The 'hack' that runs 3 brands on 1 Shopify store, ChatGPT x Shopify make it official
So there's this baseball media company. They make shirts about guys with nicknames like "The Big Dumper." And they needed three different store experiences, but only wanted to use one store. What our co-host Paul Reda figured out next is either brilliant or insane. Maybe both.
Today on the show, we're asking: when does a hack become a feature? When does one store become three? And why would anyone voluntarily remove every frontend app from their Shopify store? Plus, ChatGPT can now sell your products directly. No, really. We'll explain how that works and why Kurt thinks automated fraud prevention might actually matter this time.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you instead of your competitors. And 45,000 stores already use it, and it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to get swim. com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com I get people ask me, they'll be like, oh, what conferences should I go to this year? I'm like, how should I know?
Paul Reda
You're like, I don't like people, so none of them.
Kurt Elster
You know, I like people. I don't love conferences.
Paul Reda
Yeah, no, I never want to go to a conference ever. I went to you know I went to Unite when they had those and they were fun.
Kurt Elster
You went to Peak Unite, Shopify Unite.
Paul Reda
Yeah, the Peak Unite. I saw Justin. We hung out
Kurt Elster
Is it the Prime Minister of Canada?
Paul Reda
Yeah, I was like, get out of here, dude. Like, you don't want this job.
Kurt Elster
It's like, you're right, bro. You're right. And then years later.
Paul Reda
And then years later he quit. But he texted me. He was like, you were right all along.
Kurt Elster
Like 30% of the story is true. The rest is false. Today in the show, we're gonna cover three new Shopify features. We're gonna go I'm gonna call them all medium. You know, small, medium, large features.
Paul Reda
Oh, medium features. Okay.
Kurt Elster
I'm gonna put these three as medium features.
Paul Reda
Are you saying they're mid? Wow. Damn, I'm telling Harley.
Kurt Elster
No, I'm 42. I don't say mid. Yeah, that's that ages me. I can't say mid. Plus I want to get into the weeds on just talking through and we'll save this to the end. We're getting deep in the weeds, some features for our new app. App decisions. App decisions. Yeah. When you're building a Shopify app, then suddenly you go wait Does this work this way because that's how I think it should, or because how people actually use it will think it should?
Paul Reda
I'm really excited because like we're gonna talk about it. And we're we're gonna like maybe kind of come to a decision, but we're not gonna be sure. And then a bunch of people are going to reply and they're going to be like, you idiot, obviously do this. But like everyone that does that is going to say, you idiot, obviously do this. And then they'll ever this will be different for all of them. Yes. But they'll be certain that they're right.
Kurt Elster
Yes. That's well, that's what makes it such a difficult decision is these opinionated design decisions. And then the other thing and we'll jump into now is this new site that we built and by we, really it was largely you.
Paul Reda
Yeah, we did a new store for John Boy, where I don't know if you know John Boy. It is uh like a YouTube channel, a media multiple YouTube channels. Multiple YouTube channels, a media company. They mostly focus on baseball, but they're branching out. And I realized I had to take it over because on like the launch call, you were like, I love it when a point guard hits a touchdown. And I was like, oh fuck, I gotta do this.
Kurt Elster
I didn't say any of that.
Paul Reda
I don't even know what those words mean. Yeah, you did. You did. You said that. So yeah, they uh we've been working with them for over a year now. They came to us about 18 months ago just to do some stuff on their Then current Shopify theme, and it was awful. Oh boy, so bad. And we were like, please, for the love of God, let us fix this. And uh they were like, no, no, no, no, no, we gotta get through Christmas. We gotta do all this stuff. And we were like, all right. And so we got them through Christmas. And they came back. Usually nine times out of ten when a client, when someone is like, oh, well, we'll get back to you later after the holidays. They don't come back.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, other stuff comes up.
Paul Reda
Yeah, so but they came back. Bless their hearts. So that's what we've been uh we've been working with them for the last couple months now. There was an interregnum in the middle. because they signed a deal, actual real deal with real boy, big boy major league baseball.
Kurt Elster
MLB.
Paul Reda
Well, yeah. So they have like the MLB team rights and everything, which they did not have before.
Kurt Elster
That's you know worth a wait.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
That adds some serious legitimacy.
Paul Reda
Yeah. So they would just be like, I love Chicago baseball. And then it's just like a blue and red shirt. You know what that means, wink wink. Uh but we can't tell ya. But now they can. Sweet.
Kurt Elster
Well, I so the I there are two things I love about this site. One, it is incredibly fast because as far as I know, it doesn't use any front-end apps, does it?
