w/ David Simoes, Sounds Good Agency
Listen in as we tackle the intricate world of e-commerce internationalization, with a particular focus on the contrasting landscapes between North America and Europe. I'm joined by David Simoas, an expert in the field hailing from the Czech Republic, who shares his rich experience navigating through the complex terrain of culturally diverse European markets. We dissect the ease of conducting e-commerce in the States and how it starkly differs from Europe's language barriers, currency variations, and a maze of regulations that could befuddle even the most seasoned entrepreneurs.
Venturing across borders in the digital marketplace brings a slew of unique challenges and solutions that we unravel in our conversation. David and I exchange insights on the necessity of localizing content, from sales messaging to adapting to cultural norms and payment methods that vary from one country to another. We highlight the effectiveness of translation tools and AI in bridging communication gaps, ensuring your online store resonates with international audiences. Whether it's dealing with credit cards, bank transfers, or local payment peculiarities, this chat lays out the essentials for a smooth cross-border e-commerce operation.
Rounding off our discussion, we dive into Shopify's journey of capturing the European market amidst strict privacy laws and regional preferences for homegrown digital solutions. David offers a unique perspective on the hesitation surrounding platform adoption like Shopify, sharing strategies to shift the e-commerce mindset in favor of such versatile tools. From the value of local expertise to the surprising impact of marketing budgets, we cover all bases, offering valuable advice to merchants eager to make their mark in Europe's dynamic e-commerce landscape. Join us for a wealth of knowledge and practical tips from the frontline of international digital commerce.
Kurt Elster
Heads up friends, the unofficial Shopify podcast is made by indie entrepreneurs or indie entrepreneurs and may contain material not suitable for all audiences, like swearing or economics. Listener discretion is advised. So if you're listening to this show, you are very likely an English speaker. And if you're listening to the show in an English speaker, I know it is probable and likely that you are in North America, probably the US, maybe Canada, but if not one of those two, maybe uh the UK or Australia. And actually, we have a lot of Australian listeners. Hello, my friends. But outside of those countries, e-commerce is prevalent and thriving and very different and very difficult. Compared to us, we're playing on easy mode, right? It is different in North America to be involved with e-commerce. So if you are outside of the EU and you want to expand into those countries, you want to sell internationally and really open up your market. There's a lot of nuance and things we need to go over and figure out. Or maybe you know the other way around, you are in Europe and you want to internationalize, where there it becomes quite a necessity when you want to reach a larger market to sell your stuff. And my work has been almost entirely American. You know, d virtually all of our clients are going to be in the United States. So I'm not fit to talk about this. I need someone. I need a guest. And so joining me uh is a a a colleague, a fellow Shopify uh plus expert agency owner, David Simoez. David, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing?
David Simoes
Thanks for having me, mate. How are you doing?
Kurt Elster
Very well. Yeah, my pleasure to have you here. Where are you located? Because I doubt it's America.
David Simoes
Right now I'm in Czech Republic, Central Europe.
Kurt Elster
Czech Republic. Wow. That's not where you're originally from, is it?
David Simoes
No, no, no, it's not. I'm originally from Portugal and I've been here for right now like eight years. But I also lived like one year in Spain, Madrid. I've been around South America as well. So I've been around quite a lot in my different places.
Kurt Elster
I believe it. Uh well and that that makes you uniquely qualified to talk about internationalization here. But what about your e-commerce background? What do you do there?
David Simoes
Uh I actually started diving more into e-commerce since I've come to Czech Republic because in other countries the E-commerce market wasn't as well developed eight, ten years ago. One curious stat or fun fact for you is that Czech Republic still in Europe is the country with the biggest amount of online stores per capita. which is quite in incredible. So when I arrived here I was surprised that every single uh small business that you see on the streets They have like on top of them instead of just having a logo like a cool fancy logo they have their website, you know, like whatever business. cz or dot com or whatever. You know, so this is already 10 years ago. So the country is quite digitally forward. And since I've come here I started going deeper into those uh these markets, this this this business. But For Shopify, it was not super mature enough. So actually in the first three, four years of me doing Shopify work, I was working mostly with uh brands from London, from UK.
