Hello and welcome to another episode of Winning with Shopify
podcast to be your host, Nick Truman.
It is Tuesday, which can only mean one thing.
It is Tuesday tea break talks. How exciting.
We're going to run through some news.
We're going to run through a few articles, have found a couple of
stats. We're going to have a Quivia a
bit later and it's new year, new me.
If you tuned in last week, you'll know that I am still
drinking tea. I've just had a cup of tea,
which is lovely peppermint tea, but I'm drinking more water.
Got a pint of water here, which is delicious.
So, so far you've tuned into a podcast and Nick has had a sip
of water. Anyway, we're going to talk
about a number of things on the show.
You've probably seen in the title.
There's loads coming this year. I did my predictions for the
year last week, which I look quite exciting.
I think loads of stuff about AIAEO answer engine
optimization, how exciting marketeers are becoming
influencers, AI is improving video and design has become one
of the number one design taste. Sorry, someone's taste in design
has become one of the number one marketing skills for marketing
teams. We spoke about some of the
things I was grumpy about, some of the things I'm optimistic
about this year. There's a lot going on.
There is a lot going on and I want to talk about a few bits
and pieces and we're going to start off with quote or fact of
the week. Which one of my teams pulled
this together? Daisy, who I shout out every
week. Daisy's amazing and I'm going to
read this out as well. Daisy's also put like there's a
box on the on the pre show note she puts together for me and it
says water New Year's resolution check.
She's checking in on me. She's been checking in on the
whole team to make sure we're sticking to our New Year's
resolutions quote and fact of the week.
So more than 60, sorry, 76% of marketing teams are now using AI
in core marketing operations, up from just 29% in 2021.
Companies using AI report significantly higher performance
and engagement, ROI and customer retention.
And that is from allaboutai.com. We find it fascinating, all this
talk about AI. And we're going to talk in a
little bit about some of the things AI actually does, because
everyone says AI is a big thing and everyone kind of goes yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm really interested
particularly in how people are using AI.
What is the tool, the function, the process, the thing AI is
doing that the human now is not the reason I flagged that.
There was a productivity report that I think was released by the
UK government back at the beginning of 2025, and it's said
that people were currently taking longer to get the AI to
do the thing they wanted to do then it would have taken them to
do the thing they wanted to do, which I find really interesting
and I'm sure we can all relate a little bit to that.
So there's three things coming up this year #1 is AI driven
personalisation and automation. So when we talk about that,
there's a lot of buzzwords in this industry and a lot of
acronyms. So I just want to break that
down quickly. AI obviously isn't wait, it's a
buzzword. I think it's also not a
buzzword. It's a specific thing.
But the way Shopify stores sell products is really, really
changing. And actually these are four ways
that you could be using AI on your front end store.
So dynamic product recommendations, lots of AI
tools now from adding an app that just does that to a whole
suite of tools that can do a whole range of things.
But when you somebody's looking at a product or browsing your
site, the products that come up recommended and also which we
haven't actually got this in our list, but I'm going to add it
into this one. A lot of brands we're working
with now are seeing a huge success from actually sorting
and organising the products on a collection using AI.
So rather than having a default set or it's automatically done
A-Z or price high to low, which customers the chance of being
interested. If you've got 400 products in
that collection, the chance of being interested in the top
three or four products come up so slim.
So using AI based on their behaviour or it just testing to
certain characteristics of people, AI can in a split second
look at things like their IP address, what pages they've been
on on the site, whether they're currently logged in or not, and
recommend according to all of the data it's got access to.
So those product recommendations or products sort on a collection
that's super, super beneficial, personalized personalized
storefront layouts and search that.
When we say storefront, normally homepage.
So when people are on the homepage, the actual content
appears in the format of content from top to bottom, whether it
recommends some products or some buying guides, etcetera, based
on where it thinks people are in that buying journey using AI for
that. And the second part of that was
search as well. So when someone actually goes to
search for a product, having AI try and complete the sentence
for them. If you say I want men's quarter
and it says, ah, you also want a quarter zip jumper and then
recommending some jumpers and some other bits before anyone's
even click search. That's how the search
functionality on AI can be improved.
You can then see how many people are currently using search and
before, well, sorry, how many people are using search and
purchasing products before you use an AI tool to start doing
some of that for you. And then also now we're using
the AI tool. How much has revenue got up when
people are in that specific journey?
It's quite trackable and monitorable, and I love that.
