The Unofficial Shopify Podcast: Entrepreneur Tales

Shopify vs. Shopify Plus [Listener Mailbag]

Episode Summary

Do I need Shopify Plus? Find out if you need to upgrade

Episode Notes

In today's episode we open with ecommerce news, Shopify feature updates, and some lingering questions from Klaviyo:BOS.

This episode is also available as a video interview on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/S-9CqspYpDM

Your questions, answered:

Plus Kurt survives the #onechipchallenge.

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Episode Transcription

Paul: This is how pros do it.

Kurt: Yeah, we're professionals.

Paul: This is how they used to do it on DuMont Network in the '50s.

Kurt: I don't know what that means, but it sounds good. I wanted to share briefly a thing. My eight year old told me that once it was in my brain, I couldn't get it out. Because this child has proven over and over, he's a poet.

Paul: I love this story by the way.

Kurt: It was just me and him. He was, "Kurt, you know what I hate?" I said, "What Tanner?" And he said, "When teenagers flex with their AirPods." And then he just stared at me waiting for the reaction.

Kurt: He knew he'd said something good. And I said, "Do you even know what that means?" And which part that's for him it's a real gamble, just to repeat great stuff he's heard. Because he said something not awful, but inappropriate things where we're like, "Hey, don't repeat that." That he heard on YouTube.

Kurt: And so this one was a gamble and he never said it again, because I didn't follow up on it. I really should be like, "I got to go back and tell him." Be like, "Hey, remember the time you said that? That was pretty funny and totally clean and tame." And now every time I see AirPods I think, "I hate when teenagers flux with their Airpods."

Paul: But you asked him if he knew what that meant and he literally like, "Do you know what any of that means?" And he was just like, "No." I just turned [inaudible 00:01:19] you made him admit it.

Kurt: Yeah, then I was like, "Just don't." Well, it's always the lesson is, "Hey, that one was fine. But if you don't know what it means, don't just go around saying it. You're going to get yourself in trouble."

Paul: That's how you sound smart though. You got to say it whether you don't know what it means.

Kurt: He is smart though, but he's eight. There's limited knowledge there. My favorite Tannerism of all time being, I think he was six, he might've been five, five or six. And for whatever reason, him and his brother were terrified not of injuries, but of subsequently applying a Band-Aid. And I guess it was ripping Band-Aids off sucks and it means you got an injury.

Kurt: He was wailing about having to put a Band-Aid on for a blister. He gets the Band-Aid on and later that day he goes, "Mom, my life's just so different with my Band-Aid on." And that's another thing, just been rattling around in my head for two years now. A couple of weeks ago, I did the one chip challenge. Are you familiar?

Paul: Well, I'm familiar because you won't shut up about it.

Kurt: Yes, I'm very proud. And my eight year old who also has tremendous tolerance for spice. I've been building them up for several years now. He did a little bit of the one challenge as well. The one chip challenge is this and this relates to e-commerce in that I bought it online and it is brilliant viral marketing.

Paul: All these guys are geniuses, because you bought a single extremely spicy potato chip. How much did you pay for a single potato chip?

Kurt: It's a tortilla chip.

Paul: A single tortilla chip, I'm sorry.

Kurt: $7.

Paul: $7, but you also have to pay for shipping. How much did the shipping cost?

Kurt: I bought three chips and I believe all three shipped were 26 or $27.

Paul: All right. You paid $9 for a single tortilla chip, because it was extremely spicy?

Kurt: It's in a commemorative cardboard box.

Paul: I want to know what their margins are, because I love these men.

Kurt: This is how they launched the brand Paqui chips, which sells a tortilla chips that are notably extremely hot. They sell a ghost pepper chip that I love. If I eat a whole bag, it will reduce me to tears. Two years ago I saw on the today show and a whole bunch of local news stations, they must've just sent these things out.

Kurt: On-air personalities doing the one chip challenge. In which you simply have to eat a single tortilla chip that has been certified by the Guinness book of world records as the world's hottest tortilla chips at one and a half a million Scoville units. And then, see how long you can go without drinking milk or ice cream and just sit with the agony.

Kurt: And then, you then you turn around and you upload a video of this nonsense to the internet, hashtag one chip challenge.

Paul: What you're saying is you paid these guys $9 for one chip and then you did all their advertising for them.

Kurt: Yes and in between they waged asymmetrical warfare against my tongue.

Paul: I love them so much.

Kurt: It's brilliant. They sold out. They can't keep in stock.

Paul: Just make the chips guys, I'll get the money.

Kurt: Yeah, when I found out about it two years ago, they were sold out. And I think they might've done it the year before that on a smaller scale. But I didn't hear about it then. I got on their newsletter. I tweeted at them, I said, "When's this come back out?" They said, "Get on our newsletter." Sure, if I get on the newsletter, it's a month later they say, "One chip challenge is back in stock." Within a week, completely sold out. Yeah.

Paul: I love them. I want that.

Kurt: Yeah, it really is brilliant marketing. Because you're involving your customer in the marketing. Ultimately, they're doing the marketing for you, but you're leveraging scarcity and social proof and all this stuff at once.

Paul: Who wants extreme? It's a thing in the world you cannot get anywhere else.

Kurt: Yes.

