Producer Paul returns & he brought hot takes🔥
Also available in glorious HD video on YouTube:
Show producer Paul Reda returns to from paternity leave and he's on fire with hot takes in this AMA episode. We answer your burning ecommerce questions. Today's themes are metafields, theming, and Online Store 2.0.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
1/25/2022
Paul Reda: Oh, you’re having my baby. You’re a woman in love and I love what it’s doing to you.
Sound Board: Eww!
Paul Reda: You taught me that song.
Kurt Elster: I did. I learned it from Glee where it was also meant to make everyone uncomfortable and did. So, where have you been, Paul Reda?
Paul Reda: I spawned.
Kurt Elster: You…
Paul Reda: I had a baby. I didn’t have the baby. I mostly-
Kurt Elster: I was gonna say, you personally?
Paul Reda: I mostly stood there while people did things to my wife and then at the end, there was a baby.
Kurt Elster: And is this a life changing event?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Officially, it’s a change of life event according to government standards.
Kurt Elster: I mean, like beyond the U.S. government’s definition, in which they say, “We define this as a change of life.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. No, I got a baby. It’s crazy. I love it.
Kurt Elster: I’m glad.
Paul Reda: I really like the baby.
Kurt Elster: I enjoy-
Paul Reda: I had trepidation about the baby.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I was terrified, as well. My wife had to talk me down. But now that I’m a full-fledged parent, I love it and I will say parenthood looks good on you, Mr. Reda.
Paul Reda: Oh, thanks. Yeah. You know, I like it. I think I have a really easy time at it because as I’ve mentioned before, my wife was a night shift nurse, so-
Kurt Elster: She’s been training for this.
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. It’s like for most people, having a newborn baby is like a radical altering of your life, and for my wife it’s like she just got a way better job. She just had her old job and now it’s just way better. She only has one patient, it’s very tiny, it can’t talk back, it does whatever she makes it. She could just make it do whatever she wants. And the diapers are like one quarter of the size. It’s really easy.
Kurt Elster: More like one eighth. Those newborn diapers are tiny.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. The baby’s two feet tall. I don’t think the baby’s gonna become six feet tall.
Kurt Elster: We’re going by height?
Paul Reda: I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know how we size diapers.
Paul Reda: I don’t know how we size people. I mean, I guess yeah, if you go by weight.
Kurt Elster: Total cubic mass is how I would do it.
Paul Reda: The baby’s like 11 pounds, so yes, the baby would be 10 times bigger then, maybe.
Kurt Elster: I measure myself in cubic centimeters.
Paul Reda: Okay. Well, I don’t have that at hand. But yeah, no, my wife is just like, “This is fine. This is great. I love it.” And I’m like, “Cool. I’m going to bed. Have fun.”
Kurt Elster: And on that note, this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Sound Board: Eww!
Kurt Elster: Oh, I hit the wrong sound effect. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: Better. And I’m joined by my cohost and this show’s producer, Paul Reda.
Sound Board: Eww!
Paul Reda: All the listeners are my children.
Kurt Elster: I see. Well, you know, they can… I’ve got nothing for that.
Paul Reda: I want to change their little pee butts.
Kurt Elster: You’re on fire with this one. I really… I’m struggling to keep up.
Paul Reda: I’m chipper. I’m back. I’ve been gone for six weeks. You did great. I got to go on paternity leave and barely work for six weeks and you held down the fort, and I super appreciated. It was great.
Kurt Elster: And then I went on a cruise, so that was my payoff. It all worked out. But I’m glad. I’m thrilled. Today, we’re answering our listeners, also known as Paul Reda’s adopted children… We’re answering your burning eCommerce questions. And so, we did an AMA. We have been overdue on doing an ask me anything in our Facebook group, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. And so, we got some good questions. We are gonna go over that in this episode. That’s all we’re discussing, except I lied.
But first, we have some housekeeping to go over, because Shopify is on fire with some new releases. So, we got an updated version of the Shopify Flow app for our Shopify Plus folks who do automation in their stores. What else we got? Shopify partnered with Chinese eCom giant JD.com. If you’re not familiar with it, it is the other… It’s the alternative to AliExpress. JD is huge. JD.com. I was not familiar with it if I’m honest. But what this means for Shopify merchants specifically is U.S. merchants are going to be able to fast track selling their goods into China with this program. It sounded like it is both online sales channel and an accelerator, a program, like-
Paul Reda: Can I ask you questions about this? Because I saw the headline.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I read a couple articles and some press releases, so I really don’t-
Paul Reda: Is it essentially like fulfilled by Amazon, but it’s fulfilled by JD.com? And that’s how Chinese people would access your store is via fulfilled by JD.com and they act as the people, as store owners in America would act with Amazon?
Kurt Elster: That’s what it felt like. I’m not sure, but I saw they’ll… This program does the translation for you, advertises the products, gets it into the country. It sounded good. So, they also… They’ve got Shopify Balance is their new thing announced today, the day of this recording. It’s a no-fee business bank account that lives inside your Shopify admin. So, just like every conceivable tool that you need to run and start an online store, Shopify’s just adding it into the admin.
We saw it with when Shopify Payments just became a native thing inside your admin. Now they’re like, “Look, the payouts had to go elsewhere. Why can’t they live here and stay with us right in our admin?”
Paul Reda: Yeah. Why give money to a bank when you could give your money to a company that’s not a bank?
Kurt Elster: Shopify Balance is an alternative to a bank.
Paul Reda: Well, that’s safe.
Kurt Elster: Oh, as if-
Paul Reda: I know. Shopify’s-
Kurt Elster: As if you like banks.
Paul Reda: I know.
Kurt Elster: Who likes banks?
Paul Reda: Well, they do hold the money.
Kurt Elster: Only because I don’t have an alternative.
Paul Reda: This is pretty… All right, so-
Kurt Elster: A reliable alternative.
Paul Reda: I know. It’s just weird, though. It’s like, “Well, now you got a Shopify card.” This is like banking. There’s like regulations around banking.
Kurt Elster: I assume they know what you’re doing.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah. That’s a great sentence.
Kurt Elster: There’s a legal counsel involved. There were contracts and lawyers. The debit card’s really cool. It’s black. It says Shopify. It’s vertical.
Paul Reda: I’m out on black cards.
Kurt Elster: Oh, really?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: They’re like all cards are black now?
Paul Reda: All cards are black now. Come on.
Kurt Elster: Here’s the thing. I have that Apple Card. It’s solid white. It immediately turns filthy.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I read that.
Kurt Elster: Mine’s just… It’s like grey, and dingy, whereas the black card, you don’t have that issue. Because that’s how I choose my debit and credit cards, is based on color and cleanliness.
