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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster • 00:00.001
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you instead of your competitors. And 45,000 stores already use it, and it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to get swim. com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com Say some words for me.
Paul Reda • 01:10.320
I'm trapped in a meat sack.
Kurt Elster • 01:12.720
This body is a prison. And then uh if you could hold up a white piece of paper here for Are you sure this is white paper? You know, I'm not.
Paul Reda • 01:21.180
Yeah, because it could be like, you know, ivory or whatever.
Kurt Elster • 01:24.940
It says white on it.
Paul Reda • 01:26.300
Bone.
Kurt Elster • 01:26.940
Bright white premium paper is what I buy. Only the finest of office supplies. We are discussing new Shopify features. Babe, wake up. Shopify drop new features
Paul Reda • 01:38.020
I love new feature day. I swear to God, if you woke me up to say that Shopify dropped new features, I would lose my mind.
Kurt Elster • 01:45.780
With excitement? I know, me too.
Paul Reda • 01:49.159
I have a thing about people waking me up. Like, obviously, wake me up if you're like, I need help. There's an emergency. Great. Like waking me up because you're like, I made cinnamon rolls. Or like, I want to ask you a question. Get ready to die. Like, do not wake me up. I don't one time my wife woke me up because she was like, you were sleeping really late. And I just wanted I needed to check on you. And I uh she got a talking to
Kurt Elster • 02:12.400
Well, fortunately for us, these announcements happen at nine a. m. this morning where you were already awake, dressed, and in this office. Correct. Yeah. I've For the record, never woken you up. Well, you know. Never were just asleep. Well, yeah, hey buddy. Because when we're done, I go home. Yeah. Uh, all right. Shopify editions. Any exciting announcements you were hoping for?
Paul Reda • 02:32.620
Uh they're gonna increase partner payouts?
Kurt Elster • 02:37.980
Well, with you know, they did you A few editions ago, they did that where they said, well, up the first million they're not taking.
Paul Reda • 02:44.740
They did do that actually.
Kurt Elster • 02:45.780
So yeah, no, you did get your wish already.
Paul Reda • 02:47.620
All right. Thanks, guys. How about our new app got Built for Shopify without us uh without us having to do anything?
Kurt Elster • 02:53.660
No, we gotta put in the work for that. Yeah. Well we'll get there. Uh the big exciting for me, I think the big exciting one out of all these announcements, this is selfish. Native split testing. The features called rollouts. Native A-B testing coming to Shopify. This I'm excited about.
Paul Reda • 03:12.140
Skipping over things in the list you gave me.
Kurt Elster • 03:14.299
Oh, I'm sorry. You know, I wanted to go with with the big one, the one I'm excited about. And then you wrote that not the first thing on the list. Yeah, yeah, that is what I did. Great.
Paul Reda • 03:24.500
Let's go. Whee.
Kurt Elster • 03:27.300
Okay. Schedule theme changes and run A-B tests directly in the theme editor with your Shopify plan.
Paul Reda • 03:36.420
I know my role on this podcast is to say is to act dumb and say things are bad. You're our resident skeptical. And then you convince convince me otherwise and you teach me about it. This is good. This is great. Native split testing is sick, uh, especially since all the good split testing tools have become insanely expensive over the last two years. So the fact that there's a native one built into Shopify now is so nice. And you are gonna lose your mind over it. You I'm talking to Kurt specifically because he loves doing that.
Kurt Elster • 04:12.080
I do. I love I love split testing because you know so much of design is subjective. And you know, when you're presenting in an online store, you have to make a guess as to will this help or hurt sales? And then once you've implemented it, you're really you don't necessarily know if it helped or hurt sales. Split testing gives you that opportunity where you could much more confidently know what does or doesn't move the needle and in which direction. In the past we were using Google Optimize, but it was shut down years ago. So not an option anymore. And so we were left looking for new tools to find. There are third-party tools, uh, both in the Shopify App Store and outside the Shopify App Store, that they're out there, they're good, we use them. I have lamented all of them seem expensive. And I'm spoiled because tools like Google Optimize were free. And a little clunky. You know, there's none that's like super easy to use. You know, I'm a marketer, tech guy, and even I'm sometimes like, okay, this thing's frustrating. To have this as a native feature, I am just it I haven't even played with it, but I'm already so excited and thrilled because I've, you know I would assume that this will be easier to use. I'm not paying extra for it. And split testing is such a valuable tool. And this opens it up to so many more people because we've lowered the barrier to entry.
