Hello and welcome to another episode, the Winning with
Shopify Podcast and meet your host, Nick Truman, agency owner,
veteran of podcasting. Now, I think I read the stat the
other day that said the average podcast lasts about 18 months
before it's killed. I've been hosting this for 5 1/2
years. In June 2026, it will be 6
years. And before that, my lovely
friend Caroline was running the show as well.
And Caroline, I know you're still TuneIn, so I'll give you a
little shout out from time to time.
And yes, we're good to good to chat to you a lot recently as
well. Totally irrelevant to the 10s of
thousands of people that'll be tuning into this.
But anyway, welcome to this week's show.
We've got some very exciting news.
As you probably saw in the title, we are announcing a very,
very exciting Shopify Summit. I mentioned it on Friday's
episode. If you didn't get a chance to
catch that. I'm going to share a lot more
information today. I purely said it was coming and
said what it was because I've been teasing it for a while.
Today I'm going to share a bit more information about what it
is, how you guys can get involved both from a listening
and actually get involved in creating some of the content for
it and what we're trying to achieve achieve with it.
In the process. I've got a few updates from one
of our partners here at Yost and a little update from Shopify as
well. And then we'll crack on to talk
about the summit, why we're running it, what it is and how
it all fits together. And again, how you can get
involved, which is going to be awesome from Yost.
We've, we've got a few messages here from Alex.
So thank you. Alex, I know you listened to the
show and it was nice to share a beer with you recently as well.
You're based on the other end of the UK and it's a tiny island,
but our transport is terrible here.
So it took me hours to get to you.
But it was nice to share a beer with you just before Christmas.
But Yost, they've changed a few bits and pieces, which is the
site Kit by Google. Site Kit by Google integration
is now available to all Yost customers on WordPress only.
No, it's not the winning with WordPress podcast that doesn't
exist. Well, if it does, it's not mine.
But this is the winning with Shopify podcast.
But I know a lot of you guys are using WooCommerce, Magento, SAP,
loads of other platforms, some custom builds as well.
So that's only available to WordPress customers.
But the site kit by Google integration is how you can use
things like GA 4, Google Search Console and loads of other
Google tools in there all in one place.
Nice and easy. A new thing.
And I think this because it doesn't say WP only in Alex's
notes. So I think it's on Shopify and
WordPress. You can now track brand
visibility in Gemini with Yoast AI Brand Insights, which is
quite cool. We talk a lot in SEO.
What is the benefit of having a brand mention if there's no link
in SEO? We always want links.
So there is some benefit and it's quite good to have that in
there. I've not played with it myself,
but it is going to be on my radar to have a little play with
that. I know my team have mentioned
they've seen it, so we'll start using that very, very soon.
I think this is all literally new stuff from last week.
And finally, we'll link in the description to all three of
these things, but we will link in the description especially to
this one. Third and final point from Alex.
Alex has written A blog post or article in Search Engine
Journal, one of the big publications.
I've been following it for nearly 20 years now, or probably
I think since it was pretty much started.
I think it was very early days when I first found it.
He's written a post about agentic.
I had to Google had to say that I've never heard that word
before. I thought it was Agnetic, but
agentic about agentic commerce may be relevant as UCP was
launched on Sunday. I'm not going to talk about it
today. We might touch on that a little
bit more next week because there's quite a lot going on.
The AI space is changing thick and fast and it's changing very,
very quickly as well. At the same time, it's not
really hitting company bottom lines apart from an expense so
far or process improvement. So when we talk about it in the
context of Yost and Yost is an SEO app for Shopify and for
WordPress, it's actually, if you've never heard of it, it's
the most used website plug in in the world.
And that was thanks to it's WordPress success running a
WordPress for a very, very long time.
And they now have a Shopify integration.
You get a small discount through us as well.
So go and check out the partner offers on our website.
Or it might be in the description as well, if Byron's,
if Byron's had a chance to, to add that, but we'll make sure
there is a link to Alex's article in there.
He talks about all of it. I had a quick glance earlier and
it's very, very interesting and I'd highly recommend it,
especially if you're getting into the nuts and bolts of AISEO
and how things are changing in the SEO space.
One from Shopify and then we can get onto the good stuff.
Look at this 4 minutes, 4 minutes and we're getting into
the good stuff, which is very, very short.
