Headless, Online Store 2.0, and PageSpeed Beef
Paul and Kurt recap and discuss July's ecom buzz:
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
8/10/2021
Paul Reda: So, what’s your favorite Olympic event?
Kurt Elster: My favorite Olympic event?
Paul Reda: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Is skateboarding.
Paul Reda: Okay, you actually named something, so good job. I was really expecting you to just totally biff that.
Kurt Elster: No, no. Gymnastics.
Paul Reda: Do you watch any Olympics at all?
Kurt Elster: I have not this year.
Paul Reda: That’s painful to me.
Kurt Elster: You know, NBC’s coverage I hear is not so hot.
Paul Reda: No. NBC is terrible. They don’t know what they’re doing. I do, because I work in TV production, but I’m very disappointed. Streaming app screws up a lot. It’s cool. The streaming app gets in a loop sometimes where it just shows you infinite ads for like forever. The ads just never stop.
Kurt Elster: How long did it take you to figure that out?
Paul Reda: I honestly-
Kurt Elster: You watched like 18 minutes of ads?
Paul Reda: I honestly watched-
Kurt Elster: Wait a second!
Paul Reda: You know, I was kind of just like half watching stuff, and I was like, “You know what? I really want to see the second half of this women’s hammer throw.” And I watched 30 minutes of ads. It’s like just maybe, maybe this ad’s the last one and the app will unbreak itself.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Paul Reda: Anyway, team handball, I’m into it. We’re not good at team handball in America. I want us to be good with it. I have a plan. Every guy that graduates from college and doesn’t make the NBA and was a college point guard should have to go to handball camp and that’s how we make our handball team. I think we’ll shock the world.
Kurt Elster: Wait. Isn’t this show about eCommerce and getting paid?
Paul Reda: All right. I tried to buy a team handball shirt on Fanatics, and they really boned me on shipping, so I didn’t buy it.
Kurt Elster: Well, that’s good, because we are gonna talk about shipping thresholds today among other things. So-
Paul Reda: Yeah, I got beefs with you.
Kurt Elster: I know. You’ve got some beef to discuss. I’m your host, Kurt Elster. Joining me is my cohost and Olympics enthusiast, Paul Reda.
Paul Reda: It’s so true. I made my uncle buy us the triple cast when I was staying at his house in 1992. Remember the triple cast?
Kurt Elster: It’s coming back to me.
Paul Reda: Oh.
Kurt Elster: Today, we’re gonna talk the summer slump. Are you feeling the summer slump? What’s new at Klaviyo? They got that new new. I like some pretty nice new features. And headless is all the rage. Everyone is at least discussing it. It’s a hot topic, so we’ll talk about that as well as Paul’s beef with me and a few other things. So, shall we? We begin with Klaviyo’s new features, just get that out of the way. I think that’s some housekeeping.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s just gonna be a soliloquy by you, because I’m like, “Emails.”
Kurt Elster: Emails.
Paul Reda: That’s what they do.
Kurt Elster: All right, so assuming you use email automation platform Klaviyo, this is my preference for Shopify because the integration is really tight, and at this point it’s a really good product. You’ve got your standard newsletter campaigns, of course, but a lot of other really powerful automation. Split testing, SMS, popups, all right, Facebook integration, okay, don’t need to keep pitching you on Klaviyo. If you’re on Klaviyo, here’s what you’re getting that’s new. Price drop trigger. This is one of the things I’ve wanted. So, you can trigger a flow and tell people, “Hey, that product you were looking at, price just went down on it.”
So, you could essentially automate a sale announcement on stuff that maybe you combine this with like a browse abandonment flow. I don’t know. I’ve not actually set this up. It looked cool.
Paul Reda: Yeah. My question is, so, it’s like they have to sign up? They don’t have to sign up for updates on that product.
Kurt Elster: That’s what I’m not sure about.
Paul Reda: You already have their email and then you also know products they had looked at?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I know you… We could track products you looked at. Because that’s how a browse abandonment flow works. And so, could I now combine that with this price drop trigger? So, it’s like, “All right, if this price dropped and then my list is people who viewed the product.”
Paul Reda: And you’re on the list and we know you viewed the product.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Then it’ll send you an email.
Kurt Elster: Then I could fire you off an email. “Hey, this product, were you still interested in this? Because the price just dropped.”
