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Ep 596: 3 Shopify Hot-Fixes for AI Shopping: Kurt Elster on UCP, ChatGPT Referrals, and TikTok Shop
00:40:56
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- [00:00]
A
If I had to pick like a single universal pain that everybody's feeling, it's customer acquisition cost. The problem is like getting started just feels like you're burning money. And then Andromeda, the algorithm update that Meta did, that's very like LLM driven is a different animal than people were previously used to working with. It seems like there is no limit to the signals the thing can draw from your website and your customer and your ads. So it's like you got to spend money just to figure that out. And then once you get ads that work, hope you could keep it working or scale it. It's toug. There's two things that I'm doing for optimizing for AI search. One is what we've discovered is.
- [00:46]
B
This episode is brought to you by Contentful marketers. You know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof, when your outside of the box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers? It's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omnichannel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels@contentful.com Kurt welcome back to the DTC podcast. I think you have one of the best vantage points in the space because you're dealing with merchants every week and you guys approach things from an E commerce first perspective quite often, which I really appreciate. We're always, I know you touch a lot of growth, you talk a lot about growth, but I'm always interested more about what's happening on the Shopify side. So what do you think is something that merchants are missing right now or they wish they would have paid more attention to right now six months into the future?
- [01:44]
A
Okay, well, number one, for the last year, Shopify added categories like you're in your shot, your product listing, and there's this new field that pops up like right under the photo says category and it like auto suggests it and it's weird. And then it like when you pick one you go, okay, that's fine, whatever. It'll be like apparel T shirts like, okay. And then I'll be like, well, did you want to add these category metafields? And they're very prescriptive. And we kind of were at first didn't know what to do with it and we ignored it. And then after a while we went, all right, well maybe we'll just set the category and see what it does. And like, it didn't seem to do anything, but it freed us up to misuse the product type. Section for like categories and a navigation. And it turned out, you know, this year when Shopify said, hey, we've worked, you know, with Google and other partners and we've got a thing called the Universal Commerce Protocol UCP, a standard for these marketplaces for ChatGPT, for Google to query a marketplace and then get back products. And well, it turns out that's what the category metafields were for. It was a search engine can now go use that protocol, go to Shopify and say, hey, what products fit this? Then Shopify returns them. Turns out it uses those category beta fields. Like that was all for AI to understand a catalog. Because if you think of like, you know, Shopify as a platform, millions and millions of products, how do you search through that very quickly and how do you search through it reliably? Well, that's why they, you know, had this very prescriptive taxonomy. And so once we figure that out now we're like backfilling and rushing to go, okay, we gotta fill all those in. You know, the more the, the more the merrier. That optimizes us for a potential, you know, AI shopping future.
- [03:22]
B
What is the AI shopping present? I think I understand that ChatGPT backed off a little bit, like making a native checkout or anything like that. I think they're still focused on, on partnering with, through this, this protocol, as you mentioned. But where are we with like, how many referrals are you seeing on your stores from AI now?
- [03:39]
A
I'm happy to say we see them period. Like it exists. It is a phenomenon that is occurring somewhat. ChatGPT, any link that it has in the chat, they're very reliable in adding their UTM query tag to it where, you know, it makes sure, you know that Referrer source equals ChatGPT. And so if you are getting referrals from ChatGPT, you'll be able to figure it out. Like, even in our Shopify apps, we could see the referral on installs. And now we're seeing ChatGPT pop up as it likes. A merchant will ask that, you know, hey, I need an app for X and then it'll make a recommendation and if we're lucky, it's us. Oh, wow. In our stores we're starting to see that too, but not to like a huge volume. And that was happening before any of this other AI stuff. It was just like, you know, ChatGPT doing web searches for it. Now the idea is like, it would skip that web search step, go straight to this commerce protocol, pull that stuff in and make the recommendation okay, that's cool. And then they were going to take it a step further with you. Then made the purchase inside ChatGPT. Now we're learning like, okay, well maybe they're not going to do that. That's okay. You know, when we look at in the past like other people have attempted it, Facebook was supposed to be able to make purchase in app, you know, in Instagram. Anytime people have done this, it doesn't really work, right? It goes away.
- [04:58]
B
TikTok's the only one that's threatening, right?