There's loads of other news I'm not covering this week, but we
might talk about it next week. You can now get better insights
from your returns with category specific return reasons.
Shopify now suggests relevant reasons based on what what's
being returned so you can improve your products and
operations, which is quite exciting.
They published it on the 16th of January.
So this is we're going out on the 20th of January.
So it'll be four days old. That would have been, was it
Friday 161718? Yeah, Friday it'll be Friday.
How exciting. So you can get better insights
basically on why people are returning things and category
specific returns. So what category of type of what
reasons to why they've returned it based on the products, which
I think is really, really cool. There's lots of people that get
products returned into their business and you so often
customers and in most countries the rules are you just have to
accept the return and refund it and there's like a notice period
of people who've just changed their minds.
The laws when it comes to returns in most places are very
favourable to the customer, not very favourable to the brand,
which is fine. As a brand you want to try and
improve your products, your processes, your communication as
good as possible. So people don't want to return
stuff. That is the solution here and
that is what the governments are trying to get you to do anyway.
How exciting. Our summit about two years ago.
I'm going to rewind the clock. About two years ago, I had this
idea of running a massive conference and it wasn't because
I wanted to run a conference. It was actually because a lot of
the conferences that I go to or engage with the online ones who
tend to be pretty rubbish, the content tends to be quite slow.
If it's the first time you're ever hearing my voice, you can
tell I speak quickly, annoyingly, I think even faster
than I'm speaking and I still speak before I think, which is a
joke, but it does happen. I think one of the issues my
find is I I sit through an hour long talk and there's one or two
good things at the end of it. I'm like, OK, that was kind of
interesting. I occasionally I find a speaker
or a talk I go to, which is absolutely incredible and I
can't get enough of it. But generally speaking, you want
to get through content quickly when you're physically at a
conference. I just think conferences and
panels and things, you just want the output.
What do these guys say? Well, the guys from this brand
said this or the guys from this company and this tech platform
said this. That's what you want to get to.
And that's the way the digital world has changed.
It's very, very quick and easy to get stuff.
If you find a long article online now, you Chuck into chat,
TBT and say, summarise this article for me.
You go to a meeting for three hours and use AI note takers,
even as a voice note on your phone or something and use an AI
note taker and at the end summarise these notes and it
summarises the notes for you. So what I've always wanted to do
and specifically around Shopify, given that we run this podcast,
I've always wanted to have some sort of conference, an E summit.
And we're going to call it a summit.
It's going to be called the Shopify Summit, the unofficial
Shopify summit might add. We're calling it that because we
want online content where people can pick and choose what they
want to listen to. And again, you're online, so you
can scroll through content, get to stuff really, really quickly
and just go, OK, that that message there is really, really
relevant to me. Or you, you can go through like
that talks. You start a talk and go, it's
not great. It's not relevant to me.
Go on to the next talk. This is a really cool talk.
It's not relevant for me. Get on to the next one, right?
This is where I'm at. This is the stuff I really,
really want to, I want to find out.
So that's the context of this. And for about two years I've
been sitting there thinking, this is a nightmare.
It's just too much work and I can't be bothered to get all
this stuff together. But in 2025, I found the energy
and I spoke to Byron and a couple of the guys in the team
and said, right, I think we're going to do this.
I think we're just going to give this a go and see how many
people sign up. So that is what we aren't doing.
There are loads of ways you guys can get involved.
So the plan is we are going to try and create and there's a big
statement and if we don't achieve this, fine.
You don't have a good target, you're definitely not going to
achieve something or feel satisfied.
We're going to try and create the world's biggest unofficial
Shopify summit. There haven't been many up until
up until now, so that's not going to be a huge challenge.
But we do want the biggest, We want to create the biggest
depository of content specifically about Shopify to
ever be released on a single day.
The content's going to be live for a year.
And we will also include probably some follow up bits
based on feedback, based on comments, based on engagements.
If lots of people engage with a specific brand or topic or
theme, or I'll talk through the different stages in a minute as
well. There's going to be multiple
stages with different themes on each stage and you can pick and
choose which stage you go to, what content you watch on that
stage, etcetera. It's not going to be a summit
where it's going to last six days and you have to sit there
and watch all the content to find the bits that you want to
watch. Everything's going to be
published in one go and you can go and choose what you want to
listen to. So we're going to try and break
a record of having the most Shopify content ever released on
a single day in a single platform ever on any, any
website, any publication, some of the stages.