Paul Reda
It's so fast. It is it is It is the thing that I want to show every store owner when they're like, boys, I worry about my site speed. Why can't my site be faster? And then I'm like 30 to 40 apps. And I'm like, delete 10 of these apps. And they're like, I need those, but I also need my site to be faster. No catch, only throw. You know, so they never want to do it.
Kurt Elster
I need a sports car and I need a pickup truck.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Okay, we'll just take out the back of the Lambeau.
Paul Reda
Yeah, so I just sitted there sitting and it's just a modern Shopify theme. It's built on top of focal. Obviously, all the modifications I did were good and correct and very fast.
Kurt Elster
Uh and
Paul Reda
So there's it there's no time. You just hit F5 all day long and that all just refreshes instant instantaneously. It's because they have no apps. This is the problem.
Kurt Elster
Well, you know, and of your performance scores, I think the one that gets us in trouble is CLS. Cumulative layout shift. But in this store, CLS reports a zero, meaning When it loads and renders, the sh site doesn't do that goofy thing where like widgets pop in and shift around.
Paul Reda
It wouldn't go that far. I don't think it reports at zero.
Kurt Elster
But
Paul Reda
I think this one is zero. I don't know. I looked I think I was looking at it last week and it wasn't zero. Anyway, it's got a great score. Anyway, who cares about the scores? When you hit F5, it goes real fast.
Kurt Elster
It is quick and it's just because they're not running a ton of IOPs. That's great. The other neat trick you did uh is template switching.
Paul Reda
Yeah, they wanted they actually wanted three stores. They wanted three stores and one stores. You know those guitars three and one? Yeah, you know how those guitars that are like double guitars? Uh-huh. They wanted a store that's three stores. So there is a theme switcher. I don't want to say theme, because that like theme is a word in Shopify that means something. So I actually call it a skin switcher. Because you're not necessarily switching templates either, because you could have like five you are switching temp you're not necess you are switching templates, but you're not necessarily, if that makes any sense, I'll explain it. I call it a skin switcher because you're switching the skin around on the theme. So there's one theme. Depending on trigger words in the template name, it will also call an additional style sheet. And the additional style sheet will change the skin around it. Everything else works the same. Everything's functional. All it is is we're changing the CSS via one additional file. Oh, and we're changing the navs. That was the thing that they wanted. So the navigation actually changes, but that's it.
Kurt Elster
So how many wait how many different looks does this thing do?
Paul Reda
It has three looks. What they wanted to do is they they just had jomboy media. And they wanted to trifurcate their store into three separate things. I know bifurcates a real word. Is trifurcate a real word? Well if bifurcates a real word, trifurcate has to be.
Kurt Elster
We can extrapolate bifurcation to trifurcation.
Paul Reda
They quadfurcated it?
Kurt Elster
Quintfurcate.
Paul Reda
Sex for Kate. So they wanted to create a new brand called Slashline, which is they're the baseball gear. The stuff, MLB teams, MLB players. They wanted a second store called We Got Ice. And We Got Ice is a YouTube channel that I would say is kind of like classic hoonigan, but baseball stuff. Like we are in the warehouse. Screwing around with like things that could be baseball bats or like weird vault. It's not hockey. It's baseball. Wait, we got ice isn't about hockey? No, it's not. Why would it be about hockey? They're a baseball theme. What's ice got to do with baseball? I don't know. It's like in the cooler or some crap. I don't know. Okay. Um anyway, it's silly videos involving baseball implements. And then the third one is just John Boy Media itself. So it's like shirts for the podcasts.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, show merch.
Paul Reda
Joke, yeah, show merch and jerk from the YouTube shows and from the podcasts and like jokes from that. So that is their main things. They wanted each one branding to have a distinctive logo and colors and, you know, uh fonts and stuff like that. So that's all achieved with a style sheet. Different style sheet that is only called when uh uh the template has a trigger word in it. So the way that works is by default every page on the store is a sl is a slash line page. But then if the template name has ice in it or dash ice or ice dash in it, it'll call the we got ice style sheet and it'll look like a we got ice page.
Kurt Elster
Oh, okay. That gives you more flexibility.
Paul Reda
Yeah, because that was the thing where it was like, well, we can't just have one template. What if they want to make another page using like a page template or like a special collection template, but they want it to be a special we got ice collection template? So I have to they have to have a way to have multiple We Got Ice templates, but all know to use the We Got Ice skin.
Kurt Elster
And It actually wor in practice it works pretty well. I was clicking around the site. It was great.
Paul Reda
I'm hyped I'm hyped about it.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. It's cool trick. But it's like, I mean it looks the whole Thing changes considerably like logo color fonts. Yeah. So you really get this like very different branded feel on one consistent store. It it's neat.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
And we've done similar things in the past. This is the most advanced version of that we've done.