- [05:00]
A
TikTok and Amazon, well Amazon, like they're very much built for that. Like that we accept a marketplace will buy from a brand, a manufacturer will buy direct from. But it turns out like other surfaces where we're very aware that it's the man in the middle, we don't do it. I don't know if it's like context switching or what. It's just a difficult thing to crack. So I was in no way surprised when cheap she said, hey, we're not doing that. But okay. Where we're at now in theory is I can use shop campaigns which like Shopify has its own advertising network built into Shopify called Shop and Shop campaigns. You can really easy to set up, doesn't have like the crazy granularity that you know, like meta ads do. And then they've got just a checkbox that's like, hey, did you want third party placements? Yes, I do. And those third party placements, one of them is ChatGPT ads. And so the idea is like I use ChatGPT, I'm on a free plan or like the, you know, the lowest tier plan similar to like Netflix, you know, they've got ad supported plans. ChatGPT has an ad supported plan. And if I ask that you know the right query, hey, I want, you know, new socks, then maybe someone who sells socks and has shop campaigns enabled and has those category meta fields filled out suddenly appears as an ad in ChatGPT directly. Now here's the problem. I have yet to be able to trigger this. I have tried. I have not been. I have yet to see a ChatGPT ad myself. And I test it just like I open an incognito window, visit ChatGPT directly and then you know, start asking it leading questions like I need new running shoes. Do you have any thoughts? There's just testing and I just haven't, I haven't gotten it to show me an ad. I've seen screenshots of ads from it. But yeah, so I think that's a thing that's around the corner, but just not quite here yet.
- [06:47]
B
And then how much tinkering on the UCP is that Universal commerce protocol is. Are you just sort of letting it set itself up? Are you going back in and having to readjust it a lot?
- [06:56]
A
No. What's crazy about this is one, you are opted into it by default in Shopify. It's in. If you go in sales channels in your settings, you could find this and I think it's at the bottom and you could go in there and like check it status, see if you're opted in, like that's part of it. And all this gets rolled into like the Shopify product network. So it gets a little confusing in like naming and quite what you're looking for. Because they also do a thing now as part of Shop and Shopify Product Network where like it'll place my products into other people's stores if they opted into it where like on the thank you page it'll show other people's products and then if the person adds that to their order, the store it appeared on gets a commission. Which they're like, that's pretty cool. That's brand new, just rolled out. Similar to this like the Shop campaign ads and these ChatGPT ads, but different surface, different thing. But it needs like you need that. I talked about the category metafields and like those extra taxonomies, those same fields, that same protocol within Shopify itself is still what's surfacing those products. So benefit all around to filling those things out.
- [08:01]
B
I like your note here about Shopify Product Network being able to allow vendors to test into like new categories maybe. So like if you don't have a category but you're thinking of expanding into it, you could always show maybe a competitor for that category and just sort of test the demand of your audience for that category.
- [08:17]
A
Yeah, well, it's kind of cool the idea is like, because I got to talk to the, the director of product at Shopify who was responsible for Product Network. What she was saying was like, that's the idea is, you know, you sell in one category, person lands on a thank you page, Shopify through AI, which when you think about what they did is really impressive considering the volume of catalog. And then like the wild variation in customer that they're dealing with. It'll then surface the products that it thinks the person is likely to buy. You as the store owner get a commission on that. So great, like a little bit of extra profit. Why not? You know, I'll take it but more importantly to your point, you can, then you can, it'll show you what sold. And so you could start to figure out like, oh, you know, maybe those are items I should list in my store. And then like and you know, exactly what's sold. And so you could reach out to that merchant and go, hey, you know, do you do wholesale? And they probably do. Can I list the stuff in my store as well? Right. And then Shopify gives you, makes that very easy with Shopify Collective where it essentially is like a drop shipping tool for two Shopify stores. And it'll just automatically, you know, I can list products from one store. If those get sold, the order gets sent back to the, the originating store, you know, and fills it out. It works like dropshipping, but you know, entirely housed within Shopify and fairly automatic to set up.
- [09:35]
B
Yeah, world of possibilities there. Back to AI a little bit. Is there anything else vendors need to be thinking about for optimizing the their PDP or for their, you know, their product descriptions? I think you have a here about AI are are pulling roughly the first 6,000 characters from product product descriptions. Is that causing you to do any edits like push, push the meat up front? I'm sure we're doing that anyway.
