Variant Limits, Theme Editors, and the Updates That Matter
Shopify just went from 100 variants per product to 2,048. Shopify Partners Kurt Elster and Paul Reda tested it and found out there's a secret limit at 250 where everything changes. Your theme might work perfectly, it might half-work, or it might completely break depending on when it was built.
They also dig into the new VS Code-based theme editor (developers love it, merchants hate it), the "unlisted" product status that's perfect for hiding free gifts and private sales, and Kurt reveals the one homepage element that gets clicked more than anything else—you're probably not using it right.
This is pure Shopify platform talk that's more entertaining than it should be.
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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
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Paul Reda
It's like I'm trying to find the happy medium between I am not too quiet but also my nose breathing isn't in it.
Kurt Elster
Looks like it's okay. I think so. I don't know. I just turn the volume up on here. It's Q4, we got Black Friday right around the corner. And what We're gonna go over some feature updates, both big and small, in Shopify that caught our eye in the geez, the last two weeks. And my co-host, uh business partner, Paul Rita and I are gonna go over it. Mr. Rita doing the uh the double guns. Bang bang. Yeah.
Paul Reda
There's a little uh cactus jack for anyone that Cactus Jack? That anyone knows that.
Kurt Elster
Okay, that was Yosemite Sam. So the big one, the first one we should talk about first, the variant limit.
Paul Reda
Yeah, Shopify, uh, you could now have 2,048 variants. I think it's 2048 because that's like a four-bit integer. Yeah. Or like eight bit something.
Kurt Elster
That's a cool guy number. It's like a computer word. It's a computer guy number. Yeah, it's computer.
Paul Reda
It's you know, it's like base eight. I don't know. Uh so yeah, it's 2048 now instead of a hundred.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, you do three sets of options, but the total combination of them could not exceed a hundred in the past.
Paul Reda
And you still only get three sets of options.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, we've got that still. But now if it was like I had, you know, ten colors in ten sizes and then I tried to add anything else, I was at a hundred. Yeah. I couldn't exceed that. So there were scenarios where we would run into this limit.
Speaker 3
Or if you, you know, more like 20 colors and five sizes.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. More realistically. Yeah. And so now we've raised that limit. There's some catches to it. But you tested this. Yeah. You were playing with this in a dev theme, a dev store.
Paul Reda
So there's Now co there's now actually two limits.
Kurt Elster
Okay.
Paul Reda
There's two hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty is It'll just work. It's going to work 100% the way the old one worked. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to change anything. Your store will work with 250.
Kurt Elster
Let's go with probably.
Paul Reda
Most likely. No, I'm reasonably certain 95th percentile, you're fine with 250.
Kurt Elster
Okay Which 250 quite a bit bigger than 100.
Paul Reda
Over 250 going up to 2048, then you're gonna get in some trouble.
Kurt Elster
All right. I know the answer here, but explain it to me.
Paul Reda
Alright, so I tested the because so what the thing is, so there's liquid, which is the template logic, which is the template language that Shopify uses when you're writing. Stuff that where you're directly interacting with the Shopify store and the Shopify code, that's liquid. Uh Liquid only has access to the first 250.
Kurt Elster
Okay.
Paul Reda
So depending on The recency of your theme, how your theme was written, it might handle over 250 in different ways. It might be fine, it might barf. It might half work. Half work.
Kurt Elster
We've seen that where it's like, okay, technically that works.
Paul Reda
Yeah. But it's not what I wanted. So yeah, 250, I think you're gonna be fine all the time. Cause all that changed was there was just an arbitrary line at 100 and they just moved the arbitrary line to 250. With the liquid code. So, like any theme that was obviously using liquid code in the first place to get that first 100, they're now just going to be able to get the 250. I tried it on four different themes. I don't even remember which ones worked or which ones didn't, but you gotta check it on yours again if you're going over 250. Um, some of them worked fine and it was just like it's fine. You could just pick the subsequent ones and it spits it out and you could buy that, you could buy variant number 1000, no problem. Uh others, it would do a thing where if you kind of counted down to You know, oh w first we went through all the small blacks, now all the small whites, now all the small, you know, blues of whatever. And then so if you just count all those numbers, when you got to 251 that one was unavailable. And it it was there. Like there would be the swatches and the selectors for it. And you could pick, I want to buy this one, but that one's 251. And so it ends up as showing as unavailable in the store. And all the subsequent ones are unavailable. So it's like a pure counting thing. Again, over 250.