Paul Reda • 05:35.380
Uh all right, let's roll it back to 101. Split testing is You make a change on your store. Could be anything. The canonical joke example is changing the color of a button.
Kurt Elster • 05:49.080
What button color coverage bust?
Paul Reda • 05:50.600
It could be like adding a different a new section onto your store. It could be changing the language.
Kurt Elster • 05:55.100
Entirely different layout.
Paul Reda • 05:56.060
Yeah, different layouts, different languages on your headlines, whatever. And you split your store Some you split your audience. Some people get see the change, some people see the old version, then the it'll track Which one sold more? Or you could set a target. You'd like I want I actually care about add to carts the most. I don't care about revenue. Don't know why.
Kurt Elster • 06:19.040
Yeah, we set a we pick a KPI and we say this is our goal.
Paul Reda • 06:21.759
Yeah. Uh and then when you need to get a ton of traffic, which is the stumbling block here, right, is a ton of traffic. You need thousands of people, maybe hundreds of people at least, to look at both ones. and see which one did better. And then you go, oh, that one won. So you make that change to everyone. Uh I also would think about, you know, it's not just about things you could add, it's about things you could take away. True. It's like, oh, you know, this giant video and all this giant crap down here at the bottom of the page, no one's seeing it and getting rid of it didn't change anything for anyone. So let's get rid of it. So there's less stuff and it's more focused.
Kurt Elster • 07:00.440
We had a site, as an example, we had a site that I was very proud of a feature we built, custom feature. It would show you cost per survey of a product depending on what Uh depending on you know what quantity and format, what packaging type you want.
Paul Reda • 07:16.340
Yeah, and this company had like twelve different packaging types, so maintaining it was a huge pain in the ass.
Kurt Elster • 07:21.940
But we got it, it worked, we were proud of it, we ran it. At least at least several years. And then I split tested it, discovered it. Actually, the site performed better without it I never would have guessed that, right? You know, but split testing, that's the power of it. You know, we were ac we were actively doing a thing that hurt our sales unknowingly. And split testing is one of those things that reveals That to you. Yeah. Now the catch is it is very dependent on traffic. Right? You have to have a ton of traffic. to get to a statistically significant result.
Paul Reda • 07:55.040
Yeah, otherwise you're like, okay, I started that split test. We'll check back in three months to see which one's better. That's not going to be good for anybody.
Kurt Elster • 08:01.800
And you know, in this this rollouts feature, there's a one of the screenshots included with it in additions shows confidence interval. That's referring to our statistical significance. Right. You know, if I have If I only have a hundred visitors and you know they really were like close to 50-50, I've I don't know which one. That's just the one.
Paul Reda • 08:23.320
Which one is actually the winner, yeah.
Kurt Elster • 08:24.940
And so that helps me decide. But you know, and that's why I like the big changes, you know, really large changes. You're it's easier to get to statistical significance, uh because it'll tend to skew hard one way or the other. But again, I I need a ton of traffic. If I don't have the traffic, this isn't useful.
Paul Reda • 08:42.960
I I just got a question. How does it work though? So what are we doing? So from what I understand it, you are gonna go into edit theme. And then up there it's got the markets, where it's like you could have B2B and you could have the international market selections.
Kurt Elster • 08:55.840
Yeah, currently it works via that. Yeah, we call it contexts or markets.
Paul Reda • 08:59.920
Yeah.
Kurt Elster • 09:00.820
So, all right, truthfully, I have not played with this.
Paul Reda • 09:02.900
Oh, okay, great.
Kurt Elster • 09:03.780
I have read about it. I've seen screenshots of it. And I have spoken to uh the the gentleman at Shopify Aaron Glazer who is going to join us on the podcast next week and he he let me ask him all kinds of questions about this. Um he said it works like uh markets or contacts, and that's where like you're in the theme editor and I could this version of my site for France, for Canada, whatever, can look materially different from the version for the US. And so all right, if I have that, that concept as far as like implementation goes on site, that already gets us pretty close to what split testing does.
Paul Reda • 09:43.260
Yeah, now we all just need now all we need to do is track it.
Kurt Elster • 09:45.980
Yeah. So And we have an analytics platform in Shopify. So all right, we're getting there.
