AI Tools, Reactions & Real Talk
Shopify unveiled a sweeping AI-first vision at Editions.dev 2025, and it's got their partners buzzing. In this episode, we go beyond the keynote to bring you on-the-ground reactions from developers, partners, and skeptics alike.
Featuring interviews with:
We dig into:
Some call it the future of commerce. We call it required listening.
Related Resources
For more unfiltered Shopify wisdom:
Kurt Elster
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Paul Reda
I'm Hercules. I am Hercules.
Kurt Elster
Hercules? I am Hercules. I love him. Arnie's the best.
Paul Reda
The dub version you see it's it's Arnold. It's young Arnold. He's so he's ripped. He's gorgeous. And he's just like, hello, I am Hercules. It's just, it's so insane.
Kurt Elster
It's gotta be. It's gotta break your brain. Cause we all know how Arnie talks, right? It's like That's him. The look, the the giant, you know, his appearance, but also that accent.
Paul Reda
You turned into podcast Kurt in the middle of that response. That's not how you actually would talk to me.
Kurt Elster
No. No, I'd be like, oh, disgusting. Sick. And then that could be positive or negative.
Paul Reda
So you they let you back in the country?
Kurt Elster
After I vaped in my hotel room last year.
Paul Reda
That was last time you set off the fire alarms.
Kurt Elster
Because I vaped in my hotel room like an idiot.
Paul Reda
Mm-hmm.
Kurt Elster
And it wasn't not my finest moment. So I avoided, I just didn't purchase. vape products.
Paul Reda
Well, and you were high, so when it went off, you were like, they're out to get me. They're coming.
Kurt Elster
Oh no. When a fire alarm goes off in a hotel room, magically you're suddenly very sober. Yeah, that was fun. Fortunate no, no. Zero shenanigans. I wasn't even accidentally rude to anyone this year. Oh good. Which that's just like that just happens when I go out in public.
Paul Reda
That you know of.
Kurt Elster
That's true.
Paul Reda
They're all recording their podcast right now, being like, you know who what asshole I talk to? Kurt Ulster.
Kurt Elster
I'm offended. But maybe. So yeah, uh additions. Shopify's b or additions. dev, sorry, their big developer partner conference in Toronto As I went to last week, had a great time. But then they've also got additions. That's different. The difference between additions and additions. dev, are you aware of this?
Paul Reda
Is that like the difference between shop and shop? And the shop app when you do shop pay for shop cash?
Kurt Elster
Now additions is the fancy website where they make all the announcements twice a year.
Paul Reda
Okay.
Kurt Elster
The like super styled one. Like this year it had a racing game stuck in.
Paul Reda
Then what's that URL?
Kurt Elster
A suit at Shopify. com slash additions?
Paul Reda
Oh, okay. It's not additions. com or additions. dev, which I think is a valid URL.
Kurt Elster
No, the other one's additions. dev. That's valid. That is in fact the URL. That's the event.
Paul Reda
So the URL of the event is additions. dev. Uh-huh.
Kurt Elster
But the website you're supposed to go to if you want about the features.
Paul Reda
Is not additions. dev.
Kurt Elster
No, that's shopify. com slash additions, I believe.
Paul Reda
Just, you know, another great naming scheme by Shopify.
Kurt Elster
But no, I love going to these things, meeting people, glide handing, shaking hands. Doing a little finding a corner, doing a little lightning interview with some background ambient noise. It's fun. Plus it gets me out of my house. Need to leave occasionally.
Paul Reda
What was the atmosphere? The buzz, comma, attendance, comma tone, question mark.
Kurt Elster
I can't even tell you're reading. That's amazing. Jeez, wow.
Paul Reda
I am Hercules.
Kurt Elster
Well, you know, it's always positive at those things. Slapping high fives. Everybody's thrilled.
Paul Reda
Just everyone is Ezra Firestone for twenty-four hours?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, more or less.
Paul Reda
And then Ezra Firestone just like vibrates to the point where he like lights up like a sun.
Kurt Elster
Well he becomes invisible eventually. Okay. Yeah. That's how he that's how he leaves. Alright, I think I've been to all of these the Shopify annual developer events. You're like previously it was Unite. Now it's additions. dev. And for sure they've got these things down to an art form or science. I mean, it's just like they are nice. You show up, you will be treated well, you will have a great time, you will be impressed. Table stakes. So of you know the many conferences I've gone to, yeah, I like like the little boutique ones, but for the big ones, this is the best I've been to. And I wouldn't even describe it necessarily as like big, big as far as attendance. For sure, I suspect they limit attendance size intentionally just to keep things uh you know more manageable and it's just less overwhelming for attendees. For me at any of these things, I like the hallway track. I just want to talk to people and hear that's what this episode is about. We're gonna hear from those folks. Um but you know what's cool about these events, in the past it was like, hey, here's the announcements, you know, here's the features. Whereas now the system is they make the feature announcements on additions of the web page. Which like we're ribbing them, but the system works better because you've you know you're not finding out for the first time at the event. Like you've had some time to digest it, you know, then 10 days later, you're at this event. And now the people who built those features, who worked on those tools, are there on the floor in like clearly delineated booths. So like, oh, you got a question about this theme feature? Uh, there's a themes booth. And then you could just go find the person who worked on that thing you have a question about. It's like that I really appreciate about the format they do here. And then there's like workshops and panels. There was a singular theme to this event. It was, of course, it was AI.
Paul Reda
Uh so what you're saying is most of this podcast is just gonna be me being mad about things that like don't really work
Kurt Elster
I saw you using AI today. You were coding with Claude today.
Paul Reda
Well, I just asked it a question and to try and get a quick answer on something so I didn't have to bang my head against it. Uh and it gave me a very confident answer. Oh, I was so confident in its answer.
Kurt Elster
And it's supremely confident.
Paul Reda
So it was like, here you go, man. Here's exactly what you need. That didn't work. Yeah, it didn't work. And then I was like, it didn't work. And it was like, oh, you're so right. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, my bad. You're right. That didn't work. Here's what you need to do. That didn't work either. Don't worry though, it's gonna take over the world. We're all we're all gonna lose our jobs. Yeah, well they're But the thing that doesn't work most of the time just lies to you.
Kurt Elster
I don't know why people are scared of it. They're like practically bred for complacency.
