SHOPIFY EDITIONS: What's Good, What's Not, and What Got Missed?

26:07Gavin McKew:yeah i want to show you guys something is this uh i'm actually going to just throw it up here I mean, I think there's a lot of psychological. So we're looking at the Apple website and this always baffles me. So this is the MacBook 14 inch model. There's only one 14 inch model. But when I go to click buy, it'll show me a few different options here. The 10 core with 512 gigs, 10 terabytes. And then this is also 10 terabytes, but it's got higher memory. If I click into any of these to buy, but you notice the difference here. This is$2 ,300 more and another$300 more. So I'm only making a$300 decision on each of these.

26:45Gavin McKew:Now I go in and if I pick this one, that's my base. Now I might upgrade the display. It's 250. I might upgrade this. It's this. But I've bucketed, like if I started on the cheapest model, like if they just said, buy a MacBook and it started on the base and now I have to add all these other options. As a customer, I'm feeling like I'm adding so much and it feels like it's getting expensive. But people can make small choice decisions in steps. And so like a jacket, let's just go back to that example. If you've got different levels of insulation and there's different qualities, like let them, the customer identify.

27:25Gavin McKew:So break that out. Like I would pick the whatever model here and then I would add on the better screen.

27:32Max Rolon:it's essentially jay it's making small decision a big decision into small parts of a decision without scaring the buyer so essentially is it's breaking this down psychologically into if you go on to a 1500 mac and you end up buying a two and a half thousand dollar mac apple absolutely nailed this right they see this slight incremental bump whether it's on a spec bump within a feature you want but they split it out in such a way that it almost feels by the time you've added two or three of these items that tiny decisions really have made actually quite incremental gains on aov for apple they definitely definitely nail this i mean nobody nobody goes onto apple and buys a mac clicks buy and clicks buy again like nobody right there's no they don't click buy twice they just don't right they click buy they review what it is they make a small decision that they need a ram bump or an hard drive bump or they need some software or they need a keyboard they click that button and they get that increased the oving there's a lot of

28:35Gavin McKew:lessons in this i think totally totally and and and it's like just because there's at the beginning of the show i told you why everyone's serious about their shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with rewind there is no excuse not to there literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility, your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, et cetera, nothing.

29:14Gavin McKew:I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products, orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything, a bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store. Now, I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it.

29:50Gavin McKew:Go now and get it, shopify1percent.com slash rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Claude ChatGPT straight to your OmniSend account, your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money?

30:28Gavin McKew:And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything. My favorite part though is AI segments. I used to build these by hand, clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. And anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails, from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me.

31:06Gavin McKew:I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up. J-A-Y-3-0. If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to OmniSend, like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo. Tools, it doesn't mean that you got to use them in a certain way. So because there's 2000 variants, still think about your strategy. So let's move on to the next one.

31:42Gavin McKew:Sidekick Pulse. sidekick is the Shopify's little, sometimes I call them clippy, little ninja guy in the corner that you can talk to and it'll help you with your running your store. I never used it for the longest time. Just in the last couple of months, I've actually found it pretty helpful. And the main reason things I use it for is running reports. So there's some canned reports, but like if I want to go in and run and actually run like a write a script, run a query to get certain data. Also for customer segments. I found it really useful, like create a segment of VIP customers who bought X amount of times and spent a certain amount, but now it's getting proactive.

32:18Gavin McKew:So now it's going, you have to opt into this. I think it just shows in the, it's live, I think for everybody. When you log into your Shopify admin, you'll see it up at the top to opt in, opt into, what is it called? Shopify insights, I think is the term. Anyways, as long as you opt into it, psychic will give you proactive advice on running your store and optimizing maybe abandoned cart emails or optimizing others like proactively telling you to do stuff based on