- [09:55]
A
Yeah, well there's two things that I'm doing for optimizing for AI search and one is, you know, what we've discovered is structured data. So JSON JSON, it's a markup language that has a standard. You can add this into a webpage and essentially it's like a very, a programmatic way to describe the content of the page in like a very strict way. You know, these AI tools, they have to spend a lot of resource on figuring out what the heck the meatbags are talking about. Right. You know, like the start and end of a sentence is obvious to you. An LLM has to think through that. And so when you can structure that data where the LLM no longer has to guess as to like where the sentence starts and ends and what that means, that really helps its understanding. And then when you think about like power consumption and the, the volume of data that has to get ingested by a search engine, you could see why they will take the easy path out every time. Right. Like generating an image. I saw. It's like running a microwave for 30 minutes or something crazy. They have. Yeah, they've got like this crazy energy requirement. And so you, by putting the data in a format it likes. Well that's like the new SEO. And so every shopify theme. Every Shopify store by default has structured data set up, but you can go create like one, verify it. Google gives you a free tool to do it. And then two, once you verified it works like, you can go crazy with it. You can make listicles and then like make a listicle article. That's like the top seven E commerce podcasts. And immediately you're like, boom, number one, Eric D2C. Boom. Number two, Kurt. Unofficial Shopify podcast. And it's just gonna like. And then you wrap that in JSON and then Google's gonna quote that back to the person when they ask what are the top podcasts. So like a lot of black hat SEO stuff or like gray hat SEO stuff that worked 15 years ago is back. You know, for these answer on mass yes. And then like the AI makes it very easy to do. Like you could literally download this podcast, give the transcript to Claude, then tell Claude, hey, what's he talking about? Okay, this is my site. How do we implement this? It'll just give you the plan. Like, that's crazy. But you got to put it the other way and you got to know where to start. So that's like, like traditional SEO. Now we, it's going to be called Answer Engine Optimization aeo. All right, so there's that. And then for like optimizing for Universal Commerce Protocol. This is a little funny. Shopify tells you like, well, these are the, this is exactly the fields in your, your product listing that we look at for this and this is what we don't and it turns out like product meta fields where we would normally like custom fields where we'd normally store extra bits of info that'll look at it. And for the product description, they look at the first 6,000 characters and I think they go so far as like, oh, look at the image and the colors in the image to try and get everything to match. I know product network does that. But then beyond that, they're really looking at that category and then the associated metafields. And so that's where you know, if you'd gone through the effort and stuck with like, even though it seemed prescriptive, use those category metafields and filled them out, I would imagine very few people did. And so the people, especially if you're in a competitive space like apparel, the people who filled those out immediately have an advantage in getting their products surfaced more often.
- [13:10]
B
Do it right. Now, you mentioned Claude. I was just. Yesterday we redesigned the DTC website, figured out a plan to port and remake all the content, built my rowboat Website the other day. This. A thousand half finished projects have been. A million half finished projects are launched every day now on Claude. But you find yourself in the middle of what, you know, the SaaS apocalypse. And I. What's your take on Vibe coding? You know, as a developer? Like you released a tool this year, right?
- [13:39]
A
Yeah, well, we launched a Shopify app and we did. Claude helped code a lot of it, you know, plugged it into our id, you know, developer interface, developer environment and used it. It just like Claude is so good at coding generative AI, like when it comes to coding that it is really good at it. And it part of it's just like the nature of coding is very structured, it's logical, it follows a clear syntax. And more importantly, there were all these open source projects and all this documentation and then these LLMs went and they ate every gross thing they could find on the Internet. And that includes these projects and this code and the documentation. And so at this point, you know, I could load up Claude code, drop a spreadsheet into it and be like, hey, we got to, you know, rearrange this into this format for Shopify, you know, and you. And like this app. I didn't even have to point it at the documentation anymore. Half the time. The darn thing already knows.
- [14:32]
B
And it knows what you don't know. It knows the questions you don't even know to ask. Like if you're building a little piece of software this or that, like it knows because of, I guess all the other git repositories of people that built similar things. Like you're going to want something like this, right?
- [14:45]
A
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And so like the way I try it is I have, I got an arcade machine in my house that's just a computer. I got a home, a media server in my house that we use and I have a home automation server in my house. And those were all like varying levels of working fine because I had set them up myself. I'm not ready to deploy Claude in a production store. I don't have a Shopify store. I'm managing client stores. I'm not going to do this to them, you know. So I deployed it on those home projects and well, okay, the first thing it did was break my arcade machine. But after that it was a learning experience and it set everything up and it like, it was really cool and phenomenal. And what I just learned with it was garbage in, garbage out. You know, it's very dependent on spec. It works better if you work in stages and Milestones and be like, all right, here's all the context. Now let's come up with a roadmap and, you know, tell me how you're going to troubleshoot this problem and then tell me when I'm going to check in. Add checkpoints to your work. Give it really clear spec. That's when it works well. And then the other problem I found with it is, and maybe you've noticed this, especially with web development, you finally give it a really clear spec and it builds what you want, and then you revise it. You're like, sweet, it's working. And then by the third revision, suddenly it has suffered a head injury and can't achieve the most basic things. Well, it turns out that this is context rot, where, like, for coding, it's got to load all this info and it burns through the context window very quickly. And so what they do is they say, we're compacting our conversation. Not compacting anything, it's just summarizing what it was doing. Stuff's gonna get lost when you do that, especially when you do it successively. And so that's why, like, working in phases and having, you know, a master, like a text file that it can reference of, like, this is where you were, buddy. That's why it works so well. It's like, okay, you finished phase one, now you clear the context and start phase two. That was my most recent unlock with development with Claude. That's like, oh, you know, that's how people are building these really complex projects, is you gotta break it down smaller.
