It's Tuesday, which could only mean one thing.
It's Tuesday. Tea break talks for me.
Nick Truman host here, The Winning Wish off a podcast.
If you haven't tuned in before, it's absolutely pleasure.
Thanks for clicking on the pinkest icon you can.
I've got this funky little pink T-shirt here.
It's not irons. Sorry if I was watching this,
but we've got funky little T-shirts.
I don't wear this that much. I should really wear this given
that it's on brand. But anyway, welcome to Tuesday.
Tuesday's a short episode. We don't ever guess to anything.
I share some of the updates from our agency, from our partners,
some of the news going on, the Shopify world.
Couple of fun facts. And if you're on a tea break
like me when I'm recording this, not really.
This is work as far as I'm concerned, But if you're having
a quick break or whatever you're doing right now, you can be at
the gym. Some people listen to me while
they're breastfeeding their children, some in the bath.
Someone else even said they only listen to it when they're
practicing for Box. I don't know what it says about
me, but they're all true stories and quite fascinating.
So if you want to reach out and tell me where you listen to this
podcast, hello at winning we shopify.com send us an e-mail.
Why not Anyway, today's quite quick tea of choice.
I'm reading my notes like that's the only way to get this
information. I have a cup of tea here with
spec my agency written on the side of the tea cup.
I'm drinking peppermint tea this week and the properties for
peppermint tea to help you in your life as an e-commerce
agency, not agency e-commerce brand owner or working in the
e-commerce space. It's good for improved
digestion. So if you've been big heavy work
lunch, relief from nausea and reduced stress, which I think we
can all relate to and all want a bit of reduced stress and this
one hilarious because this won't make any difference.
But this will put a nice little shiver down some of your spines
when you think about me talking for the next 1520 minutes.
Fresher breath. How exciting.
Anyway, before we get into today's bits and pieces and
stuff and things, we're going to talk about quote of the week.
I love this quote. It's from Jeff Bezos at Amazon.
We quote Amazon quite a bit. We're certainly Jeff and a few
bits from Amazon team, but I love this one.
This one is the best customer service is if the customer
doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you.
It just works. And I love that because actually
I work in SEO a lot. And when we're working in SEO,
if we look at what people are reaching out to customer service
to ask and we basically answer those questions with content on
the website at the right point of the journey, customer service
costs start to come down, which is nice.
You can reallocate these people for revenue generation, sending
emails out to people, maybe phoning customers, that kind of
thing. And actually then the SEO is
better because Google and all the other search engines.
And we're going to talk not just about Google today, we'll talk
about another part of SEO with a new acronym.
All very exciting. So it didn't have enough
acronyms in our world already. But then you find actually
Google and other searches want to index you more because you're
answering those questions, right?
Shopify news, the first one I've put in capital letters here,
underlined and involved with an exclamation mark.
Finally, finally, we can whitelist crawler tools on a
Shopify store. Oh my gosh, I remember which
office, which desk I was sitting at when I logged in one day and
tried to crawl a Shopify store and my team were like, Nick, we
can't crawl Shopify. What?
Basically, if you tried to bring up too many pages too quickly on
Shopify, it would block you from the entire store for I think
it's about four hours. It's quite a long time.
Now you can whitelist those things so you can say in a
little setting in Shopify and tell Shopify if this crawler to
make one of your own tools to scrape content, write metadata,
your SEO tools, all that sort of stuff.
You can tell it, it's fine. Let this one into the site, let
this load the code because it's my tool and I need to get some
stuff back from this. So that is really exciting and
the bane of our lives trying to get that kind of thing working.
The second one is you can now use, I'd be honest, I don't know
what these are. This is for the physical world
or as a friend of mine says IRL in real life you can use HID
barcode scanners with Shopify POS.
I don't know what that means but someone mentioned it the other
day and said they couldn't do it.
So I had a look and it was literally released about four
days ago in the Shopify change log.