Paul Reda: I just have a series of Italian beef juice jars buried around my property that I keep my cash in.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And do you have a treasure map for those?
Paul Reda: You know the spots.
Kurt Elster: That makes sense. You know the spots. You’re out there digging up your irrigation system. Oh! Let’s see. And then the other notable release, they expanded the native metafields that we had seen pop up in product pages last year to now they’ve been added to orders, collections, and customers.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We had a couple ideas over the course of Q3 and Q4 where we had a thing we wanted to do for a client and then we were like, “Oh, we do that with metafields. Oh, it’s on a collection page. Oh, they’re not giving us collection metafields yet.”
Kurt Elster: Well, they’re here.
Paul Reda: So they’re here.
Kurt Elster: They have delivered. Let’s jump into our AMA so that we can do some asking and answering. You have returned. You start the first one off.
Paul Reda: Brenda McFarlane, “I struggle with using different SEO for similar items. I sell jewelry. Do you have any tips?” I don’t. That’s not my job.
Kurt Elster: We’re not SEO experts. However, the question, the subtext of this question is I’ve got… I need SEO for similar items. I sell jewelry. And so, one of the things in SEO is you need to have unique content per page to make sure that all of the pages will show up in search results. And you don’t want that duplicate content issue to come up. And so, I think the answer here is, well, everything has to have a unique description. But depending on how many listings she has, that’s not practical.
So, A, number one, you want these listings to be as distinct as possible. You want them to be longer if possible. Not needlessly so. I like to treat them as a sales letter, your product description, will always make life easy. This has been my advice in the past. But all right, let’s say you’ve got 500 items. It’s just not realistic to do that. Certainly not to do it all at once. So, I would take the Pareto’s principle approach and just apply it to the top products.
And what’s really cool, Shopify now, they have the ABC analysis report. I love this thing. It is a report that grades your products A, B, C, and it tells you the A products, they’re like, “These are the ones that make you the most money. C, this is the stuff that if it’s here, it’s a necessary evil, and otherwise you should probably get rid of it.” And B is just like everything else. So, really, you run that report and just work through in order of revenue, units sold, writing great descriptions for just those A products. They don’t all have to have fabulous descriptions.
Now, I’m sure there’s a lot of subtext here, and there’s reasons, and-
Paul Reda: Yeah. I’m just making up a scenario here, but it’s like if she’s selling rings, and there’s sort of like a base ring, and then she has different stones inside the ring, it’s like-
Kurt Elster: Are those different listings or one listing?
Paul Reda: Are those different listings or the same listing? And then it’s like, oh, well you can get little shoulder stones to either side of it. Is that another variant option on the same product or is it like this band… Say every ring has four parts. Say there’s a band, the bands could all be different, and it’s like what is the center stone, and what’s shoulder stones, yes, no, then what those are. So, it’s like is that all… Is that one product listing? Is that 100 product listings?
Kurt Elster: You know what? Now you want to make this really complicated?
Paul Reda: And then you hit the variant limit?
Kurt Elster: And then, yeah, then you whack into the 100-variant limit. Oh, I hate that thing. Where this gets really weird is what if they’re all one-off items?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: She hand crafts one unique ring. It sells. It’s sold out forever. You get those issues with vintage stores, too. Resale stores. And so, that, it’s like you just gotta put in the work to write a unique description every time? That’s tough.
Paul Reda: Yeah. What if there’s a thing, what if there’s a paragraph that applies to all the rings that’s like, “Our rings are handcrafted in the volcano that blew up in Tonga,” and you know, all that sort of stuff. If you have that on every product description, is that bad?
Kurt Elster: I don’t think so.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: No.
Paul Reda: Do you know so?
Kurt Elster: I don’t know so. My experience tells me that you’re not just gonna get kicked off the internet because too many of your descriptions are too similar. That’s just not a thing that’s gonna occur.
Paul Reda: Is the similar page penalty, like how similar does it gotta be?
Kurt Elster: I’m sure there’s a percentage to it. But essentially the duplicate page penalty, it’s not so much a penalty as they just go, “All right, these two pages are so similar that we’re just gonna take the one that is either published sooner or has the most internal links to it.” They’re just gonna show that one more than the others. That’s the risk to they all have identical copy.
And again, truthfully, I’m really not an SEO expert.
Paul Reda: I assume, I assume very much that the title of the product is different, so at least you have an H1 that’s completely different on the product.
Kurt Elster: That’s a good point. Yes.
Paul Reda: And maybe if they have different options. And the images. Does Google care that the images are different? Do they know that?
Kurt Elster: I would think they know that, especially on like an eCommerce page where it’s written into structured data.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, and Shopify really gives Google-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. A properly set up Shopify theme describes the page to the machine.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And so, like the machine can see the differences. So, maybe it’s not that big a thing to worry about it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. At least in here. But I think that’s the approach, is okay, what sells the most? Give that a longer, better description. Braedon Stefanshyn, “Can you go over the new metafields? Collections, customers, orders added in Shopify, and best use cases/examples in utilizing them.”
Let’s start at what the heck is a metafield.
Paul Reda: All right. A metafield is a little piece of information, like you create a bucket in Shopify that’s like a metafield, and it’s like you’re creating your own piece of information. It’s gonna be on a product page, it could be like a little tagline that’s like, “Our best-selling item,” or like, “Make your face look prettier,” or whatever. It’s just like a little one-line thing you could jam in there.
Kurt Elster: So, I could add a bonus field that I define what it is.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Like think about your product listings on the backend of Shopify. There’s all those fields you gotta fill out. You could create bonus fields that there’s more fields you have to fill out.
Kurt Elster: So, currently it’s title, price, description, and then I could be like title, price, tagline, description.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Tagline. Or like hero image that’s like a big image that appears before the product form that’s like the full bleed width of the page.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: And then, so you could create all those, and then those will now appear on the product listing, and then you just fill them out. You upload the giant hero image, or you type in what your cool little tagline, buzz line is, and all that sort of stuff, and then it can be different for every single product on the store, handled on that product page. And that’s product metafields.
And so, it’s the same thing, you do the same thing with collections, where you have your backend collection listing. There’s extra fields you could fill out there. And putting in extra little pieces of information. That being said, someone needs to go into the code and make that metafield available, like put in the little code snippet that calls the metafield and put it into the page so the metafield actually appears on the page.
And this is another thing with Sections Everywhere, where you could create sections, and those sections can be populated by metafields, and you gotta create the metafield, but the maybe you don’t have to go in the code. You just have to create a section for it and then select that, “Oh, this section is gonna be populated by this metafield.” It’s a huge pain in the ass.
