KORE Outdoors Podcast

Mike Blarowski
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MIke: [00:00:00] his 12-year-old son, and himself, built a Shopify store using Sidekick and Chat GPT. They built it and no one came.

So AI does do a lot of the heavy lifting and it answers a lot of these very relevant questions.

You still need to learn how to run an eCom business .

On today's episode, we're talking all things e-commerce, specifically Shopify. We get into the foundational elements you need for your Shopify site, the apps to use, which ones to ignore, and most importantly, how do you get people to visit your website and keep them coming back again and again. Today's guest is Mike Borovsky from Iceberg Commerce.

Mike has been building on the internet since the late nineties when he co-founded one of the industry's most iconic websites, pink Bike. Mike now runs an e-commerce agency specializing in the Shopify ecosystem. He's based in Kamar, Alberta, where he runs his [00:01:00] agency, and somehow also makes time to pursue his passion as a ski guide.

Before we jump into the episode, please leave us a review. It's really helpful. This podcast is a production of core, the Kuni Outdoor Recreation Enterprise. You can learn more about Core by clicking the link in the show notes now. Please enjoy this e-commerce workshop with Mike Borovsky.

Christian: .

So I guess that begs the question how did you get started online? Like

MIke: How did I get started

Christian: Yeah. Yeah. Like what? What introduced you to the wild world? The internet.

MIke: Yeah, totally. So completely coincidental. So gonna go back to 19 97, 19 98. I'm working as a electronics engineering technologist at an on an r and d team at NovAtel GPS. I meet another guy there who I introduced to mountain biking. We become friends and then one day we say, you know, in our downtime we should, there's this internet thing and it's not going away.

So we need to learn how to make websites So rad makes rad something. And I make, I [00:02:00] make Mike's bicycle cafe. And uh, and then one day we're like, we should make a real mountain biking website, and it's gonna be trail resource. It's gonna be telling people where to go and ride. So we go on a trip to Rosalind.

This idea gets born very quickly. We realize that the GPS is not accurate enough and it's too expensive. So we still launch this website and we want to be like downhill mountain biking.com. Whatever the most raddest, craziest names we're thinking of everything is taken even back then. So finally I look at Radi.

I'm like, Hey, try Pink Pike. Is that available? Pink pike.com? Yep, that's available. Okay, let's register that. And the rest is history. So we started Pink Pike. Within a year it went number one in the world, and it remained that for its entire lifetime. A few years ago, rad sold it to outside media together with Trail Forks.

Unfortunately, my handshake deal didn't pan out the way I was expecting it. Not only that, they actually wrote me out of history of Pink Bike. I'm guessing [00:03:00] this is that their lawyer's advice? I have no idea. Maybe they thought I would come asking for money, but, uh, yeah, pink, pink, like Mike got a erase from the history of, of that business for the six years that I was running it.

So the other day I was going through a binder of clippings, magazine clippings, thank you letters, things. We sponsored videos. There was an episode on Ride Guide that we were in on in Winter Green, like, so it's pretty hilarious. But long-winded answer, that's how I started online is, uh, creating and running Pink Pike and building our own e-commerce because there was no e-commerce.

Christian: Right. So the, well that's I guess two things. Um, how does it feel to be written out of something that grew so big that you were a part of?

MIke: You know, it's really interesting. I catch myself, I, I catch the ego side and the ego saying, Mike, you need to feel important. You need to be recognized. And then I, I bring myself back down to like, reality. And I say, you know what, like the amount of opportunities that came my way [00:04:00] because of Pink Bike and just like learning how to do things in online, realizing that you need to be up at five in the morning before your day job every single day to put a piece of content on there.

There was no SEO, we just wrote content, right? And it got me crazy. Things like my first job as a heliski guide, as a practicum at uh, cell Kick Tanger in re was because the guiding manager heard I started pink white. So now hurt feelings. It felt a little bit weird. I realized that. Being written out of history, the person that was responsible for this is my ex-business partner, and there is a very good reason why we don't work together anymore.

So life is not just about money. I don't care if you got a hundred, 200, $300 million for this business. If I got half of that today, my life wouldn't change. I would still do the same thing. I would get up and I would do e-commerce because I love it. So

Christian: Oh wow. Okay. Yeah, that's, that's pretty awesome. Good for you. Um, there was a second part of that, but I completely [00:05:00] blanked on it, so I won't even, I won't even try to get into the second part of it. , Why I wanted to have this conversation with you is 'cause I, I would like to start something more on this podcast around like a workshop in that sense that, like, I've had a few people on, I had Andy Bethune on about branding, uh, Dustin, Westin, sc, about the EOS system.

And I thought there are, if you run a business that is selling something m. Which most of our listeners are, chances are you're running on Shopify and you are a Shopify expert. You've been in it for, you've been in e-commerce. Well, Jill, like you said since before, it was called E-commerce. So I thought it'd be great to have you on to help us break down, like what can we do better?

What do we need to know about Shopify? What could we improve on? You know, it can be sometimes daunting, um, to like crack open the black box and look inside of it. So that's what I wanted to do in this conversation is jump into it, get your passion, get your insights, and see where you can go with it.

MIke: No, that sounds good. You know, you called me an expert and those are big shoes to fill. And I like to tell people, like, I love to surround [00:06:00] myself by people that are always smarter than I am. And, and try to stay really, really humble because that's where all the learnings happen, right? So I don't know if expert's the right word, but I'm definitely passionate about it.

Christian: Yeah. Oh, great. I mean, one reason why I love Shopify, two reasons I love Shopify. Uh, it's Canadian and I think that's wonderful. The second one is, it's built by Toby, who is actually a, a, he was a merchant before he built Shopify, so he owned a, a snow online snowboard shop. That's what he was selling. So I love that it's built by an entrepreneur, by a bootstrapping entrepreneur, and it still has that as its core.

The interesting thing about Shopify is that, . Your local business can be running on Shopify while at the same time, like the largest e-commerce stores in the world are also running on the very same platform. So there's a huge spectrum of abilities and capabilities of it. So before we get into, , the nitty gritty, I thought we could kind of build out a foundation of like where people should start.

So I'm going to assume that in this conversation, the people listening are familiar with Shopify. They probably [00:07:00] have a store, , they have some understanding of where we are in, in, in the whole ecosystem of e-commerce. , But a, a place to start would be like, what are the three or five like critical decisions that people need to make kind of on the foundational level as they approach their

MIke: On Shopify.

Christian: Yeah,

MIke: Oh, that's, that's an awesome question. And uh, before I answer that, may I just talk about, very quickly about if you are not on Shopify, how the process works, because I think this is important.

Christian: okay. Let's go.

MIke: 'cause what happens is like people often get overwhelmed because they are on legacy platforms. So without giving any names, I'm gonna say I've talked to a very large map retailer in Calgary who's been in business for 20 years and he is on illusion, which is, does not work.

It's completely broken. He says, Mike, I can't switch because I have 80,000 SKUs. And I said to him, I don't wanna like make this sound trivial, but we do this, we do, we basically migrate people off of illusion, Magento, [00:08:00] WooCommerce, you name it, to get them on Shopify. So once you're on Shopify and you've broken that barrier, that barrier to entry, um, your question was about the most critical decisions they may need to make.

