Hello and welcome to the episode the Winning, which will provide
podcast if you're tuning for the first time.
Hello and welcome. I have a terrible sore throat.
I've had a very long weekend and we were at E Com Expo last week
and we're going to mention that again later.
So this is Boiler. I'm going to say anything about
it. But that was it and it was in
central London. I think a few of us caught
colds. We're going to the big city, US
country folk who live out in the hills running an hour on a train
from London though, which is exciting.
But anyway, welcome to another Tuesdays tea break talks with
me, Nick Truman. I am the host winning Shop 5
podcast on Friday. We will have a guest in so you
won't just have to listen to my dreadful dulcet tones.
But today I'm going to give some of the headlines and what's
going on and someone said to me this, so I thought we're going
to start the show with this. Someone sent me an e-mail and
said I love your Tuesday tea break talks.
It's a nice small moment to take a deep breath away from the
madness of running an ecom business in 2025.
So thank you Barbara for sending this in.
And she said maybe we'll need to do a deep breath before we start
because you talk 1,000,000 miles an hour.
Nick, I do apologise. I'm probably going to go a bit
slower today because my throat. But anyway, we're all going to
take a deep breath in and I'm going to take a deep breath out
and we're going to see how much better we feel and then we're
going to crack on with the show. So without further ado, it's the
first time we've done this on the show.
It's not part of e-commerce, but it does help.
So with me, we're all going to take a nice deep breath in right
on three 123 and hold it and release.
Feel better already feel better already.
I've had a hectic morning, so that's good.
Anyway, tea of choice this week. I'm not feeling very well.
So I've got a ginger tea in one of our very famous.
They're all famous. No one's got one, but I wouldn't
win Shopify mug. And yeah, we're reaching over
half a million people a week at the moment when we looked at our
stats. Insane.
So many of you guys tuning in, especially through social
channels now and watching all of our social reels, which is
awesome. Yeah, I've got ginger tea.
We are. Anyway, if you're like, what on
earth is going on? But let's see you Friday
episodes of ages what you're doing, Nick.
We are going to talk about some of the Shopify news, something
from our partners, our sponsors and partners, what's going on in
the e-commerce space and also a few agency learnings.
And then we have this really cool thing at the end that I
like to call a Quivia. The Quivia is really exciting.
I found a resource for my next like 20 or 30 Quivia, which is
quite cool. And it's a statistic.
I think it's going to scare and shock you quite a lot and make
you have a conversation if you have one with a CTO or technical
director or just a web team. So we'll come on to that at the
end. Something to stay tuned for.
Quote of the week, I got 3 quotes, 2 have been sent into US
and 1 is from me. Well I say from me, my FD keeps
reminding me of this, which we'll come on to in a minute.
The first quote of the week is every morning you have two
choices continue to sleep, which is very tempting this morning so
I'm not feeling great. You can continue to sleep with
your dreams or wake up and chase them and that's from Carmelo
Anthony it was sent in also by Barbara Slager.
Barbara, you've had two shout outs in the first what a Week 2
and a bit minutes. Excellent.
Jim Rowan famously said either you run the day or the day runs
you so take control. And that's that's what prompted
me for the third one, which is something that I'm being
reminded of on a regular basis. I've got much better at this
over the years. Delighted to say you need to
work on your business, not in it.
And I need a constant reminder of that because I love getting
involved in some of when clients having challenges.
One of my teams like, oh, I wonder how you do it?
I'm like, I'll show you. And the rest of my team now got
very good at going. No, Nick, don't get involved in
specific things on the ground because then you're not on the
helm and we need you at the helm.
So you stay there please, which is a lovely way of them telling
me to go away. On the occasion there, we loosen
a client and I am incredibly good at SEO and PPC as we do
have a little reminder, but again, working on my business,
not in it. So And yeah, apologies if I've
said either of those two names wrong.
Carmelo as I'm going for there and Jim Rowan.
I actually got the my best friend who was my best man at my
wedding. I had a complete mind blank
yesterday and it took me about 20 seconds to remember his name.
That's how tired I am at the moment and how much this cold
has taken grip. Do you please send in some more
quotes? That is my next note to read
out. Send in some more quotes.
They're always better from you guys.