Paul: And it is the best in its market segment. The market segment being horrific food items.

Kurt: Yeah, and it's accessible to anybody. Because okay, yeah, I paid $7 for a chip, but the thing shipped is 10 bucks. Well, a majority of people could afford a $10 item to as cool on the gram.

Paul: As a goof. Look cool on the gram.

Kurt: And just tears streaming down my face was brutal.

Paul: All right. Let's get onto actual podcast content.

Kurt: All right. A couple e-commerce and news items. Simon Property Group, largest mall owner in America.

Paul: They don't own our mall.

Kurt: They don't. We're Westfield.

Paul: Well, Westfield, they own. Westfield ball, which is my top Chicago area mall.

Kurt: Which you may have seen in the news when someone drove an SUV through it.

Paul: Yeah, I know. It was awesome.

Kurt: Yeah, it was pretty crazy.

Paul: You can say it was awesome because no one got hurt. If someone got hurt it would have been horrible.

Kurt: Yes, unless someone got.

Paul: He drove it through the Sears, which is good that he drove it through the Sears. Reduced any sort of possibility of injury, if you drive through Sears, no one in there.

Kurt: Ooh, dig on Sears.

Paul: And then, he just kind of drove through the mall for a while, until he crashed the car.

Kurt: Yeah, the Twitter video from Twitter user nipsfalloff. I'm not kidding. At least saw that going around and we're like, "Oh man, I wonder how local news will credit this man." And they just credited by like, Twitter user and his first name. They did not say, "Twitter user nipsfalloff. Anyway, Simon Property Group owns that mall and that was entirely a tangent.

Kurt: 9.4% of mall units were emptying Q3 that ties the previous record from 2011, so 10% almost one in 10 mall units are empty right now. And Simon sees the writing on the wall. They're hedging their bets, so they invested $280 million for a stake in flash sale site Rue Gilt Group. I remember years ago when fall field sites were huge, seeing Gilt. But I haven't paid attention to it recently.

Paul: Oh, yeah. They had like an insane valuation I thought. Were they the ones that did the [inaudible 00:07:08] some bullshit three years ago, where they were like, "They're worth $5 billion." Billion dollars? Yeah, I don't think they are.

Kurt: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:07:18]. These valuations are getting a little out of control. I think that's their bubbles popping with what we're seeing with WeWork and Uber.

Paul: Yeah, because WeWork was worth $40 billion two months ago and is now possibly bankrupt.

Kurt: Anyway hedging their bet, they're trying to get into e-commerce. Even the mall owners themselves are getting into e-commerce and they are pushing shoppremiumoutlets.com, which is an extension of their successful outlet stores, their premium outlets. It's the online version of that.

Kurt: And they claim they've got an email list of 35 million people and they're going to market to them with 300,000 products from 2000 brands. That's kind of cool, [inaudible 00:08:00] to see this very traditional company making this very expensive investment into e-commerce.

Paul: Yeah, I just wonder how they're going to. I mean, I could see them doing the... If they've got a flash sale site, there just becomes like a guilt zone in the mall. That just is like a pop-up shop, like a rotating pop-up shop like we have. There's an area in our mall called The Cube.

Kurt: The Cube.

Paul: And it's technically being rented by Amazon. But Amazon swaps out what is in The Cube, every single month.

Kurt: The theme.

Paul: Because it was a Star Wars Cube about four months ago. It was a Batman Cube last month. I don't know if it's still the Batman Cube.

Kurt: I'm sure they'll switch it. There was the Autobot Cube.

Paul: There was the Autobot Cube.

Kurt: Oh, the Barbie Cube.

Paul: There was a Barbie, yeah.

Kurt: A barber Cube.

Paul: A barber Cube every month, it's something different. But yeah, there's a lot of empty units in our mall. That's one of our favorite things to do, is when we walk around and a new store opens, we just kind of look and we're like, "Oh no, they're dead. That's not gonna work."

Kurt: Yeah, we morbidly take bets on how long it will last.

Paul: Yeah, there was a chocolate dessert shop that opened directly next door to our office and it was weird. And then, it was, sold desserts, but there really wasn't any seating. Also who's eating dessert in a mall, that's not a classic Frozen Yogurt.

Kurt: [inaudible 00:09:14]Cacao 70, which in Canada is a very big chain, but here it's not.

Paul: Yeah, Cacao 70. It's a chain. There's a lot in Canada and it's successful.

Kurt: I'm always looking for them, but [crosstalk 00:09:19].

Paul: But yeah, just walking by and seeing what they were offering and how they had it set up. You're like, "Oh, no, they're dead." They lasted way longer than I thought they would though.

Kurt: I think what we're seeing is a convergence where these traditional brick and mortar is evolving and so is e-commerce as well to include these physical experiences like popup stores and in like in store retail experiences, where you go see the product, but then order it, just to have it sent to you. That's how the Amazon cube works.

Kurt: I heard Lord & Taylor is doing that with popup shops. And even Google's getting in on the action, they relaunched the Google Shopping platform at the end of September and it does two cool things. You can upload a picture of what you're trying to buy and then using Google Lens technology it will suggest similar items to purchase.

Kurt: You can be like, "I like these shoes or I like this dress." Give it the photo and it comes back with, "Okay, here's stuff like that, what you want to buy?" And then, you could go shop in person and then screw the retailer by using Google Shopping to find a similar, a knock off, essentially online.

