w/ Paul Reda, Co-Host
We discuss a range of topics from technical problem-solving to the impact of AI and automation. We explore how to enhance your ecommerce business with alternative strategies such as live shopping, and Shopify's new performance-boosting URL change. We also dive into the use of Chat GPT for writing and the importance of domain names in the present-day landscape. Tune in to gain insights on how to improve your online store and stay up-to-date with the latest ecommerce trends.
TIMESTAMPS
[00:04:46] Exploring the relevance of.com domain names
[00:15:00] Shopify Changing URL Strategy for Faster Loading
[00:21:53] ChatGPT struggles to accurately determine month-end dates
[00:25:47] Uncovering the Syntax of ChatGPT
[00:31:57] Facebook's New Shopping Rules
[00:37:18] Unconventional E-commerce Strategies
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
5/30/2023
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s open with something easy, do a little schtick, just try to get the banter rolling here.
Paul Reda: I think the problem is we’re on two different energy levels right now. I’m used to us recording after lunch.
Kurt Elster: Lunch is when I’m slow.
Paul Reda: See, yeah. I need you slow is the thing.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I see.
Paul Reda: Because when you’re too chipper, I hate it.
Kurt Elster: Sorry. I just get excited. I’m excited to be alive. Let’s jump into-
Paul Reda: Oh, boy.
Kurt Elster: Let’s do a news and updates episode.
Paul Reda: Sure.
Kurt Elster: I asked my 13-year-old, obviously Gen Z, so his… Even though he has no disposable income, that’s whose opinion we care about as marketers.
Paul Reda: And everything you said to him, you were like, “Did you know this is happening?” And he just went, “I know.”
Kurt Elster: “I saw it on TikTok.” We’re like, you know-
Paul Reda: Do they watch TikTok?
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. Because like-
Kurt Elster: Well… My 11-year-old is like, “I deleted TikTok.” I don’t know if that’s true. I think it is.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Because my wife watches a ton of TikTok and she’s 30-something?
Kurt Elster: 29.
Paul Reda: Something in the mid-30s. And I’m like, “She’s too old for that.” But once some people in their mid-30s are hanging out on it, you know the 13-year-old’s gotta get out of there.
Kurt Elster: I know my 13-year-old is TikTok and Discord.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Is there even a deeper… We think TikTok is what the youths are into because we’re old losers, so is there even a deeper level of stuff that we don’t even know about yet?
Kurt Elster: Oh. There’s like the underground TikTok?
Paul Reda: Like what’s the shit, yeah, that the 12-year-olds are into that we don’t even know about or understand?
Kurt Elster: You know, they use Opera as their browser. That blew my mind.
Paul Reda: That’s weird. As a ‘90s browser wars person to know that, that Opera is on a major comeback?
Kurt Elster: That Opera is cool if you’re in middle school. Yeah, that, when I saw… So, I’m like, “Maybe just my one kid’s a weirdo,” but the other one was doing it too.
Paul Reda: Oh, I’ve met them. They’re both. They’re both weirdos.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They’re always online.
Paul Reda: Kennedy is young. She’s too young to not be a weirdo yet. She’s at that age where all children are weirdos, and she hasn’t evolved into a true weirdo or just being-
Kurt Elster: Don’t say evolved in front of her because she’ll do a 30-minute monologue on Pokémon. All six-year-olds love Pokémon. They just… Pokémon, she knows more about that, she can identify more Pokémon than any other animal. To be fair, Pokémon yell their name at you, but-
Paul Reda: Yeah, that helps.
Kurt Elster: I mean, she knows Pokémon cold.
Paul Reda: Yeah. My daughter is still… She’s one-and-a-half, so it’s all just like “moo.” Everything is the noise it makes.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: So, she’s just like, “bock bock,” just points. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Pokémon’s the reverse of that. The noise they make is just their name.
Paul Reda: Is their name. Well, that makes it easier.
Kurt Elster: A cow, they just call it that’s a Moo. Duh. Dog, that’s a Bark. There’s a dog Pokémon called Yapper because it’s yappy.
All right, news and updates. This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Soundboard Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And I am joined today by show producer, Mr. Paul Reda.
Paul Reda: I’m more than that.
Kurt Elster: You’re a business partner.
Paul Reda: Sure.
Kurt Elster: Show producer.
Paul Reda: Life partner.
Kurt Elster: Business partner for many years.
Paul Reda: Therapist.
Kurt Elster: Therapist. Yeah.
Paul Reda: Lunch buddy.
Kurt Elster: That’s a two-way street. Oh, yeah, you are. You are my lunch buddy. You don’t want to eat lunch by yourself.
Paul Reda: Antique show partner.
Kurt Elster: Oh, this is getting worse. We did go to an antique show together recently. Oh, boy.
Sound Board Clip: Eww!
