Expert Insights w/ Harley Finkelstein & more
Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mi3iKmZBxRE
We’ve got all the highlights from the Shopify Editions.dev conference in Toronto. With exclusive insights from Harley Finkelstein, Shopify's president, we unpack the exciting upcoming updates designed to keep the Shopify intuitive admin interface effortless for all merchants, big and small.
Kurt Elster (00:17):
I just flew back from Toronto and boy or my arms tired.
Paul Reda (00:19):
Oh my God.
Kurt Elster (00:20):
I didn't have an opening and didn't have a good cold
Paul Reda (00:22):
For this. Did you fly out of Billy Bishop?
Kurt Elster (00:25):
No. I am so foolish. I flew out of YYZ. Oh no, no, no. But here's the, alright, so in Toronto you can walk to Billy Bishop or it was 30 minutes to YYZ, but YYZ has the pre customs clearance. You clear US customs there and then when you get to America, you just walk out of the airport.
Paul Reda (00:45):
Okay, yeah. But customs is nothing at O'Hare. Every time I've flown back,
Kurt Elster (00:49):
Yeah, it probably would've been faster going through it at O'Hare. Just let me feel better about, even though I've been to Toronto multiple times and No, you should go to Billy Bishop foolishly booking YYZ without thinking.
Paul Reda (01:02):
I did not go to the special Shopify event. I was in Door County, Wisconsin, which is the Cape Cod. It's the Cape Cod, the Upper Midwest. You didn't know that it actually is.
Kurt Elster (01:13):
Yeah. You see people with door life stickers.
Paul Reda (01:16):
Did
Kurt Elster (01:16):
You? That's on Shopify too. The Door Life store.
Paul Reda (01:20):
Do you know why it's Door County? I do
Kurt Elster (01:21):
Not
Paul Reda (01:22):
Because that straight going through into Green Bay at the tip of which is Green Bay, Wisconsin is very dangerous. And the Native American tribes used to war with each other over Washington Island. And so that whole area was called Death's Door. And so then when they were naming the counties so pleasant, they were like, oh, we can't call it death's Door County. We'll just call it Door County.
Kurt Elster (01:48):
I mean Death's Door County. Very different vibe.
Paul Reda (01:50):
Yeah. So yeah, it's a little cooler due to so many shipwrecks and murderous wars. It was deaths door.
Kurt Elster (01:58):
So you were in deaths door county for the Shopify conference?
Paul Reda (02:02):
There was no, oh, oh. I was at some stupid farmer's market and there were these guys selling shirts. Oh, what was on the shirts? I don't remember what they were. It was a thing where it's like, yeah, but it's like Door County, but cool. Just dudes in their twenties that have a lot of rope necklaces and bracelets. The kind of shirts those guys would wear, but still Door County shirts and just, I took one look at those dudes and looked at those shirts and I just went That stores on Shopify. I know it. And I straight up and I was standing there right next to their thing and I just loaded them up and I was like, yep, that Shopify, oh, pay with shop pay. Look at that. Oh look, they didn't style the checkout at all. Dopes got to style the checkout.
Kurt Elster (02:44):
No one, everybody forgets to style the checkout. Yeah, so I was in Toronto for Editions. Dev, that's a conference that's not Shopify Unite. That's over. Are you sure it's not one day, but we've replaced it with Editions dev, which is essentially the same vibes.
Paul Reda (03:00):
I don't know. I saw the video with Harley. He got mad at you when you didn't say do dev.
Kurt Elster (03:05):
Well. Alright, so Shopify Editions is the features announcement that happened the day before. Editions dev the conference. So don't get these confused.
Paul Reda (03:16):
Sorry.
Kurt Elster (03:16):
Editions is the feature announcement Editions Dev is the developer conference.
Paul Reda (03:20):
Excuse me.
Kurt Elster (03:21):
Yeah, these are very different things, but we did have some feature announcements like recap at dev, but 150 things in total between the two. I can't keep track of all that. It takes me, it's like every six months they announce a hundred plus new features and you got to get really granular and they're recapping some stuff very detailed to get to 150 new
Paul Reda (03:45):
Features. I was going to say they announce five new features,
Kurt Elster (03:48):
Even if it's 25, 15, 10 every six months and you got to keep track of release dates half the time. I don't know what's going on. Fortunately I was able to in person, ask people who did know what was going on, who could break down some highlights for me. And there's so much, I don't think we're covered at all in this episode, but we're going to do the highlight reel this episode. Maybe a few bonus episodes.
Paul Reda (04:12):
Yeah, I think we'll be doing some mini episodes over the next week or two focusing on various more specific topics like Shopify point of sale, which a lot of people don't use, but some people do use and they're super into it. So we're going to kind of mix and match. You can listen to the ones that you feel like most affect you the most.