Paul Reda
Yeah, we well we've done that. Um I know we did it for Adams because Adams has the blackout products and they wanted those pages to be black, which then they're necessitated making all the other page elements white and you kind of need to do like a switch there. I think that was tag-based, I'm not sure.
Kurt Elster
That would also, you know, it's just limited product, you just template as well. Yeah. Tag based. I like your handle trick.
Paul Reda
The handle trick's better because tags This was another thing, so I also became like their information architecture guru because, okay, well this is a Derek, this shirt is a Derek Jeter shirt. And so how do we know what it's a Derek Jeter shirt and how do we get all the Derek Jeter shirts together? It's like, well, we just tagged everything. Well, who tagged it? Ten random people that have worked here over the past five years did the tagging. So that it's like Jeter, Derek Jeter, Derek underscore Jeter, Derek Space Jeter, Derek Hyphen Jeter, Derek Jeter, one word.
Kurt Elster
This is not an unusual thing to see when you're managing big catalogs that have changed over time with, you know, different people working on it because they're like, all right. One person goes, yeah, we've got the system set up and you know you just gotta tag it. If you want it hidden or you don't want us to discount, tag it no underscore discount. Next person tags it no dash discount goes why doesn't it work? And then they go well it needed to be tagged no underscore discount. They add that. Third person goes through the same thing, types no and it autocompletes, and they see two no discounts. Select a bolt at and then that just keeps happening until eventually you have like ten tags. You know one of them does the thing you want, and so every time you add them all. That's where You know, pre-Metafields we had to use tags or like fun conditional logic like this. And it it could become messy.
Paul Reda
Oh, it was very messy. Obviously the Jeter products, there would be a lot of them over a long period of time. So people were slapping everything they could think of on top of it and their tag fields on every product was insane. Whereas like a Kyle Schwarber shirt would just be like Schwarber. And it was like, okay, but are we doing first names or are we not doing first names? Like how do we know? I remember when I worked at the AV club on the at the Onion, you know, there'd be like movie reviews. There'd be like movies and they would you would end up being like Tag-based searches that you could do. And so then it was like, well, in the tag there would be the you know, tag cloud.
Kurt Elster
Remember tag clouds? Oh, tag clouds. Yes.
Paul Reda
Of like a you know, it's like for this review of this movie and it's like well you gotta fill out the tag cloud on the movie they're like well what should I I was like well what should I put in it they're like I don't know the tags it's like okay so like the director And then like all the actors, like the year it came out, like genres that I think are involved, topics of the movie.
Kurt Elster
Like just keyword stuffing.
Paul Reda
Just keyword stuffing. Like what tell me give me an outline? And they're like, I don't know, just do it.
Kurt Elster
To this day. I still regularly field questions where people are like, that's what you do with any field on any content management system, Shopify's or otherwise. If it has a section called tags, you just start stuffing keywords into it. Because it'll be helpful, you think, maybe?
Paul Reda
Yeah, so everything has 500 random things that are just tangentially related in any way whatsoever. That's good. That helps narrow things down.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Well, and those tags would become keywords that you could search by. I think is why people were doing that. In Shopify today, you can in search, you can add synonyms, you could do product boosts. Um, you know, you handle a lot of this stuff at search and discovery. And then really instead of tags, you do everything with uh meta fields. And then to prevent the situation we described where it's like it just over time you end up with like five overlapping similar keywords with meta fields I love doing like you could pick from a predefined list of values that cannot be changed willy-nilly And then that really simplifies things, at least in preventing, you know, that um that cruft from accumulating.
Paul Reda
Yeah, I re I I didn't do that and now I'm I should well cause so we had I added one for player so there's a meta field now on their store called player and it's like you're supposed to put in the name of the player that is associated with this article of clothing. And then I also added teams, and teams could have multiple entries because it's like, oh, it's for the NLCS. So it's Cubs, Mets. You put Cubs and Mets in there. And you're supposed to do the whole one. But given that there are like, you know, 30 baseball teams, 30? Uh I should have just made it a predefined list.
Kurt Elster
Where you could pick multiple? Where you could pick multiple. Yeah, it's a good solution. Yes. Okay. You just can't change you can't like go back later and change type. You can't switch from like I don't think you could switch from list to multiple and vice versa. But if you have like this is the l the list, you could change that.
Paul Reda
Yeah, because I would need to change that because the Yeah, it'll change. Because the athletics are maybe moving to Las Vegas. Who knows? That's a shit show. The White Sox are maybe moving to Nashville. Probably not. Who knows? There might be a new team in Nashville. Like, so, you know, that list would have to necessarily change at some point. Um, so yeah, so we set that up again where and before they obviously kind of had to wink wink at the teams and now they don't. And so that'll allow to use the real team name. So then it's like, okay, we could build collections now. Instead of, you know, again, how do we build the Yankees collection? Well, we build the Lank Yankees collection for any product that contains the tag NYY or Yankee. or New York Yankees or New Dash York dash Yankees or New underscore York underscore Yankees.