And also, if you do have an internal mantra or motto or
something, you can come back to you to remind you of the North
Star, the thing you was a Shopify merchant or business are
trying to achieve. Send it in.
I'm all keen. Like with the more we share, the
better that the quotes are. So let's do that.
Let's talk about some news. There's not a lot of news this
week. Shopify has been surprisingly
quiet, like they're going in some big.
So we'll see what happens next. The two things are out.
Products cannot be sold outside of configured shipping zones.
So I said that really weird. Products cannot be sold outside
of configured, configured, configured, I don't know
configured shipping zones. This has actually been an issue
for a number of our international sellers that we
work with where you set up a shipping zone and the product
still appears on the other ones, but it's only when you get to
cart, you can't see it. So we used to use Shopify
markets for that. If you don't have a shipping
zone set up for that zone for that product, it won't show at
all. Now I, I believe from reading
the reading the, the actual documentation around that the
second thing from Shopify this week, the 2nd and final thing
from Shopify side is Shopify e-mail now supports dynamic
products sections. So you can use Shopify data.
It's probably from things like Sidekick, for example.
And I, I understand that sidekick is obviously the AI
it's built as bad, but I understand sidekick is and the
general Shopify AI engines having a play in this.
So if you send an e-mail to customers saying hot this week,
you can put a dynamic products like sections, you insert 2 or 4
or 8 products, whatever in this section here within Shopify, if
you've been using something like Saguno Clavio, Saguna's
obviously our partner. So not only am I going to say
they're the best because they're a partner, they are actually the
best, which is why we partnered with them.
But those guys have been doing that kind of thing for a very,
very long time. So there's lots of plenty of
tools been doing. It's like Shopify haven't.
And obviously Shopify don't want to suddenly launch all the
features themselves. There's no point using the apps.
We have incredibly, and I mean incredibly, like a career high
for me this week on Friday, I'm not going to give any more away,
but you should see my face all over social media as well as my
2 guests. So yeah, definitely TuneIn on
Friday. It's gonna be a really big one,
possibly our biggest ever episode.
We'll see. We've had some big UNS over the
years and then other non non Shopify news.
Number one was obviously that we were ecom Expo last week in
London, which is amazing with so many good talks.
So many of you guys came out and also a lot of the speakers then
actually came to our stand and had a little chat with us as
well. So some really big brands were
marching around. We were giving out chocolates
and the last hour of the show is 2 days long and the last hour of
the second today I was running around giving out sweets to
everybody else. And in fact, since hitting
record only six and six and a bit minutes ago, I've just seen
a LinkedIn message coming on my laptop as well from somebody.
I went up to their stand, a potential partner of ours.
So super exciting, so many good people to meet there.
We probably drank a little bit too much on the Wednesday night
before doing it all again on Thursday, but it was really good
to say thank you to Nosto and Gorgeous as well for having us
at their partner drinks. Couple of the brands involved, I
think it was Nosto who invited us to that and obviously
Gorgeous have been on the show many times before.
The only other bit of news as well, just to warn everyone here
in the UK, and I know there's a similar thing in the US going on
and there's all kinds of stuff going different countries around
the EU at the moment, but the UK government budget is coming.
Yikes. I've written next to that.
So yeah, we'll see what see what they do.
I don't think they're going to be very nice to us because the
last, I think 10, maybe 20 budgets have been very, very
mean on businesses, especially e-commerce businesses.
Not like most of us are rolling in it.
You know, margins are getting tighter, tariffs aren't helping,
shipping costs are going out. Customers have less money to
spend at the moment. There's a bit of a global crisis
going on. And last thing for me, it's not
a bit of news, but just again, a quick heads up and says every
week, Cyber Weekend is coming out end of November, 1st of
December is Cyber Monday. And then we're into just
hardcore peak, peak peak holiday season going into the first sort
of two, maybe 3 weeks, December depending on the delivery cut
off date. Make sure you get organising all
your stuff in advance. If you've not organised your
Cyber Weekend campaigns, what on earth have you been doing all
year? Yeah, I've just dropped my phone
so I've lost all my notes. Now.
Here we go, tea of choice Ginger, we've gone through that
picnic. Scroll down a little bit more
partner news. Here we go.
So I mentioned last week there is going to be a webinar next
week. In fact, if I just grab my
diary, obviously I'm on my laptop right now.