Kurt Elster (04:35):
I think that's a good way to do it.
Paul Reda (04:38):
I'm sorry, I'm looking at something here in my show notes that you wrote up for me. It says here, we'll be going over high Liggetts. What high liggetts did you see over there? Is that a Canadian thing? Well
Kurt Elster (04:48):
That's actually how you could tell that Chachi PT didn't write this because there's a classic Curt typo in there. But Alright. Do you want to jump into Harley?
Paul Reda (04:59):
Yeah, who we start with? Harley.
Kurt Elster (05:00):
Let's start with Harley. He could break this all down for us. Who are you? What
Harley Finkelstein (05:05):
Do you do? My name is Harley. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm also the president shop play. Oh, okay. And most importantly, I am a long-term friend of Kurt ELs and we've known each other now for almost a decade, if that right? Yeah, it must be a decade.
Kurt Elster (05:18):
10 years. Somebody was just asking
Harley Finkelstein (05:19):
Me I think 10 years. 10 years. And it's been a lot of ups and mostly ups, maybe some downs
Kurt Elster (05:25):
You 10 years. It
Harley Finkelstein (05:26):
Happens sometimes. Every now and then we put out something, you're like, I don't really like it and you give us some good feedback and we make some changes. But that's what a real ecosystem is.
Kurt Elster (05:34):
Yeah. Looking back at it, when you see it long term, it is insanely cool. I've been around long, I don't think about it, which is a little insane.
Harley Finkelstein (05:43):
Well, I mean I say this with all due respect, but you're sort of like, when I see you here, I'm like, oh yeah, of Kurt's here. Obviously it is not a surprise to me. Whereas I just saw Daniel Patricia, who's worked at Shopify, who's an app developer, amazing app developer I should say. It's so nice to see him. It's a nice surprise. But you you're like, fucking furniture. I'm a fixture. You're a fixture here. You're always around, which is amazing. So yeah,
Kurt Elster (06:08):
I feel, well it's only an hour flight from Chicago, but I'm compelled to go. That's right. Alright, so we're at Shopify editions, I can't
Harley Finkelstein (06:15):
Help Editions. Dev
Kurt Elster (06:16):
Editions Dev, sorry.
Harley Finkelstein (06:17):
Editions is our release. That happened yesterday. Dot dev is the event
Kurt Elster (06:21):
And at the dev event, I can't help but compare it to Unite. I got Unite Vibes. Is this the new Unite? It's
Harley Finkelstein (06:27):
Not. It's different than Unite. Partially it's different for a few reasons. Number one, unite was focused on all types of partners, agencies, sis, app developers. This is really focused on developers, people that are on top of the Shopify code base, so top of our APIs and top of our SDKs. And you sort of do feel a little bit of a different sense of, I am sure there are some agencies and other freelancers that have showed up as well, but generally the crowd beer is very technical and even in terms of, we have some merchants here that sort of snuck in as you probably can tell. But the
Kurt Elster (06:59):
Merchants, it happened at Unite too
Harley Finkelstein (07:00):
And it did happen. That's right. But they're very technical merchants. Merchants that are really going deeply into the Shopify tech docs and trying to figure out, hey, there's this one thing under a beta flag. I want to explore that a little bit more, but yeah, it's a little bit different.
Kurt Elster (07:15):
Okay, give me the highlight. What's the big hot feature, the one you're proud of?
Harley Finkelstein (07:22):
I think, so we released our summer edition yesterday. There's some really cool stuff that we're bringing. Analytics is one, analytics is just going to work much better. I think it was always good. I think now it's getting much better. I think there's a bunch of cool stuff happening right now on markets. It's probably the one that's getting the most attention. Just the ability to select different pricing, different skews to really, I've been talking about shop being a retail operating system for a long time, but this idea that B2B is a market and the US can be a market and Canada can be a market for wholesale and then you can do different products in different places, different pricing depending on the market. I think that's just going to make, we've been talking about default global for a while. I think that really advances it. But actually I think the theme of this edition is even more important than the specific features. This idea of bringing it all together, having a unified product where every feature that we add, we added 150 features, this edition about a hundred features in the winter edition that every feature feels like it was always there. That I think is really important. So the theme is unified and I think that speaks to how we want people to think about our product.
Kurt Elster (08:30):
So the double-edged sword of shipping all these features is a, it's remarkable and we all want our toys, right?