Kurt Elster
Like yeah with in with tag you can't do contains. It's exact match only.
Paul Reda
So again it was just like how do you build the Yankees collection? Everything that is the meta field The team Metafield is filled out with New York Yankees. Done. Just keep filling out all the fields on the products and you're going to do great.
Kurt Elster
The well gee, now we got to revisit if we do some defined meta fields on there.
Paul Reda
Yeah, but yeah. I should I maybe I mean if they screw it up, I should probably do that. I don't think the pro so the problem is the way they could screw that up is they never stop making products. Holy shit. Because it's all kind of like meme content. It's like weird baseball meme. You know, there's a guy, there's a catcher, he plays for the Mariners. His name's Cal Raleigh. He had 60 home runs as a catcher. That's never happened before. Congrats to the dumper. And his nickname is the big dumper.
Kurt Elster
The big dumper. And everyone loves poor man.
Paul Reda
And everyone loves the big dumper. So the day that uh the new theme launched, they also did their big dumper drop of a bunch of big dumper gear. And so like that obviously helped the numbers, but You know, I looked since the site launched. I was like, oh let's look at the data. It's only been a week. The top 50 products sold in the last week. Forty of them weren't on the store a year ago. They are just it's just constant turnover of the items on the store and they gotta keep thinking up new items. Sarah, the graphic designer there who we worked with, Sarah's gotta just be cranking out t-shirts all day long. They just gotta strike while the iron's hot and just keep turning over that inventory.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Paul Reda
Not really turning it over because it's print on demand. That's my other thing. I'm kind of like, you guys. Print on demand, those margins, they're terrible. And I think that might be part of the We Got Ice thing too. And We Got Ice and John Boy Media is that those maybe necessarily those are more evergreen, I would think. I would hope. Then yeah, then the big then like counting on a catcher suddenly getting hot and you know who knows if anyone's gonna even remember his name like two years from now?
Kurt Elster
With a nickname like the big dumper.
Paul Reda
Well, you know, two years from now, I was gonna s I was gonna name check a guy that played for the Tigers that hit like 10 home runs in April and then like obviously you never want to Chris Shelton. Yeah, Chris Shelton. Like, you know, who thinks about Chris Shelton? I couldn't even remember his name.
Kurt Elster
All right, let's move on to That's it? Well we talk about this all day.
Paul Reda
We did 20 minutes. Ask me questions. Tell me more. I want to talk about it. It's the only exciting thing I've done all year. I had a baby. Who cares? This sights my baby.
Kurt Elster
Oh wow. Uh, you know, on that note, I'm especially gonna move on. Man, those order change emails suck. They're always like, I ordered the wrong size. I meant to change the shipping address. Oops, I was drunk. Instead of making customers email you that stuff, let them fix it themselves with Cleverific. Cleverific is a self-service portal that lets customers edit their orders without bugging you. That means you get fewer headaches, customers get faster fulfillment, and there's fewer returns overall. Everybody wins. Peter Manning New York cut their support tickets by 99% with Cleverific. You want in on that? Get 50% off the pro plan, just $49 a month, exclusively for listeners of the unofficial Shopify podcast. Go to cleverific. com slash unofficial and use promo code Kurtfifty. Done. Problem solved. That's cleverific. Go So you can now segment your customers. I don't know if you knew this. You can segment customers.
Paul Reda
By buyers and not buyers? And you tell the not buyers to get the hell out?
Kurt Elster
Well, they give you Instead, like what's your in the customer's view, they give you um oh shoot, do they give you GraphQL for customers or is that orders? I don't know. I don't touch that stuff. So the new option they gave you for filtering customers, so you've always been able to create customer segments where you could save it and you say like, you know, customers or place more than one order. Okay, those are repeat customers. And I could save that and make a segment called Repeat Customers. And then I could refer to that. If I'm using Shopify for email, I could get to it there. I I've used that in Shopify Flow with tagging. Um, but that generally that's how I use it for my automations. Um, and it in other marketing campaigns, one would think. The what they added, which is helpful, is you can now segment customers by the product category they viewed or the product category they purchased. Now one important distinction here, when we say product category, in your product taxonomy, which you you just did a whole bit about taxonomy. It's not product type.
Paul Reda
It's not product type and it's not collection. It's by like category. Yeah, so it's just like knit hat or something like that.
Kurt Elster
And so Shopify's had this change. I think this was last year.
Paul Reda
And that's set up by Shopify those those cat those categories, right?
Kurt Elster
Which I believe those correspond to what Google Shopping uses. Like there's a ton of categories. Those are the ones where it says like it'll say, you know, category suggested, and then it'll try and get it right. And often it does. If it gets it, you know, right or close, just hit apply.