Paul Reda
It's truly like the dumbest employee at your company. Like think of the job you think of where you work right now. Think of the dumbest guy you've ever that works there. And it's and it's like it's like a pleasant version of that guy where he's just like, oh, I'm sorry, you're right. I did get that wrong. Yeah, it's like, all right, little buddy, you're okay.
Kurt Elster
In my head, like Skill from the Simpsons, exactly. I mean, sure, they're like lots of cool tools. The big one Yeah, the big AI announcement here was really like something that will seed develop over twelve to twenty-four months from now. And it's a suite of tools to try and make, in my interpretation of it was to try and make Shopify the like AI e-commerce data layer to the internet. And what I mean by that was they've added developer tools or will be adding them, you know, announcing them that give these AI tools direct access to the entirety of the Shopify catalog. Holy crap, that's got to be quite the undertaking. Uh and then the other stuff they announced was a global cart where it's like, okay, if we have access to every online store product from every store. then how do people purchase it and can they, you know, mix and match? And they announced, you know, global cart coming soon.
Paul Reda
Yeah, because I mean if you think like all the All the products that are on a Shopify store are on Shopify. So like the products are all there. You could make a giant pile of all the products. And the checkout, that's entirely controlled by Shopify. They've always controlled the check the checkout. You kind of a little bit leave the store and go to Shopify when you check out. But that middle thing of that cart, which is various products from the giant product pile and the checkout, so it's just a certain subset of products that could all be from different stores, they got to build that.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Paul Reda
That's there's no support for that.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. So that's like the thing that comes after this global, globally accessible catalog built for AI. And you know, we'll get into that. Um, that one's real. That's out there. Uh, you know, whereas like the the global cart that was announced they announced it, but that was like a coming soon. Um, but the obvious next step here. And then, you know, point of sale, POS, if you use that. That got a big update, real refresh. And we've got an episode coming up after this one where we'll go deep into that as well. Um, and then What was the the other AI thing? Themes can generate their own blocks now. Oh you know, I tried it. It I told it what I wanted. I was like, you know, put a put a quote in this thing and fancy it up. It did it First try, like did what I wanted, made theme settings. It was cool. Rather than have me recap it from my memory, let's go to Ann Thomas from Design Packs. Great theme developer, and she's gonna break down uh these theme sections in this AI tool. Who are you and what do you do?
Speaker 3
My name is Ann Thomas. I'm one of the co-founders of the Design Packs app.
Kurt Elster
Well, as long as we're here, what does design packs do? And this is important.
Speaker 3
So uh we uh create sections and templates that can be used on any theme.
Kurt Elster
Okay, so you are deep in themes. Very deep. I have theme questions for you. Oh great. So recently they added in horizon theme, I can AI generate. I just type in and it makes a block. But a block's not a section.
Speaker 3
Correct.
Kurt Elster
Alright, give me the difference between a section and a block.
Speaker 3
Okay, so a section is the parent of a block. And so blocks also they used to previously they were just one level. Now you could have nested blocks. Okay. So they keep going down. So the section is essentially the the container and the block goes within that container
Kurt Elster
So on a my product page, the product info is that's a section, and then like title price reviews, those are blocks.
Speaker 3
Those are blocks, and you can rearrange them and move them around and they each have their own set of settings.
Kurt Elster
Alright, and the new feature that we just added was I could type in a prompt and make a block. And it works it works reasonably well. It's kind of cool. And then There's something underlying to the theme code that had to change to make this possible.
Speaker 3
Yes.
Kurt Elster
What is it?
Speaker 3
Yes, so there is now the introduction of universal blocks. Uh so you can actually use these blocks in any section that you would like and we're removing the block code so the schema it used to be in the section file. and now it's been moved into a completely separate blocks folder with its own specific liquid file for that block.
Kurt Elster
Okay, so that's To a merchant, I don't think that matters or probably means much. True. To a theme developer, you're like, all right, it's that's not technically challenging, but it changes how the theme is structured.
Speaker 3
Yes.
Kurt Elster
Is this going to be a problem for support for features apps?
Speaker 3
Well, you can use a theme app extension, so that's what apps use to bring in their own blocks from their uh apps, so those will still be able to be used in there and everything. But there is, I think we're gonna see a little bit of a friction point for people that if they're not starting net new and instead they're using their existing theme. A uh adding in those those extra features if their theme doesn't already have them. So we'll see how that goes in terms So my I can't just click update? No. Well Yeah, there is there is there are some sort of breaking changes that will be happening.
Kurt Elster
Okay.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
So this is I shouldn't expect this to just appear in my theme.
Speaker 3
It it may take a little bit for it to happen. I will say though, something uh that DesignPax does because you can use them, we have sections that you can use in any theme. All of our sections are um being updated to support universal and the AI generator. So you can use those anywhere and those can be carried over and updated and no problem.
Kurt Elster
So can I make like a dummy section that's got nothing in it, just like a div, but you know contains the right structure and then be able to generate blocks?
Speaker 3
Yeah, you can definitely do that.
Kurt Elster
Okay, so there are ways out if I'm like really desperate but can't update my theme for some reason.
Speaker 3
You can still get that fun AI block experience without updating your entire theme. You just need to uh That one section that you've added, either from design packs or custom code, it just needs to be added in there so that you can generate that block.
Kurt Elster
And you know, you talk to a lot of partners, merchants, you do demo calls. Yeah. We were talking about demo calls. What's the What's the vibe? What's the sentiment? How are people feeling? Any trends you're noticing? I mean it's very new, right?
Speaker 3
So it it just Horizons just came out recently, so I think that people are still playing around with it, learning what it can do.
Kurt Elster
But it is I'm trying to break it. I have yet to break it.
Speaker 3
It's very powerful. It's very, very powerful. So I think we're right on the the edge of a change for what we're gonna see in the storefront an online store.
Kurt Elster
Are you excited?
Speaker 3
Yeah, I am. I am excited. I think it's gonna be very different moving forward. I I can't wait to see it in the hands of merchants and actually see what they do with it and what they build with it.
Kurt Elster
How do you feel about AI? I I sense in these talking to people that there are mixed feelings. There's like wow it's this powerful tool. But there's also like some existential dread with it.
Speaker 3
Yes.
Kurt Elster
Someone else compared it to Y2K Where they're like, well, they're waiting for the shoe to drop.