Paul Reda • 09:51.100
So all yeah, so uh I think what it you're gonna end up needing to do is you're gonna have like I guess you're just gonna create a different market, we'll call it, you know, the test market, and make changes in your theme editor And be like, apply this to the test market. And then there'll be something that we click on that goes, okay, do a split test between the normal site and the test market site. And then track that and tell me when you're done.
Kurt Elster • 10:16.140
I would think, you know, maybe it's a another app we add, a first-party app called Rollouts, but I haven't played with it myself. It's in preview. Um or invite-on preview. And I want to be on the weekend.
Paul Reda • 10:29.520
You didn't score an invitation?
Kurt Elster • 10:30.960
I didn't. No. Wow. Well, there's another feature we have a store that's in there. I know. I know. Look, I got I got early early scoop on some of this. Oh wow. Yeah. I like that. Okay. If I don't have enough traffic to confidently run these tests, they're really it it's not helpful to me yet. They have at the same time another feature that just rolled out. And this one, you could install this right now. It's called. Sim Gym. Snap it to a sim gym. Oh, you were waiting for it. Uh mine was uh what was my line about it? Oh, it's a gym for your Sims Yeah, no, there are lots of jokes for this. Finally the Sims coming to Shopify. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, yeah, we've we've given the hard time about the name SimGym, but it it's cute, it's fun, I like it. SimGym this App search SimGym in the Shopify App Store right now. You can find this and install it. It'll show you what it does. It won't do anything yet. It says AI research preview on it. And then from there you can hit join wait list. And but just like given the state of how it looks, I would imagine you get access to that fairly soon. That's speculation on my part. Um, but The idea, and this is another one Aaron Glazer is gonna tell us about this next week, but the idea is it'll create agents that represent user personas And it attempts an AI attempts to cr complete a task on your website and then make suggestions based on that.
Paul Reda • 11:59.640
This is not gonna work. Well, you know, what's the There's gonna be a fake AI person that uses your website and then tells you Where you can make improvements.
Kurt Elster • 12:10.340
Okay, but think about like first the first step of a CRO audit that we would do for someone.
Paul Reda • 12:17.259
I mean, no, I understand it really functionally similar. Yeah, user testing is a very important tool. The AI is not smart enough to do that. The recommendations it's gonna make are gonna be so dumb and so bad. There's no way this works good.
Kurt Elster • 12:31.339
If it all right, let's say it has a list of defined I again we're speculating here. I've got a l like I have a list of best practices and a list of defined tests and a list of user personas. The AI is essentially role-playing through shopping on the website. And it could figure out, I think it could figure out on its own, hey, it is hard to find this particular item that I'm looking for, whether that's a piece of information or a product. Or maybe it's let's assume the AI is dumber than the person. If if you've used like comet browser, it's not real good. I was about to say You know, the AI can navigate my website, a person definitely can't.
Paul Reda • 13:06.180
The main stumbling block is usually they're always building a stupider person on for these things, like we know, you know, testing these apps. So it's like maybe if it's the AI is really dumb and bad. it'll accurately be able to simulate extremely dumb and bad users.
Kurt Elster • 13:25.339
Alright, I don't like the words dumb and bad, but like if I'm just Yeah, uh think about the context though. I'm like walking down the street and scrolling on my phone.
Paul Reda • 13:36.260
You've seen heat maps.
Kurt Elster • 13:37.460
I have seen heat maps.
Paul Reda • 13:38.580
Yeah, and what have you seen on these heat maps?
Kurt Elster • 13:40.839
Yeah, but in screen recordings you see some strange things. Just people clicking on stuff that doesn't do anything like 20 times in a row while their phone is horizontal. You're like, just what what happened here? You know Let's just if the AI is less competent than that.
Paul Reda • 13:57.040
Oh, okay, less competent.
Kurt Elster • 13:58.320
And I could optimize for that. Well, okay, now I know I have a frictionless experience. Oh, okay. That's what I'm going with. We're gonna wait until we should get a dog to test the website. Okay, AI can read. My dog can't read.
Paul Reda • 14:11.380
I got a four-year-old. Maybe my four-year-old could use it.
Kurt Elster • 14:13.700
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Paul Reda • 15:16.700
I don't know what that is.
Kurt Elster • 15:18.060
What? It's this little nerd guy in the upper right. He's got a mask on.
Paul Reda • 15:22.700
I generally don't need help when I'm in there. Click your little nerd buddy. No, I'm I'm usually fine. So I'm using It's Clippy for your Shopify store?