- [16:46]
B
It's just wild. Like, do you think the rumors of the SaaS apocalypse are overblown? I have a friend who is a video company and they just put their IPO on pause because of all the swirling around here. I think Shopify as a business model, no one's gonna try to. It's going to be a while before anyone's trying to replicate that code base, I'd imagine, for the. For how it works. But what about the app ecosystem? Like, what is. What is AI doing? Like you said, it helped you guys build your code better.
- [17:10]
A
Is it helped everybody else build apps, too?
- [17:13]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [17:14]
A
No, currently the. I mean, you could see it on Twitter, the wait time to get an app reviewed when you submit it to Shopify. And I bet this is true of, like, any app store with a review process has ballooned. You know, it's really skyrocketed because so many people are just vibe coding an app and then submitting it. A year ago, it was really easy to weed those out because the apps would show up and they just didn't work right. You know, like you could tell a Vibe coded app because the darn thing didn't work today. That's not the case, you know. Now like, the giveaways with Vibe coded apps are like just the way they look. Because by default. Yeah, well, it's more like by default. What I've discovered the LLMs are not great at web development, just like the visual portion of it. So especially css. And so they lean on frameworks and so they often have like, unless you've specified otherwise, they get a real similar look. And it's. Cause, like they're all using tailwind css, you know, or something similar. Claude just seems to default and enjoy tailwind. But yeah, now they all get this like that similar, similar look. It's like big headline over gradient background. But yeah, like, I see posts from merchants who were not developers, did not think of themselves as developers, and they're like, you know, suddenly all these simple apps and tools that they were using and maybe paying a little bit of money for, they're taking the time to try and figure out if they could Vibe code it, you know, make their own or find alternatives or make like theme customizations that'll do it. And you know what? They're getting there and it's working now. What they don't realize is like, there are limitations to it, and in some cases there are, you know, security vulnerabilities that you're creating unknowingly. And then the larger problem is like, okay, well, now you're responsible for it. Now you have to maintain it. And it turned out like a lot of that monthly fee was peace of mind. But yeah, it. Now it. It is a weird time on the Internet. So like twice a day, I think to myself, I don't even know what's real anymore.
- [19:07]
B
Most of the scripts that you see, people like, any of the, you know, matter how deep and weird the video is on, whatever, you can tell that they're like, this isn't just a rupture, this is a so and so or whatever. You can tell that they're. It's like it's on X, it's Y. It's like all of our thoughts are being filtered through these machines now in some ways. And yeah, it's a. It's a wild time to be alive, I got to say. Everything hits at once, that's for sure.
- [19:31]
A
The problem is, like, when you're really used to the AI tools, you recognize the output Immediately. And I don't know why. It's like, it's so annoying.
- [19:39]
B
I know.
- [19:39]
A
Like, NBC News did a survey. 51% of Americans say they use AI tools daily. All right, so just over half a majority now. Okay, it's self reported. So what are they really doing? Like, oh, I used Siri today. Does that count? You know, but. All right, take that with a grain of salt. But the damning thing was 25%, one in four approved of AI. Okay? The majority of us are using it, but the majority of us don't like it.
- [20:09]
B
My 12 year old hates it. She's like, she's very skeptical of it right now, which is interesting because she's going to be coming up into it fully.
- [20:16]
A
Oh yeah, no, my kids, they're like, they swear they're not using it for their homework. I don't think they are, but they also are like, think AI is. They're like, their view is just, AI is bad. I don't know how that happened.
- [20:28]
B
I know.
- [20:28]
A
And I was very much like, you know, play like these two. You're not going to avoid these tools. Generative AI is here. Please, like, I encourage you, play with it and understand its limitations and like where it's dumb, you know, and like they all did it and they played with it and then we're like, it was early with ChatGPT. I think they kind of decided it was a novelty and moved on from it. And now they're just like, all their friends are like, AI's dumb and bad. Like, I don't know if it's like the edgy thing to say. They're teenagers.
- [20:54]
B
I think so. Yeah, we've, I've talked with people that have built whole like analytics suites for it.
- [21:00]
A
Oh yeah, it's really good at that.
- [21:01]
B
Use case for that. Right? Like just building your own, like building something that only would work for you or that is like perfectly built for your business kind of thing. Right?
