Two Shopify partners take ecom's temperature.
"If your product sucks, you're never going to succeed. A lot of people are trying to solve product problems with marketing spend."
Chase Clymer runs Electric Eye, a Shopify agency deep in CRO, redesigns, and migrations. He also hits about one industry event a month, which means he's got a real read on how merchants and partners actually feel right now. Not the Twitter version. The hallway version.
We got into the real state of ecom in 2026: Facebook CPMs nearly doubling since the pandemic, why most brands under $5M shouldn't be split testing at all, how agencies are using AI tools like Claude and Nano Banana to skip hours of busywork, and Chase's bold prediction that Shopify is about to overhaul its partner program after a failed enterprise bet.
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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 • 00:00.001
This episode is brought to you in part by Swym. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swym actually activates that data. When someone wish lists a product, you could trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Klaviyo or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wish lists for gifts and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in store. And unlike card abandonment, wishlist data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this. Just not right now. Swym's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes. You can try it for free today at getswim. com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M. com slash Kurt. Today on the unofficial Shop Buy Podcast, let's do a vibe check. I am curious, you know what What's what's the word on the street? And so to help me figure that out, I've joined by one of my colleagues, Chase Klymer, a fellow Shopify partner, Shopify agency owner, uh Shopify app developer now. From Electric Eye, Chase Klymer, in Ohio. And I've known Chase a while, and we met at a Shopify event in New York some years ago and have stayed in touch, you know, through online communities. and uh Shopify events, especially, you know, n what's now uh Shopify. dev, their conference in Toronto every summer. And if Chase is in a special position where, man, he goes to way more conferences than I do. Like me, he hosts a podcast. He's guesting on podcasts. He is doing bizdev for his agency. talking to Shopify merchants and partners, you know, like vendors and app developers. And so he has a really good sense of, you know, how people feel and kind of, you know, what are the trends, what's going on. And so I want to pick his brain on the topic. Chase, welcome to the show. How you doing?
Chase Clymer • 02:19.200
I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me. Uh some inside baseball for everybody. This is take two or three now of me and Kurt trying to get this one done. But we promise uh third time is the charm and we're gonna do it.
Kurt Elster • 02:30.960
We'll get it this time. Yeah, no, my internet last week was not cooperating. Which, yeah, thanks for that Comcast business. So we're doing it again this week. That's okay. We'll get it. So, on topic, and let's let's focus. Shopify events. You're at uh well how many events do you do a year?
Chase Clymer • 02:50.180
Uh I do a lot. Uh last year I was trying to hit one a month. Um it this year it's changing though. Uh luckily uh we have hired someone new. He's gonna start to take some of that stuff off my plate. I am gonna go to um the ones I want to. Sounds like a cop out, but there are certain ones I feel that uh I it's a better idea for me to go and then there are certain ones that I can delegate to our newest team member helping out on kind of you know the sales side of things for lack of a better term. But I do feel, especially if you're in the service game, there's so much noise out there on the internet, it is really hard to break through to your ICP, especially if your I ICP is highly sought after, especially if your ICP is, you know the type of work you're doing is not necessarily cheap. Um, you know, the easiest way to kind of turn those relationships into you know, clients is by meeting them in real life and having genuine connections and just kind of playing the long game.
Kurt Elster • 03:55.400
Yeah, nothing beats face to face. Like meeting someone face to face makes them real. And you just you can't replace it with telepresence.
Chase Clymer • 04:03.440
Absolutely, yeah. Um and that's it's getting to the point where we are considering You know, if it's a good fit like client that's ending up on our on our calendar through, you know, inbound or out whatever, you know, however we made the connection and we have not met it's we're thinking about like I'll hop on an airplane and I'll go buy someone dinner. You know, just it's it is worth it in in a certain extent for the right for the right client.
Kurt Elster • 04:28.940
It's powerful. Yeah, it is. You know, that's the stuff you remember. So, all right, to but the point though is you're talking to all these people. What if you had to describe the general mood in e-comm right now, 2026, what is it?
Chase Clymer • 04:43.240
Uh I mean I'm gonna say it's resilient would be like the overarching word. Um, but you know, there's like some other stuff I I feel like that also comes up. Like obviously We're still on like the the tail end of recovering. I mean, the pandemic was over five years ago, but you know, all of the Expenses going up, and right now everything's getting more expensive too, and that affects everybody. So stuff is just so much more expensive, and it's making merchants kind of look into certain things and look at it through a v a a very, very discerning lens when it comes to where they're making their investments. And so like obviously The ad costs spiked during the pandemic. I believe they're around like eleven dollars was like the average CPM on Facebook. And then afterwards it ended up it's 1966, I think is the average CPM. So that's like almost a hundred percent. you know, change of cost per metric on just Facebook metal alone. Uh but not only that, cost of living goes up, everything's more expensive. We're more expensive. I'm assuming you're more expensive, right? So there's just everything costs more these days. And I like this isn't even like an antidote. Like we've lost business because we were the most expensive person. as of pitching lately, right? So I think people are are still watching, watching their bottom line. Your value really needs to be there in that conversation to win the business right now. Um, but I say all that with people are still doing the business, they're still building brands, they're still looking for help, they're still uh, you know. Trying to build their career, their lifestyle, their business in e-commerce. Uh so I still think we're at the end of the day, the entrepreneurs that are into this, they like the grind, they like the grit, they're resilient.