Kurt Elster • 15:33.500
Yeah.
Paul Reda • 15:33.980
Okay.
Kurt Elster • 15:34.540
Yeah. I got my little buddy sidekick. And
Paul Reda • 15:38.339
Oh wait, let's roll it back. So you're claiming, by the way, your segue there going into Slim Gyms is. It'll solve the traffic problem in the split testing is that you can instead of getting real users and waiting for the real users to hit your site, you could just run the Slim Jims through it and then they can pick a winner?
Kurt Elster • 15:59.040
They're well, they're an alternative. Both have the same outcome, conversion rate optimization, usability optimization, trying to make the website better. But do they work in tandem? I'm sure you could run them both, but by the time I have the ability to go to real split testing, do I want to use this tool?
Paul Reda • 16:20.180
That uh yeah, because it's like, okay. You run the sim thing on it and it hands you a report. Fine. I bet there might be one or two little interesting nuggets in the report. I'm not gonna really pour over it that deep. Using the simulator to determine whether something is better or worse on your website. Definitely don't do that.
Kurt Elster • 16:45.000
I don't know well no, I don't think that's what it's doing.
Paul Reda • 16:47.160
Okay.
Kurt Elster • 16:47.720
No. No, I think this is an alternative.
Paul Reda • 16:50.840
You think these are two separate products?
Kurt Elster • 16:52.839
Two separate products serving similar needs.
Paul Reda • 16:55.880
And we're not going to use Symgium to supercharge our split testing.
Kurt Elster • 16:59.959
No.
Paul Reda • 17:00.600
Good.
Kurt Elster • 17:01.399
Very good.
Paul Reda • 17:02.199
That was one of my worries. Well, I'm glad we clarified. So sidekick or clippy. French Canadian Clippy.
Kurt Elster • 17:09.120
French Canadian Clippy. Sidekick. Sidekick's really grown on me because I now use it to make my life easier for shortcuts. I generate reports with it and that's my number one use case. I'm just like, I'm always looking for info, you know, why did this conversion rate drop? And that's really like a series of analytics questions I have to ask to get to the bottom of it.
Paul Reda • 17:30.900
Yeah, it's if you ask it why did my conversion rate drop, it's not gonna give you a good answer.
Kurt Elster • 17:34.419
No, I I don't want it to think for me, but I do want it to you take some of it. Yes. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And it is now integrated really nicely where it could generate reports, customer reports for me. I just have to be able to tell it w communicate to it what I want. It gets it right uh nine out of ten times. And say like customer segments, it could do that as well for me. I don't use that as often, but helpful, you know, when I need it. Like I, you know, I want people who've placed more than three orders since this time. you know, and are subscribed to my newsletter. And like, yeah, I know I could just I could do that in the admin filter, but being able to just like type it and have it do it magically for me, uh, that's pretty convenient. Uh similar with the reports. The reports it's just it's a big time savings to for me to not have to click around and instead just describe what I'm looking for. Now there's other stuff that's been added into Sidekick that I have not played with yet. One, and I can't believe I missed this, it's just because I never tried it. You can have it create workflows, automations in Shopify Flow by just describing them to it. And Shopify Flow, one of my favorite apps, because I love marketing automation. Uh, and so being able to put that stuff. to have it attempt to make that flow for me, that I gotta try. That could be significant time savings. Because oftentimes I'm like, all right. I'm pretty sure Shopify Flow can do what I want, but I'm not necessarily sure on the specifics. You know, and there's gonna be some uh some fiddling to get there.
Paul Reda • 19:12.659
Back to rollouts. Did rollouts include a thing where you can like publish? I think I heard or saw that you can like publish and unpublish sections. By time and stuff like that? I know it included it's included schedule. It's called rollouts.
Kurt Elster • 19:30.120
It's not called split. So you're rolling things out. No, you're right. It does more than just split testing. Yeah. You could schedule a theme changing.
Paul Reda • 19:36.880
You could schedule theme changes and theme publishing and unpublishing, which is great because you know Where it's the holiday season and you know everyone's got like the Black Friday version of the theme with all our big Black Friday banners on it. And it's like, so there's no one needs to be there. at 1159 on Thanksgiving night to be like, okay, I gotta go publish the theme. It could all just auto-do it inside.
Kurt Elster • 20:00.600
Everybody gets a good night's sleep now.