- [21:08]
A
Yeah, that's another thing. It's like there is a big difference between build it once and it works for you and build it where other people can use it. And I think like with vibe coding, you discover that you're like, oh, you build it one successfully for yourself. Takes you like all day, but you did it. You couldn't have done it without AI. And you're like, wow, this is amazing. I should sell this. I could sell it and yeah, I
- [21:30]
B
might become a web. I think I'm going to redesign my daughter's school's website for them and just be like, that but then I realized then I got to maintain it. I'm like, I don't know if I want to be a pro bono web developer, but I can. Look, I can be anything now.
- [21:42]
A
There's a big difference. You know, it opens you up to now, like, oh, you know, I'm discovering all the other problems of customer support and billing and security, you know, and the legality of it, you know, that turns out it's more than just programming. So, like, those problems we haven't solved for yet. Some of those, like, you know, softer skills, especially, like, regulatory compliance, stuff like that. But, man, for just, like, pure coding. Ooh, is good at it.
- [22:05]
B
Talk to me about your app and why you built it.
- [22:08]
A
Oh, all right. So promo party. You know, we. I love free gift with purchase. Like, that's I. As a campaign discounts, I don't love because it devalues the brand or the product. But free gift with purchase, we're going the other way with it. We're like, hey, we're going to reward you for buying X thing or spending, you know, Y amount in this order. And so, like, I'd always loved free gift with purchase, but Shopify itself does not do it natively because you got to be able to add the item to cart or you need to give them, you know, a way to select from several items if there's options with your campaign. And so certainly there are apps in Shopify that will do free gift for the purchase. But, man, I've run so many free gift for the purchase campaigns. I had an opinion on, like, okay, we could do this. We could simplify it. We could make this bulletproof and reliable. We could add validation and checking to it. Go like, that was a lot of my issues with running free gift for the purchase campaigns. And so we did it, man. It took us over a year because I really. We're, like, sweating the problems with it and really thinking through it with various scenarios, and we're still not done. Would you really, really think through a seemingly simple problem, you have to apply it to a platform like Shopify where every person using it has a slightly different use case, has a slightly different customer, maybe has a different, you know, a slightly different theme? You know, the amount of, like, tech debt and issues that could pile up if you're not careful is intense. It's just been, like, a fun project to think through and figure out. And at this point, all right, I've got my core functionality down now. I'm just trying to make the thing easier to use. And then from There I'm going to go to. I want this thing to be bulletproof. But the app itself, there's no AI in that. It's straightforward. The goal is just make it easy to use. But someone immersion could go, I have to code this myself. I'll tell them, go for it.
- [23:58]
B
More power to you.
- [23:59]
A
Weird issues that you. You don't know about until you attempt it. And like, it's been, it's been a learning experience. But yeah, promo party pro free gift with purchase.
- [24:08]
B
Check it out. The, the most famous free gift with purchase, I think is the football phone. Is this is the Sports Illustrated football phone where people were subscribing to Sports Illustrated as an afterthought so they could get that football phone. What's the best free free gift that you've been a part of sending?
- [24:24]
A
Oh, well, all right. The ones that have, weirdly, they've always been the most successful are like, you do. It's got to be exclusive to the free gift. And enamel pins. You can get custom enamel pins made pretty.
- [24:37]
B
They look so cool.
- [24:37]
A
Like, yeah, low minimum order quantity. Like here I got like, I found the Shopify pin on ebay a long time ago and I love these enamel pins. But like, as a free gift with purchase, they're great because they, they don't break, they're easy to ship, but they're fun. And like, for a customer who's willing to spend more with your brand to get a free gift, a exclusive enamel pin that like, matches, you know, speaks to the hobby or interest, whatever it is, that could be really powerful. It was Hoonigan. It was an automotive lifestyle brand that we worked with. And it was like over Black Friday week, every day of the week they had a different exclusive enamel pin that they sold. What was great about is it gave people a reason if they wanted to, like, here is your excuse to make another purchase if you want it. Like, this is the only day you can get this pin. And of course, on any free gift with purchase, like, what's your aov? Okay, you know, that's probably a good starting point for what that that free gift with purchase threshold should be onto
- [25:33]
B
the marketing side a little bit. I was reviewing your podcast with Nick from Pins and Aces. I did a pod on your invite. I did a podcast with him as well. What a great guy, great brand. And a lot of it was on how tough it is out there in the Meta and Google auction and how all the different sort of areas that they were expanding into to try to compress their. Their acquisition costs is that something you're seeing across a lot of vendors out there.