Harley Finkelstein (08:37):
There's a but coming, I feel like
Kurt Elster (08:38):
The but is then you're making your life much harder in making the interface consistent and easy to use is fixing that. The theme,
Harley Finkelstein (08:46):
I mean certainly making it feel so lemme take a step back. Truly elegant, delightful software has a lot of, it's like a beautiful watch where on its face, it just sells the time, but underneath the face there's all these really fancy complications. And I think Shopify, we endeavor for it to look like that where it's simple to use as easy to get started, but as you grow and as your business needs expand and the complexity sort of reveals itself over time, but at the right time so that if you're sitting at your mom's kitchen table right now and building a store and shop light, it feels super easy and elegant. But if you're some big merchant doing company billion a year and you have wholesale and retail and wholesale and direct to consumer online on target, but you're cross-selling on Instagram, it all feels like this.
(09:33):
Well-oiled machine. And a major challenge is as you add more stuff, how do you make it so that the admin still feels elegant and easy to use, easy to navigate and making this sort of unified thing a priority I think will make all that easier. But that is a major challenge. It's the reason why most companies either become way too complex and frankly they make their admin, their dashboard look like a NASCAR car with all those different decals everywhere, it's confusing. You're not really sure who's sponsoring the car or they hit a particular ceiling in terms of complexity and beyond that size, it just doesn't work. We think we can do both.
Kurt Elster (10:12):
It certainly feels like it. It's funny. Markets is the thing that's being used as the example for Look how Simple, unified, easy to use. We made this, that was one of the features. I could not believe how easy it was to use.
Harley Finkelstein (10:26):
Yeah, it's really easy. I mean I have a store on the side as you know I have a fire belly tea with my best buddy, one of my little side hustle sold Shopify. And we use markets, it's amazing. It allows us to do things that I always like to think about the metaphor of a browser with a bunch of tabs opened and you have nine different tabs. You have one tab is your admin, one tab is your point of sale admin, one tab is your Instagram admin. This idea of collapsing tabs, the one single admin, which is Shopify, the amount of cognitive load gets decreased or downshift by doing something like that is immense. And I think that our job is to make it so that the millions of merchants that you Shopify, they feel like they can focus on growing their business, making beautiful products, not managing the admin. That should be something that comes for free and it's easy because you want to focus on building whatever product you're building.
Kurt Elster (11:20):
That's fantastic advice. Thank you. Or fantastic outlook I should say. Alright, last question. I know you've got to run this evening. Let's give people some fomo. What do
Harley Finkelstein (11:31):
You have in top for? Oh man, it's going to be amazing. So we're going to the port, it's the after party and we're going to the Shopify port, which is our space here in Toronto. We're opening up all the floors. Every floor will have different cool stuff. It's going to be great food and great party, but also super thoughtful stuff. So actually you'll see tonight, I don't give it anything away, but it's really cool. We've been planning this for a while and it's also, it's fun to get together with everyone and there's a lot of hugs and a lot of selfies as you're seeing here, which is amazing. I think people are asking to have more selfies with you than with me, which is, oh please shows your, that was the first thing I did. Your dominance here, this community, Kurt. As
Kurt Elster (12:09):
Soon as I saw it, I was like, give me a selfie.
Harley Finkelstein (12:12):
I say this, this is also tonight and today is our way to say thank you to the community. Shopify would never, ever, ever be what it is today if it wasn't for you and others like you. And shout out to the unofficial Shopify podcast. It's freaking awesome. I've been on it I think once or twice maybe you've been on. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's time to come back on. Hey, happy to have you. And what's your license plate by the way?
Kurt Elster (12:35):
I famously had the Shopify license
Harley Finkelstein (12:36):
Plate. Famously. Yes, you were the first person on the planet to have the Shopify license plate.
Kurt Elster (12:39):
What's funny is the number of Shopify license plate I've seen pop up since then.
Harley Finkelstein (12:43):
I live in Montreal right now. I was at the Grand Prix with my wife. We're walking around, I do not have the Shopify license plate. I walk around and see a car with Shopify license plate. My wife's like, whose car is that? Turns out Shopify merchants. It was amazing. I love that Shopify merchant has the Shopify license plate in Quebec and items. It's
Kurt Elster (13:00):
Cool. It only happened a couple of times, but somebody would pull up to the pull up next to me really excited, like roll a window. I roll it down and they go, what's your store?
Harley Finkelstein (13:06):
And you're like app developer?
Kurt Elster (13:08):
Yeah, I would say, I'm sorry, I just do theme development.
Harley Finkelstein (13:11):
Okay, that's good. Alright, well thanks for having me on.
Kurt Elster (13:15):
So I was there. What did you get out of it? What's the takeaway?
Paul Reda (13:18):
Damnit, because I was about to be like, oh, you should start talking now because I was kind of just like, it was more him. I felt like it was more him being like he's Shopify's head cheerleader. That's who Harley is.
Kurt Elster (13:27):
He's chief storyteller,
Paul Reda (13:29):
Perhaps he's head cheerleader.