Kurt Elster
In Czech Republic, they seem to be early adopters. A lot of e-commerce penetration. And even so, you still ended up working with English speaking native brands in the UK.
David Simoes
Yeah, it's not just about the fact that you are digitally forward. Because of that and because of the specificities of the culture of the country, Shopify was like not prepared at all for f to serve this specific location, you know? At the same time my check wasn't so good as it is today. Right now I speak Czech, but before I didn't So it was just much easier for me to get in touch with UK London clients and sell there and serve them there. And uh slowly what I did is I started educating our local market to the advantages of Shopify. through some case studies, blog posts, etc. In the beginning we were getting the smallest entrepreneurs that want to be different. And now like we have clients that are doing like Hundreds of millions with 150 physical locations between two countries and so on.
Kurt Elster
I like that. So I mean from where you're sitting, do you look at American merchants and think we're playing on easy mode?
David Simoes
Like I don't want to offend anybody, but kind of yes please do because Yeah, let's make some clickbaity entrance here. Sure, like If you think about the states, you have like 350 million in population. Europe is around 450 million. And you have one currency, one language. There may be some like tax differences and legislations per state But Shopify natively covers most of them, and if not you have like a bunch of partners that do it for you, uh like Avalar and so on. In Europe, within these uh 450 million potential buyers, you have like uh 27 languages, I think, 10 currencies, and uh each country has its own language basically. Not to speak even about culture and the habits or traditions that make everything much more complex. So imagine that if you want to reach 15 million or 40 million like market. You actually would have to have an independent strategy for each one of these. You don't have any of this to worry about when you are in the state. When you are in the state, you basically start a store, English, dollars. Accelerated checkout, let's go. You know, connect to Amazon, let's go. Anybody from these 350 million people can buy, you know? And in Europe it's quite more complicated.
Kurt Elster
Our issues then, we have language barriers, quite a few. In it in North America, it's like, all right, if I if I cover three languages, English, French, Spanish, all right, that's everybody. Like you really have covered um a majority of the market there. You have more to deal with in terms of languages. You have more currencies to deal with. You've got for me it it's three. That's it. And I'm done. Um and these indiv like you're tailoring to these individual locales, but that have much smaller total market, peep you know, total people in them, just smaller populations. And then on top of it, we're gonna layer just to make things like extra special, different regulations for all of those geographies. Um I'm sure we'll get into some of that. And Shopify features, they tend to roll they roll out almost I would imagine almost all of them roll out North America first, often US first, which for a Canadian company, I'm sure could be frustrating for our Canadian friends. So you're, you know, there's stuff that like I have access to within Shopify that you you probably don't Yet. You know, they it rolls out, it expands. But all right. Well of the like language, currencies, features, market regulation, w what's the toughest problem to solve?
David Simoes
The toughest problem to solve is probably something that neither you or me solve on a daily basis, but it's actually the operational side is logistics. That's something that like we don't like. It's not so sexy or fancy to speak about. It's not just about a quick gain that you make, you change color but uh the butt the butt the color of some button and you have 100% increase in conversion rate is the actual the hard work, you know, of setting up the processes, setting up where we're going to have warehouses or what 3P are we going to use or not. How you're going to handle customs and all these things. But this is like something is not so much digital oriented, it's more like processes and business oriented and it's solvable. But this is like something that is quite challenging in the beginning when you go to a completely different continent, you know? So this is like the first thing that you need to figure out if you have the capacity and the budget to handle it Eventually, if you want to have a local team to support you with that, or if you want to find a local agency or partner that can support you with that. That's something even within Europe, sometimes we do. Uh but going from the States to Europe, you really need to consider it as like one of the biggest pain points.
Kurt Elster
You know, the thing that fascinates me, I think it's it's subtle cultural differences. How much thought goes into that? How much work? Like what is the level of effort required here if you're trying to successfully connect with people from different cultures? Even if realistically, like in many places, you could just get the car and drive to that country, but different language, different country, different culture, different history, how much effort are we putting into that? Help me wrap my head around it.
