No brakes on this AMA.
Two Shopify Partners get real in an AMA packed with listener questions. Store spying tricks, AI fails, bold 2025 predictions, a garage full of jacked-up cars, and a sneak peek at their next app.
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Kurt Elster
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Paul Reda
Uh I found a Cuban place in displays. When I lived in the city, I don't live in the city anymore. I lived in the city of Chicago for very many years.
Paul Reda
And there was a Cuban place that I loved. Sandwiches, mango shakes, coffee. Loved it. Moved to the suburbs, the death of all. interesting things and you just live in your car all day long. It's it's a nightmare. There's no ethnicity or like cool differences whatsoever. And so I've been dying for a real Cuban place mango shake, uh a licuado. And I've been trying to make them at home, could never get it right. And I found there's a Cuban place in Displains, which is not far from our house. And it's a real-ass Cuban place, run by real-ass Cubans, populated by real-ass Cubans. And I'm sorry. So you and me. And I am so excited because I've I've gone there three times in the last like ten days.
Kurt Elster
Do they recognize you now?
Paul Reda
I went in, I mean uh my wife went for dinner one night. And then the next morning I was kind of like, ooh, I want some coffee. I'm gonna go get coffee. So I took my daughter and we went and grabbed coffee there. And I think I feel like there was a tinge of recognition on the woman's face. Was like, wasn't that guy here yesterday? So I don't know, but I'm just psyched.
Kurt Elster
I like to hustle over to Highland Park to go to Madam Zuzu's. Oh.
Paul Reda
That's Billy Corgan's.
Kurt Elster
Billy Corgan's wife's sandwich shop. And you know, you go just to hope you see Billy Corgan. Because he does just mill around, hang out in there. He's got, you know, some stuff going on.
Paul Reda
I'm actually I'm actually a fairly big pumpkins fan. So uh I would like some you know, cool pumpkin stuff that they might be for sale there. I might if all I saw him, I would probably ask him to re-release the Zwan album because I feel like I'm like the only person in the world that loved the Zwan album.
Kurt Elster
So we're doing a AMA episode today. I have sourced questions from our Facebook group. unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders and you as my business partner, longtime Shopify developer, show producer, just let that praise wash over you. Yes. Zen-like state of acceptance. Really, you're not helping here.
Paul Reda
I'm the platform you've built everything on top of. If I'm not here, you collapse immediately.
Kurt Elster
I stand on the shoulder of giants. A giant Mr. Paul Rita. And so I love our opening question, uh, longtime listener, Braden Steffenschein. I have butchered this man's name many a times on the show. He wants to know like the The he wants to go hacker mode, dev mode. He wants to know the tips and tricks for sleuthing in a Shopify store. And just through troubleshooting Shopify stores, we've come up with a few. You should be one today or the other day with um You could get a product page on Shopify to dump out a bunch of info about the products in a structured way.
Paul Reda
Well, yeah. If you put so there's a there's a data format called JSON and that Everyone just uses now. Like the internet kind of runs on JSON now as just like here's a way to turn data into a portable machine readable format that Everything kind of knows how to read. And so, and that's how Shopify works too. Shopify stores everything and sends everything back and forth in JSON. So if you go out any store and if you're on a product page At the end of the URL, if you type in . json on the end. json. json, like you're looking for a file, um, and load that, it'll just load all the data. Uh it'll spit it out. I think in Firefox uh in in Chrome it just spits out like JSON code, like unmoderated. Like have you seen it? But Firefox does a really cool thing where it actually structures it and like colors it's a little bit. Yeah, it's all nice and like you can click through and like expand and like close things and really read through the data. I mean it's not it's not like trade secrets. I mean it's just like, oh, what's the name of this product? Like what are some of the tags on this product? Like what collections are it in? Like when was it published?
Kurt Elster
It's all the stuff that you would see in the admin listing?