Kurt Elster (13:31):
He's very disciplined about staying on message. Yes, I am not. That's
Paul Reda (13:35):
True. Well, that's why they like
Kurt Elster (13:37):
Us. I'm all over the place. As far as impact on merchant platform product, I think the takeaway of this round of updates is, hey, everything's going to get easier to use. The double-edged sword of we're adding constant features and updates is where do all those things live? What gets move around? And when I had posted about the new features in our Facebook group, there was a group member who commented right away and was like, now I get to play the scavenger hunt of where this stuff is. And that's the thing they're addressing. Like, okay, we've got so much in here now let's start reorganizing. If you want great software, it has to be both powerful but also intuitive. And so I think that this is a little bit of them acknowledging, let's make this thing and it's considered easy to use, right? I had a friend who's trying to use Wix and they're complaining about it. He said, what are you doing? Just use Shopify. It's going to be a lot easier. Oh, okay. So I think that was the takeaway. If I'm a merchant, it's like just six to 12 months. Expect it to get easier to use. Even if some things maybe get rearranged, it is in your best interest.
(14:49):
As for web developers, partners, app developers, whatever you're doing on Shopify as a partner, man, they've always done a great job of making you feel appreciated. Editions dev, they really went above and beyond in acknowledging people and calling out specific people for their contributions to the community and specifically calling out people who weren't just cheerleaders, who were both critical and otherwise of Shopify choices and acknowledging them and thanking them, which quite a smart and powerful move, I think a great experience. But let's get into things that impact us directly. We spend all our time in themes in the theme editor in the online store portion of Shopify. And so I got Ann Thomas, who we've had her, we've been lucky to have her assistance on our team for some time. She was a developer out of the sandbox in the past. She worked on Turbo. She's been building this Design PACS app and she's quite integrated into the community, so her perspective going to be very valuable.
(16:01):
And so let's hear what she had to say.
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Who are you? What do you do?
Anne Thomas (17:14):
My name's Ann Thomas. I'm the co-founder of Design Packs.
And how'd you get here?
I drove an hour away.
So I've run into many Canadians and I'm like, wow, I'm so jealous of your short commute to this event. It only took me an hour to get here. I shouldn't complain.
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean depending on traffic it will take an hour. It can take longer, that's for sure.
Yeah. Well, tell me about what Design Packs does. Sure. Yeah. So we have an app and it really is more of a section delivery tool. So we add new sections to your existing Shopify theme and there have all sorts of settings that functionality, and they're like new Lego blocks for your Lego collection.
(18:09):
And it's the Lego blocks in the Lego collection that most interests me. We do just, my day is spent in the theme editor. I do theme work. That is what we do is theme work and I'm lucky you help us with that. And so there's a term that got coined on stage today, I believe Vanessa Lee from Shopify said Online Store 3.0, online store 3.0 that's one more than we use now, 2.0 true. So immediately I was like, I want to know what that is, and you were just telling me that you went to a talk and you've got ideas on what 3.0 entails. So what do we mean by this? What are we getting?
Anne Thomas:
I went to a full workshop, so there was full coding laptops out. The laptops were out and there was examples. And essentially the biggest mind blowing thing is that at the moment you have sections and you have blocks. Well now we're going to have the concept to be able to group blocks and nest blocks.
(18:58):
So it's like block inception. And at the moment you can go in levels deep. So if you think about columns and how you can rearrange different things, that's what we're going to be having with just blocks. And you don't have to build a regular merchant, just go in and build that. Alright, let's think through the example. I have a section and we're going to call it multi column. We have a section called multi column list. And then in it, I have to put in my columns. Now I have to put blocks. I can do that. Now. I What's different? No. So right now if you've had columns, each of those columns would be a block. And then within those columns you would have to have, okay, maybe an image, maybe a text. And it's very static as to how the order of those things appear within that individual column.
(19:47):
Now you could have an image block inside of that column, you could have a text that you could then rearrange and move around. Yeah, there is a lot of possibilities. And then even then, within that column, let's say you want to have three icons in a row. Within that specific column you could have another group of image, image, image because those are also vested blocks. So in my online store theme editor, I've got this idea of sections and blocks and the premise, they just can't go more than one level deep. It's like I have section is the parent and then block is the thing in it. But then we get into something more complicated. Everything then has to be bespoke theme settings, and that's where things get crazy. Instead I can now my blocks become more granular and I can nest them. You can nest them.
(20:38):
Okay. And then the alt, that sounds fantastic. How far out are we on this? Like a year, six months for Shopify? Oh no. Yeah, I don't know. I was asking the same question. Yeah, sometimes they're like, wait, we're not quite sure yet is the answer. Yeah, I'm hopeful that, I don't know. Who knows? All I know is that I think it's going to roll out in ways where you can add in these sections that have the more high tech flexible blocks without having to redo your entire story. So you could just add it on as an extra piece and you don't need to worry about setting everything up from scratch. Okay, sweet. I don't have to blow up my theme and start again. Exactly. So these themes get expensive and what else? Well, there was, they talked about break points. Yeah. Oh yeah. So this is the other thing.