Kurt Elster: All right, our agenda today, Facebook’s move toward what they’re euphemistically calling a seamless shopping experience. A lively discussion on dot com domain names. Do they still matter? Shopify updates their URL structures. Why do we care? Does it matter? The AI gold rush. If I hear the phrase AI used incorrectly one more time, I may vomit. And you know, is it all hype or game changer? And then finally, let’s throw out some out of the box ideas for scaling your Shopify store’s revenue.
Sound Board Clip:
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s open with domain names. When I say domain name, what pops into your head?
Paul Reda: Dot org.
Kurt Elster: Dot org?
Paul Reda: Dot gov?
Kurt Elster: Mine’s dot com. I believe the correct answer was dot com. It wasn’t actually… I wasn’t looking for opinion.
Paul Reda: Dot RE, the TLD for the French protectorate of Reunion Island, so I could get paul.re, but you could only get it if you’re a French national, so I can’t get it.
Kurt Elster: You know, but you can order passports from the internet. No, by the time anyone comes to us for help with their store, they already have the domain name, so it’s never a discussion. I feel like it’s not a discussion I’ve had in five to 10 years of what should we do about a domain name. I remember having… 20 years ago, it’s like, “Well, which TLD should I get?” And there were only a handful. And you know, should it be long? Short? Should it have dashes? What do I do here? And the advice was like no dashes, as short as possible, it’s gotta be dot com or no one cares, but the problem is today, trying to get a dot com name, good luck. They’re all taken.
And if you can find one that’s any decent, someone’s squatting it and they’re like, “All right, that’ll be $10,000, please.” And I’ve met people who have paid the big money for really cool domain names that are like short, and pronounceable, and memorable, but now there’s… To get around that, there’s all these other TLDs. And so, it’s like I saw dot AI today. Dot shop is a sizable percentage of Shopify stores, like 5% to 10% supposedly are dot shop. If there’s dot shop, is there dot store? I don’t know.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. The TLD, the domain name registrar is the top level. TLDs are top level domains is what they’re called. It’s weird. It’s monitored by this multinational thing called ICANN.
Kurt Elster: What’s ICANN stand for?
Paul Reda: I-C-A-N-N.
Kurt Elster: It’s two Ns.
Paul Reda: It’s two Ns. I don’t know. Internet Communication?
Kurt Elster: How about Internet Consortium Association Neural Network?
Paul Reda: Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It’s a neural network.
Kurt Elster: All right. Made that up.
Paul Reda: Polymimetic alloy.
Kurt Elster: That was a grade-A Terminator impression. That was really good. Oh, wait. Oh my gosh. I can’t believe you made a Terminator reference when I have on here-
Terminator Sound Board Clip: No problemo.
Kurt Elster: It’s very good. Perfect.
Paul Reda: Okay, good. I can’t hear it. Yeah, Emily… So, you know, she grew up a girl, and not a boy, so she didn’t watch boy movies growing up. She’s very excited for the Barbie movie. She’s like, “You don’t understand.”
Kurt Elster: You know, so am I.
Paul Reda: She’s like, “You don’t understand the lore.”
Kurt Elster: That Margot Robbie.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: What can’t she do?
Paul Reda: I don’t know how it got started, but yeah, she was like, “I want to watch ‘80s and ‘90s canonical boy action movies.” I was like, “You came to the right guy.”
Kurt Elster: Did you start with Blade Runner or Predator?
Paul Reda: I don’t like Blade Runner. Blade Runner is super overrated.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. If you’re not super into it it’s a little boring.
Paul Reda: Blade Runner 2049, way better. She’s seen multiple Denis Villeneuve movies. Loves them. I had on my playlist the ’84 Lynch Dune, and that was like a me one. I was just gonna watch it because I like things where they made choices and no one got told no, because that doesn’t happen anymore. Everything is just focus grouped to death by executives. And she’s like, “How about this Dune?” And I’m like, “You don’t want to watch that.” I’m like, “That’s not for you.”
She’s like, “No, we’re gonna watch it.” I was like, “Okay, fine.”
Kurt Elster: There’s some Dune superfans in their car screaming right now.
Paul Reda: Well, she watched it, and she was like, “I loved it.” And I’m like, “What?”
Kurt Elster: That’s a shocker. She’s deep in sci-fi if she loves Dune.
Paul Reda: I was like, “You know they’re making a new one?” She’s like, “We’re watching it.” So, we watched it. We had a whole Dune party. We made Dune-themed snacks. And she’s like, “I love it.” She looked and she just went, “I’m a real Dunehead. And I was like, “Yep, that’s what they call each other. Duneheads.”
Kurt Elster: Maybe they do. I don’t know.
Paul Reda: But anyway, we just watched the three good Terminator movies and not the three bad Terminator movies. Because there’s six Terminator movies. Three of them are good, three of them are bad.
Kurt Elster: You know, 50/50. That’s pretty good.
Paul Reda: It’s a good batting percentage.