Kurt: It also, which is called and I feel like a shot across about Amazon, you can set automated price alerts on items when they go on sale. And then, it'll even say like, "Okay, here's your local store that has it in stocks, so you can go pick it up today." That's that e-commerce brick and mortar convergence again.

Paul: And I mean getting an automated price alert when something goes on sale is just going to... That's so extremely powerful that you're just going to get so many sales off of that, it's crazy. Common thing here is how much I play computer games. And on Steam, if you have something in your wishlist, if it goes on sale, you get an email from Steam immediately. That's like, "This game is on sale right now. Do you want to buy it?"

Kurt: Do you?

Paul: And I also have the Steam app on my phone and my app pops up a notification where it's an item on your Steam wishlist is on sale. And it's clearly the same trigger because it arrives the exact same second to email does too. But yes, twice in the last 24 hours an item on my scene wishlist has gone on sale and I have immediately bought it.

Kurt: I don't know what the details are on this thing, but if you're not on Google Shopping missed opportunity, I would jump on that. Some housekeeping items, so we talked in the previous episode about my Klaviyo Boston experience and how they're adding SMS. And a lot of excitement around that and a lot of questions as well.

Kurt: And I think I addressed it then on the show, but people have asked several times, "When is it available?" They said, "For flows, so the automated version that will be available in October this month." It should be available. And campaigns that comes later. And I don't know what the exact date was.

Kurt: The other question, people are with SMS not just Klaviyo, all implementations of SMS. They're nervous about it. I don't want to annoy my customers. I hope they can unsubscribe. Yes, of course they can. I didn't explicitly state it. I didn't think I had to. If you reply, "Stop." The customer is opted out, period, done. I mean, that's just the way SMS short codes work.

Paul: I'm very intrigued by the SMS thing. Because on one hand, I personally feel it would annoy the hell out of me. But on the other hand-

Kurt: I don't know that you would opt into it though.

Paul: That's true, I guess. And to me that's one of the stumbling blocks, is that it requires a very explicit opt-in, that I don't think people are used to doing yet. People will understand giving your email, but giving your phone number for some reason feels more personal to me. It's, I feel like it would annoy me. I don't think I would opt-in, but then everyone who has implemented it that we know of so far, it just prints cash.

Kurt: Yeah, so it's tremendous.

Paul: It's hard for me to marry those two thoughts, where I'm just like, "I don't like this. This is gross." And then also, "Oh, no. But everyone else loves it, it prints cash."

Kurt: And when we say, "Implemented so far." We're referring to SMS campaigns, agnostic of app or service providers. Just you are sending some kind of promotional [crosstalk 00:13:16].

Paul: Yes, I'm talking about SMS campaigns in general.

Kurt: But yeah, we're like consistently crazy Roaz numbers where you're getting 99% open rates and 20X ROI on the spend. Because the catch with SMS is your bizarrely and this is the telecom industry doing this. You're paying per text you send?

Paul: Yeah, which is BS.

Kurt: Do you know what the supposedly most requested Shopify feature is at all times?

Paul: Oh, I know. It's order editing.

Kurt: And order editing according to Shopify apps team, will start rolling out to merchants at the end of this month, October 28th. If you have been tearing your hair out every time a customer goes, "Hey, I placed an order and it's wrong, can you fix that?" Then you have to go, "No."

Paul: It says it's small, but I wanted an extra large.

Kurt: Yeah and someone asked me, "What's the use case for ordering?" That's the use case. Person placed an order and then goes, "Oh, shoot. I forgot to add this. Oh, shoot, I forgot. I put in the wrong size. Oh, could you help?" Yes, the answer now will be, "Yes, I can. Let me fix that for you."

Kurt: Once order editing is live in the store. And for the first time saw another new Shopify feature announced that unite, is in beta right now. I saw it in a client store, shipping profiles, so I feel like this solves a lot of painful edge case issues for people.

Kurt: Let's say you've got a store, you sell a whole bunch of regular items and you've got one giant item or you've got one item that can't go second day air that kind of thing. Up until now, your only option was figure out convoluted shipping rules to add, figure out some Shopify if you're on Shopify Plus to fix it.

Kurt: The new solution is shipping profiles, it's product based shipping rules. You can go like, "Here are my general shipping rules and then here are the rules for this one edge case product." If that is a concern for you, congrats it's in beta. I believe if you ask, request it from support, they could turn it on and your store.

Kurt: I don't know if that's official, somebody told me that. Not sure if it's true or not. I may have just hosed myself. Anna Moins says... Oh, this is a Paul question. I want to be able to have GeoIP decide what currency to display on the products and in checkout. I've seen a few that say they do this. But it either doesn't work at checkout or you have to not use native checkout, which is another question.

Kurt: What are the pros and cons if you switch, if you do switch from native checkout? There's two questions in here. Paul, walk me through Geolocation.

Paul: Well, Geolocation and by which we're talking about, judging by the... You can stiff out your user's IP addresses. You can trace them back to the country that that person's in. You could even do it down to the city they're in, but you don't even have to go that far to figure out the country they're from.

