w/ Kurt & Paul co-hosting
In this AMA episode, we're tackling your listener questions. Learn our insights on ChatGPT and get an inside look at what questions you should be asking yourself come 2023. We'll also give tips on how window shoppers can join your email list as well as provide advice if you've been thinking about migrating from WordPress to Shopify. Plus- are Shopify Functions a yes or no for us? Tune-in this week and find out all that plus more!
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
January AMA
Kurt Elster: So, my cold open bit originally was what’s-
Paul Reda: We’re getting meta here.
Kurt Elster: What’s the cutoff for saying happy new year?
Paul Reda: It’s today. It was yesterday.
Kurt Elster: It’s today. I mean, we’re recording February 1st.
Paul Reda: It’s February first today that we’re recording this and yesterday was the day.
Kurt Elster: All right.
Paul Reda: All January you get.
Kurt Elster: Because I turned 40 on January 24th, so for me-
Paul Reda: Wow. I didn’t know you were that old. I mean, I turned 29 this year.
Kurt Elster: Oh, you’re forever 29, as well?
Paul Reda: Yeah. No, I’m not forever 29. I just turned 29.
Kurt Elster: Yep. You know, I’m not correcting any of this. It’s all true. That’s just straight fact.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I know.
Kurt Elster: All right, so we’re just all agreed. Happy new year nonsense is over. That’s done.
Paul Reda: It was so weird going to high school in 2008 when Obama was elected. I was in high school.
Kurt Elster: You have an unusual amount of gray hair for someone who’s 29.
Paul Reda: Wow. That’s like commenting on somebody’s body. Super problematic. Well, it’s because of the baby I have.
Kurt Elster: None of this is adding up, but I’m just gonna accept it as fact because we’re on a podcast.
Paul Reda: All right. What, your original cold open was what?
Kurt Elster: What’s the cutoff for saying happy new year?
Paul Reda: Yeah. We already went through that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I don’t have… That’s it. That was what I had.
Paul Reda: All right. I have nothing.
Kurt Elster: All right. We’re good then. We’ll just move forward.
Paul Reda: Yeah, because we’re just… We’re in the winter doldrums. The only thing I watch on TV pretty much now is Perfect Strangers, because it’s on Freevee.
Kurt Elster: As a 29 year old, how do you even know what that is?
Paul Reda: Oh, I just like watching old shows from before I was born.
Kurt Elster: Okay. You’re right. That makes sense. I should have thought of that. It’s historical to you.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Exactly. My wife and I did a thing last Friday. There used to be this thing on television called TGIF. I don’t know what that stands for or what that is, because I’m 29, and-
Kurt Elster: You know how 29 year olds always announce their age repeatedly.
Paul Reda: So, we ordered Domino’s Pizza and then watched Perfect Strangers, Family Matters, Full House, and Step by Step. The exact episodes that aired 29 years beforehand, the year I was born, and we watched those exact episodes that aired that night, while eating shitty pizza that your family would order on a Friday.
Kurt Elster: You had a ‘90s date night.
Paul Reda: Yes.
Kurt Elster: We did that once where we hooked up a Super Nintendo and then got crappy delivery pizza.
Paul Reda: I mean, it was weird to me, because obviously I was like a one year old, but she liked it.
Kurt Elster: All right, in this-
Paul Reda: Oh, wait. Wait. No, the best part was… So, I found a YouTube video that was the ripped commercials from a night of TGIF that was like six months later. It wasn’t the exact night we were watching. But it was still like that season, so it was like between shows I was like, “All right, we have to watch three minutes of commercials from this YouTube video now.” And we’d go back to the YouTube and watch the commercials.
Kurt Elster: That’s like one of… That’s my wind down TV sometimes, is I will just YouTube ‘90s TV commercials.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Emily was like, “This is soothing and fun. I don’t know why I like this.”
Kurt Elster: It’s bizarre.
Paul Reda: I was like, “Yeah. Just search on YouTube. There’s a ton of commercials.”
Kurt Elster: Then the rest of the time when you’re watching commercials you’re like, “I hate this. How much do I have to pay to get out of this?” But then when it’s on me, I’m like, “Oh, I’m gonna go load up commercials voluntarily for long defunct things.”
All right, so this episode, the fact that you’re here tells us it’s an AMA episode. Yes, this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And joining me is show producer, Paul Reda, and today we are going to answer your questions that I demanded of you in our Facebook group about 30 days ago. In housekeeping notes, I wanted to share a few of our upcoming episodes, because I think we got some interesting stuff here. Former Hoonigan art director, Jon Chase, is gonna tell us how he’s selling his art on Shopify online, and that one also… We really geek out about just being creative. Creative dorks. So, I like that one a lot.