Kurt Elster • 06:35.039
Yeah, I've been doing this since 2009. So when we started, we started into a recession. And so this really, you know just feels like more of the same to me. You know, in 2020 I thought, all right, you know, the wow, you know, the entire world seemed to have shut down. Things are going to continue like this, and it's not going to be good. And then now, you know, it's 2026. I'm still I've been doing the same thing the whole time, right? And so being able to just spend through it, keep going, and approach things day to day has always seemed to work. Yeah. Rather than just going, well, uh forecast not so good, outlook not so good, I quit. Right? Yeah. Like m maybe it's just it's last man standing, maybe it's survivorship bias. I don't know.
Chase Clymer • 07:22.540
I definitely think obviously there's there's always this survivorship bias element to anything in e-comm just because you just don't hear from those brands anymore. But like um I do specifically remember conversations with brands where they were scared to make decisions and scared to make moves and they they paused for a while. Um, and I'm talking about early on in the pandemic, not necessarily now, but I still draw some correlations between that because now we've got tariffs, war, it's the same general uncertainty, just in a completely different package. Um, and uh the difference is those that are betting on themselves and they're continuing to make choices. I think the paralyzation of not making a choice Thinking that that is a good choice is just making your business stagnant and it stops growth in its tracks.
Kurt Elster • 08:18.659
Yes. Yeah, I think the the businesses that spend through a downturn recover faster. I think that is a proven fact.
Chase Clymer • 08:27.260
Actually, I think that's a proven fact that had it's in a couple business books, and I uh wish I wish we went down this thr rabbit hole in the first conversation, so I could have pulled that for you. Uh yeah, the the brands that spin during a downturn come out on top. And I'm gonna I wanna believe it's something like uh Good to Great might have been the book that that's from. Uh it's a fantastic read.
Kurt Elster • 08:51.459
The yeah, I've no I've I've heard it before. You know, I'm sure if we googled it we could figure it out. I think, you know, my version of it I think I got from Leo Burnett, but I could be wrong. So, okay, is there But that you know if I go on Twitter right now, sorry, X, the all the discourse is going to be around AI and then like what's the next AI tool? And that really eats up a lot of a lot of discourse. Is there a disconnect between, you know, what people are talking about online and the conversations that are happening in hallways, at conferences, at dinners?
Chase Clymer • 09:27.800
I would say there is a bit of a disconnect, but AI is always coming up. So they are at they're like, hey, what tools are you using now? And I've actually heard people ask, like, how are you using using AI, right? Which is a very fun and interesting conversation. But it always is coming from like one step above that is just like how can I make my business more successful. So that they're always, at the end of the day, these merchants specifically are looking for ways to lower costs. to increase efficiencies, to stack the cards in their favor so that they can basically make more money, become more profitable, spend less on things that they don't need to spend right so it's the whole every conversation I believe that we ever have around apps with merchants at the end of the day their goal is just like This needs to make me money. Or if you want to put service providers in there too, it's like, will this partner make me money? And so that's kind of like the north star of all the conversations is like how does this actually affect my business? Um But yeah, I think that entrepreneurs in general, some of them have kind of shiny object syndrome, and AI is the biggest, shiniest object ever.
Kurt Elster • 10:50.660
Yeah. No, it's it's definitely addictive, you know, and then once you it's this black box that you could just give k commands and demands and then maybe it gets it right and helps you out. So would you say the the sentiment around AI, is it, you know, it's positive, it's negative, they're scared of it, they're excited, they're anxious.
Chase Clymer • 11:12.800
I think it's a little bit of all, right? So I think it's a certain s type of merchant, it's a certain type of perchant person, it's a certain type of entrepreneur, right? So there are Certain folks that are super tech forward, they're all in, they're testing everything, and the results are to be determined, right? I've heard some cool things about it. I've heard people deleting lots of code because they let open claw do whatever it wanted, right? So there there's a lot of stuff happening, right? But those tech forward people, adopt early adopters. There always s survivorship bias again. There's always success stories around the early adopters. Now There's that camp of folks, which I don't know about you, Kurt, but we end up not working with them that often. The folks that are kind of a little more DIY, they do have a bit of a developer brain. They're not really our client. But this other camp, it's, you know, a a product obsessed founder. They are locked in on what it is that their product is doing for their customer and how it solves that problem for them to where technology takes a backseat, Shopify is just a tool in their business tool set and then they're like Chase, we want your team to just own all this stuff and you tell us what of this AI stuff is important to us. And they are just heads down doing the same thing they've been doing and seeing great success. And To that can't we're using AI all the time and we're very open about it. But I think that, you know, uh us kind of technologists, we get distracted by the shiny objects sometime. The those founders that have that focus to like S keep the main thing the main thing I'm almost jealous of, and you can kind of see it in the results of how their businesses grow.
Kurt Elster • 12:59.660
What How are you personally using AI in your agency?