Paul: There used to be some free tools that did that, but they're pretty much gone now. Now, there are services that do it and that they charge you per look up they have to do. And it's just a piece of JavaScript. And every time a user hits your store, it fires and a value is returned, that's the country code like, US or CA or I don't know, MX from Mexico.

Paul: And you can then do a bunch of stuff that's like, "All right. Well, if it returns US, do this. If it returns Canada, do this and all that sort of stuff.

Kurt: What are some use cases for this?

Paul: Use cases for that? I mean, if you're displaying free shipping below $50. But if it's someone's in Europe and you're in the US, you want to have the free shipping threshold way higher or maybe not have a free shipping threshold at all, so you can change content like that. If you have a currency in switcher install on your website, you could have the currency switch or default to whatever the currency is, that the user is from. You can hide and show content.

Kurt: If you run multiple sites, you can redirect them to the localized version[crosstalk 00:17:11].

Paul: Oh, that's right. Yeah, you can redirect them to a localized version of the site. We had someone like that, that they were in Australia and then there was the non-Australian version. There's that, that cost money. I think you can get away with it for probably less than 200 bucks a month. If you have a big store, can still do it for less than 200 bucks a month.

Kurt: This is, if I do, I want to just custom or have a developer customize my theme to do whatever the heck I want and then I'm going to have.

Paul: And subscribe to a service. Yeah, you're going to have a service that gives you access to their API. You get a certain number of requests to their API to find out where their users are from.

Kurt: Do you remember the name of that service?

Paul: There's a bunch of them. I don't remember. I linked it in the Slack channel with that question, that someone had a couple of days ago.

Kurt: Iiplocation.net?

Paul: Maybe. I don't know. They all generally have the same price. There isn't really much. Just search for IP Geolocation service or something.

Kurt: Yeah, there's a whole bunch.

Paul: Yeah, the other way you could do it that's free, is there is something called the HTML5 Geolocation API, I think it's called, which is built into your browsers and the browser kind of does the requests. The browser can request from the computer, what country you're in. But it can't do that automatically.

Paul: I'm sure you've seen this, where you go around on websites and there's little pop up. It's like, "Hey, google.com would like to know your location? Yes. No? And you have to check a box and agree to it, in order for it to work with every single site. I've always thought that using that was a waste of time, because a random website wants to know my location.

Paul: My immediate response is like, "No, I'm not telling you my location." I assumed since it required an opt-in, people would not opt into it. But then, I've had a couple people come back to me in our Slack channel that was like, "Oh, no." I've used it and people opt-in, so maybe give it a shot. I'm a developer, I haven't turned it on.

Kurt: The solution is hire developer to do this. Well, it sounds technically complex and therefore expensive. When we've done things with it, it really was not bad.

Paul: It's not bad. I mean, the hardest part is getting the location from the person and how you managed to do that. But there are services that do it for you.

Kurt: They do it silently. They don't have to ask the customer.

Paul: As for the separate question where he's like, "Well, I want to do a bunch of stuff surrounding this and checkout." My answer to that is, "Don't do that. Leave the checkout alone." That's my thought. [crosstalk 00:19:37].

Kurt: I mean, if you were placed the checkout, the biggest issue is your Shopify analytics get jacked. That's the downside.

Paul: Yeah, I don't think this is necessarily a secret, but Shopify views the true core of their product as being the checkout.

Kurt: Yeah, replacing the check on is frowned upon for this reason.

Paul: And Shopify is like, that's one of the best things we do for you, is we provide the checkout and do all the things in the checkout. That's the hard part. And so Shopify is trying to optimize that checkout. They care very much about optimizing the checkout and having it work great, so you're probably hobbling yourself if you switch it.

Kurt: The alternative checkout systems, like [inaudible 00:20:17] the issue, if you're on Shopify Plus, you could customize your checkout and you could run a Shopify scripts to change shipping payment methods and pricing on products for advanced discounts. Obviously, none of that stuff is supported in the replacement checkouts. But if you're not on Shopify Plus you can edit your checkout and you don't want to move to Shopify Plus you can use these third party checkouts that add extra features.

Kurt: The three I know of, that are the big ones are a Bold Brain, I'm sorry, Bold Cashier, which staples Canada uses as our Firestone's zip file, One Click Upsell. And what's the third one? Oh, Carthook, Jordan Gal's Carthook. None of them is bad. That's also the way the subscription apps work. When you hit the checkout, it's a clone of the Shopify checkout. You're not in the actual checkout. Now, they're adding checkout extensions, which is going to fix that issue.

Kurt: Isn't part of it, didn't they talk in at unite 2018 about all this multicurrency is going to be built into the Shopify checkout. Multicurrency is live and available now in the native Shopify checkout.

Paul: All right., so that kind of makes this guy's question almost moot.

Kurt: A lot of people, I don't think realize that this is available to them, so I will link to that in the show notes, Shopify multicurrency. And you don't have to be on Shopify Plus for that. If you're on Plus, I think the feature and adds is rounding rules. Let's say your price ends in 99 cents and you convert it now it ends in like 38, what on Shopify Plus it gives you the option where it'll just re-round it back to 99.

Paul: That feels extremely minor to me.

Kurt: It's pedantic, yeah, that's not a big deal.