Paul Reda: Okay. Yeah, because I don’t think having just an email field on there that’s like, “Sign up for price announcements,” or whatever, like when the price drops, is not-
Kurt Elster: Probably a bad idea.
Paul Reda: Probably a bad idea.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They said AB testing for SMS, coming soon. All right, great. And SMS, previously US and Canada, now available in the UK, and they said more coming soon. And really, that sounds like a regulatory thing where you’re jumping through hoops to deploy this stuff. Multistep forms, so the popup form builder in Klaviyo is good. It could be better. And multistep forms are a big step in that right direction.
Like certainly if you feel limited by it, there are other great popup builders, like Privy is my favorite. But the mote between dedicated popup builders and Klaviyo, it got one step smaller with these multistep forms. And then the coolest thing here is reports library. So, with Klaviyo, I know there’s a ton of data in there. And I always felt kind of limited by the reporting. Like I try to get the data out in a meaningful way for me and it just made me feel stupid and frustrated. Like I’m sure smarter people can figure it out. I would just get annoyed with it.
They’ve got this new reports library, which is something like over 30 pre-built reports, and all kinds of interesting stuff. I wasted like 90 minutes just going through these reports and generating them.
Paul Reda: That is you.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: That’s you.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Just diving through those reports. Oh, numbers and data.
Paul Reda: I disagree. The coolest thing is AB testing for SMS messages. Because I love AB testing so much.
Kurt Elster: I do. Because with AB testing it’s like, “Well…” You remove the subjective aspect of, “Well, what does the stakeholder like?” And now it becomes, “Well, what does the data say is effective?”
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s like it’s survival of the fittest. It’s evolution for your marketing.
Kurt Elster: Survival of the fittest.
Paul Reda: It is!
Kurt Elster: The two split tests are out in the wild. SMS. Just trying to kill each other.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And which one is better adapted is the winner.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: That’s why we moved into eCommerce is because we were making all those websites for marketing agencies, and it was just all about everyone’s feelings. It was like whoever our contact, random people at the marketing agency were, whatever their feelings were, that’s what dictated what was happening. And it drove us insane.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. In eCommerce, everybody says, “I love data-driven marketing. I want data-driven decisions.” Whether or not they actually do it, who cares? But they say they do. Whereas, when we were doing those marketing sites, there was no data driven. It was purely ego driven and unspoken.
Paul Reda: Yeah. At least here we have like, “Well, here’s what made the most money. Are you gonna want to make more money or you gonna be stupid? It’s up to you.” And then usually when faced with that, yeah, 80% of the time, they pick the money.
Kurt Elster: All right, so our other housekeeping item, a little bit of headless talk. There’s gonna be more. We got headless coverage coming down the pipe here.
Paul Reda: Yeah, but we’re seeing a lot of headless talk, and I feel like there was something that we didn’t cover in our last little headless talk two weeks ago, which was everyone’s like, “Headless. It’s so fast. It’s so fast.” And that pulls me partially into my beef with Kurt, is that when we installed Dawn on a test store, I was like, “Oh, let’s run this through PageSpeed.” And it scored something insane, like a 98 PageSpeed score. Which again, is stupid. Who cares? PageSpeed is bad. Stop looking at it. But it scored a 98 and I was like, “Oh. Well, that’s nice for all the idiots that care about PageSpeed.”
And then Kurt decided to screenshot that and tweet it out to everyone and was just like, “Oh my God! Dawn gets a 98 on PageSpeed! This is huge!” It’s like I thought PageSpeed was dumb. That was our entire brand. And why you wrecking the brand?
Sound Board: What?!
Paul Reda: By lying. That’s saying something is important when it isn’t.
Kurt Elster: All right, here’s why. Here’s why. Because I 100% agree with you, but I still know what is important to our audience. And unfortunately, yes, we can dismiss PageSpeed, but they still have anxiety about it, and that’s the thing that drives me crazy about PageSpeed. And so, if there’s a scenario in which, “Hey, there’s an easy and legitimate way where the score goes up,” so we can move on and just stop talking about this, that really is my ideal outcome, is like, “Oh, I can close the door on this thing.”
Paul Reda: All right. Well, here’s where our philosophies differ, because you want to give the people what they want, whereas I think the people are dumb and need to be educated and told what they want.
Kurt Elster: It’s paul@ethercycle.com.
Paul Reda: That’s fine. That’s fine.
Kurt Elster: One-star reviews left and right.