Kurt Elster
So Shopify, the admin, you know, the platform says, hey, you could do up to 2048. There's a soft limit at 250. And we're beyond like up to two, previous it was 100, now it we go up to 250 variants or it's skews. How many skews could you put on a product? And if we can hit two fifty, great. They should all support that.
Paul Reda
They I I think they will. Okay. I would I'm
Kurt Elster
Because that like that immediately covers ninety-nine percent of my use cases. Yeah. But then beyond that, if I'm on, you know, a a latest and greatest theme. And I'm not going crazy with apps on my product detail page. I could probably go to 2,000 variants, 2048.
Paul Reda
It it it's not, it's a function of how it is written. how the theme variant selection code is written and because it you need to use the shop the storefront API to get that subsequent those subsequent variants. And so if your theme came out three years ago before the storefront API existed, it ain't gonna work.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Paul Reda
And if your s even if your theme came out Two months ago, but they don't use the storefront API to pull all the variants, they just use like a a you know the standard sort of liquid system, it's also not gonna work. Okay. So you need to see that. So this is the thing to just try it and see what happens. Try yeah, you gotta try it and see what happens over 250. I have not figured out how to use the storefront API because I mean we do stuff where we iterate through all the variants. Like I have a whole thing where When you change variants, Shopify kind of pulls the variant data that you can that there's like a standard payload of variant data that comes along from Shopify when the user changes it. Variant meta fields are not included in that payload. Okay. So when we're doing stuff with variant meta fields where it's like, oh, the on this variant, the ship on this variant, the ship time is two weeks, but on this variant, the ship time is one week. So like we want to change that when they change the variant. Well, bad news, that doesn't come along with the payload. So I gotta write my own. I've got a whole snippet that I use all the time that essentially writes my own little problem specific JSON in the template, and then I pull from that JSON and swap the stuff and change stuff as needed. That solution will not work. with the new system if it's over 250. So like I gotta figure that out.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, well I think yeah the moment you get it over 250 This becomes a much bigger ball of yarn to solve and so they move to a a different system essentially handles this. Yeah. That can move faster, but then You know, we're we're going from liquid to JavaScript to do this.
Paul Reda
Yeah, to like two GraphQL APIs and all this other stuff that it's like, well if you're pulling o if you have over 250 variants, you're big and you're a big enough boy to be able to handle the rest of this stuff.
Kurt Elster
Now if you're editing your theme code, perhaps you do that in the theme editor and you click edit theme, there has been a new, they quietly pushed out a new theme code editor And it's VS Code. Yeah, for people who are not developers, the editor that that theme editor uses, that's not Shopify's. That is a an existing standard that many of us have seen and grown to love. So what uh what's your opinion of it?
Paul Reda
Uh it's change and I don't like that.
Kurt Elster
Mm-hmm.
Paul Reda
Uh I like that there is integrated theme search now. That is nice. It's like you gotta find this stupid snippet that's doing this thing. It's like, okay. So instead of being like, okay, product template, oh look, that has two sections in it. It's in this section. Oh, this section has a snippet in it. Okay, it's in this snippet. Okay, this snippet's in another snippet. Gotta go in this. It's just like, oh my God. So at least I could search now. Have you noticed you can't copy and paste in the VS code?
Kurt Elster
I have not had that experience. I swear you have to be able to copy and paste.
Paul Reda
You cannot copy from inside the VS window if it's like, oh look, I want to copy this line up here. And paste it 10 lines below, like within the same thing. You can't do that. Right-click, uh pull up a context menu by right-clicking. Paste is not on it.