It's really powerful, and awesome, and can make your pages really cool, but you really gotta figure out what you’re doing.
Kurt Elster: Yes. So, yeah, you’re essentially… They’re saying, “Hey, we’ve opened up our…” Shopify is a content management system. “We’re opening up a big chunk of this to you where you can define your own content structure, your own taxonomy.”
Paul Reda: Variables. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, your variables, like custom fields for product pages, which is really helpful for those longer-form product pages. And then stuff like, “All right, I’ve got my H1 as my product title. What’s my H2? Oh, I can add that as a metafield now.” And metafields have been around for years but it was powered by an app, and the apps all took different approaches to it, so it was a little weird. And now Shopify is saying, “Hey, this is native,” so really support for it is much improved. And we had been using metafields and this new system is even easier, so we like it. And now they’re saying, “All right, now we’re gonna give you that same thing in other places.”
For a collection, this is the helpful one. Oftentimes on a collection page, maybe we’re feeling a little limited. We’ve got title, description, and image, and that’s it, similar to the product page. Well, what if I want more info? What if I want a description at the top and the bottom? Okay, you could do that with split, but I don’t want to do that. The metafield will let me add that, so I can add these extra description fields in there. Maybe there’s a sidebar. I can add that in there. Or we’ve done some really complex things in the past where we have a promo, like the fifth in your collection, you got a collection with 20 things on it, and the fifth product gets replaced with like a promo.
Paul Reda: Or like a video.
Kurt Elster: Or a video explaining it.
Paul Reda: Yeah, or like one of the blocks. There’s all the products being listed out and then we actually inject a video that’s like the same height as all the product listings in there, so it really fits in with the flow of the grid and all that. You can define that video in the metafields for that collection.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, or just stick in the URL for the YouTube video.
Paul Reda: You know, it’s a big thing to break the collection grid like that, and so it’s easier with metafields where you’re like, “Well, if this metafield’s filled, if the video metafield is filled out, do this, but if it’s not filled out, do this. And if it is filled out when you break it, inject this video, whatever video has been uploaded in the metafield,” and sort of do all that. It’s just easier GUI tools to make changes to individual things on the store, because under the old templating system if I made a change in the collection template, but only wanted it to be one, one collection, or on two collections or whatever, I’d have to do a bunch of stuff or I’d have to create entirely separate template for that collection, and then maybe if I do that five times, now I got five different collection templates, that then we’re like, “Oh, by the way, on all the collections we want to do this.” Well, now you gotta do that five times and it’s like a huge pain in the ass to wrangle all these templates.
And now you don’t have to.
Kurt Elster: Well, even more importantly, those old approaches that you just described all live in the theme. So, that also means I have a good chunk of content living in the theme. And it’s like in-
Paul Reda: And then you want to change themes-
Kurt Elster: In a content management system, you want to try and separate style versus substance. So, design and content. So, I want as much of the theme to not have content stored in it, and metafields really gets us out of that. So, I like that.
As far as like the customers and orders metafields, I would imagine that’s more useful. For customers, great, I can use Shopify more as a CRM. Like currently, you’re probably using Shopify plus an email system, like Klaviyo, and then Klaviyo I can set custom properties on customer profiles, and so this really… Adding metafields in customers, I have not done it. I would imagine it’s so you can do those things, like store those custom properties. Like birthday would be an example, or like this is the topic I’m subscribed to in a newsletter.
And then for orders, I would suspect that’s more for like ERP integrations, so we could store some bonus data that the ERP needs to know.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Maybe if there’s like-
Kurt Elster: I’m just thinking out loud.
Paul Reda: … this product gets a pack-in thrown in with it or something like that.
Kurt Elster: Ah. There you go. Yeah. Something to that effect. Or even just like more complex order notes or gift notes. Yeah, but the pack-in, that’s a smart example.
We got Dan McClen.
Paul Reda: “I run a Shopify jewelry store in the U.K. and I’m looking to expand into the U.S. I have a .co.uk and a .com, which I’ve set up using Shopify’s geo settings, so it automatically picks the correct currency, but it’s the same website, so mainly set up for the U.K.” He’s got a huge opportunity rate but the .com has a low conversion rate or whatever. The U.S. people get a low conversion rate because it’s obvious it's a U.K. business. You guys even spell jewelry differently. Do we only do it with one L?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We have one L. He has two Ls.
Paul Reda: Ah, So Brenda McFarlane also used two Ls. Secret Brit. Do you think this is putting people off? Yes. Is there a way to replicate my store without setting up a whole new Shopify store, but be able to edit certain parts of it? What are the SEO implications?
Kurt Elster: All right, hold on here. Listen to this last line. All right, so he’s identified the problem, is I’m trying to sell overseas. For him. He’s trying to sell into the U.S. But the U.S. customers are resistant to buy from overseas and he’s got… So, he needs to make it more localized.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And so, he needs more flexibility in the store. And then he says, “Hey, is there a way to replicate the store without setting up a whole new store but be able to edit certain parts of it without SEO implications.” Well, it sounds like you’re like, “Look, setting up a second store,” which will give you complete and total flexibility and utterly granular controls, and you already know how a Shopify store works, so now you gotta manage two of them, but you know how to do it and how it works. Instead of that, you’re like, “Because that’s a lot of work, let me come up with a really convoluted process to try and have only certain parts of the site change things to make it more localized.”
You’re just trading one set of headaches for another. I would just… If I really want the control over regionally localized stores, I would run separate stores.
Paul Reda: Could he do… I don’t know, whatever. DansJewelry.com and then have like UK.DansJewelry.com and US.DansJewelry.com?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: And they’re two separate Shopify stores on the backend using different subdomains, but the SEO reads that as a single store, right? Because it’s the same URL.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s a metatag that you use to do this. I know there’s a way to get them associated.
Paul Reda: So, that’s the way to do it, then.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And there’s also the Shopify Markets feature, which is meant to directly address the issues he’s describing, but it’s coming soon.
Paul Reda: Okay, so I was wondering, because I remember Shopify was talking about that a lot, but you know, I didn’t know if they actually shipped anything.
Kurt Elster: And it’s even in settings. If you go in the settings in your admin, you’ll see like Markets, coming soon.
Paul Reda: Okay, so yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, the fact that it’s already in your admin suggests that like-
Paul Reda: It’s really a tease.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, but it also suggests like that’s genuinely coming soon.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so I think he wants to set up two stores. He wants to set up two stores. Yeah. I would Americanize all the spelling. Get rid of all the unnecessary U’s, I feel, and spell jewelry the right way. If I was shopping from a store and I found out it was from overseas, my worry would be shipping costs.