Paul Reda: Anyway, the reason it got a 98% was because it was a pristine, untouched theme that had no apps shitting it up. So, once you get your dumb ass apps all in there, because we need 30 apps on our stores apparently, it’ll go back to scoring 14. So, and that’s the other thing with headless, is one of the reasons headless is so fast, and this is an example of that, is that headless, you can’t install on-page apps in headless.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: So, that thing where you’re like, “Well, that’s a cool app. I want to have that little doodad on my website.” Can’t do it. You’re running headless. You gotta hire your in-house dev to write that thing from scratch.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You have multiple people on retainer who know React or Angular, whatever flavor of progressive web app JavaScript you’re running for your headless store, and then they are going to recreate that functionality for you, and that’s how you do it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And it’ll run fast. I’ll be honest. It’ll run faster than an app you downloaded from the app store, but you’re gonna be paying for all that stuff.
Kurt Elster: Well, because you’re doing everything native and server side at that point.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Exactly. And so, that’s why-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I saw this great comment in the Shopify Plus Facebook group from Taylor Sicard. I hope I’m remembering it correctly. He can correct me if I’m wrong. But he said, “Hey, part of the reason headless is so fast is you don’t have a million apps at your fingertips to install.”
Paul Reda: Yes!
Kurt Elster: And when you install those apps, like they all have to pull from third parties, except for the handful that render entirely via Liquid like our apps. Hooray. But there’s trade-offs to that. There’s sacrifices. There’s a lot of functionality it can’t do because of that. So, a lot of the stuff just has to be third party JavaScript. What we’ve seen over and over on sites with these low PageSpeed scores, third party JavaScript, loading in widgets that result in cumulative layout shift. That’s what tanks these PageSpeed scores.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And you know, and you want that. If one of your main things that you want, “I need to get that headless speed,” stop installing apps on your store.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Which no one will do. So, it’s like what do you want from me? It’s like yeah, just install untouched, raw Dawn right now with zero apps and you can get that headless speed experience.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You gotta raw dog your themes.
Paul Reda: You gotta raw dog them.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: Just meaning like no apps. Don’t install these frontend apps and JavaScript widgets.
Paul Reda: They won’t stop, though. And also speaking of PageSpeed, we were talking to one of our favorite brands yesterday that’s our client and we don’t really talk to them that much because they’re probably the only client we have where we set up all these crazy metafields, we did all this wild shit for them on all their product pages, and they worked with us hand in hand when we set that up, and then we kind of almost never talk to them anymore because they just do it all themselves.
Kurt Elster: Well, you know what? They’re too busy counting up that paper. All right, give me why we care about this and how this is relevant to PageSpeed?
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: I know where this is going.
Paul Reda: We care about it because they were like, “Yeah, we had a great month last month.” They made $2.2 million last month.
Sound Board: Dollar, dollar bills, y’all.
Paul Reda: On a PageSpeed score of 4.
Sound Board: R2-D2 sounds.
Paul Reda: Okay. That, stop it! Yeah, their PageSpeed score is 4. Their conversion rate is 3%. Their conversion funnel is extremely efficient, works great, and PageSpeed score 4.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: So, guess that’s not stopping you from making over $2 million a month.
Kurt Elster: Now, the argument someone might make is like, “Well, if the PageSpeed score went up, imagine how much more they would make!” And we have an upcoming interview with a gentleman who was an engineer at Lululemon, among a number of other Fortune 100 companies, and he said, “Well, the data says,” according to this gentleman, he’s like, “Until it drops it to something horrific like 9 second load times, you really don’t see a drop.” And you need to be decreasing that initial page loading time by like one to one-and-a-half seconds on huge amounts of traffic, like Lululemon levels, I’m making a million a week. That’s when you start seeing the gains.
So, if you’re not at those numbers, I just don’t think it’s something to prioritize.
Paul Reda: Well, and here’s another thing. Two weeks ago, one of our clients had an app installed, to go into how apps are bad, and the app company’s servers borked and they were supposed to download a JavaScript file that they were unable to serve to our client’s store, and so the load times on our client’s store was 90 seconds a page.
Sound Board:
Paul Reda: I’m gonna… Stop it!
Kurt Elster: 90 seconds!
Paul Reda: And they still made money for the entire day that the page load was 90 seconds a page.
Kurt Elster: That was the shocking part.