- [25:55]
A
If I had to pick, like, a single universal pain that everybody's feeling, it's customer acquisition cost. And when we say customer acquisition cost, we're really talking about Meta Zuckerberg, right? Because they have the most surface area, they could get the most eyeballs, right? They have Facebook, they have threads now WhatsApp and Instagram. Like, man, that. That's hard to beat. And when you think about, like, the stuff Zuckerberg has built, like Quest, Meta Quest was just like, hey, we're gonna get a new modality for more ads and more eyeballs. And then it didn't work great. Years later, he's moved on. Now he's like, all right, it's wearables. I don't know how you put ads in that, but if it's like, ads in my glasses, it's not happening, guy. And then, like, they just bought Molt Book, the social network for AI.
- [26:43]
B
Oh, I just saw that.
- [26:44]
A
Yeah, that had some folks scratching their head. But, you know, I assume it's like Zuckerberg sees, hey, like, here's another place. If this. If this grows, if this happens, this is another place to inject ads.
- [26:56]
B
So it's got him. He's testing TikTok Live affiliates wholesale licensing. I think that that kind of is the name of the game. Like, especially once. Once you have product market fit and you're looking to scale it, it does. You can't just hit the scale button on Meta at this point. You got to have some tentacles.
- [27:10]
A
No, none of them do. You know, I think, like, the people who use the landing pages and, like, really, like, test offers have landing pages that match the offer. You know, like these very optimized funnels. That definitely helps. The problem is, like, getting started. You know, it just feels like you're burning money. And then Andromeda, the algorithm update that Meta did, that's very, like, LLM driven, is. It's a different animal than people were previously used to working with. Every time someone tells me about it and, like, the stuff it does, it seems like there is no limit to the signals that the thing can draw from your website and your customer and your ads. So it's like you got to spend money just to figure that out. And then once you get ads that work, hope you could, you know, keep it working or scale it, match landing pages to it. That seems to be like, if you can get successful ads, okay, landing pages help. But then, you know, keeping it going from there, at some point, you Exhaust the audience and you gotta find new eyeballs. Yeah, it's tough. And like, what I like about Nick for Pins and Aces is he's aggressive about being unafraid to test new things. So for them. And I'm pretty sure he shared this on. Yeah, I interviewed him as well recently and he shared it there. But 11% of their new orders were TikTok shop. And that wasn't an accident. You know, they were trying to. They're like, let's make this work. And they had some influencers that they worked with, had stuff listed. We're trying to optimize for it. And then ended up with. You end up with copycat influencers. People will just make similar successful content that was from a brand sponsorship. It's so strange.
- [28:45]
B
Yeah, you're like, great, go for it.
- [28:47]
A
Yeah, please do.
- [28:48]
B
I think of Brock Mameser from Frostbuddy and the level that. The level of scale he's been able to achieve on TikTok shop is unreal. But it has been through tens of thousands of pieces of creative through, you know, through affiliate. So it's. It's like the scale is there, but it's a different playbook than. Than with meta. You really need affiliates, I think.
- [29:07]
A
Yeah, that's my feeling as well. I'm not an expert at it. I just, you know, I've seen people try and fail and I've seen people succeed. The ones that have succeeded, the story is pretty consistent. It's like, hey, you know, their product will be cheap enough where they can do product seating. If I talk to a guy who sells turntables, well, a $600 turntable, I can't just like give that out. But if I have an inexpensive product, especially in like fashion and apparel. Okay, great. That I'm more easily can give to creators on TikTok. And then, you know, maybe I get lucky and one of them beats the algorithm. Right. They go viral and then you get copycats off that. Or other people, you know, that you could reach out to, or you even. You're like, hey, this is an example of a successful TikTok. You know, try this. And when you reach out to other creators, the other thing Nick was doing that's. That's really cool that I wish more people would try is live selling. They do, they call it power hour. They do like a live, live streamed show, you know, where you only like your best customers show up. And then it becomes a social thing. Or like they have it. It's like Twitch streaming. You know, they've got a Chat and there's a live video and they're. The guys at Pins and Aces are talking through merchandise and then people just like order it right in the chat. It's fun, you know, it's like QVC people love for the right person, that's quite fun.
- [30:25]
B
I think that's a great show. We had, we had someone come out to our event in 2024. They actually sold, I forget the name of the brand but they sold men's underwear for well endowed men. Some great, some great hero shots on that page. But they, but they had. They were doing really well and they're doing really well with live selling as well because who wouldn't want to show up to a meeting of those guys basically.
- [30:46]
A
Yeah, well, yeah, of the live selling stuff I felt like it tends to be fashion and apparel that that does it and does well with it. The other one that does well like just you know, knows that space it does well with it is like trading cards, collectibles especially like blind boxes and opening them. So like I mean the trading card community is crazy. We got to work on a site Wolf gaming Wolf with a U and I, I had no idea. It's like the level of excitement and insanity around like the next Pokemon card drop and Magic the Gathering is still around. Like I remember Magic the guest playing that in eighth grade.