Chase Clymer • 13:04.660
Well, this isn't me. This is AI right now. This is my chase spot. No, I'm just kidding. Dude, we're using it all over the place. Um well first of all, we've been doing this before AI, but we record every sales call. We use Fathom. It's free. We're probably the product. I don't care. It's a fun little tool. Actually, we're paying for it now. Um, but we record every sales call that gets dumped into kind of our AI of choice. It was Chat GPT for a while. Right now it's Claude. Might start to explore some other ones. All that gets synced into our CRM combine CRM combined with like all our discovery notes. Basically all that does is it gives me better, more specific information to use with pitching that client our services and writing our statements. of work. I hate writing statements of work. This has made it a lot easier. Um a little more into that process, uh just because I know Kurt you'd be curious. is like I do a rough draft of it and then I send the rough draft against that like nodule that knows all this stuff about the conversations with the client and all the discovery stuff and the emails. And I'm like, what am I missing here? And then it's like, let use the client's words and their feelings about these things to help craft my responses to this stuff. And obviously edit everything AI says because it sounds like AI half the time. But it still gives you the uh a lot of really good answers. Um so that system has been a lot of fun and efficient for me kind of in the sales process, and I'm currently training Paul on like how to use this Um what else are we doing? Just just a couple weeks ago, we asked Claude, uh, we have a client that sells uh kind of gag gifts, stink Spencer's gifts, but online, right? Fart jokes, you know, poop books, whatever. Um, so we helped her craft a quiz product quiz flow for like a uh a a gift guide, you know, find it find a gift for whomever. Um And was kind of like, oh, like, where do we start? That zero to one thing. And I was like, just dump their, you know, catalog in a clot and see what it does. And Oh my g it was such a more efficient, like get to the end point type of situation at that point. It distilled it down instantly, basically. You know how AI works. It's super fast, but yeah, yeah, it got us to like the MVP of that gift guide, like within an afternoon as opposed to what I assume would have taken us much longer than that.
Kurt Elster • 15:26.240
This episode is sponsored in part by Zippify. Here's a stat that should keep you up at night. 80% of the people who buy from your store will never come back. They're gone. You get one shot with these customers, one chance to recover what you spent acquiring them and maybe turn a profit. That's why upsells matter so much. The problem is most upsell apps only trigger after checkout, post-purchase only. Which means you're ignoring every other step of the funnel. Product pages, cart, checkout, all of it, just leaking money. Zippify's one-click upsell fixes this. OCU lets you place offers before, during, and after the sale, so you're capturing revenue from the moment someone lands on your site to the moment they leave. That's how it's generated over a billion dollars in extra revenue for Shopify merchants. It pays for itself, so there's zero risk. Thirteen thousand merchants are already using it. Brands like Victoria Beckham, Lumi, even Cheechin Chong. You could try it free for 30 days at zipify. com slash Kurt. That's Z I P I F Y dot com slash K-U-R-T. Yeah, it sounds like you use a Claude for a lot of stuff. So am I. One of the the really cool unlocks I found recently, you know, once I started playing with Claude Code, then I shifted to like, oh, let's check out Claude Cowork. And this sounds so silly, but the magic of it is you are allowing it a sandbox to play in in the form of a folder on your computer. So I have of like uh in your examples, like we gave it a catalog, and I do everything with matrixify. So I can import export to Shopify. I had Claude make its own markdown or own matrixify documentation, and that goes in a folder. And if you put a file named Claude. md in a folder, Claude has to read it. And so I've got, you know, here is all the documentation you need for matrixify. Here is you know instructions and how I want you to work. And here's the catalog export from the client store. And so once I have that, Claude, you know, can write Python scripts and then you know act on the spreadsheet in that folder. And so you can really do some impressive like data transformation research work. It could be like, hey, rewrite, you know, check this catalog out, what's missing SEO-wise. All right, fill that in. Hey, there's a bunch of We got a bunch of custom meta fields. Those seem to be missing. Can you fill those out based on what's in here? Oh, all right. Uh you go through the catalog. you know and figure out what are my categories. Hey, based on this catalog, can you help me come up with a main menu? Right? Like you could really get wild with it and then have it generate the input, have it create a matrixify file. with all these changes that you just drop, drag and drop, and import back into the store. And so you're not giving Claude direct access to your Shopify store to control it, which I think is where you get into those nightmare potential nightmare scenarios where it like messes something up. But merchants are doing that. You know, I have people DMing me telling me that. And I don't know that like they're more the the DIY type that isn't necessarily going to hire an agency. So good on them. But also I think, you know, some of those people may be Uh, well, I hope they're running backups. You know, you you could get yourself into trouble very quickly with an autonomous agent as good as Claude is. Yeah. The other recent change was they uh very much expanded its context window. So it's its short-term memory, its thinking memory is much bigger now. And so you could work with these big data sets. Yeah and have it be efficient.
Chase Clymer • 18:42.960
I I was one of the uh the people that you know left ChatGP for Claude in in you know the last couple weeks and there is A noticeable difference between the quality of the memory and the quality of the copy. I will say that ChatGPT is a better writer. uh from what I've found. But it isn't something I, you know, you could probably train Claude to do things better, but everyone, Claude is definitely more tech technical and we are using it all the time for Um our project managers on our team are using it to solve kind of simple tasks before you know tagging in a subject matter expert because it's It's like when you can speak the common language, and you know, you can just it'll tell you how to fix the thing and you know we'll hop into the code. And make sure we you know, GitHub, all that jazz, make sure we do it the right way. Um, but just a few other uh examples I had of things that we were doing. Uh CRO data analysis. Ooh, buddy. That is where we have so much fun. All of the stuff that you're Using to get all this like uh data for CRO that you know, so you're talking about customer reviews, uh support tickets, user testing recordings, um you can even We're trying to play around with ways to pull out insights from analytics and from like heat maps, but it will dive into that stuff and if you prompt it correctly, it will find kind of the sentiment analysis and we're really getting into the rabbit hole here with like how we use the PXL framework and having try we're trying to see how much we can get it to do for us. Um, but that is super fun uh to play around with uh and it's really giving us awesome kind of like backlogs of test ideas for our retainer clients. Uh or, you know, m more recently we've also been doing similar approaches to redesigns. It's like, all right, we're gonna do a bunch of data up front to understand how your website is working well and also what isn't working well, take those insights into now the design of the new version of the website. Um, yeah, and CRO for like sentiment analysis is sorry, Claude for Senten Analysis has been like really fun.