And again, this is just a list at the moment.
And we've got speakers signing up, we've got sponsors signing
up, and we've also got brands signing up as well to come and
come and have a chat or reaching out to us about this.
So one of the stages is going to be all about brand stories,
which is going to be similar to what we do on the podcast, but
we're going to have these short, sharp, snappy, hey, I run this
brand. This is when we got started.
These are the three biggest challenges we've gone through.
And this is where we are today. This is where we're trying to go
and try and keep things short and snappy and stick to the good
stuff like I try and do on a on a Friday episode.
But we're going to have loads of them.
And again, they're going to be available for a year in one
single place. We're going to have a marketing
and sales stage. So we're going to have some
brands featured on that, some tech tools, some pieces of
software, some Shopify apps sharing how you can increase
your sales, how you can do marketing better, more
streamlined, how you can invest more, how you can make more
profit out of marketing and sales.
Where my heart very much lies in that, that stage right there.
And the brand stories. I run a podcast.
I've heard so many great brand stories.
We've had so many great brands on the show.
I can't even remember a bad brand.
I think we've only ever had, even when I sort of think like,
oh, this is going to be a bit of an average show, you get talking
to people and you find out so much interesting stuff.
Plus I love connecting with people as well.
So the brand stage and the marketing stage, marketing and
sales stage, those are the 2 that are going to be really
exciting. I think for me.
The other stages though, do fascinate me.
The next one is about customer retention and lifetime value.
So naturally, we're going to be talking about loyalty.
We're probably going to have, I know our guys, sponsors at
Saguna are going to be involved in that, that stage as well and
sharing some tips about how you can build the right automation
flows and other bits and pieces. We're still agreeing some of the
content with them at the moment. The fourth stage is going to be
about finance and back office, all the boring stuff, but the
stuff that if you don't get it right, your business is going to
fall apart. So we're certainly going to have
tax cloud involved in that. Again, one of our one of our
partners here. And the other thing we want to I
want to really bring to life in that is how to make finance and
things really, really easy. How you guys can actually keep
up to date and in touch with how your business is actually
ticking? What's it's really driving
revenue right now? Going back to that thing I just
said about Shopify, if I just scroll back up.
So we're talking about the return rates.
If you can use data in your finances on a real time
dashboard to understand your return rates, what's being
returned and why, you can start making changes very, very
quickly to things before you get more returns so you can stop the
problem before it grows any more.
So actually that back office, back office and finance I'm
calling at the moment will come by the better name for the stage
itself. But I think that's imperatively
important. And so many businesses get a
great product, customers love it and they're happy to pay for it,
and they start growing this business and the whole thing
falls apart because they've not got their finances in order
correctly or don't know where their profits coming from.
They don't know where to double down it.
It can be a real problem stage #5 warehouse and logistics.
I should shout all our partners out.
So Inventory Planner, we're going to shout you out as well.
The guys Inventory Planner are amazing.
The software is incredible, and it can predict when you're going
to need to top up stock based on how long it takes to get it in
stock. When you're thinking about
things like Black Friday, if you've been using something like
Inventory Planner for, I don't know, 5 or 8 years now, then
when you get to Black Friday, it tells you exactly what needs to
stock, and it also tells marketing what to push, what to
pull, etcetera. We're going to have those guys
obviously heavily involved in your inventory management, a
piece of software. We're also going to have some
companies that provide warehousing, provide fulfilment,
provide logistical solutions in there as well.
We are going to have a stage #123I have a number of these #6
is going to be about HR and legal, because if your business
starts growing, you're going to have to start to hire people,
and you're also going to have to work about work around the
legalities of things. So we're going to have some
expert advice on that. I think it's such a sidestep
from my world. It's probably the place I'm
going to struggle the most to get good speakers to, to come
to. But when you've as soon as
you've got a plan, you can prevail.
So I'm going to move heaven and earth to get some good people to
come and share on that stage. And finally, last but not least,
we're going to have the Shopify app stage SO1 video from each
app that wants to feature on that stage quickly showcasing
their app, Why it's the best app.
