Two Shopify VPs map the future: new rev share, Catalog, and where to bet.
"You think you know what you're doing. Like I work at Shopify. I should be better at it."
That's Atlee Clark, Shopify's VP of Partnerships, on running her own store, Pika Layers, for the past seven years. She's joined by Eytan Seidman, VP of Product for everything partners and developers touch. Together they just rewrote the deal for Shopify's entire partner ecosystem, and this conversation explains what that means for your store.
We get into the new revenue share that pays partners on merchant GMV growth (Plus upgrades finally count), why Catalog and UCP put the world's products in a single API, and how Sidekick app extensions going GA changes what apps can do inside your admin. Plus the two areas both VPs say are wide open for anyone willing to build.
Stick around for the complaint Eytan admits Shopify still hasn't fixed.
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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 • 00:00.001
This episode is brought to you in part by Swym. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swym actually activates that data. When someone wish lists a product, you could trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Klaviyo or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wish lists for gifts and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in store. And unlike card abandonment, wishlist data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this. Just not right now. Swym's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes. You can try it for free today at getswim. com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M. com slash Kurt. Uh last month when I was supposed to attend . dev in Toronto and then forgot my passport uh was expired. Horrible. Didn't figure that out. Never making that mistake again. But we're here. You rescheduled with me. We're gonna do this conversation again. I wanna know from the two of you what is changing about the Shopify platform. For years I have said a rising tide Right. And I I believed it. The investments the Shopify made in the partner ecosystem, in the platform, in the entire thing, not just software and features. And the vision that goes with it means we attract more people, more development, and the whole thing gets bigger, better, easier to use for everyone involved, right? That is that's my thesis. I think I have seen Shopify. I think I've seen you as executives really reiterate a commitment to that promise this year. And I'm impressed and excited, but always slightly skeptical, I have questions. All right, we're joined today on the show by Atley Clark and Aton Sideman. At Lee, tell me in your own words, what do you do at Shopify?
Atlee Clark • 02:21.739
I am uh VP of partnerships here at Shopify, so I oversee partner programs across apps and agencies.
Kurt • 02:29.260
Well, how long you been there?
Atlee Clark • 02:31.020
I've been here uh just over eleven years.
Kurt • 02:33.580
Oh wow. Okay. Long time. Uh long time.
Atlee Clark • 02:36.940
Yeah. I was twelve when I started. Mm-hmm.
Kurt • 02:40.319
Yeah, I'm forever 29.
Atlee Clark • 02:42.159
Yeah, exactly.
Kurt • 02:42.879
It's perfect. Yeah. And Eton, how about yourself?
Eytan Seidman • 02:46.239
Uh I'm a VP of product at Shopify. Uh I've been here almost six years. Um I work on uh all things partner and developer from the product side. So think about like starting with the top of the journey, Shopify. dev or DevDocs, our CLI. our dev dashboard, um, our distribution to App Store, Theme Store, uh, and then a lot of the primitives that power the experience. So things like Shopify Functions, Polaris. uh meta fields, meta objects, all the kind of key capabilities that developers might use on their journey, uh app events, which is a newer thing. Uh and then also we work on some power tools like analytics and flow.
Kurt • 03:20.920
Tell me primitive is a phrase I've heard a lot in the last couple years in reference to software. Tell me what a primitive is.
Eytan Seidman • 03:29.180
Ooh, uh so primitive um can mean one of two things, uh like depending on the context. So we talk about probably um like platform primitives and then also commerce primitives. So a commerce primitive is something where it's like, hey, this is a um an API and potentially storage that models commerce and that gives you the capability. So subscriptions, for example, is a primitive. Like, hey, we have the underlying capabilities that allow you to create subscriptions, manage subscriptions, delete them, modify them, all that sort of stuff. And then there's kind of like platform primitives, which are kind of key um capabilities that a developer might need along their journey. to make their app work. So for example, meta fields and meta objects is a really great primitive for storing state. And then you want to use that state in various places across Shopify, like hey, I want this meta field to be used in Shopify functions or on the storefront or in other places. So it's an underlying capability that usually powers commerce or some sort of um underlying platform thing that that is needed um in the journey
Kurt • 04:28.800
Okay. So synonym for feature? Not quite.
Eytan Seidman • 04:32.880
Not quite. Because he typically features are built on top of the primitives, right? So you're like, hey, I'm going to use actually take discounting. Like, hey, I'm gonna go build a discounting feature on top of like, you know, MetaFields as a storage mechanism, uh, on top of the MetaField storage primitive. Um or or or go into it that way.
Kurt • 04:52.960
Okay.