Paul Reda: Obviously, not great. You don’t want that. But even 90 second page loads will not stop you from making money.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If they want it bad enough. Well, it was funny, it was during a product launch.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It was a big product launch.
Kurt Elster: My theory is when people saw the page load times that became scarcity.
Paul Reda: They were like, “Oh, man. Their servers are getting hammered because everyone’s trying to buy this cool new product.” Nope, an app screwed up and those guys should be shot, and they were causing 90 second page load times.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I question Google’s agenda here.
Paul Reda: As we all know. In fact, Kurt and Julie had a conversation about PageSpeed score from her perspective as a store owner and how everyone is sort of just shoving it in her face without explaining what it’s measuring or why it’s important, so let’s listen to that now.
Kurt Elster: How does PageSpeed make you feel?
Julie Elster: I don’t know anything about PageSpeed. I know nothing about it. All I know is that both Shopify and Google tell me my PageSpeed sucks.
Kurt Elster: What does that mean?
Julie Elster: I have no idea. I don’t know. And had I never heard you talk about how stupid these PageSpeed scores are, I’d probably be freaking out about it because they’re both constantly trying to tell me that my PageSpeed is no good. I have no idea what it means, no clue whatsoever. You just talk about it so often, like I can’t escape it. Living with you, I cannot escape it, so knowing this, hearing it every single day, when I see the little popup with like Google Analytics or on my Shopify page, I just ignore it. Because I don’t know what it means, but my PageSpeed is low according to them. I don’t know. No one’s ever complained about it, and everything seems fine on my end, so I don’t worry.
Kurt Elster: Well, hold on. So, you keep saying, “I don’t know what it means.” When they say low, what’s the score it’s telling you?
Julie Elster: I have no idea. Because then I literally do not pay attention. Do you want me to look it up? I could look it up.
Kurt Elster: Well, I… Actually, it’s 24 out of 100.
Julie Elster: You know the score?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Julie Elster: That’s hilarious.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s 24 out of 100.
Julie Elster: That sounds right. I was gonna guess in the 20s, but I wasn’t sure. Okay, that sounds right.
Kurt Elster: Which I-
Julie Elster: Is that really bad? That sounds really bad.
Kurt Elster: We have two seven-figure clients who have single digit scores.
Julie Elster: Wow.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. At least two.
Julie Elster: So, is that supposed to mean that it takes forever for my website to load on somebody, like literally load on somebody’s computer or phone?
Kurt Elster: That’s the implication, isn’t it?
Julie Elster: Because I… I know you like to brag about our super great Wi-Fi setup or whatever, but I’ve never once had an issue with my website loading in a decent amount of time. Ever.
Kurt Elster: It is my dad right to brag about.
Julie Elster: You do brag.
Kurt Elster: We have perfect internet.
Julie Elster: So, like maybe it’s just because we have perfect internet. I don’t know. But I’ve never had an issue.
Kurt Elster: Well but like on your phone.
Julie Elster: Yeah. No, it’s fine on my phone.
Kurt Elster: That’s got nothing to do with the Wi-Fi.
Julie Elster: No one has ever said anything to me, and I have a pretty tight knit community, so I feel like somebody would say something if they thought things were slow or lagging. But nobody’s ever said anything.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The whole thing’s a bunch of bullshit.
Julie Elster: Yeah. That’s what you tell me literally every day.
Kurt Elster: I hate that it tortures people. And so, we were sitting on the couch, and you said, “Man, this thing’s always…” You said, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d be really worried about this.”
Julie Elster: I would be worried. I probably would. If I didn’t have you constantly telling me that it’s BS. And Paul. I also hear Paul’s rants about it being BS. So, between the two of you, I have learned to ignore those scores on Google Analytics and Shopify. I just don’t pay attention to it.
Kurt Elster: That’s why I hate it. It tortures people.
Julie Elster: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It really bothers me.
Julie Elster: Because all of 24, what’s… That’s an F. Not even… That’s not even a high F.
Kurt Elster: That’s an F-minus-minus-minus.
Julie Elster: Yeah. That’s a low F. A 24 out of 100. That’s pretty bad.
Kurt Elster: If someone said like, “All right, you give me a thousand dollars and I’ll guarantee you a B-plus.” Would you do it?
Julie Elster: No. Like, what difference does that make? It’s not slowing down traffic to my site. Traffic’s pretty high. So, even if I do have a low score, it’s not slowing anything down.