David Simoes
Uh if I'm going to give you like some examples of these differences, for example, uh in Germany the privacy laws are even tighter. than we have for example in Romania. So you have to be much more careful about it. In the UK, it's not so uncommon to buy pills online, you know, from the drugstore or from pharmacy or whatever. In Netherlands it's completely frowned upon. Uh in some countries, if you have some product like contact lenses or some uh uh something that could be applied on a medical sense, you may actually have or have the possibility. To add some ELF ID to get some cashback from the from the government. So these are some quirks from different countries. But what I've seen this year, which isn't quite interesting, is that there are merchants that solve this in two opposite ways. And it's really dependent on what type of product you are selling. Uh I assume that the majority of your audience will be more D2C oriented. So what this merchant does, which is like very I would say time consuming and uh painful at point is that they actually have one store per each single market They try to change the copy, the promotions, uh sometimes the pricing, of course. They try to have completely different marketing strategies. for each single one of these countries to make sure they can get the most out of it, you know? And this makes sense if you have, I don't know, up to a hundred products in your store. So you really need to focus on the advantages of your products, on the your USPs, etc. On the other hand, we've seen merchants that like are selling kitchenware, which is nothing super special. There is no custom like patent on it that makes it like unique. And it's about like volume of the product offering they have, and it's about scale. And these clients what they try to do is automate as much as possible. Um their expansion through automatic translations, chat GPT, then having some like manual people manual translators of course checking the highest uh value pages and products But they try to basically expand as fast as they can, for example launching one store per ever per quarter, so they can have maximum presence. And what they do is they try to be as generic as they can. So that there will be no conflicts whatsoever with the cultures. So if for example, if imagine they are based in Czech Republic, once again, they have a huge PR campaign very successfully, they will never put this on their main website Because if they do, they wouldn't be able to translate it correctly to other countries in order to have the same impact. So they try to have a very generalistic approach, which makes sense because their product is not specifically special It's about basic like mid-cost kitchenware that if I don't buy from you, I buy from B, C, D, and so on
Kurt Elster
So we've got our issue. I mean number one, we have we have regulatory issues. So knowing, you know, what is oh what's okay to sell in certain countries versus others. Though most of the examples you gave were more um around like sensitive or restricted goods, you know, like how some places treat prescription lenses or it well actually several examples were prescriptions. Um so certainly there. And then with content localization, we gotta we have to make sure that the offers make sense for everybody. But it sounds like some people try to get too granular. They try and make offers that are too specific to each place and make themselves crazy. They're trying to change too much. I'm wondering about unique cultural aspects in the sense, you know, that like you may it's something that's perfectly acceptable, like on sale shop now might be offensive in some country and we don't know it.
David Simoes
That's a very like um layered question, you know, because if you want to talk about culture specifically, there's the aspect of language, but that is it's more than just like direct translation If you speak about, for example, in English you have the word you. You can mean you personally, it could be your family, a group of people, and so on. In Europe, different languages have a different U for plural, for singular. And depending on the context that you use, it can be respected, respecting. It can be actually offensive to use one or the other. And you actually need to know what is your Audience and what is the best way to communicate your values to that audience in a way that we don't feel weird, you know. So in some cases, you want to be extra respectful if you are, I don't know, some classy luxury product. And in that case, even the U-word and the grammar of the sentence will change dramatically. And therefore, the value proposition, the way that you communicate your brand is going to be different. That's like the culture aspect. That is like very strong even within the language. If you think about the habits of like how should I buy something online, it's true. Like some countries are very card-oriented and they use Shopify payments or different payment gateway for all it. Some countries that if don't support Shopify payments need basically to shop around and see what gateways could they get or not for what conditions and it's like more painful. It's like one more thing on your checklist to do before you launch your store. And what you have then on Central and Eastern Europe is a bunch of manual payments. Uh you have bank transfers. Which means that people receive the information about your bank ac bank account, they send the money, and then you have the job to basically somehow get the statements from your bank. And pair it with your invoicing system. And uh Xero or QuickBooks don't do that for you, you know? So you need to have some custom integration or some automation put in put in in place so it's extra work. If you are also in central and eastern Europe, you have cash on delivery, which is very, very common, unfortunately, which put a strain on your cash flow. to and it's one more challenge that like European emergencies have to deal with. But if you go from your um aid from your company in the States to Europe And you don't have cash and delivery, bank transfers, etc. , you probably could lose like thirty to fifty percent in conversions, which is like a lot.