Right? So I think one of the number one things is like. Where are my customers? So am I building a local store in Canada or am I building a North American store? Right. Or worldwide, if you start going like beyond North America, things can get quite complex, right? But out of the box, Shopify is built to handle multicurrency and multi-country.

Um, and we can set it up, but that's a very important decision to make, right? The other thing is like, uh, so that's the geography and the currency handling, right? The other thing is like my app stack, and I know we're gonna get into apps later on, but like, what are some of the business critical apps that I might wanna use?

And that's a very high level conversations. 'cause I'm gonna be asking things like, do you want [00:09:00] to do subscription? Are you going to do business to business like wholesale? Right? How much of that are you gonna do? And then I would say lastly, what's really important too, is the theme. I know we can talk about that later, but like sometimes people think they have to have the fanciest theme in the world that costs a lot of money.

It's like, no, there is, I've built stores on very basic, very, really well bit built fast Shopify themes that are free, that are done by Shopify, right? And then another thing is like, are you a retailer? If you are a brick and mortar retailer, that's something we need to talk about because Shopify handles that beautifully at point of sale.

But you might not think of yourself as a retailer, or you go to a, you have a pop-up store, or you go to a farmer's market or like, uh, your previous guest with a ski poles you set up at the base of a, a ski hill. Right? So those are kind of some of the most important considerations.

Christian: . What do you think are some of the common mistakes that you see people make in those early phases of setting up a [00:10:00] shop?

MIke: , I think some of the common mistakes that I see are things like uploading massive images. They don't understand that an image needs to be sized to fit, its placeholder and it needs to be optimized for web. So they're doing that. You know, they're not setting up search on page search engine optimization correctly.

They don't understand things like, I'll get a little technical, but like all tags, h headings, like H ones, H two, so all that markup that helps search engines and now. The AI crawlers. So there is another thing that's beyond that CO now, it helps them really read your website and see what it's about, because they can't read and see images.

They can only read the text. Right. So that's some of the more common mistakes. And then often people get really, really overwhelmed and caught up in the nitty-gritty of the setup. But what they really forget about is like, what does my store actually look like? So they make it look okay on desktop, it looks [00:11:00] terrible and mobile, it's not responsive, and they don't realize that 80% of your traffic is, or it might be mobile.

Christian: , You cracked open the door, so I'm just gonna kick it open. , This has come up recently in that, you know, we used to be , focusing on search engine optimization for search engines, and now we're really focusing on ai. , Do you think that there's, like, are you building sites differently now because I've heard that.

Dropdowns and accordions and all those things that were so common are now like, AI doesn't work. You can't use, you know, it's like it's actually, uh, breaking your speed because the AI aren't crawling on it. Are you seeing those things and are there workarounds to that? Is that kind of, is that kind of a common movement we're seeing now in Shopify?

MIke: So basically, so it's called geo generative engine optimization. You're gonna see this word geo more, and geo doesn't mean geography in the context of ai, it means generative engine optimization. So there are some things that are extremely important, and I don't wanna for this to get like extremely technical, but like, let's [00:12:00] just say I am doing a very deep dive into it right now.

I listened to a brilliant presentation at the Gathering couple weeks ago in Bath by a gentleman that runs a company. It's a $600 million marketing company in. The United States, they do everything there at a, at a large scale, as we all know. , And he did a wonderful presentation on that. But what it really comes down to, you know, I mentioned in the previous question, H one tags, H two tags, all tags.

You need to be doing all of that. And you also need to look at what's called schema, which is this markup that's used by Google forever and ever, but also by AI to make sure they understand everything. Where are the reviews? Who's the author? Where's the business located? Is there a return policy, on the product?

Right? So without getting super technical, there's a little bit of markup and, and setting up things in the, in the right way. And there are also some Shopify apps [00:13:00] that I'm doing a deep dive on right now that are specific for geo optimization. So if we did this again, let's say three months from now, we had another episode, we could go deep into that because I promise this is a, a very large area of, of my, and my team's focus right now.

Christian: Yeah, I mean, it's true. Just anecdotally, I'm using it for myself. Like I, it's so rare that I go to Google now to ask. Comparisons for or to, to search up products. Like, uh, I just go straight to, well I'm now, I'm on clo but I go straight to CLO and I'm like asking for a comparison chart on three different products, you know, and give it to me.

And they, and they just pull it up and it's there and it's beautiful. It's like, this is way easier than search. So I understand the necessity to start thinking about, especially if you're doing something that's like a, a technical product that you know, you want to know about the, the waterproofness or you want to know about the capacity or those things.

It's like, yeah, these are all technical things that the search engine engine or sorry, that the, the AI is gonna need to be able to crawl and pull quickly.

I'll put, I'll put a pin in that. We'll come back to AI in a second 'cause we can spend the whole conversation there, so we[00:14:00]

MIke: We absolutely could.

Christian: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned themes. , Just briefly, what are the themes are important? So a theme is basically the, the, the structure of the visual layout for your website.

What are some things that people need to consider, you know, top two or three things like, you know, consider this when you're picking a theme.

MIke: Absolutely. This is a really good question. So I would say, uh, speed, extremely important because, uh, people have no patience on the internet, very low attention span, especially if you're selling a product that's available elsewhere. So it needs to be super fast. It needs to have a really, really good functionality.

So Shopify has these things called sections and blocks anywhere, which makes custom page building a lot better and easier than it used to be. The other thing is it's store 2.0 compatible. Does it fit the new sort of framework that they have? And I always say like, how good are the reviews and a support for the theme you're about to pick, right?

So I generally speaking like themes [00:15:00] that are made in Canada or USA, like in North America, but I'm working with North American businesses. I like themes that. Our like Pixel Union would be one that I could think of. Out of Victoria, I've done a $500,000 build for King Horse Coffee with Pixel Union. That was headless e-commerce, running on sanity and and other things.

So that's the extreme version of that. But in this case, like it was all about the relationship with a local company. Right Now, having said that, a Don or Horizons theme from Shopify will do the job for certain type of businesses, and I'm working with quite a few. We are working with quite a few businesses that are on those three themes as well.

Does that answer your question? Yeah.

Christian: What's the easiest way for somebody to check the speed of a

MIke: Speed. Okay. So I mean, Shopify has their own little dashboard. It kind of uses Google Page insights. So Google Page insights is one, you're going to feel [00:16:00] very, very depressed because some of the things that it, the data gives you are actually. Kind of like very technical and really hard to optimize for, but doesn't mean that your site is necessarily slow as long as it's not basics, like huge amounts of Java script that's not loading a asynchronously or things like massive images that I talked about.

Right? But I would still use page speed. I use it on mobile and desktop. I look at the errors. And then GT Matrix is a tool I really like to use. And again, it gives you like a all the different important parameters. And then you can go into the different sections that are highlighted, like high priority, medium, and low.

And once you go into high priority, you can then discover if you're have experience in it, the things that it might be wrong with your site that are slowing down your site.