Kurt Elster: 100 bucks.
Julie Elster: No. No.
Kurt Elster: All right. If it’s free.
Julie Elster: Sure. Okay. Why not?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Okay. That’s what I thought.
Julie Elster: Okay. Yeah, if it’s free.
Kurt Elster: If it’s free, I’ll gamble on it. But beyond that, I would not waste any resources worrying about it.
Julie Elster: Okay. Does Shopify tell you what this means? What this score means? Does anyone have a high score?
Kurt Elster: If you do this really complicated thing.
Julie Elster: Oh. I heard about it. I live with you. I heard about it. The scam.
Kurt Elster: Any number of really complicated things, you could get a higher score.
Julie Elster: Okay. But you’re not actually improving anything on your website, you’re just improving that number that nobody but you sees?
Kurt Elster: That’s one way to do it. That’s the scammy way.
Julie Elster: Okay. Oh, because there’s a non-scammy way.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You could also hire like a team of developers to build your website as a progressive web app.
Julie Elster: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Julie Elster: All right.
Kurt Elster: And if you did that for many tens of thousands of dollars.
Julie Elster: I’m good.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Julie Elster: I’m good.
Kurt Elster: But then the score would be bigger.
Julie Elster: No thank you.
Kurt Elster: All right.
Julie Elster: I used my manners. That’s what my children say. I used my manners!
Kurt Elster: Okay. That’s pretty good. Let’s leave it there.
Julie Elster: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Thank you for your service.
Julie Elster: My pleasure.
Paul Reda: Summer slump. Oh, do you want to talk about Shogun frontend? I don’t really know what Shogun frontend is.
Kurt Elster: Well, you know what? So, when we’re talking about… People talk about headless. Honestly, I think they’re talking about… Four out of five times, I think they’re talking about Shogun frontend. It really… Because I say we gotta get some headless folks on the show. Every single person I’ve talked to is on headless, Shogun frontend. This thing really became the default.
Paul Reda: And so, what is that? Is that like a GUI tool? Is that essentially the Shopify customized theme but it’s instead of being in Shopify, it’s running on your headless store?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s like, “Hey, we’ve got progressive web app CMS that plugs into Shopify.” So, it’s like you can spin up your CMS straightaway. You’re still… It’s built on React. You still have that scenario where it’s like, “I’m not getting apps unless I’m doing custom development.” But that seems to be… Headless and Shogun frontend in the context of Shopify may as well be interchangeable phrases right now.
Paul Reda: Are we just abandoning Shopify in order to rebuild Shopify?
Kurt Elster: With headless, yeah, it feels like that’s what you’re doing. And that’s where I’m confused about it. That’s where I need to know more and that’s where we gotta talk to people who are doing this.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We got a couple guests coming up in the next few weeks. When we randomly talked about it two weeks ago and we’re like, “We gotta talk to people about this.” We had people come out of the woodwork who wanted to talk to us about it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: So, we’re taking them up on the offer.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. Anyway, the summer slump. Are you… Do your sales feel low this summer? Like June-July.
Paul Reda: My sales feel great.
Kurt Elster: Okay, good. Very good. Because if you’re… Well, what we’re seeing, you know, if you’re selling travel accessories and bathing suits, you’re doing well. If you’re not, things are… and you’re used to that, like that 2020 bump, that’s gone now. And I’ve heard analysts, industry analysts, refer to this. They have this wonderful euphemism. They call it reopening headwinds. The industries are… We’re facing reopening headwinds.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s such a dumb financial term. It’s like, “There’s some headwinds.”
Kurt Elster: We’re hitting a resistance band. All right, in Amazon’s Q2 earnings call, their CFO, Brian Olsavsky, had this to say in a question. He said, “I think the impact of people getting vaccinated and getting out in the world, not only shopping offline but also living life and getting out, it takes away from shopping time.” Well, duh. So, everyone had this… Essentially, an artificial boost in 2020 because I was bored in my house, and I spent more time on devices. And then that resulted in more time shopping. That also… There was more time, often more expendable income because you’re not spending that on restaurants, and leaving your house, and events, et cetera, and gas. There was just more disposable income coupled with general anxiety that I can ease with some retail therapy.
Paul Reda: Yeah, like year-over-year comparisons are not gonna be good for a lot of market segments.