(21:26):
They have break points. So within the theme editor now, so at the moment you would have to have mobile specific settings. So you might have, okay, this is desktop and on mobile, I want it to look like this. Now similar to markets, how you can change what country you're previewing, how that looks. You can select a different mobile view or you can set the break point yourself. Oh, it works like markets. Yeah. Okay, sweet. And so then you can actually see, okay, there's going to be different settings that are visible when you have that mobile view set, when you're free viewing it basically. Wow. I know. And another thing that they talked about was also you can combine with that static blocks. So let's say you have settings that are only specific to something like a slideshow. Let's say maybe you'll have a slideshow block, but you want maybe that slideshow block isn't visible at that time.
(22:24):
So you would have conditional settings that you could turn off and on and it would also hide and show that element in the section and everything is sort of cold out. So it's not like you have, okay, enable this grid and then you have grid settings. Everything is pulled into its own little static block. I love the theme editor and I love contexts, what they call being able to switch between markets and b2b. It never occurred to me that well, you could make that work with device widths as well. And so rather that right now we have to write into a section, this is the mobile one and this is the desktop one, and you hope that all the sections support it. Using context makes way more sense. Alright, os 3.0, I'm here for it. I want it, bring it on. Yes. Now we just need to know when Ann Thomas, where can we learn more about you? Design? Dash packs.com. We're also in the app store. If you just search for design packs, we have two apps, theme sections and product blocks. Are you going to work on that built for Shopify status? Yes,
Paul Reda (23:31):
I am scared.
Kurt Elster (23:34):
Is that your default state though?
Paul Reda (23:36):
Scared or annoyed merchants? All the merchants hearing this, your life's going to get a lot more fun. You're going to have a lot more flexibility it sounds like, especially when you're getting themes from the big official theme developers who are going to be implementing this stuff properly and ready to go with it. I am scared because I see the backend of all of that and I'm like, how are we going to do blocks on blocks on blocks? What is that going to look like? What do I have to do? I mean, there's a lot of times our clients will request something and it's like, oh, do I take an existing block and really screw it up to make it do exactly what the merchant wants or do I just write a new section from scratch that does the exact thing that they want? And I usually only write them with the settings that they would need to do the one thing that they want to do. And then for me, that's easier. I know how to do that. And now I'm worried that I'm kind of like, oh wait a minute, what am I going to have to do to make, have it support blocks on blocks on blocks or have it support these new different types of
Kurt Elster (24:51):
Contexts,
Paul Reda (24:51):
Contexts to have it support different contexts and all that sort of stuff.
Kurt Elster (24:54):
Yeah, the context switching for mobile that never even occurred to me is that's how you should do it. And as soon as I heard it, I was like, oh, that's so much better than trying to have a mobile and desktop version inside each of these
Paul Reda (25:08):
Sections. That's the thing I want to know is that's either going to be awesome or that's going to jack me up so bad. Depending on how Shopify implements it, if it's got real robust liquid support where I could just be like, alright, if you're in the mobile context, act this way. If you're in the desktop context act this way and then I could just write two things and then you're done. That would be great. I mean, that's certainly better superior than the current thing where I got to write it all twice and then hide it. Hide it. Sometimes I'm hiding it, sometimes I'm showing it, sometimes it's pull tag. This way I could just write it a single way within the context and that's it.
Kurt Elster (25:43):
I think this is just the relationship of theme developer to new features. Anytime they've had announced online store 2.0 sections anywhere, flex sections, which flex sections didn't necessarily do what we wanted, and I think this is a better answer to that, what that was trying to fix. I think that's to be expected. A little trepidation of like, alright, I see where you're going. I like this. How am I going to do this? You just got to get through it. The first time
Paul Reda (26:10):
All you did was show me the finished meal and look how good the finished meal is. What do I got to do to cook that meal? Yeah, what's
Kurt Elster (26:16):
The meal prep here, buddy?
Paul Reda (26:16):
It's like, oh, okay, start 36 hours beforehand. Oh man, that's the worst. That trips me up every time where I'm like, I'm going to make this. And then I never read the first paragraph and then it's like, yeah, I'm going to make this for dinner tonight. And it's like, all right, one day beforehand, start doing this. Oh, damn it.
Kurt Elster (26:36):
So we got the overall highlights and the theme from Harley Anne went deep on we're going to get a better, more customizable, easier to use version of themes in the theme editor. And I know everyone's going to be like, what am I getting that I want that now. Do I? But realistically, these things take time, so I don't have a timeline on it, but figure you're like six months from seeing this in real deal practice.