Christian: Okay. So that's a good way to basically just do a quick analysis of where you could speed things up.

MIke: Exactly. Yeah.

Christian: Okay, great. [00:17:00] Um, you, you mentioned being able to, you know, the kind of those early critical decisions that you make when you set up a site is thinking about, you know, if you're gonna sell B2B. So if you're gonna have a wholesale component of not just e-commerce running through your Shopify, um, how can businesses use Shopify to serve both the e-commerce part of their business and.

The alt, you know, you mentioned POS and the wholesale business. Like what does that look like from the backend to set that up properly and what would you, yeah. What are your suggestions on how to run that?

MIke: Awesome. Yeah, so I mean, I, it really truly depends what size of a business you are. So if you came to me and you said, Mike, we do whatever, $5 million plus a year, we're actually thinking of having some retail stores, or we have retail stores. I would say right away we're going to go build on Shopify Plus.

Shopify Plus has an incredible wholesale setup. They've made so many changes in the last two years, and every, not not a week goes by where I don't get pinged about some new feature, right? [00:18:00] So these things are very powerful and handled by Shopify, uh, pro. Now, Shopify Plus subscription, I meant pros on the retail side.

So Shopify plus subscription is, uh, north of $2,300 US a month. So it's not for everyone. Right? So now going back on the other side, the way I've been doing wholesale for smaller businesses that I work with is we use a combination of, uh, apps. And I've spent, me and my team spent quite a bit of time researching and handpick apps that we work really, really well.

So we are an agency partner with a com app called Spark Layer, which is very, very good for wholesale. And then we also use, and we're partnered with locksmith. So those two apps together, uh, make wholesale possible. One really important thing you need to decide when you are doing that. Are you building a hybrid site so direct to consumer and wholesale, or are you [00:19:00] building completely two separate sites?

And there is pros and cons to each, but a lot of businesses can get away with a hybrid SEC where they show B2B products to B2B tagged and logged in customers and they hide. The retail products from those customers and vice versa.

Christian: Okay. So I wanna dig into that a little bit because this is, this is something that came up for me personally when I was running my own Shopify

MIke: Yeah, you bet.

Christian: Um, so just to clarify, a hybrid site is basically, it's one URL where both my wholesale customers and my e-commerce customers are coming to the same URLA separate site is basically I'm running a completely separate.

Shopify site that's just dealing with my wholesale customers and a separate site that's just ring. So you said there's some pros and cons. Can you just quickly go through what those pros and cons could be and how? How would I go about making the best decision for my

MIke: yeah, you bet. So maybe I'll start with the one where you would want them separate. Separate would be like where the same products are available at wholesale and retail. [00:20:00] Consistently. But most importantly, it's more like where your inventory, your business unit, your warehousing, everything's done like sort of differently in your business.

And you have different people involved on that. You have different bank accounts. Uh, as soon as you have that two separate sites, it's the best way to go, right? If you're happy with depositing all your proceeds into the same bank accounts, if you have the same group of people working on it, if you're connected to the same warehouses, no problem.

Right? You can do a hybrid site. Uh, and that's, you know, there are example of businesses, uh, in the lower mainland I just built. The system for that are, you know, small skincare companies, organic skincare, that are a company of four people running the business. And they used to do things with spreadsheets and faxes.

And as of about a month ago, I actually received a phone call from one client and she goes, Mike, Mike, Mike, listen. And I thought I was in huge trouble. She goes, Mike, listen, wait, I'm gonna get my operations person on the, [00:21:00] on the phone here. And I get this like, testimonial, like from this girl that's just jumping up and down.

And she goes, you've changed our life. Right? So what she was trying to say by that is like, we are no longer doing spreadsheets and CSV files and faxes. We are entering orders either ourselves or the customers are logging in and ordering, entering orders. They get their payment terms, their payment methods that are for them, their shipping rates.

And it's the same inventory. It knows what warehouse to go to. And uh, and it's, they called it magical, but they were very overwhelmed when I first proposed the system to them. Does that answer your question?

Christian: definitely. Yeah. No, no, it's, it's good. I mean that, that, that's been my experience is like, I think w from the operation side, I would say if you can manage everything in a single inventory and have everything pull from that same inventory list. 'cause it can get really confusing if you have one literal inventory.

But do you have two different mechanisms for measuring that inventory? Meaning, you know, the wholesale. [00:22:00] Order fulfillment is not speaking to the e-commerce whole, whole order fulfillment. That can get really frustrating and, , yeah, really confusing, really quickly. So that's what I love about having this, this hybrid version where you can have both together living into one ecosystem.

It just makes, uh, operational way more simple.

MIke: Absolutely. And imagine now like this is the same person. They have a small retail store where people come in right now with Shopify point of sale. They are now, again, have the same visibility to the same inventory. They can do unified gift cards, they can do buy online pickup in store. And one of my favorite things is like, they can subscribe hundreds and hundreds of customers through email, through Shopify POS, when they're tapping their card.

And I can get into that at some point later on if we are gonna talk retail. But for now, you know, maybe we stay focused on, on your wholesale questions. But I, I just thought of it because you brought up inventory and Shopify solves that [00:23:00] beautifully. Is that unified inventory and then one connection to an ERP and one connection to your accounting software, because this seems to be a huge thing for most of us small business owners is like accounting, oh my God.

Like, where do I even start, right? So that, that hybrid store solves all those problems.

Christian: Y Yeah. You bring up a couple different things. , let's get into that POS idea, because there are people, even if you're not selling B2B yet, you're just, you just have an e-commerce store, but you also go to live events. Like you go to markets, you go to rallies, you go to whatever it may be, that's live event.

You can use that. POS, so you just said you can be capturing people's email addresses when they purchase. Talk to me about

MIke: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So I'm just gonna give you a very concrete example. So local French bakery in town. Set them up with Shopify store Later on, we set them up on, uh, Shopify, POS. Right. And one of the reasons why I really wanted to do that is, well, one, it's a very nice [00:24:00] customer experience with a very high resolution display.

Shows what they're ordering, the tipping options, all of that. And as they're checking out, it gives them the standard, like, would you like your receipt emailed, printed? Or text. Right. And then when they choose email, well, because they're on Shopify, POS, and this is huge, this to not be underestimated, like Underemphasized is like shop, which is the, the, the, the network of Shopify merchants has over a hundred million users.

So what's been happening is people come in, they tap their card, it knows who they are, and there's a subtle little box and it says, Hey, would you be interested in a newsletter? And, uh, in this particular business, in a little town here in Canmore in the summer, we were adding 900 subscribers a month through POS email subscribers.

Christian: that's crazy. Now, are they, do they have an active email, like backend that they're, that they're nurturing those people with?

MIke: Y yeah, exactly. So one of the great questions, so like [00:25:00] this was a big part of the, the big game plan for them when I got involved was we were going to. Really, really focused on email list building because email, uh, when we get involved, I like to say email should be minimum 25% of your revenue. So it's huge part of the strategy.