Eytan Seidman • 04:53.360
So so sometimes it can be, but not always.
Kurt • 04:55.440
Good to know. That's kinda through context clues, that's what I thought.
Eytan Seidman • 04:59.840
Yeah.
Kurt • 05:00.720
Do either of you, by chance, have your own Shopify stores?
Atlee Clark • 05:04.900
I do. I do. You do. What is it? Uh it's called Pika Layers. Um, and we make sensory-friendly pajamas for every kid. Uh we've been I've been doing it for oh god uh seven years. Um and I think it was the thing that kept me sane during um COVID and also probably makes me the most annoying VP at Shopify. Um because I'm always in you know, PMs, DMs just being like, hi, so, um, feature idea or hey, this thing's broken. Can you help me? Um and but I think uh it is uh such a it's so it makes I think it makes me better at my job um because uh it helps me deeply understand the platform, have tons of merchant empathy. And then of course I work with apps. I've worked with agencies and really like get to interact with like the ecosystem that I work with every day. So um it's really fun and I always joke it's way harder than my day job. So
Kurt • 06:13.280
Yeah, no, it is it it is not easy to run an e-com store once you add up like you know everything all the hats you have to wear and everything you have to do. But it is rewarding.
Atlee Clark • 06:22.639
But I don't think you know what you're doing. Like I work at Shopify. I should I should be better at it. Um and like and then there's things you can't control. Like two days there was a typhoon at our uh manufacturers and uh We now have an undetermined delay in our fall collection. So, you know, it's just another another fun nighttime thing to try to figure out
Kurt • 06:45.000
Nat, you and I talked, not on this podcast, but like uh on a Zoom call, maybe less than a year ago, and you said, hey, do you use Claude with your stores yet? And I said, no, that scares me. I'm like, I'm not plugging that thing into my store. Now I've of absolutely I have done it now that Shopify has has provided us those tools. Do you have a coding agent like Claude or Codex plugged into your store?
Atlee Clark • 07:08.440
Yeah, I use Clog Code with my store. I actually was very proud of myself. I did um a full, I wanted to do like swatches based on um actual product images as opposed to um uploading fabric mm samples whole different r reasons why I want to do that. But basically I just like created this entire instruction um and it did the whole thing. It was a it was amazing. There was a couple bumps that I had to go back and deal with, but um it was uh it was incredible. Um and yeah, so I use claw uh Claude with uh the Shopify AI toolkit um that actually HLN Steam built So I should thank Eton and then I also bug him. I'm like, hey, this thing isn't working.
Kurt • 07:56.940
Well, okay, I'm thrilled to have you. I did not know that. I'm thrilled to have you here. Because that the AI toolkit, Shopify saying here is an official way to plug in this coding agent. That was the thing that for me, it was like, oh, now you have permission to do it. Right. Like prior to that, I'm like, I'm not sure about this. Like I was, you know, do it using a very manual approach. Once that happened, I was like, okay, I'm I'm given permission to attempt this. And then I will add my own guardrails that I'm comfortable with on top of it. I love that. Was that s tell me about that that background, that process. How did that that come to pass? There the I'm sure it didn't happen lightly.
Eytan Seidman • 08:36.180
Yeah. Yeah, I mean so we um context is we had an MCP server for a while. We also had um a CLI for apps that apps could use and we had actually were introducing the ability for apps to kind of like do one off um execution of GraphQL. So we have this app execute command where you could be like, hey, execute this piece of GraphQL, which could be a query or mutation. And we were like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if like a merchant or an agency could do this without like having like an actual app? Right. And so what we did is we came up with the idea of like store execute. Which basically says, hey, I want to go and run something or an agent. I want to empower an agent to go run this thing on my shop. Like so store execute could be like, hey, product create. It could be product update. And then you could take context, you could tell the agent, hey, um, go and update my products with um SEO that is well suited for a fall collection, right? uh for Pico Layers. And so the store execute command is what enabled this, right? You could do it kind of outside the context of an app. Behind the scenes, we obviously validate like, hey, you at least have the authority to do this on your shop. So we it is done like in a in a way that is um fully authenticated. Um and we really kind of geared it towards merchants more so than like app developers in a way, because again, the store execute command enabled you to do without without that app. And so Um the reception has been phenomenal, right? It's like it was like we we literally put it out there like just kind of like, okay, let's see how this goes. Um and it went quite viral in terms of just the adoption. Um so yeah, it's it's been it's been awesome to see and like all these use cases. exactly the ones at least describing where now hey you can plug in um the agents will of course find the right command the right graph ql to go and execute shop. But I think the human stays in the loop, right? Like Atly is saying like, okay, yes, Claude, go and do this on my shop, and making sure that all the mutations are happening that way.