Kurt Elster: So, I think if you’re comparing your numbers-
Paul Reda: And you need to not freak out about that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If you’re comparing your 2021 numbers to 2020, I don’t think that’s necessarily reasonable. I think especially in terms of like year-over-year growth, you should consider 2020 a bizarre outlier and probably compare to 2019 and 2020. And take those in stride.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and I bet those will… The way I think about it is if you set the baseline normalized and say 2019 was 100, 2020 was probably like 125 or 130, and then now you hit 2021 and things are opening up and this stuff is ending right now. It’s gonna go back down, but I think a lot of things have changed that are going to be more permanent changes. Like there was a big bump, so I think it’s not gonna normalize back down to 100. It’s gonna normalize back down to like 110, or like 115.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Paul Reda: So, I bet if you compare it to 2019, you’re still gonna be doing great, and that’s gonna be the new baseline, but don’t compare it to 2020, which was an anomalous one-time bonanza.
Kurt Elster: Now, I think looking forward, now we have… In my mind, the moment that Pfizer was coursing through my veins, in my head I was like, “Pandemic’s over! Let’s roll!” And it turns out, it wasn’t.
Paul Reda: I got feelings on that, but I don’t know if we wanna go into that here.
Kurt Elster: Oh. All right, the last thing you and I wanted to discuss, free shipping. And this is you have more beef with me.
Paul Reda: Yeah, because… No, this is a mild beef, more of a question. More of a comment than a question.
Kurt Elster: All right. I’m just trying to gin up some drama.
Paul Reda: So, last episode we had a question about shipping rules and what… how you should set your free shipping threshold. And our answer was, “Oh, well, you should take your average order value and increase it by like 10% or five bucks or whatever and make that your free shipping threshold, which will then… People will be so close to free shipping, they’ll buy something extra to get the free shipping and thus increase your average order value, make you more money.”
But then also, I remember we’ve previously declared there’s no gods but shipping.
Kurt Elster: No gods but shipping!
Paul Reda: And you should offer free shipping to everyone and just increase your prices because free shipping is a bigger pain to them. Not getting free shipping is a bigger pain to them than paying more money per product. So, which is it? Is it they’re supposed to have a shipping threshold, or they’re supposed to do free shipping?
Kurt Elster: Look, I don’t have an answer for this, and I don’t have a sound effect for this.
Paul Reda: Good.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I think it depends on… Ultimately, I think it depends on what you’re optimizing for. If your initial concern is, “All right, I just need to know what sells and I’m early on and I’m starting out,” I would ideally… I want to price shipping into the product. Everything ships free. This is very… This is the customer-centric view. This is the conversion rate optimization pure play. And then I’m not… When conversions are down, at least I’m not thinking to myself, “Look, well, maybe it’s my free shipping threshold is wrong.” I’m just ruling that out entirely.
But it’s not practical on all products and audiences to do this.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I was gonna say I feel like we need to… Everything we say here, there is a caveat whereas if you have small little accessories, you’re selling for like four bucks, obviously if someone showed up and was like, “I’m buying a four-dollar accessory and that’s it,” and also you have no free shipping threshold, so you’re definitely gonna be losing money on this purchase… You can’t have free shipping.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Or you can’t somehow allow that to happen. Do not lose money on a transaction.
Kurt Elster: And you know, truly, our show is very US-centric, because we’re in the Midwest, and so that changes things, and also, even in the US, where you’re shipping from makes a big difference. I’m in California, everything I’m shipping that has to go over the mountains, it really ends up being quite expensive. Like if I’m shipping from California to New York, that’s rough.
Paul Reda: Whereas, if you’re in like Memphis, you’re just like, “Woohoo!” UPS is next door.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And when that’s a cost on every single order, it adds up. Both answers are right and it really-
Paul Reda: That’s not helpful.
Kurt Elster: It depends on your business. But at the same time, like I don’t want to be giving away… I don’t want this huge expense in the shipping. So, I don’t know what the right answer is. I like doing shipping… If I’m optimizing for revenue, I probably want to use a free shipping threshold based on my average order value. If I really want to know what’s going on here later stage in the business and I’m on Shopify Plus, I can use this app called Ship Scout. It’s fabulous. I was lucky. I got to play with the beta. I’m in love with it. If this is the question, like, “All right, what’s this costing us and what’s the right free shipping threshold?” You can use Ship Scout to effectively split test free shipping thresholds and then there’s no question. It’ll tell you all other things being the same, at $0, this is the conversion rate. At 50, at 100, you just test it with it. It’s great.