Speaker 3
I don't know about you, but I remember the first time I ever wrote something in chat GPT and it gave me back a fully coherent answer And I feel like I had goosebumps in terms of, wow, that is that is something else. And I think we are gonna start outsourcing a lot of the stuff, you know, the drudgery work that, oh, you know, even things like merchants do on a regular basis, updating their products. that you no longer have to do manually instead you can just get a AI to do it. So that part I think is exciting.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, no I agree. There's a yeah there's I think it's a wonderful productivity tool.
Speaker 3
Yes
Kurt Elster
Sure. I'm not afraid of it though. You know, I think some people are are worried about it.
Speaker 3
I I think that it's the important thing is the The more you use it, I think the less it's afraid because you'll see its limitations.
Kurt Elster
Yes.
Speaker 3
Yes. Um but it is getting better and better and better. But we're not at, you know, artificial general intelligence yet So it's it it's still you still have to give it context of the world. It doesn't know what the real world is. Um so we have an advantage over it uh for sure. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Any Any Shopify features, apps, tools that you think are underrated, that you're like, man, I wish more people used this.
Speaker 3
Hmm. I would say I think that markets actually a lot of people aren't are just sort of using it for very basic things. One of the things the announcements I was really excited about is being able now within markets to not only be able to target uh specific countries, but specific provinces. So Uh for Canadians we have Quebec which is a French speaking province so things like that where you can really dive deep into that personalization I think that's AI in at its at its core is really personalizing answers for you and the context. And so I think anytime you can do that for a customer and the buying experience, that's what people are going to start to expect.
Kurt Elster
So don't sleep on Shopify Markets.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, we've had good experiences with it. It works. Yeah, it does. It's helpful.
Speaker 3
Yep.
Kurt Elster
Uh geez, anything else I should ask while we're here One tip, give me one tip, one thing you wish every Shopify merchant would do. It could be anything.
Speaker 3
Um I wish that I know everybody's really busy and and things are constantly changing and you have different things to worry about, inventory and that kind of thing, but I really wish everyone would uh take the time to look at their site and and honestly do their own quality assurance, get their friends to look at it, look at it on mobile. Not enough people, they just sort of set it up and then they never look at it again and there may be really obvious, you know, ways that you can convert and and that kind of thing that you're just missing um so look at your site more frequently especially on mobile.
Kurt Elster
That's what's funny, like one of the most valuable things I do for people is I just look at their site. Yeah And I'm not doing anything, there's no fancy tools. I'm like, I'm just looking at it the same as anyone else. I'm like, hey, this button is completely covered by a widget. And they're like, oh, that's surprise. When was the last time you used this? But no, it it sounds simple, but you're absolutely right.
Speaker 3
It's an easy win. Honestly, get that friend that you have that is a major online shopper, get them to look through and and they'll find things, you know? Yeah
Kurt Elster
And Thomas, thank you so much.
Speaker 3
Oh, thank you.
Kurt Elster
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Paul Reda
We love Anne. Anne used to work for us and then she got too big for her britches and decided that she could just head off on her own because she was a big girl now. Do you just miss her? I do miss her. She's great.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. No, she's got her app design packs, which you she's unique uniquely suited to talk about this because her app does nothing but add theme sections to a theme. So she knows she knows what she's talking about here.
Paul Reda
Yeah. So yeah, this AI thing, instead of having a pre-built section, you tell the AI what kind of sections you want it to have what you want it to have in it. And it just like writes the code and makes it happen and then it injects it directly into the customized theme. It's not in the actual theme code, it's in the It's in like the content editor portion.
Kurt Elster
It appears in the theme editor, but I think it writes well ARI. So you're saying section, it's limited to blocks. Oh really?
Paul Reda
Yeah. It well you have like an AI section, and in that AI section you then write blocks in it?
Kurt Elster
No, I believe it's any section you can add a new block. But it can only generate blocks, not section.
Paul Reda
That's a lot less useful than I thought.
Kurt Elster
A little less. And like the example I did, it was a block inside the product form section. Or the product info section, whichever. Part of the way this has to work, the like actual file structure of the theme changes, how are theme updates gonna work?
Paul Reda
Yeah, because that cause uh because the array of blocks in It could be the same theme. It's all we're all running Dawn. We're all running Focal. But then the AI blocks that you generated are different from the AI blocks that this other guy generated. And so when we try to run the theme update What do we do? Because the base theme is now different.
Kurt Elster
As far as I know, there is not a way to update or have the updater go to this new version where that theme structure changes. Like what's the path there? And we see that a little bit with what uh with Shopify in that they said, hey, we've got horizon. Well, why not add this to Dawn?
Paul Reda
Well, an uh a developer at m at Maestro, which is one of the big theme developers, we like them a lot.
Kurt Elster
And who won a community uh or who won yeah a Shopify award. For their newest theme. Yeah.
Paul Reda
Congratulations. Yeah, so uh one of their main developers uh flamed Shopify pretty hard because they were just like on the
Kurt Elster
Uh Shopify subreddit, right? Yeah.
Paul Reda
He's like, yeah, Shopify took the easy way out in that they built an entirely new theme from scratch in order to support this. But everyone else who has a library of themes that they're supporting across thousands and millions of merchants, uh, they've given us nothing. And we have no idea how it will work. And we have no idea if there's any way to update it or how that would even happen. And they're just like, but yeah, look at this great thing we made from scratch that we're the only ones that know how to do it. So and so he pretty much was like, so no, we will not be updating our themes to support this until they actually give us something to work with.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it was hey Yeah, we're not we're not updating until we get guidance from Shopify and how this is supposed to work. Uh which is true. So like i if you want to play with this new tool, just Upgrade to a theme that has it that already supports it. I currently I think that's the option.
Paul Reda
In which case is one and it's like it's like a beta? Like it's not even like really released yet?
Kurt Elster
No, it's new. I can just grab it. Oh, okay. Yeah, the the way I tested it, I made a dev store, installed Horizon, the theme, and then was able to do it.
Paul Reda
And then you'll have the ability to have the app make weird gobbledygook blocks for you that no one else will understand.
Kurt Elster
You know, I I only made two with it They were fine. What was odd was you trying to make it have make the same thing twice. It always comes out different. Yep. That's just an an inherent problem to uh the way these AIs work. And then the other the other issue, well, you know, from a CSS standpoint, it was doing absolute positioning. That's a no-no, isn't it?
Paul Reda
It's like you're taking a photo and you're like, there it works. And it's just like a static thing. Like at that exact moment in time. I mean, is it like responsive?
Kurt Elster
Oh yeah, see that I didn't really try. Oh. That's where absolute positioning would fall into the state.