Kurt • 10:29.040
Yes. No, I think uh human in the loop has become one of my favorite phrases lately. I think if you give an my feeling is you can have an agent run autonomously. That's fine. You will potentially get a mid output. You will get a C plus output. The more human you add to it, it becomes then it becomes a force multiplier. Now we can get to A plus P output. But, you know, do same thing. It's like, all right, you still have to have a person look at it, review, check the plan, and essentially provide, you know, guidance along the way for for the robot to do its work. Agree or disagree?
Eytan Seidman • 11:04.680
Strong agree. Strong strong agree. Yeah. I think like yeah, I mean like also, I mean, look, LLMs are phenomenal, right? Unbelievable. They're really good, also like monotonous tasks that like humans are are bad at, right? Like or like, you know, like repeated monotonous tasks and like they'll always do it like gusto and vigor. Like, yes, Aton, I will do that for you for the thousandth time. Uh, but they will make mistakes. Right. And so the human in the loop to be like, wait a second, this doesn't look quite right. This is actually not what I intended. Oh wait, like please do not delete all my products. Uh I do not want that. Um so so yeah, I absolutely strong agree.
Kurt • 11:40.560
Yeah. Okay. The we're all on the same page, it seems. What being that I missed . dev, I wasn't there, what's the headline? Like what was the theme? What was the the one big takeaway you wanted?
Atlee Clark • 11:55.160
First of all, Kurt, we're very sad that you weren't there. Uh and it won't happen again. Um I think You know, for us, uh, this year's . dev, like first of all, we made it two days as opposed to in the past, it was one day. And really the purpose of that was um to give enough s like what I kept calling oxygen to make sure that we were delivering um great content that was relevant to everybody that was there, but also time and space for what I think is the most important and special thing about our ecosystem, which is the connection between everyone. I talked on stage about what I like to call collaborative competition, which I think is the thing that makes this ecosystem great, is that everyone believes what we were talking about earlier, Kurt, that like every new entrant, every new partner, every new merchant um just makes the ecosystem better. Like if it's bigger, it is better. It is creating more opportunity for uh in and of itself of existing and growing and evolving. And so the big takeaway, I think, was then I'll just say this from the like a like an ecosystem side was really like That is where we want to invest, is like making sure that we are continuously making the pie bigger or all agreeing that the pie is infinite on the opportunity. And then I think on the product side, and Ethan, you should weigh in on this, but it's like, you know, Vanessa, VP of product, here at Shopify, executive, really got a stage and talked about some of the things that we're thinking about in terms of the future, UCP, catalog, like how do we think about agenda commerce and really trying to say like this is the moment the Shopify and its ecosystem together. can take a hold of this technology, take a hold of this opportunity and and turn it into something really productive
Kurt • 13:51.120
A big change if you're a partner, and I think merchants should know this too, because it will ultimately be relevant to to them, to their interests. The revenue sharing model that Shopify has with partners has always been good, has always been generous. It has changed in a a significant way. What is it?
Atlee Clark • 14:08.400
Yeah. So um the change is that we uh are now going to be sharing in the upside of GMV growth of our merchants that partners bring to Shopify and build and launch on Shopify. And I think maybe what's interesting is to understand like the why behind why we made this change
Kurt • 14:30.500
Um that was all this was a setup for me to go, why do this now?
Atlee Clark • 14:34.420
Like I'm not mad about it. But why do this? So one, um we uh we're looking at our current you know our current reward system and we wanted to evaluate on it on a couple like levels. So one was like, is it simple to understand? And that is really, you know, it's like a Prado principle that we have. It's just like, hey, is this something that you can see and see the very clear opportunity? And the reality was like we had tacked on a lot of things and made all these different qualifiers for all different kinds of different plans and different partners and all this stuff. And there was good reasons for those over time, but collectively they weren't making the thing good. So we're like, okay, how do we make it super, super clear? And simple. Um, two, how do we make sure that we're on the same side of the table as our partners? And by that it's like, how do we all have the shared same shared incentives? And our incentives as a collective are to bring more people, like bring more people to Shopify, give those people more Shopify, and to set them up for success. Right. Like we all want merchants to be successful because if they're successful on our platforms and with our apps and with our agencies, then it helps again, it's like that infinite pie mentality. And so uh set up those incentives to do that. And then lastly, just like be more generous. We believe that our partner ecosystem and in this, and this is like relevant specifically to our agencies play such an important part on bringing Shopify to the world and for supporting our merchants in their growth and their uh challenges and their opportunities and all the kind of thing. It's like, hey, like we want to be m more together on that. And so those were the principles that we set out with. And then we went and we looked and so we made it super simple. The new model applies to all plants, all partners, all merchants. Very, very simple. Same side of the table. So the incentives are focused on both MRR, so the subscription fee that merchants pay that they always have, but now also the GMV. So when a merchant is either set up for success or becomes more successful, Shopify, the merchant, and the partner all reap that reward. And then because of those two things together, it is inherently more generous. Also on that generous side, we added a couple of things to make it more clear and have higher opportunity for things like plus upgrades, which is like The number one thing I hear about all the time, I upgrade somebody to plus and I do not get rewarded for that. Well, that is no longer the case. uh plus get rewards we made the return on uh retail um have a longer time span and then there's new opportunities across um B2B, um as well as uh shop payoff shopi. So that was the that was the intent and that's what we landed and it seems to be people are liking it.