Easy to monitor. Third one out of four is
predictive segmentation and messaging, which I find quite
interesting because we spend a lot of time, especially in
e-mail marketing. A lot of people in e-mail
marketing make a lot of assumptions and assumptions can
be based in the data. The data tells you what
happened, but it doesn't always tell you why.
And AI has the ability to test in real time those
segmentations. So AI might say, I've looked at
all your data and 10% of your customers have bought more than
twice and 90% of your customers have not that based on all of
the different stores I've, I'm connected to as an AI tool, all
the different data. I can see that is your number
one opportunity right now is to message the people that have
bought more than once and get another order from them and the
people that haven't. And that that would take you,
you know, a bit of time just to put up the right report.
But also the other thing that I find fascinating about AI is how
would you know to look at that in the 1st place?
That's the exciting bit is it tells you here are some
learnings you might be interested in because when I've
presented these learnings to other people in your situation
or the marketeers or store owners, they've made some
changes. And so that's quite exciting.
And then automated marketing and operations, I think it's how
most people are using AI at the moment is they will use it from
an operational point of view to say, if somebody is trying, if
somebody submits a return on our website, that AI automatically
finds the order number in the back end, updates the order
number, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And so that's again a way AI can can help with that.
This was from cleargo.com. So there's some other insights
on is the future of Shopify Plus trends for 2025 and 2026 quite
exciting. Personalisation really is, is
the big point. The thing I don't like about
personalisation is I know a lot of you guys are listening and
not like a lot of our clients turning over millions every year
and growing considerably. Some of you are starting out,
you're only getting the odd sale every day or two or every couple
of hours. You get a sale here and there
and they're all a bit random because you're starting out.
Personalisation doesn't really work until you've got enough
data to know what to personalise.
And that is one of the chicken and egg scenarios.
What came first, the chicken or the egg?
You know, a quick sip of water because I've got a horrible sore
throat today. Delicious.
I never used to light water, but I change the glass I'm drinking
it out of. Fascinating, isn't it?
And suddenly I like it again. How the mind boggles me.
Anyway, commerce everywhere is number 2.
So we're going to talk about social, conversational, multi
channel. And what we mean by this is
where people are trying to buy your products from Shopify, but
not just on your store, there's lots of other locations.
So wherever people are shopping. So it could be your catalog
appearing in AI assistance. So there's a thing that's built
into ChatGPT now called merchants.
I've mentioned it a few times. So via Shopify, you can feed all
of your products into ChatGPT and people can actually purchase
them on ChatGPT as if they were on Shopify.
They can do that whole process. And that's an integration ready
readily available for free done by ChatGPT or Open AI who run
ChatGPT and Shopify themselves. It's my understanding Copilot as
well for Microsoft. So you can sell products through
Copilot without doing anything. I'd say without them to do
anything, all the normal marketing things and brand
awareness and stuff do kick in. AI doesn't just show you because
you fed your products. You've still got to convince it
you're a good option for that. There are things like social
commerce and shoppable video. So on YouTube you can buy, well,
you can find products on YouTube, but TikTok shop, you
can shop Shopify products and do a Shopify store order as if
you're on a Shopify store. But actually within TikTok
itself. The same applies to Facebook and
Instagram. They've had stores for a very,
very long time. So you can buy products within
those stores as if if you were as if you were on Shopify, which
is quite fun. And this is from the
foldtech.com. So it's their Shopify winter
edition, new innovations and it's all the emerging shopping
channels as a result of AI and lots of other stuff.
Some are new, some are not. And so again, trying to make
sure your store and products are available in all the places that
your customers would want to find them can be quite fun.
I'm good. I'm going to put a caveat on
this as I'm going to hang about this, but I think thinking about
it now while I'm reading through my notes and, and what we're
talking about, this to me is one of those lovely but also
annoying shiny objects. It's the kind of thing where
you, you've sitting there, you've probably got a list of
admin to do and some tax returns and some new products add to
sites and customer service emails to respond to and all
this, whatever your job function is from founder down to one of
those kind of more niche and specialist roles.
This is the kind of thing where you're like, wow, what other
channels could we be on? And suddenly like 2 hours has
gone on Google trying to find those other channels.
So I would definitely say like maybe just carve out a bit of
time to do this, like 30 minutes an hour just to connect up some
of those bits. I would definitely recommend
copilot and ChatGPT integrations.