Kurt Elster: You know, like Fast and the Furious, there’s 10 of them and all of them are bad.
Paul Reda: You love those.
Kurt Elster: I love the first one.
Paul Reda: You have to love all of them. Shut up. You’re a weird car guy.
Kurt Elster: I am.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and she declared Dark Fate was her favorite one. The last one.
Kurt Elster: I don’t think we can talk anymore.
Paul Reda: I was like, “Not Terminator-“ She’s like, “Not Terminator 2 because Terminator…” I was like, “None of the movies we watch are gonna be better than Terminator 2. I’m gonna be honest with you right now. We peaked already.”
Kurt Elster: So, going back to domain names.
Paul Reda: Go back to domain names. Sorry about that. So, what annoys me about them is ICANN creates the domain names, but they also sell the domain names, which is like if realtors were the only people allowed to build houses, which actually would be good-
Kurt Elster: It is, isn’t it?
Paul Reda: Because we’d get more houses. But they would just build them willy nilly. No one would ever stop them. They’d just build constantly, and they’d go, “Look what I got to sell you now.” And so, they’ve just been inventing new stupid TLDs over the last 20 years.
Kurt Elster: Well, yeah. You pointed this out. Many of them are file names now, like file name extensions.
Paul Reda: They just added dot zip and dot mov, which is-
Kurt Elster: That’s very confusing.
Paul Reda: It’s very confusing and very bad. Are we going to dot zip the domain for something or are we downloading a zip file that will then hack my computer?
Kurt Elster: All right. Here’s the argument for, is A, dot com, everybody’s squatting on those names, which is frustrating, so we need more real estate with these domain names. And so, what’s the solution? Add TLDs. And you know, I guess we decided we couldn’t just do dot com2, dot com 3. That’s not gonna work. And so, giving me a variety of options, I like that idea. The problem is it’s not well publicized and it’s confusing, and there’s domain names that did work and didn’t, and when you get spam links, fishing links, those always use the craziest TLDs. So, I feel like there’s some inherent skepticism of TLDs I don’t recognize.
But so, I asked… You know, I wasn’t sure. I asked on Twitter. And the theory for this is, “Hey, domain names don’t matter because I’m not typing in http://www...” I’m not doing that anymore. I just type… The URL is also a search bar, and so I just kind of like type it and hope it autocompletes. And so, it doesn’t really matter.
And when I asked on Twitter, there were a couple anecdotes, and this was my fear, was people were like, “Well, depends on your audience.” Especially if they’re older, they grew up seeing dot com was everything like us, us geriatric millennials.
Paul Reda: I’m sorry. I’m the last Gen Z. How dare you? Gen X.
Kurt Elster: Oh. My mistake. I like the last Gen Z. I thought that was-
Paul Reda: It’s like a sequel to Children of Men.
Kurt Elster: And so, it was like yeah, we had someone who registered .fitness, and someone else said they had dot club, and they said it really confused people because they saw it and they would just add… They’re like, “Oh, clearly that’s a typo.” They’d add dot com to it, and they’d go, “Oh, it doesn’t work.”
Paul Reda: I mean, to me, it really smacks of being low rent. Anytime they’re just like, “Yeah, check it out! It’s at Pillows.shop.” And I’m just like, “Those are full of lead shavings if you even get it.”
Kurt Elster: That’s how I feel about .to. If I see .to I’m like, “Well, I’m getting hacked.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. No, no, no, no, no.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That one’s never legitimate.
Paul Reda: It only works if you are selling tech things to tech people, and you have dot io.
Kurt Elster: That, I agree with.
Paul Reda: Yeah. .io has become legit and joined the big four of com, net, org, and gov.
Kurt Elster: I agree.
Paul Reda: And then io is up there now, and the rest is just crap.
Kurt Elster: But you know, what I like about some of them, they’re exact match. Acme.shop, that’s the Acme shop, right? That makes sense. That one’s confusing because it’s four letters and in my head our TLDs need to be three letters or maybe two. The moment it’s longer than that, I think that’s where you get that confusion, that like, “Oh, this isn’t the extension. I gotta tack dot com onto that.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. Just get the dot com. Just think of something different. Just make up a word. Who cares?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think that’s probably the best option. Unless you’re selling to nerds, then do dot io and go crazy.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: A lot of those are taken, too. So, similarly on this nerdy discussion, Shopify is changing how URLs work. They’re changing how they serve up some store assets. So, mainly theme components, images, JavaScript, style sheets, and in the past they would… You’d put in a liquid statement that was like, “This is the name of the file. Go get it.” Right? And then it would come back with… It would replace that with the URL, and it would be a CDN, so it was CDN dot Shopify dot com, and the idea was like that was very fast.
Well, your Google Page Speed score, Google’s like, “Oh, I have to look up that other address, I gotta connect to it, I’m already connected to this one site, why you doing this to me? If you just put everything in one place it’ll load faster.” And they’re not wrong. The actual benefit of that… Not great.