Then we get very academic with business school professor Daniel McCarthy, who takes us on a deep dive of customer lifetime value, because I made the mistake of going on Twitter and being like, “Hey, how hard could it be to calculate customer lifetime value?” And it turned out that just revealed how wildly ignorant on the topic I was, but I was able to get a guest out of it.
Then we have Shopify partner Logan Grasby. He’s gonna tell us what he’s learned building 300 landing pages. Tweet Hunter’s JK Molina is gonna make the case for why entrepreneurs should post on Twitter. That was a good one, but I don’t know, that one might be mostly for me, but give it a shot. And Stacey K from Poneyback Hats is gonna share the story of her patented hats. Ooh.
Paul Reda: I love that one. I love Stacey. She’s super chipper and ready to rock. She is a current client of ours and when her application came in I literally was like, “Call her now.”
Kurt Elster: And it was funny, then when I shared it with the rest of the team, Anne Thomas, who does part-time development work for us, she’s like, “I see those ads. I’ve almost ordered so many times.” It’s always fun when someone applies, and you recognize them from just you’ve seen that in the wild. You’re like, “Wow! Connected the dots.”
Real bummer that I want to bring up. A tragedy. Yeah, bummer is underselling it. Last month we had a client die in a motorsports accident. Ken Block, who was the cofounder of Hoonigan, he had founded DC Shoes, he’d sold that to Nike, he died in a tragic snowmobile accident. But I just wanted… It made national news. It was weird and it was also… It was nice to see. It’s like, “Hey, his fame and success wasn’t limited to just the automotive world,” when I came home and saw Lester Holt on the Nightly News talking about it, but I just wanted to acknowledge it. I never got the chance to tell Ken Block, the man personally, hey thanks. Thanks for what you did here and thanks for all the people you helped whether they knew it or not. This is my only opportunity to try and share that. Just because they’ve been a client for many years, and having them as a client has been a wild and amazing ride, and having… It also opened a lot of doors for us, and so I’m eternally grateful for what Ken Block did for us, whether he knew that directly or not.
I don’t know how to transition out of that.
Paul Reda: I was about to say I can’t make a joke about that, so I really got nothing. There’s no point in me being here.
Kurt Elster: In the upcoming Jon Chase episode we talk about it a little bit.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It was strange because it happened the night of the Damar Hamlin thing on Monday Night Football, so I’m watching-
Kurt Elster: Oh, that was scary too. Yeah.
Paul Reda: I’m watching Monday Night Football, and you know, we didn’t know that he was gonna turn out fine, so it was like, “Oh, that was a guy that just died. I just watched a guy die on national TV. Holy crap.” And then at the time that was happening, I got a text message that was like, “Ken Block died.” It was like, “What?”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah, he was snowmobiling. It was a snowmobiling accident. I talked to a guy this morning, a client who’s in motorsports, as well. He gets on, he’s got a neck brace on. I said, “Oh, man. What happened to you?” He goes, “Oh, snowmobiling accident.” I’m never getting on a snowmobile in my life.
Paul Reda: Well, I’m not going skiing. No. No.
Kurt Elster: All right. Motorsports and snow sport dangers aside, let’s move onto some questions. Let’s do some discussion here. And I’ve attempted to move these, group these into topics. Oh my gosh.
Paul Reda: And the first topic is AI. Malik wants to know, “What’s your take on ChatGPT to generate product descriptions and to write short codes to fix theme issues?” I find the ChatGPT output pretty much is like an eighth grader.
Kurt Elster: I think sixth grader.
Paul Reda: Who doesn’t really know the answer but got called on in class and is bullshitting really hard trying to get their way out of it.
Kurt Elster: So, middle schooler with extraordinary extemporaneous speaking skills.
Paul Reda: Skills, but no actual knowledge.
Kurt Elster: You know, that is kind of how it works.
Paul Reda: That’s pretty much it, which I think is fine for a product description.
Kurt Elster: Well, it depends on the source. If you’re just telling it like, “Hey, make this up,” that’s what it’s gonna do. Because when you use it and it looks like it’s typing, it’s because it is. It doesn’t know what the next word’s gonna be until it’s finished the word it’s on. And then sometimes it’ll change its mind and go back if you watch it.
Paul Reda: Oh my God.