Paul Reda
It's underneath the description.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Paul Reda
It's before it's after the description and before the variance on the product page.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Or if you bulk edit the product, you can see those. But you can now uh just quickly, assuming you have all those categories applied. And, you know, now you could make a segment. And so it's like, okay, you know, on John Boy, I could be like, all right, everyone who bought something in category hat. Great. Hats, you know, if you're doing this type of apparel lifestyle apparel, hats are often uh a big, big seller for you. You got a new hat launching, great. I am now going to do, you know, for my new product line capsule that's coming out. I'm just gonna send a promo about just the hats to the people in who viewed or purchased hats. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. And so if I do a product launch like this, okay, then I would do another one where I segment by t-shirt. And now that one is just gonna lead with the t-shirts and then, you know, of course also it'd be like, hey, there's also new hats. But I'm gonna lead with what I think is gonna work. Just an example use case.
Paul Reda
I'm downgrading this feature to mid because. From medium. From medium to mid. Because those categories are too general. Like this dude's into t-shirts. Like, come on. Again, in the John Boy thing, I didn't want it by Metaphyl. Like, okay, well, we know this dude keeps buying Cubs gear. So when we get new Cubshirts that we invent, email that guy.
Kurt Elster
Or Yeah, like Cubshirts not going to be a category.
Paul Reda
Well, no Cubs. Cubs is going to be a collection.
Kurt Elster
It's gonna be a collection or a meta field potentially.
Paul Reda
Yeah, or a met or a meta field. Or like for our automotive, like, all right, we know this dude owns a a 2023 Toyota Tacoma. So we want to include him on our new products that fit his 2023 Toyota Tacoma. People aren't like hat fans. This guy loves hats. I think no, I th oh I we don't wear it. Some people are hat people, that's true. Some people hat people maybe, but it's like, you know, come on.
Kurt Elster
T-shirts, come on. There's a guy with a baseball cap on right now screaming in his car. He's a hat guy. I own 40 hats. That's a lot of hats, sir. Uh the big one, the big feature announcement that just occurred uh is the the chat GPT Shopify integration that's now official official You know, for sure this is a thing we knew was occurring in the background. Now if you go to shopi. com slash chat gpt, you could pre-register for this. The idea is ISJPT for a product recommendation. It makes the product recommendation And that's where Shopify has been providing catalog data to ChatGPT. You could see this if you install the app Shopify knowledge base. It'll show this, these recommendations to you. Um and but now they take out one step. Because currently I could see in analytics for a few of our our bigger client stores, they're starting to get purchases where the session was referred by ChatGPT. So that means someone asked ChatGPT a question. It said, hey, here's the product. They click the link they bought. This takes that second step out. Instead, it's The example they show on the website is like they click the product card and it's just like, hey, make a buy, order now. And it's one click.
Paul Reda
And it just does it. So they don't go to your store?
Kurt Elster
No. No, the order just appears in your Shopify orders.
Paul Reda
So I'm assuming one, you need to be logged in via ShopPay.
Kurt Elster
I would y yes, one of the requirements is that you use uh Shopify payments, I believe. I mean that you're well I would okay, so that's I don't think they stated that that is, but I would assume it.
Paul Reda
Because the just my question is, in no place on the internet can you click a single button one time. And you are immediately charged and a product is shipped to you.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it's always it. Even if it's buy now, it's still buy now, then I click
Paul Reda
Then I that buy now and then Amazon still takes me to a checkout page that's like we're gonna be charging this credit card. It'll be going to this address. Here's the tax we're charging.
Kurt Elster
It should does that.
Paul Reda
It does?
Kurt Elster
So it's like yeah, it's like a it's it So a chain so yeah it's like here's product photo title price you click it tap it then it opens the car the checkout card so then you place the order but like where did it get that info?
Paul Reda
So you are there's like an integrated checkout inside ChatGPT is what you're saying.
Kurt Elster
In the the little like screen share snippet they included, that is how it appeared.
Paul Reda
Okay. So yeah, I don't think they're gonna want people logging in via that. So it's like you already need to be logged into shop pay, guessing.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Paul Reda
Or shop shop app. I don't know. Something with shop is a suffix, you know. Or they just own that. Shop.
Kurt Elster
Uh yeah. But you know, it currently you're already enroll automatically enrolled into your catalog at shared, so it can make the recommendations. Fine. you know, more more surfaces to recommend my stuff. Gimme gimme. And you know this potentially simplifies purchasing, but right now it's just a landing page where you sign up for it. And so I say, you know, sign up for it, see what happens.