Paul Reda: Are they?
Kurt Elster: Not huge. They don’t like it. Google is our performance overlord. We’ve decided that just as zero-to-sixty is the standard measurement, where did that come from? I guess Google is the one who gets to decide this is our equivalent of zero-to-sixty metric.
Paul Reda: No comment.
Kurt Elster: You know, I think we’ve lost the fight on arguing about page speed. Or at least performance. Yeah. I think we just have to adapt to it. They’re giving us tools now to actually be able to address it and that is what changed things for me.
Paul Reda: I just can’t get off the fact that in my personal experience here, I have store owners that are just like, “You know, what can we do about the fonts to lower the font load times because the font loading is hurting our page speed metric? Also, I have 30 apps installed. I need every single one of them. They’re so important to my business. But what can we do to shave 3K off those fonts?” It’s like you’re not a serious person. Get away from me. I can’t live with that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You’re saying you need to be able to make harder decisions-
Paul Reda: It’s like, “Yeah, are we here to make changes? Then let’s make changes. Are we here to fix this and make a significant difference? Let’s do it. Damn the torpedoes.” But when we’re like, “I don’t… 4K maybe we can save? Let’s talk about this over 10 emails while just ignoring the giant monolith over here.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: I love it when you hate agreeing with me.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You’re right. We’ve been on that many times where it’s like, “All right, you want a faster site? The solution is you gotta make hard decisions and get rid of as many of these apps as possible that are on the front end slowing the site down and find other solutions.” Or say maybe this isn’t worth it. And then instead it becomes like, “All right, we’re trying to shave the tiniest amount. We’re shaving grams of weight off a vehicle that weighs 4,000 pounds.” Okay, yeah, it’s lighter, but it’s not gonna make any difference.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But this new format, all right, assuming you’ve got a standard theme that came… You just downloaded your theme. This change happens automatically. If, for whatever reason, you, or a theme developer, or me, was a bad, lazy boy, and you just stuck a URL in there to reference from the old CDN, which you could do. They did not recommend. They warned you. They said, “Don’t do it.”
Paul Reda: So, when you upload something in the file section, there’s a little button that’s like, “Get URL,” and it gives you the actual URL of that object.
Kurt Elster: They’re like, “Don’t do it.”
Paul Reda: And they were always like, “Don’t do that because we might make a change in the future. Always use the liquid to call the file. Don’t just hard code the URL in there.”
Kurt Elster: They made this announcement and I and others had assumed that this meant that stuff was broken.
Paul Reda: I immediately was like, “Anyone who was a bad boy and directly inputted that URL into the code, Tom Siodlak who works with us, I’ve seen you do that.
Kurt Elster: I’ve done it.
Paul Reda: Was a bad boy and all that stuff’s gonna break.
Kurt Elster: And no, they amended it. They revised the announcement and said, “Those old URLs will continue to work. You’re just not gonna get any performance or other benefit here.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. I think there was like a 48-hour freakout.
Kurt Elster: They didn’t specify otherwise, and I think we all kind of assumed based on how it was worded. But the answer is, “Hey, you don’t have to do anything. It’ll continue to work as is.” If you’ve never messed with your theme, you’ll just benefit from this. Don’t worry about it. And if you want to make this change, double check it. It’s not that tough to implement and fix this at all.
All right, I know we both have strong opinions, many people do, on artificial intelligence. Is Skynet coming to kill us?
Yes/no?
Paul Reda: Mimetic poly alloy.
Kurt Elster: I love your Arnold. It’s so good.
Paul Reda: But the problem is-
Sound Board Terminator Clip: No problemo.
Paul Reda: But the problem is my Arnold.... the State of California.
Kurt Elster: All right, last week on The Today Show, they’re like, “Skynet’s coming. We’re all gonna die.” On the Today Show.
Paul Reda: Everything I’m mad about is all just caught in the doorway and an individual piece can’t get out. Will the AI… Is the AI built on the blockchain?
Kurt Elster: No, I don’t believe so.
Paul Reda: Can I use… Does AI make NFTs? Is that why I should care about it? Because I still care about-
Kurt Elster: We don’t even remember what NFTs are.
Paul Reda: Oh, but I was told-
Kurt Elster: That’s over.
Paul Reda: … that that was the future. It’s amazing how AI came out of nowhere as the thing no one can shut the fuck up about until the blockchain crashed and then NFTs crashed. Oh, now we have a new thing that everyone has to talk about.
Kurt Elster: The difference is this has actual use cases.
Paul Reda: But hang on.
Kurt Elster: Blockchain and NFT really didn’t.
Paul Reda: Okay. Yes. True.
Kurt Elster: Again, there’s some crypto nerd screaming in his car.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: First Dune, now this?!