32:49Max Rolon:the data it sees thoughts on this i am overall i'm bullish on psychic it's i did it like a talk on psychic maybe like three months ago and then cliff notes were like it's cool but like don't take away the human component of it because it is a merging tool like there's been a bunch of well Shopify released an engineering behind the scenes like hour-long talk and I thought it was really interesting how much they're investing in this part of the business like this is not just like a tack-on this is like quite a strong investment that has a lot of AI experts and in order to like capture like to action this data set and build your own pipelines like it's it's a real soul here and i think you know we're still seeing it grow and develop and i think shopify is still playing around with it but i think it has the opportunity to be quite powerful and i see there as being a um uh yeah like a behavioral trend for administrative power users where instead of doing a bunch of these clicking particularly you know you can save a recurring pattern that you do and put it into sidekick and use sidekick as your you know like one of your core areas to interact with the item and i think it's got a good training mechanism here too which is not you know if that if shopify is like changing the ui or introducing a new feature you don't have to go like try and find that you can just ask sidekick and then i think data and insights is also a really important part they've rebuilt shopify's like querying language a shopify ql with the last release of sidekick so that they play really nice together and we're starting to really see that come through.

34:25Max Rolon:I think Dev was in the details again, like if you're doing location based segmentation, like maybe check if it's on billing address or shipping address, if you're looking at orders, like some things like that but it's exciting and I think it's good to see that they're capturing productivity and being able to use some of these tools. Again, I would just urge, check it, make sure that you as a human believe in that insight before you go ahead and action it because there's probably going to be some hallucinations or some considerations that happen. Yeah, I I agree, Max. I think Sidekick is becoming center in front of where Shopify is going to go, though, I think.

34:59Max Rolon:There were three real things I think were big on Sidekick this time. And the first one was taking the gadget.dev approach and deploying apps. So essentially allowing you to store databases. And if you can store databases, you can run small apps and get that developed. I think that's really exciting. Really early. So I don't think it's going to really be heavily used by anyone of any significance. but certainly small brands that can't really i don't really want to spend money on apps and they kind of want to think they can kind of control it themselves i think that'll be used now that'll change in the future second one i think is and this is the big one this is probably one of my most interesting points of additions i think psychic app extensions was probably the most interesting point of the whole additions out of everything was i speak to what we build apps max will build apps app developers i speak to every day how do we get ai into shopify what do we do essentially they were building an infrastructure there putting their own credits on it pinging it out and making that ping back now that there's app extensions you can essentially use psychic to through two means to use and read that data and read it back so i think that's really interesting and the third one is kind of around well it's a the reporting side was always part of it from summer editions you haven't really seen much sections being built in shopify and i seen i seen one demo the other day building some really advanced design sections on front end i I think the design side of what this could potentially do.

36:21Max Rolon:Now, don't get me wrong. It's not going to be what the agency level can do or any means by that. But I think for smaller brands, I think given elements of design within sections directly in Psychic could potentially open up some opportunities for brands. They're the three, but Psychic app extensions for me is probably the single side of rollouts, probably the single biggest feature I feel in this edition.

36:45Gavin McKew:I put it as my Shopify's all the stuff around Psychic as my number one, like I think impactful thing for merchants because the A-B testing is awesome. But I think Psychic is getting to a place now where like everyone should be using it. Even if you're just asking, like ask it questions you wouldn't normally ask. Ask it to analyze your business's health for the last three months. What products are least performing, best performing. I mean, run a sale on the ones that are like, ask it things you wouldn't normally think about doing. And it's there. Like it's good.

37:21Max Rolon:One thing that is interesting as well is I read and I heard that Shopify's token limit that they used within Sidekick, 4X'd in the last quarter. Now bear in mind that if 4X'd in this quarter without all of these features released. So let's suppose it 4X's again. Now, I mean, I don't want to get in the granular detail. How long can Shopify hold those tokens, whether that's for app developers or merchants? I mean, if it gets significantly heavy use, it's got to live through some level of channel. And I know Shopify use Anthropic and Google and OpenAI and kind of merge that into their own knowledge base and outputs, what that is.

37:56Max Rolon:And they've got their own infralare. But I think the usage was already forexed in this core, which I think is super interesting. What about next core? Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how long they can stay. I know that's a good point.

38:10Gavin McKew:But if it helps merchants make more money and they're making money off of it. Exactly.

38:13Max Rolon:That's a very solid argument in the sense of what it is. But if it really pivots and they set that up with flaws and they start setting full automations up and that's using credits every time, there's risk there. But anyway, it's not a worry for now, but it's just a consideration. Yeah, yeah, probably wouldn't worry about it. But yeah, the embed is really cool. Like when I was thinking about Sidekick months ago, I was like, what if the actions that you could prompt could be done on Recharge or could be done in the third parties that make up your stack rather than just siloed in a single instance of Shopify.

