Off the Record Ecommerce
Insider conversations about how to grow an ecommerce brand on Shopify. From marketing and conversion strategy to operations and scaling, Leighton Taylor and Patrick Rice share what's working now and what isn't.
Episodes
Email marketing specialist Mel Driver breaks down the Klaviyo flows every Shopify store needs, the open and click-through rates worth aiming for, and how often to email your list. She also covers segmentation, selling subscriptions, cashback loyalty, SMS, and the most common Klaviyo account mistakes.
Links Mentioned
- Mel Driver: https://meldriver.co
- Klaviyo: https://www.klaviyo.com
- Redeemly (affiliate link): https://apps.shopif...
One Shopify store we work with had more than 65% of its traffic coming from bots, and it's a growing problem that skews analytics, burns through app credits, and can even lead to a cloned copy of your store. Leighton Taylor and Dave Tanguay break down how they fight Shopify bot traffic with Cloudflare O2O, AI-written security rules, and ongoing monitoring for clone sites.
Links Mentioned
Some Shopify food, beverage, and CPG brands are making $20,000 to $30,000 a month from their recipe pages alone. Patrick Bollenbach, founder of Recipe Kit, joins Leighton and Patrick Rice to break down recipe SEO on Shopify and how his new app Recon catches the scammers cloning Shopify stores.
Links Mentioned
- Recipe Kit: https://recipekit.com/
- Recon Brand & Clone Protection: https://recon.bot/
- Judge.me: https://judge.me/
- S...
What is a good Shopify conversion rate? It depends on your traffic mix, your industry, and your price point far more than on any benchmark you will find online. In this episode we break down the three step funnel from add to cart, to reaching checkout, to a completed purchase, plus the drop off numbers that show you where a store is actually losing sales.
Links Mentioned
Patrick Rice started a Minecraft YouTube channel at 13 and made his first $3,000 online before he had ever heard of SEO. He walks Leighton through the whole path to running a Shopify SEO and Google Ads agency, including the client he lost to a migration that went sideways and the point where managing everything himself turned into a ceiling.
Links Mentioned
Leighton started his first ecommerce business on Etsy while teaching English in China, then found Shopify in 2012 and turned freelance work into Envision. He ran the Shopify agency from Mexico, Ecuador, and Southeast Asia, then sold the house in 2020 and spent five and a half years working from a sailboat.
Patrick and Leighton dig into all of it, plus the hiring mistakes, QA systems, and priority questions that came with growing a ...
LTV, or customer lifetime value, tells you what a customer is really worth to your Shopify store, and it decides how much you can afford to spend acquiring the next one. Leighton and Patrick break down how to measure LTV using cohorts and time windows, why contribution margin matters more than gross revenue, and the levers that actually move it: post-purchase email and SMS flows, subscriptions, loyalty points, retargeting, and AOV.
...Agentic commerce is generating a lot of hype, but very few people are actually buying inside AI tools yet. Leighton and Patrick break down where AI really fits in ecommerce today, and the practical Shopify setup work every store owner should be doing right now.
Links Mentioned
- Shopify Knowledge Base app: https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-knowledge-base
- Shopify Inbox: https://apps.shopify.com/inbox
- Gorgias: https://www.gorgias.c...
Everyone wants to increase their AOV (Average Order Value), but it's not always clear how. Leighton and Patrick break down what actually moves AOV in the right direction: free shipping thresholds with dynamic progress bars, relevant cart cross-sells, frequently bought together widgets, build-your-own bundles, and post-purchase upsells, plus the two cross-sell mistakes that cost stores trust and revenue.
Links Mentioned
Many Shopify sellers have no idea whether their Google Ads are actually making money. Patrick Rice breaks down the numbers that tell you the truth, why a 10x ROAS can still lose you money, and how to know your ad manager is doing a good job even if you never open the dashboard yourself.
Links Mentioned
- Google Ads Search Terms Report (Campaigns > Insights and reports > Search terms): https://support.google.com/google-ads/...
Shopify keeps telling you a new theme version is available, but should you actually update? Leighton and Patrick break down when to update your Shopify theme, when to switch to a new one, and when leaving it alone is the smarter (and cheaper) move.
Links Mentioned
- Shopify Theme Store: https://themes.shopify.com
- Ilana's JSON-LD for SEO (structured data app): https://apps.shopify.com/json-ld-for-seo
- Theme Updater & Backups b...
"What apps should I use on my Shopify store?" is a question we hear all the time. Leighton and Patrick break down how to decide between a Shopify app and custom development, the trade-offs of each, and the apps they install on almost every store, from reviews and subscriptions to CRO, SEO, and indexing.
Links Mentioned
- Shopify Search & Discovery: https://apps.shopify.com/search-and-discovery
- Judge.me Product Reviews: https...
Migrating your store to Shopify can tank your organic traffic if you're not careful. In this episode, Leighton Taylor and Patrick Rice walk through the exact pre- and post-launch checklist that protects your SEO, ad tracking, and conversion rate when making the switch.
Links Mentioned
- Microsoft Clarity (free heatmaps & session recordings): https://clarity.microsoft.com
- LambdaTest (cross-browser & device testing): https...
How do you actually do SEO for a Shopify store in 2026? Patrick Rice and Leighton Taylor break down when SEO is worth the investment, how to size up your competition, what legitimate link building looks like today, and how to get your products recommended by AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews.
Links Mentioned
- Ilana's JSON-LD for SEO (Shopify app): https://apps.shopify.com/json-ld-for-seo
- Shopify's GEO Playbook: ht...
Your product page is the most important page on your store, so in this episode we break down how to optimize it for both conversion rate and SEO. We cover product imagery, reviews and social proof, cross-sells and bundles, unique product content, structured data, and page speed for Shopify stores.
Links Mentioned
- Judge.me (reviews): https://judge.me
- Stamped (reviews): https://stamped.io
- Okendo (reviews): https://www.okendo.io
- ...
Collection pages are the SEO and CRO workhorse of any Shopify store. They rank for the most commercial keywords, and they're where most shoppers decide whether to keep browsing or bounce. In this episode, Leighton and Patrick break down how to balance content for search engines with an optimal user experience, plus the specific Shopify defaults to turn off and the subcategory strategy that wins both rankings and conversions.
LINKS ...
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