Kurt Elster: But it conceptually has zero idea of what it’s saying, and more importantly, doesn’t know if what it’s saying is true or not. So, it’ll make all kinds of crazy claims all day. It doesn’t care.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I saw a great snippet yesterday where someone was like, “What’s three plus four?” And it was like, “Three plus four is seven.” He’s like, “My wife says three plus four is eight. Should I tell my wife that she’s wrong?” And it’s just like, “No. For a good marriage you should not tell your wife that she’s wrong,” and blah, blah, blah, “Therefore, three plus four must be eight,” or something like that. It has no knowledge whatsoever. It’s just a way of rearranging words in a dumber fashion. But if you are mentally blocked at thinking up words, it’s better than nothing. It’s not gonna replace an actual writer unless you don’t care at all.
Kurt Elster: That’s a fairly negative impression of it. I don’t disagree with any of it and yet I’m still quite bullish and optimistic about the tool.
Paul Reda: I think, you know, obviously everything’s gonna get better, and I’m here for fairly pessimistic things about technology. I was talking about NFTs on Clubhouse. It’s going great.
Kurt Elster: NFTs on Clubhouse.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I was talking about NFTs on Clubhouse. I think it’s really gonna do really good this year.
Kurt Elster: Lot of people still on Clubhouse, buddy?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Talking about NFTs.
Kurt Elster: Well, so on this ChatGPT question, he’s-
Paul Reda: As for the code part, I’ve seen it.
Kurt Elster: That’s pretty hit or miss.
Paul Reda: I’ve seen it do some correctly, but in the Facebook group someone was like, “How do I do X?” And you were just like, “Here you go,” and you just pasted something that you clearly asked ChatGPT for the answer, and it was 100% wrong and would not have worked.
Kurt Elster: Here’s the problem is-
Paul Reda: And I had to drop in and be like, “This would not work.”
Kurt Elster: … I looked at it, I saw it, and I was like, “This looks like it would work to me.” It looked unfinished. But other times I’ve asked it basic stuffs and it gives you a thing that’ll be right, or it’s like, “Well, that’s at least a good start.” I don’t know. For the product description, I think with ChatGPT it’s, “All right, what’s our prompt?”
Paul Reda: All right. Here. We’re going into Andriy’s question, which is, “Kurt, you’ve been playing around with ChatGPT. Your top three eCommerce use cases?”
Kurt Elster: All right, so the way I am personally using it, so there’s Jasper.ai, and I signed up for the free trial, gave them my credit card, agreed to the annual plan, then did what everybody does, and I forgot to cancel, and so $900 later I have a year subscription to Jasper.ai. And so, that’s what I’ve been playing with, and I’ve got my wife using it as well for her store, and so it’s phenomenal for I have writer’s block, or I need a writing assistant, where… You know, get me started on something and then I can rewrite that. Or take what I wrote and rewrite it in a particular way to try and get me unstuck, give me different views on it.
It's also interesting, like I can write something that’s too long and then tell it, “Hey, rewrite this as a tweet.” And then it understands. It’ll shorten the length.
Paul Reda: You do that a lot. I see you do that a lot where you use it to shorten things. You’ll be like, “Say this but only in two sentences.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Or you can have it change tone. It’s like, “Say this but don’t be cynical.” And it understands that. And so, I think as a copy editor, it’s great. I think the value of it is in the prompt. You need to be a master of crafting your input to it. And so, all right, I’ve been using it for like… I gotta write this newsletter every week and I gotta write podcast show notes every week, and so I’m using it as an assistant for that, like give me the ideas, or here’s the source content, try and summarize that, shorten that, take my verbose thing and rewrite that. Using it that way where I’m just… It absolutely works.
If you sit down and are like, “All right, ChatGPT, just give me a 500-word SEO article on X topic.” I think that’s the wrong way to do it. So, it’s like don’t make it do your homework. Do make it your assistant.
Paul Reda: That’s just like all Google results now.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Just like-
Paul Reda: You click on it and it’s just like a robot write this, and it’s just like, “You are asking why something are this way. Well, it could be this way for many reasons,” and it’s just… No human-
Kurt Elster: It’s a book report.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s like no human has ever touched this.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The thing, it really does write like a middle school book report just by its default. But I think certainly a thing to keep an eye on and a thing that in the next 18 months these tools are really gonna evolve and be more interesting.
Paul Reda: I mean, I think it… I saw a thing yesterday. It was a real estate agent and they used it to write the listings. They were just like, “It’s great.” Because a real estate listing, these things I feel like… A podcast show description, a real estate listing, evoking emotion isn’t necessarily the top priority, or it’s at least better to just… You gotta have something in there. You gotta fill it. You gotta fill the hole.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s perfunctory.