Kurt Elster: That’s the immediate. It’s like I know I’m gonna pay more for shipping. I’ve had stuff just disappear in customs.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Or like it’s gone, the tracking stops updating, and then around the time I’ve forgotten about it like six months later it just appears.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I think the biggest problem, the biggest worry on the mind of his U.K. shoppers is gonna be different than the biggest worry on the mind of his U.S. shoppers.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Maybe he could address it, like-
Paul Reda: Yes. You gotta address it. I feel like-
Kurt Elster: Reshipping insurance.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I would hide that you’re in the U.K. as much as possible, other than like on the about us page, just be like, “Yeah.”
Kurt Elster: But what happens when the order ships and it’s from the U.K.? Is the person gonna be like… Are they gonna be mad?
Paul Reda: No. I don’t think they’re gonna care. I just think the problem is I’d hide it the whole time other than on like the about us page that you’re in Stratford Berkshire, and then obviously the shipping’s gonna be different. He’s gonna have to charge for shipping, I assume. I don’t know. And so, he’s gotta have a reason to be like, “We ship from the U.K. That’s better because…”
Kurt Elster: The jewelry is better when it comes from Diagon Alley.
Paul Reda: Because the queen touched it. I don’t know. And then there you go.
Kurt Elster: There’s just gonna be a string of one-star reviews that all you spell color with a U.
Paul Reda: I didn’t say anything bad about the queen. I watched The Crown. She’s had quite a life.
Kurt Elster: People love that show. I have not seen it.
Paul Reda: Hopefully she’s not dead by the time this comes out.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez! Oh!
Paul Reda: They’re keeping her in a box. They don’t want her to be like Betty White. Just before the finish line, doesn’t make it.
Kurt Elster: You’re really full of hot takes this episode.
Paul Reda: I haven’t talked to these people in weeks. I haven’t talked to my children in weeks.
Kurt Elster: And you’re like, “All right, number one, I’m gonna shock and scar you. That’s priority one.”
Paul Reda: That’s what a good dad does.
Kurt Elster: Priority two, education. It helps them remember. So, the answer is like, hey, you just gotta bite the bullet and do the separate stores if you want to do it right.
Paul Reda: Do the separate stores. Do the subdomain trick. And then talk to someone smarter than us about SEO in order to only… to mitigate whatever SEO implications might be. And I think come to the understanding that you have two separate audiences.
Kurt Elster: Aha.
Paul Reda: There’s gonna be a lot of crossover in that Venn diagram, but it’s still gonna be separate because of the shipping issue, the international shipping issue.
Kurt Elster: Yes. You’re absolutely right.
Frequent commenter Clifford Shakun says, “What’s the best pizza in Chicago?” We’re known for deep dish.
Paul Reda: I want to open with… I was thinking about joking about this one, but this is no laughing matter. One, we don’t eat deep dish constantly.
Kurt Elster: Isn’t that funny?
Paul Reda: It’s a sometimes food. It’s like once every three months, maybe.
Kurt Elster: It’s been at least a year since I’ve eaten deep dish pizza.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s a stereotype. The actual Chicago pizza is thin crust, tavern style, square cut pizza.
Kurt Elster: The bar pizza.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s actual Chicago pizza. The deep dish is like a fun little side piece. That’s not what we’re really-
Kurt Elster: It’s regional. It came from here.
Paul Reda: Yeah, sure.
Kurt Elster: Give me your favorite deep dish.
Paul Reda: All right. Well, the best deep dish is definitely Pequod’s.
Kurt Elster: All right. I agree with you.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s Pequod’s without question. Of the three big chains, there’s like three big deep-dish chains, there’s Giordano’s, Lou Malnati’s, and Gino’s East. Giordano’s I would say is the best one. It used to be Gino’s East, but they really cratered about a decade ago. They made it a lot worse.
Kurt Elster: I used to… I felt Gino’s East was the best, as well.
Paul Reda: They were.
Kurt Elster: Now, I think it’s just like flip a coin between Lou Malnati’s and Giordano’s.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They got bought out by like a PE firm and they really wrecked Gino’s. So, Giordano’s is the best unless you can get Pequod’s, which is definitely the best.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s independent. Family owned. It’s good.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Square cut, my fav is Dino’s on Higgins.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Okay.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s my ancestral family pizza place from where I grew up, eating Dino’s, so that’s my favorite. It might not be the best.
Kurt Elster: I’m gonna go with Barnaby’s.
Paul Reda: I’ve never liked Barnaby’s.
Kurt Elster: Barnaby’s licenses their recipe to other pizza places.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s how… That’s a good one. They put the cornmeal on the crust. That’s critical for me.
Paul Reda: There was a place on Kedzie. I forget what it was called but I lived across the street from it when I lived on Kedzie. That place was good too. Just south of the Kedzie Brown Line. It’s where I’d take all my dates when I was dating and single. I would take… It’s like a bar that had pizza and whenever I went on a date, I would be like, “Oh, you know, there’s this cool, quiet bar pizza place not far from my house. You wanna go meet there for the date?” And they’d be like, “Oh, sure. Of course.” It would be like literally across the street from my house. I’d go on a date, be three minutes. I’d leave three minutes before the date started. It was awesome.
Kurt Elster: I like that we just found out how Paul Reda would run game.
Paul Reda: That’s where I met my wife.
Kurt Elster: Oh. See, it works.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Pizza’s so good, it gets you married.
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. And I was just like, “You wanna go back to my place? It’s right-“
Kurt Elster: And now you have a baby.
Paul Reda: I was like, “It’s right there. Turn around, it’s right there.”
Kurt Elster: All because of pizza. Here’s one that’s a little loaded. Anthony Watts, “What’s the best 2.0 store you have found? Design/speed/et cetera.” So-
Paul Reda: Doesn’t matter.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Online store 2.0, it’s like it’s a feature set. If I’m just looking at a store from the outside, I really can’t identify it as one versus the other.
Paul Reda: I’m just gonna say it. Sections Anywhere really doesn’t do anything for us.
Kurt Elster: Because I’m so into metafields.
Paul Reda: Well, we’re into metafields, and we know how to actually wrangle the backend of the store, so we’re kind of like, “I’m not dealing with that shit.”
Kurt Elster: I mean, I like that a homepage section works through all other sections. That’s… Sections Everywhere does that. That’s a nice feature.
Paul Reda: It’s essentially it’s like if you were formatting a document, would you do it in Word and then highlight all the things, and then click the little button that makes it italicized, and then highlight this word, and then click the button that makes it bold? Or would you just write markdown or the HTML code to actually just make it italicized and bold and have control over it?
Kurt Elster: You know that I’m a big nerd using a text editor and I would use markdown or HTML.