Paul Reda
Yeah. Well not all of it, because as I discovered this week, some stuff doesn't come through in that. Like it'll tell you what controls the inventory. Like if if It's Shopify inventory or the inventory is not tracked and that side of stuff, but it will not tell you how many are in stock. So you can't like game it to be like, oh, there's only five left. I'm gonna buy all five. Like you can't Do stuff like that. And then variant tags don't show up. I'm not sure why. I'm not even sure if product tags show up.
Kurt Elster
Product tags do appear. They do. Yeah. There are browser extensions that are it's like Shopify Store Spy that kind of thing and they'll they're like, oh here's all the information we'll give you. That's what it's doing. It's just loading that that JSON endpoint and then parsing the info for you. If it when it barfs it out it's not real pretty, you can give it to ChatGPT and be like, hey, you know, format this for me nicely. The problem is I had to do it. It misunderstood my intent and is like, oh, I'll optimize your product listing for you. It just starts You know, like try to write descriptions and stuff. Yeah, if you're knock it off.
Paul Reda
If you're a total weirdo like me, again, like the Zuan album, uses Firefox, I'm I'm truly of the 1% of losers. Firefox is great for parsing Web JSON. I don't know why, but it's all nice and very easily readable.
Kurt Elster
The other one, uh a couple other ones I like doing. Slash sitemap. xml is the store sitemap. You probably had to submit that to Google Search Console. But you could just load that up on any store. And ShopFise is really nice. It groups it by page types. It'll be like products, pages, collections. And so often I'm curious like, hey, do you what's in the pages? And so like that will have its own sitemap, and then I'll get all the UR URLs out of that, use a browser extension to load them up quickly. Uh I think the extension it's called copy paste URLs. And then doing that, like let's say it stores a hundred pages. Well I'll just have all of their pages open in a hundred tabs in Chrome and then just quickly go through them looking for like Is there some promo landing page that's inspirational? Like I figured this out for doing store migrations and SEO stuff, but just also an interesting competitive research tool. You can do the same thing, uh, slash robots. txt, which you can modify that. This one's rare, but maybe they've excluded stuff from being indexed in Google. And that but it like it's gotta define what that thing that what Google shouldn't be looking at. And so that you just grab that URL and go see what the heck it is. I don't you know the chances of finding something interesting there are pretty slim. Yeah. Or you just look at collectionslash all. By default, it's just gonna dump out all the stores products.
Paul Reda
And then you sort by bestselling. I mean that that's what I do, because it's like if I'm uh just as a shopper, sometimes on a I'm on a store and I'm just like, oh, this is definitely Shopify. They just have and if I've I'm finding that the store has set up their product collections very stupidly or in an annoying way. And it's like, oh, all of these collections, there's all these collections and they all have two products in them and they make no sense. I'm just like, all right, no, collections all. Like give me all the products and I'll figure it out.
Kurt Elster
I do the same thing. The workaround to that is you make a collection with the handle all. Just slight collection slash all.
Paul Reda
You just make that and then it replaces That's yeah, that's how you can kind of block it.
Kurt Elster
If you wanted to block this this particular effort.
Paul Reda
It's useful. I mean it's just listing out all the products on your store that are available.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, and then you go sort by best selling. And you can see what is the big bestseller.
Paul Reda
Yeah. Well and I sometimes as as a user I want that. Like if they have like if it's a place that has very similar product listings. I'm kind of just or or even if it has a giant catalog. If it's like I'm kind of interested in some of this stuff, but their catalog is 200 products. It's kind of like Okay, just show me the best selling one. Okay, that the best-selling 10, the thing I want's probably in there.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. No, do the same thing. And then there's like lots of tools and stuff. Like Store Leads is a cool app that'll tell you try and pull info about a store. So March 5th in the Shopify Change log they've got this thing, the AI, the AI theme generator tool. We played with this earlier. What'd you think?
Paul Reda
It sucked.
Kurt Elster
Sucked. Sucked balls. Alright, I don't think we could say sucked balls. Hmm. So it asks you have to be in an English spe it has to be an English language store and you have to be on like free trial basic or advanced plan, I think were the restrictions. Like you have to be on a specific plan in an English speaking store. And then you give it like a short prompt, you know, maybe 200 characters max that describes your store. And then it quickly gives you like three theme previews that are supposed to help get you unstuck. But I threw several I tried this with you and we gave it several different variations on prompts and it just felt random.