Also one day if you wanna sell the business like that active and engage email list is everything as far as business assets go. So, yeah, absolutely. Like I use a, I'm also a partner agency with a company called Klaviyo or Klaviyo, and we do email marketing and we, POS, uh, and other ways of capturing email leads is a huge part of the strategy for growing, uh, direct to consumer retail and wholesale business on, on Shopify.

Christian: Great. I'm glad you brought this up 'cause I wanted to get into emails specifically, , because this is, yeah, this is what, what I've learned and what everybody's learning is that when you use social media, that's a rented audience. If you can capture their [00:26:00] email address now, that's considered a air quotes owned audience.

Meaning there's nobody who's gonna get in between my business and my customers as far as being able to communicate directly with them. So talk to me about email. What does that look like when you're, when let's just use this, if we can use that French bakery as an example, so they're capturing 900 emails through that shop

MIke: Point of sale. Point of

Christian: of sale.

Yep. And so because, because it's recognizing that person's email address. As, uh, as somebody who's already opted in to shop, you know, they've shopped on other Shopify websites and now they're opted in that store can now add them as, essentially an if they opt in, they can, they can add be added as email

MIke: yeah. So, so imagine, so just if I can add one thing, so imagine in the old, not even old days, but a lot of people, the way they do it is like, I. Hey, Susan, would you like to be added to our newsletter? Yes. Okay. May I please have your email address? It's like, no, like that doesn't work. Right. So with the shop network, they tap their card, it correlates their profile, it has their email address, [00:27:00] and on their really nice screen it says, would you like to be subscribed to our newsletter?

And it's pre-checked, just like online checkout. You can have that pre-checked and of course they can unselect it. We have not had a single person say, Hey, you guys, un, you subscribed us and we didn't give you permission. If they feel like that, if you are using a really, really good email marketing software like Klaviyo, let's say you provide these opportunities to unsubscribe and you still maintain a self cleansing clean list, if that makes sense.

Clean email list.

Christian: And so what's the next step? So I've captured the email address, and I mean, I, I think most of the listeners of this podcast understand the, the necessity for an email list, but there's some kind of like, still some tactics that need to go into, you know, best practices. And even if we understand that we need to have an email list, we don't exactly, uh, know what we should be doing after that or during that.

So walk us through like what's the important thing that, you know, what are the important flows to have [00:28:00] you take us where you think is most important from an email marketing perspective.

MIke: Okay. Right on. And by the way, like if you don't have a retail location, you have like, I call it like a slide out instead of a popup where you can get people's email addresses and you need to have a strong lead magnet, which means you're gonna give them something and exchange. Or their email address, unless you're just totally awesome and people are dying to, to talk to you, then you don't need to give them anything.

And there are businesses like that, that have that sell out, and they do product drops. So it's like major fomo, fear of missing out. So they're gonna give you their email address, but you grow your list. So let's just say you now have a list. You've been using all these different tactics. What, and we're working together.

And then you say like, okay, Mike, let's make the magic happen. I, I don't know what I'm doing in email. Okay. First thing I'm gonna do, make sure you are authenticated, verified senders. So there's a little bit of techy stuff that's extremely important and a lot of people miss, they actually don't send out emails from the email address that belongs to their website.

You believe it or not, to this day, this [00:29:00] happens. They get blocked by Google, Yahoo. They end up in spam without knowing they're in spam. So let we take care of all of that. We set up and move all the important, uh. Flows over from Shopify. So we will no longer be doing abandoned card or abandoned checkout in Shopify.

'cause it sucks. We're gonna do it in Klaviyo. It really does.

Christian: So, so

MIke: Shopify,

Christian: Yeah. Wow. You, we've, we've sung the praises of Shopify and then you just threw 'em under the bus. So you're saying that email, the baked in email marketing that's in Shopify is probably worth considering moving out away

MIke: yeah. Let me rephrase. Maybe that was an extreme word, but like there are opportunities outside of Shopify email because Shopify email is one of the things they do. Right? At one point they decided they wanted to be in a fulfillment and warehousing business and they spend huge amount of money buying companies and then they backed away from that.

Right? So they're to dream. Maybe one day Shopify email will be as good as everything else, but there are other. [00:30:00] Services out there that were built from the ground up to work with Shopify, and all they do is email, right? So we're gonna move all the flow, like abandoned card, abandoned checkout into Klaviyo or Omnisend or whatever we decide to use.

We're gonna set up those flows and then we get really good analytics. We see like which emails people are opening, where are they dropping out, where are they unsubscribing, which emails are converting. So abandoned, uh, checkout for sure. Abandoned cart is a little more aggressive. That's people that haven't even reached a checkout.

If you do have their email, somehow you can still reach out. There's even abandoned browse. That's too aggressive. Too aggressive for my liking. I don't email people when they abandon their, when they just stop looking at your website. Right? Uh, welcome flow. So welcome flow would be like founder story, story about the business, why they've subscribed.

Thank them. Tell them about what you're about, what to expect. So that's like a trickle email, right? That's why it's called the flow. We'll [00:31:00] do two to four of those emails over a certain period of time. And if you can have branches or decision points, so when somebody does something inside that flow, you can kick them out of that flow or you can continue with it, right?

And eventually they get kicked into what I call your regular newsletter. So just a weekly, biweekly, monthly, whatever makes sense. And another flow is like a welcome, uh, wind back flow. So wind back would be if somebody's purchased from in the past, but they haven't in the last, whatever the period is, that makes sense for your business, right?

So if you're selling, uh, collagen, let's say, and they use collagen, a tub of collagen every month, you expect to see an order once a month. If you don't see one for two months, you can. Automate automatically send a, a win back flow email to that customer says, Hey, Susan, or, Hey Bob, it's been so many days, we miss you.

What's up? Right.

Christian: Okay, so

MIke: [00:32:00] are some of the critical flows that, that I would set up to start with.

Christian: okay, so we've got, let's say, abandoned checkout welcome series, and a win

MIke: Sirius and I went back and also one, another one for businesses that often run out of stock is, this sounds trivial, but a back in stock flow.

Christian: Heck yeah. Yeah. Makes sense if, because this is the thing, right? Entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, running, running these businesses. We're always spinning plates and we're always prioritizing what, what to work on first. What's the most important thing? And everything feels important. Right? If you were to say, okay, let's just break this down.

Let is take one thing at a time, what flow would you have them focus on to? Kind of like that first lever to pull.

MIke: Yeah. And this is a straight up, uh, direct to consumer business

Christian: Yeah. Let's just say it's, let's just say, just direct to consumer.

MIke: First thing I will do is the abandon checkout flow.

Christian: Okay.

MIke: Okay. And the reason being is those usually get really, really high open rates. And the open rates are what I call warming up your [00:33:00] list and your deliverability, your sender reputation.

Right? And, and those are like no brainer. Like we can do it. And then, uh, outside of that, you know, welcome flow would be really, really good. However, not everybody's very good at building their list. And if you're not building your list, a welcome flow doesn't go out because there's no one to welcome. Right?

So does that make

Christian: Yeah, so, okay.

MIke: so that, so welcome flow is a priority. If you're subscribing 500 people a month, it's not a priority if you're subscribing five people a month.

