w/ Marcus Seoighe, Clean Canvas
A Shopify theme is not just about making your store look good... it's the backbone of your customer's shopping experience. There is a lot of functionality baked into it, and as a result, your bottom line may also be tied to which theme you pick.
Marcus Seoighe of Clean Canvas, and ex-Senior Theme Partners Manager at Shopify, joins us to unpack how the right theme can elevate customer experience & drive your bottom line.
In this episode, we delve into the evolution of Shopify themes & how staying fresh is crucial for your digital storefront. It's a deep dive into what makes themes succeed & how the partnership community at Shopify pushes boundaries for merchants.
Chapters:
Our conversation isn't just theory; it's loaded with practical advice. From choosing the right theme to understanding premium offerings, we cover the factors that matter most to your e-commerce success.
00:00 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Heads up. Friends, the unofficial Shopify podcast is made by indie entrepreneurs or indie entrepreneurs and may contain material not suitable for all audiences, like swearing or economics. Listener discretion is advised. If you enjoy the unofficial Shopify podcast, I bet you enjoy podcasts exploring how profitable businesses start growing and run right. That's what our friends at the Upflip podcast are offering. Like this show, it's a show that uncovers how great businesses are built and how others can replicate that success. Each episode features a real-world business owner or expert who shares their story, strategies and advice. So if that sounds good to you, subscribe to Upflip wherever you get your podcasts, and then let me know what you think.
01:00
Well, my friends, it's another themes episode. Right, shopify themes? It's so critical. A Shopify theme is not just about making your store look good, right, it is a bit like an outfit. You want to look cute, you want to feel cute. But unlike an outfit, it's the backbone of your customer's shopping experience. It is more than looks. There is a lot of functionality baked into it. There is customer experience dependent on it and, as a result, that means your bottom line, your revenue, your conversion rate may also be tied to which theme you pick. Plus, you got to maintain the darn thing. So on today's show, we're talking about that crucial piece of the online retail puzzle Shopify themes and our special guest to go over it with us is Marcus Shoiga, who is the CEO of Clean Canvas and former senior Shopify theme partners manager, and so you, hopefully, should have a pretty good sense of what we're talking about here. This is the unofficial Shopify podcast. I'm your host, kurt Elster, jack Masdy. Let's dive in, marcus, welcome.
02:07 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Thanks, kurt, great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
02:10 - Kurt Elster (Host)
All right, sir, let's start with a bit of your journey. How do you go from? Well, just share a bit about your journey from senior theme partnerships manager at Shopify just rolls off the tongue to CEO of Clean Canvas.
02:27 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, I suppose that to me it wasn't. There was no intent, I suppose, on my side to end up going into that area. Listen, life of Shopify is fantastic. It was a roller coaster, incredible journey. I mean even to jump back before that, my journey into Shopify, I suppose and I always sort of used this term it was almost under false pretenses in a sense. I don't know, that sounds really dodgy. But no, what I intended, more than sort of similar to yourself as well, I was doing an awful lot of freelance work prior to joining Shopify web development, web stores, graphic design, so on.
03:04
I had veered away from e-commerce an awful lot because at that time some of the systems were just they will cover some root for TUDO not very intuitive and very yeah, very expensive I suppose as well, just in terms of, from a client perspective, the amount of maintenance that will go on with that. So I had veered away from that an awful lot. My web design Heard of Shopify thought this is very interesting. They started to expand into Ireland, started to get a bit of a workforce hired there. I went in with the full intention that I was going to go in, learn the platform from the inside and spend maybe six, nine months there, jump out then use it as part of my service offerings to future clients. Fast forward six and a half years later I was still there Phenomenal place to work.
03:52
I ended up in the themes section, as we mentioned. It was, yeah, a phenomenal experience because we had the ability and those are that we still had very much the early startup you know Shopify at that stage. So we were really highly engaged in certain areas, particularly in the theme partnerships community, which was quite small at that time. So it allowed us an awful lot to collaborate, to innovate, beta test, filter feedback and even just enhance the ideas and concepts around what a theme should be for merchants and to make sure that that partner community were very highly merchant focused and engaged.