Probably 5 days by the time you guys are watching this.
I record on Monday afternoon voice mode in Sidekick, which
Sidekick is Shopify's AI that's built in.
So you can talk to Sidekick, ask us, do stuff, ask the analyse
stuff, ask it how to do things and what it can help with.
You can even ask it for image generation, which is pretty
cool. But now you can talk to it.
And I had some of the other day saying like, who are you talking
to? You're a bit blunt and rude
there, Nick. Normally you're really polite.
I was talking to an AI bot. So I was being blunt because I
didn't want it to pick up on any random words.
I just wanted to get my question across, get the answer and tell
it it was wrong until it was no longer wrong.
And that's what I needed from it.
So you can talk to that. Another thing on Sidekick as
well, it's quite an AI focused episode this week.
Sidekick can also be now put in full screen mode.
It was in a tiny little chat window at the bottom, which was
quite difficult when you're writing quite a lot of text or
you were asking to write content.
You had sort of scroll around quite a bit and get it to get it
to see what's going on. So that was a bit frustrating.
You can use it in full screen mode now.
Shopify have changed so much in the last week.
So before, well, since I made the last episode and before
recording this one, there's a whole article about shipping
information that Shopify's changed and shipping systems and
a whole range of other things. There's too much.
I thought I could have done a whole episode on this, which we
might do at some point, but shopify.com/news slash ship
hyphen with hyphen Shopify. So if you just search ship with
Shopify and check out the news page that comes up on your
favorite AI or SEO related search engine, that will come
up. But there's loads of updates in
there for a whole range of things from the couriers
available to how shipping works and a lot of other stuff.
So if you're shipping, I'd say to more than one territory or
using more than one Courier or delivery partner, definitely go
and give that even just a glance over.
There's quite a bit changing and there's going to be some good
opportunities in there for you guys to make your lives easier,
potentially cheaper and potentially for customers as
well, make them better and faster.
Sweet. Last one on Shopify and then
we've got some non Shopify news. Shopify CEO Toby Luke is
prioritising AI over people. He said, I'm not going to
comment on this, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.
So send us an e-mail hello@winningshopify.com how you
feel about that. He's prioritising AI over people
when it comes to Shopify's hiring policy.
Now, not so much you guys, but Shopify's hiring policy.
They're looking at doing things with AI rather than hiring
humans. It's interesting.
I think I was always scared about everyone losing their jobs
as technology gets better. But if you look at it
economically, it's gone a slight tangent for a minute.
And if we use sound effects in this, there'd be some traumatic
music right now. And we tend to find that every
time people are scared, they're all going to lose their jobs.
Suddenly even more jobs are created through the new
technology, new industries, new systems, new pieces of
equipment. Like I get I won't go into
detail as well. It's kind of massive tangent.
Then we won't. We won't for today, today's
purposes. But if you only hear what the
tangent was, just send me an e-mail and I'm happy to happy to
do some what I call verbal diaria via the keyboard and tell
you what I think. So other news outside of
Shopify, Alibaba all over the place at the moment is being
cited as having record growth. AI has been the driving force of
that. Share price is going up and all
sorts of other things as well. But Alibaba reporting that
things are growing really, really nicely.
And final bit of news, multiple outlets are predicting a drop in
e-commerce revenue this holiday season.
So coming into Black Friday and coming into Christmas, they are
predicting a drop in e-commerce revenues.
People predict this every year. There seems to be more noise
about it this year than ever. They're talking about things
like the tariffs generally globally, there's a cost of
living crisis in most countries. Things get more expensive,
inflation's at an all time high, wages aren't keeping up with
inflation. And there's a whole range of
things going on. And so the prediction feels kind
of relevant this year, but it's always been wrong. e-commerce
revenue has always gone up collectively, Shopify's always
reported record revenues. And so, so is the retail space
when you look at it certainly in 1/2 year basis across pretty
much any of the kind of major world's economies.