Christian: Okay. Great point. Thank you for making that. So, on that abandoned checkout, are there some best practices that we should consider? How many emails should I be sending? How soon should I be sending, is there some subject lines? You, I mean, you don't have to tell me all the secret sauce 'cause you, you know, you gotta keep some things proprietary, but give us something to work with.

MIke: But this is so interesting, right? Because we all fall into this trap and the way you're asking questions, like, I love this because I'm guilty of that as much. It's like, like, I just want the secret sauce. Like, give me the three things that will absolutely blow my business out of [00:34:00] the water. And I'm sitting here thinking like, there's really no secret sauce.

There isn't like, like, but, but yeah. Okay, here it goes. So, you know, firstly, do not use, do not just go activate abandoned, uh, cart flow in Klaviyo let's say, and use the template that email that everybody and their, their dog uses, or cat. If you're a cat person, uh, don't do that because you're gonna look like everything else, right?

So make that first abandoned cart email yours, make it funny, make it clever, make it useful. And then the number is really dependent on how aggressive you wanna be, how tolerant your customers are, and what you have to say. Right? So if every abandoned cart email is the same as though the previous one, they're gonna get very tired of it very quickly, and they're gonna unsubscribe and now you just lost the subscriber.

Right? Which can be huge. So look at the open rates. I usually will start with like two, [00:35:00] maybe three tops. I

Christian: Emails. You mean two or three emails total in

MIke: In the flow. Exactly. I will not start with a discount ever. I start with just a convenience thing and something a little clever or a little bit of FOMO like, Hey, you know, maybe this product's gonna be running out, or a hundred other people bought it, whatever.

Right? Like it's unique for every business. The next one, if you are in a competitive industry. Could involve a coupon code, a unique coupon code, or a free shipping offer if you can afford it. Or even more clever things like gift with purchase, right? Like if you're selling a high ticket item. So say, you know, one of my customers, rise Outdoor, sells a $1,500 inflatable, uh, tent, right?

And they're selling $1,500 tent and somebody abandons the cart. Well, the second or third email could be, Hey, we've noticed you are looking at our tent. Uh, maybe you don't have $1,500 to spend right now when it's winter, but how about if you do buy it right now, we're gonna give you one of our [00:36:00] Wicked Ride outdoor hoodies free.

Right? So you're giving them a 50 or $60 value instead of discounting. So the perceived value is high. You actually get to keep more money in your pocket because you're not giving hard dollars away.

Christian: Yeah, I like that. That's good. Um,

MIke: Frequency, Christian, 'cause I didn't answer your question fully. Frequencies really. Or the spacing is very, some like clavio and other ones will recommend something like four hours. Like that's it to my taste. It's quite aggressive. I usually say like 10, 12 hours or even next day. For the first abandoned cart.

Christian: Okay.

MIke: Yeah, not four hours. And then the second one is like maybe five days later.

Christian: Oh, okay.

MIke: Yeah. So, but again, like experiment and split test. This is like, I love data. My background's engineering, so it's like data, data. So I split test, I split test the different ways, but overall, I would say say 10 to 12 hours after abandoned cart.

Because people often, or checkout [00:37:00] people, often switch devices as well, right? So, or they're at the office, they just rolled in, it's Monday morning, they don't quite wanna start working. So they're gonna do some shopping, they're gonna leave this thing in their cart and they're going home to purchase it.

But meanwhile, you at lunch, you're like disturbing them with abandoned cart flows. So it's very Canadian way of doing things maybe. But I like to go easy and gentle and then, uh, only if needed, I amplify it a little bit. And after three emails, if we don't get that recovery, it's like, leave it alone. Right?

They'll probably come back, but it's uh, or they don't like what you're selling or they don't like you or, or I don't know. But there's so many reasons, right? We all do it. We all put things in our cart.

Christian: Right. No, that's good. That's good advice. I appreciate it. So start with the abandoned cart. That's a good place to start. Um, if they were to move down the list and be like, okay, they, we knocked the abandoned cart out of, out of the park. You said, we should be working on a welcome flow, but a welcome flow only works for adding people to the email list.

Do you have any best practices for how to build that list out?[00:38:00]

MIke: Building an email list or building a

Christian: This is a whole nother, this is a, we could have a whole nother podcast on how to build an email

MIke: Absolutely.

Christian: But do you have any things that you've seen that you're like, yeah, I like that, that works.

MIke: for building a

Christian: Yeah. For building a list

MIke: Yeah, no, totally. I mean, and And you're absolutely right. We could have an email workshop. We absolutely could. And you'd hear me talk like I could go on for four hours and I would still not blink a single time

Christian: that, that's why people should come to the core summit Next year, we'll have an, we'll have an email and e-commerce, a workshop.

MIke: Uh, an in-person workshop. Let's do it. I'm excited. Okay. So building a list. So, yeah, I mean, if you have a popup, a market that you're attending, an event set you, if we can set you up on Shopify, POS and set it up in a way that you can capture emails. Amazing, right? Second one, like I said, would be more of a lead magnet.

So give people something in exchange for their email address. So the, the boring way is like, here's 10% off your first online order, right? That's the boring way. The more exciting way is like we [00:39:00] have these incredible, uh, mugs, uh, coming out for winter camping. They're like triple insulated. Or if you're in Vancouver, they're triple insulated because you're just in the city.

'cause when it snows, people get like really jittery 'cause it's snowing. So you get a triple insulated mug free of charge when you sign up for an email. Like I know that's. It's a lot. But for a certain kind of business where that email could be worth tens of thousands of dollars, it's worth it. Right? So some kind of a offer that's not a discount.

It could be free shipping or it could be just like, we are just about to launch this amazing product and you'll be the first person to know because we're only making a hundred and they're gonna sell within the six hours. Uh, working with a local distillery in Canmore, we did this one thing where they were releasing their single malt scotch and they've been, we were working on it for six years.

'cause that's how long it takes to make it. That was amazing. When we're building those, uh, we were using that a lot in [00:40:00] our slide out email capture, because that was like fear of missing out. Uh, anticipation. Excitement, right. So we were getting the email addresses like that.

Christian: That's very cool. Um, the one thing we haven't talked about, and this is what, what I think is really important for, um, thinking about e-commerce shops is the lifetime value of your customer. So yes, we wanna get that, that initial purchase from them, but the beauty of keeping them on an email list and kind of nurturing that list over time is that we get to cha, we get the opportunity to sell it to them continuously year after year after year or season after season, or if you're lucky enough on a subscription month after month.

So I think that's just one thing to be thinking for, for those with the shops is like, yeah, think about that lifetime value. 'cause like, like you said, with the mug or whatever that gift may be, yeah, it may cost you something now, but if you do a good job of nurturing the list in email marketing in the future, you're gonna get paid that back.

That return on investment's going to be a no-brainer.

MIke: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Lifetime value. Email marketing plays a huge role in [00:41:00] lifetime value, and so do subscription services If you're already in a business of consumables. Uh, like selling backcountry, dehydrated food, like one of your guests or other things that people order regularly. I always say subscription is like printing money.