Kurt Elster
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David Simoes
Yeah, and like not even that, then there is like another type of payment method. And of course I'm forgetting about all the crypto and all this thing that like someplace can be popular depending on your niche. But there is still in some countries only a specific direct bank transfer, which means that I go to the checkout, I click on a button with the logo of my bank. And it connects directly with my bank account and make a direct deposit to the merchant's bank account. So it's kind of a very specific thing that is is used in specific countries, Czech Republic, Italy, I believe. And uh what was the other country? Spain, they do that as well.
Kurt Elster
In Portugal, they actually have a interesting one.
David Simoes
In Portugal, they have a payment method which basically gives you a reference that allows you to pay your online order through the ATM, for example.
Kurt Elster
Oh, I think we they do that in Mexico as well.
David Simoes
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, you like go to a local, like, uh, my local convenience store and then like all right, here's my reference, and I pay there in person. Well, all right, with these language translations. What tools are you using? Like I used Shopify's translate and adapt recently and I switched from in translating from English to French. And according to someone who said they could speak French, it was good
David Simoes
Translate and adapt is like the go-to solution for us as well, most of the times. There are some limitations sometimes. But in most of the scenarios works pretty well. And I I love that Shopify puts a real effort into that app and you can see it. And it really works very well in auto-translating and then you of course you can always correct or improve it and so on. I have a client that using Translate and Adapt together with some internal processes and some extra translators that they hire professionally. That are able to translate the whole store from one country to another within like one day of work.
Kurt Elster
Whoa. What what kind of devil magic is that? How are they doing that?
David Simoes
Yeah, ChatGPT plays a big role in there as well. You know, they have some auto-translations, then they have some script to run it through the the ChatGPT to get the translations. improved by ChatGPT 4, which is better than the automatic things that we see for most apps. And then they have uh professional translators just reviewing the copy.
Kurt Elster
And then so like they do the basic GPT translation and then they punch it up with GPT-4. Because GPT-4 is slow and expensive if you're doing a ton of content. So we start with GPT 3. 5. Punch it up with four and then finally a copy editor or translator like actually goes through it, make sure it's makes sense.
David Simoes
Uh more or less. Not 3. 5. They first is do the automatic transaction adapt, for example. or using whatever app that they have on Shopify store and then they can either use it if it's good enough, but most of the time they just g grab what they have there. the two texts and they individu I don't know if they have a script right now or if they are doing manually of actually just like putting the text into the script into the the editor with some like Not super expensive like a manpower and then they just have somebody going through through through the decks. But of course it's not a huge store. They have maybe what 50 products. So it's something else that if you are selling like thousands of those
Kurt Elster
Right. Yeah. I mean when you're when you have the small catalog versus the huge catalog, your life gets much easier with the smaller catalog. So talk to me about shipping methods, right? What uh what are what are typical shipping methods, trends, or preferences that you're seeing?
