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Headless vs native Shopify: when it's worth it, and when it's a waste of money · Leaders on Shopify with John Readman

• John Readman: So welcome back to Leaders on Shopify. Super pleased to welcome Tom from Superco onto the podcast to share his stories of some of the brands he's been helping scale on Shopify and understand his journey as an agency. So welcome on Tom. Do you wanna kick off by introducing yourself, introducing your business? Tom M - Superco: Sure, thank you very much for having me, John. So I'm one of the Toms at Superco. There's two of us. You might have seen us around at various e-commerce events. But yeah, we're Superco. So we're a Shopify platinum partner based in London, based in of sunny, Bermondsey Street I've been Shopify kind of since we started. I mean, I've been in and around the e-commerce space for a while and then just ended up never anticipated having an agency and ended up. being an agency owner. think it's kind of a fairly common journey is no one wanting to be a, no one wanting to set out to be an agency owner and end up just being a freelancer is too much work. Or in our case, we thought we would create a Shopify app. We were trying to look for like a digital car park type business, something that would kind of work whilst we were asleep and ended up like basically. Creating an agency via an app, was like you put in what you wanted and we had a team of developers who just build it. So like, want a new landing page, I want to look like this. And the whole model was like, it was a dollar a minute. I mean, it super cheap, very low cost labor. We lasted about a month in the Shopify app store, And Shopify just kind of came to us and said, by the way, you can't offer agency services via an app when you just become an agency. So here we are five, five, six years later. Yeah. John Readman: I sort of suggest you're not really an app, you're service pretending to be an app. Tom M - Superco: Yeah, I mean, that was it. Like we thought we'd like, we'd kind of actually built this like quite good project management tool, like our side. And it was basically kind of a front end for, people just put in requests and then we would just like deliver the work. But we were kind of trying not to be an agency, but deep down we were accidentally an agency. John Readman: Yeah, so you've then been 100 % Shopify, you don't do any other platforms. Tom M - Superco: 100 % Shopify. I mean, think just going back to where we first met John, I seem to remember it was at a Magento Imagine conference or something back in the... But yeah, no, John Readman: It was, yeah, yeah, long time ago, Yeah. Tom M - Superco: we're 100 % Shopify. Never even looked at another platform. mean, I'm preaching to the converter, the choir here that... I mean, it's obviously been a pretty singular growth story over the last five, 10 years. as an agency, think you just want to like minimize, minimize complexity in your business. And like even looking at other platforms makes me, makes, makes, makes me feel a bit sick. We do a lot of migrations to Shopify as well as we do see a lot of like backends of Magento's and Visualsoft's and WooCommerce's and all of that. I'm like, Oh, quite glad we just work on Shopify. John Readman: And what do you see the most people migrating away from? Cause I think when I've had these conversations with other people, Tom M - Superco: Amin. John Readman: there is a bit of a common theme, but it'd be interesting to get from your point of view. What's, is it people growing and coming off WooCommerce or is it established people who are big and struggling with Magento or Salesforce, Commerce Cloud? What's the sort of tend to be the mix? Tom M - Superco: It's kind of everything. We see a lot of Magento. We see a lot of Woo. We see the old Salesforce Commerce Clouds. I a fair amount of custom stuff. Some Visualsoft. Some really niche platforms you've never heard of and will probably never see one of and then probably no more ever. It's a real mix, but it is very, I feel obviously the big rush to migrate happened, guess, when like they forced everyone to, or at least for them on Magento front, forced everyone to move to Magento 2 like whatever, six odd years ago, seven years ago. And I think you got a lot of the kind of the more slightly, I mean, maybe not the initial trailblazers or the pioneers moving to Shopify Plus, but some of the kind of then more established brands who are just kind of forced into a corner by Adobe and forced to make a decision. And then obviously Shopify looked pretty good. We're definitely seeing... I mean, I think we're seeing a lot of brands who I think have maybe just got bought into kind of a long Adobe contract, which is now coming up. Or maybe they're a little bit more risk averse Maybe not. They want to kind of see how the kind of Shopify thing paid out. And it's obviously played out very well in the market. And then I guess additionally brands who like maybe, so we're doing one at the moment and B2B is a big component of it. And until probably fairly recently, the Shopify B2B offering wasn't quite good enough. But that now being good enough coupled with their Adobe contract running out, this meant that it was a pretty obvious decision for them to move to Shopify. John Readman: Yeah. Well, I've for the benefit of the listeners, I've got back from Toronto from the Dot Dev conference. And I was, you sort of forget when you sort of dealing with one or two people at Shopify on a regular basis, they've got five and a half thousand developers. Right. And there's their spending. Tom M - Superco: It's