- [31:22]
B
I do find myself watching the opening halls every now and I don't even know anything about Pokemon but I'm just like, I hope he gets a reflective one.
- [31:29]
A
I'm just like I don't even get Charizard.
- [31:31]
B
Oh my God, have you seen that guy doing the divorced dad card sets?
- [31:34]
A
No, but that's already funny.
- [31:36]
B
It's like Night Drive. Well, you don't want that card. Anyway, I wanted to ask about. Are there. So we had a really recent podcast with this woman named Laura Cantor from New York and Co they're called and she talked about Zenit AI. She talked about figuring out for the huge amount of inventory in the SKUs that they have. There was this AI tool that went and just like en masse looked as a consumer would look at all your products and found a bunch of little errors like fixed hundreds of little errors that you. That humans might not catch. And I just thought that was a really cool she and she kind of made a big post about it and got a lot of attraction about it. Are there any tools that you found like in your arsenal, like specifically AI tools that you're. That you're using besides like the Claude and the ChatGPT well, that's the thing
- [32:19]
A
is like, though, both of those tools are now so powerful. It's like the stuff I used if I wanted to mess with a spreadsheet in the past. My solution was like, all right, I would give Teach ChatGPT the documentation, give it samples to work with examples, have it build me a Python script that did what I wanted, you know, and then I test the output and like it would get the job done in a way that was better and faster than I could have before. You know what? Previously I would have had to task to a developer and wait a week. I could get done in a day today if I want to do the same thing. You know, like I use matrixify to import spreadsheets in and out of Shopify. That pairing of like matrixify to get anything in and out as a CSV to the Claude Mac desktop app. You could just drag and drop the spreadsheet and do it like, you just be lazy about it, Go, hey, this is a matrixify thing and here's what we're doing. It just figures it out. It's incredible, you know, like so extra steps in my workflow that I was doing in the past just because the thing wasn't smart enough. Now I'm like, I don't even have to think about it anymore. That's it happens so quickly.
- [33:23]
B
And is that Claude or is that. Do you have different. Because I have Claude and chatgpt and I kind of have discrete uses for both. Do you have, do you have them both active? Are you more one or the other?
- [33:31]
A
Yeah, I use, I'll use perplexity for like I want a quick web answered question. You know, I want it to be more people answered, but I want the summary. I use CLAUDE for almost everything, like all things work related, Claude code for, you know, like coding projects, terminal stuff. I like it a lot. And then chatgpt, I. It's so sycophantic and it's like so verbose. It is, I know, I'm like, you're just like brain dead Claude. And I know it scores well and it's smart and it does fine. You know, I just, I don't like their approach anymore. I used to use it all the time and so now it's like, oh, it's claw down. I'll fire up ChatGPT and then just for separating, like quick personal stuff versus work, I'll just use, you know, ChatGPT just for like if, if I want
- [34:15]
B
my ego justified or if I want like just the. It'll tell you, what you're doing is good. I'm not going to sugarcoat this, Eric. This is a tough thing, but like on and on and on. It. It really does have that Sycophantic, I think is the right word. They gotta, they gotta figure that out.
- [34:28]
A
Well, they did. You know, they tried to change it and people got mad because there's like so many people that just the dumbest person. You know, Eric, is currently being told, you're absolutely right by ChatGPT. I know that's addictive. And so they're like a lot of people that just are at home talking to the damn thing way too much.
- [34:47]
B
Anything coming up? Maybe my, my last question here. Anything coming up on audits or anything. I know. I think last time we just talked about like what you look at when you, when you sort of wrote, has that changed at all or is it still always the fundamentals that the top things you're looking at when you audit a site.
- [35:03]
A
So yeah, we do like the, like a health check, you know, starting a new site and starting a new retainer relationship. I want to get a good feel for the site and then I also want to make sure, like, okay, you know, we're starting in the right place. And so I just go through all the store settings. You know, after like doing it 15 years, if something's weird, it jumps out at me. Go through the theme settings similarly. Like that's the stuff we were doing. And then I could do like in the catalog, I could quickly make sure all the photos have alt text, all the, you know, every product page, collection, blog has SEO meta title and description. And I can get, I have, you know, all the processes set up where I can have ChatGPT API do that for me, you know, for a few cents, like it's quite, it's cost effective. So I like that, you know, being able to like just quickly fix everything through a templated approach. Now, you know, the new thing is like I will look for those opportunities to add structured data to the site, like a. Make sure it works. What I found is it virtually always works at a basic level. And then, hey, is there other stuff we can add? Like review snippets, faq and that's usually what we're adding to it. And then the, the other one, well, now we have to audit the catalog and be like, hey, did you actually fill out those category fields? Yes. All right, well, like, no. Okay, we're going to do that. And then if you have filled them out, hey, for your top sellers, like for at least your top 10 bestsellers. Let's fill out the suggested category meta fields that Shopify gives us because there's no harm in adding it. That's helpful as well. And we still do like hey, app audit. Only now sometimes it's like, well, you've got this app installed, it's perfectly good. But if you want we could just Claude can write that as a theme customization. You don't even need the app. People like that saves them a little, little bit of money, a little bit of load time. Doesn't hurt.