Paul Reda: Yeah. So-
Kurt Elster: And you have source material there. The real estate listing, I imagine you could be like, “Write a real estate listing within X number of characters for a house with these attributes.” And then it’s just like three bedroom, five bedroom, whatever.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If you could somehow mechanize the inputs, where you’re almost like you’re filling out a spreadsheet with the house attributes and they’re just like, “All right, give me a description for each house in this spreadsheet,” it would just barf them all out. And like, “Oh, I just saved… That was 10 hours of work that just got saved.”
Kurt Elster: But in that case, in both of those examples, what’s the source input? The real estate thing, I could give it a very quantified description of the house, and so it’s gonna be able to work off that, and you’re right, I’m not too concerned with the readability of this short description. Mostly it’s just gotta work and be as good as I could bang out, and the chances are it can. If you’ve read real estate listings, they’re all over the place.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, and again, you’re banging them out. You’re not crafting… You’re not Hemingway. You’re not crafting a story here.
Kurt Elster: No. And I’m not publishing my op-ed in the New York Times, either. For the podcast show notes, that one I’ve done where I will take the transcript from the show and say, “Here you go, summarize that.” And then it’ll come back with a summary where it’s like, “All right, here’s the points you hit. Here was the topic.” I’m like, “Fabulous.” And so, I’ll tweak that, and then I’ll take that and go, “Write a podcast episode description under X characters based on the following interview outline.” And then it’ll turn around and be like, “Here you go, buddy.” It just does it. And sometimes it does it and I’m like, “Well, that’s actually… That’s really… You missed the point on the theme.” It has trouble understanding what is and isn’t important.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It definitely needs editing. I would not just post whatever it outputs blindly.
Kurt Elster: And so, if you’re looking to play with this, all right, I’ll plug Jasper.ai, because the magic is in the prompt you give the AI. A lot of these tools are just like, “Hey, we’re a prompt generator and we’re just gonna hide you from the shenanigans.” And it works pretty well. And assistant tasks. I’ll be like, “Hey, strip the HTML out of this.” “Hey, can you just reformat this listing?” You can make it do a little bit of research for you, like, “What are the top five restaurants in this zip code?” I don’t know if it’s right, though.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s the thing.
Kurt Elster: That’s the problem with it.
Paul Reda: I see you ask that all the time. You’re like, “What are the top 20 stores that sell this?” And it just spits crap out at you and you’re like, “It sounds right.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s the catch with it. It’s like, “Well, that sounds right.” Because it’s not like it comes back to you with its methodology because it doesn’t know, either.
Paul Reda: Again, going back to your code sample that you posted in Facebook, you were like, “That looks right,” and I’m sure everyone in the Facebook group was like, “Yeah, sure. That could do that.” And I was the only one that was like, “Yeah. No one do this. This wouldn’t work.”
Kurt Elster: And that’s the magic and the danger of it. All right, moving on from AI. Who do we got here? Oh, Mark Parks. We had two questions based around year in review kind of thing. Mark Parks, “What questions should we be asking ourselves as we move into 2023? Not every answer will be the same, each business is their own beast, but are there key questions we need to explore properly to come out ahead this year?” I think there’s a million and one listicles and gurus that will give you all the questions you gotta sit down and ask yourself.
Paul Reda: Well, I think the bigger, is there something specific to now that we think is more important than it was a year ago?
Kurt Elster: AI?
Paul Reda: Web3? Web4.
Kurt Elster: NFTs and Clubhouse? All right, so forget the year. Working in quarters is probably better. There’s a book about it, 12 Week Year, so whatever advice that applies to like, “This is what you should do every year,” you want it to… If it works for you, do it every 90 days. Problem is I don’t know what’s the thing that works for you, and so for me, like year in review tends to be… It’s like, “All right, what are my long-term goals? What are my short-term goals? Are we still on track for that? Do they still make sense?” And for me it’s like short-term goal is 90 days or next 12 months, and long-term goal is like, all right, five to ten years. And are we within that?
So, you gotta have that vision in your head, and then okay, looking back at the last year, what worked, what didn’t? What did we not like? What did we like doing? Okay, can we double down on the things that worked and that we liked, and can we get rid of our reduce the stuff we didn’t like and didn’t do or don’t want to do? But now that I’ve said it all out loud, you don’t have to do… That should just be every day, shouldn’t it? A new year is so arbitrary.
Paul Reda: It’s just too open-ended of a question. I don’t know. Just the same shit you always worried about. That’s it.