the. John Readman: The rate at which they can build stuff Tom M - Superco: It's. John Readman: and do stuff is just mind blowing. Tom M - Superco: It's nuts. We've got, and we've got a Slack channel, which just has like product updates in it. And every day there's like at least one thing. and then obviously they will get packaged up in these very nice, like product marketing, like Edition guides and like, they give a fun brand, whether it's Renaissance or something else. Yeah. John Readman: the renaissance. Tom M - Superco: They have a bit of fun with it. normally a bit of, It just goes out to everyone. of our clients suddenly want all of these things that are in Editions but maybe are actually more like on the roadmap for Q4. They look great. They sometimes cause a bit of issue, but overall the rate of improvement and just rate of like the scale of the ambition that Shopify has to be leaders and obviously D2C that they are like unquestionably the leaders in that space, but building out B2B offering, building out POS, looking at, mean, they're the only platform I can see who even is talking about what, I mean, obviously they jumped all over the kind of NFT crypto world like a couple of years ago. They've got a bit silent on that, but at least it shows their forward thinking and trying to like embrace what the future might look like. John Readman: they're definitely a lot of the, a lot of the chat at the conference just this week was they want to get into travel. They want to get into hospitality. They really want to push harder, even further into luxury. They want to push into automotive. All right. So Tom M - Superco: Mm. John Readman: yeah, they, I don't think they're just going to shop, stop at DTC. We've already seen that with Tom M - Superco: No. John Readman: the whole B2B thing, right? They're doing a really good job there. And we get a lot of people listening to the pod, that are basically trying to understand the risks and the opportunities of migrating, because sometimes it's better the devil you know. And I think historically there was a bit of an association that shopify was only for small merchants and quite small shops. What would your sort of advice be on that? And then I suppose what's on your sort of checklist when you do a migration? What are the hard stuff that people forget to think about? Tom M - Superco: I mean, I always say the biggest thing that's all is it's also one of the only things you can't easily walk back is the SEO element. So we've, because we do a lot of migrations, we've got someone in-house who just manages all of that. She's just incredible. Just like, yeah, managing, like assessing the kind of the scale of the migration, managing the risk around it, doing the work, and then ongoing monitoring to make sure that. Organic traffic is not just maintained, but actively as improved post-launch. So that's always the biggest, that's the biggest like risk point. And it's always when I have migration conversations, it's always the. Regularly brands will have had, or heard of another brand having like a really terrible SEO migration experience and it has set them back three years or whatever it is. so like that is, that's the number one thing. I mean, all the rest of the kinds of data migration typically is fairly fine. Often you get, and particularly some of these older brands where, or more like, I guess, less risk tolerant brands we speak to are now migrating over, have probably got an ERP that's been in place for 25 years and does the job. But is it fit for purpose for like... 2026, probably not, but everyone knows how to use it. But there's always like a bit of figuring out how to like make that work with Shopify really well. So that's always like bit of not a rugged necessarily a risk, but it's just an area to think about. John Readman: And do you do that sort of iPaaS stuff internally or do you use tools or partners for that? Tom M - Superco: It really depends. mean, typically if it's one store, one, like one online presence, maybe a couple of like in store locations or not, maybe a warehouse or two and like a fairly simple tech stack, we'll just build it, particularly with like AI development these days, building out these connectors is actually a of a lot easier than it used to be. But for more complex stuff, we've worked with Patchworks, High Cohesion a good partner of ours. So we kind of just right size it. Those are great if you're a like a scaling business within the ERP and like a lot of additional complexity. Whereas if you don't have that complexity, they're often overkill. So yeah, it's kind of all about right sizing it. John Readman: thought you were going to mention Patchworks. I spent quite a bit of time with Jim this week. Tom M - Superco: yeah, yeah. John Readman: And he's very excited about life at the moment. He's built his new AI thing that makes it even easier to work with Patchworks. yeah, we're seeing them, I think, as you said, the really complicated data backend stuff that helps you and helps the client and just makes it smooth. Tom M - Superco: Yeah, yeah, if you want monitoring, it's, yeah, if there's like complexity in there, if you just want your ERP to update your store, like, John Readman: Right, you can do that. Tom M - Superco: it's not super, it's not super complex, but where there's like other, other people playing data needs to move around, you want to monitor it, this, yeah, where you've got like, distributors in different territories and multiple stores. it's, there's just comes a point where it just makes sense. you a good iPaaS in place? Particularly one John Readman: Yeah, the... Tom M - Superco: that's like natively built for Shopify. John Readman: It is amazing how many people forget or think that SEOs are just like, it's not a major issue because people, think as a general rule, people obsess about the PPC and about this and and often forget the amount of traffic and the amount of sales they're getting organically and the amount of percentage of traffic that is coming from like non-direct longer tail stuff Yeah. Which is, and it is a significant thing to think about and it needs project managing as well as building the site. You're absolutely right. Tom M - Superco: Yeah, we do, we do it in-house, we also, we regularly work with other SEO agencies. And like, I mean, I kind of implore like any large brand who's thinking about moving across to me, like we've, we've got a really great person who does it in-house, but if, there's much, if there's a ton of complexity, we'll often bring in like a, a specialized partner John Readman: this. Tom M - Superco: to support there and brands will often just have their own SEO agency. So we're like, it's definitely not something to be sniffed at. And I think people are taking it lot John Readman: Yeah. Tom M - Superco: more seriously these days with like GEO and AEO as like, it's not something people are... I think it was the unloved child for a while. But I think much less so these days. 100%. John Readman: Yeah, SEO is back on the agenda a bit now, isn't it? And now the broad room is interested in it. It's people are getting some budgets and we're having lots of conversations with people about moving PPC budgets where they can identify the keywords they're wasting money on, unlocking budget and sticking that into sort of geo, SEO and working Tom M - Superco: Yeah. John Readman: with the content plans. A couple of conversations I've been having recently is the headless versus out of the box conversation. Tom M - Superco: Hmm. John Readman: And then we've been having conversations with brands who've migrated back to a standard Shopify from Headless. What's your view on where Headless does or doesn't fit in if people are thinking about it? Tom M - Superco: I mean, this is like, I the pendulum swing constantly swings like it was headless was super hot like four or five years ago, then it like became very uncool. And we've been kind of extolling the virtues of not being headless. Shopify has kind of got better on the kind of liquid front. It's much faster, much a lot of the kind of the benefits you'd have got from headless are much, much like kind of much less of a much make much less impact when kind of the nature of Shopify liquid is as good as it is. That being said, Shopify, I'm sure the most recent additions are really and their partnership with Vercel are really ramping up Hydrogen again and making that a lot easier to play. John Readman: Well, Tom M - Superco: It suddenly feels like Headless is swinging back to like being in vogue again. So like, see how this all plays out as an agency. We will, we will probably, I mean, at least for the foreseeable recommend brands stick to liquid, John Readman: stick to the liquid. Yeah. Tom M - Superco: but there's always, there's always, um, I think there's always like a place for Headless to play. I mean, we've had, we, we saw a deal like last year where It was just, was very, it was like, I mean, he was a, he's a very famous chef. And a lot of his online presence is basically just content recipes. And I mean, that took about an SEO play. was it like the organic traffic there was stratospheric. And to try and force that all into like the Shopify URL structure, the Shopify like blog structure would have been, would have not. John Readman: Too hard. Tom M - Superco: not, yeah, wouldn't have been recommended. So they've gone headless and definitely the decision they should have made. And we see it with some like, due to see brands just wanting that just slight elevated polish. They're happy to take on the responsibility of managing it. You do get like slightly faster site speeds, et cetera, et cetera. But for most brands at a particular stage, I just don't think it's a prudent use of time or money to do it. John Readman: And when you're sort of going out now and you're pitching for, by the way, you can mention your brands. can big up your brands, but you don't, if you're comfortable doing that, if you want to talk about those, but if you're going out to pitch now, what's sort of in your stable of your sort of tech stack, what are the apps or tech partners that you sort of go to when you're, SuperCo come along and pitch a brand. Tom M - Superco: I mean, it really depends. But I would have said, I mean, like we do, we've historically done a lot in and around broadly FMCG stuff And we would, I mean, we would always work with Recharge on something like that. So anything that's going to go anything subscribe subscription in there. Recharge are very much our kind of go to partners that quite happy that they've ended up buying Skio because quite a of our clients also use Skio. So it's not like John Readman: That's true. Tom M - Superco: it's not as nice. They're under the same same stable. We've got one partner manager you can just like handle both. Both very good products. But yeah, mean, like we've historically just always like, I mean, like when I was in, in New York, kind of remember, remember the Recharge team when they were like three or four people, look at them now, like billion dollar, so yeah, without a doubt them, I mean, Yotpo were very close to, just kind of, often makes sense just bringing reviews and loyalty and, just like all under one. John Readman: Have you? Tom M - Superco: I