Paul Reda: Exactly. And so, they gave you… What Sections Anywhere, online store 2.0 or whatever is, is an attempt at the Word GUI tools for the store owners. For us, it’s meaningless.
Kurt Elster: All right, so let’s talk about Shopify’s approach to theming. They’re really… They’re saying, “Hey, we’re gonna meet merchants where they are at whatever their current technical skill level, whether it’s they’re limited by skill, current skill, or that’s just all they need.” And it’s, “Hey, there’s no code,” which is I just can install a theme and use the theme editor, and that’s where online store 2.0 really expands.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Expands the powers there. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: There’s low code, where all right, I can go in the theme editor myself. I don’t have to use FTP. I don’t have to use a text editor. I could just edit it right in my Shopify store. And I could pop a metafield in and then I could add a custom field. I can make custom fields. And that’s low code.
And then if I want to go to like full code, I can hire a theme developer to customize the theme, build a custom theme, or completely go full nerd street cred and build-
Paul Reda: Headless.
Kurt Elster: Use the Shopify Hydrogen tools, because Shopify now supports headless on their own with Hydrogen framework.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so you’re not even logging into the Shopify code backend. It’s like a thing that you are running on your machine, on your servers.
Kurt Elster: And so, this idea of online store 2.0 really is like it’s that feature set and vision. The themes have to support it.
Paul Reda: The themes are 2.0 compatible, meaning they have support for some of that low code stuff. Meaning essentially instead of using the old Liquid templates, the templates are now defined in .json. That’s all it is.
Kurt Elster: It’s a little quicker.
Paul Reda: Sure.
Kurt Elster: My point is I wouldn’t get hung up on like this is a 1.0 versus a 2.0 theme.
Paul Reda: To 90% of you, it doesn’t matter.
Kurt Elster: And that roll out, very quick. Like if you go in the Shopify theme store, it’s gonna show you this is a 2.0 theme. Obviously, if you’re picking a theme, you want one that’s up to date.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You don’t want to pick… Yeah.
Kurt Elster: If you’re buying a new theme today, don’t go buy a 1.0 theme. Get the 2.0 theme.
Paul Reda: Obviously, cars from 2020 are better than cars from 2015. But it’s not like, “Ugh, cars from 2015. Garbage trash. Oh my God.” It’s not that big a deal.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah. You’re right. No, you know what? That actually is a pretty good comparison. Edwin Alejandro Ruiz, “How do I improve conversion rate? I have 150 visitors per day but only 1-2 sales per week. I sell soccer-inspired watches with a social purpose at futlov.com. F-U-T-L-O-V.
Paul Reda: I looked at FUTLOV before we started recording and it’s fit and finish issues. It looks cheap, and not very trustworthy, and you’re selling $200 watches.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I will say when you Google it they’ve got the nice search listing. In the Google search listing, which I think is important, it looks really nice. The theme itself, it’s a good theme. Looks good. But like immediately, when I land on it, spin to win!
Paul Reda: Yeah, spin to win. And on the desktop version, the navigation was like off by 100 pixels to the right and up for like 20 pixels for no reason.
Kurt Elster: There’s a tagline on the logo on mobile that’s illegible.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and so, okay, so we got the images, which are all kind of boring. Not that zoomed in. And then we have all these soccer players from MSL-
Kurt Elster: Which, this is cool.
Paul Reda: … which is cool. All of those photos on the product pages are like 200 by 200 pixels. They’re thumbnail. The other thing to me, and we got all the seals underneath the add to cart button. I don’t know. For me, those seals make it look real low rent. I hate those.
Kurt Elster: Oh, really?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I have-
Paul Reda: It just screams 2002 to me.
Kurt Elster: I got mixed feelings about the seals. Trust badges.
Paul Reda: And the other thing to me is I understand that it’s like, “We have a purpose,” and we donate all this money. That seems to be the main value proposition of the store is we donate money, but that can’t be the entire value prop. The value prop is the watch I’m getting.
Kurt Elster: It’s tough, because a watch, for men, a watch is jewelry. If men could wear gemstones the way women would, the Swiss watch industry would not exist. I think this site is so close. He’s got good product descriptions. He has good photos. He has interesting products. I do like some of these watches. I would wear some of these.
Paul Reda: But like this training vest pennie, I don’t know what that is. It’s just like a shirt. Like a training shirt. Like the photo, the aspect ratio is all off. It’s crushed.
Kurt Elster: So, I think the answer is like-
Paul Reda: It’s just these tiny fit… It’s like there’s 20 problems on the site that all need to be 5% better and now your site is 100% better.
Kurt Elster: Doug Geiger from Can You Handlebar always said to me 90%. You can get to 90% quality. That’s not bad. Getting the last 10% of quality is gonna cost you just as much as the first 90% did. And that’s what we’re seeing here, where it’s like, “All right, you’re at 90%. I need you to get that last 5% to 10% of fixes.”
Paul Reda: I would not give him a 90%, but that’s-
Kurt Elster: I don’t… Really, I think you’re being overly critical. I think there’s a handful of things to fix.
Paul Reda: To me, it’s just low effort. All the images are too small. They’re broken in some ways. They’re squished. It’s just it screams low effort to me and then it’s like now I’m gonna give you 200 bucks for a watch? And watches are things that break. People know watches that break. There’s the classic like, “Oh, I got a Rolex. I bought it on the street.” That thing, that’s gonna break in 48 hours.
Kurt Elster: I think the answer… Well-
Paul Reda: It’s fit and finish.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Go through it with a really critical eye. Make a list of everything that goes like, “Well, this is why it’s not perfect.” And then either fix as much of it you can by yourself, and then if there’s anything else, pass it off to a theme dev, small task service, whatever.
Paul Reda: It says something… Sebastian Villa is one of the guys wearing the watches. I’ve heard of that guy. If you said, “Who’s Sebastian Villa?” I’d be like, “That’s a guy that plays soccer.”
Kurt Elster: I would have that above the fold.
Paul Reda: There should be more photos of him. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I know. I was really… I was quite shocked when I scrolled to the bottom and discovered like, “Whoa, he has for real soccer players wearing these watches.”
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I would have that above the fold at the top. I think that’s what sells it.
Paul Reda: And we’ll be giving money to kids. All right, I’m-
Kurt Elster: Paul’s like, “Oh, I hate kids! I’m father of the year. Don’t give them any money. What are they gonna do with money? They’re kids.”
Paul Reda: Here’s the thing-
Kurt Elster: That’s my Paul impression.
Paul Reda: This baby, great. Love her. Eventually she’s gonna be a kid. Some people are like, “This car is four years old. I need a new car. I can’t deal with it.” That’s what’s gonna happen with this baby.