I think this is absolute given and whatever you're doing on
Shopify is just automatically fed across really nice and
simple. But it's the kind of thing you
spent hours and hours and hours getting yourself on every single
platform and then suddenly you still have no sales.
And it's like, OK, something, there's a bigger issue in the
business than what channels it's available on.
And the third one I want to talk about, which is going to be
really, really dry and boring. I'm joking.
I'm gonna make it fun. But it is about data, first
party data, third party data, privacy, Omni channel
experience. Cookies are changing quite a
bit. There's an initiative going
through the EU at the moment. I'm not going to go to too much
details. I'm not a lawyer.
I because I don't fully understand it.
I wait for our lawyer to tell us or one of our clients say this
is what we're doing based on the new rules.
The UK, the way cookie banners work in the UK has changed and
it changed. So this will be the 6th of
January when you're watching this.
I'm recording it the day before, but 6th of January.
So six days ago, the UK law changed on cookies.
You don't need to be as strict on cookies as you used to be.
And there are some, I understand there are some scenarios where
we can actually get rid of cookie banners.
And I've been saying this for a while that if we can, we're
going to get rid of cookie banners for all of our UK
clients. The EU is doing a separate move.
It's something slightly different, but it's focusing on
the same kind of thing of going, do you know what, we've over
regulated cookies and we've accepted that now.
And it's like as a marketing person, it's been in the digital
world for years. It's like it was always, it was
always a terrible idea. How have you just realised?
I think the UK doing it has caused the EU to follow suit.
I don't know what the US is going to do, but the US rules
are a bit more relaxed anyway. But Shopify stores must rely on
owned data and seamless experiences.
First party data allow data power, smarter retention,
segmentation. Integrated channels like e-mail,
SMS, mobile, social create consistent journeys and privacy.
First personalisation replaces third party tracking.
So this is where you can track based on that customer.
Because when you can see what's happened, when you've sent them
an e-mail, when you've sent them an SMS, when they've been using
their mobile on your site and they're logged in, when they've
been on your social channels or followed you on social, you can
see who that user is. So it's almost irrespective of
the cookies themselves actually running.
There are going to be more changes on it on this this year.
I'm trying to make headway of this and I'm waiting for a
lawyer to get back to me on what we can and can't do in the UK
following the changes on the 1st of January.
Because guess what? The documentation from our
government is very, very vague. But it's going to be interesting
because I think cookie banner is a complete waste of time.
And I'll be completely open in saying that when we've not had
cookie banners on site compared to when we have, we've seen
conversion rate be worse where we've got cookie banners.
Trying to get a cookie banner to work and tick all the compliance
boxes is complicated, and I think it restricts trade is my
gut feel. If somebody's on a website, it
should just be a given that every, because every website in
the world will put some sort of cookie on your machine from that
website. It should just be a given that
if you use the Internet, there's going to be cookies.
And most sites I've tested when you click decline, it doesn't
actually make any difference. No one's really compliant.
No one's really got in trouble for it.
And I think it's a complete waste of time.
And I, I shudder to think how much money's been spent on
getting the legislation there in the 1st place and how much
companies are spent trying to be trying to, you know, abide by
every single rule that is there. And it's just a waste of time,
waste of money. And then then you look, and
there's a global downturn economically in almost every
single country or certainly in in the Western world.
So anyway, rants over cookies are cookies are fantastic cookie
banners, complete waste of time and no one, even the EU don't
understand what they are. And if they want to talk about
it on the show, they'd be very welcome to come on and and clear
things up and be very happy to have that that debate.
But anyway, new year, new opportunities.
So the last thing from me before we do our Quivia, which one of
my favorite things. And if you've never listened to
the show, I came up with it myself in a sense every single
week, which is why I'm talking so quickly.
New year, new opportunities. One of my big learnings.
I just want to finish on one of my one of my kind of mental
dwellings I've had over Christmas in Q42025, lots of
brands in the UK and US, which are our main 2 markets and also
brands across Europe we work with and various other places.
They're trying to cut costs on marketing.
Now if I've been in this industry for nearly 20 years and
so it's the first time I've heard people trying to cut costs
and I was surprised by it, I'd obviously be lying.