Paul Reda
Well, you have to rewrite the absolute positioning at like literally every single screen.
Kurt Elster
But I think that's part of the reason why it's like this is limited to a block. You know, like what's the what's the smallest unit of theme?
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
A block. And that really makes its life a lot easier, the AI anyway. So you know the the big exciting thing from earlier was that catalog, you know, Shopify catalog, and Ezra Firestone, bullish on it Right. But when I asked him his pick for like what's the thing people are sleeping on? It wasn't even one of these announcements. You know, he had his own favorite. So Let's I love Ezra. Had him on the show before. He's got smart marketer. He's got uh couple Shopify brands. Let's go to Ezra. We got Ezra Firestone, smart marketer, Zippify apps. He has been to many of these events. Ezra, how many of these have you been to?
Speaker 4
I've been to every one.
Kurt Elster
Every one.
Speaker 4
Even the virtual ones
Kurt Elster
The and the virtual ones don't count. Ah come on that count. Just watch a replay. It's all good. So what uh alright one announcement, one feature, like just give me a single exciting thing you've discovered this morning.
Speaker 4
Well first of all We got Tech Nasty, the baddest man in the game. Camo jacket. It's good to be back. I love that we can, you know, we've been doing this together now I don't know, ten years or something. I've been seeing it. So um what I love is that Shopify is really embracing AI. And that's everyone's talking about AI, but some of the interesting things that they're doing, like what they just talked about, which is catalog, which is the ability like the ability to they Everyone thinks of the Shopify catalog like it's a catalog of my products. Think about it as a catalog of every single item on all the Shopify stores.
Kurt Elster
entire platform.
Speaker 4
And being able to like for them to open their data for us as as developers to be able to query that data and build experiences for merchants, build experiences for consumers. where we're aggregating all data from all stores is a pretty exciting use case that is going to be really awesome in a bunch of ways going forward. It's not out yet, but like the fact that they are thinking How can we leverage all of Shopify and let and put that in developers' hands to make better experiences for merchants and consumers?
Kurt Elster
And I think what was cool is they said, hey, we built the tooling. We don't necessarily know what is going to come out of this. We don't know what people are going to build with this. And it's like chatbot is an obvious one, but we'll see where this goes. That's uh you know maybe there's like the ultra Amazon competitor.
Speaker 4
Who knows? That's what I'm thinking and which is why you were gonna ask me what's the most underrated Shopify app. I'm out of this, right?
Kurt Elster
Yes, it well is the next question.
Speaker 4
I think the most underrated Shopify feature is the Shopify. Nobody is really embracing it. Nobody's on it, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel. A hundred million people, a hundred million have it installed on their phones. It's giving currently tracking updates. People are using it for tracking updates mainly at the moment, but Shopify is incentivizing consumers to use it through the cashback. I use their cash back I shop only from Shopify stores when I can. Like I try not to shop on Amazon to be like a good steward of our ecosystem. And dude, I end up with like hundreds and hundreds of dollars of cash back a month So Shopify is incentivizing their users to shop on this app. We uh with OneClick Upsell are the only upsells on the shop app right now. OCU. OCU, baby, let's go. There's so much available for there uh there for merchants to optimize and like if you build your shop app out and you and you sign up for the incentives in there and you install all the apps that are available Adopt Shopify's dumping so much money into getting users to adopt that app. They want to compete with Amazon. They want an aggregate place where all where where a consumer can shop all Shopify stores at once, all products in one order. Get on it now because it's gonna continue to grow and it's at the very early stages of it.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, we've got a few clients using it, probably the most notable Harney Sons T. Yeah. And we're Them and us were always consistently surprised that it does well and it keeps growing. And we're experimenting with um uh sh ads. You could run ads on campaigns inside Shop Ads. And they work.
Speaker 4
They work. And look, maybe it's 5% of your revenue currently. It's gonna be a quarter in like five to seven years. Okay, I mean a quarter of your business, it's a lot of your business. So we can kind of get ahead of that and it's the way I think about it is like Any win is a good win. I'm not above a small win. If I can book a win and do something that helps me, I'm gonna do it.
Kurt Elster
Well it's funny, it's not even hard to set up I think people just for sure that is like oh it's it's underrated a few points.
Speaker 4
It's like okay but you know what my dad needs new teeth. If I can make an extra ten grand, I covered that shit. You know what I'm saying? Like it's like I'm not above hard work or trying to optimize.
Kurt Elster
All right, now tell me, you mentioned OCU. I want to know what you're working on, what you're excited about.
Speaker 4
Okay, so I'm work uh OCU, we got a lot of cool stuff going, but what I'm excited about is develop I'm developing a couple new apps that enable AI. I've got a really sweet And I think a lot of people are attempting this, but a really sweet app that supports you with uh customer support, but not the way that you think. The way that people think about customer support is, oh, I'm gonna build an AI that the consumer interacts with. I'm not building a con customer support app that the consumer interacts with and I'll just leave it there. I I like where you're going. Yeah. I think this is smart. It's gonna be cool and then I've also got um a kind of like in the vein of OCU AI that supports you in re capturing lost sales. So I've got two sort of like, you know look we gotta AI like you heard what they said. AI is scary disrupting this space. Like the way the disruption of AI, one of the things that Toby said that blew my mind was only 20% of people under 20 have Safari. on their home. That blew my mind. I'm gonna go check my kids' phones. People aren't shopping the way we shopped, right? And I think they made a really good point which is we had a static internet Meta, Google, you know, uh Safari, Apple, like Yeah, with all the the standard fairly kind of like social media and web browsers. That's it. That's going away. Now it's these all these different disparate apps that people are in based on their interests and use cases and the commerce layer coming to those apps. Integrated social, integrated app commerce. Like that's the new world from like you and I grew up in a world pre-d iPhone. We saw the migration to mobile first, mobile only shopping, mobile only computing. Well now we're like sort of moving beyond that. We've got the, you saw me wearing the goggles We're moving into augmented reality, wearable technology, data layer, AR layer over the physical reality, and all this disparate interacting, it's not gonna be just on Safari, just on Google, just on Firefox, just on Meta. It's like it's gonna be on all these different places. So I think we're we're moving into a world that actually has more moving parts. And and the AI and the commerce layer is gonna live on all of those.
Kurt Elster
You got us talking trends. What's one trend you're noticing with merchants?