Kurt Elster
Weird. I gotta try that. Yeah, so that like annoys me. The one it was funny somebody got tripped up. We had somebody they're like, hey, just want to upload a file for it was an old theme. They had a color swatch. They said I can't find the upload option. It was because VS Code made it too easy. There was no upload. You just drag a drop it, it just works. But I also, I stared at it and was like, oh, there's no upload option. And I had to Google it. So But I do I know I it took a little getting used to because it's change, but I prefer it and I'm just I'm happy to have uh theme search built into it. One might think, you know, the uh I've seen some complaints from it online. Again, I think it's just like, hey, this is different. I gotta relearn this. Mostly from merchants, because they'll have not exper probably haven't experienced this thing before, VS Code. What if this change to this is a way to say, hey, here be dragons. You know, don't don't go messing with the code. If you don't know what you're doing, you're just gonna make your life difficult.
Speaker 3
I agree with that. I did a I did a modification for one of our clients where they wanted a five-step uh like rewards thing in their cart.
Kurt Elster
Like a tiered progress bar.
Speaker 3
Like a tiered progress bar that was like, all right, and at $30 they get this gift and at $40 they get this gift and at $50 they get free shipping and this gift and then they get, you know, so this whole thing. And so, okay, if it's two steps, all right, I can write that and then have like theme settings for it, and they can change the theme settings. Okay, well now it's five steps.
Paul Reda
And like each step has its own rewards and wording and all this other stuff. So I'm just like, oh, this is just in the template now, dude. Like I'm not writing you all the tools for this. It's like, well, what if I didn't fill out step three? Will it still work? If I like, we get we're getting rid of step three, but you're gonna keep four and five in there. Like, no, I'm not I'm not doing all this for you. So, you know, when I sent it over to them, I was like, yeah, bad news. You want this like five-step complex thing. Uh if you want to change this or edit it in the future, you need to contact me or you can go into this file right here and change it yourself. I mean it's very obvious what you need to change, but don't do it if you don't know what you're doing.
Kurt Elster
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Speaker 3
What would you usually do? Well, usually then I'd like, well, a lot some themes would support it out of the box if like a product was tagged. Other themes would not, in which case I would have to go and be like, all right, for like the collection listing, like if the products are tagged hidden, if product it tags contains hidden.
Paul Reda
You know, skip the skip it and then like in the cart, like for the search, like in the search loop, anywhere, oh, there's search results if the product tag contains hidden. Skip it. Then in like the um predictive search results, I'd have to go into that and like screw with that. You know, if it's in the c in the cart items.
Kurt Elster
If we didn't want it to show up at Google, I would then add a liquid statement to be like robots, uh a meta tag called robots that speaks to search engine, be like robots, no index, comma, do follow. Yeah. Meaning Hey, you can index the site starting from here, but you can't include this one page even though you found it. And that's actually that's all built into it now. Like the Yeah, high switching to unlisted uh hides from search collection channels accessible via the direct URL, which is what we want. Real Bill and their description of the examples were exactly the use case we would use it for. Yeah. Like free gift add-ons and stuff.
Paul Reda
I'm wondering how they implement that and I'm get I'm wondering what level of theme support is gonna be needed because for a lot of those it's like There's a flag on a product. A product has a state, and the state of that product is available. And if it's is it available? Yes, no. So a product that has zero inventory and stops selling when inventory is zero, obviously not available. If a product inventory is zero but continues selling when inventory is sold out, that product is available. You know, if a product I suspect this stuff happens in the admin.
Kurt Elster
And the theme can see the status, but it otherwise appears like an active product.
Paul Reda
But what I'm say but what I'm saying is yeah, it it it okay, this should show up in the collection listing. And the collection listings are like, you know, if if it's a draft product, it's obviously not available. So all these pro I assume these products are not going to be listed as available. So if they're not listed as available, how can they go through checkout?
Kurt Elster
And end up in the cart. Well, checkouts handled by Shopify, not the theme.
Paul Reda
Shopify so they could like look at that state maybe.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I think the theme doesn't have to do anything different because they're the theme is just asking the shop Shopify admin. to return products on a query. And so the I think the Shopify admin is what skips over this product. So if it's like, hey, I need the collection loop, it knows to skip over the unlisted. Hey, I need to return these search results. It just doesn't it's not going to include that unlisted product. But if it's like, hey, I gotta render this template, I have to add this to cart, then it just sees it as an active product. All right. Well, I think yeah, my guess, my educated guess is the workaround occurs in the admin, not actually in the Shopify theme.