Paul: I mean, I feel like if you're asking these questions, you have so many international customers, you want to do a bunch of GeoIP locations shit and redo your whole checkout and all that sort of stuff, you sound to me like a candidate for Plus.

Kurt: Yeah, move to Plus. And then, the advantage there is you get the additional support to handle this stuff you're going to get. You customize the checkout out of the box if you want to. You can do Shopify scripts to handle a lot of this stuff. And you get the clone stores.

Kurt: If you wanted to run multiple localized versions of the store, you can, it's all under one account and you get the multi-store dashboard.

Paul: Speaking of which David Aspinall asks, "I'm thinking about migrating to Shopify Plus. My question would be, do you see significant revenue increases from clients who migrate that you can only attribute directly to Plus? And as a bonus what features do you think are the most powerful and game changing?"

Kurt: I like this question.

Paul: I know. Our general rule of thumb when someone asks us, "Well, should I be on Plus? What should I do?" Is what problem are you trying to solve, that you think going on Plus will fix for you? Because I mean, you could have a great store that sells millions of dollars a year and not be on Plus and be totally fine.

Paul: But we have clients that have specific to them, pains or problems that Plus then opens up a tool box that those pains or problems can be solved. It kind of depends specifically on why you think you need Plus. And sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes the answer is Plus couldn't really fix that for you anyway, we've got to figure out a different way of doing it.

Kurt: Yes. And I would say like he's saying, "Hey, do you see revenue increases that you could attribute directly to Plus?" If that's the question, the answer is it's because they were able to-

Paul: They were able to leverage the Plus features.

Kurt: Yeah, before you sign onto it, you need to have a plan in place, where going to be able to leverage those features to see that return on investment. In some cases the brand is so big and the price is a drop in the bucket and they're like, "Listen, I want the best of everything and I want the VIP priority support."

Paul: Well and don't they get different credit card rates.

Kurt: They get lower processing rates.

Paul: Get lower processing fee. If you're big enough that the lower processing fees pay for Plus, then yeah, you should totally upgrade to Plus no matter what.

Kurt: Yeah, the point, if you're doing seven figures a month, then it's like, "Well, you just go to it just to save on the processing fees." But there's some other nice stuff, they'll give you a nine clone stores. Well, that's where if you want to localize it or you want to use one specifically for wholesale, you get that priority support, the reduce fees and the other things or the Plus exclusive apps, which is my favorite is Launchpad.

Kurt: Black Friday is coming up, you could schedule your sales. You can say, "This is my Thanksgiving day sale and it swaps in the theme that has all the info in there and it like automatically discounts the products or publishes the exclusive gift product or a swaps out your scripts to change, to power a discount without coupon codes. Launchpad's very convenient, especially during the holidays.

Kurt: And Shopify scripts is cool if you want two. Two common use cases for that would be if you've got, you want to have these complex sales and not even use discount codes. You could go-

Paul: And just do like automatic buy one, get one sales or?

Kurt: Yeah, we do that one a lot?

Paul: Just kind of like create a pack of things or it's sort of like, "Oh, if you buy two of these then something else gets added to your cart and that thing is now free."

Kurt: Yes.

Paul: They can like add it as an add on.

Kurt: Yes, in the magic, it's like all right, if you're doing a lot of promos with coupon codes, the coupon code itself is a barrier to entry. That is a friction point. Shopify scripts let you apply the discounts automatically, no more coupon code. You may then see the conversion lift or AOV left that then pays for Plus just in doing that.

Kurt: But I would say it's either you've got a strategy where you can leverage those things or you've got very specific pains or problems like, "Oh, man. We've got to add a compliance for California Proposition 65 and so now we can customize the checkout, that does it.

Paul: Yeah. You got to edit the check[crosstalk 00:26:01].

Kurt: That's when you've done a couple of times.

Paul: We've done that a couple of times. And legally, California has this really dumb law called Prop 65, where if someone, somewhere in some study at one time in the history of the universe, found that one of the ingredients in your products may possibly have caused cancer one time, in California you need to note that down on your product forever, till the end of time.

Kurt: Forever. Till the end of time.

Paul: Tell someone. And if they buy it and the rules are very specific on how and where and what you have to say in order to warn them. Of course, the problem with this is people in California, are just inundated with these warnings at all times, So they're just like, "Oh, whatever. I don't even care." The entire property of Disneyland possibly causes cancer.

Kurt: Yes, I was there in June or July. And as you enter the property, there are several signs that say like, "Warning this area under Prop 65 may cause cancer." What? Disneyland, the whole park causes cancer. And the answer is like, "Yes." At some point maybe there was like mercury in the earth, I don't know.

Kurt: The other crazy one is Starbucks. Every Starbucks in California has the Prop 65 warning on the door.

Paul: Oh, because roasting coffee beans and then the roasted coffee beans possibly cause a increased cancer risk.

Kurt: Yes, so the issue is-

Paul: Also all the grilled meats cause increased cancer risk?

Kurt: Obviously we have to say "Hey, wow that's great. They're trying to protect people." But when you do it to the point of change blood, where people will have banner blindness, no one is going to pay attention to the label anymore.

Paul: If every day of your life you're warned about something that causes cancer 10 times, you're kind of just like, "I don't even care anymore. I can't leave my house."

Kurt: Yeah, that's the issue with it.