David Simoes
In the northwestern part of Europe, it's pretty much similar to what we have in the in the States. We want as fast as possible. We are like Spoiled by Amazon for sure. When you start to go and uh there is not much variety in that, you know, except some countries like Netherlands and France a bit as well. This means that like there is basically standard delivery. Maybe if you want express delivery you can have. You may be using some specific provider for insuring your package. typical things that we are all used to. Once you start going to the south, central, and eastern Europe, then you see some specificities. You see that some countries, because they are very much more evolved like Czech Republic as we were discussing before, it's very much advanced in this in this in this sense. They are expecting actually next day delivery or you know or two days delivery box. And if it's more than that, you may re get a bad review. In Italy, for example, people are totally fine waiting three, four days for their order. So actually, this is something you can leverage in your own like behalf because you can say, okay, I can adapt my logistics to serve First, the clients or the countries that are like more demanding of some like delivery time, then others that are more comfortable. And maybe we can even like over-deliver in those countries without too much effort. And regarding the very specific shipping methods you see then on Central and Eastern Europe is, for example, the pickup points. There are many specific services that allow you to basically go to the checkout opens a map with your area and you can see tens or maybe even hundreds of potential places where you can pick up your order and this could be like I don't know a small local shop that has a partnership with this company or it can even be automated boxes that you go there you put some pin it opens automatically and you have your your order there And it is something that is very comfortable getting more and more popular in Europe in general. And people are preferring it much more over like having to wait for the courier to arrive home. and like connect with him because we don't have the habit, which in the US is very typical and very common, of just letting the package at the door, you know? Here I don't think it would like work very well. Also I think we are living much more concentrated cities. Of course, not every is not I cannot compare it with New York or whatever, but like the general America that you see in the movies, suburban America and so on. Everybody just leaving the packages at the doors. Here it wouldn't work, you know. Here nobody would like be comfortable with it. So these pickup boxes or locations are much more preferred.
Kurt Elster
And it worked it's like similar to it sounds like it's similar to the Amazon lockers that we use here.
David Simoes
Yeah, correct, correct. But uh here is not like one Amazon, there's like five to ten different companies doing that. And I think in the future there will be some consolidation where this will be like norm. And some companies are even over s they are seeing some type of potential like uh future where this will be part of the state infrastructure and there'll be one box next to each ohm where these things will be like connected with but this like five to ten years away from us
Kurt Elster
I think you just invented mailboxes.
David Simoes
Basically. You know, it's basically mailboxes But you can have there everything. You can get your prescription drugs. You can have there like your I don't know furniture. You can even there your groceries deliver there.
Kurt Elster
That would be you know, I've I've been doing gr our local grocerier offers delivery and it's like 75 bucks a year. It's so cheap. I love it. I well going to the grocery store is like a weird delight now because I do it you know once every six weeks and then the rest of the they just show up on my front door. It's the coolest. So no, I totally uh totally off track there. So talk to me about advertising and marketing, right? I have to I would suspect that it it's the same s channels, you know, it's social and and Google, right? Are there like secret European only channels that I don't get to use?
David Simoes
Uh actually, now that you say that, kind of there is some like secret sauce in Europe, you know, some specific local national channels that you should take a look into. Because of course you have the social that we everything you do in America sooner or later comes to to to Europe. Here influencer marketing is still like Very much in trend, I would say. Even if it's getting more and more expensive, it's still like very like realistic But then you have this type of local Amazons, you know? You have these local services that work as marketplaces and where you can put your products in using a feed or something similar or connecting directly with your Shopify store and you can actually beat on these marketplaces for your products to like rank higher So instead of just having Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. , you actually have like two, three, four different potential marketplaces where you can list your products and increase your visibility much faster. Uh if you are in Poland, of course there is Allegro. If you are in Czech Republic, you have Eureka, you have Zboży, you don't know what this is, so it doesn't matter. But like in Hungary they have their own as well. Like there is a bunch of countries that have their own like preferred places to buy on or to compare prices. And uh you should definitely do your research like what is the place where people will compare prices and list the products there. Especially if you don't have like a super unique product that you will not find elsewhere.
Kurt Elster
So run me through the regulations on that advertising. Like in the US There are some regulations like on organic, I gotta market sponsored content, SpawnCon. But you know, not a ton of stuff. Uh what Tell me about uh yeah, tell me about uh regulations on advertising. Stricter, lax, different?