Paul Reda • 20:01.799
You could schedule everything.
Kurt Elster • 20:03.080
Yeah, you're right. I miss that. Yes. So the the other thing with Shopify sidekick, that this we gotta explore a little bit. Alright, if it could write stuff into Shopify Flow, it's because now they've added uh app extensions to it. And so third-party apps in the app store like ours could conceivably build an integration where Shopify sidekick, you could tell Shopify sidekick You know, in our case, like, hey, I want to run this crowdfunding campaign. Hey, I want to run this free gift with purchase promo campaign. And then by talking to one of our two apps, it would be able to do that and just set it up for you.
Paul Reda • 20:37.360
Oh, well, and I was wondering if like, oh, could you have it so I want to set up this free gift for the purchase campaign, but it's a limited time offer because I only have a hundred of these gifts. So the moment I run out of the gifts, turn off The app and turn off the campaign.
Kurt Elster • 20:55.039
Alright, in this example, I'm going with probably not Okay. But Maybe we're not that far from a world like that. Because they added there's a feature in it called lists where now like you can for uh multi-step processes like this, you can have it make and work from a list, but it's kind of like it it's working with you. You know, it's not you can't have it kick something off on a schedule. But then like if it can also if it could build workflows and Shopify flow, that gives you a way to do scheduling. Like it I don't think we're far off from that world, but I doubt something like that would work today.
Paul Reda • 21:34.600
What's SPN?
Kurt Elster • 21:36.200
SPN. Shopify Product Network.
Paul Reda • 21:39.260
Is that on my cable provider?
Kurt Elster • 21:42.059
Is it is it a sports network?
Paul Reda • 21:43.980
No.
Kurt Elster • 21:44.700
No, uh No, I was thinking, you know, home shopping network. Ah. Which I mean, okay, if you're if you could get on one of those home shopping shows, oh my gosh.
Paul Reda • 21:56.160
We've had several Shout out to Osutra, our client, Stephanie Moramoto. She's on uh home shopping channel all the time.
Kurt Elster • 22:02.960
Yes, she does. Well geez, is it HSN or QVC?
Paul Reda • 22:06.160
They're both owned by the same company.
Kurt Elster • 22:07.600
Oh, okay. Sweet.
Paul Reda • 22:08.560
So it's it's cool. I think it's QVC. I think QVC's got a higher profile now.
Kurt Elster • 22:13.640
No, anyone I've talked to who's done one of those shows is like, wow, it prints money. Um, but okay. Shopify product network. I love any Shopify feature that leverages the Shopify platform, like everybody on it, you know, those network effects. And they had this app, Shopify Collective, which we use where you can offer your products for sale in other people's stores. So it works like dropshipping.
Paul Reda • 22:39.460
Well, and you could so more like you could become an affiliate. for other people's stores, right? Well essentially it's like well collecting Or that's or that's um what did we just set up?
Kurt Elster • 22:51.340
Shopify Collective.
Paul Reda • 22:52.539
That is collective.
Kurt Elster • 22:53.340
Shopify collective, yeah, is the one that essentially where it sets up drop shipping between two stores. So you could be a supplier or a vendor.
Paul Reda • 23:02.500
But you could sell other people's products on your store.
Kurt Elster • 23:05.380
Yeah.
Paul Reda • 23:05.780
Yeah.
Kurt Elster • 23:06.260
Yeah. It really it really streamlines the whole process. And so they took that idea a step further, Shopify product network. I can now show other people's products in on my thank you and order status page, on my search page, and my collection pages. And there's a it's an app called Shopify Product Network that you install. And then you could you opt into it and you could pick which of those surfaces you want You can also exclude, like if you have competitors you don't want to have pop-up in your store, uh, you could exclude those. And then if someone purchases, you know, a customer could then make a purchase from one of those. And it auto-fulfills and you just get paid a commission on it.
Paul Reda • 23:51.260
Isn't that just what Shopflight Collective is though?
Kurt Elster • 23:54.140
This is It well Shopify Collective, it's just pulling bonus products into my catalog.
Paul Reda • 24:00.400
You're like, I'm gonna become an affiliate of this store.