Speaker 4
I mean the trend I'm noticing with merchants the most is they're freaked out man. They're terrified because We have obviously in this, and we are Americans, we're in Canada, but in our country we have a lot of economic uncertainty for a number of factors. Geopolitical factors, macroeconomic factor. I mean, so so that and there's a lot of pressure on merchants, margins are being shrunk. Prices are going up, lead times are long, and you know, the bread and butter of what brought us to the dance, which was paid digital advertising and organic search engine optimization however you did it whether it was through influencers or through organic search those are harder everything's a little harder and then you have this technology of like Hey, by the way, not only is everything a little bit more difficult and uncertain, but the technology layer that you're using to build on is fundamentally changing. So what I feel from merchants is doubt, uncertainty, fear, and just uh apprehension to take like almost paralysis by not analysis but just by like bombardment of the noise. Yeah. Yeah. And so how do I prioritize? What do I do? You take the next best step you can take. You do the next thing that you can do in the direction of your goal. And it's going to be the basics. It's going to be optimizing your advertising. It's going to be making better products. It's going to be telling better stories. And it's going to be figuring out what is the best technology for you because there's so many technology solutions now. And you're going to use the big players, you're going to use an Omnisend, you're going to use a Clabio, you're going to use a Shapletai, you're going to use a one-click up sound. But then there's gonna be other things popping up. So I think the like we all thought when when when mobile devices came out and when search engine optimization basically went away it was this kind of thing. It was like a doomsday. But look at all the beauty that has happened since then. So it's like you just gotta stay the course.
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. Yeah I think with our retainer clients what's interesting is like they it is like they got, you know, just kicked into high gear where all of a sudden that uns for them that uncertainty meant we're gonna double down and work harder. And so for us just like per in professional services The last three months have been wild with people activity. Yeah. With people going, all right, you know, we we gotta get ourselves in the best possible position.
Speaker 4
Yeah. I mean look, I I just bought back a company that I used to own where you're which shall not be named. Congratulations. What was the first thing I did? I called you. Could you come work on this for me? So
Kurt Elster
Yeah, we're you know thrilled to be helping you out. Alright, last question uh plug something where can we learn more about Ezra Firestone?
Speaker 4
Smartmarketer. com zippify. com Instagram.
Kurt Elster
Instagram. com, the whole thing.
Paul Reda
See, I feel like that's always the way. Is that everyone's obsessed with the new hotness? You know, we know we have all of our our clients we've spoken to, they're always like, I want to have the coolest new store. It's gotta be just the most incredible design no one's ever seen.
Kurt Elster
Who doesn't want the latest and greatest? Yeah.
Paul Reda
So the Switch 2 launches tomorrow. If you're listening to this, it's already out. And and you know, you know, if you know about video game consoles, the Nintendo consoles are never the most powerful console.
Kurt Elster
No.
Paul Reda
They're never trying to win you over with their megahertz and their gigahertz and the RAMs, you know, and their flops. Then they're bad and they're blast processing. There was a executive at Nintendo named Gunpei Yoki, and Gunpeioki made the game the original Game Boy and was a part of a bunch of projects. And his idea was what he called withered technology. And it's technology that is well understood, stable, can be gotten a little cheaper and easier, but everyone knows how it works and everyone is comfortable with it. That's what Nintendo has adopted. They're never trying to always be on the cutting edge. They're always trying to say, what's technology we already know is how to use or has been in use for a long time. We're so comfortable with that, we could do the best version of that. And that is like my philosophy too. People don't, the latest and greatest is never going to be as good as the thing everybody knows and understands done perfectly.
Kurt Elster
You don't want to chase the bleeding edge. You don't see the advantage.
Paul Reda
Yeah, and it's like, yeah, it's lateral thinking with withered technology. It's using known technology in a kind of new interesting way. That's why all this AI stuff is me just going like because I Just see all the problems with it and it's just like, okay, is this better than what we have now? And to me it's not. That's why I like what Ezra said. What the shop app is, it's just an it's an Amazon replacement.
Kurt Elster
Which yeah. Like the the Shopify catalog, what's the pitch? A one big pool of all the Shopify products that things on the internet can access. And the reason we're really interested in doing this is because of the fear that Gen Z prefers apps to browsers. Well, what's ShopApp? It's an app and it has, assuming they've opted into it, has all Shopify products across the whole catalog that you could just search.
Paul Reda
Ezra's right in that it's entirely free it's free money.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Paul Reda
It's free money. It's not a ton of free money, but you know, one of our clients uses the shop app. They make like five percent of their revenue.
Kurt Elster
Which I'll take it on the shop app.
Paul Reda
For them is like, you know, tens of to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it's kind of like they did nothing. All their products are in Shopify already. They, you know, filled out all the fields in the back end. And all they did was just click a button that was like, you know, make this also available on the shop app. So now they're just getting a bunch of free eyeballs and making no extra effort and making free money.
Kurt Elster
They also run the the shop the cashback. Yeah. Like there's there's advertising you could do inside the shop app that is just it's such a bargain. Right. And because not enough merchants are chasing that thing or trying it. And so I think all three of us, you, me and Ezra, are in agreement here. Just go try using the shop app. Yeah. That thing is sweet. Assuming you know you're already successful in the online store.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Like just add it.
Paul Reda
You're not gonna suddenly make ten times as much money on the shop app as you were on your website.
Kurt Elster
Uh and then, you know, while we were there, ran into a a fellow agency owner, Jamal Buya, and I was like, uh teach me to say your name. That's how like uh often I start interviews. And he goes, easy. Booyah, like Booya. I was like, thank you for that. I will never forget your name now. He was previously a merchant, went to running an agency with his wife. I love people like this because they've been on both sides of the table.
Speaker 5
Who are you and what do you do? Jamil Buya from Other Half Studios. So I'm partnerships and sales for Other Half. We're a custom design and full stack development agency. We build beautiful websites that convert.
Kurt Elster
So you're building, you know, soup to nuts, you're building Shopify stores for merchants, for clients, for brands. Yes. What's one feature theme, something you're excited about, because you're like, man, this is gonna make my life easier or make it easier to sell.
Speaker 5
The new AI content blocks, you know, that just m makes the development process way easier. We can test multiple kinda Things as we're building out a theme so we're really excited to kind of dive into that and play with it more and see what the capabilities are and the customization.
Kurt Elster
I'm excited to play with it. It's available now. I played with it a little bit. And you know I've yet to break it. That's what you give me new tools, my first reaction is I want to break it
Speaker 5
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
I want to see where I can go with this. And I haven't broken it yet. Oh that's so that's good.