David Simoes
There is much more specific regulation, specifically speaking about GP GPR. The laws here in Europe are more how can I say more well detailed on how things should work So you have to pay more attention to it comparing with like federal laws or even state laws in the US regarding privacy and so on I think that's for example one of the reasons why Shopify collabs, it would take a long time to get here in Europe, you know? The fact that you would be like sharing data across multiple like stores and companies, it's it's kind of messy, you know. Um there are laws regarding privacy that make things harder to do and makes features and tools come here later. I don't think that it's just like because Shopify is so focused on the US that things stay there for a long time. It's about the fact that things take a long time to be able to be adapted and prepared for the EU regulations. The same thing happened, for example, with threads by Meta. It took like six months extra after they launched in the States to actually get to Europe. And that's all due to these like regulations. TikTok shop, similar thing. Start First in the US, not just because it's a bigger market, because it's easier to start there, and slowly they start devolving into other countries
Kurt Elster
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David Simoes
Not yet, because it's not like really available here yet. That's exactly the point, you know, like you don't have much you don't have like all the tools that you would like to have. You don't have them at first glance. At the same time it's good because you can see how it works out in different countries before in the States, and then you can just put it here in place when you see it's work or it works or not when it arrives here. Uh one thing that is very clear and that's like regarding GDPR once again, you should take it very seriously because they not play like the fines here can be pretty high. You know, every year there is some new law on how your cookies bar should look like, what options should be there or not, how easy it should be to handle consent or not consent, etc. You know, we have uh quick story about GDPR here in Czech in uh in in Europe. High decline from Canada actually, living in Austria And uh she was launching a new business and she said, Okay, I have a bunch of contacts from previous business deals in the past. Some guy I met in an event like eight years ago. Let me just like mass email my new store, my new project. Like these people, like I helped them in the past. I think they'll be happy for me. Like one week later, she got served in the mail because of breaking GDPR laws.
Kurt Elster
Oh man.
David Simoes
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Ugh. Worst nightmare.
David Simoes
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Like here, it's just like a free for all on my inbox.
David Simoes
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
You know, you were talking about email. So for email service providers, what's the what's the go-to? What's the default? Is it s is it still Clavio?
David Simoes
Uh actually Clavio. In some countries, yes. Is Clavio still super strong? In some countries, Clavio never got super popular because there are of course the mailchimps of the world, and there is similar Shopify, Clavio grows. in these markets due to partners like us, not because they are focused it focusing here or marketing here. So the grow is very slow. And then there is a bunch of like really good local solutions that do the job pretty well. And they are localized to the needs of the country, you know? That's so that Clavio will never be able to do it by themselves. If I want to give you an example, just speak about one language. There are languages here that basically conjugate the words depending on their grammar syntax. So if I say hey Kurt, I cannot say the word Kurt Just like it is, I have to say Kurt T, you know? So if I say hi Kurt in an email, I actually need to have some API to conjugate these words. So it doesn't look weird when I address you by your first name. So this is something that Clayview wouldn't ever do by they would never think about doing So of course for example my agency for this specific problem we did an app that allows for this specific language to do this this this translation and we basically put it in the some clavial like uh meta field or whatever to make sure like people can use it on on their on their templates, you know? But these are specific things that it's very hard to solve at scale for a big company like Clavio. So the very generic solutions like milchin everybody knows get successful and at the same time local solutions for each country end up being like very popular as well. But I think Clayviews just doesn't succeed here. as much because of lack of knowledge about the platform and because its price point is quite high in comparison with other tools
Kurt Elster
Perception and adoption of Clavio very different depending on region. What is the perception of Shopify in Europe?
David Simoes
First of all, like maybe the summary of this whole conversation is that Europe is not really a place. Europe is like a group of places. So it would be even hard to say what is the feeling about Shopify in Europe in general. Of course I can say they have a market share of ten to twenty percent, but like Each country is quite individual in that. You know, UK obviously obviously is the country after US with the most amount of Shopify stores. So hugely popular there. Then you have places start being very interested in Shopify in Europe, especially France, Germany, and Spain Shopify is actually investing a lot themselves into that. They have like local people getting hired, promoting, being in local events, etc. So Shopify is becoming a household name in these nations In other countries, it seems like something very good that I want to try, but I'm afraid of. So if you don't have the support of the partners in the ecosystem, you actually can like be always defaulting to something that you know, you know, the the the the the lesser evil that you already know. So it comes to The devil you know.
Kurt Elster
Better the devil. The devil you know.