Yeah. So, again, the answer is, well, split test, but in the case of free shipping, really the only way to do it in a statistically significant way is you gotta be on Plus.
Paul Reda: Well-
Kurt Elster: And that, like we just… Most of the market just is now… Doesn’t have access to that.
Paul Reda: Well, and the problem with split testing is it requires a certain traffic amount you need to be getting every month.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: I’m just worried about a rule of thumb we can give to our shorties out there who are just still getting into the game. I guess I think if you’re just starting out, I think a good rule is jack up those prices and just have free shipping, because it just makes things a whole lot more slippery, and like people will just slide through the conversion funnel easier.
Kurt Elster: Yes. I think… Yeah, in our scenario, free shipping never hurts.
Paul Reda: True. Free shipping never hurts. Again, caveat, unless you have tiny little cheapo products and there’s… You’re seeing people buying the tiny cheapo products and it’s destroying your margins.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, but at the same time, it’s like if I sell stickers, I can probably ship that free and the margin’s great. Five bucks a sticker, I drop it in. I buy weird artist stickers off Etsy.
Paul Reda: Well, and what, they just send that like First Class mail in an envelope?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s just like wrapped in a piece of paper. Costs them 50 cents. In case I need to explain how postage works.
Paul Reda: Okay. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: You know, neither do I.
Paul Reda: No.
Kurt Elster: I was hoping you wouldn’t ask follow-up questions.
Paul Reda: I know the people need the small stamps when they change the rate because I watched Fargo a couple weeks ago.
Kurt Elster: I haven’t watched that one yet.
Paul Reda: You’ve never seen Fargo?
Kurt Elster: I’ve seen the movie. I’ve not seen the TV show.
Paul Reda: Oh. I was talking about the movie.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Yeah.
Paul Reda: TV show kind of goes… First three seasons. Watch the first three seasons of the show.
Kurt Elster: All right. Lastly, before we go, and we’re digging up some dirt from our last episode. We’re doing some follow ups here. Let’s revisit online store 2.0. Because we got… We posted a 10-minute walkthrough of Dawn on YouTube and it got over 2,000 views, a lot of comments, and the comments were like, “Well, how do I get the theme? When can I use it? Who’s this available to?” What do we know here?
Paul Reda: Well, if it’s not available in the theme store now, it will be before the end of August. If you want it now, just Google Shopify Dawn GitHub.
Kurt Elster: G-I-T-H-U-B.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And then there’ll be like a little thing that says “download zip” and you just download the zip file of the theme and upload it to your store, which is how you install themes on stores. I hope that’s straightforward enough for you. If you can’t-
Kurt Elster: And then you can play with it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If you can’t figure that out, don’t install Dawn. And that’s it. You could play with it. You could use it right now. It’s real barebones, but you know, you don’t need more than that. I mean, if you could sell stuff on Dawn, then you could maybe… If your stuff is selling on Dawn, now you can think about how you can optimize it and make it fancier and nicer. But it would be… It’s a good proof of concept for your product, I think.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I mean, if you want to play with it, you absolutely can.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Without a doubt. Just go right ahead and do it and you could launch it. I think we know people… didn’t friend of the show Ann Thomas have a store running on Dawn right now?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. She does. She spun it up quickly.
Paul Reda: Yeah. There are live Dawn stores selling things as we speak. But again, it’s just a Shopify theme. It’s not gonna make your teeth white and solve all your problems, so don’t get too crazy with it.
Kurt Elster: I need a theme that will clean the litter box.
Paul Reda: Oh. I hate that.
Kurt Elster: So, and then the other online store 2.0 feature, the one that really, we’ve been using in practice, in the wild, that I’ve seen you use quite a bit, and you seemed thrilled with it, and clients really like it, is the new metafields implementation.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I love them. It’s really great. It’s an easy way for me to make custom product pages for people that are so easy to maintain. It’s awesome. I mean, I know, because I’m deep in the weeds on this, so I know how to make it as simple as possible for our clients to use, but yeah, I can set up… If they want to upload an HTML5 video, I write out for the code for that and then I make an HTML5 video metafield, and you can make it a file metafield, and it’s just like, “Well, pick what file from the files section on your Shopify store is gonna be filled in here.”