You wake up in the morning and you just printed yourself a bag of money. Right. So

Christian: Nice. Oh yeah.

MIke: we can also talk about subscription for like an hour and a half

Christian: Yeah. I mean, well that's why every podcast you listen to, every major podcast you listen to is sponsored by AG one because they, the subscription, a consumable subscription business literally prints money.

One thing that has come up recently, and you know, I never, when I was running my eCommerce business, I never jumped into, uh, SMS text lists. What do you, what are your thoughts on text lists? 'cause you know, like email's hard enough as it is for a small business.

Do you think text is worth diving into? If we're gonna dive into it, which we would consider?

MIke: Yeah. Great question. So I would say like, texting is cool now, right? Like, it's like it's not, it's not like going [00:42:00] from fax to email and going from email to text, but in a way, like, you know, especially in Canada, we'd say like, well, texting a business, texting me, that's not really good. That's spammy. That's let's not do that.

But it's becoming a thing, right? And because it's convenient. And I find myself often using WhatsApp with businesses, which is a form of text, right? But like, just straight up SMS, like, I would say, why not? Right? So again, if you, if we were setting up email strategy, email strategy, absolutely. Now includes getting permission and consent for texting. And then we just do a slightly different version of that email campaign. But we do it in text form and we can also give people options. And the way I capture. Uh, phone numbers for SMS is when you're doing your email lead gen. You do your first form for email, you get them subscribed, and then as a second or third step you say, how about a phone number?

Here's why. So, yes, SMSI think it's, uh, [00:43:00] it's the, the way of the future

Christian: Sure. And I guess one thing to remember as, as the person sending those messages is like, um, don't be annoying.

MIke: Don't be annoying.

Christian: Speak to people as if they're your friend. Would you ping your, your friends with this many emails or texts? Probably not. Don't be annoying.

MIke: absolutely. Don't send it at like, be very aware of time zones,

Christian: Oh yeah.

MIke: Yeah. Be aware of time zones. Don't send people stuff at like 11, unless you're really clever. Like there was a mattress company that sent, uh, SMSs to people at like midnight or 1:00 AM says, Hey, so you're not sleeping. How about a memory foam mattress?

Like, how creepy is that? And how amazing. At the same time.

Christian: Yeah. Okay. That's bold. I appreciate

MIke: Yeah,

Christian: , We talked about it earlier and I think this is, you know, uh, the black box of, of Shopify can be the app store. And we talked about, you know, having a really clean app stack and what you should consider when you're getting into building your Shopify site.

. That's one thing I warn people about with Shopify. You look at the kind of the initial startup cost of Shopify [00:44:00] and you're like, it's not that expensive. And then you look at, you know, you're a few months into it and you look at your monthly subscription fee, you're like, oh my God, how am I spending this much money?

And it's probably 'cause you have so many apps. So let's talk Shopify apps. , what do you think the important ones to start with? What are the ones we should consider, uh, you know, gimme the best practices on Shopify apps?

MIke: totally. Maybe I'll flip this a little bit and, and just say what not to do first. Okay. So, and I don't know if this comes from like the, the days of WordPress where there's so many plugins and people go in crazy because they're free. But what happens is people, uh, especially early on when they're maybe not understanding it, or they haven't really worked in the business heavily yet, they're attending a bunch of conferences and things and learning, and, and everybody's got the perfect app, right?

So they, they get very app happy and they install, like, like you said, dozens of apps, uh, only to end up with a huge bill. But even with the free apps, you end up with a bloated store that loads very slowly, right? So I would, [00:45:00] there's no, like, magic number because it's very, very dependent in what kind of business you're in, right?

Uh, but I would say there's like, I'm gonna say like five core apps and channels. Like, I don't know if everybody knows what a channel is. I can get into that, that are important in, uh, in most, for most DT D two C brands. Should I go through a few of them or.

Christian: do it. Yeah. That's what we're

MIke: Okay, so like one of them would be like, as we all know, social proof and, uh, reviews is very, very important, right?

So reviews, uh, the one that we handpicked and partnered with is called Judge Me Reviews. They're amazing, great team, great product. People can submit written reviews, uh, also photos and videos as part of the reviews. And then there's a way of also by building UGC through that u user generate content and even questions and answers.

FAQs, FAQs are super important for ai, for optimizing for generative, , search [00:46:00] engines. We can talk about that later. So that's, that's a really good app. I love to set up and install two channels for people. One of them is the Google, YouTube, CH and YouTube channel to get their Google Analytics hooked up, Google Merchant Center for product feeds and, um, the Facebook, uh, channel because that allows the, a very deep and advanced integration with the Facebook pixel and sending events, and it's called conversion, API to make sure that.

You're tracking what the users are doing, both for Google and Facebook, for when you're ready to run some performance marketing or advertising. So I set up those two channels. I will absolutely set up Shopify's inbox if you're not using a live chat app, because Shopify inbox is free, and I could talk about that for a long time as well.

But it's essentially a live chat that's deeply integrated with what the user's actually doing on your website. Uh, so I would do that. Uh, we [00:47:00] talked about key business to business apps, so probably won't go through those again. Uh, customer service heavy businesses. I like to use an app called Gorg or Gorg.

Yes. Uh, really, really good. Um, wow. I mean, that's kind of the key, right? People say they, they need like SEO apps. You don't need SEO apps, you just do, , SEO within Shopify, just following best practices. , Obviously if you're running like a warehouse, then you're gonna need an app or a connector that connects to your three pl.

And if you're doing like accounting on QuickBooks or QuickBooks Desktop, there is a very close partnerships I've developed with companies like My Works that's also Canadian that allows that bridge between Shopify and your accounting system. Right. So I think though, for most part, those are like the, the key apps.

Uh, if I miss something, uh, maybe you can nudge my memory, but like

Christian: No, I, I mean I can only speak the my two when I was running. [00:48:00] And granted I haven't run a Shopify site in a year, so everything's changed in a year. The two that I love the most were better reports because I was running on the, a lower end Shopify and, and it doesn't, one thing I don't love about from the finance side, Shopify can kind of be lacking on the baked in reports.

So Better Reports basically allows you to turn every piece of data in your site into a report. So I loved that one. That was worth paying for and another one I loved a lot is No Commerce K in O Commerce. That's a post purchase survey. It was a two question survey and we got the best data.

Off of those post-purchase surveys, and I think like over six 60 to 70% of our purchasers would actually fill out this two question survey. And it was amazing. And we would rotate through questions throughout the year just so to get to see different questions. But like, yeah, it was, it was amazing the type of information we were able to get directly from customers after they purchase things like where they first heard about us, how they first encountered the brand, [00:49:00] what, what almost kept them from purchasing was one question that I really liked.

, Yeah, so I, those are the two apps that I would add to it.

MIke: No, that's great. And it got me actually thinking because there are apps that are abso absolutely necessary at the beginning of a business growing A DTC business. But I've seen it over and over where people installed those kinds of apps that are designed for like large volume businesses because they think they need them.

Uh, and that includes things like that post-purchase survey sometimes, or like you are so many dollars away from free shipping. Like there's, because then the store gets really, really bloated very, very fast. Right? So the one that comes to mind that's not heavy on the front end at all, it doesn't slow down the site.