Kurt Elster: But somehow when it’s like it happened after Christmas, that’s a whole new world. All my previous mistakes have been washed away. And then Anthony Watts had followed up with, “What are some trends that you like, dislike, that you hope to continue/discontinue in 2023?” I thought that one would just come to me. I really did.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. What’s a fucking trend?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, like fundamentally trends come and go.
Paul Reda: I mean, I’ll let you in on my little secret here. I just tell you every single trend is garbage and I’m right 80% of the time, because that’s just the batting average for it.
Kurt Elster: It’s the inverse of like, “He predicted the last three of 10 recessions.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. Exactly. It’s the same thing. The recession’s coming. I’m just gonna keep saying it. Eventually I’ll be right.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And when you’re not right we’re like, “Well, it just hasn’t happened yet.”
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Same with trends.
Paul Reda: Same with trends. That trend’s bullshit. Well, it’s been going on for five years. Ah, well. It’s the exception that proves the rule.
Kurt Elster: All right, so what are the things that I’ve been hearing are right around the corner and are gonna be huge for the last five years? Mobile payments. I don’t know how we haven’t all agreed upon and mastered this yet. I mean, we got Apple Pay, Google Pay, all that, but-
Paul Reda: I mean, what is the mobile payment pickup that we see?
Kurt Elster: It’s way less than you would think.
Paul Reda: Is it even 25% on stores?
Kurt Elster: My guess would be it depends on the store, but also probably no.
Paul Reda: No. Which is just crazy.
Kurt Elster: I know. It’s such low-hanging fruit. Just make it easy for me to buy on the device I’m most likely to be on. And so, okay, maybe this is the year we can finally accept mobile payment.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s the same thing as desktop Linux.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s not happening. And I’m a Linux fanboy.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Social shopping is gonna happen. It’s always gonna happen. It’s been years of this. Has it yet? I don’t… To a degree.
Paul Reda: I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: It’s available. Does anyone use it in a meaningful context? I don’t think so.
Paul Reda: Are people buying things on TikTok? I don’t know. All right, I got a confession to make. I’m 42. I’ve been lying for a really long time. So, I don’t know what’s happening on TikTok. Again, all I do is watch Perfect Strangers reruns, so I’m not-
Kurt Elster: This is who you get your advice from, people.
Paul Reda: I’ve really stopped getting involved in anything new whatsoever. I’m really enjoying it. So, to ask me like are people buying things on TikTok, I don’t know. Are they?
Kurt Elster: What’s funny, the really successful stores, it’s still the same core playbook. I own the channel, I have an online store, I may or may not be in some marketplaces, and by that I mean Amazon, and I get my traffic through organic SEO, paid ads, and all right, a little bit of social, but that gets rolled up into paid ads too. And those networks are probably still Facebook and Google. And then we get a ton of people through email, and if we’re fancy there’s some SMS in there, and that’s been the playbook for how long?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And the subtleties change to it, but that overarching scheme, unchanged. You would think like yeah, it’s technology. We’ve got all these tools that are constantly moving. But the core fundamentals, it’s always the same.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We got a client that has a website that was one of the worst websites we’ve ever dealt with just in terms of age. It’s like this is a 2005 website. It didn’t even have a logo on it.
Kurt Elster: No logo.
Paul Reda: Nothing.
Kurt Elster: It was just text.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Text. It does over $30 million a year. You know, we get applications that are like, “My website looks like a four-figure website. I want my website to look like a six-figure website. I need to look like I do $10 million. My competitors are Nike and Reebok.” All these guys that just constantly are just pushing, pushing, to be like, “Well, that’s not cool. It’s gotta look like this site that is not in my niche, but I’ve decided this site is cool, so we gotta look like this hot sauce website for my shoe store. I don’t know why.” And in the end, we look at this client of ours and it’s like, “Wow, that site’s garbage. $40 million a year.”
Kurt Elster: Because it was simple, it was direct, it didn’t screw around, there were no shenanigans. It loaded quickly because it didn’t have a bunch of widgets on it.
Paul Reda: They didn’t have any apps.
Kurt Elster: It was like ShipStation… There were five apps and I think they’re all backend, so it was like ShipStation.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And so, it’s just like, “Well, we sell a product in our niche that we sell. We price it, we have good pricing, and you could just get on our website and buy it right away, and then it comes to you.”
Kurt Elster: That’s the whole promise, fulfilled.
Paul Reda: That’s it. And $40 million a year. We haven’t touched the website in over a decade. And it’s just all these other people are like, “Why do you make it so hard?”