Speaker 5
That's exciting.
Kurt Elster
And yeah, if you're building store, you're doing biz dev, you talk to a lot of merchants. Yes. What's Give me the temperature. What's a trend? What are we feeling right now?
Speaker 5
Well I think because of the tariffs, the economic uncertainty, everybody's trying to think about optimizing dollars spent. Optimizing, you know, just making sure that Every dollar they spend everywhere else, when it ends up landing back on their store and their website, they're squeezing every dollar out of every visitor. So CRO, right? People want to know about, hey, how do I treat, take these landing page principles and apply it to the entire site. Right, because as much as design needs to be beautiful, it also needs to work.
Kurt Elster
Yes. No, absolutely. So it sounds like you do split testing.
Speaker 5
Do split testing, but actually our bread and butter is building custom stores from the ground up. So we'll build you your own Shopify Theme, custom design dev and we take a lot of those landing page principles and we apply it across your entire site so that your PDP, homepage, everything's optimized to convert as it would in a landing page.
Kurt Elster
What are some of your favorite tools that you're working on for this?
Speaker 5
Oh, we love shoplift.
Kurt Elster
Shoplift? Shoplift.
Speaker 5
Shoplift is really good. Split testing tool. Amazing split testing tool. Just makes it so much easier. They're lift assist. They got so many features and a great team behind them
Kurt Elster
The yeah we recently I started playing with Shoplift. And I was uh the app is great, but I was impressed with the team. Yes. I was like, all right, you guys are on top of things. Oh they're great people. Uh what man, what's one thing you wish every merchant would do?
Speaker 5
Oh my god. One thing I wish every merchant would do. I guess. I don't know. That's actually a very tough question. I know I was a merchant myself and I think the biggest thing that I wish I did when I was a merchant was like collaborate more with other merchants. And I think sometimes as merchants we can get so with your head down. Yep. Right. And now being on the agency side, it's kind of like The emotions are not as involved. So like I think sometimes as merchants we get so gung-ho on like our path forward. And I think like learning to remove the emotion from the problems Not so much that logic can take over, but you can get like multiple perspectives before wasting potentially a lot of time and money chasing a solution that might not have been a problem necessarily. Yes. If that makes sense No it does. It it's more philosophical than it is technical and I think that's the thing about you know running your own store, being a founder, being a merchant. Sometimes it's about like removing the ego from the problems in the situation and you know allowing like a collaborative kind of solution to appear once you're chill.
Kurt Elster
The yeah. It's so easy to say like, oh just remove the emotion from it. Yes. But I mean if you can, wow, it makes running your business a lot easier. It does. Like as a younger man, I think that's the thing I wish I could have changed. Yes. You know, when I started She's 15 years ago. Yeah. It's like, you know, 20 something. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5
Out of my mind. The energy we had back then and uh You know, where we are now, I think I think the wisdom that you obtain, now it's like it it does make it easier to kind of remove that emotion that we're speaking to. But I think yeah, I think every every merchant needs to kind of find their own path on how to get there and you know face some form of failure yeah in order to really understand how they react when their back's against the wall. I think that's very important. What um
Kurt Elster
Well where can we go to learn more about you?
Speaker 5
Otherhalf. studio.
Kurt Elster
Otherhalf. studio? Man dot studio is a TLD now? It's not bad.
Speaker 5
That's that's the site, so go check us out and uh if you like what you see Shoot us a message or an email and we're happy to chat. Shameel Buya, thank you so much. Thanks, Kurt. Appreciate it.
Kurt Elster
Are your upsells stuck in the stone age? Your store runs on data, so why aren't your upsells? Outdated upsell apps make you guess, test, and tweak manually. That's costing you money. Zippify one-click upsell changes everything. Its AI engine automates upsells, analyzing every cart in real time to offer the highest converting product. No guesswork, no setup, just results. Over 10,000 Shopify stores trust OCU, and it's already generated nearly a billion dollars in extra revenue. So flip the switch and let AI handle your upsells. Try Zipify one click upsell free for thirty days at zipify. com slash curt. That's zipify dot com slash K U R T. Don't leave money on the table. Start AI powered upselling today. Yeah, so I asked everybody I ran into that day, like, you know, what what's the sentiment with merchants? You know, what what are you seeing? And everybody without fail just immediately was like Uh fear because of the T-word. Tariffs. Right? Everybody. It was unanimous. That's the only question I got the same answer to on everything. D what do you do? I think the smart thing to do, the thing we've seen, especially with our retainer clients, is the way through is forward and they just go, all right, you know, we don't know what's coming. If there's an economic downturn, inventory supply shortage, whatever. The only thing realistically we could do is keep going. you know, double down and hustle. And man, we have been busy.
Paul Reda
Oh yeah. We've been banging the last month and a half, two months.
Kurt Elster
And, you know, we see this with profit optimization. That's why. If you can do that, you have a healthier business. You can sleep easier at night. I was also lucky to talk to our colleague, dear friend, and newsletter author, fellow podcast host, Carl Meisterheim.
Paul Reda
Uh that's Mr. Ham to you.
Kurt Elster
That's yes, that's I believe that's how that translates in German is Mr. Ham.
Paul Reda
No, Heim is Haus. It's not Ham, unfortunately.
Kurt Elster
Oh shows my level of German.
Paul Reda
Mr. House.
Kurt Elster
Ah.
Paul Reda
From Fallout New Vegas.
Kurt Elster
Mr. House, he had uh he had thoughts on Shopify catalog, which you know we've talked a lot about. Let's hear what Carl's got to say.
Speaker 6
Who are you and what do you do? Hi Kurt, you know me. I'm Carl Meisterheim. I do app development and technical problems for our agencies and merchants. But I also have the Liquid Weekly Newsletter, which I started three and a half years ago, just to help surface things that are happening in the Shopify developer community. And then a couple years ago I started the Liquid Weekly podcast with a friend of mine, Taylor Pagey Award-winning Taylor Page, who just won the community award. And And where we again interview different developers, talk about what we're working on, just try to bring Shopify development to light and help people learn more about what's happening.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, Taylor uh your podcast co-host Taylor Page won the Community Build Award. Yeah. Which is cool, because that thing is heavy. You could bludgeon someone with that thing.
Speaker 6
I'm not uh I don't envy him for having to carry that around. Yeah, really, they should mail it to him. Every coffee much.