It is on the 8th of October. It is 3:00 UK time, which I
believe is either 9 or 11. It's not ten, 9 or 11 AM New
York time. And if you want to get up nice
and early on the West Coast as well, we can come along to that.
Saguno and my agency Spare, I'm going to be hosting it.
One of my team's going to hopefully be there that we might
change the speaker from our side.
Rob's downstairs at the moment. It's one of our senior SEO
consultants. So they're going to be talking
about holiday season and some of the stuff you can do last minute
before peak really comes into play.
If you're like Nick was there between peak and holiday season.
Nothing, I'm just using different words so you will know
what I'm talking about. But it's the bit at the end of
the year when most retailers make most of their money, which
is super exciting. And second point in doing in
January as well, Saguna going to be back on that inventory
planner, another one of our sponsors be joining them.
But also if you are currently freaking out about your stock
and you feel you don't manage your inventory very well, we've
probably heard on some of the shows of the pre rolls I've done
within normal Friday episodes. Inventory Planner are obviously
super busy at the moment with their clients helping to get get
all of their inventory ready for Peak and understanding based on
previous peak experience using the inventory Planner software.
What they're going to need to be stocking, when they need to
restock things, how quickly they can get hold of things and
actually stuff they're not expecting to do well, super
vital information. If you're an early start up
stage, the inventory plan software is probably not for you
at this point. But if you've got probably 5000
plus sales a month going on through your store or revenues,
you might have low volume of sales, super high value or
revenue based, then actually that is a really good piece of
software. But whoever you are, you can go
and get 7 days to better inventory management e-mail
series. There'll probably be a link
below. I don't know how much these get
edited this Tuesday because I'm not as important as our guests
on Friday to get fully edited. So if it's not in the
description below, just head to our website.
That would be the wspodcast.com and you can click through to the
inventory planner offer. It's on our homepage.
So click through there. It's free to sign up and you've
got 7 days where you're going to get 7 emails, one e-mail a day,
seven days to get better inventory management.
Sorry, Barbara. I promised I wouldn't talk too
quickly, but it doesn't go really fast.
I'm going to slow back down South.
Updates from my my agency, the editors of the podcast wind me
up for coughing too much. Today's not going to be a good
day. I'm very sorry guys, but the
updates from our PPC team then we had lots from SEO last week,
so decided to prioritize the PPC team.
The first one is if you're using Google performance Max, you may
or may not now have access without an agency like us
managing it for you. You might now have it because it
was only released in beta to us. You may now have access to a
thing called channel Breakdown that's still in beta.
It shows you how much of your money has been spent through
that Pmax campaign. Pmax campaigns on Google
Shopping with shopping ads. Sorry, on Google search with
shopping ads. That's Google shopping.
How much has been shown on Google without product ads,
which might be probably going to be this space is probably going
to be the text based adverts on there.
So I'm going to be mind blank. I've been in I've been in text
ads for 18 years. Would you believe it's not like
I've just just learned about it this week.
But make sure you go and check out that Channel breakdown
because I'll show you what you're spending on YouTube
display and Gmail and all the other channels.
So actually where P Max is supposed to do full funnel, it
will show you how much of it's doing just on Google Shopping,
how much thing on other channels.
But most importantly, if it's spending money across lots of
channels and it's only converting on text ads or it's
only converting on shopping, you might want to get rid of your P
Max campaign and just do search and search text ads and also
only do shopping campaigns. Cut the spend.
That's not working. It's quite simple but super
effective. I've got three points.
I've got 5 in total, but I've got three points now on Bing.
Bing, Do you remember Bing, that search engine that never really
got going that nobody uses? Well, neither of those two
things are true and I'm going to talk about it much more now.
So if you're spending, where are we?
I'm going to come into that one in a SEC actually.
But if you're spending over 10 grand a month, that's probably a
good, good place to go on your Google campaigns or on all of
your PPC. So you're spending over 10,000 a
month. Give us A and you're not using
Bing. Give us a call because we can
get you a voucher that gives you a 5X free voucher for what you
spend on Bing. There are a couple of caps on
that, but we can basically test out that offer on AP Max
campaign. And then we get a 5X again for
search campaigns, those text ad campaigns.
