm just excited. I'm mainly excited for Jomboy, where if you are interested in baseball, you know about Jomboy. Um the YouTube baseball content podcast network. We are doing their merch store. Uh they're getting all set up. They got the license from Major League Baseball. Is that official? That's official. I think they published that, so I think I'll say that.
Kurt Elster
I will check that before I make sure we don't share anything proprietary.
Paul Reda
Yeah. And so the John Boy gear will now have official major league teams on it instead of like, hey, what are you? We're the Bronx bombers. That's not copyrighted. And so we built a whole new store for them. And It's got multiple skins. I put together an entire meta field system because I'm the only person that works at Ethercycle that knows how sports works.
Kurt Elster
And I thought you were gonna say metafields.
Paul Reda
No, sport, correct. I was just like, hey, how about we tag each product with what team is on it and what players are on it? So then you could just so then you could create systems for like get all the Aaron Judge stuff in one thing. Before they had crazy tags that were didn't make any sense. Everything had 10 tags that were all different. Depending on what team it was.
Kurt Elster
You get the stores that predate, you know, Metafields and like Metafields as they are now, tags were your catch-all. And you know, undoing that is always fun. Satisfying when you get it done by the way.
Paul Reda
Well i yeah. And it's it was just the thing where it's like clearly that was like uh they had everyone just kind of picking up the slack when they could. So everyone had different nomenclatures for what they were tagging the stuff with. So none of it none of it made sense.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, well what's cool with Metafields, you can make like if you do a list, you could say it has to be people have to pick things from this list.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
And so then it's stand you you're able to standardize your catalog versus tags. It's like, all right, have fun.
Paul Reda
Yeah. It's like, oh, is it NYY? Is it New Space York Space Yankees? Is it New York Yankees? One word. Is it just Yankees? Is it new underscore?
Kurt Elster
And then you're not sure underscore yay. So the solution is at all of them.
Paul Reda
Yeah, and that's what they did.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, no, I've seen this many times.
Paul Reda
So yeah, I'm very excited to get that site launched and that's a cool site.
Kurt Elster
I'm excited about that one.
Paul Reda
It's like the information and I'm the only person here that touched it. So So none of you, no, no one else may touch it. Only I may touchy.
Kurt Elster
Touchy touchy? No touchy.
Paul Reda
You no touchy, Tom no touchy. Only I may touchy.
Kurt Elster
You know, Tom designed it. He did a very good job.
Paul Reda
He did. That's true. I'm excited for a information architecture that makes sense to occur on that store.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, that one's a really nice theme build. Then we also have Battleborn Off-Road. It was like a Vegas-based off-road truck outfitter. And They had used Shopify Collective to add to imp ingest catalog. Because when you're an aftermarket auto parts dropshipper, the number of items you could add to your Shopify store seems limitless. And Shopify Collective is a feature now where you could just say, hey, you just automatically add these approved uh whatever's new from approved vendors. I think they hit half a million products. Oh my god. Yeah. And like just try dealing with a spreadsheet that big. Try bandaging that in the Shopify admin.
Paul Reda
Like you couldn't open the spreadsheets. You were having problems.
Kurt Elster
Yes. Yeah. And so I ended up, you know, you gotta get really clever at that point. But I was able to clean it up. I am so I I'm a matrixified jockey. I've at this point I feel like I could do anything in a Shopify catalog between uh Python API scripts, Matrixify, and Yeah, just getting really creative with a lot of these things to try and, you know, make it work. Um Yeah, that one should be launched soon. I'm proud of that. That's a good look. You know, especially like knowing the amount of effort that had to go in cleaning up the catalog and then you gotta make the collections. Ugh. But Got that. And there's another one. Oh, the super guys. Perrin. Perrin. com. They're gonna move to Shopify. There's a you know, if you like vaped in the two thousands and wore a DC hat, you probably are familiar with Perrin because I know you owned a Subaru or a Ford Focus, one of the two.
Speaker 3
Oh, it had like a it has like a aftermarket spoiler on it?
Kurt Elster
Yes. Yes. The short answer. Yeah, no, the cool projects uh coming out, plus this app. This app I'm so proud of. Promo party. I would love to see see some beta testers from that.
Paul Reda
So what you're saying is next year we're moving to Aruba?
Kurt Elster
No, no, you'll never get me out of the Midwest. Safe with my low cost of living area.
Paul Reda
Yeah. Near the largest one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, and my, you know, fairly moderate weather. Like yeah, that's gray in the winter and I get very depressed and sad about it. But that's like sixty days. I just gotta power through for sixty days. Let's wrap it up there. Crowdfunding campaigns are great. You can add social proof and urgency to your product pre-orders while reducing risk of failure. But with traditional crowdfunding platforms, you're paying high fees and giving away control. All while your campaign is lost in a sea of similar offers, it can be frustrating. That's why we built Crowdfunder, the Shopify app that turns your Shopify product pages into your own independent crowdfunding campaigns. We originally created Crowdfunder for our private clients, and it was so successful we turned it into an app that anyone can use. Today, merchants using Crowdfunder have raised millions collectively. With Crowdfunder, You'll enjoy real-time tracking, full campaign control, and direct customer engagement. And it's part of the Built for Shopify program, so you know it's easy to use. So say goodbye to high fees and hello to successful store-based crowdfunding. Start your free trial and transform your Shopify store into a pre-order powerhouse today. Search Crowdfunder in the Shopify App Store to get started.