Paul: As part of those rules in the checkout, you have to note what products cause cancer if it's going to California.

Kurt: If it's going to California.

Paul: And obviously you don't want to do that to every state because people in other states are going to be like, "What? Holy shit, I don't want to get cancer. I'm not buying this." We've implemented a thing where in the shipping field it, if they put California in the shipping field, it sniffs that out and then pops all the warnings up before they purchase. And you can't do that on a shift Plus.

Kurt: Yeah, you can't edit the checkout in a reasonable way without Plus. Follow-up question. Mr Dave's, Dave asked Bell's question, he owns Chasing Wonder, which has one of the best about pages I've ever seen chasingwonder.com. He writes, "What's the best app solution for wholesale? We sell wholesale and multiple currencies with different pricing, not directly linked to a currency exchange rate and currently use a different platform for this handshake, which incidentally was bought by Shopify in May. I'd like to bring our wholesale site, so it sits within Shopify. Mostly, so I can sync with Klaviyo and other automations, which are current provider [lax 00:28:52]. Anyone got any solutions that aren't clunky and it sounds like all right if you've got-

Paul: Well, the thing with a wholesale with [inaudible 00:29:00] where he has different pricing, but the pricing isn't connected to exchange rates. I don't know how to fix that without, unless you have multiple wholesale stores.

Kurt: That's the answer. Under Shopify Plus you get the nine clone stores, so that's how he would do it. And it's cool. You tell them you, you email your merchant success manager or the merchant success team, whichever. And you say, "Hey, I need to clone my store. I'm spinning up a new store, colone it." And they will, sure enough they will do.

Kurt: You'll get another store in your dashboard, that is a duplicate of the first one. How's that perfect? There's a handful of things you got to go finish yourself, but it saves you a lot of work.

Paul: Say he has a standard retail store. Then, he has wholesale one and then, he has four other wholesale stores for like four major currencies. When he makes a change, does he have to make that change five times?

Kurt: Good question. This was one of the big United announcemenTS?

Paul: I'm not even trying to throw you softballs here. I legitimately don't really answer these questions.

Kurt: You get you if you're on Plus, you have a multi-store dashboard and I don't know if that's a brand new feature or not. I've never logged into the multi-store [crosstalk 00:30:14].

Paul: I've never seen that.

Kurt: Yeah, so I don't know if it's rolled out to everybody yet or not. The multi-store dashboard, you can have a single product catalog that also lets you... A single product catalog for everything and then, you can make individual changes to even description, price, whatever on a per store basis. There's a lot of effort put into, you can manage this multiple catalog in a sane fashion.

Paul: Well, that sounds like the answer to all of his problems, Shopify Plus.

Kurt: Well and so I'm thinking through this for a client with a huge wholesale store right now and for wholesale. And they were using Bold Customer Pricing. You tag and Bold Customer Pricing is cool, you don't need Plus for it. Let's say you, they tag their wholesale customers bronze, silver, gold.

Kurt: And bronze gets 20% off, silver gets 30% off, gold gets 50% off. And then, Bold Customer Pricing implements that. But it's all apps have that level of complexity including our own crowd funder. It's a little hacky. It has to do a bunch of workarounds to achieve this, so that's option one without Plus.

Kurt: With Plus, you could do essentially the same thing, just with a single Shopify script where you say... And this is like an example script they have that you could just get. You don't need to know code, just plug in your variables and run it.

Kurt: And it's like, if customer tag gold, discount all products, 20%. If customer tag broads, blah, blah, blah. You could power the whole thing without having to use an app, without having to mess with crazy multi-variant setups where there's the discounts are hidden variants and yeah, big pain.

Paul: Rachel Reed says, "Customer retention techniques!" I assume she wants to talk about them. Product replenishment email flow and Black Friday cyber Monday benchmarks. Kurt, what's product replenishment email flow?

Kurt: All right. Product replenishment email flow, this could be one of two things.

Paul: Does that mean how to send people emails when products are back in stock?

Kurt: All right, that's the first safe guess is she's talking about back in stock emails. I don't think she is, but let's say she is. In Klaviyo, they have a flow called a back in stock flow and they give you a back in stock form, you put on the product page. When the products on available it swaps in this form, they put in their email, they go on a list.

Kurt: When the products' back in stock, they automatically get an email from Klaviyo going, "Hey, this thing is available. You want to buy it?" In an ideal universe, you also run dynamic checkout buttons. That way I'm sitting on my couch on a Friday. I see, "Oh man, the tee shirt I want it, it's back in stock."

Kurt: I'm describing a real event that happened. This is how I bought a stupid Star Wars t-shirt. Months later you can email, "This thing's back in stock." I click it, I end up on the page, I click buy now Apple pay, so start to finish in nine seconds. I bought a stupid Star Wars tee shirt that I like, so that's the back of the stock version.

Kurt: Product replenishment flow is different and very clever. Let's say the, you got to sell a consumable good. Let's say you sell coffee is the easy answer. And oh, no. I ran out of K-pods or K-cups, whatever those things are called and I reorder.