Kurt Elster • 20:49.440
Yeah. No, I love giving it uh exporting product reviews. That was like one of the the early things I figured out with ChatGPT before it was, you know, anywhere near as smart as it is now was like, man, there is a treasure trove of info in those product reviews, but as a person trying to read through hundreds or thousands of them just is not practical. And that's where like, ooh, AI could do sentiment analysis on it and do a really good job. You know, and now today it's like, all right, I just have to point it at a folder with all of my product reviews exported, all my support tickets exported. And ideally, I want to strip out personally identifiable info. I don't want people's names, emails, addresses, et cetera, in there. because you know this data's going back to and they're doing you know who knows what with it. If I don't include it, then I don't have to worry about it. So you know, just uh Little cautionary side note there. Um but yeah, no really it's like when you talk about AI tools, you're talking about Claude, at least in our space. It has taken over. So if you're still on ChatGPT, check out Claude.
Chase Clymer • 21:46.440
Uh uh here's uh uh two shout-outs to other ones that we do play with. So uh Figma Make is kind of wild for UX wireframing. Me and you were talking about that just like over DMs the other day. Um, I basically had a conversation with no well, they're now a client now, actually, but just it I kind of just took their existing product catalog, which was just the link to their Shopify store, just that link. So the Shop All page or whatever. I said, this is their existing product page. They have every product is its own individual variant, which we all know is Bad UX. Design me a single PDP with a intuitive user you like user flow UX to select the proper variant within their product assortment. And my favorite thing about AI and in uh in all of AI is it goes from zero to one so fast and helping you visualize stuff. So 30 seconds later, I had that, screenshotted it, sent it over to the the lead at that point. I was like, this is what I was referring to on the call about how you should look at this. And honestly, I think that was like the aha moment for him. He was like, wow, these guys actually know more than us. Wha we never thought about it this way. Um, but yeah, like so that it was a pretty bad wireframe at the end of the day, but it sh it showed from like a design, like we weren't just gonna like make that design live. We're still redesigning it right now, but To show like how to think about that in thirty seconds was like amazing. Didn't have to call in a designer, didn't have to do and I my prompt was two sentences. It like I didn't even overexplain what I wanted. It just you know, Figma knows good UX patterns and it pumped it out pretty quick.
Kurt Elster • 23:35.559
Yeah, by that Figma make I've played with it, it's really cool. And it's it's free. I don't know how much you can use it before they're like, hey, you gotta pay for this. Like just try it. It is free. Um I got one more Kurt.
Chase Clymer • 23:47.260
I got one more because I know your audience is just like mine, so I'm just gonna start rambling off cool things we've done on all these other AI things.
Kurt Elster • 23:53.100
Ramble off tools.
Chase Clymer • 23:54.380
Yeah, have you played with uh nano banana yet?
Kurt Elster • 23:57.440
Oh, it's r yeah, I tried all I've got Adobe Firefly so I can like try all the different image generators, and by far nano banana is the best.
Chase Clymer • 24:05.440
Yeah, we've got a client right now that uh And this is this is quite uh common, right? That you've great client they just don't have the maybe it's not even the budget, the time to do lifestyle fodder. Photos. Yeah. Uh we're we got one right now where we're like, Lance, dude, just give us just go buy this and give us access to it. Like we're gonna have fun with it because we would kind of want to learn how we can bring this into our workflow. And that's what you get when you have a good relationship with your with your t your like agency and like you're a good client. It's like, hey, we're gonna just bend the crap out of our scope real quick because we want to play with something. And then you and anyways. The content that we're producing for this for this brand is awesome. And it's super and it's it's wild, except this one lady has three arms, but we like her.
Kurt Elster • 24:50.960
Um Yeah, you got it does do some strange things at times
Chase Clymer • 24:55.320
But it's it's r really, really good stuff. We've got a a another client. This is where the idea came from. I don't know how many of their products are the entire kind of like lifestyle part of it are AI generated, but uh You could not tell. Their prompting is amazing. It's nano banana. It is a real person, five fingers, showcasing their product in a lifestyle environment, and it like blew our mind. And this is a big brand.
Kurt Elster • 25:28.040
The nanopadana is really good. Same with um Adobe Firefly. They're or I think the image generator's Firefly. They have one that's like supposed to be creative safe because it's all the training data's all like c licensed stock photos. Um kind of clever But the trick I found is I will like you got to give it reference images and then all these LLMs, whether it's an image generator or a chatbot. They'll have documentation somewhere that's like, this is best practices on how to talk to this thing. And in the, you know, Claude, Nano Banana, they all have these guidelines. And so I've turned those into saved prompts for making the idealized prompt for whatever you're working with. And for sure with the the chatbots, it works really well. With the image generator, you know, it it either could get like too specific in one way, but for the most part, it it tends to work really well. The most fun with those things is like, yeah, because you're you've got some camera gear, you know, you know some lenses, is like you get to you can specify a specific lens and look. You're like, yeah, I want that this is on a Canon, you know, nifty fifty uh DSLR. And it like it'll change the look to that. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's like, okay, it approximates it.