Paul Reda: Yeah. He can just turn into a bridge embankment for all I care. Tell me about your AI usage.
Kurt Elster: My two primary uses, copy editing and summarizing long content into short content.
Paul Reda: Tell me more about that. What do you do?
Kurt Elster: I had a seven-minute screencast from a client today. I took the transcript of that. I dropped it into Jasper.ai. You could use ChatGPT too. I have Jasper because I’m an idiot and I forgot to cancel the trial. Now I own it for a year and I’m gonna use it. And so, I dropped that into summarize and it perfectly summarized it. It was like, “Here are the action steps that this person is looking for.” And it made it very easy to verify it and write the work request. So, what happened there was I spent five minutes with the AI to save myself doing 10 minutes of work.
Paul Reda: Yes. On a job that you already know how to do.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: So, these are interesting tools that allow people that know how to do jobs to do their jobs faster and more efficiently.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: I used it yesterday. I used ChatGPT yesterday. We had a thing where we have a page and on the page it says offer ends May 31st, 2023. But we don’t want to touch that page every month, so we just want-
Kurt Elster: That offer is evergreen. It restarts every month.
Paul Reda: It restarts but we say it ends at the end of every month. So, when the month changes, we want it to then say June 30th, 2023, or February 28th, 2023. It has to know what the last day of the current month is. Maybe I could have figured that out, how to do that in Liquid, but I was like, “Let me ask ChatGPT.” And I did it. And it was fully wrong. Then I reworded my question, and it was fully wrong again. Then I reworded the question a third time and it gave me something that did always give you the last day of the month, but it was off by one day. I then took that output and added another day to it and now it works.
So, that did take less time than me screwing around with it, or trying to figure out how to do it, but I still needed to know how to do my job in order to make this work.
Kurt Elster: Yes. You are… In this case, you are now a prompt engineer. Presently, you can hire a virtual assistant, probably in the Philippines, to do any manner of task you can think of. I view ChatGPT as being in the same role, where the tasks that you would have to assign to, document, and explain to a virtual assistant, oftentimes, I would imagine the majority of those handed to ChatGPT would work reasonably well. And so, I think that’s the way to look at it, is like this thing is a virtual assistant that sometimes is very impressive and other times you’re like, “I don’t know how you screwed that up so badly.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. You can’t trust it. And again, we’re only talking about ChatGPT, because everything else is just like stuff that they’re just like, “Well, what…” Just taking it off 10 years into the future maybe if we could somehow figure it out. I mean, even the stuff that ChatGPT outputs, everything it writes sounds like a high school kid that didn’t do the reading and is kind of bullshitting his way, because the teacher called him, and he needs to act like maybe he did do the reading.
Kurt Elster: That’s kind of how it works.
Paul Reda: That’s the best. That’s what it outputs, though.
Kurt Elster: Every time it says a word it’s like, “All right, I think there’s like 97% chance this next word is the right word.” And it just… So, it’s very good at extemporaneous speaking, essentially.
Paul Reda: Yeah. This thing where it’s like, “It’s gonna write movies.” No, it’s not.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s not creative.
Paul Reda: It’s dumb as hell.
Kurt Elster: It is.
Paul Reda: And now everything is AI. You know, there was-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They just tack AI into it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Zoom, the conference call company, whose stock is lower now than it was in 2019. I don’t know how they blew that. Remember Zoom, how they were gonna take over the world two years ago? They just had their quarterly earnings report and every single question from every single Morgan Stanley analyst and all these people were just like, “Well, how are you gonna integrate AI? Don’t you need to get AI involved? What’s the AI usage here?” And the CEO was just like, “Yeah. Well, you know, we have an independent… We need more capital because we’re gonna do AI.” You just say, “We’re gonna do AI.” What does that mean?
How is AI gonna help Zoom? Tell me about it. Oh, it’s gonna make the audio sound better? We’ve had that. That’s just a thing that already exists. That’s not AI. Now we’re gonna call it-
Kurt Elster: Just haven’t implemented. Yeah. There’s a lot of just automation tools that we are now rebranding as AI.
Paul Reda: Yeah. AI is now short for the computer is good. We’re gonna make the computer more good, and once the computer reaches a level of good, it’s AI. That’s AI. The computer did good. That’s all it is.
Kurt Elster: Do you think ChatGPT is AI?
Paul Reda: No. It’s a language model.
Kurt Elster: It is a language model.
Paul Reda: It’s Siri. It’s Siri that’s not shitty.
Kurt Elster: It’s the promise of Siri delivered 10 years later.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s not shitty Siri. It can’t think. It doesn’t know stuff ahead of time. You ask it a question and it kind of maybe bullshits a thing that you go, “Okay, I guess.”