So there we go, quick tipity and then we'll talk about one of our
partners, which is quite exciting.
You know, when tea is just drinkable and you just think to
yourself, that is delicious, have another sip.
And some people are now thinking, I'm just listening to
Nick drinking tea. We move on.
Yacht PO are hanging up their boots on e-mail and SMS. You
might have heard about this if you're using Yacht PO.
Quite a few of our clients have said like, yeah, I got the
e-mail. It's terrifying.
What am I going to do? We work with Saguno.
Saguno, one of our sponsors and partners.
We love Saguno to bits. If you want to talk to Saguno,
we've got a chap called Chris in the UK.
We've got Brian and a whole team.
Other people in North Carolina in the US do talk Saguno.
Saguno's completely plugged into Shopify.
So you don't need to do any integration.
You can download, well not download, install the app from
Saguno. I think you get it.
I think it's a three month trial.
Apologies for not getting that right guys.
I love you all. But on Saguno you because it's
plugged into Shopify, you can just create segmentations within
your customer area and start emailing them.
Plus you can use those segmentations in lots of other
ways within Shopify when it comes to discount codes and a
whole range of other things. So it's definitely a good option
and we finding so many people probably because we endorse them
so much and we love them here. So many of our clients are
moving to Saguno. I don't know anyone that's been
moving away apart from 1 and it purely came down to technical
issue because they have more than one business.
The other business wasn't on Shopify so couldn't use Saguno
for it. But Saguna's built in.
So definitely check out Saguna if you want.
We've got loads of offers and other stuff.
So check out our website wwspodcast.com and check out the
link through Saguno. You definitely get a free on
boarding analysis set session with them, so sit down and show
what's going on. I've introduced Brian and Chris
here in the UK so many times to to so many of our brands we work
with and people from the podcast reach out as well.
So definitely check out Saguna as a good viable option.
I got 6 learnings from the agency.
One I'm going to go into quite a bit of detail on and the other
five we're just going to skim through, let you know what's
going on. Brand clicks.
That is where somebody types in your name into Google and they
find your ads. And what you don't want to do is
spend too much money on that. You want to spend most of your
money on people searching for non brand keywords because once
someone knows who you are, you want to get them in through the
door and spending money on your site as fast as possible.
If they don't, if they do know who you are, you do not want to
spend too much money on that. This year, 2025, we've averaged
a 75% saving on new clients. We've taken on and started
managing the Google Ads campaigns, but the 75% saving,
that's how much we've saved on click cost on brand alone, which
means we're driving a majority of spend through non brand,
which again, is where you're going to acquire customers.
They're searching for your brands.
They might not have transacted yet, but they're certainly a
customer because they know who you are.
And again, definitions, but you can spend, you can save up to
75% of those clicks. So I definitely would.
We are doing more performance Max tests.
These these have been really popular.
People in the community have been asking about these and we
did a meet up last where was it Thursday last week with Molly,
who are great, great option as well for you, your checkout save
you loads of money on transaction fees, Molly.
And we did this meet up and loads of people came up and
said, Nick, I love your Tuesday talks.
I love what you're saying about P Max tests, Performance Max and
Google. And also Performance Max is also
in other other channels as well, sometimes with a different name.
But you guys have been emailing us and spoke to several people
at the meet up about Performance Max tests.
Here's an interesting one. We are getting multiple clients
in the last sort of four or five months where standard shopping
is outperforming Performance Max, which leads me up to point
#3 which is connected to that. So Standard Shopping
outperforming performance Max with Standard Shopping is just
shopping ads on Google and nowhere else.
There's nothing else P Max does. Every channel across the whole
Google spectrum, if you are connected to an agency like us,
you will get access to it's called channel performance or
channel breakdown, and it's currently in beta.
But what it does is performance Max, which has been a massive
move for Google. When people who are nerdy like
me and my team managing campaigns come along.