38:44Max Rolon:So now that those times are starting to get unraveled, it just becomes much more of a powerful tool. Yeah, the amount of conversational AI conversations I had with people building conversational AI for Shopify apps. I mean, everyone was essentially building the same app, and it was how do we build conversational AI. And I was essentially saying, when this surface is on Sidekick, you're better off just surfacing it naturally anyway, and then it's going to happen anyway. I think another interesting point on Sidekick, and this is for the future, I think if you look at Sidekick right now, it's only back end right now.

39:19Max Rolon:Everything exists in admin on Sidekick. And I think one of the most interesting things would happen, especially across the app ecosystem, will be when Sidekick goes front end, right? Right now, I serve as Sidekick as an admin on Shopify and I have certain tools. Now, let's suppose that that doesn't happen and I can use it on the front end for different use cases for users. That's a very interesting use case.

39:41Gavin McKew:Okay, now take that one step further with, because the next on my list was the Shopify product network. And then you also have Shopify, shoot, what's it called? Where you actually like drop ship.

39:53Max Rolon:Collective?

39:55Gavin McKew:Collective, collective. So Shopify product network they announced, which is kind of like an affiliate experience where you can show other people's products on your site through search if they click through and buy it on that other site, not on your site. and that's the difference between collective um you get some type of an affiliate fee and i don't know what that is yet i don't think they said but it's probably going to be like five to 15 percent like typical affiliate kind of fees then you've got collective but i was like now imagine it's it's like shopify is slowly becoming a marketplace i think everyone knows that what's a shop app what

40:33Max Rolon:is shopper it's the second or third biggest app in about 12 different countries right now worldwide up there with Google. So yeah, it's becoming a marketplace.

40:43Gavin McKew:I still remember when they were arming the rebels, though, against the empire, against...

40:48Max Rolon:They're still doing that. They're still doing that. Just in a different way.

40:51Gavin McKew:But it's such a delicate thing. I actually think Shopify is doing it in a way that is good. It's like if they just full on... I mean, they did launch a marketplace years ago and they shut it down. But now they're just...

41:02Max Rolon:They're covering themselves, Jay, aren't they? In the sense of they need to cover themselves from the agentic side, from the marketplace angle that could happen. As long as essentially they get checkout, which is again what's happening at Gentic, they have to cover themselves from all angles. And the level of velocity that they're building and developing in all of these areas, there's literally nobody in any ecosystem, let alone e-commerce, that's building anything at the velocity that Shopify does across so many different verticals. And I think that's like, I mean, when summer editions dropped, I was blown away by how much they dropped.

41:36Max Rolon:And then winter edition drops and they do it again, there's literally five and a half months between it.

41:41Gavin McKew:So yeah, correct. When you mentioned like Sidekick living on the front end of the store, have you played around with ShopApp when you ask it's AI for a product? There you go.

41:49Max Rolon:So that's it. So exactly. And then you can buy multiple stores. You can have multiple check. I did it the other day. I ordered three products from Japan, two products from America and two from Europe. I'm in the UK. And in one checkout, in one time, all on the ShopApp. And I had the level of trust that I knew that I could see the reviews from there so I could read them directly from the app and that I would be some level covered. So this marketplace isn't just like individually localized to that region. I'm using ShopApp to order worldwide, essentially.

42:23Gavin McKew:Yeah, so is it good or is it bad? Shopify product network, should merchants be turning it on to make some more money or cause it causes more damage?

42:30Max Rolon:I think it's like a place to watch. And as again, it goes back to this market thing and like how, like I think brand integrity is like a big part of it like how do you control where you turn up and kind of control the channel and like the you know reputation of that perception so yeah luxury luxury or struggle max i think you know luxury products would probably not not be of a good vertical like in that sense but potentially like utility products or homeware products potentially like in that region it works It's very niche-to-niche specific and brand orientation and layout specific. So I think, yeah, there's definitely use cases.

43:09Max Rolon:It's a clever idea. It's smart. But at the same time, the brand needs to make that call.