Chase Clymer • 26:45.260
Yeah, that would be super fun. Um this conversation is uh reminded me the other day we were talking about uh, you know uh using claud code and uh just like how some people's workflows in like a group chat I'm in with some some young developers and uh One home said something. He was like, Yeah, he's like, all I have to do when uh Claude like goes off the rails and isn't listening to me is say I'm about to lose my mind and it somehow just turns up the Turns up the thing and it's like, you're right, let me do this the right way. And it just produces a result for him. I'm like, what that's insane. First, when they take over, you're the first to go, but at least you have a little a hack now.
Kurt Elster • 27:26.300
Uh my version of that, and I don't do it anymore. I used to do it to ChatGPT all the time. I go, don't be lazy. And then it would be like, I'm so sorry. And it would go do it. Um so all right. You know, the one thing I think I think AI still struggles creatively. Like that's just a a human thing. You know, and for an AI, creativity is just a a randomness variable. Like it's not ideal. With visual stuff, it struggles as well. Cause like it it essentially an LLM doesn't see an image. An image has to be described to it, and it has just like a very detailed description of the image, and that's how it sees the image. So it's bad at CSS and web design. It just is. Even when you like you were talking about Figma Make, you're like, yeah, it made the mock-up, went zero to one, but like it wasn't perfect. Yeah, exactly. But they keep getting better. At what point do you and I get replaced?
Chase Clymer • 28:20.780
It's a good question. And I am fully team embrace AI. It is a Efficiency multiplier, it is a strategic tool, but it's not going to replace Expert jobs, right? AI doesn't understand, like you said, visually how stuff looks, but beyond that, it doesn't pull in And we're not far off from it doing a better job of working towards these directions, but it one Large language models at the end of the day are just uh you know the average of all the junk that's thrown into it. So if you're building your business and relying on AI, To do something that has a unique perspective, it won't. That perspective needs to come from the operator, aka you. So if you don't have that unique perspective, perspective or that strategic edge or that, you know, the insight that is going to help elevate and create a moat, right? Remember moats in business? Like what is your moat? Just think about it. If anyone can prompt it to do what you're doing, how unique or special is your idea and how far along can it take you? But kind of getting back to like, will it replace me and Kurtz jobs as, you know, I'm gonna distill down what we do is Strategic design, right? That's kind of it at the end of the day. Whatever we design, we have to develop, so that's part of our jobs. But it's like, how do we make this core function of this experience for a customer do the thing that we believe it should do better? Uh, and I don't think that AI has kind of the connectivity yet to like see things through and I like uh see a lot of people that are stringing together agents to try to do so. Um but it's just I think it they're just burning tokens right now. I don't I don't necessarily see that the results are are there just yet. Uh I don't know. I'm optimistic. I don't think that we're gonna go anywhere.
Kurt Elster • 30:24.320
Yeah. The giveaway is if you are absolutely an expert on something, have a chat with AI about it. And that's the thing where you'll see like, oh, the wheels start to fall off. Like when you will really know something, start talking to uh ChatGPT about it, and you'll discover like, well, here's all the stuff it's wrong on. Um, you know, and I go back to like web development. There's just CSS stuff that I'm like, I'm not even gonna bother trying to have uh AI troubleshoot this for me. But then there's other tasks, you know, that A human would find extraordinarily time consuming that it just nails. Like I had it run a theme update for me where we would have had to like manually merge files. It would have sucked. For the AI, it was like it took it, you know, a few minutes, and then I had to make, you know, like 30 minutes of changes. And so great. You know, what would have been a 10-hour task became a one-hour task. Um but then, you know, simple stuff where I'm like, all right, let's just revise this CSS, it just falls apart, l falls on its face, where, you know, and makes this like overly specific mess that a human developer w would've been readily, you know, could have done it faster and better.
Chase Clymer • 31:29.940
Yeah, I think that it is creating like uh an economy of people that are going to AI first before just doing the thing themselves, which is like your Not becoming smarter that way, as a you're not advancing your career and you're not advancing your expertise by basically outsourcing your job to a computer. you are helping your company replace you, right? So you need to become an expert in your field and then use the tool to do your bidding. But I see a lot of people just using the tool to do their job and not trying to become better.
Kurt Elster • 32:11.540
I like I like that view. I agree with that. Ever had a customer cancel an order because they were shopping? Well high, 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. In your your vast experience here, what do you think merchants are getting wrong today? You know, you work with D to C brands, one to ten million. Uh seems like mostly lifestyle brands. What's the common mistake you see in in your bracket right now?
Chase Clymer • 33:22.600
Common mistakes. Well, I mean, it is still surprising to me, uh and this is like I know you know this, it's like, okay, you Look at a store and and you're like, this is gonna be a bad fit. They're not making any money. And then they're doing $10 million on the worst-looking website you've ever seen. Still happens all the time.
Kurt Elster • 33:44.260
And you go, Great, this is gonna be a home run now, but uh those are the yeah, when you find those, those are like those are the best clients to work with because you're like, wow, you're successful in spite of this. Please, you know, let me give you a great website and then this will really work.