Kurt: Klaviyo knows and I'm assuming this is a Klaviyo flow, because Klaviyo can predict next order date. You use that to email the person. Or maybe while you sell supplements you know it will only last 30 days, you preempt it by sending them an email at three weeks from the order of that product. And you could do flow filter, filter by product three weeks from when they ordered that, "Hey, do you need more or are you about to run out? Here's a link. You can reorder right now." You just-

Paul: You give them a deal on it?

Kurt: If you wanted to. You don't have to. That's up to you. That's the easy part.

Paul: I like deals.

Kurt: We all like deals.

Paul: Then if you're going to do that, use a dynamic coupon code for the love of God and then you can send a follow up, "Hey, your coupon code is about to expire." She also mentions customer retention techniques.

Kurt: Also, she says strategies to increase CVR from blogs visits. CVR, customer value [crosstalk 00:34:22]. All right, so I also saw CVR and was like, "What does that mean?" I think CVR is shorthand for conversion rate, yeah.

Paul: People be more specific in your questions. I beg of you.

Kurt: Well and especially if for new merchants, people who are getting started. If the acronym confuses me, if someone's new, they're going to be like, "I don't know what they're talking about." And if we use acronyms on the show or technical terms that I apologize that as a personal failing.

Kurt: All right, so her first topic suggestion was customer retention techniques. You want to focus on retaining your customers, because customer acquisition costs are so high. That's really what makes or breaks a direct to consumer brands is what's going to cost you to acquire a customer.

Paul: Customer retention techniques, well, one is have a good product and give them a good user experience with the thing that they bought from you, so they don't hate you after they buy it.

Kurt: Yeah, it starts with good experience.

Paul: And then two, it's just all email. It's email till the end of time.

Kurt: Yeah, it's going to be staying top of mind with email, having consistent promos, having relevant valuable content related to it. Having either that automation like, "Hey, get these accessories." That kind of thing. But also, I mean there are other channels you can look at too, so that's where SMS could come in handy.

Kurt: But I think it has to start with customer service or you could be like, "Hey, you got your item. Is everything working out? Let us know if you have any questions." If you're leading with either customer service or "Hey, let's be entertaining and here's a bunch of value."

Kurt: You're a [Hoonigan 00:36:06] ask a media company, where people are there for that media in the entertainment are chubbies. Where I stay on that newsletter, I won't buy anything for nine months and I'm just like, "I want to see what they're putting out next." I think those are the methods for retaining people. Is that you're selling as a side effect of the other things you're doing.

Paul: It's you know what they bought. If you have the time and the ability you want to contact them.

Kurt: You need to stay top of mind without being salesy.

Paul: You need stay top of mind. But keep in mind the thing that they bought, that is the sort of how you are helping them, like segmentation. If you're selling like home brewing kits or whatever, you're contacting them about, "Well, here's how you need to do it. Here's some tips. And how did that turn out? And like stories about it and accessories you might want to buy. I think that's really where segmentation gets very strong.

Kurt: Oh, absolutely. But it can even start with-

Paul: Is segmenting post-purchase flows depending on the exact product that they bought?

Kurt: Yes and you know who does a really good job of this is recycled firefighter Jake star. Depending on which product you buy, he turns around and emails you like, "This is the story behind that product. These are the details behind that product. Hey, I'm doing a 24 hour sale on related product."

Kurt: He dives into, he looks at the category you bought. Because if I buy a wallet from him or I buy a backpack from him, it's very different purchases. He's going to segment his followups in his campaigns based on that. I think that's, well, you know what, if we distill it down to its core thing, it's be relevant to their purchase. You know what they bought, send them relevant content.

Paul: Always.

Kurt: She asked about BFCM benchmarks. Dude, I have no idea.

Paul: I don't know. Just sell a bunch of shit.

Kurt: Yeah, you just get out there and sell some stuff. What's your problem?

Paul: Well it's [inaudible 00:37:53] don't.

Kurt: It's too broad.

Paul: It's too broad. The only goals you could set are your own goals. We can't tell you what your goals are, your benchmarks need to be.

Kurt: And it's going to be different based on how old your brand is, what you sell, are you direct to consumer? Are you the manufacturer? There's so many factors of that.

Paul: And I mean I guess there are other benchmarks that we sort of have rules of thumb for like email opens and stuff like that. [crosstalk 00:38:15]

Kurt: Yeah, the moment you're at 15% and under for your email opens you have a problem. You want to keep it at like above 20 but realistically 30 is good or a return customer rate. Well, that's a benchmark for Black Friday. You'll probably get a lot of past customers, but I mean those are all things you would look at in retrospective to decide what's[crosstalk 00:38:37]

Paul: [inaudible 00:38:37] over, like "Did that work out?"

Kurt: Yeah, I think-

Paul: You shouldn't be setting preemptive goals, I guess. Just kind of do the best you can.

Kurt: And I liked that you asked about customer attention and then Black Friday benchmarks. Because on Black Friday, you're not acquiring a cold customer on Black Friday. It's going to be people that your remarketing to from the previous 60 days as well as past customers who may be eyeballing and something else, re-buying or purchasing a gift.

Paul: Yeah, we talked about this previously in that cost of customer acquisition through November are just going to be through the roof. Trying to acquire new customers is going to be extremely expensive at the content store, at the traffic store AKA Facebook. Instead of that, you need to be remarketing to people to keep your costs low.