mean, for us, what we we look for in a partner is like, is is the tech best in class? Like that's kind of table stakes. Like ideally, there's like a London based partner manager. Ideally, they have ideally, they're willing to get involved in that we do a lot of events willing to get involved in sponsoring events, helping us with content, working together case studies like a kind of a and, eagerness to like, be like marketing and part, like kind of a, like a kind of a go-to-market partner as opposed to just like a, just the tech tech vendor. and then obviously importantly, like obviously it goes, I guess, alongside the best in class technology. Like do, do the clients like using it? Do they like the team is their sales? Yeah. John Readman: It's adding any motion. Tom M - Superco: Is there any money, but if something's not working, like can they get support or some strategy from. someone who knows what they're talking about with the product. Yeah, it's the sales person on it, like do their values align, but they're not like just trying to mug off our clients. And then right at the bottom, John Readman: It was quite interesting. Tom M - Superco: the call is like commission, I guess, but that's not so important beyond others. John Readman: Yeah, it was interesting when we were at the Yotpo partner day, that Yotpo were actually asking, they had Domain in America talking about what makes a good tech partner. And then they had loads Tom M - Superco: Mm. John Readman: of other agency owners and CEOs in the room. And commission was like a hygiene factor. It wasn't really balanced. Some people say we don't even take the commission because that we think that's Tom M - Superco: Yeah. John Readman: not a good situation. We don't want to be seen to take commission from a tech partner. So the client thinks we're compromised. And it was all about humans, real human beings who can help us and work Tom M - Superco: Yeah. John Readman: with us as a genuine partner. People just didn't like faceless apps and tech partners where you can't get home. Tom M - Superco: I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I, I totally buy into that. The amount of like outbound like email, like messages I get on my LinkedIn being like, I'm a new whatever app. but I offer like 30 % commission. I'm like, don't, care. Uh, if that's what you're leading with, then I'm just really don't care. Um, John Readman: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it was, it was all about like education on boarding, but making my client look good, making me look good to our clients and working together with us. And then fundamentally, if you can help our client become successful and we introduced you, that's going to look good on us. But as our client grows and becomes successful, you become more successful. So it was really interesting. It's the commission and what was happening at Shopify was saying is there's loads of people vibe coding, spinning up apps, sticking them in the app store. And actually they, they didn't quite say like this, but there's good. There already is a sort of two tier system. The Built for Shopify not, but they're really going to push the Built for Shopify. But then they were also talking about huge, real human customer success, real human account managers. So it's like, they're going to have like a different way of ranking and scoring these businesses to try and push Tom M - Superco: Yeah. John Readman: out all this sort of random noise. And if you look back over your years of building Shopify sites, which... project to which brand are you most proud of? Tom M - Superco: that's a very good question. John Readman: Obviously they're all amazing if your customers are listening, but which one sort of really sets it apart and why? Tom M - Superco: I mean, I think the one that kind of like really helped kind of put us on the map, did like quite a lot of work at the beginning with Represent. We were probably two years old. And obviously they've gone on to incredible things. So I think initially that was probably like a, that was really helpful for us just as an, like from a personal standpoint, getting kind of getting on the map. But we've had, mean, we've had some sort of very long standing relationships. We've had a couple of clients that we've worked with the whole way through. I mean, basically from day dot. So I think, I mean, the first migration we did was for like Funkin' Cocktails, who were part of AG Barr It kind of a, it's kind of a cocktail brand we did. I mean, very B2B stuff on Shopify. We did a kind of a really fun like trade hub piece to help like bartenders get. like things you'd want in a bar, like beer mats and drinks, all those John Readman: All the actions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom M - Superco: extra bits. there's a loyalty piece built into that as well. like the more you bought, like the more like of these kind of free gifts you can get. And it was, I think it was our first Magento migration. So, I mean, and there's still a client. So kind of that one, that one feels quite close. In fact, actually also we, Lisa, who's our head of delivery, was there as she was our point of contact on the other side. And then she left it with a lot of hiring her and she's an incredibly intrinsic member of our team. So I think that one is probably like the one that feels most like, yeah, I kind of have a really good journey with them. And we now kind of have one of them working outside as well. John Readman: Yeah, We haven't talked too much about AI, but there was a lot of chat. There's a lot of chat, as you can imagine, this week around agentic commerce. What's