David Simoes
Exactly. Exactly. So you need to depend on the local community to catch up to Shopify first and then the immersion starts going into it. That's what happened with the Czech Republic, Slovakia, countries around us. That uh we as partners come in, start educating, start showing case studies, results, that big business can work perfectly in Shopify. So then people start like joining the bandwagon.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, you need those those early wins and then to publicize them. That makes sense. But you also you need the that partner buy-in as well. So Uh you've got experience here. I'm curious to know what's the the biggest challenge that you have faced, you know, working with a large business and moving them to Shopify or Shopify Plus. You know, for us The the migration projects, those are the the glorious Shopify projects. Those are the big ones, the fun ones, the tough ones. And so I think you know for us, that's where I see the real learnings happen because you have to solve new problems. For you, what's one of those those biggest challenges in doing those migrations to Shopify for clients?
David Simoes
Yeah. I 100% agree that migrations are the most fun. They are like the biggest and most interesting things we can do. From my perspective, I believe that the hardest thing is to Change the mindset around software or e-commerce software development. Because you asked me before what is the feeling about Shopify in Europe? And one of the biggest competitors of Shopify is still maybe the custom solution, either in-house or you or through some external agency. I guess people want to have full control about everything and they want to decide how everything should work on the store, each single process, etc. So for us to move like a big company from their custom solution to an in-house solution, we need to basically educate them to don't try to like Like fit a circle in a square. No, they do have to try to explain that they shouldn't like try to adapt the online store so much to what they think they need, but try to adapt their processes to what Shopify offers. And explain that by doing that, we are actually doing them a favor because we're going to be able to streamline a lot of things, automate a lot of things, and make the customer journey even more successful because Shopify has this know-how of like millions of stores and they continuously improve their solution based on it, you know, and they are just like one company. Maybe they have okay a hundred experts. But what is 100 experts experts compared with like the amount of know-how that Shopify has? Of course, we need to adapt it to our local market and there may be some challenges with it. But the moment that we can explain to the client to try to natively take advantage of Shopify and then build on top of it, that's like very hard to educate people on that. But it's getting easier and easier. As we show them more and more solutions, more and more clients that have taken that step and are saving like hundreds of thousands per year.
Kurt Elster
So again, you know, it always it goes back to education and awareness. But to your point, you're right. Shopify gives us all these tools, and we're we're grateful for the tools they give us. You know, they don't have to do they could just stop adding features today, right? You know, so I'm always grateful for what they provide us.
David Simoes
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
And then within those tools, you could do crazy things with them. You all kinds of goofy workarounds. But yeah, ultimately, the system works best and life is easiest when you use the tools the way they were intended and like Shopify describes to you. They're like, this is what how we want you to use this. you know, when facing X problem, this is th our preferred solution. And then suddenly everything works nicely together. And like there's reasons you may not be aware of as to why they're like, hey, do it this way, you know, until you end up breaking something later. So easier to to try and adapt. And adopt easier to adopt their processes than to try to adapt theirs to yours, I think. Um so all right. Final question. What's one piece of advice you'd give to a Shopify merchant who's trying to succeed or break into the European market? G acknowledging fully that European market is an extremely broad group of folks.
David Simoes
Connect with local experts that know what they are doing. In that specific country, not Europe. Go to Germany, speak with German experts, you know, or local experts know best what people are used to and how to better leverage your product and your operations into that country. Don't underestimate the power of uh countries where the the ad costs are much lower than what you are used to. Like your marketing budget in US makes much more here than you can expect. These are the two big things that come to mind and don't underestimate logistics and operations. These three things are key for me.
Kurt Elster
The I love I love that tip that yeah that your your marketing dollar is go further um and go like when you're trying to localize localize Your your experts localize your help too. I think that I think that's excellent advice. Uh David Simwa's where can we go to learn more about you?
David Simoes
You can definitely connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, DM me, ask me anything, or you can check our website at soundsgood. agency.
Kurt Elster
I will include uh I'll include Sounds Good Agency in the show notes. We mentioned Shopify's translation app that we both had good success with. Put that in there. Uh and I'll I'll throw in your your other other links in here as well um for LinkedIn, etc. Okay, fabulous. David, thank you so much. I have I've learned a lot.
David Simoes
Lovely. Love to speak with you, man.