Kurt Elster: I’ve used it enough now where A, I can 100% recognize ChatGPT’s writing style. If someone has not either rewritten its output or been really careful with the prompt and how they explained its tone of voice, I see that thing a mile away. It has a very obvious syntax it uses. So, that’s issue one with it. Because if I can see it, for sure algorithms will be able to spot it very quickly. One workaround is just throw some typos in there. It never makes typos. It abuses commas and it really likes colons, lists, and adjoining modifiers. It’s always like, “Actually, sentence. But or and, sentence.” And all of that is comma, comma, comma. The thing just abuses commas and exclamation points. Part of my prompt is always like be concise. You hate exclamation points. And then you get a much saner output with it.
But I’ve really been pushing it to its limits where you’ve got these huge ultra prompts that it has to run through over and over, and as soon as I’m a few steps into it, error generating response, error generating response. When you’re really trying to work it into let’s have a discussion, let’s work step by step, let’s do these long form things, it just starts to fall on its face and the magic starts disappearing.
The fact that it speaks in human English I think captured our imaginations where we’re like, “Wow. The computer’s talking to me.” When you play with it, similar to a smart speaker, you’re like, “Oh, it is nowhere near as smart as I thought on day one.” Still is very useful. I use it daily. But it’s just… You know, in no way am I terrified of it like some of these media portrayals.
Paul Reda: And the reason that this is getting pushed so hard is because the forces of capital can now envision a world where no worker exists that they have to pay. All that will exist is executives and shareholders that reap the economic benefits from a robot worker that they don’t have to pay, and no other human involved. And that’s why everyone in the media, and the high-level finance people are so excited about this, because they finally have a gateway to a world with no workers.
Kurt Elster: They would have seen ChatGPT and then seen, “Ah, payroll is my biggest expense. If I could reduce that with similar or better output through automation, fabulous.”
Paul Reda: You know, the Writer’s Guild, the WGA, is on strike right now. So, we’re not getting any movies or TV shows being made. In the Writer’s Guild final demands, they put in one that was just like, “You cannot use AI to write movie or TV show scripts and you cannot use the scripts we write for you to train an AI to write movie and TV show scripts.” And the WGA bargaining committee thought surely the studios don’t want to do that. They’re not gonna want computer scripts. They’re gonna be garbage. So, we’re gonna put that in there. The studios will say, “Of course, we don’t want to do that. We’ll give you that concession.” And then the writers were like, “Well, we’ll give them a concession and that’ll get the ball rolling. That’ll grease the wheels. We’re just gonna give them an obvious one that they will agree to. Then we’ll have an obvious one that we’ll agree to, and we’ll all work it out.”
And they made that proposal, and the studios rejected it, which kind of says it all. I don’t know if you saw… Did you see that company that was like some car company, they tried to get Elon Musk’s attention by making a fake commercial with Ryan Reynolds, and it was entirely AI generated?
Kurt Elster: No, I missed this.
Paul Reda: With a fake Ryan Reynolds in it. It was terrible. It looked like freakin’ Clutch Cargo. It moved like five frames a second. Only his mouth moved. It was garbage. But it was like, “Okay, well, here you go.” Now they get a world where they don’t have to pay actors, and they don’t have to pay writers. That world is gonna come for you. Not that it’ll be successful. Just like how Zuckerberg saw, “Well, the Metaverse is coming. I gotta hire 10,000 people because the Metaverse is coming.” And then the moment the Metaverse didn’t produce the returns he wanted; all those people are fired. Get out of here.
“I’m not gonna be punished for that. The CEO of Microsoft and Zuckerberg and all those people aren’t gonna be punished for that. You’re gonna get punished because I hired you and said, “This was the new big thing.” And then when it wasn’t, I get to fire you.” And that, to me, is the danger of AI. The danger of AI is not Skynet. The danger of AI is everyone who’s a billionaire just being like, “I’m gonna replace them with AI. See ya later.” Firing everyone. Then the AI is garbage, and the company gets screwed, and now no one has a job.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s this-
Paul Reda: So, just throw me in capitalism jail now, because I’ve ruined this podcast.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. One star. Look, if you like the show, leave a five star review, because the number of one star reviews we now have to offset from angry capitalists on this show about eCommerce entrepreneurship…
Paul Reda: Hey, I’m a true Marxist. I keep 100% of the products of my labor. That’s the reason I do this.
Kurt Elster: We’re doomed. I don’t know. I like AI but the hype around it, as someone who uses it constantly, the hype around it is insane.
Paul Reda: ChatGPT is a fun tool to use. Everything else you say surrounding this is dumb as shit. That is my stance.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. My mother-in-law is like, “Are you afraid of it?” I said, “Afraid of it? Why would I be afraid of it?” She didn’t really know but it was just like that’s kind of the media’s portrayal. It’s strange. I don’t know. Just throw Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics at it and hope for the best. I don’t even remember what they are. Thou shall not kill. It’s basically like don’t let humans get killed. And then number three is like, “All right, as long as it doesn’t interfere with not killing humans, you can try and engage in self-preservation.” See? We solved this with 1950’s sci-fi. Long ago.