Paul Reda
It was just the same crap all the time. And to me, first of all It would give you a homepage that had like three sections that were maybe just like, here's an image, and then text to the image. And then below that is an image on the other side and text next to that image. Just like not even not even text that's relevant to your store. And so it's like, okay, what was the point of this? Like when you buy a theme, it comes with like uh like a you know kind of a default home page to kind of show off all the various sections options on that yeah and all that sort of stuff that's just taking that and putting in your stuff is better than the crap that this thing put out. And the thing that really galled me is if it's running on the store, it should know the store name, products on the store, some data that's already been entered.
Kurt Elster
No, it didn't it seemed to be totally independent of it.
Paul Reda
I didn't know any of that. Oh yeah, you know that Shopify AI theme tool, they just have a static template of fifty of images of fifty different themes, and it just picks three at random and just gives it to you. Like, yeah, okay, I could see that.
Kurt Elster
I 100% I could see this idea working though, if it were like, you know, a little qu I guess it had a quiz.
Paul Reda
I think it's working if it used, I don't know, the JSON data available uh from any Shopify store to actually fill it out and make it look like it is your store.
Kurt Elster
That's what was odd about it. Yeah, it just it wasn't We're not the audience for it, but I didn't find it useful.
Paul Reda
Just because we're not the audience for it, it doesn't mean we can't see what the problem is.
Kurt Elster
You know, I like having Shopify magic, which really it's like In the theme editor itself, you can have it just rewrite headlines and stuff quickly for you. That's more useful than than having this thing do it. Maybe, you know, they'll it'll get somewhere Someday. These things are evolving quickly. Oh, like a V V1, not ideal.
Paul Reda
Don't worry, man. AI. It's gonna run the world real soon, I promise. Just give me ten I listen, I just need twenty more billion dollars this quarter. Okay, just a billion? That's it. This for ninety days. Just twenty billion for the next quarter. And Oh, it's that for the electricity bill? It will for everything. It's gonna run the world, I promise.
Kurt Elster
How many GPUs do you need?
Paul Reda
I need twenty billion and I need soft bank to borrow money in sort in order to give me the twenty billion. But don't worry, it'll all pay off in the end. I swear.
Kurt Elster
I think the idea that AI could generate a decent store is totally plausible.
Paul Reda
Again, because Shopify great at data structuring. Super great at it. Kudos to them. Just hey, could the AI ingest that data maybe? Instead of whatever the hell this is?
Kurt Elster
Yeah. No, I think you could make this work, but the version I saw not not impressing me at the moment. Sorry. I apologize. Uh auditions. dev, Shopify's partner conference, is coming up in Toronto at the end of May. And uh uh Ann Thomas, our dear friend Ann Thomas. Said, who's Canadian? We're not. She's closer to Toronto than we are. She's like, all right, what are the hidden gems and must see spots?
Paul Reda
I don't know. She says Toronto. Unlike us that say Toronto.
Kurt Elster
Toronto. Yeah, you gotta drop for sure that second T is not there if you live in Toronto. And she was like, oh what are what's your favorite poutine spot? All of them? I really don't discourage I've yet to have poutine where I went, that's bad. Right? It fries and gravy and cheese curds. I I'm gonna like it. We're a cheese family. That's how I get my calcium. But uh no, the last time I was there I went to nomnomnom. It's a memorable name, nom nom nom. And that seemed to be pretty fantastic poutine. So if you see nom nom nom, check that out. And then it, you know, if you're going for the first time, I mean the sea and tower seems like the one tourist thing to definitely check out.
Paul Reda
I mean, you definitely are very high. You are extremely high.
Kurt Elster
But not like Willis Tower High, formerly Sears Tower?
Paul Reda
Uh I'm pretty sure. No, I'm pretty sure the CN Tower observation deck is higher than the Sears Tower observation deck
Kurt Elster
I've been up there. I w it and I have a terrible fear of height. So it for me it was like an intense thrill ride. I w they've got that glass floor and I had to really work up to standing on it. And then some guy next to me jumped. And I screamed. Not my finest moment.