Kurt • 17:45.340
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Eytan Seidman • 19:29.240
Yeah, and something something catalog.
Kurt • 19:31.240
Something something catalog.
Eytan Seidman • 19:32.680
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I I think like another big part of . dev was talking about how Do we help merchants and partners succeed in this new era? Right. So we talked a lot about things we're doing with AI Toolkit. We talked about psychic app extensions. Um, but we've also, we launched catalog in January of of this year. It feels like forever ago. uh but it's like barely been a year. Sorry, it hasn't it's not even been a year yet. Um we launched it, uh we've added a bunch of new capabilities, and we're also announced that there's going to be a mod station aspect to catalog as well. Right, where we want to incentivize our partners to build phenomenal experiences, to an amazing opportunity to build these new experiences, and and partners will participate in the upside of it. So same thing we did with apps. and with themes and with storefronts, now we're doing for catalog as well. Where again, I think Kurt, you you built in a new experience and you shared it out um on Twitter. uh a lot of people building new experiences um on it and this is I think I think it's just an amazing opportunity because like the world has never really had this before where it's like, hey the world's products in a single API, easily available via catalog via the catalog API. And it's I think it's going to be really cool to see what it unleashes. And you can build lots of you know, uh specific things like, hey, I want to go build a thing for like kids Legos and start finding all the products for kids' Legos. I'm into pizza making and so like I'm working on a on a commerce experience for pizza making where I can show like ovens and peels and accessories. Um, and so I think it's gonna be really neat to see the creativity it unleashes and then again making sure partners can participate in it.
Kurt • 21:05.880
Yeah, those have been I I see the vision with UCP. It's such a a fun, accessible way to build something that is Shopify adjacent. And that's what's kind of cool about it, is like you someone who is not who has not developed an app, a theme, whatever it worked on a Shopify store yet, can get an introduction to it by being able to work on their own thing and then pull in products from the Shopify catalog. through UCP. And I built, you know, I built uh two demos with it and it was successful at it. You know, one that uh finds Barbies, it's kind of cool, and the other one that found um retro video games. And you know, and I just picked two hobbies that my wife and I had so that I'd be familiar with it. So I would be comfortable that like, oh my gosh, this thing works. And so Going through the dev docs for that, I suspect that this gets lumped into some kind of revenue sharing in the future. And that's how we incentivize building on this as well. Right or wrong?
Eytan Seidman • 22:02.940
Uh right. Yeah, so so so so yeah, so there will be a revenue sharing. Still have details to work out um and all the mechanics to work out, but but yes. Um uh we very much want partners to to you know to participate in all the upside that's created. If you create an awesome experience and and the Barbie site gets a ton of traffic and and helps merchants sell more of their stuff, we absolutely want partners to participate in the upside of it.
Kurt • 22:26.200
So we've got So partners become, you know, indirectly the sales force for this Agentic network by building experiences outside of Shopify. that leverage and point two Shopify products.
Eytan Seidman • 22:42.159
You got it.
Kurt • 22:43.279
Ooh, that's good. That's so fun because we're seeing these projects already being built. Now it's just a matter of time until we see one that's like, this is a breakout success. This one's a runaway success. Yep. And then once someone, you know, the first person to crack it where it's like, oh, that really, really did something, well then you're gonna see more. And this thing is potentially the snowballs.
Eytan Seidman • 23:03.419
Yeah, yeah. And I think you'll see in like in a lot of like niches, right? Just niches that like like, hey, you know, maybe it's like South African bookstore, right? And somebody just built a phenomenal South African experience for that. So I think there'll be a lot of different niches and passions where people can do surface products and help people discover these things in ways that were just not possible before.