43:15Gavin McKew:Yeah. I'm a fan of Collective. Actually, I'm actually a bigger fan of Carl. I don't know if you guys use it, Carl. It's been around long before Collective, and they actually have a much more expansive network. Like you can pull in products from Target, from Walmart, from Best Buy. It doesn't just have to be a Shopify brand, but we've seen stores who have a single SKU, like maybe they sell a blender and bring in a product that complements it, like the oil to put on your blender, to keep it running. It's not something they sell, but there's good blender oil. And so they use Karo to bring that in, sell it on your site, one checkout, one experience.

43:53Gavin McKew:It feels like a brand. Like that I get. And I've seen stores like increase their average checkout size, like 60 % by adding products that are very complimentary to their core. Makes sense to me. Is this the new drop shipping?

44:11Max Rolon:Is this the new drop shipping? Is it Collective meets Shopify catalog? Is this the new drop shipping? Is there a way to kind of, do people find angles within that? I don't know.

44:21Gavin McKew:Max, are some of the brands that you work with using Collective or Caro?

44:25Max Rolon:or collective is i'd say like it's kind of come up when you can control their services so like yeah you know we work with a lot of multi-brand kind of businesses where the need to like bring that product catalog onto multiple shopify stores is something to solve like it can be solved through a pimp for example or you can do that cross upsell using something like collectives and so that's where collective can kind of shine rather than you know the wide sweeping thing which is I'm going to allow my products to be published anywhere. That is something that we don't typically see a lot of. It's probably handier for smaller brands as it is for larger brands.

45:01Max Rolon:You know, get some level of exposure in places you necessarily wouldn't. Really, it's about service and products and essentially maybe getting some free level of exposure. But I think for the larger brands, certainly when they're trying to protect the brand, it's maybe not prevalent. Yeah.

45:16Gavin McKew:I know we're getting close on time here. I want to pick one more feature that we highlight And then I want to talk about just one thing that we think was missed in this one. So Max, I know you saw my list. You probably have a list in your head. Is there one that we think we should highlight that we haven't talked about yet?

45:31Max Rolon:I mean, I got like a boring techie one, but it's been nice to see Shopify investing in a bit more of its POS back office, like omnichannel office, like small, but the fact that they took away the time limit on inventory system of order and data retention is a big one. like proper IMS, like proper inventory control within Shopify, it starts to break down at scale and then you're thinking about what you can bring in there. And so the fact that they've got purchase orders, transfer orders, like, you know, more inventory elements there and then starting to bring that into the POS surface is a very comforting thing for me to see is where looking at POS gaining more and more traction and being more and more attractive for brick and mortar scale brand.

46:15Gavin McKew:Yeah, they're clearly, that is a future path for them. Like that is, yeah. Gavin, which one would you want to highlight that we haven't yet?

46:25Max Rolon:Well, I've got a few, but I'm just going to do one which links exactly to what Max has just said. And I think I'm going to mention B2B features. So I think collectively, the B2B features, again, we got POS, we got some hardware, we got lots of tiny features that make big differences. I think B2B got the same as well. Potentially, the love it's probably deserved over the years. it's had to kind of be the second cousin to B2C. But I think we've seen the shift a little on that to a degree in this edition. And it was nice to see some B2B features and again linked to POS. So I think that unified commerce angle is becoming more relevant.

47:00Gavin McKew:Yeah, I noted a couple of highlights. I thought there was some really good ones in B2B too. So you can now issue store credit to your B2B merchants, which is important. ACH payments, when you're doing huge volumes, saving a couple of percent.

47:13Max Rolon:And Shopify payments was good. I like it. Yes, ACH is good. I mean, because again, you've got to think, and this, you know, how does Shopify make some money? It probably makes some money from this checker, right? And if you have to give some of that aware to create efficiency around how B2B users use, I think that's a really interesting player and very proactive from Shopify to act on that and deliver what's kind of being asked in the B2B space.

47:38Gavin McKew:Yeah, and then the dynamic payment terms, I thought was very useful too. So if you want to give different terms to a wholesaler who spends hundreds of thousands a few a year versus someone who doesn't, you can give them longer terms, better terms, like net 90 with 1 % versus net 30 with 2%.