Paul Reda
Uh I don't know. Go to a Blue Jays game. Check out Roger's Center with an E at the end.
Kurt Elster
Didn't you do that last time you were there?
Paul Reda
Yeah, well no, because I got Uh my flight got delayed and then canceled. So the airline put me up in the super fancy hotel that like the Queen stayed at. Ooh.
Kurt Elster
And then I got Oh I know which one you're talking about. It's it from the outside it's beautiful.
Paul Reda
Yeah, and then I got I was like, all right, and I was just like, what's the cheapest Blue Jay ticket I could buy right now? And walk to the Blue Jays game and went to the game that night. And so yes, you could hang out in a stadium that is the most state of the art thing anyone could conceive of in nineteen eighty nine. You know, that's cool.
Kurt Elster
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Paul Reda
Well, I'll just say our first two months of the year. were bad. It's slow. We hadn't we were we were like, ooh, wow, is this is how twenty f twenty five is gonna be? Because this is not good. Then the last month It's just been banging. Crazy. Like it's crazy. So it all just like shot out of a cannon the last four weeks. Uh so that's I don't know what to take from that. That's our personal experience. That's our personal experience. I know from economic data, the official economic data metrics that have been released are not bad. Consumer sentiment's low. Consumer sentiment is awful. That's the one that's Squishy. But also like sort of the leading edge indicators. Like there was some manufacturing report I saw that came out. that was like, oh, we, you know, they like poll all these manufacturers every quarter or something. And they were like, oh yeah, we're like our our demand is way down. And like, but we're also paying more in We're also paying more for our products and we're paying more in salaries, but like we're not producing as much. So it was like, ooh, that's bad. And then I think the Fed said that like they've been downgrading the GDP numbers for this year several times. There's n of the things that people consider hard data. Nothing bad has happened yet, but all of the forward looking data is like recession is coming.
Paul Reda
No.
Paul Reda
So I don't like the R-word. Take it that what you will. I mean, but then again, you know, I also remember three years ago when they're like, we will 100% be within a recession in the next 12 months. And then that just never happened.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, after surviving the pandemic, like if you survived e-commerce from 2019 to now.
Paul Reda
But and by survive you mean swim around in your money your infinite money bank. Correct. See, that's the problem. The problem was people that like got the one-time inf you know Scrooge McDuck cash infusion in 2020. I don't know, Peloton. And then decided, well, this is just how the world's gonna be from now on. I'll just be making more and more on top of this. Uh-uh. You got a one-time special thing where people couldn't leave their houses And like no one planned for that apparently.
Kurt Elster
I think for sure the start of the year revenue was softer for a lot of businesses. You would have seen lower sales. But not to a a detrimental, you know, unsurvivable degree. And then you're right, in March, really a phenomenal month for us. Which that surprised me, you know, but happily, that's good. We I still see MA deals. Like, all right, MA deal flow was lower, but in no way has stopped Things continue on, life goes on, you know, largely no matter what happens, but what changes is consumer sentiment. And so the th the things people are willing to buy change. But at the same time, you know, we've got client stores that sell stuff no one needs. Right? Like you're if I buy another t-shirt or whatever, my life is not going to change. But the stores that d have a lot of that have some novelty, that are able to continually do collabs, are able to continually do releases, are doing stuff like live selling uh with video, they're doing really strong, right? They're up year over year. So it's not it's not all bad news. The uh and then Store Leads, which is like this third-party analytics app that gives you data about Shopify stores. According to them Shopify stores Q4 last year, year over year, we're up five percent. So it's not like these stores are closing or going away. You know, they're there's net more of them now than there were last year.
Paul Reda
So the answer is we don't know. And if we did know, we wouldn't tell you. We would just put it all in the stock market, whichever way that was we thought it was leaning, and then would make money on it.
Kurt Elster
I don't think options trading is where I should be spending my time.
Paul Reda
Well I'm not saying options trading. Come on. Not stupid.