04:32
So through working with these phenomenal teams, seeing their dedication to what they do, what they build, how much they're involved in it, I became a massive advocate and champion for themes and I suppose you know it got to the stage where we built this fantastic community of the online store 2.0, it started to come out. We started to reopen the theme store. But the two original founders of Clean Canvas, john Llewellyn Smith and Kevin Pierce two amazing guys still great friends to this day. They actually approached me and said that they were looking for Clean Canvas to take. You know, fresh direction, fresh blood, fresh input and, obviously, knowing my tenure, my career, my passion for the themes and my understanding of it from the platform perspective, yeah, they just literally invited me to step in and out the room. The ship.
05:23 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So how long ago was that? When were you? When did you join Clean Canvas? What did you join Shopify?
05:28 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, shopify. I think it was, if I recall, 2015, 2016,. Perhaps in around that and I mean I've been working with Clean Canvas pretty much as their contact point within Shopify, for you know pretty much the time since I started at Shopify, so that would you know. I think I joined with them back in 2022. Yeah, mid-2022, I that Shopify joined Clean Canvas and been there ever since.
05:58 - Kurt Elster (Host)
You're at Shopify. Geez, six, seven years. What were some of the key changes you saw in the theme landscape? You alluded to it in your journey.
06:09 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, I mean it's. There was a couple of key, pivot of moments, I suppose, in themes. When I joined first, there was still a. It was quite a I'm not even going to say a high bar. There was always a high bar getting a theme into the theme store in terms of standards, feature sets, requirements in general.
06:28
But in terms of what a theme was and creating a concept and a brief around it, we would always ask a theme partner why should this theme be in the theme store? It would force them to come up with a concept of brief, really think about the minutiae of what this theme is doing and what is it serving, what's its purpose, who is it aimed at? So that was having the space to be able to delve into all of this. In the early days, the early stages of the partnerships, I communitally really did help structure how we want to look at themes and how they should be moving forward. So eventually that led to we have to identify, I suppose, where themes could expand and where they could go to online store 2.0, a great example and even prior to that we had non-section themes, if we remember them, and then obviously sections came and was just limited to one page and then, obviously, the next natural evolution was getting that to online store 2.0, where sections were right across the entire store. So it's just working with the teams internally in Shopify.
07:37
Working with the theme partners around those was massive, because it was literally the very essence of what a theme could not do. Another big area then, of course, was obviously when Toby Luke put the mandate out for performance and that we all literally every area of Shopify had to zoom in and see where exactly we could enhance our particular corner at Shopify and improve the performance aspects of that. From a themes perspective. That was things like removing jQuery, third-party libraries, native JS web components and all these other factors taking into making sure that themes, you know, were streamlined and performed as possible accessibility then, or being another one. So those were probably the key ones around themes. But yeah, it's also just, you know, building towards that area where the theme store could be reopened to more people.
08:30 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So you really saw quite a lot of evolution in this platform. There's some things I want to go over about Shopify themes. So in the Shopify theme store there's only 175 themes. There's less than 200. So they're really quite vetted. What was some of the thinking there to try and keep it so finite?
08:55 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, the biggest premise behind all of this and the biggest driver was and we drank the Kool-Aid on this, we lived it, we read it, we advocated this consistently was the product had to be merchant focused. At the end of the day, this is the person who is bringing this out. They're putting it on their store. This could be their livelihood, this is their connection, their customers, to the world, to their livelihood. So we wanted to ensure that anybody that's building is not just building this as a solely as a business interest, in the sense that accumulate as much as you can and maybe deprecate the theme and build another one. Get what you can and deprecate it, because there is an awful lot of work that goes in the maintenance, enhancements and the longevity of the theme. It would be quite easy to build one, get it up in the theme store, sell it for a while, deprecate it, build another one. But yes, what you're doing is all those merchants that would have purchased or invested and hope that this theme would be literally something that they couldn't live with for a number of years while their business grew, would be left pretty much high and dry and happen to restart again, so ingraining that into the teams that were building things to the Shopify theme store was really what created that limit.
10:15
I'm not going to call that a limitation, but that mindset that was. It was not for everybody. Some people could admit to it, some people would feel that this was almost too much of a demand, but it is that care for the fact that we really do want the merchant to succeed. We want our product to be with that merchant or that store for as long as possible and that they maximize every nuanced element and every enhancement and every update and every maintenance element that's pumped into that theme to help them succeed online. So I know it sounds almost evangelistic, but it is like that with the theme partners and I think that amount of care that was put into the theme partners landscape in the early days is really paid off.