Paul Reda
Yeah, I mean get five sales before this whole AI thing collapses.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, even if it collapses, it can still be, you know, working. We can still get sales with it. It's the people who spent the billions to build it that have the problem.
Paul Reda
All right, I'm just being a declaration right now, by the way. So this whole thing, this is all gonna fall apart in about six months. Like NASDAQ's gonna tank. Like they're all it's all all it's all gonna be a house of cards. And they gotta find they're gonna have to find their next scam to shovel billions into. And you know, because we had NFTs and you know, we're the blockchain and all that sort of stuff. And now we're on this. It's gonna be robots.
Kurt Elster
Oh yeah, humanoid robots.
Paul Reda
They're gonna be like, oh, we're building these robots and like these humanoid robots is gonna be your best friend and it's gonna like do all this work for you and it's gonna clean your house and like we're working on that, but we need a hundred billion dollars every month in order to make the robots happen. So money plea. That's that's gonna be the scam.
Kurt Elster
I mean I think what we're already there.
Paul Reda
Oh, I don't think it's the it's not the main new scam though. What I'm saying is gonna be the main new scam.
Kurt Elster
Okay. Maybe. I just think yeah it they've been around. The humanoid robots in development have been around a while.
Paul Reda
Chatbots have been around for a while, Kurt. I you don't see everyone losing their mind over chatbots all of a sudden.
Kurt Elster
That's a good point. You know, well, but chatbot suddenly got like good and exciting. It's like maybe the humanity.
Paul Reda
I'm gonna make the robot a good and exciting, Kurt. I need a trillion dollars this quarter.
Kurt Elster
What's the robot do? Well, I mean if it's like making dinner and doing stuff I don't want to do.
Paul Reda
Listen, listen. It's not about what the robot can do right now. You need to think about what the robot will be capable of. Imagine, see, you gotta see, look at how the rope much the better the robot's gotten in the last six months, extrapolate that to two years from now. The robot's gonna be taking over. In fact, the robot's so good, I'm worried that it's gonna cause a Terminator situation. So you actually need to give me more money so I can think about avoiding how good these robots are gonna be.
Kurt Elster
Mm. But what about our jobs?
Paul Reda
It's gonna destroy all our jobs, but also we'll all be rich. Okay. Because the robots
Kurt Elster
So I'll be rich and I won't have to work because Yeah, yeah, that'll yeah, yeah.
Paul Reda
The the money will be distributed. Don't worry about it.
Kurt Elster
I invest in your robot plan now. Well I I'm sold.
Paul Reda
I need a hundred billion dollars, Kurt.
Kurt Elster
The wow good job totally derailing jail up. I'm in. That's my job. Uh the other nice feature they added is automated fraud prevention. And this is like a settings suite. So this one you have to use Shopify payments, um, and then shop like the fraud settings that are available in payments would update automatically with best practices. And I've noticed they're adding this for uh like privacy policy, you could set to automatically update now. Um Some of the like the customer privacy related stuff, like whether a cookie banner shows, you could set which regions it shows to automated. I love these automated Shopify features. Or just go, hey, uh you're implicit is you're gonna forget about this or mess it up. Let just let Shopify keep it up to date for you. It'll be better than you forgetting about it. I agree. It is better than us forgetting about it. So anytime they give me that option to be like, we just automatically handle this accordingly. I'll take it. And You know, we've seen even a couple episodes ago, we talked about, you know, dealing with the these fraud orders. These like low-value, weird fraud orders where bots buy like your order protection product. Get out of here. So, you know, anything that automates that, please do. Here's a word from our sponsors at Zippify. Black Friday's coming, and so's the squeeze. Every year, the same thing. Ag cost balloon, customers want 40% off everything, and your margins get crushed. But there's a fix. Boost your average order value before the chaos hits. One-click upsell does exactly that, increasing AOV by up to 30%, with AI-powered upsells across your entire customer journey. Launch up sales for every product in one click. Customers see personalized offers and spend more automatically. Unlike other apps, you only pay for results. not views, so you keep more profit. Takes under two minutes to set up and starts working immediately. Don't let this traffic season slip by without maximizing every sale. Go to zipify. com slash curt for your 30-day free trial. that zipify. com slash kurt. Turn this into your most profitable Black Friday yet. Yeah, we're building this app, Promo Party, which is a free gift with purchase app. And I said, you know, we'll our next app we'll do something simple. And we'll make it opinionated where it just works the way we think it should. And how hard could this be?
Paul Reda
Yeah. And we got and we asked for beta testers. We got some beta testers. We would love more, but now these beta testers found a bunch of problems. That's the problem with them. We want beta testers that don't find problems.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, just tell me it's great and move on.
Paul Reda
Yeah. No, that's not helpful. So we got an issue where the someone has set up a free gift with a purchase deal.