Kurt Elster
So Well, I hope Jim McDonald's got another AI question. AI coding. He specifically wanted to know if you personally use AI to write code.
Paul Reda
Uh I can't say I never have. I mean I'll just be frank. I'm not the strongest at JavaScript. I can read it pretty well. I'm very good at planning things out. And and so it's like, all right, there should be a thing right here that does X, Y, and Z. And that will solve my problem. But like the exact sequence of commands and parentheses and semicolons in order to make that thing happen Not the strongest at. Generally I can feel my way through, you know, go on Stack Overflow, which is what all great developers do is just steal from Stack Overflow.
Kurt Elster
Certainly no shame in that's a rite of passage.
Paul Reda
Um but Uh there have been multiple times that I have gone to ChatGPT and been like, okay, here's JavaScript that doesn't really work, but I want it to do this. Make it do that. And then the thing it spits back at me. Generally like 90% works, but is like still not right all the way. But then like from there I'm like, oh, I could see that that only I'm smart enough to know that that only 90% works. And I can then like troubleshoot that and then feed what it gave me back into it and be like, but here's the problem with this. And then it spits out another one and that one works. And so like it's my partner in figuring this out.
Kurt Elster
I think that's the way that's absolutely the way to approach it and use it. It's like you You need a sounding board. You need a writing buddy.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
You you're doing pair programming. Only your partner is a dumbass AI.
Paul Reda
Yeah, a dumbass AI that's like, yeah, because if it was just like, I want JavaScript that make the thing big, like that would not It wouldn't give me something good and I wouldn't know that the thing it gave me was bad and then no one's right.
Kurt Elster
I view it as a way to get me unstuck. Right, or a way to copy edit, to troubleshoot. That stuff it's good at. Trying to get it to work, like develop something from scratch, could be frustrating. But I've been successful with it too, as long as you temper expectations. And so like I've I've had it write Python scripts that access the ShopFi API and do stuff like update SEO, generate reports. Um add alt text images, which it's like is shockingly good at. It can look at an image, understand it, and describe it back to you. Anything that's like a copy editing test. Uh but you know, there's still catches with it. Like it can only pull the first 250 images. And then try, you know, trying to get it to do more than that. The code got too complicated. It's suddenly like, now you're asking too much of ChatGPT. Now I'd have to move to something like cursor, where it's purpose built for this. And I've heard other people say like other LLMs are better at coding, but I don't know, ChPT is just the tool I know, and so that's what I go with. Um but Absolutely worthwhile to attempt and explore, especially if it's like, all right, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm stuck at this problem. Now what? It's great for that. Ooh. Robert Williams asked, What's going on in my garage these days? Well My wife had this nineteen eighty four Bronco that she dearly loved.
Paul Reda
That's right, you got rid of the Bronco.
Kurt Elster
And it was it was time to go. The Bronco was tough to work on, right? This is this is a big vehicle and not pr oh if you get in an accident with that thing, uh you're you're not making it home. It's over for you. And so we f we sold the darn thing. Bought a used Model 3 while they're super cheap. I now own two Teslas, despite the fact that I can't stand Elon Musk.
Paul Reda
So very conflicted. Oh wait, and you still have the Beatle?
Kurt Elster
And I still have a our our 79 Volkswagen Beetle, which that I can't part with. I love that car.
Paul Reda
See, i i it's a very strange thing because that like on one hand you're like, he's got three cars, but on the other hand, for a very long time it was like, yeah, two of them are over thirty years old and cost under ten thousand dollars. Like it's not Over 40. Over forty years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's like, uh, oh, oh, oh, okay. He's really not like anyone could have ten cars if they all cost three grand. Three of them don't run.
Kurt Elster
No, I I like screwing around in the garage. Really the thing I did that gets my attention that I focus on is screwing around with my e-bike. Oh man, do I love being an e-bike guy? That's a good time. Yeah. I'll do like You do like a 30 miles round trip on that. That's exciting in Lake County.
Paul Reda
Um in my garage is a Ford sedan and my wife's White Toyota Mom SUV and they sit there. And that's that. They are both used.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, that's the way to be.