48:00Max Rolon:Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you only had like the, obviously the terms meets catalog setup. So you had to set a catalog, set a set terms. And then you didn't have any level of dynamic between catalog and terms. the fuck that we can now do that massive so many use cases and the fact that like everything is backbone by the api so that like big part of b2b is extensibility of b2b and how it fits into a you know wp and all that kind of stuff so the fact that payment terms are exposed in an api

48:28Gavin McKew:level layer is also like fully powerful yep uh one last one that i wanted to highlight it's a small one but i think it's actually super useful and i've found myself needing this a lot is the direct editing in the theme editor. It seems like a small feature that not a lot of people talked about, but now in your theme editor, if you want to change the price on a product or change copy or change something, because I always would have my theme editor and then go back to the product and go back to the thing. And context shifting costs a lot of time. And when you can do something when you're in one workflow, I find it a lot easier.

49:00Gavin McKew:This might be for smaller brands where they're managing only a few products, but I think it'll be a big time saver for a lot of brands.

49:09Max Rolon:Yeah, me too.

49:09Gavin McKew:It's not just about editing,

49:11Max Rolon:where you can actually see the value. So it's like, even if you don't actually edit the thing, the fact that you have visibility on those data endpoints can continue going in that flow.

49:20Gavin McKew:Correct. Yeah, I think that you'll actually be able to see all the options that are on a product and change them right from there as well too, right? I think so.

49:28Max Rolon:Yeah, I haven't played with it yet, but that's my... You can see the options. You can see anything that it lives on within the matter fields or anything that it subs off. that particular field. Hugely valuable, even valuable from a standpoint if you were to bring in a third-party ERP integration or you want to do anything from an integrational standpoint, at a later stage at least you can see where that lives, what that looks like on the backend, without necessarily having to scope around and look at what that looks like on the backend. So yeah, really great.

49:54Gavin McKew:Okay, what was missed? What was the thing that, was there anything you were hoping for that didn't get announced?

50:00Max Rolon:I want to say like a little bit more in like admin to mission growth and like some thinking about the different workflows of brands that come in like i think this is going to be an area that will see some traction in 2026 so not holding my breath for too long but kind of that and how it might play into market how you might be doing you know you could do get users in certain countries to be playing nice and certain parts of the instance together would be a good thing to that would enable for some of the brands that we work with i think one thing that was slightly missed and they released sms through contact and now i think you've probably seen how you can now sms as well as email through yeah it's now instead of shopify it's shopify messaging shopify messaging i think the part and i don't know whether it was necessarily missed as opposed to it's just in the roadmap and they build it out is if you look at what like clavio and whatnot kind of do around floors and how that links to that messaging i think some type of unification between messaging on sms and email but that's kind of potentially linked to flow so it's kind of like you know you can essentially build contact flows within shopify itself using these native features because right now the reason i think if you and i mean obviously shopify is a vested interest in clavio but in the sense of if you look at if you look at for smaller brands why they would need clavio it's essentially around communication and flow and really shopify already has that because it has flow and it can now comes through sms and email but the part of the unification of that pulling together yes it can be built but it should kind of just be kind of almost there small but massive i the one i thought

51:39Gavin McKew:i i think it's going to happen whether it's the next edition or a few editions down the road is i i feel like shopify needs to launch shopify cdp so like and that's what i was thinking in my head earlier when I said PDP instead of PIM, a customer data platform that they seem to be going in this direction with their AI personalization. They've kind of got loose customer segments you can create and they're kind of building a lot of wrappers around it, but like a true customer data platform of knowing who the customer is, everything about them, the lifetime.

52:16Max Rolon:And linked to PIM as well on that point here as well, we're seeing on our end as many migrations with shopify to pim as people who are getting rid of pim and then using pim on there and then what the only part that they miss is a cvp part where they want that full kind of what's the customer journey what are they all doing what does that data set look like but bringing all that together as a collective yeah he's kind of i go in some stores and like

52:42Gavin McKew:the the tags on products just is overwhelming and the way that they're managing it and i thought and actually I asked ChatGPT if like, does this make sense? Like should Shopify be going in their direction? It said Shopify is essentially building an agentic commerce future on top of a customer model that was designed for 2014. So I guess, yeah, I mean, I don't know.