10:59 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I have. I've always enjoyed just hey, limit my choice so I don't have paralysis analysis. And the other advantage of that is I've been doing this a long time, as themes that I loved many years ago have been consistently updated and are still around today and are just better, enhanced versions of the thing I loved years ago, and so hearing your explanation of that intended thought is good. It's been my experience. I think that's great. Now, contrasting that you could buy Shopify themes from a number of places that aren't Shopify. When you do that, it turns it's like the absolute opposite of what you described. Again, we're biased, we're evangelizing, but man, it's a horror show out there. Man, oh, oh God, we years ago said you can't, we're not, we can't work on themes that didn't come from the Shopify theme store or trusted developer. If it's like you got it from some third-party marketplace, I'm out, because that code was always a horror show. It was like we're going to take some WordPress stuff and try to adapt it. Oh, it was grim yeah.
12:01 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
I mean, we've seen some.
12:02 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I don't have a question there, I'm just like, oh no but I listened.
12:05 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, I mean, I could talk about that for hours. We've seen some car crashes in our times and I think it's finally starting to well. I think it's probably started to come around a little while. If you go back to the older forums and the older merchant forums and Shopify community forums and you see somebody even mention a WordPress or a theme forest theme, for example, or some other place, you can just see the responses to what those have played out like.
12:33
The big thing, then, for the Shopify theme store is it's the only place that you can go to actually be guaranteed that the Shopify features that are served through a theme are actually built in a robust and stable manner. That was that's like a prerequisite for this. So I mean, if you want your dynamic checkout button, if you want your you know automatic discounts, you want your nested navigation up to all these areas that, like Shopify, invested into and that are served through the theme partners, that's where you go to ensure that they don't break or don't look absolutely catastrophic on an iPhone versus a Nokia versus whatever it is that you're working with.
13:15 - Kurt Elster (Host)
All right, so clean canvas. How many themes do you have in the theme store?
13:20 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Currently nine. We can boast currently that we're the largest fire themes theme store. We're also one of the longest serving 2010, 2011,.
13:29
I think, and even saying that, just like you said, some of the themes that we have still on the go come from then, like symmetry, which is one of our top selling themes. That's usually floating in around either first, second or third terms of the top selling theme on the theme store and that's been there since about 2011, 2012. So I mean that that that theme is it's not just stood the test time, but it has been reinvented numerous times based on, you know, at various enhancements and, obviously, the the tenured experience that has been gathered within clean canvas over that, you know, well, over a decade. So you know that that keeps getting pumped back, and we invested into the theme so that every single version that we release has some sort of, you know, incremental improvement moving towards the needs of that particular current time.
14:19 - Kurt Elster (Host)
The other one that really that jumps out at me in addition to symmetry, is enterprise. I see a lot of enterprise theme and I think, just because it it is so visually obviously like this is for larger catalogs.
14:33 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, we put a lot of work into enterprise. We went back to the drawing board because clean canvas being around so long, you know, each theme was almost built in a silo in the sense that this is, you know, one unique old structure for this one, one, for the next one, the next, With enterprise, we decided, you know, we're going to rework our entire code framework, make more performance accessible and also factor in extensibility, which we might get into in a bit. So agencies and customization services could build on top of our theme.
15:05 - Kurt Elster (Host)
But enterprise oh, it's on my list oh good, good, no worries Again.
15:09 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
another thing I could talk about. You know, I had an idea, but the enterprise theme was just. Yeah, it was a pleasure, but we really, really we have time with this one, the. It is, as you said, large inventory, multi product stores, drop shippers, large brands, but it also factors in so many conversion elements, emotional elements and still we feel anyway at least, and this is the feedback we're constantly getting there is a lovely customer journey experience on the store, so a customer is never feeling cluttered or cluster full big car, you know, it's just everything's piled in in a messy manner. You can quite easily have a beautifully structured layout store but yet have hundreds of products displayed out across it and still have your conversion elements more since factor into that as well.
16:01 - Kurt Elster (Host)
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17:33
When we're talking about these themes, we would refer to them as premium. If I look on your website, I'm looking at themes. The title tag is premium Shopify themes. Our SEO tells us that this phrase premium Shopify theme is how we talk about this. What the heck is a premium Shopify theme? What do we mean by premium in this context?