Speaker 3
Well, I and I just wonder if it's like if it's via APIs and stuff, can then We talked about it a couple weeks ago. There's the credit card bots that try to find the two dollar products on your store and add them to cart.
Kurt Elster
They would this would slow.
Speaker 3
Does this stop them?
Kurt Elster
Because it says it takes it out of the site map and it adds no index.
Speaker 3
Okay.
Kurt Elster
So in theory, a product mark unlisted, even though it's you if I give you the link, you could just go buy it. It should not be indexed by any search engine, which and it's gonna make it a lot tougher to discover it if I can't just get it out of the sitemap. And so if that's the case, I think you probably stop the majority of these bots, because it'd be a ton more effort for them to find it. Like they'd have to go to the site and then manually crawl it. Just a lot of work.
Paul Reda
So going back to my variant limit, all right, we gotta use the storefront API. Well that now the storefront in order to do that
Speaker 3
The storefront API doesn't require a login anymore because, you know, you can't do this whole thing where it's like, well, everyone that wants to like access these extra variants, they need to make an account to like mess with this store and all this other stuff. Like there's just loginless storefront API access now.
Paul Reda
Is there a way for malicious actors to get loginless storefront API access so they could then look at The full store catalog? Probably not. I mean, given I don't know enough about that.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. I'm thinking that they've got this under control.
Paul Reda
I'm just making stuff up.
Kurt Elster
So the other one that's you know minor but this is one of the ones where you go, oh I'm surprised they didn't already have this. If you've got the B2B Offering, which is part of Shopify Plus, and a big part of why people go to Shopify Plus, is this dedicated B2B options and wholesale? uh for wholesale, you can accept ACH payments. Previously, you know what I'd do? I would just make a manual payment gateway called ACH, and then you'd have to like it would the order would just pop up as unpaid. And then you'd like someone would have to go track down and make sure the payment came through. That was my workaround. Now we have official ACH payment gateway, um, but it's for specifically for B2B. But if you think about, you know, like wholesale, oftentimes that stuff's on terms, they're placing the order, but they're not necessarily paying for it at that same time. So like that sounds a little goofy, but With B2B in wholesale, that's just, you know, par for the course. You know, only limitation though, it's US only. I mean it's very much a US shop fight, North American centric. We so are we. You would expect some of these things to kind of disperse over time.
Speaker 3
I thought wasn't I remember what I remember when they added like all the various um shop pay payment gateways and stuff at Unite one year, they talked about how Different countries just kind of have different payment methods.
Kurt Elster
It's true.
Paul Reda
Like America's America's like, well, you buy it with a credit card. That's how you buy things online. And I think it was in Germany that they were like, oh no, everyone uses ACH in German. Yeah, I would get, even though we see it. I wonder if like German Shopify's had ACH this whole time.
Kurt Elster
Probably.
Paul Reda
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. No, they're very good about localizing payments to like whatever that you know, the country's preference is. So for sure Even though I'm excited, you know, the US B2B customers on Plus get ACH payment as a method. I'm sure there's other countries that are like, yeah, we had that. Uh okay. So we got uh we we have our retainer clients and I thought it'd be for uh one of them, tactical baby gear. I said, man, let me just export the products from your top your top your top sellers and analyze them. And so I exported them and I'm uh my whole intent of course is like run it through AI. I'm gonna put it through Claude and be like, all right, I wanna know my unique selling propositions, uncover pain points we don't know about, et cetera, et cetera. But before I even got that far, I'm just looking at the spreadsheet. And in there it shows you the source. And the source was always one of two things. Follow-up email was 70% of it.
Speaker 3
The source of the review. Yes. Where they got the review from.
Kurt Elster
Yes. All right. So person makes a purchase. 14 days later is the standard. They get an email. Hey, write a review. 99% of people ignore that email. Then one or a week, 10 days, two weeks after that, they get a follow-up email. That's the one that generates the reviews.
Speaker 3
But I feel like maybe if you if you got rid of the first one though, maybe would the second one get ignored 99% of the time?