Kurt Elster • 24:03.520
I'm going to in-Not it's Shopify Collective, I'm it's a dropship model. I'm drop shipping someone for someone else. This one is like affiliate. So it's going to fulfill So it fulfills on their store. In Shopify Collective, you fulfill it? On Shopify Collective, the customer just sees an order. You know, I buy from store A and I get products from store A and B. But my order is just one store. Like I bought a Tesla accessory from Pete at Abstract Ocean, but it actually dropshipped from Tespros. And that was through Shopify Collective. But for me as the end user, all I saw was Abstract Ocean, was Pete Store.
Paul Reda • 24:48.600
Yeah, okay. So it's like
Kurt Elster • 24:50.140
Where Shopify Product Network makes this a little more transparent. The other one's drop shipping. This one is like an affiliate setup.
Paul Reda • 24:58.540
Okay. And so when you click on the product, you're going to the other store? I think so.
Kurt Elster • 25:06.160
Yeah. But we have a store in early access that has this running. And sure enough, they they are there are clicks, there are sales. Uh and like, you know, real brand new, real limited. But even with that, they still generated seven orders and got paid uh fourteen hundred bucks in commission in thirty days.
Paul Reda • 25:24.779
For doing nothing.
Kurt Elster • 25:25.580
For doing nothing.
Paul Reda • 25:26.300
All right, I'll take that.
Kurt Elster • 25:27.180
Yeah. That's like just bonus and that's for them that's pure profit. Now there was a little note there's like a note in the app that was like, Hey, you're early access, and so these these payouts are higher, you know, than they may be later. It was yeah, it was like seven it was seven orders and the commission was close to fourteen hundred bucks.
Paul Reda • 25:43.679
But depends on how big the orders were.
Kurt Elster • 25:46.000
Yeah. You know, I wouldn't expect it.
Paul Reda • 25:47.519
It's a percentage of the orders.
Kurt Elster • 25:49.140
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Paul Reda • 27:10.139
That Don't do that. Why? Because if I'm shopping on like I'm already engaging in commercial activity by shopping on your store, and on your store, you're gonna serve me ads for another store. Are you kidding me? I mean that makes you look that looks so low rent and like cheap and I do not like it. Anyway, speaking of low rent and cheap, Tinker's coming out, and it's an AI image generation model that could be a tool for product imagery experiments. If you want to have really crappy-looking AI-generated product photos, use Tinker. Have you played with image generation lately? It du you can tell.
Kurt Elster • 27:51.159
Nanobanana, that Google nano banana model is wild. It is so good. You gotta try this thing.
Paul Reda • 27:58.520
I can tell. It looks like garbage. You can tell.
Kurt Elster • 28:01.000
I think you're prompting it wrong. I think skill issue. User error.
Paul Reda • 28:06.960
The so anyway, don't put freaking commercial, don't put advertising on your store. They're gonna buy from you. People don't like looking at ads. They understand it's a necessary evil for a lot of things. But if I'm already about to give you money for a product, why are you also advertising to me?
Kurt Elster • 28:22.559
Something else. Put it on the thank you page where and the order status page where we have already gotten the order.
Paul Reda • 28:29.600
This is just bonus. Well, but you decided the collection and like on the pr on the store itself.
Kurt Elster • 28:35.919
Well and I will say, I would I suspect the way most stores would implement this, because you could pick which of those four surfaces it appears on. Yeah we'll they'll check thank you and order status, they'll uncheck search and collection. And our client store that has it installed, that's how it's set up. Yeah. But I like the option. I don't. We'll see what it does. You know, as it as it rolls out more. Um, that Tinker app, it looks like that's gonna be a free iOS app. Well, I st I don't know if it's gonna be free. They didn't say that. But it'll it looks like it's gonna be an iOS app. It's not out yet. And you know, watching the demo, it seemed like they referred to as like a sandbox to try other AM AI models. This sounds similar to a tool I use now, but have to pay for, Adobe Firefly, that generates its image generation and video generation from images. But I you know, they say, hey, which model do you want to use? And like Adobe has theirs, or I could flip it and be like, yeah, I want to use, you know, Gemini. Google's Nano Banana Pro. Um and that's kind of fun to try them, but really I just always end up using Google's because it's like by far the best. Currently. I don't know, that could change in a month. These things move quickly.
Paul Reda • 29:46.560
I have a complex product. I sell a backpack that looks very specific. How do I generate product photos of my very specific looking backpack?
Kurt Elster • 29:55.780
So I've I've attempted this. You give it this worked when I was doing it with the Adobe Firefly and the Google model. I gave it a reference photo and then a dis really like a description of the setting and the background I wanted in. And it consistently was able to do it. Occasionally there'd be a little weirdness. And, you know, I like your example. I used backpacks. You know, and it's a good thing.