17:52 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, it's a good point. What qualifies as premium versus just the theme that you're paying for, versus a free theme? By Shopify it's very easy to attach these keywords and tags and market in whatever way you wish. We all know that people very often embellish just how elite our experts are. Premium they may be, or their services may be, and can be difficult for merchants or any customer to let's call it decipher between what is actually legitimate at least something that you get a premium service for, or premium product, versus somebody who's literally just labeling it as such. For ourselves, proof is in the pudding. I feel we've been here well over a decade in the space as market leaders.
18:43
The reviews we have in our themes stand for themselves. It's much easier to get a negative review than a positive review in any sense. We all know this. Generally, we go to restaurant but bad and meal it's easier to leave a review about because you're feeling sensed. Actually, when people have a great experience, they tend to rarely leave a review. But yet in saying that, we've got like I think nearly all our themes are over 90% in terms of positive review rankings and that's over. We've had over 100,000 merchants use our themes over the years With the premium tag.
19:17
If I had to advise anybody on it, what would decipher it? Reach out to the team. Talk to the team behind it. See why they feel that they are a premium theme and what do they offer. Judge their support, judge their reviews.
19:34
Take the product and the great thing about themes, as we know, is you can trial them indefinitely.
19:38
So go in, take the product for a test drive, see how much you enjoy using it, how much you engage with the elements in it and how, as you go through it, you can sort of feel if there's elements that are missing that you wish were there, or things that you don't even have to look to perfect because they're already presented in front of you and within a short space of time you shall have a store looking like a million bucks that you know, that you'd be happy to put your mark with All those elements put in together.
20:06
Lean towards that. But then, when you're talking to the team, you get the support that I can safely say that the level of support we offer is something that we really pride ourselves on. But you can look through the change logs, the amount of investment that's gone into this product over the years, and again on the team listings as well. We have sample stores using our themes, so if you go in and check out those and see how other people are using it, you'll immediately get the feel of yeah, this is something that does warrant the premium.
20:38 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I do. I often I look for and I reference those sample stores because I know it's like okay, here is a real world use case of what this looks like out in the wild. So I find it very helpful. When I'm browsing a theme in the Shopify theme store, I get 174 themes currently. If I browse all themes I can now filter them. So I'm going to filter by paid and then this leaves me with 162 choices and from there it says okay, you can filter by features, which, if there's a must have feature I want I'm going to. I could use that like interestingly, only 126 have breadcrumbs as a feature. 143 of color swatches yeah, I think those two are table stakes and I'm down to 111 themes here.
21:22
My remaining filters are interesting. There's catalog size and industry. I think both of those are nonsense. Industry, as it relates to a theme, is really just like well, what splash photos, what stock photos? What example did we include in our default styles? And catalog size? That's what I don't get. I've never understood that. How is the theme and the catalog size dependent on one another?
21:53 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, listen, I am absolutely valid points and I will throw this out there and I don't think it's a secret really but the Shopify theme store has not gotten the same amount of resources and investment as the app store. So when you go into the theme store the filtering, the feature elements that are presented, some of the classifications they need to be revised. They need to be reworked. They're not relevant. They were designed. Some of these things are early stage platform stuff that was put there and just hasn't been updated. There's a lot of phenomenal things in there. There's a lot of great people behind it, but there is a need desperately to rework this and present the themes better and to educate merchants around the world. Yeah, industry, it's impossible. We can release a theme enterprise and we release it based around a business type or a business model or a business structure within it towards what the customer experience may be, plus factoring into things like conversion, the promotion and the presentation of products that can be used for anything that can be used from selling hand knitted T-Coses to massive sportswear and drop shippers. There is very few things within a theme that can make it vertical orientated. So we could build a clothing store theme and maybe create something that caters for size chart or a returns element or something like that, and that's fine. But that's not to say that somebody might take that theme and use it for an automotive repair center or something else, because they like some of the elements and the aspects and the designs of the treatment, and that's perfectly fine. We see our themes used literally for every possible thing you can imagine being sold online. Some of it, from the fun to the freaky, it's all out there, as we know. But it's a yeah, it's catalog presentation can be a bit nuanced and since we've got a large inventory, you need to make sure that a large amount of products we presented on a collection page quite well, be it a grid, be it a list format. How much real estate did they take up on a page? But again, these things should be, or can be, configurable within the theme settings as well, so that the merchant has the ability to make the decisions of how they want to present.