Kurt Elster
You know, and I only did this for this this one store. Yeah. And so the question is like, well, is this the store or is this where you're simply asking for the reviews too early? I think that I this is a thing Optimizing for getting reviews is a thing I started thinking about in the last several months. And so I'll like I'll look at stores. And I think everybody sends their reviews too early. I do. I think it takes time. Like it shows up and you're like, yeah, I got it, but like I haven't opened it. I'm busy.
Speaker 3
I don't know. For me, two weeks, it's like you're still in the honeymoon stage. Like they got it. They're still excited.
Kurt Elster
Well that's yeah, that's what we're going for. I think it's it's so dependent on the product. Like you send me a t-shirt, I get it three days later, I wear it, I'm like, it fits, it's comfortable, I'm happy, done. But for a product it's like I gotta learn it, I gotta play with it, you know, I think or it's like a gift product, it's like oh they haven't even opened it yet. I think there's a lot of oper opportunity to gather more social proof for stores just by messing with the timing on these emails. And I think for most stores, it's like, hey, whatever you got now, add a week to it and see what happens. The other thing that was wild to me, the number two source, shop. The shop app. Yeah. The shop app by default, I believe, it's gotta be based on the number of stores I've seen where this occurs. It asks for product reviews and it gets them. Like whatever it's doing, maybe it's because it's push notifications, I don't know, but it is successful at gathering reviews. And then many of these review apps now support syndicating those reviews from shop back into the store automatically. And so that like Check to make sure you have that turned on. I understand.
Speaker 3
Yeah, that makes sense now. It's not like the shop app has judge me installed on it. No. So the reviews that people do of you on the shop app are a completely separate set of reviews. Yep. And so those needs to get ingested into your store somehow.
Kurt Elster
Yes. That feature, you know, looking at review apps, you know, now that I noticed this and just like turning this on for a whole bunch of stores, it seems like a majority of review apps just already have this feature. Yeah, in there and often it's toggle box.
Paul Reda
I could see Shopify making that a requirement to be in the app store for like a reviews app.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, for a reviews app, yeah. It's like, hey, you gotta We had a store, the guy's like, Oh, I want to do reviews. I said, Great. I you would love it. You need reviews. You know, the only thing that sucks is you're due, so you don't have them. He'd been on shop the whole time. Who didn't even know it it was gathering reviews. The man was so thrilled. I was like, hey, you know, we put up the I put up the reviews that's on the site and good news, you already have some. He had no idea. I was just like so he was ecstatic. Here's a word from our sponsors at Zippify. Black Friday's coming, and so's the squeeze. Every year, the same thing. Ad cost balloon, customers want 40% off everything, and your margins get crushed. But there's a fix. Boost your average order value before the chaos hits. One click upsell does exactly that, increasing AOV by up to 30%, with AI-powered upsells across your entire customer journey. Launch upsells for every product in one click. Customers see personalized offers and spend more automatically. Unlike other apps, you only pay for results, not views, so you keep more profit. Takes under two minutes to set up and starts working immediately. Don't let this traffic season slip by without maximizing every sale. Go to zipify. com slash Kurt for your 30-day free trial. That's zipify. com slash K-U-R T. Turn this into your most profitable Black Friday yet.
Paul Reda
That shop app is crazy, man. Like it has reached cultural penetration in a way. Because in the last week, I've had two independent people, just like normal people I'm talking to.
Speaker 3
Not e-commerce. Normies in my day-to-day life. Two consumers. Yeah, two consumers. Not like me though. I don't buy stuff. Yeah. Uh In my day-to-day life, who c who like knew what I did?
Paul Reda
And we were talking and then they were like, is that like is Shopify? Is that like that Shop app too? Or that's different, right? That's not Shopify. And I'm like, no, the Shop app is that's Shopify. That's a fire hose of all Shopify stores stores catalogs. And they're like, oh, really? Is that what that is? Because like when you think about Shopify, Shopify is. It's kind of B2B. It's B to potential B. You want to be a B, and so you start a Shopify store.
Kurt Elster
It's called a B.
Paul Reda
You're a B. And then you start a Shopify store, and they are a B, and then you're now a B. And these people that are Cs, they that is Shopify to them is the sh is the Shop app, which they have no idea is Shopify.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, well clearly I think you know that shop as branding is consumer facing. Shopify is business entrepreneur facing.