Chase Clymer • 33:59.320
Exactly. But I mean, there's still brands out there that are just making, you know, poor UX choices, they're on old, outdated themes, their mobile experience might not be the best, right? So that seems like a little bit of a cop out, but it's not. There are still Th thousands of brands that are doing that, uh brands on legacy systems that aren't directly connecting into TikTok shop, for example, right? Like, so they need to get off these antiquated technologies. And get on to, you know, obviously we're big Shopify people here, but you know, get on to the modern a modern stack so you can utilize all of these tools that are available to you. So that is a big mistake I'm still seeing all the time. Um I'm seeing this is maybe for like a younger business in their kind of life cycle where it's like I see a lot of brands like around a million dollars a year, maybe a little bit higher, but they are This is coming directly from a f I'm quoting a friend trying to solve product problems with marketing spend. Which is a polite way of saying if your product sucks, you're never gonna succeed, right? So um people are oftentimes will come in with this viewpoint that, oh, I just need to CRO my way into a successful product. But like if you if your product sucks to begin with, like you can't you aren't gonna be a successful business. So I think a lot of people uh need to do more work to make sure that their product is solving a real problem for their customer and a lot I think a lot of people do a lot of us assuming that their product solves a problem. without doing customer research and learning if their product solves a problem. With that being saying that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that
Kurt Elster • 35:51.500
They only talked to fr their customer research is I talked to my friends and family and they agreed with me.
Chase Clymer • 35:55.820
Yeah, yeah. With that being said, you know Maybe you are onto something and you're just like a simple pivot away from just the positioning or the copy or you know being open to pivoting means you will have a more successful business. is kind of where I was going with that rabbit hole of thought.
Kurt Elster • 36:15.620
What what metric do you think people put overemphasize? For me uh yeah as someone who is specialized in conversion rate optimization, I think they focus too hard on conversion rate.
Chase Clymer • 36:28.599
Yeah. Going back to the small merchant I mentioned, which now small merchant is a generalization for anyone under five million dollars a year. Um your conversion rate will fluctuate so much at that because notably your your traffic is fluctuates a lot at that number. Um and it's just math. It's not necessarily anything as a dig on you or your business, but Your conversion rate exists kind of in the Zeitgeist alongside average order value and sessions. And if you dump a whole bunch of money into all unqualified traffic, your conversion rate's gonna drop. You know, that's just what's gonna happen. On the other side, you know, if you want me and Kirk to double your conversion rate overnight, we're gonna slash your prices in half, right? There's all these things that you can do to manipulate that number. But on the unfortunate truth is to really see if you want statistical significance on these changes You kind of have to hit a certain velocity in which to run these tests, which is about you want a thousand orders to run through this test. So if at your size it's taking you six weeks to hit a thousand orders. Well, Facebook's algorithm has changed. Your offers probably changed. Nothing on your website is the same as when you launched that test. So that test Arguably maybe isn't statistically significant, right? So if you can't prove what you're doing from a CRO perspective, you know, I wouldn't necessarily start testing until you can get the order volume to do so. So I would argue instead of you know focusing on CRO, if you are getting conversions, you are getting sales, focus more on marketing. keep driving up demand of the tra you know getting people into your funnel and once you kind of get to a velocity of you can honestly what you want to see is a thousand orders in one week would be like my line in the sand. Once you get there, then start talking to somebody like myself or Kurt about doing real CRO. I just rambled about when to not start, and then I'm gonna just completely ruin what I said. You can still do a lot of learning about your customer and looking at your heat maps and finding cool ideas and the sentiment analysis that I talked about with AI, but you won't be able to test it and get a statistically significant result. until you have like the velocity at that. So you can still do a lot of data mining and research as a smaller brand. Especially customer research, like you should be talking to your customer all the time, doing customer surveys. You can do all that stuff, but you can't necessarily do true split tests, which I think a lot of people need to understand to decouple those things in their brain because it's CRO isn't split testing.
Kurt Elster • 39:14.440
Thank you. Yeah, they go immediately to split testing when it's like, no, I mean you could do things to make better informed decisions without knowing whether or not that had a statistically significant or incremental improvement. on the results. Yeah. Better than flying by the seat of your pants. Uh so are there any are there any underutilized Shopify features right now?
Chase Clymer • 39:39.480
Yeah, um this one is so annoying to me right now because it's something we deal with all the time. GitHub The native integration with Shopify, so many people aren't using it and they are just making their lives harder and therefore anyone that they work with's lives harder. Uh version control is a simple concept. Just chat with your favorite AI about it so you can get a base-level understanding of how it works and then force your team to use it. Because what inevitably happens is it's the Spider-Man meme, four weeks into a relationship of who broke this thing. And if you version control makes it very easy to understand. Who to blame if you're that type of person, but most notably how to fix it quickly.
Kurt Elster • 40:28.500
Yeah, let you you can see where the changes happen, who made them, and what file, and then quickly roll it back.
Chase Clymer • 40:34.500
Absolutely. And do not let Claude access your GitHub.
Kurt Elster • 40:38.980
Oh yeah. It will run amok. So are there any you know, like obviously we're dealing with the the online store sales channel specifically within Shopify. Yep. Are there other sales channels that uh you see having uh success this year?
Chase Clymer • 40:57.260
Absolutely. I mean, TikTok shop is exploding. I know some folks that that is the entirety of their business is helping brands grow on TikTok shop uh agencies. Uh and these agencies that find the right clients where their products resonate with the audience that is on TikTok shop, you know, they're they're printing money for their clients right now. So Uh, if you've got a product where you think your audience is on TikTok, I would definitely explore that if you haven't. Uh, and I also think that influencer seeding is still like a great way to get Cheaper views of your product and of your website. Um, I think people are scared of the risk of like sending a free product to somebody without asking for anything in return. Uh, but what's the difference from that than spending on ads and not knowing who your audience is, right? So like I think that that is still a a worthwhile place to kind of get some eyeballs. But both of these are are pretty, you know, top of the funnel plays. It's all about getting more eyes on the product. So you definitely need to make sure that your product is in a good place. Uh for those extra eyes, you know, more eyes on a bad product isn't going to solve anything.