24:23
But yeah, there's a lot of things like I mean even breadcrumbs. It's weird within Shopify because of the way the products can be assigned to different and varied collections but they're not linked directly underneath them. The breadcrumbs system can only literally go one or two deep. So it is quite limited. And we constantly get questions about you know more nuanced breadcrumbs. Can we create them on the theme? But just not technically possible within Shopify. So it's again almost a bit of I'm not going to call it false advertisement, but there should be a little bit more nuanced attention around those finder elements Going into the theme store.
25:00
Yeah, it's just shop around, just take a look. What I also find handy is just reach out to the various partners that you might look at some of their catalog, like the look of some of the themes they have. You can get direct links to just their catalog of themes as well. You can browse through those. Sometimes it's helpful to just section off something if you like the look and the appeal that a particular type of theme designer might have. But yeah, reach out and talk to us, we can give you the information and, yeah, make a more educated choice there.
25:34 - Kurt Elster (Host)
What's the first thing I should consider if I'm shopping for a new premium theme for my store? What's the one thing? Where do I start?
25:45 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
I would look at the experience of the team behind it. For the simple fact, the matter is, if you're going to invest this money into a theme, if you're going to purchase a theme, you want, number one, to know that this isn't a flash in the plan, it isn't something that's literally going to look phenomenal in this version or this iteration and then, six months down the line, you're still looking for some basic feature that's not there, or there's some bug due to a new browser update that still hasn't been resolved. So look to the experience of the team, because if you're talking to a theme partner that has a number of years of experience, you know that those areas are going, that they have dealt with across all the support tickets they've done with merchants. That's going to be factored in already, so you're not going to find those same mistakes or those same issues or those same problems that all these people had maybe one, two, three years ago. So that would be the biggest thing Experience behind the product. Look at the level of support as soon as you reach out. How quickly do they get back? How do they get back? How do they answer your information or your question? Why information do they provide? You know and get your guidance from there.
26:57
Then sample stores look at those various items, see how other people are using these themes and make a good judgment call as to whether you feel that that store is actually a pleasurable experience, because, at the end of the day, we're all customers at some point online shopping, so we're all perfectly capable of going in, looking at a store and judging the experience that we had. Are the novel elements or treatments that might be presented on a store through a theme and yeah, that'd be the biggest thing Demo stores as well. If you want to, the theme page listings for any of the themes. Check out the demo stores, because these are literally the way that we have created a mock version of our theme and we show how the features can be used. So at least then you can go in and you can see the potential for what you can bring your store to, and that'd be the biggest thing. But do lean on the team behind the product more than anything else. That would be my piece of advice.
27:58 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And if we're talking about with these themes, you've been around for years and they upgrade, they evolve as the platform evolves, as features get added how often Should I be thinking about upgrading or switching themes? I think just the nature of a website is three by year, four, they're look at, dated.
28:20 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
It's hard in one sense because, even with the best roadmaps and intentions and plans that we'll have to have particular type of updates or elements sort of worked in over the course of however amount of months or a year. Shopify will come out with new features and then we have to rework our roadmap around basically getting those features out and get them lied so that people access them. So a certain amount will be subject to yeah, what's Shopify releasing? Is this something that's needing to be in themes or is going to be served through themes? So obviously you know Shopify have addition and keep an eye on those. So generally, if there's something major that's coming through in themes, you can always reach out to your theme part and ask them is there any major updates coming?
29:05
But you know we try to avoid what's called, I suppose, those breaking changes, and this is just around, I suppose, around the platform structure, the sense that certain changes to the encode structures cannot be automatically updated and carried across to your current customized version that you're using. Some required that you need to reset up the store on the new version. It's just. It's the content portability issue within Shopify. It's just such a complex nuance to area that to try and treat it correctly. It's, yeah, I don't know if there ever will be a solution, but again, it's a small lift for a major, major, major amount of value that you will get in a new version. So we at Plink Handlers, anyway, we try to limit any major, major, massive breaking changes or whatever it says. It's like once, maybe twice a year, subject to, let's say, a major Shopify feature coming out.
30:03
To be honest, how regular should somebody update their theme? I would recommend at least on an annual basis at them. Very, very, very, because you you will be losing out so many nuanced enhancements, subject to who you're using, of course, in part, but we we're. There's things like accessibility, performance, browser updates, new device types, all these areas that are constantly moving very quickly in the background. So we're constantly keeping our products in like up to date in tandem with those.