So if you want to try Bing and see what it can do, give us a
ring and we'll give it a give it a test for you.
And as I say, you're going to get, so you'll, you'll get A5
sixths of your budget will be paid for by Bing, which is quite
fun just to get you started and see what it can do.
But the total amount is quite good.
There's a bit of a cap on that. If you were spending over 30,000
lbs or EUR or dollars 30,000 euros, $30,000 or 30,000 lbs on
Google and you're not using Bing, then you definitely need
to give us a call. This is not a public offer that
I can give out to everybody. It has to come through US.
So give us a call or drop us an e-mail.
You send an e-mail to team at spec dot digital spec spell
SPEC. So team at spec dot digital,
drop us an e-mail. If you're spending over 30K on
Google and not using Bing, Bing will all well say, oh, but they
will actually guarantee an agreed ROI and result and they
will refund you for the bit that you don't get that result on.
So if you're spending over 30 KA month from Google and have been
for a little while, a little while being 3 plus months, give
us a call and we can get you running on Bing with a an Albert
guarant. Well, I say, I don't know.
I keep saying Albert. It is actually guaranteed
results. Give us a call about that.
And then the third thing on being my 4th point out of five
today is that when you're using Netflix now, you might notice
there's a free plan. And on the free plan you get
adverts, but you can use it for free.
Or maybe it's the cheapest paid plan.
I don't actually know which, but the point, but that's irrelevant
to the point. The point is you can now
advertise on Netflix through Bing.
So if you want to say The thing is like a survival show and you
sell survival products, you can advertise on Netflix through
Bing for not a lot. You can start with a few
thousand a month for like less than $10,000.
Probably start with about 3 to $5000 a month to test it.
But you can actually run proper video TV style ads on Netflix.
There is a very big social platform about to integrate with
Bing as well. When I say integrate, you won't
be able to run it off the bat from Bing.
You have to come through us as we've got an amazing
relationship with an agency here in the UK who are also based
partly in Seattle in the US. So if you want to run on a big
social platform as well, and I can't say which one yet, but I
will announce which one it is eventually probably one of these
Tuesday tea break talks. But the we are going to be
running on a very big social platform.
You can run ads directly out of Bing, which is quite exciting.
There we go. So you're probably sitting there
going, I don't even think of Bing.
Brands that are using are absolutely crushing it.
It's got much bigger market share than you'd imagine.
And most importantly, if you're in B to BE commerce, if you're
selling products in Shopify store to other businesses, you
need to be using Bing. Because especially the more
corporate your cut your customers and desired clients
are, the more they're probably using Bing as their search
engine #5 totally total gear. Change back to Google, Google
Feeds, we've been doing lots of tests as I keep saying on Google
titles in feeds and we've now seen that just over 50% of feeds
where we've changed some of the products, the best selling
products that have best seller at the start of the product
title in the feed, just over 50% have done better than before.
So you've seen a significant uplift by adding bestseller to
the start of some of the best seller ads.
So loads you should be doing on feeds.
Feeds is one of the biggest things, which leaves me really
organically, which is not on this list, but feeds is one of
the biggest things we see. Other agencies are not
optimizing, but the feed determines what you appear for
and what you look like when you appear.
So it's your keyword and advert. And when you strip Google
Shopping back and Bing Shopping and include that one, now when
you strip Bing Shopping and Google Shopping back, there
isn't really much else to it. There's lots of targeting and
things like the middle, but it's yeah, what are people looking
for, whether she's searching for on Google or Bing to get you to
come up And then what's the advert actually look like and
actually say? So one of my team said, why
don't you tell everyone what we put in our pitch, which is the
three biggest is things we see brands not doing or doing badly
or is costing them way too much money before they come on board.
Number one is that most over 50% of brands and most brands that
we take on here are spending over 50% or sorry, spending more
on their own brand than not on their brand without knowing him.
So say Nike, for example, if Nike weren't included in this,
but if Nike were included in this, they'd be spending over
50% of their Google Ads budget on phrases that include the word
Nike, which they should be getting those as cheaply as
possible because people are already looking for Nike or
Nike. I don't actually know which way
round it is. If the tick was actually on the
E, I'd understand it as Nike. But anyway, somebody from Nike
if you want to reach out and tell me what it's called.