Kurt Elster: I keep collecting old ones.
Paul Reda: I think this baby gets one year old; we trade it in for a newer model.
Kurt Elster: Paul Reda. Your heart will grow in love and abundance every day with your child.
Paul Reda: It’s true. Every day I come in and I’m just like, “My baby smiled.”
Kurt Elster: Yes, actually. And you know what? As a parent, I’m like, “Yeah. Mm-hmm.” Know how it goes. No, I think what Edwin here has is a really strong start. Go through it with a fine-toothed comb and then get… and the aspirational part of it, your soccer players wearing your watches, the coolest thing, get that above the fold. And the fact that you said, “Hey, I’ve got 150 visitors today and one to two sales per week.” Off to a strong start, right? The fact that you’re getting sales-
Paul Reda: Getting sales, yeah. That is something. Don’t discount that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And a watch, a $200 watch, it’s just it’s not an impulse purchase, so the conversion rate’s gonna be a little lower there.
Paul Reda: You’re never gonna get a gangbusters conversion rate selling a $200 item, especially like kind of a commodity item in a watch.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The chances are anyone buying a $200 watch already owns one or more watches. Here we have Dylan West.
Paul Reda: What are the best ways to offer free gift with purchase over $X without using Shopify Plus? I would love to stop offering free shipping and instead offer a free different gifts at $50, $75, and $100.
Is Shopify Scripts now not Shopify Plus anymore?
Kurt Elster: No, it’s still Shopify Plus.
Paul Reda: Damn.
Kurt Elster: And Shopify Flow is still Shopify Plus, but I really was quite convinced that in Q1 of this year, Shopify Flow was going to be made available.
Paul Reda: I thought they were making Scripts not Plus-only anymore.
Kurt Elster: I thought it was Flow.
Paul Reda: I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: But that would be the way to do it.
Kurt Elster: But anyway, neither of these apps, both of those apps are Plus exclusive as of right now.
Paul Reda: Is there a way to do it then without those? There’s apps. There’s like a free gift with purchase app, right?
Kurt Elster: There are plenty of apps that will do this. There’s one that’s… I think it’s called like Auto Adder. There’s a whole bunch of them. All of them are… None is going to be perfect in 100% of scenarios. And you’re already complicating it a little bit it’s not just free gift with purchase, it’s free gift with purchase and it’s tiered.
Paul Reda: Which is good. I like that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s a really brilliant idea.
Paul Reda: No, that’s the way to do it. No, we agree.
Kurt Elster: And make sure you’re communicating that to the customer to get the value of the average order value bump with this.
Paul Reda: I honestly think… What is Plus now? Does it depend?
Kurt Elster: No, it’s two grand.
Paul Reda: Two grand a year?
Kurt Elster: $2,000 U.S. a month, currently.
Paul Reda: A month.
Kurt Elster: They don’t give the pricing on the website. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say it.
Paul Reda: It’s 24 grand a year. I mean, I don’t know how much Dylan’s store makes, but he could easily pull off an extra 24 grand a year getting this set up properly with the average order value bump he would see.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I know what his store is, and I would say yeah, probably. It’s just it’s the cleanest way to implement it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s always been my thought, is like the stuff you would do with Scripts and Flow, if you-
Kurt Elster: That’s the core value of Plus.
Paul Reda: You just need a base level of knowledge with how to manipulate those. Those are worth $24,000 a year. You will make money, more than 24 grand a year, using those things. Definitely.
Kurt Elster: That is the best endorsement for Plus I have heard out of you.
Paul Reda: What? No. I mean, it’s true. I see this-
Kurt Elster: You’ve lived it.
Paul Reda: There’s the crap we do with Scripts all the time.
Kurt Elster: So, the answer is this is a great idea. Use an app. I don’t know which one is the best one. There’s several that will do this. The last one I used successfully to do something like this was Pixel Union’s. What’s it called? Ultimate Special Offers was the one we used, but there are many, so I would look.
Let’s see what we got here. Peter White. Peter White from AbstractOcean.com, Tesla aftermarket accessory seller, says, “When is the right time to bite the bullet on a 2.0 theme?” And then he specified in parenthesis, Sections Anywhere. Which, it’s Sections Everywhere. Or is it Anywhere?
Paul Reda: Who knows?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And or how often should you refresh your theme in general, mostly to sweep out old/redundant code if, um, you have a habit of trying a lot of apps?
Paul Reda: I mean, to go back to the car metaphor, it’s like, “When should I buy a new car?” It’s like, well, obviously if your old car doesn’t work anymore, but then… But if your old car’s working fine, it’s like, I don’t know. When you get tired of it?
Kurt Elster: Which, in practice, I think tends to be three to five years. I think by four years, just trends change, features change, and old, crufty code builds up. So, if I just want to give you like quantify this, when’s the right time, how often to change, every four years. There you go.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: And saying when should I upgrade to a 2.0 theme, you’ll know. Honestly, I think you’ll know when you’ve outgrown your theme.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Some people are like my dad, and they just see a cool new thing and they’re like, “Well, I gotta have it.” Well, why? Was the old one bad? “I want the new one.”
Kurt Elster: You know what? If that-
Paul Reda: Then that could just be it, then that could be your reason.
Kurt Elster: It’s your business. Fine. Yeah. Go for it.
Paul Reda: That’s how we got a LaserDisc player.
Kurt Elster: Ooh! Did you have Star Wars on LaserDisc?
Paul Reda: No, we had Christmas Vacation.
Kurt Elster: Oh, wow. That’s easily one of my favorite movies.
Paul Reda: Home Alone.
Kurt Elster: All right, so we’re going with two Christmas movies.
Paul Reda: And a-
Kurt Elster: Did he make this purchase in November?
Paul Reda: Get ready for this. And a collection of MC Hammer videos.
Kurt Elster: Those came with the LaserDisc player. It was free gift with purchase. That’s what that was.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. That’s all I know.
Kurt Elster: To Peter’s other question, sweep out old, redundant code if you have a habit of trying a lot of apps, I think part of your standard operating procedure on uninstalling an app should be email the app support and say, “Hey, I trialed this app. I don’t need it at this time, but I want to make sure my theme stays performant. Is there any old code I should know about and need to uninstall?” And for a lot of apps, either the answer is no, or the code is loaded in a conditional way, where like it’s not actually ever gonna show up on the front end of the store without the app being present.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But unless you ask or spend even more time sleuthing, you’re not gonna know, so you may as well just ask and find out. But yeah, just consider that as that’s one extra step in I uninstalled a theme. I would also say frequently go through your themes or go through your… Review your apps and uninstall the stuff you’re not using. Because apps are what have the biggest performance cost.