Kurt: Yeah and then she asked a wonderful followup question, "Strategies to increase conversion rate from blog visits?" All right, here is the tactic that Ezra Firestone teaches. This is the example he uses, it's a great example. His market is women who are concerned about fine lines and wrinkles, so they Google something related to that. They land on a blog post about it. The blog post has an email opt-in, in the middle or the bottom.

Kurt: This is called a content upgrade where you essentially you say, "Hey, do you want to learn more about the topic that this blog post is?" And if it's about a product, she say, "Do you want to get 15% off your first purchase?" And immediately you deliver on that. You also have an exit intent popup, when they go to leave the site that tries to collect their email, BEcause we need to get them on that email list, get them into that welcome series and build that relationship.

Kurt: And then, because they visited that blog post, create a custom audience in Facebook for just that blog post and then send them the offer related to exactly that thing. Similar to the core message of our customer retention answer is be relevant always. Same deal with, that's how you're going to increase conversion rate from blog visits. Okay. We had a lot of good questions today I want to do one more and wrap it up.

Kurt: Malik frequent commenter. Malik asks, "How often should you be emailing customers and at what point do you go for the sale? How many value emails should you send before asking for the sale?" That's a very-

Paul: I think you're asking for the sale at every email.

Kurt: You do it as a PS.

Paul: I think at the end of every email you're just like, "Hey, buy this thing." I mean, why not?

Kurt: I would do it as like, if you're looking for a hard and fast number, it's three to four. But there's people who are going to want to buy right away and you want to prime the pump on the idea. I think, it's you're always entertaining or informative or educational email with a PS, "Hey you could buy this right now. You're ready to buy right now, here you go." And then email four is, Hey that thing we've been talking about, you can get it right now.

Paul: Well, it lets you window down the list too. Because obviously if people bought at the end of email one, you don't have to send them email two. And that allows you as you go down the funnel, you tailor the message, because clearly the email to buyers don't ever see email three. Then email three can give a different or harder sell.

Paul: And then, those people who never bought by email four, so then email four can give an either different in different sell. You can keep hitting them from different angles.

Kurt: I've heard this strategy called buy or die. Or I like that one buy or get off my list. It starts educational, educational, soft sell, soft sell, educational, moderate, sell harder, sell, extreme sale. You're unsubscribed like or breakup email.

Paul: Yeah, I think,[inaudible 00:42:14] yeah four, four even feels like a lot to me. I think four you're just all right fine. You get a coupon code, you held out long enough.

Kurt: Good things come to those who wait. Yeah, now that's a good question. Any other ones? How often should you be emailing customers as a general question? People are so worried about annoying customers. People's tolerance for pain with emails is very high, especially if you deliver any kind of value or entertainment in the slightest.

Kurt: Certainly don't spam people, but you can get into an issue where if you don't email them enough, they forget. They're like, who is this? When did I sign up for this? And you'll get more unsubscribes by sending too few emails. I mean and I think you're getting into too few at the point where you're at once a month.

Kurt: I think weekly is the right answer. I really do. It's going to depend on the brand and the content you have available. But I would not want to be sending fewer than twice a month or they're going to be like, "Who is this?" And just unsubscribe.

Paul: It's email them until your list starts shrinking.

Kurt: That's also true.

Paul: Did your list shrink this month? No. Send more emails.

Kurt: Yeah, look at your unsubscribe rate, see what it does. And you can also use segmentation. I'll give you an example that I use. I love segmentation. I am doing a virtual conference, virtual summit for e-commerce tech and it's about operational excellence for Black Friday. Okay.I know it's about Black Friday.

Kurt: I looked at people who opened my Ezra Firestone Black Friday email. If you open that, I know you're probably shouldn't Black Friday, so you only, if you opened it, do you get the email about this upcoming Black Friday webinar. Then, we do a follow up email to that one. You only get the followup if you opened, but didn't click the operational excellence one.

Kurt: It's like, "All right, I know you're interested, but maybe you got distracted, you didn't have time. I'll send you a second one." But that way I'm not just spamming the entire list. And I think that's the other approach to get comfortable with sending more email is through that segmentation.

Paul: You're ridiculous.

Kurt: Oh, I love segmentation. It's so fun.

Paul: You're so weird. I'm so glad I hitched my cart to a congenital optimizer.

Kurt: Yeah, I am. I'm addicted optimization. 100%, that's what's going on here. Closing, we always need topics and questions for these episodes, and we'd like to help. Our Facebook group is growing. Help us get to 3000 members in our Facebook group. Search the Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Facebook and join Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders Club. We would be happy to have you and happy Halloween.

Paul: Halloween's a couple of weeks away.

Kurt: I love it. You don't love Halloween?

Paul: I'm too old. And I don't have kids yet. I'm sure I'll love it again when I have kids.

Kurt: That's a good point for me, it's just like, "Oh, this is the season in which Adam's family is on loop on the TV."

Paul: That was a cartoon looks bad.

Kurt: I know. I'm not into it. It did not please me. I'm a curmudgeon.

Paul: You'll never be Raul Julia.

Kurt: No.

Paul: Because Raul Julia, it's just so good.

Kurt: He's irreplaceable.

Paul: All right, we're done. Enjoy your time.

Kurt: See you guys.

Paul: Farewell.