It's called Mattify. And it's simply an app that lets you do bulk updates and, uh. Using CSV data or bulk operations. And that's, uh, that's really, really great when you're working with larger catalogs or you're trying to clean up your titles, your descriptions, your prices, UPCs, you know, barcodes all in a very [00:50:00] classy, easy way.

Instead of doing it the hard way, which should be a right click and open a hundred tabs, one for each product, which I've seen done.

Christian: I dunno what you're talking about, Mike. I don't think I've ever done that.

MIke: I hit a,

Christian: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, let's move on from that. Let's, I, I, this, uh, let's move on. Let's move on. Um, you brought something up a second ago, uh, that I wanted to talk about. So thank you for bringing up, you said performance marketing and that's something that I, we talk about a lot.

Uh, is that the customer acquisition cost CAC as it's known, is, uh, really expensive and really challenging and, um, there are mixed results now on what performance? Yeah. The performance marketing results that people are getting. So talk to me about performance marketing. 'cause you said something to me the other day that said, you know, performance marketing's not dead.

People are just doing it wrong. So talk to me about that.

MIke: I set a high bar for myself. Now I have to answer this question.

Christian: Well, you know, you can answer around it if you want.

MIke: Dance around it a little bit. So the answer [00:51:00] performance marketing, it depends, but no, truly, uh, all jokes aside, like performance marketing is not dead. I think what what happens is, uh, and I'm generalizing here, but often, especially when it's done by the solopreneur or like entrepreneur, that's like. Been kinda, I'm gonna use the word gamed, gamed into it by meta or Google to give them their, give them your hard earned money.

They'll take it as fast as you can give it to them. Like you wanna give them $10,000 a day, they'll spend it in one hour. Right. So you can give them the money, they'll take it. Right. But, and, and AI and all this automation and automated creative, it's also tempting, right? So often what people do is they launch, launch these massive campaigns, uh.

Without really knowing like what's important or who to go after, right? So performance marketing works if you're talking to the right people and to find the right people. Often nowadays, it all comes down to the creative. And so many businesses are so, [00:52:00] I don't know if allergic is the right word, but they think that video. Facebook stories, Facebook reels, it's extremely hard to do.

So they don't do it. But that's when I say good creative, that's what you need, right? You need founder led stories. You need things where you see people's emotions. Yeah. Like they're real content from real people that work in the business, right? If you have good creative and you figure out like who to get it in front of, performance marketing absolutely works, right?

So that's on meta. And the same thing on the Google side. There's Google search campaigns work very well. There's this black box thing called Performance Max that a lot of people are afraid of because it's a little bit hard to extract the reports from, but once you know how to set that up, performance Max can be very, very effective because it follows your avatar around the internet.

So what I mean by that, instead of just advertising for specific search keywords. In a specific [00:53:00] place like Google search, you just say, I want to go after this kind of a person. This is my avatar. This is what they like to do. I'm going to give you the creative that signals to you that this is my person.

Right? So her name is Susan and she loves, and she's, uh, in, in her forties because that's what the photo looks like. And she likes to backcountry ski At Rogers Pass, there's my creative, so you're basically telling Google, like, find me all the Susans in the world that like to backcountry ski in, in British Columbia.

Right. So the creative signals that and performance maps, what it does is it follows the user, your ideal user around the internet. So it'll be in their Gmail, it's gonna be in the search, it's gonna be on YouTube, it's gonna be in discovery, and it basically gets your, your ads or your message in all kinds of different format in front of that user.

So in a nutshell, that's performance marketing. Today. If we talk in six months, it's probably gonna be something slightly different. But [00:54:00] creative is king, copy is king. You could pick up a 40-year-old book by Ogilvy on writing advertising copy. And those principles still stand to this day.

Christian: A hundred percent. Number one, that's creepy as hell. Um, but I guess if that's what we're in, we're in, we're in the business of selling stuff. That's something you gotta do. If you gotta do performance marketing to the copywriting, um, I would say that is a skill that every founder should hone in on. And there's a really good cheap, uh, copywriting course called Copy that I believe it's called Copy that.com, created by Sam Par, uh, creator of the Hustle Newsletter.

Great copywriter. It's a very good, I would recommend everybody go check out how to improve your copywriting skills, 'cause that will help your, uh, products on your website. That will help your email campaigns or SMS campaigns that will help your ad sets. So get, get a copywriting and don't rely on AI for helping you if they can help hone the skills, but they can't write it for you.

MIke: As soon as you see, I see all the m dashes that are now dead, [00:55:00] which all the real writers are very upset about because, uh, AI killed the M dashes. And so I see m dashes, I see the emojis, I see the formatting. I'm like, this is ai. Right? And if you, if you don't use your human brain, the filters through the noise, you can publish all kinds of gibberish out there without even realizing.

Yeah. So copywriting, uh, writing headlines for emails, hugely important skills, right? You don't have to be an expert, but you need to know how to at least filter the output if you're gonna use AI and figure out what good copy is and what it means.

Christian: Yeah, I heard Steven Bartlett. Uh, that's, he's the guy behind diary of his CEO. He said that he's, he's starting to add spelling mistakes into his e the emails that he works really hard at writing. He, he adds spelling mistakes just so people recognize that he wrote it and it wasn't ai. But the next thing is people are gonna start prompting AI to add spelling mistakes so it looks more natural.

MIke: amazing. There's this gal I follow, uh, Alex Can from Vancouver. She did this amazing keynote last year at Smart Marketer Live. It's like Copy Posse, I think is her [00:56:00] business. But she does like, she's an incredible per, uh, email marketer and she has the most hilarious emails and it's all like.dot, dot, lowercase, lots of jokes, lots of f-bombs.

Like, but she's real and she's an incredible, brilliant copywriter, especially for email. And she has a cult like following, uh, people that learn from her. Right. So, and she just spoke at the gathering in Banff as well, and I went to that session 'cause I was like, we need more people like that to keep it fun, keep it authentic, right.

And uh, but professional at the same time.

Christian: Yeah, for sure. , , this conversation can keep going and so I wanna be mindful of, of the time. , We've been skipping along a lot of different subjects with I, which I think is amazing. This is like, we're kind of. Touching the tops of a lot of different things. Like I said, Shopify is very complex.

Email marketing, all these things. We could go on and on. There's a couple things that I wanted to touch on because I am, , out of date with the new tools that are in Shopify, and I'd love to hear you talk about them more. They've been coming up in a lot of conversations that I've been [00:57:00] having with core members, and that's specifically Shopify sidekick and Shopify Flow.

So give us a little bit about both of those things and like how we can be best practices for using them. And uh, yeah, get me started on that.

MIke: For sure. So let's talk about flows. So flows used to be something that was only available within Shopify Plus. So unless you're spending $2,000 US a month, you, you had no privilege. So what Shopify flows is, is, I, I like to say it automates all the monkey work. So what it does is as soon as you find yourself pushing data around or moving things from one system to another or trying to use connectors, uh, Shopify flows allows you to automate some of those tasks. So one example would be, I have B2B within my hybrid site on Shopify, and I have these like customers that are notoriously slow at paying their bills.