You can now see on performance Max how many clicks, how many
sales, how many, how much money you're spending across each of
the different channels. It even splits google.com
itselfor.whatevercountryyoureingoogle.dgoogle.fr. It splits that now.
So you can see ads with products featured in them and ads without
products featured in them, which is an enormous game changer
where it comes to focusing your time.
So if you find that actually products or ads, sorry, without
products on Google are outperforming ads with products
on Google, Google, something's wrong with your shopping feed.
Something's wrong with your landing pages where people land
on products. You need to fix that.
You want your shopping ads to outperform all other channels
because that's what we should do.
So what it probably means is all your channels doing really well
apart from the products. 1 So you want your products on Google
Shopping to work really, really well.
So again, if you want to get access to that, whether you
become a client or not, you can connect up to us if you want and
you'll get that feature because we can, we can, we can get it
turned on for you #4 I mentioned there's a new acronym because
there aren't enough acronyms in this industry.
With some clients we start working with they're like
CPCPPC, what's all of this SEO like and all these different
acronyms. There's so many.
We start to break it down to like CAC.
CAC, which anyone should know, runs a business.
It's not just a e-commerce one. There's a new acronym, Geo,
which is generative engine optimization, and it's basically
doing SEO, but it's doing it for AI.
Quite exciting. And we've been talking about
that quite a lot on here. If you don't already, go and
check out the Yost app in Shopify as well.
Excuse me, I haven't drunk enough tea today, so I'm
coughing too much. But check out Yost because that
can help you with ranking on AI engines like chat, DBT, Gemini,
Claude, etcetera, etcetera. Quick sip of tea.
It's all very well having a tea break talks.
We don't drink any tea. What was the point?
Apart from sharing some amazing information with you guys and
none of this is really is mine. Is my team doing stuff and news
#5 we are doing an exercise for multiple rounds at the moment,
an SEO where Google's basically said if you've got loads of
pages on your site and no one's looking at them, no one's
transacting through them, and you're asking me Google, and
tend to be if you do it for Google, it works on most search
engines. That's no exclusive, but there
are certain nuances we find. Actually, we're trying to start
removing collections where people have thousands of
collections and you look at them and say if you've got 1000
collections, only 50 of them actually get used and replacing
lots of those collections now, which is filters of another
collection. Because depending on how you set
your sites up, Google is probably not going to index a
lot of those filters, but they will index the proper
collections. So if you only had 50 or 100
instead of 1000 and they were all getting used and people
buying lots of products through them, you'll probably find those
50 to 100 will rank better than before because Google's not
trying to crawl all this different stuff around your
site. So it's basically about focusing
search engines and customers to a slightly smaller sites, a bit
more organising but easy to find stuff rather than just loads of
stuff all over the place that basically gets ignored.
Quick tip of tea, although we're talking about collections for
that. Sorry, I haven't got a really
bad cough at the moment. We're no though, we're talking
about collections that can also apply to products as well.
So if you've got, I don't know, 20% of your products actually
get viewed on the site and, and, and bought and the other 80%
don't really get viewed very often at all and definitely
don't get bought. Maybe you want to look at your
product range and start shrinking it down a little bit.
There might be a what I call a merchandising reason why you've
got so many products. But certainly for drop shippers,
we find a lot of drop shippers have got thousands upon
thousands, sometimes even over a million products in the site.
No one's looking at any of them, which is going to cause you
issues on SCO right number six, another sip of tea counts of
coughing tea. I'm going to feel much better
after this. This mint tea is delicious.
SEO is the final point. How many not found Sorry, found
but not indexed pages are you sitting on is the announcement
here? And what this means is if you
connect up Google Search Console, it's completely free.
And even if you've never connected it up or set it up or
well verified it before, you will get up to 16 months
previous data from Google, which is quite cool.