Kurt Elster
Spend 50 bucks and then get my free sticker pack.
Paul Reda
No, free sticker pack won't have variants though. The problem is, I see it is with variance. You get a free shirt. We gotta pick the size of the shirt. So you've qualified for the free shirt. A pop-up shows up that says, you just qualified for a free shirt. You want a 2XL fatty? And I do. So I have to pick, but instead of picking, I go, what's this? A pop book? Get out of here. And I close it right away.
Kurt Elster
Cause you've already I mean it in any e-commerce store, you've now already been hit with like 10 putting.
Paul Reda
I've already closed the cookie pop-up. I've already closed the two pop-ups pop-ups asking for my email, spin to win, you know, so many things. So I just saw another pop-up. Get get out of here. And I didn't select my free gift.
Kurt Elster
And then after you reflexively click close, you're like, wait a second. Did that say free gift?
Paul Reda
Yeah. So now the question is. What do we do as the app developer when the user dismisses the free gift without selecting a free gift? Should they never get that offer ever again? If they like somehow hit the threshold again, do we re-offer the free gift to them?
Kurt Elster
Which, but that's how we had it. And the issue with that was I add an item to cart. I'm now over the and I'm over the trigger threshold. Like I qualify, but the cart item's not there. So the pop-up comes up. I dismiss it. Now I go add another product. The pop-up comes up. So I dismiss it. Then I reload, pop-up comes up because I qualify, so I dismiss it. Like what is the cooldown time on my pop-up? Do I only show it once? Do I like put in a So our solution well we'll put in a buffer? And we set it to 30 minutes. So it'll tell you again in 30 minutes. Within a day of doing that, one of the beta testers was like, well, a customer dismissed this pop-up but then couldn't figure out
Paul Reda
How to get their free gift.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, because they wanted it. Because they, you know, they dismissed it by habit. Well shoot, the heck's the right answer there.
Paul Reda
Yeah. Darn.
Kurt Elster
And so the answer is I don't know.
Paul Reda
Well, I think the answer is we had it as an X. In the an X in the top right corner, you know, a close button. An X means make this go away. Get out of here. We need to make it more of an act of choice on their part. So my proposal was to add two buttons. We still have like a the product form field where they're selecting what size shirt they want. And then it says add my one button says add my free gift. And the other button says, no, I don't want a free gift. And if they click no, I don't want a free gift, you never get the pop-up ever again.
Kurt Elster
I like that one. That's a good solution to it. The other one I wanted to do was give the the merchant a range slider where they set how long that cooldown period is.
Paul Reda
That's too advanced, that's too in the weeds. Because then what does the merchant know? The whole point of this is like we're I could default it to the right setting. Obviously we could default it, but we don't know what the right setting is.
Kurt Elster
No, I don't.
Paul Reda
We do we like making simple things that just work. And every time you add another option, you're getting farther and farther away from a simple thing that just works. True. Obviously you need some options, but you know, there be there comes a point where there's too many.
Kurt Elster
The yeah if you're interested in this, jump in uh our Facebook group, unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. There's a post where you know we're talking through this stuff. The the other one that's kind of fun is how often can you show little Easter eggs before they're just annoying?
Paul Reda
Uh I would say once.
Kurt Elster
So we've got on your first campaign creation, when you create the campaign.
Paul Reda
The first time, the first time the store owner uses the app creates a and creates a campaign.
Kurt Elster
It animates confetti, which I thought was a really neat touch.
Paul Reda
On the admin screen.
Kurt Elster
Yes.
Paul Reda
Okay, fine. Maybe have it say like congrats or something, because otherwise it might seem a little weird.
Kurt Elster
Create that campaign, boom, confetti. It's like the party popper's been pulled, but it only does it that one time, never again.
Paul Reda
That is my choice on that. I agree on that. I guarantee if we did it so it's set, so it was every time. And then people would complain. Power users would complain and be like, what the hell is Stop Ed?
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Like on my iPhone I have reduced motion turned on because I'm like, knock it off with your nonsense.
Paul Reda
If we took it away, if we had it on every single one and we took it away, I guarantee we would get emails, people being like, where'd my confetti go? I really loved that.
Kurt Elster
So we'll keep that one I think is an easier answer. We're just gonna leave it as first time only.
Paul Reda
Yeah, we're leaving it as first time only.
Kurt Elster
If you'd like to see it more than once, uninstall and reinstall
Paul Reda
Uh and then one more you have here is accidental gift edition. All right, so the user has added, already added the free gift product to their cart, because maybe the free gift product is a product that's on sale on the store already. Then they qualify for the free gift. Do we add a second one? And one of them's free? Do we just make the one that's already in the cart free? Like what do you do there?
Kurt Elster
So on this one, we actually set a line item attribute on the product so we know which one is ours.