53:07Max Rolon:ChatGPT is a bit harsh, but. I like that cynical view. I like that cynical view. It's pretty true. But I think it's a good question to ask. Yes, it's investing in agentic, but it's also investing in owning the customer more and more. And like a big part of the unification story is like have a united, like a unified profile of that customer and then be able to action that across a multi-surface channel environment, turn up anywhere, you know, someone wants to interact. And so I think it is going to mature over time. I'm very interested in like the interplay with something like Klaviyo that, you know, you know, there is some CDP there as well.

53:45Max Rolon:And, you know, that's really tied into SMS and email and app prompts and what have you. And what's the big picture there and how much does Shopify want to take on? Yeah, it is as well, Max, on that. I think sidekicks potentially the eyepass for all of those things to happen, whether they're unified apps and non-unified apps. And I think if you start to look at it a little bit that way, in the sense of like from a brand perspective, I think that's where they see sidekick living. It is essentially the iPass for all these internal flows to then be built out, like these full customer journey, owning checkout, A-B testing, reports, flows, and then reporting back.

54:21Max Rolon:And I think it's some really smart moves by Shopify in how they're kind of getting there without really demonstrating the master plan.

54:29Gavin McKew:Yeah, agreed. Well, this was fun. there was 147 ones we didn't announce so or that we didn't discuss on the show um make sure you check them out everyone listening go go read all about them it's it's worth the time some of them are really worth playing i mean we didn't even talk about uh the the new the flexible inventory controls i loved the unlisted products you can create things that are hidden products now that you can use for multiple reasons like there's so much um in this one it's definitely worth checking out. This was a lot of fun. We'll have to do it again on the next six months in the summer editions.

55:07Gavin McKew:Can you guys just let our listeners know really quick if someone wants to follow you or learn more about you, your company, what social media platforms you're active on and where you want to send them? Yeah, totally.

55:17Max Rolon:My name is Max Rolland. Find me on LinkedIn, CTO of Domain. Pretty mildly active there. So, you know, we'll get back in touch quickly. The website is meetdomain.com. You can always get in touch there. Or you can reach out to me at max.meatdomain.com. Amazing. Yeah, Gavin McHugh, Sheerall Commerce. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You can reach me out on there. Gavin at sheerallcommerce.com if there's any queries around anything. But this has been super fun, Jay. Thank you so much for having me.

55:45Gavin McKew:Well, thank you for giving the time and coming on and sharing your insights. I appreciate it. Max, amazing. Thank you, Max. Talk soon, guys. Bye. Bye, guys. As you know, at the end of every Every episode, I like to give a 1 % win. That's why it's called the Shopify 1 % podcast, because if you improve 1 % every episode, by the end of the year, you will be 3 ,700 % better. That's just the math on 1 % compounding. So this was an amazing episode. There was, we could have gone into, we probably could have talked for five hours on all these, on all the things that came out. But I wanted today's 1 % tip to be related to something that came out in additions.

56:23Gavin McKew:There's a lot to pick from, but I think the most important thing probably for the next six to 12 months is for you to become AI discoverable. So here's the 1 % tip today. Pick your top 10 products and we're going to make them AI discoverable because I, let me say something, this is probably going to annoy a few people, but your biggest competitor next year is probably not another brand. And it's confusion on the customer's part and on AI's part. If AI can't figure out what you sell and how to exactly answer questions, because the way people discover products is changing. And more shoppers are asking AI what to buy than going to Google or going to a friend.

57:06Gavin McKew:They're just trusting the answer. And if your product data is unclear, AI will just skip you or misunderstand you and falsely recommend you or recommend the competitor who just explains it better. It doesn't even mean that your competitor has a better product. They just have better data about the product on their page. And most Shopify stores that have the same problem, they have amazing products, but they have messy or no explanations of what exactly the product does, how it's used, who it's for, you know, graphs or data of like strength in certain areas, like every single thing that a customer would ask needs to be on that product page.

57:44Gavin McKew:And so you don't need a full rebrand. You don't need a new theme. You don't need even a bigger budget here to win. You just need clarity on your products because the brands that win in this new AI driven world won't just have the best product. They'll have the best understood product. And this is perfectly aligned with where Shopify is going. Shopify is doing everything they can to allow your store to be found in a agentic world. And like, to be honest, like a lot of, I think this is not a false statement when people say your homepage won't matter anymore. Like AI will be your homepage. How AI sees you will be here, your homepage.