30:35
So you may lose out on those few extra little bits and pieces just by not keeping it up to date, but again, you can just keep an eye on it, you can watch these things starting to gather and that just then decided certain times in the year obviously not a week before BFCM or you know some major sale or event maybe pick the quiet times of the year where you go okay, we've a week, two weeks here where we know that this is generally maybe a quieter period of our sales are will allow us a bit of additional development time. And, of course, in saying that as well, you can work away on a version of the theme in the background, have it that all done and then literally switch it across without an interference with your actual live store as well. So, yeah, there's ways around it. But I'd say, keep an eye on the change of the theme, talk to the theme partners, but don't miss out those cool updates, because they're done for a week. Yeah, checking out.
31:29 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I do the same thing. I look at the change log until when I see something interesting, I'm like, oh, that's, that's what I want. And occasionally we'll we'll find like, all right, here you know, a theme's been customized, but hey, there's this one feature that will go through the effort we'll port. We'll find it just like, port just that code, which it's not ideal compared to the full upgrade, but it is a good, good hybrid approach. And if you give you a good like Band-Aid or stopgap solution so that you're not necessarily going through that full upgrade process as often, if your store gets traffic but doesn't see the sales you want, it can feel like throwing money out of a window, and that's a huge problem. I get it. It's frustrating, but there's good news.
32:14
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33:14 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, I'll say, and first of all, to your point, what you made there in terms of that solution, absolutely I mean, it can often be the most the best approach possible at that given time, given, obviously, gale of the store and the amount of work. But this is also why there's great service providers out there that you can actually lean on to do this stuff for you as well, and at very reasonable cost too. If you've got an in-house dev or you've got a maintenance contract with somebody who can do this for you, phenomenal, absolutely. And for those reasons, and obviously for we build things that people can take use and go to market pretty much straight away. But we also see an awful lot of agencies and third party providers take our themes and use them for client builds, so it gets them off the ground in terms of this is 90% of what we need, and then there's that extra 10% of these additional.
34:09 - Kurt Elster (Host)
That's our approach, yeah.
34:11 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Exactly, and it's the most sensible, effective in terms of time and cost as well For us. We want to provide that groundwork because we build to broad base. We don't build for, you know, the very niche, the very specific, the very nuanced. We have so many conversations around elements and features and stuff that we look at, potentially build into our themes and you go well, how many people are actually going to need this? And if we put that in that, minor as it may be, we'll still have a bloat on the performance impact of the theme. So if this is something that is only going to be used by a tiny subsection of merchants and it's not really for us to be building it, that is ideal for any other agency or service provider to use our theme, build on top of it for that niche category then. So what we've done is we've taken the approach that, yeah, we still see our themes as a great product, but it's also a start point to a good extent, or a base framework for people, as you said, like yourselves or whomever, to build on top of.
35:15
So the way we've done this is we've released and I think we are probably the the one thing partner has the most amount of JS events exposed in our technical guides and documentation Say listen, here's where you tap in to the key functionality elements for our themes so you can build on top of them. We've structured our code so we have a huge amount of code comments left throughout it, so basically any anybody who's comfortable going in there can navigate their way through all the code in terms of where they need to find stuff, what it does, how to represent what they need to build on. There's no spaghetti code. We built, like in web, components and elements so that you know and we we give guidance around this in our technical guides, literally so that people can take our products and further enhance them. They're very specific once needs, yeah, just so agencies, customization service provider or any smaller large merchants, brands, companies who may have a developed brain house can really maximize this and not feel locked out from this product.
36:20 - Kurt Elster (Host)
What's the implementation? A lot of themes I'll see like oh, there's a box where I could stick CSS in for just this section, which I like because I can make quick edits without breaking other things. Is this a similar concept?
36:36 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
It's that and more. We have areas where you know you can actually add in custom HTML, custom liquid, custom CSS just within the theme settings themselves. But actually what we do then as well is if you actually wanted to go in and explore the actual theme files and codes themselves and further work in there at a greater level. We have we literally outline all how we every function and every element would are not themes. That relies on JS triggering some variable or some event or whatever. We've mapped those out so that anybody going into work with this is not going to have to go in and try and decide first. They can literally go look for this event and say, okay, we can now pack onto this bent for an action in the cart will respond to do X, y and Z now for us. So it's, I suppose it's a blue. Yeah, it's a blueprint. It's a blueprint for themes that allows people to really sort of translate them very, very, very quickly from a developer.