Atlee Clark • 23:24.019
And I think it's also such a cool opportunity for merchants for a new avenue of discovery that they, again, if they're like you know, in the world of like millions of products, how do you get discovered? And then if you can get to your audience in an in a more niche way or in a way that they're already interacting with, let's say, like a creator or a different, you know, they're a part of a fan base, a Barbie fan base or whatever it is, then um you can get discovered in new ways and and I think that's really exciting. I'm really gunning for the um, you know, people to build the baby registry apps here, so call me if you are. Yeah.
Kurt • 24:02.480
Yeah, that automatic that's a I hadn't thought of that. That's a good one. Baby registry. Like I've seen a fair number of these now and they're very much they're like hobby based, interest based Or there's a lot around gifting, you know, like trying to find the right gift. So like you definitely see it, see it evolving very quickly. It's fun. It's exciting. The so in many ways like that the that agentic future, that portion of it becomes self-fulfilling. Though it's not necessarily like UCP kind of gets lumped into AI and agentic talk It on its face it isn't necessarily it, you know, an AI thing. Any application could pull and get the query and and make the query and get the products.
Eytan Seidman • 24:46.080
Yeah, I mean it's any application. I mean the thing that UCP though enables is like every Shopify store by default supports UCP. And so it enables agents to talk to that shop in a programmatic way to go and you know build carts, add to the cart, so you can be in that sort of a jet dick environment where like imagine actually just play it out for a second. Hey, I go build a new chat-based thing for a baby registry. And it's like, hey, you know, I'm shopping for a friend, um, helping them get ready for a new baby that's coming and go to their registry and go find things and then add them to a cart. And so all that can now be done programmatically. Right. So you can interact in that environment, fully build a cart, and then when you're ready to check out, it can happen agentically or it can happen like, hey, just continue on to the to the merchant storefront and go check out there.
Kurt • 25:31.620
And if I launch on Shopify today, I am opted into this by default. Like this is just just one of several features on and available should a an AI request these things.
Eytan Seidman • 25:44.440
Correct.
Kurt • 25:45.399
Cool.
Eytan Seidman • 25:46.279
What but merchants are in control? Like though you can open it. Yes. Yeah, that's right.
Kurt • 25:51.000
Yeah, it should make that clear. Yeah, anyone can opt out of it if they choose to. Uh or if I make a product like unlisted, it's still in my store, but then it gets exempted, right?
Eytan Seidman • 26:01.100
Uh yeah, if it's unlisted, it would not show up. Like it goes by channel that like there's a configuration inside of like the admin to be like, hey, this these are the channels I want it to be in.
Kurt • 26:09.980
Okay. That makes sense. Um well as long as we're talking agentic, I want to talk about sidekick. You know, we just uh integrated it into our app into promo party. Um it it worked. It was really cool. It was I don't know why why it impressed me like it did, but seeing your own app get surfaced in Shopify Sidekick, what that I was like, wow, that's really cool. I was I was elated to see it. Tell me about um, you know, give me a little bit of background there about sidekick. How long wait how long have we had Sidekick now?
Atlee Clark • 26:48.040
I don't know what time is anymore though. I know it was two editions ago.
Kurt • 26:53.000
Ever since 2020. I'm like, I have no idea.
Atlee Clark • 26:55.640
I don't know anymore, but Yeah.
Kurt • 26:57.540
At least at least two years.
Eytan Seidman • 27:00.020
Yeah, at least two years.
Kurt • 27:06.020
What's new here?
Eytan Seidman • 27:08.680
Uh I mean big thing that's new is Psychic App Extensions is now generally available to all apps. All right. So any app can go and build Psychic App Extensions. We kind of like early launched it in January, February timeframe where we said, hey, let's get it out to a few select partners, if you will, to get some uh to get some eyes on it, see how it's working, um, and also fine-tune it. Um, because I think like one of the things going back to our prior conversation, is that it's really important that sidekick is safe, right? Like it's really important that when a merchant goes to sidekick, that they can trust, okay, hey, This what I tell it to do is not going to do something to my shop that I did not intend it to do. If I go and ask an app to go do something, that again I can be comfortable that it's all going to work the way I want to. So that was really like a key principle we had was around safety. We very much wanted to enable the apps to participate. We're like, hey, like You know, it's really annoying that like I want to go and find out about like my subscription and how it's doing, or I'm running some sort of email marketing campaign. How's that doing? So two extensions, the data extension, which allows you to bring data into your app, and then the action extension where you can kind of stage things and say, hey, I want to go and create an email says, I want to go and create an email campaign. we can bring up that experience for the merchant and kind of uh prompt and get everything in the right shape. And then the merchant hit hits go. So um key things were like keep it safe and really enable apps to kind of um uh to showcase their functionality in a way that serves merchants and helps them get more done faster.