Paul Reda (27:00):
Oh, I would think so. Yeah.
Kurt Elster (27:02):
And even when the first versions of these things come out, it's more like a preview where you're like, all right, we got this kind of work kind of working now down the road. Then you really start to see it advance, and that's just how it goes with I think it's just the nature of software development. But
Paul Reda (27:19):
Yeah, I would think when you're like, I really need these online store 3.0 features, it's like, well, don't think about implementing those until 2025. My dude, it's not going to be baked in. It's not going to be fully ready by then. You don't want to be screwing up all your stuff in Q4, so let's save that for the new year
Kurt Elster (27:39):
And like, Hey, can I backport this into a 2.0 theme, or is that not going to be realistic? There's still a lot of questions to answer, but I'm excited about
Paul Reda (27:46):
It. Like color schemes, like that color schemes thing that they have that you could see in some theme sometimes. Yeah, the palettes, color palettes, it's really cool, but it's like, oh, could you add color palettes to my 2.0 theme? No, I will not be.
Kurt Elster (28:00):
Yeah, it gets complicated. You try to put that into every section and rethink it. Some things are easier to backport than others, but the Shopify is so big now, it has to do so much for so many people and it has to meet merchants where they are. And so online store 2.0 that's going to cover people in beginning, middle, advance, that's the majority of folks. But the extreme end of revenue is going to be enterprise clients. And I dunno that we have true enterprise clients. We have big clients, we have plus clients.
Paul Reda (28:39):
Well, I mean, I kind of want to know what makes an enterprise client different from another?
Kurt Elster (28:44):
They're just the most corporate of clients.
Paul Reda (28:46):
It's just like, what does that mean? Well, they make you have 10 times more meetings than you need. What? They have the
Kurt Elster (28:52):
Biggest
Paul Reda (28:52):
Budgets? Yeah, they have a big budget. Okay, good. But it's like we got clients that do $20 million, but I
Kurt Elster (28:59):
Think the moment it's publicly traded, we move into a lot of compliance and then that is what is going to drive it as enterprise. Oh, okay, let's go with that. But I need a guy who it can break down the impact on enterprise for me and none better than Mac King. He's a former Shopify employee turned agency owner and one of the biggest agencies now domain. And so I was excited to sit down with him and get his take on this. Who are you? What do you do?
Mac King (29:26):
I'm Mac King. I'm the CRO and co-founder of Domain.
Kurt Elster (29:29):
That's very cool. What does Domain do?
Mac King (29:32):
Domain is a Shopify service partner or an agency, and we're the largest independent Shopify agency.
Kurt Elster (29:37):
Incredible. Yeah. What'd you do before that? Something interesting? Yes.
Mac King (29:41):
Yes. I used to work at the mothership, the big green bag. I was there at shop, but employee number 362 started in 2013, left in 2018 and joined the farmer.
Kurt Elster (29:51):
Okay. And so you have a different interesting perspective. You watched the keynote same as I did. Yep. What was the number one highlight where you went? Oh,
Mac King (30:01):
For me it was what I guess now is being colloquially referred to as Online score 3.0, the visual editor for Hydrogen. I think that's the most novel thing that was talked about today in my world and the design and build world. So yeah, I'm stoked with that
Kurt Elster (30:16):
Visual editor for hydrogen being called Online Store 3.0. That's headless, isn't it?
Mac King (30:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's like what it's doing is kind blurring the line more or headless than not. This is an editor now that's within Shopify where it kind of functions as if it's a theme store editor in a similar way. So it's kind of like bringing the two things closer and closer together in a Shopify way. They've somehow made headless easier again, therefore, is it headless still? Isn't the headless more difficult than that? But yeah, what I like about it is that it's boring, the two headless Oracle or not.
Kurt Elster (30:53):
Okay. It's the theme to me seems like the surface theme here is we're going to make everything cohesive, easier to use. I posted about the new features yesterday and in my Facebook group, somebody commented and was like, now the scavenger hunt to where all my stuff went, but that's what they're trying to answer here. It was like, Hey, as we add new features, you add more complexity. And so the theme is unified, we're going to make everything easier to use. Did you see that here?
Mac King (31:24):
I mean easier to use for sure. Yeah. Unified as a concept. I mean, I think it's a bit of a buzz buzzword to be honest. And I get Shopify doubling down on unified commerce as this approach, but I spent a lot of time talking to brands. I was on a panel of brands last week. The unified commerce as a theory isn't resonating with brands just yet. I think we're having to work towards it and it's feature by feature. I think not only does the features that Shopify release in these conferences and make it easier to use, but what actually more important is they were moving barriers. It's like there used to be all of these reasons to not choose Shopify well. It wasn't good for multicurrency or multi geolocation or it wasn't a good B2B portal. They're just kind of removing one barrier at a time. All the reasons to say no are getting less and less, and that's what I'm excited about as a partner just bringing sites off Salesforce. It's like I have how many more barriers could we peg away?