- [36:44]
B
Contributing to the SAS apocalypse on 1 end or the other.
- [36:47]
A
I think the SaaS apocalypse is overstated,
- [36:49]
B
but I think so for sure.
- [36:51]
A
It's, it's weird. We're in just like such a transition phase in the Internet. Like we went, you know, web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 was crypto. Okay, obviously that didn't go anywhere. Like when was the last time we heard about NFTs? We're not calling this Web 4.0, but like really, that's, you know, AI. Are we in like Web 3.5?
- [37:10]
B
Did you see Taylor Holiday's post last week? We're talking about it a lot of pilot house, but the, the profit, the transition to profit engineer sort of collapsing this, this notion of collapsing entire growth teams that may have had, you know, five to 10 people on them into one super gifted, you know, profit engineer who is using all their suite of tools kind of thing. It seemed like a very, it was like really well written. It had a lot of EM dashes in it, I will say. But as it's Taylor, so it was very intelligent. But it also, it seems like we're in a moment potentially right now of like overreaction a little bit where everyone's so gassed up about these tools. There's gotta be a little bit of a pullback at some point potentially.
- [37:47]
A
Well, I think we're already seeing it in like everyone's. You feels the need to use the tools and we're. Because they're sold to us as hey, AI is going to save you time. And then like then you could go live your life and touch grass. Only that's not how tools work. And when they save us time, guess what? The work we're doing just expands to fill the container, right? And so we just end up doing more work than we were doing before. And like there's a especially like for developers, for marketers, there's an existential dread that AI will replace you. And so you. And like out of fear you learn to use the tool, discover it's very good. And, you know, you could get up to speed with it very quickly. And then you're like, well, I should use this for everything. Now you're doing more than you did before. You're using AI, but you recognize it everywhere else. And then you judge everyone else for using it.
- [38:34]
B
Yes.
- [38:36]
A
That's like that at some point that. That has to implode. Right. And you already see it, like, tweet anything. That's like AI Doomerism. And it gets great engagement. Just be like, yeah. Oh, I bet 50 likes. Yeah. And like, you used AI to write AI sucks.
- [38:54]
B
And we all have to adapt our working curve so that you, in between loading times, we can jump to new tasks. So you set something up. Let's go. Okay. This is going to take three and a half minutes before it gives me an answer. Okay, now I can do something for three and a half minutes. We're going to become a scattered but highly efficient group.
- [39:09]
A
Do you find that it. It takes some of the joy out of creation? Like, a lot of the project work now feels more like babysitting Claude and verifying its outputs.
- [39:20]
B
Well, I've never done this work, like, literally the first time to me that, like, I've actually never really built a website. And so. And for me, it was always like, oh, I got to get the domain pointed to this. And then I got to DNS does this. And it was all. It was just a bit of an opaque thing that I'd never really done. And so then just Claude walking me through, step by step, put it on netlify, drop the folder here. Like, just all the things that were a bit opaque to me just became totally translucent.
- [39:46]
A
And it's like, as a learning tool, it's so cool.
- [39:48]
B
Yeah, it's gonna. I just heard about the Alpha School in San Francisco right now, which is this new learning modality. Like, AI is gonna eat so much. And for education, like, the human touch is super important, but what's more important is a super individuated approach, which AI can do. Right. So what a time to be alive.
- [40:05]
A
Yeah, it's exciting, truly. I don't know what the future holds. I think it's probably halfway between, like, AI becomes smart and perfect. It does everything for us, and the backlash is so severe, no one will touch it. Like, somewhere in the middle of that pendulum.
- [40:21]
B
All right, well, thanks. We'll leave it there. You gotta go. Of course. Subscribe to the unofficial Shopify podcast and follow Kurt on socials. Thanks for checking in again. We'll have you back in another six months or so.
- [40:31]
A
Yeah. Oh, my gosh, it was fun. Always happy to be here.
- [40:40]
B
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now @directtoconsumeralloneword.co. i'm Eric Dick, and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.