37:40 - Kurt Elster (Host)
That is music to my ears. All right, so, coming to the end of our time together, what do you think? One piece of advice you'd give a merchant who's starting out with Shopify, you know they, just they have the store. They've got dawn, they're making sales. Now what?
37:58 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, I suppose the two biggest things that we tend to see in terms of merchants starting with themes are, you know, obviously you know, moving from one theme, from a pre theme perhaps into a premium theme is, you know, your product content. You want to have really good lifestyle imagery content, product photographs and whatever. So a theme can only work with what it's given. So if you've got really good content, work on it, make sure that you've got really good lifestyle videos, product images and so on and so forth, because the better they are, the better your store is going to look, the better the presentation is going to be offered in terms of theme and the more you can utilize all the configurations, settings that a theme would provide by ensuring you have really good content. I mean, shopify is now including AI so you can create really cool product descriptions and various other content.
38:58
And sure, this is where all leveraging the likes of chat, gbt and barge or whatever, to be able to help, you know, create any type of promotional content. So just work on those areas, because and I'm just Kurt, I'm sure you know this as well more than anyone is, how many times have clients come to you and look for you to create a phenomenal site, but giving you scraps to work with. So that's something I would say to anybody from the end of the day. No, the worst, yeah it's yeah. You can only do so much when you're given so little. So I'd just say to anybody make sure you have your content.
39:35 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, it's like oh, we got three colors and a logo. Have fun.
39:39 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, you make the logo bigger, as they always do.
39:44 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Well, rub the. Yeah we get, I have. I buy logo and bigening cream and I rub it up.
39:50 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, exactly exactly. We use like a little type of like liquid fertilizer and we just sort of grow them up the back there until they're sizable enough.
39:58 - Kurt Elster (Host)
But yeah, and as I know I've said it Just pour the fertilizer right into the keyboard.
40:05 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
It'll work wonders. But yeah, listen to me, it's. If they have questions about it, they reach out to the partners because we've been doing this a long time. We can, even if you don't choose our products, reach out and chat and because they'll give you some guidance and some of the other notes might be picked up. Same as every service provider you work with, be it apps, be it the agency that's developing your store, lean into their expertise Because, while people may be an expert, we're not an expert in products and marketing. We're an expert in design and development. So we can give you know, we can give guidance on those and the features and everything that we provide. But, yeah, just lean into those areas.
40:46 - Kurt Elster (Host)
what I would say what I want to close on is you have kindly offered a interesting competition for listeners of the show. Can you walk us through that?
41:01 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Yeah, so what we're going to do is for one lucky listener who has subscribed this phenomenal podcast series from the date that this is released for a week afterwards anybody who purchases a theme within that and contacts us and references this we will pick one lucky person and they will get a store configuration by CleanCamp, which essentially means that one of our designers and one of our developers will go in and structure their store just like we would do one of our professional demo stores on the Shopify theme store make it look and be as fully featured, enhanced as we can, based on what the theme can offer. And yeah, so I think it's a pretty exciting opportunity because you literally get to have someone come in and build it with a designer's eye that have been working on themes and stores for well over a decade.
41:53 - Kurt Elster (Host)
No, it's a great opportunity, especially if you're like thinking about upgrading. Anyway, certainly explore it, consider it. How do they enter?
42:03 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
Here is a simple, just literally email marcus at cleangoncanvascouk and just drop me your story URL, which theme you have and the fact that you listen to this podcast series and have subscribed, and we will take it from there.
42:18 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Fabulous. I will include that info in the show notes, Marcus. This has been fabulous. Where could I go and learn about Clean Canvas? Obviously the theme store. What's the site?
42:33 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
This site is just cleancanvascouk, so literally hit us up there. We have contact forms that you can reach through there and obviously through our support site as well, which is linked up that and is linked through our theme listings. So just reach out to us by that means and the app would be sure to respond. But greatly appreciate being here. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm a big fan of the show and thanks to anyone and everyone who's listening.
43:00 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Thank you for doing it. Appreciate it.
43:02 - Marcus Seoighe (Interviewee)
No problem at all.