Kurt Elster (32:22):
Smart, and then one, alright, then the other thing I saw is an underlying theme of many of these feature changes is merchants should never be exposed to code, should never have to worry about it or deal with it. And I see that as checkout extensions and Shopify functions. We're on the developer side, we go wild on the merchant side. Really simplifies things like the general experience. Agree, disagree.
Mac King (32:49):
Yeah, I mean, again, that's a pretty, in my world, I think there's the two worlds of Shopify, right? There's the DIY version, which is what most people are doing is building their own experiences and not looking the code. And then there's the plus Shopify, plus Shopify enterprise. No, Shopify Plus as a brand is no longer whatever. It's a plan.
Kurt Elster (33:13):
No, not a brand. Which yeah, they didn't address that here. That's true. But we all saw that internal email that went
Mac King (33:18):
Around. All we know is a link memo. So
Kurt Elster (33:21):
Which if I could find that gentleman, I'll ask him.
Mac King (33:22):
Yeah, we should ask ca. Yeah, I would love to know. But so at the every man Shopify level, I get the idea of merchant shouldn't touch code. You just make it easy as possible, move the tools away. But at the enterprise, on the large scale, our clients and merchants that we work with are often comfortable in code. At least they have someone technical on their team, they're a digital company, they're selling online. So it should be easy to use, but also the access should be there. And in fact, more access, more APIs using GraphQL. I want to see more unlocks from merchants as well as partner.
Kurt Elster (34:05):
I like your view on it. And I love working with merchants who have someone competent with code like, oh, now we can really cook.
Mac King (34:14):
Yeah. I mean, dude, if they have someone who's good, who knows tech, they can work with us better. Or the other option is they go like, Hey, listen, out of my hands, go. And they have no opinions at all. We do whatever we want and then we deliver something to them and at the end of it they're like, oh, actually I wish it was this way. We're like, well you didn't tell us that. It's like tell us Guy Dots.
Kurt Elster (34:36):
Yeah. Yes. No, with similar experiences here. Alright, so where can we go to learn more about Mac King and Domain?
Mac King (34:45):
Yeah, check out our website, meet domain.com. We build websites for enterprise brands, migrate people to Shopify design dev and strategy services. Check it.
Kurt Elster (34:54):
Fabulous. Mac King, thank you so much. Thank
Mac King (34:56):
You.
Kurt Elster (34:57):
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Paul Reda (36:28):
Alright, I didn't understand this. So hydrogen, as you alluded, this is
Kurt Elster (36:32):
Interesting.
Paul Reda (36:33):
As you alluded to in this video, hydrogen is like Shopify's internal fancy term for headless. Headless for API access. Yeah.
Kurt Elster (36:40):
Hydrogen is their headless solution,
Paul Reda (36:42):
Is their headless for hitting the API to build a headless solution, but now they're adding a gooey tool to hydrogen. Yes. In which case, what's the point of hydrogen? Well,
Kurt Elster (36:55):
Okay, when people go headless because hey, this is going to give me total flexibility, but then the downside is, alright, I have a store that is significantly more static in its approach than my typical online store 2.0 theme. And with that, so there's trade-offs, right? I get this very fast site that looks exactly the way I want and it's dialed in and I could do really custom stuff with it, but then trying to maintain it, I am now married to the developer who
Paul Reda (37:25):
Built Yeah, you literally the downfall of headless. And as we've seen over the past year and a half, two years of tons of merchants coming to us, asking us to get them off headless
Kurt Elster (37:35):
And we're not alone. I took plenty of agencies
Paul Reda (37:37):
Had the
Kurt Elster (37:38):
Same
Paul Reda (37:38):
Experience, they all jumped in, it was the hot new thing and they thought it was going to solve all their problems.
Kurt Elster (37:42):
That doesn't mean headless is bad though.
Paul Reda (37:44):
No, it's not bad. But what they don't understand is, but they weren't big enough to, you need headless. Exactly. You thought you needed headless, but you didn't, but you wanted to be big and cool, so you went and got it. Well,
Kurt Elster (37:53):
It's like I'm going to spend the money I want to buy once, cry once, and if you're telling headless seems like the fanciest option, well isn't that the best? Yeah. And it turns out the answer is not necessarily.
Paul Reda (38:04):
Yeah. The problem is is that okay, in order to do that, you're not doing anything yourself from now on. Now you straight up need a full-time developer on retainer or on staff that's making every single change on your store for you. And the merchants didn't like that Once they realized that that was the case.
Kurt Elster (38:21):
I'd say in the past, what you could get a CMS and plug it in and try and maintain it. Shopify has an official partner for this. Oh gee, what did he say the name of it was? I forgot Unity.