Paul Reda
No work is done on them.
Kurt Elster
Alright, change at least change the oil. When it dings.
Paul Reda
Check the brake pads. I take it to Jiffy Lube when it dings. Oh, Jiffy Stooge. Oh dear. Oh, that's a good one. Jiffy Stooge. Well, I I love any any car forum like terrible names.
Kurt Elster
They're fun. Did they try to get you to replace your air filter? Oh, every time. At some point you should replace your air filter.
Paul Reda
Sometimes I do. Okay. When I'm like, oh, that one you showed me that you pulled out from under the desk, that does look dirty. Okay.
Kurt Elster
Uh and then Robert's other question, Shopify related side projects. We're doing another app We've got a successful app Crowdfunder, does crowdfunding campaigns. And for our next trick, my favorite promo of all time, free gift with purchase. I want to an opinionated way to implement free gift with purchase in a store where ID this is the easy right way to do it, according to me. And so we partnered with Carl Meisterheim of Liquid Weekly, who's done development work with us for years, and we're building uh a free gift with purchase app. And uh I don't think I've shared that.
Paul Reda
No, this is the first time you're mentioning it.
Kurt Elster
So for people who made it like twenty-five minutes into this podcast, wow.
Paul Reda
If you want to steal it, you better get on board, because it's going to be out soon, I think.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, no, that one we're gonna we got one more thing to do before we can apply for the app store listing. And then I'm gonna start looking for merchants to test it privately with us and really like get some feedback and shape it. And then we'll make it available public at that point. But you know, it's been years since Crowdfunder and the app store is just it's different now. It's much more crowded. And so I think this is going to be a a different experience. I think it's gonna be harder.
Paul Reda
Oh well I have no doubt it's gonna be harder, but I think the I think our strength is all these big apps, they're all like platforms now and they all do 12 things.
Paul Reda
It's kind of just like, hey, I I'm just gonna be one app I'm gonna be one app. I'm gonna do this one thing. I'm gonna do it correctly. There isn't like a back end admin that you need to like hunt through 10 menus to find the thing you want to do. Uh just come in, set your thing, and you're done. And I think that is our special trick.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, taking complex ideas and simplifying them. That's my bread and butter, man. So uh Teg Alfonso Brooks asked about Shopify video optimization, which this is a question we get from clients a lot, like hey, I have a video and I want to put it on my product page. Do I upload it to product media? Do I upload it to YouTube and then embed it in my product description? They get really paralyzed by the options. You know, a photo, people don't think about. There's drag and drop done. What about video?
Paul Reda
There's my answer for if I'm doing it, and then there's the answer if you're doing it. You being the store owner. If you if Paul Rita If I'm doing it, that page is covered in video. And you know, half the images are actually videos, and they're like five to ten second animated gifts. Silent animated gifts, but they're video. that are just running on a loop. I encoded them myself and uploaded them to the Shopify file section and have put them in the page. That said, I have over 20 years experience doing this, and I know what I'm doing. You don't do that Because what's going to happen is you're going to have a video that's like, oh, it's, you know, it's like a little 400 by 400 cutie video in my description. Uh but you uploaded it and it's like 2000 by 2000 and it's got a giant boom and soundtrack and it's five minutes long and it's a hundred megs. And so every time anyone loads your product page, they're downloading 100 back video. And so don't do that.
Kurt Elster
So upload it to YouTube and then embed it?
Paul Reda
I would say upload it to YouTube. Yeah. I think just the base idea of just like get the video on the page. Everyone knows how to you use YouTube. It's everywhere. They already have YouTube, JavaScript. On their web browser, they already have YouTube installed on their phone. Like put it all on YouTube and use the Shopify. Um, you could put YouTube videos in your Shopify product media, and it'll all just work. And that's that's what you should do. Now, if you want to hire me, really just optimize the hell out of it, and you just live in a video wonderland, I would love to do that. But no one no one is willing to put forth the effort to have me do that.