So if you're looking for apps to install on your store, which I
know you all are, some of our most popular episodes cover this
as well. When I've done what are my top
10 apps, I haven't done one for a couple of years.
Some of the most popular episodes are like, what are my
top 10 apps that I'm using at the moment recommending to
clients and why? The problem we've got is because
we have sponsors. We want to push our sponsors
because we've chosen our sponsors for specific reasons.
And sometimes I do endorse apps just because I love them, not
because they sponsor us or pay us any money, but we're going to
have that app stage as well. So if you're looking for new
apps for your business or you're like, I just want to like, if
you're anything like me, I just want to call tech.
I'm always looking for new apps to put on my phone, my Apple
Watch, even in my car. I've got a BMW and I'm so often
going, what new app could I put in the BMW that could help me?
I got an app the other day. It's a plug in hybrid, so I can
charge it when I'm out and about.
I got a new app the other day that's much better than one I
was using to find charges out and about and it tells you where
car charges are without you having to log in into each car
charger app to see if they've got one nearby.
It gives you all the charges in one place.
It's way better than one I was using before.
So I'm always on the lookout for new tech.
And if you run a Shopify store, you're doing the same.
It's like there's an app that can change your product title
based on personalisation to make it more dynamic to the person
that's on the site to try and get them to buy the product.
Oh, that's cool. Could that increase my
conversion rates? Maybe.
Will it affect my page speed? Maybe.
And so actually go watching app videos about how these apps run
on the app stage could be absolutely imperative.
So naturally, we're going to have this content live for a
full year. And if things go well on the
SHOP Unofficial Shopify Summit 2026, we're going to do guess
what, a 2027 summit as well. We're going to make it even
bigger and better once we've done 1.
And it might be a bit ropy at first, so please bear with us,
but it might be a bit ropy in the first year.
We might find a couple of technical issues, we might have
issues getting enough speakers for the actual event, all that
sort of stuff, which doesn't seem to be a problem so far
since we started putting the net out to existing partners,
previous sponsors, previous podcast guests seems to be
absolutely fine. But please bear with us Year 2.
If we do a if, if you support us enough in year 1 and bear with
us a little bit and help make this amazing, I can guarantee
year 2's going to be much, much better because we would have
some learnings and we can keep going with it.
And like all of you guys, you all jumped off a Cliff at some
point and started a Shopify business.
We're jumping off a Cliff and starting a summit to bring
better content to all of you guys.
So it's gonna be live for a full year, but we're probably going
to put some exclusive interviews and things live on there after
launch as well. So it'll be a bit of extra
content to to look out for. We've also got a few big names
and headline speakers and brands.
I'm going to do our marketing really, really well by not
telling you today who they are. We're going to start drip
feeding that through our newsletter.
So it's going to be very different from the podcast.
I'm not going to be featuring everything, which should be joy
to all of you because anyone who's been tuning into the show
for a while will be very, very bored of my voice.
I said that the other day and I got two people emailing going.
I love your voice, your recommendations.
Great. Thank you so much.
And I've got in quite a long e-mail chain with with Sue about
this. Sue, thanks so much for reaching
out. I said to give you a little
shout out, but you've asked some amazing questions and I've been
answering Sue on dictation in my car on the drive home.
So love your emails, Sue, but yeah, been been talking to
people. So yeah, there'll be lots of
content on there, lots of the content we added by the
companies, the brands themselves without too much influence from
me. There will be a few interviews
I'm going to do as well. But yeah, I just, I want to get
great content out to people and I want to do it in mass and let
you guys start to look at which stages, which bits of content
you want to look at. The other thing we're going to
do with some of that information is the more popular topics, the
more popular content, the more popular stages or talks or
particular videos people are really, really engaging with,
We're going to do more content like that on the podcast as
well. So it'll help us give you guys
better content. Of course, the podcast is free
to tune in and you're probably sitting again.
How much is the summit going to cost?
Nick and I have some really bad news.
I'm afraid. It's going to cost nothing.
It's going to be free. It's bad news for me, great news
for all of you guys. But we're going to launch the
whole thing for free, and we're probably going to keep it free
forever. There's no premium content,
there's no upsell. We're going to be charging some
of the sponsors, some of the speakers to come on, and it's as
simple as that. But like the podcast, we're not
just going to let anybody on. We're going to vet everybody
that wants to come. So the final two things from me
are how you guys can get involved.