Paul Reda
You can't call it an app shop. Get out of here.
Kurt Elster
They you know they did it and it's working. For as many times as we've made fun of them.
Paul Reda
How dare you?
Kurt Elster
Now, you know, clearly it it's working out for them.
Paul Reda
But yeah, they're just random people are like, is that Shop? That's not Shopify, is it? 'Cause that's this is the shop app. This is its own special thing. It's an app for shopping. I was like, that is Shopify, yes.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, that's theirs. Yeah, no, actually that Shop app's pretty useful, you know, because it does it tracks orders, but it'll connect your Gmail and it'll pull deliveries beyond just what you're getting through Shopify stores. I like it.
Paul Reda
I love that your use case for it being useful is for shipping tracking. Yes, that's the problem that desperately needs to be solved. Not people wanting to buy things. No, no, who cares? I just gotta ship track all my shipments.
Kurt Elster
Okay, yes. I'm really revealing the level of perfectionism I live by. Yes, that's what I'm interested in. I like the tracking. That's my favorite part. Well, okay, so with ShoPApp in you know, that's the other missed opportunity, is you really could fill that thing out and make it look nice and it's the shop that sales channel is already in your Shopify ship. I mean it's free money. Yeah.
Paul Reda
You just turn it on and Shopify Just as your catalog and they put it in the city.
Kurt Elster
It's gotta be on by default.
Paul Reda
And people buy stuff off the app. Like, just would do you want free money? Okay. I do.
Kurt Elster
I do want free money. No, I like that app. No, increasingly, Shopify does such a good job of leveraging the network effects of having all these stores. And like there's more features coming down the pipe. that are gonna do more of this, like being able to advertise in your collections for other stores, etc. You know, like Shopify becoming its own ad platform. We're seeing this a little bit. Why am I doing that? Because you want to get traffic to your store from them as well. And like in theory, you're gonna get paid out for this clip. Get the hell out of here. I there's third party ones that'll put ads on the thank you page. You are they already purchased from you. So then run that ad and then they're running ads for you. It's a win-win. I don't know that we have any client stores that do it yet, or if they've like they've tried it you know for a little while and then you know they want to try some other thank you page widget. But I'm definitely curious, you know, about this this larger leveraging of uh the the network of stores.
Paul Reda
No comment.
Kurt Elster
Well like, you know That ease ease of login and ease of payment. If I'm do like work if I'm purchased from one store with shop, now I could just easily do it with all other stores. And then like these stories could drop ship from each other with collective, which I think is the coolest thing.
Paul Reda
Did they do that uh did they ever end up implementing that like uh look-alike audience? advertising thing.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, Shopify audiences.
Paul Reda
Yeah, there you go.
Kurt Elster
You got Shopify audiences. There's other examples too. And I s I think there's one um where like they're trying to leverage the collective info to get better at fraud filtering. I believe that's happening. Now don't quote me on it.
Speaker 3
Well if you're buying a bunch of $1 products at one store, you they will ban you from all the other stores as well, hopefully.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, yes. Yeah, it's like this guy only does one dollar purchases. Just get out of here, scumbags. Yeah, those um those fraud purchases. Fortunately, you know that Shopify's got that uh uh fraud protection app. That's very useful for automating it where you just block the stuff. Like once you've identified someone as a fraudster, which Shopify Flow will do it. Then you turn around and add them is um you create a fraud rule and then they don't even complete the checkout. Right. Then like we we don't have to deal with the hassle of cancel the order, refund, restock. All right, there's a design pattern. Before we go into you're about to go into Black Friday, I will there's a design pattern I noticed that gets consistent results. It's like a lot of these sites, Home Hero, and then below that, you put either a featured collection or featured promos
Speaker 3
is it it'll be like collections. It'll be like three collections, the three main collections that we'll have on the store.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Speaker 3
Like shirts, hats, backpacks. Done.
Kurt Elster
Yes. Yeah. If I think of my homepage, I want to think about that as like it's as a catalog. And I've got what do I feature as first second thing? Almost always it's hero image is the first thing. Which I don't think you necessarily need, but for the holidays, it's good for messaging. Just don't make it too tall.
