The Unofficial Shopify Podcast

Amanda Engelman is the Director of Product at Shopify leading advertising and channel expansion. She built the Shopify Product Network, a free app that lets other Shopify merchants' products appear on your store. You earn commission on every sale, you keep the customer, and you get category expansion insights without carrying a single unit of inventory. One store earned over $3,000 in commissions in just two months.

We dig into how...

"Even if it ends up being something that ends the universe, it at least will have been a fun ride. So let's do it."

That's what Karl Meisterheim said when Kurt pitched him on building a Shopify app. Over a year later, Promo Party Pro is live, and the journey from "this should be easy" to "why is the cart API doing that" was anything but smooth. Kurt, Paul Reda, and Karl sit down to talk through the whole thing: why free gift with p...

"Nobody wants to get rich slowly."

Nick Mertz started Pins and Aces with $6,000 and zero outside capital. Today, his golf lifestyle brand does $25 million a year, employs over 40 people, and ships every order from their own warehouse outside Denver. But with customer acquisition costs through the roof, Nick stopped fighting the ad auction and built an omnichannel machine instead. We break down how live selling on Whatnot and TikTok...

"I kinda told myself I need to take a step back from e-commerce. When I took a step back, e-commerce said no and put me back in."

Amer Grozdanic burned out running paid media for brands. The results were good — but never good enough. So he walked away, rebuilt his agency around what he could actually control, and landed clients like MVMT Watches and Billie Eilish without spending a dollar on ads. Today, Praella works with brands up ...

For most direct-to-consumer brands, the term "ERP" evokes dread. Six-month implementations. Six-figure costs. Software built for factories, not Shopify stores. Kyle Hency experienced that pain firsthand. He scaled Chubbies Shorts past $100 million in revenue, and along the way, his "sophisticated" spreadsheet system (built by a former banker) completely fell apart. The breaking point? When Nordstrom called wanting to stock Chubbies...

Here's something most merchants don't realize: you can run paid ads through an influencer's handle instead of your own. It's called whitelisting, and it converts about 15% better. Brad Hoos, CEO of Outloud Group and owner of Shopify store MuskOx Flannels, has been doing influencer marketing since YouTube was mostly cat videos. In this episode, he breaks down how whitelisting works step by step, why he thinks of creators as "decentr...

"You can't control tariffs. You can't control the weather. But you can control what's happening within your business."

Salena Knight has audited thousands of retail businesses since 2007 and found that 4 out of 5 seven-figure stores share the same blind spot—and it's not marketing. It's money. We talked about why inventory is secretly taxable cash sitting on your shelves, how one brand increased profit margins 30% by auditing their ...

"I would have invested 100% of all of the money that we raised into Meta. I would have done nothing else but secure that one channel first."

After launching Troop, a functional mushroom gummy brand, Jake Mellman discovered that community events and sampling don't pay the bills. What does: Meta ads, a 76% contribution margin, and defaulting customers to quarterly subscriptions. Now he's applied those lessons to Psilly Goose, a functi...

"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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Swym - Wish...

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...