Paul Reda • 30:20.960
Why do you think I made that by example?
Kurt Elster • 30:22.400
Oh, okay. Technical backpacks. I know.
Paul Reda • 30:24.880
Uh you know what? I'm here every day. I know what our who our clients are.
Kurt Elster • 30:28.940
Yeah, for like if you have a product photo and you're like, hey, I want to swap background or setting for like a you know a banner, a hero image, an ad, I think a hundred percent those AI tools have hit a point where that is practical to do. You use Shop App?
Paul Reda • 30:42.980
I don't use the Shop App, but I'll tell you who is using the Shop App. Literally everybody. That damn app. I hear people talking about it. People are just randomly talking about it in front of me. They're asking me questions about it because they're like, is that Shopify? I don't know. Is that I know that's the thing you know. And so this shop app, it is broken containment. It is fully in the normie brain world. I think I think it's like kinda going after Amazon a little bit.
Kurt Elster • 31:06.679
Yeah, we gave Shop at a couple years ago. When it came out, we gave it a hard time. Mostly just on the name.
Paul Reda • 31:12.300
Well, no comment on Shopify's naming procedures.
Kurt Elster • 31:15.900
It's been number one in the iOS App Store over Black Friday. I was in Times Square over Black Friday. They were running ads for it. Like for sure they're promoting this. We're seeing, you know, more and orders pop up uh comparing like Black Friday this year to last year. More orders are being referred or getting as a sales channel, shop is growing in our client stores. So we're seeing the results from it. Uh and these shop campaign ads, we have stores that have been consistently running ads in there and getting profitable row ads. You could acquire acquiring new customers at 1. 9x, 2x. ROAS in shop and I think those numbers are only gonna get better. Meta ads more expensive than ever, and so people are starting to look for alternatives to it. If you haven't explored these shop campaigns, 100% this is one of them. And there, you know, that shop app, what was so clever about it to get the installs for early on on the thank you page, the order confirmation page of a Shopify store, it said, hey, you want to track your app, get or track your order, get the shop app. And it does the order tracking for and the app's free. It's very convenient and it works well at that. That's like your Trojan horse. You know, that that utility was what got people to install it, use it, and leave notifications on. And now it once you're in the app, all right, I could browse.
Paul Reda • 32:34.860
You just have this giant library of everything.
Kurt Elster • 32:39.440
You go through it, see past orders, see offers, and they're starting to include, you know, shoppable content. So they've got this like this concept, this one of the announcements is shop minis. And all right, it took me a little bit to wrap my head around this. What is a shop mini? So it's if I said it's apps for the shop app. That's sort of true, but it's not when we think of apps, we think of like the merchants installing it for their store. This is really for, you know, looking at it, it seemed like other content creators To surface shoppable content inside this app. And the best use case was this recipe app.
Paul Reda • 33:20.360
So it's a thing inside the shop app.
Kurt Elster • 33:25.240
Yes.
Paul Reda • 33:26.480
Who makes the thing? Shopify?
Kurt Elster • 33:29.920
No, a third-party developer.
Paul Reda • 33:31.360
A third-party developer. How does the thing get installed on my shop app?
Kurt Elster • 33:39.640
Oh, it's just in there. I believe shops just Shopify is curating these.
Paul Reda • 33:44.600
How do I get okay? So there's just a section in the shop app yeah called shop minis.
Kurt Elster • 33:52.800
No
Paul Reda • 33:56.320
What's it called, Kurt? Oh here, hold on. Let me look it up for you. I bet install it because I gotta see if they got if any I you know if anyone wants to send me the 4K Blu-ray of hard boiled that came out, it's sold out everywhere. And it's really driving me nuts. That was like I told my wife that was my like on an emergency pull for a Christmas present for me. I was like, just give me the hard-boiled 4K. And she can't find it anywhere. So
Kurt Elster • 34:22.040
Alright, so you open this the shop app up.
Paul Reda • 34:25.160
I'm installing it.