Paul Reda
Well, yeah, it's good for messaging to be like Christmas sale, everything 30% off, you know.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. And then after that I think you want to have a featured collection of like here are the things to click on which are related to the hero, you know, that you should click on. But in all these heat maps I've been looking at, the theme will often have an option where it's like under the title, include a view all link. And the view all link just goes to whatever that featured collection is. In the heat map, that stupid view-all link ends up being the most clicked on thing on the site, or at least on the homepage. And so my optimization has been, a one, include it, and two, restyle it as a button instead of a text link. They're just more likely to click on it. I just gotta get them off this homepage to a product or collection.
Speaker 3
Hmm. I wonder if there's something that like generally those collections maybe will have We'll show 12 products. What if we showed more?
Kurt Elster
The well, and then do you show it stacked or you do it in a ribbon? I hate the ribbon as a carousel.
Speaker 3
No, no, stacked. Hate the ribbon. I think it really that is the ribbon, because it's like they move so slow.
Paul Reda
Sometimes you gotta hold it. Oh, don't you work it? Scrolljacking. And when you click it, sometimes it moves one and sometimes it moves like three. Yep. Instead of dealing with something that I don't know what the hell this Dumb buttons gonna do, I'm just gonna click on view all and get the hell out of here.
Kurt Elster
Well, I think the answer is it it should work the way Amazon does. And they do They do the ribbons instead of stacking them. The only time they stack is if you're in like a surger kit. What do they know? What could Amazon possibly know about each other? The fools. I sell pet supplies, I must know better.
Speaker 3
Well, what if you just got rid of the hero image? My dream.
Kurt Elster
I love getting rid of the hero image. And then like when we split test it, it either makes no difference or it doesn't do as well.
Speaker 3
Oh, that's right. We did do a split test of it. No, that was a big thing.
Kurt Elster
It's because they expect the stupid hero image to be there. I know. Even if it's like we're just scrolling past this.
Paul Reda
Yeah, it's the consumer's fault.
Kurt Elster
Ah, the consumers. They're like locusts.
Paul Reda
They're dumb. The the C's. Stupid C's.
Kurt Elster
You would never read a hero image.
Paul Reda
You are a B. Of course not.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I'm a B. I'm not a C. This guy's a real A. Of these theme updates My favorite unlisted status because free gift with purchase, my favorite, my favorite promo And this is what this is for. Like free gifts with purchase product.
Paul Reda
So people have unlisted status.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Yeah. So when they brought that out, I was thrilled to see it. But the you know, the thing I should be most excited about is having that variant limit like solidly increased, even if it's just consistently two fifty. That's great, right? Two and a half times what I had at a hundred. Um but you know the hundred variant limit has been a very famous limitation of Shopify, supposedly. uh based uh what you know CEO Toby's described as a poor early code choice on his part. And so they they're thrilled to have worked around it for everybody now. But yeah, no, I I'm glad it's there. It's exciting. I'm just it's always been that way. The whole time I've used Shopify. I'm so used to working around it. In my head Yeah, products can't a product could not conceivably have more than a hundred SKUs. Absurd, right? That so that's why I'm going with the unlisted status as my favorite update here. Any preferences?
Paul Reda
Nah, I'm fine.
Kurt Elster
Fine. Really? Not even that the theme editor to get you cited. Fight no more fighting with janky search extensions.
Speaker 3
The search the search is good. Yeah. That's it. But then the other part where you're kind of like, okay, can I like look at it?
Paul Reda
And sometimes it closes, sometimes you open one file and then you click on a second file you would also like to have open and it closes the first one. And then when it opens the second one, it's like thanks, I kinda wanted that one too. But it only that's helping you focus.
Kurt Elster
That only happens sometimes. The I think it's user error. Maybe you're clicking wrong. Mm-hmm. We'll have to research those.
Paul Reda
I'm a B. How dare you?
Kurt Elster
Yes, very important B. And on that note, we'll end it there. If you enjoyed the show, you know, leave a review or join our Facebook group, unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. Happy to have you, uh, Mr. Rita. Any closing thoughts? How many times are you gonna ask me? I don't know. I'm waiting for you to do something funny. No. Do a little dance for me? Dance monkey. Oh no. No. All right, we'll end it there. See you guys. 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. 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.