But anyway, point being is that the keywords and the search
terms are actually triggering all of the ads.
Over half of them are including the word Nike.
So net new customers where you're fighting against other
brands without your brand name in it.
When someone's just searching, I want some white trainers, some
green trainers, some size 8 trainers, women's size 4
trainers. I was going to say 22 tiny size
4 trainers. Apologies.
If you do have size 2 trainers, you're probably under 18 as
statistics in terms of their sizes, But so over 50% of people
spend is actually going to their own brand name without them
knowing it. And that's when we actually do a
proper deep dive in what we call data mining, dig into that data
and see what's actually going on.
The second thing we always find is that the brand clicks are
costing between 60 and 80% more than they should be because
people are using the wrong, I used to say like an inefficient
or could be better bidding strategy.
We're now just going actually, it's just the wrong bidding
strategy. There's multiple bidding
strategies. You can pay per click.
You can do a target cost to acquire loads of of other stuff,
but we found there's one in particular I'm not going to give
away for free I'm afraid because it needs to be set up correctly
as well. But there is one that we use and
we're seeing between 60 to 80% dropping click cost on people's
own brand name. So you can focus most of your
budget acquiring new customers, not trying to get people in
there already looking for you. 3rd .97% this is Matt.
We put this on the spec website now with some other call stats
which I'll read out in future weeks or you can go check out
yourself. Spec dot digital is our website.
97% of brands we start working with have tracking issues that
we need to fix in order to make decisions based on accurate
data. So ensure 97% of people we work
with don't have accurate data coming in.
They think they do or they don't use it properly or it's kind of
accurate. But then when we actually
compare like Shopify to GA 4 for example, it doesn't add up, not
even close. And Shopify is not going to
attribute stuff to the correct channels.
All right, Quivia, if someone's like, what the heck is Quivia?
Well, I came up with this word. I'm super proud about it.
So I'm going to shout out every single time for the rest of my
life. It is a question about a piece
of trivia. How exciting.
You could just call it trivia, but Quivia sounded way cooler.
And I came up with it live on the show as well when we're
recording. So I've read a report from DHL,
they've got a free 2025 e-commerce trends report.
It's a global report from all over the world about e-commerce
brands. It included 24,000 online shops,
sorry 24,000 online shoppers. So consumers from 24 global
markets, which basically 24 countries, but a couple of them
is arguable. You could argue they're not a
country or a geographic location or a principality or something.
But there's basically 24 global markets they're calling it.
And this is one thing I've only got about 8 pages in so far
trying to absorb this information.
I only found it this morning, and I record these on Monday
afternoon. So it's Monday, 29th September
right now. This one really shocked me.
What percentage of millennials? So you can Google what
millennial ranges. So what percentage of
millennials shop using a retailer's mobile app?
So what percentage of millennials shop using a
retailer's mobile app? I'm going to have a quick sip of
tea and I doubt anyone's going to get this.
If you get this right, e-mail me and please be honest.
I don't, I was, I wouldn't have gotten close to this ginger tea,
you know, and it's just cool enough to drink.
I think I said that last week as well.
Apologies, I'm getting old. Anyway, the answer then, So what
percentage of millennials shop using a retailer's mobile app is
83 percent? 83% of millennials shop using
retailers mobile apps. So if you haven't got an app,
it's actually quite easy to get an app set up if you've got a
Shopify store. So highly recommend it.
The only thing is everything I just said about the 97% of
people not tracking their data properly, that goes out the
window. Like it's so hard to track if
someone lands on your website and then they open your app or
the app opens automatically. It's so hard to attribute that
journey across. So some homework to do there.
Thanks for tuning in. Please tune in again next week.
I'll be really awkward if nobody ever watched any of these.
But also, yeah, if you've got any cool quotes, anything you
want me to cover in this, anything, any cool reports, you
see, stuff going on, please do share it.
I'd always like to shout you out, Barbara, like all the other
ones. I don't know what brand you're
from or if you're just listening out of pure curiosity, but send
us in your brand. I'll read out the brands as
well. I'm going to have one of Lorna's
coffees next week as well. So Lorna, I will not let you
down. Tuesday next week I'll be
drinking one of the the Bean Shop coffees from Perth in
Scotland. Thanks for tuning in everybody.
See you next week.