Kurt Elster • 34:26.360
Click categories at the top. No, that's not it. Oh yeah, this is a bang up feature. Open the app, click search. And then they've got the section that says try something new. Discover more ways to shop with minis. And the top three that are in there are Recipes by Food Social. Picnic gift registry and gift sense. A new way to find the perfect gift. And so if I click gift sense That one opens a quiz that's like asking, it's like a chat bot asking who I'm trying to buy for. And then it asks a ton of questions and then tries to make recommendations on products to buy. And so with the Shopify product catalog, there is now programmatic access to that where apps can search every Shopify product in every store. And all these stores are opted into it by default. So you've got these huge product catalogs.
Paul Reda • 35:30.140
I mean, yeah, I mean what shop is is what's Amazon nowadays. Obviously Amazon sells Amazon sells some stuff to you directly, but So many people bought by direct are getting it from the manufacturer. Like I bought a Cuisinart food processor, uh a small one, a couple days ago, and it came from Cuisinart. Cuisinart was selling it to me via Amazon. This is all the Shop app is. Is I I feel it's it is a direct Amazon competitor. Shopify itself isn't selling you products, but all the army of all the Shopify store owners Have all put their catalogs on the shop app, and you can now shop the entirety of the Shopify universe within this one app. And it's killing it. Everyone's using it.
Kurt Elster • 36:16.820
Yeah.
Paul Reda • 36:17.799
Yeah. And I mean it's no no skin off your nose as a store owner. You're doing literally nothing. In fact, it requires less maintenance because you don't have a You don't have you don't have like a store to maintain that you have on your URL at your website. It's just pulling all the data from your product catalog.
Kurt Elster • 36:33.780
Yeah. And so I'd encourage you, if you haven't played with this yet, in your Shopify admin, you could chew you could change the look of the your shop storefront in the shop app. They've added more options to help you curate it. Uh and really for the few minutes it takes to set it up, absolutely do it.
Paul Reda • 36:53.580
A lot of gift registries. Which makes sense. Yeah, it's all gifting. I made an app to recommend a gift.
Kurt Elster • 37:00.240
Yeah, I think like that's the idea. I mean they followed to tell you discover more ways to shop. It is just variations on recommendation engines. Which good. You know, we're we're trying to sell more stuff to more people more often. This does it. Mm-hmm. Of course, with all Shopify Editions announcements, there's lots of stuff we didn't cover. And you know, there's features that got added since uh the summer, you know, that to us feel like you know I've been using those for months. They're so they're not new, but they're included in these announcements. And as well as you know, entire categories we then touch on point of sale, B2B, uh developer stuff, shipping, you know, lots of content in there. But we're just picking our You know, the highlights. This is the exciting stuff. Yeah. Well, exciting for us. Hopefully exciting for the students. Wow. That's high praise for Bue. Yeah, right. Uh, keep sending them checks.
Paul Reda • 38:04.200
All right, so for the hard boiled, it should also be available at Gruv, which is my preferred forky Blu-ray vendor. It is a secret store front end for Universal Pictures. Gruve is on Shopify, but not in the Shop app. So I don't know what they're doing there.
Kurt Elster • 38:20.820
This missed opportunity for them.
Paul Reda • 38:22.020
It's a huge missed opportunity for them. Also, I really want Gruv as a client. So Gruv, if you're out there. Uh let me do stuff on your store. And you can pay me in product.
Kurt Elster • 38:32.279
Oh. Yeah, no, I would 100% I take Grub as a client. For sure. Not gonna complain about that. Uh yeah, I mean all the info you can get it on the Shopify Edition site. We'll include that in the show notes. Some of these features are in preview, they're not available yet, others have already been available. So, you know, scroll through it and pick the stuff that interests you. If it's interesting and not available, there's always an option to get notified when it is. And so, you know, I I end up signing up for a lot of those at all of these announcements. But yeah, exciting stuff. I'm looking forward to 2026. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Happy Honda Days. No, no happy Honda Days.
Paul Reda • 39:11.619
I celebrate Toyota Thon.
Kurt Elster • 39:13.220
Oh man. Hey, before you go, I was hoping you would check out our new app, Promo Party Pro. It is what I want to be the single best, easiest way to run a free gift with purchase promo on Shopify. We just put it live in the App Store. We've got less than 50 users. We want your feedback. So if you need to run a free gift with Purchase Promo in the near future, install it, try it. There's a live chat. I check that all the time. And so if you have any issues at all, you know, or any suggestions on how we can make it even easier to use, let us know. We're happy to help. If you want to try it, search promo party in the app store. Promo PartyPro is the app. Give it a shot. It's got a free trial. Thanks