Kurt Elster
If the vi you know, it's true, I don't know anyone who knows more about video formats or encoding than you. It is one of your unexpected interests and hobbies. Like truly. If I have any question related to video formats or encoding, I ask you and you always know the answer.
Paul Reda
I mean I'm sitting here waiting because, you know, H264 is a very old format and we could all switch to AV1.
Paul Reda
In which the video will be like half the size. Very soon. The problem is Apple only started supporting AV1 on its phones. last year, I think with all the sixteens, with the fifteen pros they supported it, but then all the sixteens supported it. We just need to wait for all of the fourteens and the thirteens in in the SE twos in the world to die. And then we know that we could put we could start AV1 encoding these videos and they could all be half as big. That day is not here yet. I don't know when that day comes.
Kurt Elster
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Paul Reda
Yeah, it's like a ba yeah, it's like a b it's bag it's a bag in a pure white Jonathan Ivey space. And uh you know, a hand reaches in and like undoes little doodad, the hand pulls back out. So it's like a perfectly little looped eight second thing.
Kurt Elster
So sub ten seconds, no audio.
Paul Reda
That should be a video. That just should be a video that you have autoplay muted. There's flags you put inside the video tag, autoplay muted loop. And it just does that. It just runs constantly. It looks real nice. I don't trust you to do that because I've seen too many stores where that's there and then it's like 30 megs. And it's like, that should not be 30 megs.
Kurt Elster
But then okay, the easy alternative if you're the merchant is like, well, I'm gonna convert it to GIF. That's even worse. That's the funny catch.
Paul Reda
Yeah, the GIF is also gonna be like 10 megs or like.
Kurt Elster
It's such an old format and so unoptimized, the GIF will 100% of the time be bigger than the video. Uh that depends. Alright, when I've seen it. Okay, your videos versus someone's GIF they provided us. I'm like, this GIF is ten megs. Yeah. The video's a hundred K. You know. Yeah, video compressions are impressive. Okay. So my the really the safe choice is put it on YouTube.
Paul Reda
Put it on, I mean for those long-form ones and if you want to do like the really nice art-directed GIF-like
Paul Reda
Just running videos, you gotta be sure you know what you're doing, I beg of you.
Kurt Elster
Uh next question. Ben Negendorf, who's been on the show before. He had a question about uh Google shopping feeds. Like if when you've got a really fancy product page and so the product page is broken out into the content on the page is broken out into meta fields. Your Google shopping feed that Google Sales Channel generates is not going to see or be aware of those meta fields. And so then the solution is uh you have to uh customize your meta fields. So in Shopify they have those predefined definitions and many of those relate directly to Google. So if you use those, I would think that the data feed could pick those up. But realistically, it once you're at this point, use a third-party app to generate that Google the Google shopping feed. Because the third party app much more flexible gonna give you a lot more customization options to generate. um to take like whatever meta fields in Shopify and have that be what you want your your data feed. The moment you're like, hey, I've got Google Merchant Center working for Google shopping, but the Google data feed isn't quite what I want. Stop using that Google sales channel for the data feed. Move on to like data feed watch. Feed Army, those are just the ones off the top of my head, but there's several Symprosis that'll let you customize those Google data feeds. That's the trick. Lastly, the spam war. Somebody was asking about double opt-in for newsletters. Like, is that best practice? Pros and cons of double opt-in? Double opt-in combating spam.
Paul Reda
Double opt-in is what?
Kurt Elster
I hit your Shopify checkout. The first field is your email address. There's a checkbox. Is that the checkbox says sign me up for your newsletter? One, is that pre-selected? Did the person check that? Or would did that just show up by default checked? That's an option in Shopify. And then two, once they sign up, do they get an email saying, hey, click this to confirm the subscription? That's the double opt-in.
Paul Reda
Okay.
Kurt Elster
And so the true double opt-in would be they had to check the box themselves and then they had to click confirm in their email. That's where we get the double from.
Paul Reda
And the real way to do it is you have it checked by default and you don't notify them.
Kurt Elster
You know, I think if I'm entirely privacy compliance concerned.