Paul Reda
Okay. Because I was thinking. I was thinking you just take the one on the cart and make it free.
Kurt Elster
No, we add a new one, make that free, and then if they no longer qualify for that, like let's say the trigger's 50 and the cart drops to 40, we remove ours.
Paul Reda
Yeah. And you know what? And now that you talk about it, that it and that is probably simpler too.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. All right, so two of three, I think we figured out the answer here.
Paul Reda
Yeah, because we're geniuses.
Kurt Elster
Mm-hmm.
Paul Reda
Anyway, you could tell us we're stupid, but only if you're a beta tester. If you're not a beta tester and tell us we're stupid, we're not gonna listen.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, beta tester could say I'm stupid. That's their job. Yeah, I think that that solves that.
Paul Reda
Are there other issues? I don't know. I just want to get this thing live and then tear our hair out at the terrible support requests we're going to be getting.
Kurt Elster
Well, that's it. I gotta figure out. We're like, oh no, it broke. Well a lot of sweat in the details is just like having it surface potential errors. Like, hey, that gift product. That's out of stock or it's, you know, in draft status, you know, surfacing those errors so that people can do a little self-help.
Paul Reda
I saw a m I saw a meme over the weekend and it was like programmers when the Programmers when it throws out a completely different error and it's like, oh, like, oh, I'm really banging my head against this one error. And then it I
Kurt Elster
Changed something and it threw out a different air, you're like, oh, I'm getting closer. Yeah, I'm making progress. That is what I feel when that happens. Yes, new error. Like, okay, it still doesn't work, but Yeah, that's where man. Uh in the case of our free gift app, it does actually work. No, it works it works pretty good. That's the problem. It's like now I've got all these little details to figure out.
Paul Reda
The the main problem is solved. Now it's all the little annoying stuff.
Kurt Elster
To, you know, you know, what makes this what makes this bulletproof? What makes this reliable a reliably pre-configured? Anything else you'd like to share with the class? Oh. I've been playing a lot of Sonic Racing over the weekend.
Paul Reda
Uh Hades 2 came out. Huge fan of Hades 1. Hades 2, the overworld is way too hard. I don't like the balance. I don't like the weapons. The only weapons I like is there's like a knife sickle combo that's like really fast attacks. That's really fun, but the rest of the weapons do not move me. However, I just got an email earlier today that the Steam Autumn sale has started, so I'm going to be buying some stuff on that. And also I'm going to get the Super Mario Galaxy 2 release for Switch 2 because I never played Super Galaxy Super Mario Galaxy 2 and this is like Nintendo is finally acknowledging it exists for the first time And like ignoring my children. Why would I just look at my children when I can play video games?
Kurt Elster
Well, I mean, they're welcome to like compete with you, but they will get stomped.
Paul Reda
Rosie's three. She's too dumb to play the video game. She still gets the she gets an unplugged Xbox 360 controller to hold while I'm playing. It's like, yeah, yeah, you're racing too.
Kurt Elster
The you know, I get I get my daughter in there, I just turn on the steering assist, and she's eight, but she already taught me. She's like, that's she's like, you don't know how to boost at start. She's like, it's like this. And then showed me. I'm like, oh, okay. You're right. That is how you do that. In next week's episode, I think we're gonna cover we'll do uh live lightning interviews from Smart Marketer Live in Denver. Should be fun. You know, it'd be helpful. Some reviews. If you listen to the show in Apple Podcasts, oh my gosh, leave a five-star review. Have you left a five-star review?
Paul Reda
No, because I think the show stinks.
Kurt Elster
All right, well don't leave a review then.
Paul Reda
You know what would be helpful going up to Kurt at Smart Marketer and be like, I'm such a big fan. Record me right now. Yeah, he'd love it. Give him a big old hug and a smooch.
Kurt Elster
You know, the offer to record is fine. That's where I draw the line. We'll end it there on that note. Crowdfunding campaigns are great. You can add social proof and urgency to your product pre-orders while reducing risk of failure But with traditional crowdfunding platforms, you're paying high fees and giving away control all while your campaign is lost in a sea of similar offers. It can be frustrating. That's why we built Crowdfunder. The Shopify app that turns your Shopify product pages into your own independent crowdfunding campaigns. We originally created Crowdfunder for our private clients. and it was so successful we turned it into an app that anyone can use. Today, merchants using Crowdfunder have raised millions collectively. With Crowdfund You'll enjoy real-time tracking, full campaign control, and direct customer engagement. And it's part of the Built for Shopify program, so you know it's easy to use. So say goodbye to high fees, and hello to successful store-based crowdfunding. Start your free trial and transform your Shopify store into a pre-order powerhouse today. Search Crowdfunder in the Shopify App Store to get started.