The Unofficial Shopify Podcast

"Shop has this amazing opportunity to convert shoppers into people that are being entertained by shoppable content."

Bill Staley built the first Shop Mini to launch on Shopify's Shop app. Food Social brings 10,000+ shoppable recipes to 200 million potential users. We dig into why Shop is Shopify's most underrated channel, how personalization matches recipes to purchase history, and why intent-based shopping beats interruption market...

Dana Roberts spent years watching fifth-grade girls panic through their first periods with ill-fitting products and no preparation. The period care aisle hadn't changed in decades. Same brands. Same sizing that was never designed for a 10-year-old's body. When she pitched the idea to her god-sister, Dr. Monica Williams, she got a polite brush-off. Years later, Monica's own daughter started showing signs of puberty, and suddenly the...

"We were close to closing the company two or three times. Every winter was like, okay, that's it. Goodbye company."

Chris Erthel built Meller sunglasses from a Spanish side project into a brand that sells a pair every 28 seconds. Along the way, he helped scale HelloBody from €30M to €107M as fractional CMO before its €330M exit to Henkel. We talked about why US brands fail in Europe, the cultural quirks that kill conversions in Germ...

Montana Knife Company pulled in $1.7 million over Black Friday weekend without discounting a single knife. Co-founder Brandon Horoho explains how: five targeted product drops, one for each customer persona. An email cadence so aggressive he was watching unsubscribe rates like a hawk. And a VIP program where the reward shows up unannounced in your mailbox. It's a story about knowing exactly who your customer is and giving them what ...

"It's really about helping merchants become more informed, helping them make more bold decisions."

Aaron Glazer, Product Lead at Shopify, reveals two features from Winter '26 Edition that change how merchants test and optimize their stores. Rollouts brings native split testing directly into the admin. SimGym deploys AI agents trained on billions of purchases to find what's broken before real customers do.

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Shopify just dropped their "Renaissance Edition" with 150+ product updates. We cut through the noise. Sidekick finally works—I use it daily now for reports, segments, and Flow automations. Native A/B testing arrives with Rollouts and SimGym. The new Product Network let one early adopter earn $1,400 in commission in 30 days. And Shop App? #1 in the App Store over BFCM. Here's what actually matters for store owners.

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"Do you care enough about new customer acquisition? What you care about shows up based off of your actions, not your thoughts or your words."

Meta's Andromeda update broke everyone's brain and most brands still haven't recovered. Nehal Kazim, CEO of Ad Pros, argues that the industry overcorrected by wildly overproducing content, burning through budgets on concepts that never receive meaningful spend. His math: you're paying $250-500...

Kate Assaraf tried every plastic-free shampoo bar on the market. They sat in her shower like, and I'm quoting here, "tombstones." Failed products. Dead ends. So she decided to make her own. Without Instagram ads. Without Amazon. Without any of the things you're supposed to need to build a business. Today on our program, we follow Kate's journey from beauty industry veteran to the woman who said no to everything, and built a million...

There's this thing that happens when you run an e-commerce store. You know you need to discount, but you're terrified. Terrified of training customers to wait for sales. Terrified of looking cheap. So you do nothing, or worse, you slap WELCOME10 on your popup and call it a day. Meanwhile, the big brands? They're discounting constantly. Just invisibly.

Cara Marin from Seguno looked at 162,000 discount code sets. Real data from real s...

So there's this guy, Bora Celik. Software engineer, thirty years in the game. Last year he tells his investors something crazy: SaaS is dead. Not dying. Dead. And here's the thing - he might be right. See, while everyone's playing with ChatGPT, asking it questions, Bora's building these things called AI agents. They don't just answer questions. They do the work. Like, actually reach out to influencers, negotiate deals, send product...

So there's this moment in 2022 where Celia Hatch wakes up from a dream about chicken supplements called "Chicken Spice." She thinks it's ridiculous. Fast forward to today, and she's running a seven-figure business serving America's 13% of households with backyard chickens.

The twist is it started as her teenage son's eighth-grade homework assignment. He made $500 selling herbs in craft bags, then quit. Ms. Hatch, a serial entreprene...

Shopify just went from 100 variants per product to 2,048. Shopify Partners Kurt Elster and Paul Reda tested it and found out there's a secret limit at 250 where everything changes. Your theme might work perfectly, it might half-work, or it might completely break depending on when it was built.

They also dig into the new VS Code-based theme editor (developers love it, merchants hate it), the "unlisted" product status that's perfect f...

Kurt and Filip break down buy-two-get-two offers that crush percentage discounts, why five emails on Black Friday is actually conservative, and the three-week framework 8-figure brands use to win Q4. If you're planning to send a couple emails on Cyber Monday and call it done, this episode will make you rethink everything.

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"These tools rely on automation that only catches 30% of issues. And for blind users with screen readers? The overlays often conflict with their assistive tech—making the site harder to use."

Bet Hannon runs AccessiCart, an agency that fixes accessibility problems for e-commerce stores—usually right after they've been sued. We talked about why "quick fix" overlay plugins are making the problem worse, the four accessibility issues yo...

I spent three days at Smart Marketer Live in Denver, capturing raw conversations with agency owners, brand founders, and Meta reps about what's actually working in 2025.

This isn't your typical conference recap. We're talking about Meta's Andromeda update that killed everyone's ad performance over the summer, why TikTok Shop might be a trap, and how a chicken supplement business owner plans to poach employees like she's manifesting ...

So there's this baseball media company. They make shirts about guys with nicknames like "The Big Dumper." And they needed three different store experiences, but only wanted to use one store. What our co-host Paul Reda figured out next is either brilliant or insane. Maybe both.

Today on the show, we're asking: when does a hack become a feature? When does one store become three? And why would anyone voluntarily remove every frontend a...

"ChatGPT is not that sophisticated yet. So for marketers, what that means is there are real ways right now for arbitrage in this short period of time before ChatGPT gets good enough to say, no, we're only showing the proper result."

Mac King from Domaine breaks down why merchants are seeing ChatGPT and Perplexity show up as referral sources in their analytics—and what to do about it. We talked about the terminology wars (GEO vs AEO ...

Jamil Bhuya has scaled businesses across three wildly different industries: restaurants, beauty, and now Shopify agencies. That multi-industry perspective gives him a unique superpower—he can spot the conversion killers that store owners become blind to. We talked about why fresh eyes matter more than fancy tools, the psychology behind purchase objections, and how being too close to your business destroys your ability to see what c...

We're seeing 10x more bots than humans on client stores. Fraudsters are buying your cheapest items to test stolen credit cards. Your SEO agency wants 150 new collections.

This week, we dig into the actual problems hitting Shopify stores right now. Not theory, not best practices, but the real BS we're fixing for clients. We break down why your analytics are lying, how to stop credit card testers, and whether more granular SEO collect...