Kurt • 28:42.519
The absolutely. I mean one of the the first time I went The two moments I had with Sidekick where I went, well, this is really good was uh early on, just being able to generate reports with it quickly. Being like, I just need to know this KPI, I need to know this metric for this time range in a store. And I don't necessarily want to have to, you know, fight through filters to figure it out myself. You know, that takes ten minutes. Robot, you deal with it. And it does. you know, it is able to generate the reports for me, which is very convenient, especially for someone who's like jumping through various stores throughout the day. And the other one that just like really it become incredibly useful. It builds complex flows. In Shopify Flow, I could do automation by describing to it what I want up front. That that is a big time savings, you know, not having to do as much trial and error with a Shopify flow to get it, you know, and I'm building it myself versus having Sidekick do it.
Eytan Seidman • 29:36.220
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, both those are great use cases. Um we worked on the like a folks and my team worked on the flow on like I I think it's just overall I think the thing you described is I think what we a lot of us feel when you go and use it, where you're like, hey, walking through what we call like an imperative UI can be really clunky. It's like, okay, I have to like if you take the app example, okay, I have to go to the app, I have to find the reports tab, I have to click these filters, figure out what it is. And like that whole thing takes you like a minute. Whereas you can say, hey, you know, sidekick, how did my last email campaign do? Boom, it knows, okay, wait a second, there's a tool registered here that's using Seguno or Klaviyo. Okay, great. Let me go ask Saguno the all details. It does all the all the tool chaining calls and comes back with an answer like way faster than you would get through that kind of imperative UI.
Kurt • 30:28.700
And I mean, if it's come this far in two years, two years from now, what's this thing gonna be able to do for me?
Eytan Seidman • 30:35.180
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we talk about a lot is obviously like, you know, today LLMs are the worst they're ever going to be. Right.
Kurt • 30:42.980
You think like they still can't fit time just baffles all LLMs. Like what are the current present is very confusing to it, it seems.
Eytan Seidman • 30:50.660
for us is just focusing on on breadth and depth, right? So like, you know, we think of a lot about, okay, I mean, take analytics, right? How do we do a better job of in informing it, giving it all the context on like more of our schemas, and also just better um true set of like, okay, hey, when you ask a question, let's actually take analytics as a domain, it's like, hey, how do we actually figure out what is the right visualization to show you? Right. It's like, okay, you ask a question about like, hey, how does this trend over time? Right. Is that best answered with a line chart, with a bar chart? Um, and so continuing to like grow obviously the set of use cases that it can answer and handle, but then also doing a better job on the use cases and saying, hey, okay, now actually we know what the right visualization is for this, right? Or if you ask by channel, um, you know, say, hey, what are my sales by channel for the last three months? Right. You know, there's different ways to show that data that that can be compelling. And so Now doing a better job of that, we just have new visualizations. We launched an analytics where we can say, hey, we'll show you like a tree map sort of visualization that helps you understand that data better.
Kurt • 32:00.580
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Atlee Clark • 33:26.620
I think point of sale is a really interesting area. Now we've had point of sale for the entire time I've been at Shopify. Um, but I think that where we are right now is um We're at this really interesting juncture where I do think the opportunity is quite large. I think on the app side, like operating a physical store is just is the most is the messiest thing you can think of, right? Like you have employees that are showing up for a shift. You have inventory like literally sitting in the store. You have to merchandise inside the store. You have people coming in and out. You have people returning and buying and using credit cards and using cash and You gotta clean it, you gotta pay rent. Like there's so many things going on. And I think that if you are somebody who understands a pain point within that set of mess over here. And you also have a keen understanding of the way that Shopify as a platform works. And you can leverage your understanding of Shopify as a platform into applying one of those solutions to one of those problems. I think I think you're in a really, really good position to uh to help solve a lot of people's problems, but also like ride the wave with us as as we continue to expand PS. B2B is also super interesting. Um I think um it was interesting at dot dev the B2B sessions were some of the most highly attended. Um, and again, another place that's super messy, that needs lots of new solutions, that again, if you understand the Shopify primitives, if you understand the Shopify um stack and you understand how it works, I just think you can help apply that same sort of like product philosophy and ease of use and um clarity of data to those problems, I think I think there's tons and tons of opportunities.