Kurt Elster
In Liquid Weekly, I greatly enjoy the newsletter. Okay, thank you. I do. I subscribe to many newsletters and read very few. And Liquid Weekly is the one that I like. I consistently scroll through to be like, all right, what tidbits does Carl have for me this week? I appreciate it. Which I appreciate. Yeah. Uh all right, so At additions, we're at the end of the day, it's wrapping up. What what was one takeaway for you?
Speaker 6
I think the thing that I enjoyed most was the new developer dashboard And the way the DX has improved for people like myself who spend most of our time developing. You know, a few years ago they came out with the CLI, which was a big change. Command line interface. Yep, and that had some rough edges, but it they smooth a lot of them out. But there's still a fair bit of like manual process involved when you would update a scope. or um handle other things in the app you'd have to manually deploy it, push it out. But they just release them updates that automate all of that behind the scenes. So they're watching the file system and when certain files change because you're changing the configuration or even like a locale setting. they automatically get the app, push it up as a a sort of a hidden version for the app, and it's all said and done. And then they they now have the declarative um meta objects and meta fields as well for that. So you can do that. Yeah what are they I didn't understand it. What does declarative mean? Declarative means that you actually are declaring it by Typing it out in the Toml file specifying what the the fields are or what the objects are just like you would through the admin interface but you're writing it almost as code the configuration but the neat thing about that is that It centralizes a source of truth for that information. So you define it in your Tomo file and if you make any changes, it not only gets pushed out to your app, but any of the stores that your app is connected to, as far as I understand, it It updates it there as well. So you don't have the mana to go through and figure all that out. Cool. Yeah. And what's the developer dashboard? The developer dashboard is it's coming. Some people have access already, but it is a new feature that allows you to spin up dev stores and a whole bunch of other utility features that weren't available before. I think one of the big ones, as far as I understand it, is for folks that were already blessed to have access to Shopify Plus Def sandbox? Yeah, I can just open I can just spin up a Shopify Plus store.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, like what's the big deal? Alright, not everybody has this, so. Okay, good. We gotta democratize our tools.
Speaker 6
Yes, yes.
Kurt Elster
I get it What was the other thing we were gonna speak to? The Shopify Catalog API. Oh, okay, Shopify catalog is this interesting concept where they essentially said we're we're presenting the tools for uh developers to access all of the products on Shopify. Not one store, everything. Yes. So What what did you take away from that?
Speaker 6
Well it was interesting. I was able to stumble upon an impromptu anime about that And the staff around it seem to have a lot of hesitancy around like it's gonna be okay, like this is already technically possible anyway because you're Product info is public because it's on the web so people scrape it and whatnot. But it is a level of access to your information that wasn't there before and it makes it a lot easier for other parties to interact with it I think their take on it is that the future of commerce is moving beyond the web store, beyond the web and into these tools like Perplexity, for example, a new search engine AI kind of thing you're probably familiar with, but they're moving more into the shopping space, the commerce space. I have a lot of questions around how that's gonna sort out for merchants. I tried asking some of them, didn't get all the answers I needed, but it's very clear that they're thinking very hard about it. And their goal as they stated it is they really want the best experience for the merchants. That if you use Shopify as a merchant, you have the most leverage of any platform that you could have. And so they're doing whatever it takes to make that happen. Now how it all sorts out we'll see, but There's a lot of questions to come.
Kurt Elster
I like any feature that leverages Shopify as an ecosystem for the benefit of merchants. Exactly. And so Shopify Catalog I like the idea, the possibility of it, but it's kinda interesting they said, look, we don't know what you're gonna build with it yet, but have fun. So it's like, all right, first one, we're building uh the anti-Amazon. Right. It's just, you know, it's just the search engine. for all of these products. Um and the interesting not actually building them. But someone will certainly attempt it.
Speaker 6
Well the nice thing too is from the merchant's perspective There's not much you need to do. Basically make sure that your product information is up to date and as detailed as you can make it so that when they surface that information through that API and people access it like Perplexity or other partners that they end up giving access to. uh that your products are well represented and and easily defined. But beyond that there's not much you need to do at this point. Now they did say if you're uncomfortable with it you can opt out. Okay. But by default everyone's opted in. Oh wow. Yeah. Again, hearkening to the like it's already out there anyway, so that's true. That big of a deal. Maybe. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see how that's perceived. Now, here's where I go with this, right? Like I think the future is If you're using an agent a shop, if you're using a search engine like perplexity, you're going to surface products across multiple stores. It's hard not to imagine a future where companies like that are going to want to offer a cart that spans multiple stores, the ability to check out multiple products from different merchants at once I don't know how that's gonna work and how will that impact things like discounting and card functions and stuff like that. I suspect that's coming.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I suspect some too. They had that that preview or Uh didn't they say global cart coming soon? Yeah. But they didn't give us details of what global cart is. It sounds like that. It's like a multi-store cart. Yeah. Ad products from Shopify Stores Plural interesting. It is interesting. So it's like there's a lot of stuff that isn't necessarily an impactful feature right now, but the tools that will come out of it will be a big deal in I don't know six months. Yeah.
Speaker 6
And one question I had I wasn't able to ask but is there a way for them to make other information available? So for example if you're a merchant and you're selling a product and you want to provide a a deal where if you sell if you buy two of them you get a gift or a percent off or something like that, that functionality now exists in the context of your store. That's the only place it exists. Is there a way to leverage that too from these other tools as they make this catalog available? Can you publish that information somehow? I don't know how that will work. But be curious if that's what we're doing. Hey, I heard you're working on a new app. What is it? I am. So I had this really cool guy approach me. You may have heard of him uh Kurt and uh he's like we should do an ass together. Yeah that's that's your name. It looks a lot like you too. And I was really looking forward to that because um the business side, the marketing side, the merchant side is not really my strength I prefer more the technical work and so to be able to combine our talent together was exciting. So we're building an app that's a free gift with purchase, which is a pattern we've seen a lot in the different work we've collaborated on from the agency perspective And by having this it'll enable us not only to serve your clients, but hopefully get it out there to others that might be wanting that functionality.