Kurt Elster • 42:17.299
Yeah, we've got we have a few clients, a couple uh retainer clients who are doing really well with TikTok shop. And in both cases, it was product seeding turns into a great video made essentially unprompted by a uh by an influence. TikTok influencer. Yeah. A TikTok influencer. And then that, you know, takes off. And what's funny is it will inspire copycats. people who like you didn't send the product to, they just go buy it because they're like, I'm gonna make that video too, because they're after the views and the exposure. And like that, that's kind of funny. You know, but it's like you send it you got a product, you send it to 20 people, and if you're really lucky, one of them takes off, but then it inspires, you know, a trend to hashtag copycats. And then like once you're in that space and you see it and you see that success, it's got kind of a a flywheel effect to it. And I assume that's absolutely blessings from the algorithm.
Chase Clymer • 43:10.260
Well, I mean, it it it's uh product sampling ha has been around since the dawn of time, right? It it is a thing that works, and I had a gentleman on the podcast A year or so ago, uh a coffee guy just go to honestycommerce. com slash and just type in coffee in the search bar and it'll come up Um, but he basically said, he's like, yeah, over the last decade, I don't think that I'm misquoting him. He said, I have sampled over a million cups of my own coffee personally to people at Costco's. And I was like, how do you think that affected your business? And he's like, it was the reason I have a business. He's like, that is what made it work.
Kurt Elster • 43:48.520
You know, and at the start of this episode, we said, like, man, nothing beats in-person face-to-face. That's what he did.
Chase Clymer • 43:54.340
Yeah, yeah, and uh and he was uh definitely their model started a little bit more kind of wholesale oriented first was through Costco, but now they've got a really big D to C presence. Uh, but he would uh sign a new kind of like not to put words in his mouth 'cause he he definitely was a little more poetic when we talked about it on the show. But basically like if he's like, all right, we're going in this new market and there's this new Costco, he would you know, pack his car up and drive six hours to that Costco and he's like, I'm gonna make sure that people see this product, that they try this product, and that this release does well in this Costco, so they ask me to come back and they ask us to stay here.
Kurt Elster • 44:36.880
With uh yeah, not a common with retail, but yeah, smart. I see a lot of people doing that now, especially like you get in a target. Hey, you want to stay in target. So, and they really expect you to be, you know, promoting your own product in their stores.
Chase Clymer • 44:49.640
Mm-hmm.
Kurt Elster • 44:50.680
Let's do some predictions. Some forward looking. Uh so How long are we gonna be in this universe of just like infinite doom scrolling seven-second videos? It's like I watch a second, skip, I watch a second, skip. Do we stay there? Does it somehow get, you know, more extreme? Or does the pendulum swing the other way? And people start going back to slow content, as they call it now?
Chase Clymer • 45:19.640
Yeah, I mean I am probably the worst person to ask about this because I have been slowly deleting all of my social media apps uh because I am not a fan of uh the brain rot that comes along with s doom scrolling and, you know, seeing what is going on in the world, uh, whether you do or don't believe in it, you know, it's not it puts me in a bad headspace. With that being said, I, you know, every once in a while you see these posts about like dumb phones and about, you know, uh you know, young gen the younger generation is like getting off their phone and you know, I don't know if I believe it necessarily because like TikTok's huge and that's all younger people, but I would love to see it, you know. The pendulum swing back a little bit. I do think that people are a little too interconnected. I already mentioned I think that AI as a tool is fantastic, but as a crutch is ruining uh the development of like experts in their field. Um So that was a little bit of a odd take on the question, but that's kind of where my brain is.
Kurt Elster • 46:28.000
One bold prediction for the next twelve months. This is a tough one. I don't have a bold prediction.
Chase Clymer • 46:33.039
I do because me and you you said something about it and I saw something about it and it is kind of playing off something that I saw you say, but I do think Shopify will fix the partner program.
Kurt Elster • 46:43.099
What's broken about it?
Chase Clymer • 46:45.260
Let's go back two or three years. Uh Shopify made a big bet on going all in on enterprise in the big four consulting firms, and it left us as kind of like the smaller partners that helped build Shopify to what it was t today, kind of in this weird position where they were bringing these people in and giving them so much access because Shopify really wanted to bring in these enter enterprise players to the Shopify ecosystem and what happened is they didn't give a fuck. Like none of these enterprise, like none of these big big none of these consultancies, they they just were like, thanks, but you know, we're just gonna keep doing what we do. And it just didn't work out. It was a bad bet. Um and then so that has changed now and they also have admitted and there's there's articles about this that, you know, it's not a focus of Shopify anymore to be going after that. That type of partnership, they still want those enterprise brands on the platform, but not necessarily uh you know, working with these enterprise and and huge consulting firms. And so I think in the next year, we're gonna see them do their best to improve the partner program. We've already seen that they've created more partner tiers, which I think everybody was looking for for a while. Uh, regardless of where you fell in the tiering of it, uh, I think it they that is a good thing. Um and they're gonna start to, you know. Hopefully everyone will start to have their partner person at Shopify to help them with the things that they need help with
Kurt Elster • 48:17.240
I think we're already seeing evidence of that. You know, and you're right, I did have I had a conversation, not on the show, um, but privately with with Atlee Clark Clark at Shopify, who's leading up this partner program now. And it was very positive. And she very much was like, Hey you know, things got reorganized and we want we want to take what worked from the past and go back to that. You know, take have that that like really um I mean, they were always so good about building community and enabling people. You know, if you went to them as a as a partner and said, like, okay, like here's my question. Here's where we're confused. Here's where we're We're stuck, help us understand. Often they were able and willing to give you like a little bit of inside baseball. And when you could understand the reasoning behind something. You know, suddenly, oh, okay, now it makes sense. Like now I can I could get behind it or I could work with it. Like whatever the thing was And I think that's that's where they're going to try to go back to. Which hey, I'm here for it. I'm thrilled to see it. Right. Yeah. I mean the reason that Yeah.