Kurt • 35:38.480
And like it we're now uh about a ru a month out from . dev. So I want to ask you I want to ask you some. dev questions. I got three for you. A year from now, we're at. dev again, how do you know, like what's just anything in an anecdote and number, something that would have told you, like, okay, what we set out to do last year was successful.
Eytan Seidman • 36:00.359
I think a couple ones. I mean, coming back to what we talked about earlier, I think I'd love to see like amazing experiences built on top of catalog. And I think you could see a world where like we're giving build awards to like amazing catalog experiences, folks that are pushing the frontier of commerce utilizing um catalog and UCP. I I think that would be awesome to see a year from now um at next. dev. The other one that we have not spoken about a lot, but we shared it at . dev and we shared it a lot on X afterwards is We're enabling so something we just enabled is we're enabling apps to utilize um our analytics stack to build merchant analytics experiences. So historically, if you were like an app and you wanted to provide analytics, right, you're like, hey, I'm Gil building checkout blocks pre-acquisition. And you're like, okay, I want to show some stats about how much this little guarantee banner is shown or shown to buy or things like that. Um, you know, Like Gill or developer had to build analytics from the ground up, right? Store all your own data.
Kurt • 37:09.599
Ingest the data, do our own calculations on data that may have actually I've run into this. We're like, hey, let's calculate AOV. Oh wait, we can't just pull it from the store. We go figure it out ourselves. Okay. Yeah.
Eytan Seidman • 37:20.480
Yeah, exactly. And so now we've built out a whole stack of capabilities to enable developers to use Shopify analytics to power their app analytics. Which will remove, I think, a lot of burden from developers. So you guys can focus so developers can focus more on like building merchant value rather than like the inner workings of how to manage an analytics stack, but also then give merchants a more integrated experience, right? So they can see um their entire shop and how it's performing. Yeah, so we we introduced like app events like in analytics where you can say, hey, I'm gonna send all these events and I'm gonna send Email sends and email opens and email clicks and then we can do the aggregations for you all and all you have to do is use Shopify QL. So I think it's another capability that like a year from now I'm I'm useful You know, looking forward to seeing uh apps do an amazing job utilizing that, which again will give merchants, I think, an even better experience um with apps. And you can come into analytics and and again and again see your whole business.
Kurt • 38:17.540
All right, here's a good one for you, and we'll we'll wrap it up. As you're talking to partners at . dev, is there I want to know. Two things. Your biggest surprise on on what people were building, you know, it's always like you're giving us the tools and the opportunity, but what we go do with it, you know, you can't necessarily predict or control. So you know, what surprised you about what's out out there being built? And here's the hard one. What's the complaint you haven't fixed yet?
Atlee Clark • 38:46.620
How much time do you have, Kurt? Yeah. Um I always take the complaints as a sign that um everybody cares a lot. So that's that's how I that's how I put it in my brain so that I can be like, okay, I can do this. Um no, so I think um The on a surprise, and maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but I think um I you know this, but I don't know if other people know this. Like my first job at Shopify was working on the Shopify apps. store right so I have my perspective from and and on agency um and but I sort of left that world in like 20 early twenty And or met late 2018, early 2019. And I it's so cool to see the difference, like the and how much has happened in between those two times. And one of the things, the thing that sticks out the most for me is just the level of complexity that people have gotten themselves into, which is amazing because it solves, it's a continuing to solve really, really gnarly problems. Again, like on the B2B side. Like some of those agencies are doing are taking people out of the stone age. And like from faxing handwritten things to like this incredible experience that is saving them so much time. so much money making their businesses more profitable and it's just like it's incredible to see. And then also like the people that are dealing with really complex things like all of the ERPs and just like going really, really deep again to bring sort of the Shopify ethos to every component of a merchant's business, no matter how if they're a mom and pop. wholesaler or if they're like a massive global company, um, where just everybody is just getting deeper and deeper into the problem set, which I think is really cool and always surpr like it just sort of surprises
Eytan Seidman • 40:55.980
I mean I think one one complaint that is that that I heard or not come Like one one one theme I heard a lot about is like how we do change management on the platform, right? So like I think one of the things about Shopify, right, is we're always bringing new capabilities to the forefront. We're always kind of trying to reimagine, okay, if we were doing this thing from today moving forward, how would we go and do it? And that's always tricky, right? Because there are people who have invested a lot in the old way of doing things and how do you kind of move an entire ecosystem of Many tens of thousands of public applications in the App Store forward, obviously hundreds of thousands, maybe millions at this point, of like apps that are like custom applications built for shops. And so it was something I heard a lot about. Like, hey, A time, like expiring tokens we're doing, and like you have app pricing, and we're doing this and that and the other. Um so I think we've Um just to say it, like we've gotten like way better at reducing breaking changes and saying, hey, we're going to like like we take the API and its contract seriously. um and and trying to be more thoughtful about um how we kind of move an entire ecosystem onto new things, right? So uh we move from scripts to functions and we did that over a period of time of effectively like three plus years. Um and so so it's a complaint that I think we have not yet quite fixed. And I'm not sure we ever will, but I think we can get better. Like we can get better in terms of like, okay, like we're always going to be a bleeding edge platform that is looking to say How do we again build APIs and primitives to come back to that word the right way for the future? Um, but also how do we do it in a thoughtful way? Because we we want to ensure that you know, our community is spending its time building on behalf of merchants and not just spending its time like upgrading APIs.