your view, Tom, on are we going to get to a world where I'm going to build myself a Claude agent that goes and does my shopping for me and I never go to a website again? Tom M - Superco: I don't think so. I think there's gonna be a happy medium somewhere, but like, I don't know about you, I enjoy brands, brand experience, looking at things and thinking whether or not I actually need them or whether I just want it. And if I want it, how much do I want it? Do I want to pay for it? But having, and then like the whole experience of like buying it, receiving it, it's all kind of wrapped up in like, it's like, it's the joys of capitalism. It's why we do this is because like we ultimately... Like people enjoy spending money on things. So I think none of, don't think that gets, I think the discovery piece gets augmented with AI, but I don't think people, I'm never going to completely outsource my kind of my like me learning about brands and buying stuff to an autonomous agent. But I'm definitely definitely using it to kind of help me learn about brands where I do think it's going to be pretty impactful and pretty soon I think is like maybe on the kind of more of this like B2B space. Say you're a, I don't know, a, you're a car parts dealership or something and you realize you're running out of nuts and bolts or whatever. You can tell it don't work in that space. But yeah, having an agent that kind of will. John Readman: automatically go. Tom M - Superco: but build these like shopping this for you. I think that's where, where like huge amounts of value can be added. Because people ultimately, they just need that, that a lot of that we see, we see brands in the moment, but their B2B process is a spreadsheet. And it's so manual and really clunky. And I mean, it's, it's not a huge lift to kind of automate a ton of that with, with AI. And I think it would be incredibly impactful for the economy. John Readman: Yeah. Well, I think also like the buying process, even just for general retail, a lot of that is still manual spreadsheets and just, well, what did we sell last year? Tom M - Superco: Hmm. John Readman: What did we do? And actually then people end up going into discount or they end up then holding it back because they don't want to go into discount and then selling it at the same stuff next season. So, or next year or whatever. And as, as, I suppose as you or as Superco, who are the brands you really aspire and look up to? in this world, who's doing a really good job. Tom M - Superco: Um, I mean, as a, like, there's all sorts of brands that I really admire. But I think one I saw today, who I've known the founder, I've known the founder since I was like, 10, we're at school together, Dash Water, like we've done a lot John Readman: right, yeah. Tom M - Superco: of, we've done a lot of work in and around like F &B. And it's It's an incredibly difficult category to make DTC work. It's just incredibly difficult category in general trying to convince people to buy a premium for water in a can. It's incredibly hard to ship. And yeah, I of I noticed today they've done also the fastest growing soft drink I think in the country. But they're like the only we've seen, honestly, we've seen, must have worked with, or at least like had a look at probably 20 to 30, like canned soft drinks. The only other one I've seen absolutely smashing online is Trip. But they, Dash, I've really like nailed this like into office B2B. It's like baby B2B. It's like, it's not like, John Readman: Yeah. Tom M - Superco: you don't need Shopify B2B for it. It's just like, we do this as well. We just have a recurring subscription of like. 50 cans a month or whatever. But they just nailed it. They nailed all the kind customer touch points around it. And they've just done an incredibly good job on that front. So that's all the kind of the more like nuts and bolts like F and B, of maybe the less sexy side. Who am I loving on the apparel side? I mean, you see some of these brands that have just like come out of nowhere. I'm not working with either of them, but the fact that you see like on Running and Hoka you're like, come out of the gate from like 10 years ago or whatever to be like John Readman: Look, amazing. Tom M - Superco: much bigger than, and like, haven't, I mean, I'm currently wearing a pair of Hokas I've bought like basically nothing, nothing but Hokas for the last, I'm quite keen right now for the last like John Readman: Yeah. Tom M - Superco: four or five years, but I've just like blown away by how they managed to. kind of come into what was a pretty established and built out category and just leave Nikes and Adidas kind of in the dust. I mean, I it's been incredibly John Readman: Yeah. Tom M - Superco: impressive. John Readman: Yeah. So just conscious of time, Tom, if people want to find SuperCo or find you, where Tom M - Superco: Yeah. John Readman: can they find you? How can they get in touch? Tom M - Superco: I'm available to all good retailers. I'm at, I think Tom Mucklow-Norell on LinkedIn, superco.io is our URL. We do have an Instagram, but I'm probably not gonna send you there. LinkedIn's probably the easiest for my sins. It's probably the social media I use the most. So yeah, my email's tm@superco.io as well, if that. That's easy for people. John Readman: So, well, it's been an absolute, I'm sure we could talk all day. It's been an absolute pleasure, but it's nearly home time. So I will let you get on with your weekend and really appreciate you taking the time to share your story and your thoughts and wisdom on Leaders on Shopify. Tom M - Superco: Well, thanks for having me, John. Much appreciated.