If you're a brand with a really cool story, please reach out to
us for two reasons. Number one is I'd love to have
you on the show. Most of the brands you hear on
the show either we've reached out and said, hey, we love what
you're doing. Please could you come on the
podcast like we'd love to interview you or they've reached
out to us and said, hey, you mentioned this the other day.
We had that problem, but we did this about it and it's like,
yeah, get on the show. We'd love to have you on.
And we don't charge brands to get involved or merchants as
Shopify calls you guys, which I don't like because that sounds
like Shopify just there to merchandise some money out of
you. But we, we don't charge brands
to come on the show. So if you want to come on the
show and you want to get involved in the in the summit as
well, we might give you a specific topic and say, can you
record a 20 minute video about this, this specific part of your
business? And we'll feature that on the
brands stage. Obviously, if you're an agency,
an app, a tech platform, there are so many opportunities to get
involved. We being totally transparent
with everybody listening to the show.
We've had times in the past, but not for a very long time, not
for years now. But we had times in the past
where we didn't have a sponsor. And if we don't have sponsors,
we don't have any income. And it's quite hard to pay the
team behind the scenes here and make the show happen.
I run my agency and lots of you guys reach out and want help
from the agency. So it works for me.
But actually trying to fund the PNL of the podcast can has been
a challenge in the past. The last couple of years we've
done very, very well. We're very happy with that.
And we do have a waiting list of sponsors.
So naturally we've offered them some slots.
So if you want to sponsor the show, get your brand out there
and use our podcasts and our platform and everything to do
that. You can't use the podcast
anymore because we don't have any space for sponsors until at
least I think it's July. August time is when the first
one comes up, so there's loads and loads of opportunities to
get involved in the in the summit as well, which one of the
reasons we're running it is there's so much cool tech out
that we want to feature. Some people can't afford to
sponsor the podcast. Here's a way we can get them
involved, get them in front of all you guys as brands so you
can see what's going on. Anyway, I'm going to leave that
with you guys today. If you want to sign up, head
over to wwspodcast.com, click on Shopify Summit 2026 and just go
and join. Go and join the newsletter there
or join the e-mail list and you'll be the first to hear
about things that are coming up over the next few months heading
in September. We're going to launch the whole
thing on the 1st September. I'm going to be honest as well,
it's great that we get brands on the show.
Brands often share their story of saying I was so scared
launching this but it was all a big success.
We worked really hard, we got it wrong a few times and then it
was a success. I'm going to be totally open and
say I'm terrified of doing this right now.
The easy thing was not to do a summit and keep it really,
really, really, really simple. But if you don't try stuff,
you're not going to succeed. We've tried so many things
through the podcast before that have completely failed.
We've also tried 3 or 4 things, one being this Tuesday Tea Break
talks. We get more emails at the moment
about Tuesday Tea Break Talks than we do about our guests on
Friday, which either means I'm not answering enough questions
or it's because people are engaged.
But either way, it's, it's great to have you guys tuning in with
us. So the summit is a way of us
giving you more of the things that we're good at and the
things that are giving back. But I am terrified.
So the sooner you guys go and sign up to that, and the sooner
anyone who's interested in speaking, sponsoring, sharing
their story, talking about their app on, you know, on, on the
summit stages, the sooner you guys sign up, the quicker my
anxiety is going to go down. So please go and join that list.
You can also join the newsletter as well.
And you can hear about all the episodes that are coming out
twice a week and some of the exclusive offers and things on
there as well. I think that's it from me today.
Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody.
I hope you go and sign up to that summit.
Otherwise it's going to be a very, very awkward occasion on
the 1st of September where it's just me and Byron and nobody
listening and nobody presenting. It's going to be a complete
disaster. So we're trying to add more,
more value to all of you guys. So please don't get involved.
Hope you enjoyed today's episode.
We're back again on Friday with another interview with I think
we've got a brand on this week. I can't remember.
I it's Monday morning when I'm recording this.
I completely forget the schedule.
But yeah, we have another brand on.
If you haven't already, please hit subscribe on whatever
channel you're listening to this.
And please give us an honest review of how much you love or
dislike the podcast. And if you think we could do
anything better, send us an e-mail hello@winningshopify.com.
Thanks so much for tuning in. See you all next time.