Kurt • 42:49.000
I think anyone who has worked in software should have empathy for the sheer insanity of operating a platform at this scale. Right. Like just everything you change has downstream effects and many of them are like it's gonna be stuff in the future that no one could have conceived of. Right. Like just it seems like such an impossible task. Um for what it's worth, I still check the change log. I check the change log and then you know, whatever email I get that says action required in big capitals, I go, okay. And then of course Twitter, right? Yeah. Twitter's always or X now is always always very helpful. Uh yeah. Man, this has been This has been enlightening. I'm so I'm so thrilled that we're able to reschedule it and record, and I swear I will see you in person in Toronto next year. But um yeah, any closing thoughts from either of you, words of wisdom, tips, things you wished people would would do?
Atlee Clark • 43:44.560
I I'd say like as I joked before, like the complaints are an indication that the ecosystem cares about this thing. And I think, you know, Aton and I have been doing these roundtables about once a month with groups of different partners from all over the world. And I think um Things that we've heard there and things that we heard at. dev are things that we've been actioning and prioritizing. And um, like that feedback is so valuable to us. And so keep like keep it c keep it coming. Um because uh it makes us better and you guys all hold us to a really high bar and that is great. That's what we want because that's what's gonna make us all uh more successful in the long run. So keep it up.
Eytan Seidman • 44:32.079
Yeah.
Kurt • 44:32.559
All right. Well the Aiton, anything to?
Eytan Seidman • 44:34.960
No, I I was strong plus one that like it it it sounds cliche, but it it really is true that the ecosystem at its finest just really makes Shopify the product better and delivers a better merchant experience for uh for for for our merchants and like There are like real I mean actually one example just to kind of bring it home and like bring like is um one of the apps that we gave in a war to um uh the build awards is is uh discount kit and sammy and dave and like they've been building on the platform for like years and years and years. Actually um Sammy was The first partner I met when I started at Shopify, we met through like this like weird mechanism we had in its Slack where you could like meet a random partner and I got paired with Sammy Um and he was building discounting like six years ago. And he kept on building it. He evolved from like our chanky APIs back then to using Shopify functions and using Polaris, using the full app like stack. And like Discount kit and CME has just made the platform and like there are dozens, hundreds of examples of these, made the platform so much better because of like, oh, hey, have you thought about this use case? Have you thought about that use case? Um, how's it gonna work? And so it it it really is tremendously helpful um just to make the product better.
Kurt • 45:48.760
I'm gonna go, I wanna go build something. I wanna go tell Claude to do something. I just you know I I just want to get on the tools. That's how I love like that that's always what's fun about interacting with ShopFi executives. I always walk away going, eh, I I have to go make something now. Um That's great. And then send us a little bit of a big thing.
Eytan Seidman • 46:07.760
That's great. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Kurt • 46:09.040
Yeah, that like that it just the community, the ecosystem, the ethos, it it fits the personality for a builder, right? And I think that comes from the top down. And I I just I appreciate that and thank you for it. Um so then my final question is if someone wants to participate in this community, where's the best place to go?
Atlee Clark • 46:29.700
Oh, shopify. com slash partners. Start. All right. Sign up for a partner, yeah. Uh and um we've been doing a lot of meetups. We've done 70 over 70 since the beginning of the year all over the world. Um yeah, exactly. Um, and so watch out for those. Great way to connect with other partners in where you live and also Shopify um and hang out with us on X because we're there all the all the time.
Eytan Seidman • 47:01.539
Yeah. Just at Atley Clark and you'll get it.
Kurt • 47:09.120
All right. I think we're not doing better than that. We will end it there. Aiton Sideman, Atley Clark, thank you both so much. Thanks.
Eytan Seidman • 47:16.240
Thanks, Kurt. This is great.
Kurt • 47:19.300
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