So, I mean, you just upload the video that you have into that little box that it gives you directly on the product page and there you go. It’s there in like the lower part of the page or wherever we decided the design was. And it works with images. You have text fields, and like larger, giant paragraph text fields, and you could set character limits, and like minimum characters on all of it, so that you make sure that they put in all the right stuff. I mean, it’s just really, really great. It’s so powerful and it’s so easy for our client to use because they’re already on the product listing where they’re making the edits to the individual product, and just there at the bottom is more fields for them to fill out that are really straightforward and easy.
Kurt Elster: And this is present in every store now. I don’t need Dawn for this.
Paul Reda: No. You don’t need any of this. I mean, this is available in the Shopify backend.
Kurt Elster: Settings, metafields.
Paul Reda: Settings, metafields. And once you create the metafield and set it up, it just appears on all the product pages. Again, my beef with it is it appears in like a specific order on the product page that’s bad, that’s like really confusing. It’s the reverse order-
Kurt Elster: That they’re created in?
Paul Reda: That they’re created. So, you create one, and then you create a new one, and that goes on top of that, and then you create another one, and that one goes on top of that, so it’s like-
Kurt Elster: Didn’t you figure out some workaround to rearrange those?
Paul Reda: Yeah, so there’s like a thing in the metafields system where it’s like, “Pin this metafield,” and I didn’t know what that meant. And they don’t explain it to you. But I determined that pinning it means it actually shows up on the product listing. And if you unpin it, the metafield still exists, but it’s not on the product listing anymore. Not quite sure why.
Kurt Elster: So, we have hidden metafields?
Paul Reda: Yeah. I guess we would have a hidden one. I’m not sure. But anyway, if you unpin all of them and re-pin them, if you go into each one individually in a specific order and pin them in a specific order, then you can manipulate them to show up in the order you want them to show up on. Would be very nice if we could have some sort of drag and drop system, guys.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s a product manager somewhere who needs to know this.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That would be really good.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That would be nice.
Paul Reda: But yeah, I made a cool thing for Black Diamond Coatings that’s like a comparison before and after you apply the Black Diamond Coating to your patio, and you know, I built out the code for it and then just on their product listing, it just is before pic and after pic, and they just have to upload one picture into each of the slots and then on every product page that before and after pic will be populated correctly.
Kurt Elster: And previously, how would you have implemented such a thing?
Paul Reda: I mean, we probably would have done it with metafields in the janky metafield system, in which case they had to like, “Well, we have an app, it’s Metafields Guru,” so now you have to leave the listing, now go in the apps. Now, fine that listing again inside the metafield app-
Kurt Elster: And you’re paying for that app.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And then upload that thing into there. Or, you know, obviously for something like that, I mean… I’m not sure how different they want to say their products are in changing your patio. We might have just hardcoded the images directly into the template.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah. Often, that was the solution. Or like tag triggers.
Paul Reda: But yeah, so this is cool as hell. You know, obviously to get that metafield data to show up on your actual product page, someone is gonna need to go into the template and write the code in the Liquid to make all that stuff appear properly.
Kurt Elster: Now, if you know enough to be dangerous, metafields aren’t scary. If you know HTML, and a little bit of Liquid, 100% you can figure this out.
Paul Reda: Sure.
Kurt Elster: You don’t think so?
Paul Reda: Well, I mean… I guess I’m just thinking of the stuff we’re doing. But yeah, if you just want to throw a video up there, or like a YouTube embed, yeah. If you want to put a YouTube video on every single one of your products, down lower… I mean, obviously Shopify has product media. You could just put them in directly with your product photos. But if you want a big, cool video lower in the page, yeah, you put in the YouTube IFrame off of any YouTube, the embed code, but then make the ID of the video into the metafield. And then just go on every single product you have and just enter in the ID of the different videos you want to have on all your different products. And it’ll just work.
Kurt Elster: This is a real upgrade to the CMS. So, our final verdict on Shopify’s new metafields feature.
Sound Board: Whooee!
Kurt Elster: We love it.
Paul Reda: We super love it. We’ve been making some stuff that’s sick and is live now or will be live in the near future.
Kurt Elster: Sweet. All right. Let’s get out of here. Folks, join our Facebook group so you can stay in touch. Search Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Facebook. Join our insiders’ group and get vaccinated and I don’t want your one-star reviews. All right, let’s get out of here.
Paul Reda: All right.