Paul Reda (38:34):
Oh, it wasn't making Connection.
Kurt Elster (38:35):
Yeah, I forgot too. Alright, that's okay. But alright, so you have hydrogen, you've got your headless store, and if you imagine your headless store, every section is a series of properties and everything's a series of properties defined similar to an API might look, it's all in there in JSON. And then the template renders it. They're adding a CMS functionality to it where you could say, okay, these properties like the text of a headline are safe for a merchant to edit. So you can add a CMS experience on top of hydrogen natively. And so, alright, I get essentially I'm adding Shopify saying, Hey, we have an official path for giving you theme settings for a headless site.
Paul Reda (39:19):
So what I'm asking here is does this come with having a headless site or is it we are now opening up the ability of an official way, an official Shopify approved way for your developers to write gooey tools for the headless setup that they also wrote for you
Kurt Elster (39:46):
That,
Paul Reda (39:46):
So that then good. But now you still need those developers to maintain that
Kurt Elster (39:57):
Because they wrote it. Yes. Yeah. The moment you go to headless, you either better have an internal team or you better have somebody on retainer to help you with it. What this is saying is, alright, so simple content changes, a marketer could do it. I think that's where the frustration comes in is if you're going to spend the money in a headless site, you also have internal or retained marketing team. And the marketing team is like, look, we just want to change the promo on the website. We don't want to have to submit a work ticket for it. This is the way out of that. Shopify is saying, this is the official that is proper way to handle this. That is
Paul Reda (40:32):
A common horror story We've heard a lot too. If you have headless and your developer suddenly becomes MIA on you, you're dead in the water. Now if they take weeks to implement something, well it's going to take weeks for anything to happen on your store.
Kurt Elster (40:47):
And so this is definitely brings that barrier down on a limitation of headless. And then the other criticism of headless in the past had been like, Hey, apps don't necessarily work with it. And I didn't see this in the Editions announcements, but they had lots of workshops and you could talk to Shopify employees and they saw someone talking about hydrogen and headless and they did have a list of apps. They're like, these we know will work properly with headless. And so they had official picks for your major categories. It's like, alright, we've got a solution for reviews and subscriptions. These things will work. And so the whole thing, again, even though we're dealing with the, once you're in hydrogen and headless, the extreme end of things, you're on the bleeding edge at that point. The focus was still, let's make that easier to use. And I like that you're going to make the tools I live in every day easy to use for me. Yes, please. Thank you. I appreciate it. And so we got more bonus episodes we'll do We'll, there's a garden center down the street from us. Yes. Garden
Paul Reda (41:59):
Center. That's right. I thought you were talking about something in Toronto, but yeah, no, no.
Kurt Elster (42:03):
Called Chalet in Skokie. And it was five minutes from our office and it's this big garden. It's like Home Depot Garden Center size but better. And they had point of sale in action. They'd been using it a while and they were using these, it's got new features, it was cool. So I interviewed him and shots of B roll for it. Yeah. You've
Paul Reda (42:22):
Been talking to a lot of people over the last few weeks about the different things that Shopify's announcing. I know you've been talking to some AI people that have been utilizing the Shopify.
Kurt Elster (42:32):
I did. I talked to a gentleman who, so Shopify sidekick, their AI sidekick that is going to go into early access, meaning go on the site, request access now, and potentially you get beta access to it. And it turns out the thing is real. It's not vaporware. I talked to a guy who's been using it in his store and he had nothing but positive things to say about it. He's like, I have a question about my store, my analytics. I just ask it and it's going to have the answer point me in the right direction. It sounded really cool. They've got those new image editing tools, which I played with those. They work as advertised. And I talked to a merchant who'd been using it in practice way longer than I had. She loved it. And then we had who, oh, Shopify Flow. I love Shopify Flow. I think it's like 700, 800,000 merchants use it, which that's a lot, but I think more people aren't using it. Who could be? And it's an app built in your Shopify plan, plug that bad boy in and it gives you all these wonderful automations. And so I talked to a couple folks about that. And so yeah, we got bonus episodes. And then just take your pick of what will, what's going to help make your life easier.
Paul Reda (43:45):
Sounds good.
Kurt Elster (43:46):
Alright. We'll end it
Paul Reda (43:47):
There. We'll post those as soon as I can get them edited, but I'm very busy right now.
Kurt Elster (43:52):
Yeah, it has been busy here.
Paul Reda (43:55):
And then we also both just left town for three days and that didn't help.
Kurt Elster (44:00):
Yeah, I'm digging myself out of the inbox hole and still producing the content, but alright. Yeah, we'll have all that stuff coming out in the next couple of weeks for you. We'll end it there.
(44:15):
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