Kurt Elster
Well and the exciting news is right before additions, we got the listing in the app approved for the app store. And now we're ready to beta test it. Now we're ready. So we need we need people who are about to run a free gift with purchase promo who would like to try it. I swear to God it works. But You know, Carl's only one man. We need guidance and I have a lot of opinions. We need guidance on what features to add, what you need. And the best way to do that is I think we give it to merchants for free. And we see what feedback we get. Yeah, what as a next step I gotta get people to reach out. That's right, we gotta figure that out. Yeah. That's your job, Kurt. Alright, I'll figure it out. Alright, thanks. Uh Carl, where can we go to learn more about you
Speaker 6
Where do we get this newsletter? Yeah, you can go to liquidweekly. com. The name is because I can't use Shopify. Not everybody can get away with that, but uh Liquid's a templating language.
Speaker 5
I'm grandfathered in.
Speaker 6
That's right. And there you'll find the latest editions of the newsletter, the podcast, as well as a back catalog of all the articles I've shared in the newsletter. So if you're looking for information as a developer mostly, you'll be able to get a whole bunch of that there. Yeah, I love it. Carl, thank you. Thank you.
Paul Reda
Don't get me wrong. I realize my main job on this podcast is to poo-poo things. But I like the idea of Shopify catalog. That is all it is is just structured data. It is structured data to make it better for machines to read all of the information about the products on your store that has direct relevance to Google shopping, to SEO, to how you yourself can look at your products on your store. You know, moving your store to a new platform or changing things about your store. Like you, it's always good. I'm like super obsessed with information architecture. And that's the main thing that drives me nuts about a lot of our clients, is that I'm just like, all right, just Give me the tags or give me the names or the types of these products and then we could do magic with them and they just have no idea. It's even just like if you do it wrong, do it wrong, but just do it consistently wrong in a single way and we could figure it out.
Kurt Elster
I love structured data. I love product taxonomy. I don't know. There's a I assume it's like by OCD nature, it just it feels good. And what I did not realize is you know a lot of the the taxonomy tools like adding categories and having it automatically suggest categories at Shopify. You know, I was like, oh, these are quality of life features. Ah, a lot of this I guess was setting the stage for uh enabling this Shopify catalog idea. All right, what I appreciate about uh Carl was he's a developer. He's a you know, a a a full stack developer who's written like full SaaS applications. And so for him, it's just like a litany of what if questions when you present him with a project as big as the Shopify catalog API. And yeah, his first call out was like, well, how do you decide what products are and aren't in it? And he went to the panel on this. It I was busy chugging coconut water, so I missed it. And why he found one of the things they did here. You're opted into this by default. Assuming you have a product in the online store. I mean, I'm fine with that. Which the logic is, well, it's on the web, and AI can search the web and find this, so why let's just fix that. And put it into Shopify Catalog. Versus like Shop, all the other sales channels would typically be opt-in. Um so like that's just I don't think that's necessarily bad. I think it's just something to be aware of. But then, you know, if you have all kinds of weirdness on your product, like, you know, there's a product configurator. Shopify's not necessarily aware of that.
Paul Reda
Right? It doesn't know that. And you know, I just think about so many clients we've seen that have like the product titles are just like type number 347. Best bag ever. Like that's the name of the product. And it's like, okay, that's not that's not gonna work for generalized search.
Kurt Elster
Well that we end up right back to like the core thing here is the structured data.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
you know, on the product listing, trying to standardize that in a way where if I take this product out of your store, does it still make sense? Can I still just buy it? That's, you know, if the answer is yes, then great. This k that product, your store, Shopify catalog, this will all work great together. If the answer is no, then there's a product you'd want to opt out. And I'm sure there's like failsafes and rules and other stuff that's going to get added in here. Um, but you know, man, I don't envy developers and product managers at Shopify who are going to have to field this. It's all JSON, baby. You just do the magic on the JSON and it's fine. That's the the magic of structured data is gonna just get us out of this. Yeah. Like everything life just gets easier when you're dealing with with structured data. I can sort stuff, I can filter spreadsheets, AI, everything can understand it better. So I think like even man, even if this catalog idea doesn't work out, doesn't take off, all the stuff that went into supporting it is gonna make life better and easier.
Paul Reda
It's taking the it's essentially taking the shop app and extending the shop app outside of the app frame and into just as like a general API data layer available across the internet.
Kurt Elster
Yes. Yeah. I think two years from now, that's where this is.
Paul Reda
In the end, you know, we're talking using a lot of big words and making a lot of claims. In the end, it's just more eyeballs on your products. Yep. It's more ways for more eyeballs to get on your products, which is just unabashedly a good thing.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. It's new surfaces. I mean the idea is like, okay. Let's get this out of the web browser. Let's get this into more apps. Now let's, if this is in an API that these AI that's like really purpose-built for these AIs, but in theory other stuff can access it too. Man. This is a win, like for everybody's on the platform. Because my favorite features on Shopify have always been those ones that leverage the network effects of being on Shopify. You know, like just the easy, the accelerated checkout, the log the easy login with ShopPay, the Shop app, you know, the order track, all that stuff, Shopify audiences, the best, the absolute best. Rising tide lifts all ships, man. That's what we're seeing with these features. Ooh.
Paul Reda
Wow, what did they put like a chip in your brain when you were up there?
Kurt Elster
Uh it was a just a really the whole thing was one long brainwashing session and I was fine. I was like, all right. As long as the coconut water keeps coming, it's fine.
Paul Reda
If you're in a chair with your eyes like this, there's a giant screen with just Harley on it.
Kurt Elster
The the last year's editions, I walked in And just happy to like Harley was right there and yeah, greeted me, I was able to get him on. This time I didn't manage to run into him or Toby. Otherwise, you know, totally would have been happy to have them. It just, you know, didn't work out that way. They're busy. They're oh so yes. Clearly.
Paul Reda
No, I'm taking it the other way.
Kurt Elster
Who do they think they are? Oh no.
Paul Reda
They didn't search search you out? What are they big timing you now?
Kurt Elster
Well they are big time. Yes. Yeah, yes. You know, always fun to reconnect with friends. I mean really that's what I'm there for. It's just get FaceTime, FaceTime with my friends, you know, see it Ann, Ezra, and uh Carl is not your friend. Oh, I love Carl. Carl's co-host, Taylor Page from Shopify Developer Alliance, who won uh a Shopify Community Award. Taylor's a good dude. Here's two, you know, a successful Shopify Editions in which I did not almost uh get the fire department called on me.
Paul Reda
Well, a goal for next year.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. No, I'll I'll get it right next year. And yeah, that's it. We're out. Goodbye. 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 Crowdfunder 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. And 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.