Chase Clymer • 49:19.420
The reason that we're still Exclusively working with Shopify as our CMS of choice and in this ecosystem is because of the early partner program, the relationships we built then, and then obviously level of expertise. and specif and specialization that we had acquired over the last couple of years. But I had never known that in any other ecosystem, which I had before I dove all in on Shopify, I had dabbled in a couple kind of other uh CMS is uh you know you and I had spoke before like how we both kind of knew WordPress and also hated it. Um but you know the it was Shopify when I and back in 2016-2017 was this amazing ecosystem. And it wasn't it isn't that hard to emulate that again these days. The numbers and the scale has grown a bit. You know, do I think there are too many Shopify partners? I don't know. Maybe we need to, you know, maybe once a year you need to check an email because I know half of these partners don't exist anymore, because I can see them in the partner portal. But, you know, I I also am an abundance mindset guy. I think there's enough worker out here to go around. And that was something I I I I every time we talk, I always I say this is like you really put that in my brain when we first met. was that 10 years ago? Uh you know, the ab the abundance mindset, there's a lot of work to go around. And uh I think that that was something that you find in the Shopify ecosystem that wasn't anywhere else. and you still find it. And I think that the people that um have any sort of other opinion about You know, abundance mindset, a lot of work to go around in like we can be collaborative competition instead of like, you know, the the opposite of abundance abundance mindset, which is a scarcity mindset. Like those types of folks tend to like not do well here. I don't know.
Kurt Elster • 51:04.980
Yeah, well, it's it's the wrong attitude to bring. You know, the thing is very much like for community to work We can't all be sniping each other and holding our cards close to our chest. The um yeah, it like those relationships turn into between you know, other people turn into referrals and ideas and opportunities, right? It it creates the luck sale that helps propel your career and your business forward. And it works for merchants, you know, it works for uh partners and agencies. It works for everybody.
Chase Clymer • 51:34.359
Yeah, I I you and I have I've sent business each other's way. We've gotten each other involved with interesting projects, interesting events. Uh, you know, it's It's definitely worthwhile to take a beat and think about the longevity of a decision as opposed to the instant gratification.
Kurt Elster • 51:54.000
Absolutely. All right, Chase, we got to wrap it up. Where do people go to learn more about you?
Chase Clymer • 51:59.440
Absolutely. Um, I also have a podcast. Mine are a little bit more bite-sized. Um, we're doing a lot more interviews with merchants. You can go check that out, honestecommerce. com or whatever your favorite, you know, podcast player thing app is. Um we have an agency as well. We're called ElectricEye, ElectriCI. io. We do a lot of the similar stuff that Kurt does. So talk to us both. Make us fight over your business. But we do a lot of uh Shopify migrations, a lot of redesigns. We are heavy into CRO, um, you know, and if you are you know, that's something that's on your radar right now. Uh reach out now. I can probably give away one or two of our you know paid diagnostics to folks before my business partner Sean catches on. Um but yeah, those are two things to do. Listen to us at honesty commerce or reach out to us at Electric Eye.
Kurt Elster • 52:54.120
The ooh, I could go for a good good WordPress migration. Those are my favorite. I love moving people off WordPress.
Chase Clymer • 53:02.640
Yeah, we just did a big commerce migration and then right now we're about to do a custom stack migration. But luckily, uh it's pretty easy to pull the data out when it's not and you gotta like deal with like a giant JSON file or like some weird database file and then find a weird website to convert that to something that actually makes sense.
Kurt Elster • 53:22.280
The I did I did one of those recently. It was Craft Commerce, which it turns out there's like one person on the planet uses Craft Commerce and we migrated them to Shopify. That's how it felt based on the absolute lack of info. And you're right, like I just Ultimately, we ended up just scraping the data off the website and then cleaning it. Like that's how desperate we got. But we will end it there. Thanks for listening. Chase Climber, Electric Eye, and Honest ECommerce. Check it out. Thanks for coming. Hey, before you go, I was hoping you would check out our new app, Promo Party Pro. It is what I want to be the single best, easiest way to run a free gift with purchase promo on Shopify. We just put it live in the App Store. We've got less than 50 users. We want your feedback. So if you need to run a free gift with Purchase Promo in the near future, install it, try it. There's a live chat. I check that all the time. And so if you have any issues at all, you know, or any suggestions on how we can make it even easier to use, let us know. We're happy to help. If you want to try it, search promo party in the app store. Promo PartyPro is the app Give it a shot. It's got a free trial. Thanks