Well, how would we do it in the past? We're gonna put something on your calendar. On this day, [00:58:00] you're gonna get this popup and you're gonna spark up your email. You're gonna type this thing in. It's like, Hey Bob, you owe me $900 for this last order you placed 45 days ago. Shopify Flow. You just say, Hey, when any, any buyer tagged with this tag, B2B is laid on their payment by more than one day, send them this personalized email, uh, done and it runs in the background, right?

Or send a slack message to this team member in my fulfillment warehouse when this happens, or when I inventory goes down to five pieces, right? So that's, that's what flows is about. The builder is very, very visual. You can drag and drop and you can create, just start talking to it. You can tell it what you wanna do, and it's going to help you build a flow.

And I think that's a good segue into Claude, or as Toby calls it, magic Shopify magic. I just watched a video with him on that, and it's literally like [00:59:00] shopify.com/ca/magic, I think. So I watched this video where Toby is like glassy-eyed. He is really excited. He's like, we got this thing, and it's called like magic or clawed, right?

And think of this as you high level, uh, business coach or e-commerce assistant that knows everything about all things of with Shopify and how to run an e-com business. And you just ask it questions and it gives you answers that are highly relevant to the type of business you are running and what you're trying to do.

So it's like picking up a phone and calling someone that's always available and then knows this stuff inside out. But you're doing this with the AI agent within Shopify that knows precisely what page you're on, what you're looking at, what kind of products you have and all that. Does that answer your

Christian: awesome. So is that, so that. Magic. Is that the same as psychic? Sorry, I'm, I'm,

MIke: Yeah, yeah, totally. No, so, yeah, exactly. So sidekick. [01:00:00] So sidekick is like the AI assistant, and uh, when I was looking at it recently to see if they've made any other updates, I found this video from Toby, from the founder of Shopify, and he, he calls it magic or like even the u RL to find the video is like forward slash magic, right?

Because it feels like magic. It's like, it's like Chad GPT or perplexity or whatever you use for ai, but it's highly relevant. Two, what you're trying to solve, right? Because you're doing it within your store. So you could be on a collection page, you could be on the product page or in a theme and you're trying to do something, and you can just bring up Sidekick and ask Sidekick a very, very relevant and specific question.

It's going to go into all the develop dev documents, the knowledge base, the whatever, all their internal documents. And it's going to find that for you instead of the old way would be like, let's go on [01:01:00] Google and we're gonna, what do I even wanna ask? How do I ask it? And once I know what the problem is I'm trying to solve, now I'm going to get 30 results and half of those will be people trying to sell me stuff, right?

So that's, yeah. Sidekick is, uh, if you haven't seen it, there's a little icon for it. You click on that and just, just start, uh, testing it out.

Christian: It's so cool. Yeah, I, I was in on a conversation of entrepreneurs talking about the use of psychic. Somebody had just used psychic, basically building their first Shopify site and just used psychic the whole way. Like, now what I do. And they, they started off with like, help me build my Shopify site, give me the instruction step by step.

And then, okay, now I'm stuck. Now what I do, oh, I want this to do this. How do I do this? And they basically had this internal chat agent that held their hand walking. And I, I was really excited for them. At the same time, I was kind of fru frustrated 'cause I can think about the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours it felt like I spent trying to like, fix stupid little things in my Shopify site that if I just had a agent.

, So lesson [01:02:00] learned, it's never been easier to run a e-commerce business than it is today. That being said, it's still hard.

MIke: it's still hard. And you know what, like this reminded me of conversation I had with a gentleman last week that ended up hiring, uh, me. Him. He, he had a store built his son and himself, built his 12-year-old son, built a Shopify store using Sidekick and Chat GPT. They built it and no one came. And now they, they're looking for experts.

So they found me through store tasker and said, Mike, okay, now we need you to like, show us how to run an online business because we ba built a store, uh, using chat GPT. So first thing I discover is like, they have no Google Analytics, no search console, no, the homepage image is massive on mobile, right? So AI is ai and it does do a lot of the heavy lifting and it answers a lot of these very relevant questions.

You still need to learn or have someone that knows how to run an eCom business, but the tool is incredible, [01:03:00] truly.

Christian: If you build it, that doesn't mean everybody's gonna show up. Right. And it's also very helpful to have real life humans with lots of experience to, uh, add to your repertoire and to help you along in the journey.

We've touched on a bunch of different topics here. People wanna learn more and learn more about the business that you run. Where would you send people to learn more about what you do at Iceberg?

MIke: Yeah, right on. , I think the best place to send everybody would be like iceberg commerce.com. You can have a look at what we do as many entrepreneurs. My own website's, not a hundred percent up to date 'cause I'm busy working on other sites, but for most part you'll see most of our recent clients. If you go under contact us, you can drop me a message through the contact form.

And please, please mention that you heard about this on the , core podcast. And if you do that, I'd love to offer you an hour of my time free of charge to uh, provide some discovery, some [01:04:00] consulting, even a quick audit on your site. Honestly, I just love to talk to people that are growing awesome businesses.

And as you might have notice by now, I'm really, really passionate about this and I'd like to give back to the community of, uh, entrepreneurs working in the trenches trying to build the online businesses. So. Please reach out. I'd love to talk to you.

Christian: Nice. It's very generous. Uh, please go fill up Mike's schedule with your audits. He's being generous in offering it to you. Hit him up. Let's, let's make him regret this offer.

Well, , maybe that's a good place to, uh, wind it up. , The question I always ask people is, , how, how do you define success for yourself?

MIke: Oh, awesome. Good. That's always such an interesting question to answer, right? Because as humans, the human condition is like, it's never good enough. It's, it's, you know, strive to get better, improve myself, whatnot. Right? I think success, uh, to me. Looks like I run a location, independent business. That allows me, at least in [01:05:00] theory, the ultimate freedom of time, right?

I'm gifting myself some time and I'm able to go climbing or fly fishing or mountain biking or whatever. Whenever I feel like, and when I say that, that's not really truly the case, but at least knowing that you have that option. So work and life balance, spending a lot of time in the wilderness completely disconnected from the technology, that's part of the success.

And when I'm here and present helping online businesses, like I love to get up in the morning and go into it. I'm very passionate about what I do. I like to hire and attract people that have the same mindset. And I love to work with customers that are. Awesome, fun people that truly love the product or service they're providing.

And if we are liking each other, if we like what we're doing together and if we're making a difference in the world with the service or product, the money will follow, right? So to me, when I think of success, money is the last thing [01:06:00] because money follows if you get the first few things right.

Christian: Love it. I agree a hundred percent. That's very cool. Well, I wish more of that for you.

. Alright, Mike, man, this has been amazing to hear about your passion for it and, , all your experience in, in growing Shopify sites.

And, , yeah, I look forward to the next one. Hopefully we'll have one another workshop in person at the summit next year in Kimberly next October. So thanks so much for your time.

MIke: thanks so much Christian. What an honor and privilege. I'm truly blessed. Thank you.

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