Paul Reda
Well, here the problem is then there's all these different jurisdictions. There's what the EU wants you to do. The state of California has passed an act that has like various regulations of what you gotta do. So there's jurisdictional questions about Where your customer is.
Kurt Elster
Yes. In rightly it these various various governments are starting to say, hey Internet privacy, you know, your personal information, someone needs to put some guardrails on what's happening there. The problem is it's a patchwork. You know, it varies depending on jurisdiction. And the solution that I've noticed Shopify start to do and I love is they try to automate it. You know, and they tell you like, hey, this isn't legal advice, we're not your lawyer, et cetera. But better than nothing. In like in uh the the privacy policy settings, it can now try to handle a lot of that automatically, like whether it shows the data sale opt-in and opt-out, uh, and the the privacy policy page itself. And so in theory it could create all that uh automatically and then keep it up to date on its own. So I like opting into those features that automate this. And I noticed in a store recently, they do the same thing for whether or not that opt-in on the email at checkout is checked. Is it checked by default? You can have it be like, all right, depending on where they're coming from, that's how we make that decision. And just let Shopify handle it for you. That's what I'm going with as my preference. Um And then but like in the email itself, for sure I would still do I would do the double opt-im. I'd have them confirm. Because like a lot of email providers, you're gonna pay by the total number of subscribers you have. And so we don't want a bunch of junk in there. If it's also just, you know, spam bots. With part of the problem with AI, I'm sure people have noticed that the sheer number of spam bots and like obviously fake customer profiles and checkouts that appear. It's those are scripts. Those are bots doing it. And so the double opt-in just weeds them out because they're not going to go confirm. You know, they did whatever bizarre, nefarious thing they wanted to do and then disappeared. So that's my answer. Double opt-in and wherever Shopify says, hey, we could do the if it's privacy related, Shopify says, look, this is what we recommend. Just do that.
Paul Reda
I just send money to everyone's hotmail account. I just enter your hotmail account and we'll send you a coupon.
Kurt Elster
You just scroll through your spam folder. You're like, wow, look at all these amazing opportunities. What there's a prince? And he he needs my help? He's in Nigeria? He needs my help. Mm-hmm. No, don't mm mm. Those aren't real, Paul. Don't do that.
Paul Reda
I'm old school. It's a Spanish prisoner.
Kurt Elster
The classic it is the the Spanish prisoner. I can't believe that would used to be like a letter people would get. Yeah. And they'd be like, you know what? I should give this a shot. I guess the letter would seem more more legitimate than an email.
Paul Reda
Yeah, and so I think a person might approach you.
Kurt Elster
Also, yeah, more legitimate.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
The but no, no. Avoid those scams. Closing thoughts. Well, I'm excited for additions. dev, the Shopify partner conference coming up. That's always fun. High five with Harley.
Paul Reda
Do finger guns with Toby. Will they do them back to you? I don't think so. Justin's not gonna be there this time. I know you were hobnobbing with Justin the last time you went.
Kurt Elster
The former Prime Minister of Canada? Yeah, he he was there. I can't the man who just hands out selfies at that time. I can't believe I missed my opportunity for a Justed Trudeau selfie. Oh well. Alright, we'll end it there. See you guys. Bye bye. Crowdfunding campaigns are great. You can add social proof and urgency to your product pre-orders while reducing risk of failure. But with traditional crowdfunding platforms, you're paying high fees. And giving away control, all while your campaign is lost in a sea of similar offers. It can be frustrating. That's why we built Crowdfunder, the Shopify app that turns your Shopify product pages into your own independent crowdfunding campaigns. We originally created crowdfunding for our private clients. And it was so successful, we turned it into an app that anyone can use. Today, merchants using Crowdfunder have raised millions collectively. With Crowdfunder, you'll enjoy real-time tracking, full campaign control, and direct customer engagement. And it's part of the Built for Shopify program. so you know it's easy to use. So say goodbye to high fees and hello to successful store-based crowdfunding. Start your free trial and transform your Shopify store Into a pre-order powerhouse today. Search Crowdfunder in the Shopify app store to get started.