Kurt Elster: We could be our own worst enemies. It’s easy to get in your own way. It really is. And I think a lot of the redesign, it’s like, “Oh, it’s gotta look cool,” or, “It’s gotta look better.” That’s for your ego. That’s why you want the cool website, is because as a business owner it’s a reflection of you. It does not necessarily sell more. Now, it depends on the category. If I’m super designy, furniture, apparel, all right, maybe I need the fancy website. Or I’m so cool it’s undesigned. That’s another trend. Undesigned. And that’s like we’re gonna spend a ton of money to have it look like the store that didn’t put in the effort and still made $40 million. That’s my big learning, is always like design’s way less important than you think.
Paul Reda: The trends that I dislike, that I would like to discontinue, is people acting like the fancy widgets on their website matter.
Kurt Elster: They don’t.
Paul Reda: It’s like, “Well, it’s full of animations and the stuff barely appears. It’s impossible to navigate. Look how the font on that button is so thin. You can barely tell it’s a button.”
Kurt Elster: That’s how you know they’re sophisticated.
Paul Reda: Our add to cart rate’s terrible because no one can find the button, but it looks nice.
Kurt Elster: It’s light gray text on a dark gray background.
Paul Reda: It’s like we’re here to make money. I realize I’m like essentially a socialist, but when I’m in-
Kurt Elster: And a curmudgeon.
Paul Reda: And a curmudgeon. Too many things are infected with making money, but some things are about making money, and when you’re doing the things that are about making money, make the goddamn money. Have no feelings about it. Do not care about anything other than making the money. And that’s what drives me insane, is that people that allow other shit to impinge on making the money.
Kurt Elster: In regards to a business, 100%. All right, does it pass the MEL test? Is it moral, ethical, legal? Yes? All right. And now we’re gonna be like, “But I don’t like the color blue.” Do you like money? Do you like the color green?
Paul Reda: It’s like, “I really want it to look like this website.” Why? “Because I have no self-esteem and I stare at it all night and I think that they’re better than me, so I need to be just like them so I can be as good as them.” No.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’m moving on from this. We went off the rails there. All right, marketing. Aisha, “Other than offering discount codes to your shop, any ideas to effectively get window shoppers to hop on your email list? I’ve also tried the discount wheel-”
Paul Reda: Spin to win!
Kurt Elster: Spin to win. Punch the monkey. Scratch off. “… exit intent popups and subscribe here in the footer.” Okay. We need some fresh ideas. The thing I’ve not heard here is downloads. A lead magnet.
Paul Reda: Oh. I was gonna say a piece of content, which is the same thing as downloads I think.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Email gated content, downloads. All right, so I talked to a gentleman who sold quilt supplies and did well doing it, and they had this huge email list because they had free patterns you could download, and they were just… I think it was a PDF to download these patterns. But you had to give them your email to get the pattern and that drove a ton for them. And my wife’s store, same deal. She’s like, “Hey, I got these PDF planning sheets. You gotta download the PDF. But to do it, I need your email.” And that works really well. And it’s actually easy to do in Shopify because you can set it up as… Shopify has a free app called Digital Downloads that they developed and you can use that to when someone purchases a virtual product in your store, and you just set it to zero dollars, you’re gonna get their email when they go through your checkout, and then it’ll just send them the digital download and they’ve gone through your checkout. You just trained them that it’s easy to go through this.
Yeah. That’s why I like to do… Yeah, there’s extra steps in there, but now I’m really… I’m going for quality over quantity with that method. I mean, the other way is like you could just have them fill out a form and then it sends them a link to download the PDF. And like, okay, that’s way fewer steps. That would work too. But I think that’s the thing you haven’t tried and it’s easy for me to go like, “All right, just go make some content.” It depends on the store. I talked to a guy who said, “Hey, we’re gonna do…” They sold shoes and they said, “We’re gonna do a big customer survey and find out all these attributes about how people buy and shop and why.” And I won’t spoil the lead on this one for them, and then that will be… That’s the big lead magnet. And so, you can share your own research repackaged. You could provide guides, templates, patterns.
Yeah, you gotta get creative, and it’s hard, but once you make the piece of content, it just keeps buying you emails.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I’ve been cooking a lot of Chinese food this year. I’ve gotten into cooking Chinese food. I don’t know why.
Kurt Elster: You got a wok, right?