58:20Gavin McKew:So today's 1 % win is just how do you become the easiest brand to recommend? And I got a few tips here, but what I would do is pick your top 10 products and make them AI ready just by tightening the product. I call it the truth layer, like everything about it. Top 10. I know you might have thousands of products, but you know, there's that 80, 20, 90, 10 rule where there's a small number of products that will make up the majority of your revenue. make sure those are perfect you don't need to redesign or rewrite everything but just make sure they have the key fields that make your product instantly understandable to a human and to a machine in seconds okay so just choose the right 10 first of all and this is actually sidekick can do this for you you just go to sidekick and ask it what your top 10 selling products are and it will tell you there's reports for it as well now probably the first thing you want to do is make sure the title makes sense.

59:14Gavin McKew:If it's cute, but vague, you're losing. So make sure the title is product type core plus core benefit plus key differentiator, not some vague thing, but you know, the gut, the gut pill that stops bloating and doesn't make you tired. Like I don't know, whatever it is, right? So like make, make it crystal clear what it does, the core benefit and why it's different. Not just something like the daily reset pill. Like what is it? Maybe a human might get that, but it means nothing to AI. So make it crystal clear. And I would look at the first five lines of every product description on those top 10 products.

59:56Gavin McKew:Most stores I go on, they bury the lead. They put the value further down, start with the lead, start with the details, I was like right off the bat, who is like these have to be answered in the first five lines. These, who is it for? What problem does it solve? What is kind of one proof point? So that like social proof point or 10 ,000 people have improved gut health with this, like one proof point. What's included and what should you do next? If a shopper only reads that, they should still understand that. If they only read your first five lines, they should know who it's for, the problem it solves, what is one proof point, what is included, and what should I do next.

1:00:40Gavin McKew:I would also, I don't know what step I'm on here, I kind of lost track. I think this is step three. Add an FAQ to those 10 product pages. Mini FAQ. It doesn't even have to look neat. But AI devours these FAQs and word them in the way that a customer would ask AI about it. Not necessarily like typical things like what happens if I break it or someone's going to ask AI, I'll go to the gut health thing, but what is the best gut health pill for someone who is lactose intolerant? And that literally should be on your product page. What is the best lactose intolerant gut pill? Because that AI needs to know that.

1:01:26Gavin McKew:It's not going to figure that out by reading the ingredients. You have to have that right on the page. I, minimum five, but see if you can get more. Like see if you can get 10 or 15 FAQs that customers would ask AI on your product pages. Okay. So it, it not just good for AI, it actually reduces support tickets. It reduces returns. It's good for conversion, but most importantly, it gives AI clean answers to pull from. You know, the last thing I want to say is there's a lot you can do for this, but I want to keep it more of a 1 % tip, but consider adding some meta fields and with details about your product, like as far as like ingredients, materials, dimensions, compatibility lists, care instructions.

1:02:09Gavin McKew:These are really, really important too. Actually Shopify has an app now called, I think it's called knowledge, knowledge base. I should double check that. Yep. It is called knowledge base. This is perfect for it. This is actually great for those FAQs as well, It adds them as meta fields on and it puts it in the JSON schema, I think on the product pages as well, too. It puts it in a way that LLMs can digest it. Use that app for sure. But make sure you have those types of details on your product pages. So this is a simple tip and it is and it works because clarity really will compound for you over the next couple of years.

1:02:44Gavin McKew:Your ads will convert better when customers understand products. It'll improve your SEO, too. Your returns drop. Your support load goes down. But most importantly, AI will become a bigger part of the way customers find you and products will become easier for it to recommend. So that's my 100 % tip for today. And hey, can I ask you a quick favor? Would you mind leaving me a five star review in whichever player you're listening to Spotify, Apple podcast? These reviews are what help others find the show. Our mission is to help as many Shopify merchants as possible. And also make sure you subscribe.

1:03:17Gavin McKew:That way you get notified when there is a new episode and you can stay ahead of the competition with amazing content like you heard today. So it means a lot. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being a part of this journey and being a listener. It means the world to me. And I appreciate all the comments and feedback that we've been getting and especially the reviews on the platforms. I read every single one. Thanks so much. We'll see you on the next episode.