Paul Reda: Always. Yeah. Always the way to do it.
Kurt Elster: And you know how much it loves to adhere to its rules that it forgets about very quickly into the conversation. All right, Facebook’s “seamless shopping experience.” So, right now you’ve got your Shopify store. Online store is a sales channel in the store. You can plug another sales channel to connect it to other marketplaces and platforms. Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Google, and Meta, the Facebook and Instagram, and then you can list your products on there, plug them into ads, make your life easier. It has your catalog. And in the past, I could have a little mini-shopping experience within the app and then people could click through, get to my site, and make a purchase. Or they could purchase directly through the app. Never go to my website, just purchase through Facebook.
And similar to any other marketplace, they hold the funds until I provide a tracking number, and then they release the funds to me. Their new announcement is, “Hey, starting April 24th, 2024, shops that direct people to an eCommerce site to complete a purchase will no longer be allowed.”
Paul Reda: To do that.
Kurt Elster: Will no longer be accessible. You can’t do that anymore. And then from starting June 5th, anyone who’s adding a new shop into Commerce Manager, which is… That’s like the business tool in Facebook and Instagram. They can only check out on Facebook and Instagram. You can’t send them to your store.
Paul Reda: So, TLDR, if you’re selling on Facebook and Instagram, that purchase must be completed through Facebook or Instagram and cannot be redirected to a Shopify store, Shopify URL.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah. They want to own that-
Paul Reda: They want to capture the channel.
Kurt Elster: They want to own the channel. They want to own the transaction and the payment processing. They get all that data, and they get a percentage of revenue. I mean, Shopify’s revenue… Oh, shoot. I forgot the percentage. But it’s double digits of their revenue is payment processing that they collect.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: It’s quite lucrative if you can own a huge marketplace.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If you just… I mean, that’s all the credit card companies are. They’re just taking 2% of every transaction or whatever it is.
Kurt Elster: Well, and they get the interest. Assuming you pay them back.
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. They get the interest. But-
Kurt Elster: Here’s the trick. I just shred the credit card bills. Gotcha. Pro tip.
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Kurt Elster: I think it’s annoying but A, it’s their sandbox. You play in someone else’s sandbox, it’s by their rules. I don’t think it’s particularly bad. But I’m giving up a feature and nobody likes that.
Paul Reda: You know, it’s the old story of yeah, you play around in someone’s… Someone sets up a marketplace to help you to work on, that’s for them. You’re getting on there for them. And then they can eventually change the terms of the deal in a way that doesn’t benefit you.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: So…
Kurt Elster: And you know, no one’s forcing you to sell through here. You could quit. I will say we’ve discovered twice recently that when you sell through Facebook and Instagram you have to provide the tracking, show it’s fulfilled, to get the payment transferred. Fine. That’s not weird. They’re essentially acting as an escrow there. But there is a limit on it. At 30 days, it just cancels the order and refunds the customer.
Paul Reda: Oh, so we’re not doing any preorders, or if you have any inventory problems.
Kurt Elster: Yes. So, something to be aware of. I think that’s the one big caveat there. And I-
Paul Reda: Do we have any data on people that do that? Do we know? I mean, I could see a clothing store selling stuff on Instagram maybe.
Kurt Elster: We have plenty of clients who do this. The ones who do really well at it are very much on the platform a lot and will do live shopping.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If you watch the LuLaRoe documentary, I mean, that was the backbone-
Kurt Elster: They pioneered that.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That was the backbone of LuLaRoe is essentially doing Home Shopping Network on Facebook.
Kurt Elster: And that strategy works. If you have fans who are interested and bored, totally works. We had Jon Chase on here who would make his own art and sell it. He would do Instagram lives every week in which he’d kind of like BS with the audience, it was fun, it felt like you were hanging out with him, and he’d work on a painting, and then he would sell stuff to you throughout, and people would buy. Or I’ve seen people do… It’s like I’ve got my regular store, but hey, I’m a maker and here’s all my one-off stuff I’m just selling in this live. That strategy really works.
Oh, which segues perfectly into atypical ideas to try. That’s how I want to wrap this episode up. And some out of the box ideas as that customer acquisition cost is always the big fear for profitability, and scaling, and continued success with any eCommerce brand. And so, adding in other channels outside of pure PPC, you got Facebook and Instagram, and of course Google Shopping I like a lot, and Google PMax ads, but there’s other stuff, as well. And so, those live shopping, those work really well. If you can get into it, it’s a big investment in content and time. There’s a platform called CommentSold that lets you broadcast on multiple platforms, tries to make it easy. So, if you’re interested in this either do it native or check out CommentSold.
The other one I like, that I thought was cool, is-
Paul Reda: What’s… Comment Sold?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Doesn’t even make any sense.