Paul Reda: I got a wok. Oh yeah. I got a wok for Christmas. And it’s amazing. And all the Chinese food I’ve been making is incredible. Every single time. I’m like 5 for 5 in Chinese recipes. And they all come from this one blog called The Woks of Life, W-O-K, ha ha ha. And they have an email capture on their site and hey, if you sign up for our email, we’ll send you an eBook with our top 25 recipes. We’ll just email you the top 25 already. And I logged on while you were talking to see, and it’s Chinese New Year right around now, and they said, “Well, if you sign up now, you’ll also get your special Chinese New Year dinner plan and shopping list.” For like if you want to have a Chinese New Year party, we’ll break it all down for you and how to do all that.
And that’s a great email capture.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s really good.
Paul Reda: Yeah, because they have recipes. They have items that they can give you. And again, those top 25 recipes, those are already on the website. All they’re doing is repackaging them into an .epub or whatever that they are then emailing you with nice photos and a nice layout.
Kurt Elster: I think that’s the other trap people get into is like, “Oh, this content’s already here, so I can’t repackage it.” Go ahead. Repackage it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If you got 10 blog posts on your store showing people how to use your product or whatever, just package… Find a way to repackage it in a nice fashion into an .epub or whatever kind of eBook type, and send them that.
Kurt Elster: I’ve seen content, they call it a content upgrade, so it’s like I’m in the blog article, and then halfway through there’s a banner that’s like, “Hey, want this sent as a PDF to your phone? Just enter your email.” It’s the same article, just repackaged so they can get my email. But they’re providing me the convenience and it’s kind of like a save for later. I’m bookmarking it in a way. So, I think it’s easy to overthink it and talk yourself out of it, but I like that one.
All right, we got Adam says, “Have you or anyone extensively tested post-purchase upsell designs with Rebuy or Zipify and have any feedback on best practices or examples of what works best? i.e. image types, countdown timers, long form versus short form, aggressive or mild copy, et cetera.”
All right, so the answer to this, like all things, is it depends.
Paul Reda: So, let’s be specific what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about post-purchase upsells. So, they’ve already bought something. This specific product they have bought, we are putting them in a special email funnel for the people that have bought this thing. Correct?
Kurt Elster: All right, so that is similar and would work. He’s talking about when I place my order, I am on the order confirmation page, and then it’s like, “Hey, you want to buy this extra thing?” And then it either makes a new order and edits my order and sticks it in.
Paul Reda: Oh. Order confirmation pages. That’s too late.
Kurt Elster: No, that works too. You could do it… You could add stuff in the checkout now. You could do stuff post purchase.
Paul Reda: What?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Technically, a cross-sell. We’re adding additional items. Upsell would be we replace what they bought. All the individual questions he’s asked here, the answer is it depends, but the more important point is relevance.
Paul Reda: Yeah, that’s the thing is it can’t just be like, “You bought this vacuum cleaner. Would you also like to buy the t-shirt? No?”
Kurt Elster: No, I don’t want your… No, Dyson. I’m sorry, Sir Dyson, I don’t want the Dyson t-shirt. But if he said, “Hey, did you want to get the wall mount for that vacuum? Hey, did you want an extra battery?” As long as it’s the item in the cross-sell will improve my experience, increase the value of the product I have already agreed to buy, then those do really well.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: The other one that people overlook that you could do is, and again, it’s like it depends what the product is, but let’s say it’s a consumable good like coffee. You can go, and they show up, they buy a pound-and-a-half of coffee. You go, “Hey, you must like that coffee. You want to add another pound for 50% off?” I’m already paying to ship the thing and fulfill it. Just let them add another item in there. That’s another good one that people skip over is sell them the same thing twice. That one works.
The rest is really like testing and just trying to come up with really relevant stuff. Less so than… I like the timer, but it could be a turn… The timer will often work, but it could be a turn off.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Timers are gross.
Kurt Elster: For this kind of thing, I think short form will tend to perform better, because you’re not… Long form implies I gotta explain it and really sell them. You don’t want that. Just be like, “Hey, you bought those shoes. Here’s the perfect socks.” You don’t have to explain the socks to me.
Paul Reda: Yeah. All these side questions of like image types, countdown timers, what kind of form, what kind of copy, all of that stuff is like 5% of it. All of those combined is 5%. 95% is-
Kurt Elster: The offer.
Paul Reda: Is this a product that will make the product I’m currently buying cooler? And it’s like an add-on that costs much less. I will… Since I’m already buying the first product, I will receive more value by buying the second product. That’s 95% of it.