Paul Reda: Justin Shook. “Now that metafields are much easier to use and maintain, which would be a better way to build unique product detail pages; custom dev sections driven by metafields, or separate page templates designed in the site customizer?” Metafields. This whole thing where we’re making 10 different page templates for 10 different products, like-
Kurt Elster: Brutal.
Paul Reda: Done. Do not do that anymore.
Kurt Elster: Because yeah, the problem with that is let’s say we’ve got the previous question. Hey, I want to upgrade my theme. When should I upgrade my theme? If all of that content is built into custom page templates stored in the theme, you then need to recreate all of that when you make the new theme. Versus if you had stored it all in metafields, you just need to add the metafields into one template and then it populates.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, like that’s a really good illustration of why you should marry yourself to metafields. And Sections Anywhere and Everywhere, to get the anywhere part out of it, again, you gotta be using metafields.
Paul Reda: Yeah, because if it’s in-
Kurt Elster: Otherwise, it’s gonna start duplicating the same content.
Paul Reda: Yeah, because it just lives… If it just lives inside the template, it’s not gonna be anywhere else than inside that template. And so, it can’t be everywhere. It can only be in that template.
Kurt Elster: Title of this episode is now metafields, metafields, metafields. Sandra Klein, “I’d love to hear tips on Sections Anywhere. How to utilize them in product pages.” And the answer is start with metafields.
Paul Reda: It’s hard for me to give an answer on this because-
Kurt Elster: I know, it’s like… Look, I want to start with Photoshop. What should I use it for?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Well, it’s like sections, it’s a tool, right?
Paul Reda: Here’s the thing. Sections Anywhere kind of doesn’t live up to the hype in that if you’re building these sections using the customizer tool, all that stuff is still showing up on every single page. It’s not… You’re not making different product pages. You’re just building out product pages. You have to then within that customer tool, the actual content inside the blocks you’re moving around has to be populated by metafields in order for it to be different on every single product.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s the thing that people don’t get about Sections Everywhere when they first… when they hear about it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They think it’ll-
Kurt Elster: It’ll work the way you think assuming you’re using metafields.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They think that I’m gonna create a block, a section block in the tool that says like, “This is the best product ever.” And then I’m gonna go to this other product and type in, “This is the second-best product ever.” No, you’re not. This is the best product ever is now gonna show up on every single thing unless-
Kurt Elster: That uses that block.
Paul Reda: Unless that’s a metafield that’s on the product page that says like, “Subtitle,” or whatever, that you’re then putting in there.
Kurt Elster: So, all right, here’s an easy way to look at it. If you stored that content in the theme editor, in that block, that piece of content now is attached to that block, wherever that block lives.
Paul Reda: Yep.
Kurt Elster: Versus if that block pulls from a metafield, ah, now it’s dynamic.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And so, that’s… Yeah. That’s where the disconnect comes from. So, if you can wrap your head around that, you’re good to go.
Jimmy Hickey asks, “Are you guys or any of the brands you work with diving into the world of NFTs and Web 3.0?”
Paul Reda: I hope you’re making like a barf noise.
Kurt Elster: I’m not. I had something else I was gonna do.
Paul Reda: We did have a client that did an NFT, right?
Kurt Elster: We did.
Paul Reda: How did that go?
Kurt Elster: It was mired in technical problems. It didn’t go amazing. They did eventually sell all of them that they had minted. And they were cool.
Paul Reda: No, they’re not.
Kurt Elster: Okay. By NFT, they fit-
Paul Reda: The idiocy.
Kurt Elster: The style of NFTs.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. You can hear my thoughts about NFTs on Clubhouse this week.
Kurt Elster: Clubhouse. Yeah, how’s Clubhouse going?
Paul Reda: I don’t know. I mean, at least with Beanie Babies you had something.
Kurt Elster: I had a thing in my hand.
Paul Reda: At least you had a Beanie Baby.
Kurt Elster: Did you watch the Beanie Baby documentary?
Paul Reda: My wife did. I caught pieces of it.
Kurt Elster: She watched it. I caught pieces of it because I was in the Metaverse at the time.
Paul Reda: Oh, you were with my wife when she watched it?
Kurt Elster: My wife. And we’re married to different women, to be clear. No, I ended up watching the thing. It was really interesting. It’s like eCommerce lore. I encourage people to watch the Beanie Baby documentary.
Paul Reda: It’s very stupid.
Kurt Elster: It was very exciting. A lot of fun. Yeah. It turns out the guy, Ty-
Paul Reda: Ty Warner. He’s a monster.
Kurt Elster: … who created Beanie Babies, thought the internet was a passing fad. That was really a stunner. It was the community that drove that whole thing. Anyways, so NFTs-
Paul Reda: No. It’s a con job. It’s meaningless. It’s people money laundering.
Kurt Elster: Metaverse?
Paul Reda: Oh yeah, Metaverse. What’s that? VR, kinda? I don’t know. What’s the Metaverse? Just making up words now.
Kurt Elster: You know what’s funny is how quickly they turned on Web 3.0. I think that Web 3.0 term came and went.
Paul Reda: Web 3.0 existed for about four months. If you look at the Google trends, it didn’t exist until August, and now we’re done. Now we’re on Metaverse.
Kurt Elster: Because it was really… True or not, it was exposed as like VCs trying to rebrand crypto.
Paul Reda: Yes. That’s exactly what it is.
Kurt Elster: As Web 3.0.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And so, they’re like, “We’re gonna just… That’s gonna go away.”
Paul Reda: We’re just making up words.
Kurt Elster: Meta, Metaverse has not gone away.
Paul Reda: It’s all just making up words to make stupid people give us money. That’s all it is.
Kurt Elster: No. We had a single client who sold, who did an NFT once. We don’t have any clients who accept crypto.
Paul Reda: And everyone told them they were idiots, right?
Kurt Elster: No, I don’t… Honestly, I don’t know. It was like, “That was a thing we did. Moving on.” Really. I don’t know. I don’t know that it lived up to expectation, but I’m not sure. Shopify supports NFTs.
Paul Reda: Great. What does that mean?
Kurt Elster: There’s an NFT program.
Paul Reda: What does that mean?
Kurt Elster: I don’t know.
Paul Reda: There you go.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know anymore.
Paul Reda: That’s what I’m gonna just keep going anytime anyone mentions. What does that mean? And what does that mean?
Kurt Elster: My tokens!
Paul Reda: They’re gonna be like, “There’s a number that says a .jpeg, I control the number attached to that .jpeg.” Wow.
Kurt Elster: My tokens are getting funged!
Paul Reda: Great. That’s great.