Plenty of businesses have tried to cut costs and as a business
owner myself, I do not want to waste money on stuff that I
don't need to spend money on. The problem with marketing is as
soon as someone comes up with a calculation that says marketing
budgets need to be cut, the problem is rarely that we're
spending too much because whatever you spend, the
marketing should deliver an ROI. Therefore, my view on this, and
it's what I've been dwelling on a bit of Christmas and how I
with our clients and some of the pictures that I do and the
brands we're going to be approaching to try and pitch to
this year. And some of you guys who listen
to the podcast trying to think about how I approach this and
what I do about this is as soon as a business is cutting
marketing, either one of two things are broken and one is the
result, obviously, or it's tracking more often than not,
both are a problem. We, we've had businesses before
that have gone, do you know what?
We're cutting all marketing budgets by 50%.
And then they do. And guess what conversation they
have three months later, our revenues down.
I wonder why that is? It's because you cut marketing.
What we should have done is said, we're not going to cut our
marketing budget. We want to increase it, but to
increase it, we need to make more revenue.
So actually we're going to set ourselves out on a, if you can't
prove it's working, we need to change the tracking, change the
way we're doing it, or do some sort of test.
So we've had clients before say I'm going to pull Meta
advertising down by 50% for two weeks and then I'm going to put
it back up unless I've got some data to say otherwise.
And what you find is you see that actually over those two
weeks, things drop and then they come back or things don't drop
at all. And actually then you start to
ask the question of irrespective of all the marketing channels
that I've got and all the budgets I spend and the tracking
and everything else, Meta is not delivering for me.
Is it because I've turned the budget down?
So again, the wrong thing to do is then go, well, let's not
spend any money on Meta. The right thing to do is try and
find out who actually seizes some Meta and what part of the
journey does that actually influence?
Because if it influences really top line brand, we should keep
that running. So if you're in an organization
that's cutting budgets or not approving budgets, I'd try.
And if I were you, my, my advice and what I would do in your
position is try and sit down with the finance director as
quickly as possible and say this initiative to lower budgets.
Like, do you realize what's going to happen next?
And is this actually, is this really a move the business want
to make when there's economic downturns?
I think I said this last week or the week before on the show as
well. When there's an economic
downturn, it forces everyone to become more efficient.
And as part of this, some businesses don't do that and
they go under. So if you manage to weather the
storm and get more efficient and make profit or make more profit
through an economic downturn when half your competitors have
disappeared or whatever number of them have gone, what do you
think is going to happen to your revenue?
The last one left and everybody's going to come and
shop with you. So you're going to see a massive
upturn as well. So whenever brands have started
lowering budgets, as much as I'm slightly biased, let's be
honest, because I don't want the budgets to go down.
I want to go up because I make more money as a marketing
agency. But actually, it's often a
warning sign that things are not looking good and long term
they're not going to be good. We've had a few clients come
back to us that we stopped working with in the last couple
of years because they were lowering budgets.
We were too expensive or people trying to after our agency fee,
and it's like, well, actually, if the campaign's working, we're
worth the fee to pay the fee. Make them work and don't hire
the wrong person who's not going to make it work and cost you a
lot more in the long run. Let's do Quivia, shall we?
I'm a bit ranty this week. I don't know why.
I'm in a very good mood. Anyway, this week's Quivia.
True or false? Over half of mobile users will
leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. 3
seconds? It's true or false.
Over half of mobile users will leave a website if it takes more
than three seconds to load. It'd be a terrible fact if it
wasn't true. So yes, it is true.
Got a big green tick next to it? It's true.
Nearly 40% get this of Gen. Z.
Say they use TikTok or Instagram instead of Google to search for
information because it's faster. How about that?
Nearly 40% of Gen. Z.
So they use typical Instagram instead of Google to search for
information because it's faster. And just reading between the
lines here, it's not because Google itself slow, it's because
they go on Google and when they click on a website to go and dig
a bit deeper into whatever they were looking for, takes ages to
load. How interesting.
And also there is so much fake information out there on TikTok
and Instagram. So there we go.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed today's episode.
We will be back, I believe with a guest this week.
I haven't checked the diary. This is only my second day back
after Christmas. I hope you've enjoyed today's
show. If you haven't already, please
hit the subscribe button, leave us a review on whatever platform
you're listening to. Give us a comment on Spotify.
I said that a few weeks ago, apparently for those of
comments, I haven't looked yet. Sorry.
It's been Christmas a little bit away, but I will go and check
those. Hope you can TuneIn again for
our next episode. If you want to come on the show,
you want to sponsor the show, send us an e-mail saying hello
at Winning Shop dot com. Thanks for tuning in.
Great having you.