And it's Google's where feeding back everything's going on in
the SEO world. And if you go in there, you can
look under what's called pages on the left hand side.
Click that and you can see how many pages Google has crawled
but not indexed. And this tells us a few things.
One is the quality of content across your site.
If there's more, like if you're talking like 20 times as many
pages or 50 times as many pages in there, that bit Google has
crawled and decided I'm not indexing your content, then it's
probably not good content, it's not relevant content, it's not
optimised content, or there's just too much of it in total.
A bit like I was saying with the killing collections, killing
products in the previous point. The other thing that's quite
interesting in that report is that we've seen some sites where
only the home page has actually been indexed and the rest of the
site hasn't, and that is a quality issue.
We've only ever seen that where people have used AI to write the
content, they've used Google Translate to do translations or
something similar to those two things.
Or on that, along those lines, you want your content to be
unique. So it's quite silly to use
Gemini to do AI written content and Google Translate to use
translations because then when it comes to ranking on Google,
Google's going to go. Hang on a minute.
I did all the hard work here. This is just copy and paste
content. It needs to be written properly
for those locations and territories.
Those are the updates from the agency Quivia this week got a
bit of fun for us all. I want you to write down or try
and remember if you can, 5 things and the five things are
what are, and this is based on largest market cap in the total
total stock markets. So the largest market cap
companies. And I want you to write down
what you think the top five of these are.
I got, I got four of them, which was better than most of the
team. Most people only got two or
three, which was quite interesting.
And I asked my mum this question as well.
And I know she doesn't listen to this, but sorry mum, if ever you
do come across this. Mum only managed to get one of
them and it's only because she, she uses it.
Anyway, top five, write this down quickly.
I'm going to see top five based on market cap.
Top five sized companies in the world based on market cap.
I'm going to start at #5 just give you a second to write down.
I don't know how long it takes to write 5 things.
I don't tend to write things. I tend to write them on a
laptop, which is a lot faster. My, my handwriting is terrible.
Anyway, enough small talk. Let's get into the top five S at
#5 we talk about this quite a lot.
It's Amazon. So Amazon is the, it's got the
fifth biggest market cap globally in at #4 is Alphabet,
which is Google. So Google, we'll call it Google
for all all intents and purposes.
So Google's there at #4 #3 I'm using one of these devices now
it is Apple. I'm using an Apple Mac at #3 #2
it is Microsoft, so I'm not using Microsoft, but I could
have given that away as a clue. But yeah, Microsoft at #2 now
this one, if anyone gets this honesty only, please send me an
e-mail if you got this and we'll send you a free cup until they
run out. Winning with Shopify cup.
I got a spec 1 today, but yeah, we'll send out some of the
winning with the winning with free winning with Shopify free
cups. So it's been quite a long Monday
so far. The top one is NVIDIA and I, I
mean, I've been reading about these guys for a while.
It's insane how big they are and how quickly they've grown.
But NVIDIA up at #1 they are the biggest look at the companies by
large, largest companies by market cap in the entire world.
I hope you've enjoyed today. We'll be back again next Tuesday
with some more updates, some more news.
And if you want to hear about anything in these as well, let
us know. I know we've talked to quite a
few guys anyway, but Tuesday, tea break talks, we can talk
about wherever you want, but these are things we settled on
and we've been told by you guys it's quite useful.
And everybody has a little list of actions after these.
So that's really, really useful. Let us know what you think.
Please do TuneIn next week. And on Friday, we'll have
another very special guest joining us.
Although we might not, there is a solo episode we've done on SEO
here as well. See how that'll be coming at
some point. But because some amazing guests
and some really big brands and a couple of tech companies coming
at the moment as well. So very exciting lows to engage
with. Hit subscribe button if you
haven't already and check out our website, wwspodcast.com and
go and subscribe to our newsletter because we're sending
out some pretty cool stuff through that as well.
I've been Nick, you've been great.
I'll see you on Friday.