Kurt Elster: More practical than this would just be accept crypto as a payment, and that I don’t really see, either. I know there’s stores that do it, but like why don’t you just see mass adoption of crypto as a payment in Shopify stores? They support it.
Paul Reda: Because it’s too complex, and doesn’t make any sense, and most people don’t actually have crypto. And because the idiots that do see it as an investment vehicle.
Kurt Elster: And the transaction fees are brutal.
Paul Reda: One crypto transaction fee is an American household’s energy usage for two months.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. See, the environmental cost of crypto concerns me. And if you have crypto thoughts, share those with Paul, not me.
Paul Reda: I’m just gonna block you.
Kurt Elster: Do you have NFT muted on Twitter yet?
Paul Reda: No. I did a thing where Bitcoin, crypto, or NFT, I have an extension that does a text replacement and replaces them with Beanie Babies.
Kurt Elster: I remember you mentioning this and it’s still funny.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s just like, “New funding round for Beanie Baby investments.” It’s like, “That’s what they did.”
Kurt Elster: My issue is I still don’t see practical implementation of anything.
Paul Reda: The practical implementation is I made a bunch of money in Bitcoin because it went up and so now I have all this money and I don’t want to pay taxes on it, so now I’m gonna launder it into something else. That’s what it is.
Kurt Elster: I’m not disagreeing with you. Peter White from Abstract Ocean is now considering going back into Amazon FBA. There’s zero doubt it would increase our revenue, if not our margin, and potentially reduce the stress we’re getting from our 3PL. We hear from other sellers that tell us Amazon is easier to work with now and listing hijackings are less common. Customers are constantly reminding us they could get the product XYZ from Amazon in a day for free. Is dealing with the Amazon devil smart or should we just double down on our own operation if increasing revenue is the goal?
Kurt Elster: I think if your fulfillment operations can support it and your product is not something bespoke, and configured, and weird, it’s straightforward, or I could just buy it, then why not give yourself more exposure and opportunity and use the various marketplace sales channel that Shopify integrates with, and plug it in. You can attach all kinds of marketplaces to Shopify. Like Walmart, you can sell on Walmart.com really easily. You can sell on Amazon, Etsy-
Paul Reda: To me, I think the most important thing is that last sentence, is if increasing revenue is the goal.
Kurt Elster: It makes it sound like-
Paul Reda: If it’s just straight top line revenue, sure. Go for it. Might not see that increase in profit, though. And like long term, there’s the worries there.
Kurt Elster: And clearly he was on Amazon before and it was a bad enough experience where he went, “This isn’t worth the hassle.” The other one is you really expose yourself to… You attract competitors when you’re successful on Amazon. It’s a double-edged sword.
Paul Reda: I want us to stay ideologically consistent on this show and I mean before, we’ve kind of been like, “Hey, yeah. You probably want to get off Amazon. It’s probably not the best idea for you long term.” And now, I don’t want-
Kurt Elster: He mentioned it. He said… You could hear it in the way he phrased it. They were on it and left and he said, “Other sellers tell us they’re easier to work with now,” meaning they were not easy to work with before. And listing hijackings, which is a real nightmare.
Paul Reda: Are less common.
Kurt Elster: They still happen. Yeah. It’s like someone thinks they’re buying your thing and instead someone else fulfills it with something else. The customer has no idea and they’re like-
Paul Reda: And they get pissed at you.
Kurt Elster: … “Your product is garbage. What’s your problem?”
Paul Reda: Pete sells Tesla parts, stuff for your Tesla, like cool Tesla accessories. Are people saying to him they can get it from Amazon in a day for free? I assume it’s a different product than his specifically? Or is he drop shipping some of that?
Kurt Elster: He sells stuff… You know, I’ve got this keychain cover. The Tesla key fob is notoriously stupid, and so he’s got a nice holder for it, and I have one of those. I like it. But he’s not the only guy who sells Tesla keychains, right?
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, in my head it’s sort of… Again, he just wants to make more money. He wants to make more, straight, top line revenue money.
Kurt Elster: Then the answer is yeah, start.
Paul Reda: In that case, go to town. Yeah. Put it everywhere. But I feel like for that kind of stuff, and he sells a lot of other stuff, like cool accessories holders that go in your cupholder, and various Tesla-specific items that I assume there’s also Chinese factories pumping out other Tesla-specific items, and in my mind the actual answer to those people is, “Then go buy the Amazon one, it’s crap. Mine’s not.”
Kurt Elster: I like that. Also, like, “They’ll ship it to me in a day.” How fast do you need this?
Paul Reda: Yeah. And so, it’s sort of like-
Kurt Elster: Can he make his fulfillment faster? That might be one.
Paul Reda: He’s trying to convince himself to get back on Amazon.
Kurt Elster: It sounds like you don’t wanna do it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And I mean, no offense to Pete. I don’t feel like he has a very high margin business. I might be wrong. I might be totally wrong.
Kurt Elster: No, they get some of that stuff manufactured.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If you just want to make one number bigger, I guess go on Amazon. But I am not convinced it’s gonna make his overall business healthier.
Kurt Elster: I think the short answer is it depends.
Paul Reda: To me, it really just smells like he’s struggling with the idea and is looking for someone to give him permission to do it. And that could mean that he actually doesn’t wanna do it.
Kurt Elster: So, in those situations, that’s when I ask myself what would someone smarter than me do? By reframing it, and I’ve seen articles about various ways to ask this same thing, but it’s essentially like if you’re giving someone else advice on a problem, versus you’re thinking through the identical problem for yourself, you’ll probably have two different ideas on you versus what you tell them. And the advice you give someone else is usually better than what you yourself do, so you reframe it in the third person. What would someone smarter than me do? And usually, you’ll find you already knew the answer, right? Go with that.
I don’t know. Pete, go with your gut on this one.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We like you, Pete. Pete’s one of our clients.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I like Pete.
Paul Reda: We like Pete.
Kurt Elster: And I like Tesla accessories.
Paul Reda: You could have just brought this to us privately. I don’t know why he had to make our business relationship public.
Kurt Elster: I like the content. Thank you. Thank you for working with us in public, Pete. All right, we will end it there, and in our next episode we’re gonna discuss the top trends shaping 2022 and beyond, and the recommendations you need to build a brand that lasts. I copied that from the meta description for the Shopify trends report for 2022.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Shopify released this 170-page report.
Kurt Elster: It’s really good.
Paul Reda: And we gotta read it. And we’ll talk to you about it after we read it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You could go download it now and check it out if you want, or we’ll give you our highlights from it next week. And of course, we would love to hear your thoughts on this episode, so please join our Facebook group, Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders, and talk to us.