Kurt Elster: I think you’re in the live stream, you’re like, “All right, if you want it, comment with sold.”
Paul Reda: Oh. I’ve never-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And then the way people used to do it is they’re like, “All right, what’s your email? We’ll send you the draft order invoice and then you pay, and then boom, now it’s sold.” That’s still how some… I was watching a few last week.
Paul Reda: I only shop on dot coms. I’m old.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Shopping on Amazon.com. That’s how you know you’re over the hill.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s like, “Oh, did you buy that on Amazon? That’s for babies.”
Kurt Elster: Increasingly, people complain about the search results on Amazon.
Paul Reda: Oh, it’s horrendous. It’s just a garbage pile.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It feels like… Just Amazon feels like I’m shopping on Wish sometimes, which that’s fun, but just like it’s a sundry good, just give me my HDMI cable and let me go home. I hate sorting through these reviews and all this nonsense.
Paul Reda: Monoprice.
Kurt Elster: Monoprice, which they sell on Amazon. The other that’s cool, and I like it because it feels a little nefarious, customer identity resolution. That’s such a great euphemism.
Paul Reda: I love it, you’re like, “Feels really…” It’s like it’s really gross and possibly illegal, but it feels so good.
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Kurt Elster: A little gangster. Customer identity resolution. This is a euphemism for there is an anonymous visitor to your site. They have not given you their contact information in any way. They have not filled out your checkout. But because we have enough wild data about them, we can pretty much make a good guess as to who they are and then email them. Or if you really want to get crazy, send them direct mail. A postcard. I think people are much less defensive of their physical mailboxes and they have to go through every piece of mail. Versus inbox.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They’re already getting mailbox spam to begin with, so just what’s another piece on the pile. They’re not thinking through like if you send them an email that ends up in their inbox that’s like, “Hey, buddy. I saw you looking at my website earlier.”
Kurt Elster: I think don’t acknowledge that. They don’t like that.
Paul Reda: No, I think you open with that. I think you get real… Sidle up to them and get real friendly.
Kurt Elster: Hey, first name, last name.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They’re a lot less defensive about their physical mailboxes because it’s just another piece of… They don’t think, “Hey, that was that website I looked at five days ago.” It’s just crap that showed up.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Oh, what a coincidence. If they even remember.
Paul Reda: How would I send them physical spam, Kurt? What would be the way to do that?
Kurt Elster: PostPilot, the company we both invested in.
Paul Reda: Yeah. All right. Disclosure, we’ve invested in PostPilot and we think it’s great. Also, we wouldn’t have invested in it if we didn’t think it was great.
Kurt Elster: But they, after we had invested, they added customer identity resolution. So, just you’re running a pixel on your site, person doesn’t purchase, they get put in a win back campaign. Essentially a browse abandonment campaign, like you would do in Klaviyo and never think twice about, except you’re mailing it to the home of anonymous visitors to your site. Think about that. That’s got some power to it. Now, obviously it’s more expensive to send a physical postcard than email, but you’d be surprised at how little it costs and how efficient it can be.
Paul Reda: I mean, I know the postage can’t be that much. Could it even be… Is it even a dollar apiece even? The total cost with PostPilot and all that?
Kurt Elster: I don’t know.
Paul Reda: Probably more than that. Probably more than a dollar apiece.
Kurt Elster: They could also do trifold brochures.
Paul Reda: Wow.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Not just postcards.
Paul Reda: But even if it ends up being like… I don’t know, a couple bucks a head.
Kurt Elster: If you segment it right it’s gonna pay for itself.
Paul Reda: Yeah. If it’s a couple bucks a head, who cares? How much are you spending for a clickthrough on a Facebook ad?
Kurt Elster: Exactly. So, yeah, that marriage of customer identity resolution and physical mail, that’s very attractive. And we have a few clients that are running this now successfully. And no one gets mad. No one’s like, “Hey, I didn’t sign up for this postcard.” It just doesn’t happen.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Because every day of their lives they get 10 postcards that they’re like, “I didn’t sign up for this piece of junk mail.”
Kurt Elster: I got a postcard today for the former owner of my house who I… The guy never set up mail forwarding. I will receive mail for this man for the rest of my life.
Paul Reda: I get mail for my old house owner’s pension plan, like private… I would get financial letters.
Kurt Elster: When those show up, I write return to sender on, they go back. Let’s wrap it up there, shall we? Any closing thoughts, Mr. Reda?
Paul Reda: Watch Terminator: Dark Fate. I think it’s really underrated. Arnold just recently gave an interview where he talked about how he thought the first three Terminators were great, which first of all, Terminator 3, not good. And then he said the last two were bad. And I disagree. I think Terminator: Dark Fate is a very good movie. It’s very fun.
Kurt Elster: That’s it for today’s episode. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these topics, so please, join our Facebook group. Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. Let’s continue the conversation. Until next time, keep selling, my friends.
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