Kurt Elster: 100%. Yeah. All right, two more and we’re out. Dev ops questions. We’ve got Derek asks or says, “I’m buying an inactive competitor store currently on WordPress. Any tips for the order of operations or things to watch out for when migrating it to Shopify?” All right, so the value in what he’s getting there I’m guessing is I acquire an email list of the past customers, so don’t just jam them into your email list. Email them at least once and go, “Hey, this is what happened. This is why you’re on this list. And here’s the unsubscribe link.” When you do it like that, and beg them to unsubscribe, they won’t. They’ll stay. So, that would be how I approach that. And then the other thing is all right, you got… I assume you want to migrate something out of that store to yours.
Paul Reda: I’m guessing you want not only the current email list, but you also want all past purchasers, probably?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so all right, we want to-
Paul Reda: You need the orders.
Kurt Elster: We want the orders, we want the customers, products, catalogs, blog posts. Ideally, this thing has SEO value to it, and so migrate over all the content, and if we don’t, whether or not we migrate over all the content, I want URL redirects for everything they had. Depending on how many pages they had indexed in Google, that may or may not be a lot.
Paul Reda: Sounds like a job for AI.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know. I’m sure AI import migration tools are coming. Now, what saves you here is WordPress and Shopify are extremely prevalent platforms and so there is no end to the number of tools that will help you do the migration. For me, my go-to tool is Matrixify. I did a WordPress migration this year. I used Matrixify, WordPress to Shopify. Even with… They had plugins, custom fields, they had all kinds of goofiness in WordPress. It still really was not bad to do. Because WordPress is a good CMS, Shopify’s a good CMS, and Matrixify is a great, well documented mediary there. But I think the value is gonna be, and the watchouts, is gonna be make sure you got your redirects, your SEO links. Even after you do it, there’s stuff you always miss. There’s an app called Redirectify I like that makes it easy to… It’ll just list out, “Hey, here’s my missing URLs.” Makes them easy to set a redirect. Or do wildcard matching. It’s like, “Oh, there’s some really common patterns here.” I could just set up to automatically redirect those. So, there you go.
Paul Reda: Jim wants to know, “Have you tried Shopify Functions at all? It seems like a great way to get Plus features for normal plans and streamline the shopper experience with automatic discounts and other functionality.” Kurt, what’s Shopify Functions?
Kurt Elster: I have not personally used Shopify Functions. Let’s get that out of the way first. But he’s right in that when he says, “Hey, this seems like I could get Plus features.” For us anyway, the big unlock with Shopify Plus is script editor, and script editor lets us add programmatic logic where we can alter attributes of each step in the checkout. I can change things about shipping. I can change things about payment methods, like, “Oh, we want to offer PayPal, but we also sell CBD, so if an item with CBD is in the cart, hide PayPal as a gateway.” And you could explain this to PayPal. They’ll go, “Okay, you can keep selling.”
Or we could do complex discounts automatically. That’s the most common use for script editor. Shopify Functions fills that similar hole. In Shopify’s own… They maintain a GitHub repo and they have one called function examples, and their three example apps are delivery customizations, discounts tutorial, and payment customizations. Well, what does that sound like?
Paul Reda: Same thing.
Kurt Elster: As Shopify Plus’s script editor. And so, he is 100% right about that. And like script editor, it’s like I gotta… It’s Ruby code, so you gotta be able to produce that, and put it in, and then you can share those templates. Shopify Functions, you’ll be able to package them up like applets, and so you could share those, as well, between stores. It sounds like very similar functionality but extended and easier to use.
When they announced this thing, I don’t think people realized what it was, and so they didn’t know to care. Shopify Functions is one of the features I’m really excited to see it roll out and see people start using. For that to happen, I think one of the things is we gotta get all these Plus stores with checkout.liquid customizations need to go for them to be able to support the new checkout, which then supports Shopify Functions, but in the next 12 months you’re gonna see this thing, and I think it’s gonna add a lot of nifty features to checkout that you didn’t previously didn’t have access to.
That’s my answers. No, I haven’t played with it, but it seems like it’s gonna be pretty cool.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If Shopify script editor is any indication, that’s super powerful.
Kurt Elster: I get so much utility out of that.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You could do BOGO deals. You could do buy this product, get this other thing for free. So many myriad discounts that will really jack up your revenue.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Yeah, then you don’t have to use coupon codes, and I don’t have the limitations of automatic discounts. Oh, I’m getting excited about script… I’m sold on Shopify script editor. No, this extends that, and so we’re excited about that.
All right, that was our last question. Any final closing thoughts, Mr. Reda? I mean, do you want to apologize for lying about your age to me for so many years?
Paul Reda: No.
Kurt Elster: I accept this. So, I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode, so please join our Facebook group, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders, and talk to us. We would love to hear from you. Let’s get out of here.