Latest / Leaders on Shopify with John Readman / Nobody gets fired for buying Shopify. But is it always the right choice...?

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Nobody gets fired for buying Shopify. But is it always the right choice...? · Leaders on Shopify with John Readman

• John - Leaders on Shopify: So welcome back to the Leaders on Shopify podcast. I'm really excited to have industry veteran Pete from Glass Atlas, formerly Space 48, some people may remember. So we're gonna get into all things e-commerce and now sort of and Pete's gonna share some of his wisdom with us and it's gonna be a great episode. So. rather than me introducing you, Pete and Glass Atlas. Do you want to give us the sort of headlines? Who are you? Who are Glass Atlas and what are you famous for? Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah, thanks for the intro. I think veteran's the right word. I worked out the other day that I've been in e commerce twenty five years and I'm only forty four. so yeah, been around a long time. yeah, I so yeah, I so I'm a customer solutions director of Glass Atlas. Glass Atlas are I guess a digital commerce agency. we basically I guess we say full service. I don't really like that phrase, but literally if if it's e commerce we touch it, so whether it's acquisition through performance marketing or it's UX conversion optimization or it's helping customers get stuff out the door like shipping stuff. I guess we we help with all that in terms of consultancy and UX design development. but yeah if it's e-commerce we we generally touch it. And even not even commerce, we're starting to move now into even more like just like lead gen stuff. So doing stuff directly with just CMS. But generally digital stuff online is that that's not the official glass atlas. A kind of I guess phrasing I suppose, but yeah, it's it's how I talk about in layman's terms. People ask me what I do are like, Yeah, we build websites and people would make them better. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, so you build amazing websites and make them better and help people make more money from e-commerce. Pete - Glass Atlas: And help people find the website thing as well if the other thing and help people actually get to them, we build them and help people actually get to them. John - Leaders on Shopify: So you don't just build the house, you put the plumbing, the road and the signposts in order to get to the house. Yeah, Pete - Glass Atlas: Pretty much. Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: good. And Glass Atlas has been on a bit of a journey from sort of Space 48. Which other sort of agencies and brands would people know that are now part of the Glass Atlas family? Because I know you use it four or five agencies you've brought together over the last few years. Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah. So you've been in Space 48 Space 48 like the founding company, I suppose, that's been around that's in terms of the original agency that kind of was then do acquisitions of screen. Space forty has been around since two thousand and eight. A lot of people in the industry will know John Woodall, founder, D CEO of now of Glass of Glass Atlas. so that's the obvious one. John - Leaders on Shopify: Excellent skier, excellent skier by the way Mr Woodall. Pete - Glass Atlas: I've never been skiing with him. I'm not in my bag, yeah, I've heard I don't think he's ever broken any limbs, so he's obviously doing right. so yeah, John John founded the Space 48 2008. and then we did some acquisitions along the way. One that nobody ever talks about. I'm gonna give it a shout out because we've got some, you Tom Robertshaw, who's not my brother, but who works with us. he was at a company called Mean Bee. John - Leaders on Shopify: No relation. Pete - Glass Atlas: No relation, we do work together, but no relation. So Tom, Tom founded with a meet based called Mean Bee years ago, but down in Bath with his colleague Nick, who we acquired. That was our first acquisition, actually. No one really ever talks about it, but actually Mean Bee was one of our founding companies. And we still get inquiries today coming through the Mean Bee website. We kind of kept up and running. They are like a Magento Shopify Agency. That was, I don't even know the time, that was like probably before I joined Glass Atlas or seven or eight years ago. Then we acquired Brave The Skies Shopify Agency really well respected and well known in the industry. Short Shopify because we'll I we'll talk about Shopify today. We'll talk about the reasons why we we we did the acquisition. we did a couple of performance marketing acquisitions, so bring digital. and this is digital both based in Manchester because we needed that strong performance arm. We had performance in space 48, but it was kind of a small team. so we acquired two performance agencies in the last few years. And then again, we've actually acquired Summit Media as well, based over in Hull. Again, people might notice Summit their best. A lot of people know them for product caster. Product Caster as one of their products. A lot of people use it for CSS. so we acquired those guys and kind of in the process of like working out how that's going to fit feed into Glass Atlas. So yeah, John's been on a busy it's been a busy boy acquiring businesses. but yeah it's glass I guess Glass Atlas is a thing's probably been around just get about twel nearly 12 months now as a name but it's it's a collective group of sort of four or five agencies basically. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and I suppose you're probably one of the bigger independents now who've got all these strings to your bow and gives you quite a lot of five pound credibility. and the interesting thing I wanted to sort of dig into, Pete, is you used to be brand side and now you're agency side. So for the listeners who don't know where you were and what you were doing, what did you used to do and what was the attraction from jumping from being brand side to now agency side? I suppose what does that give you that maybe other people in agencies don't? Pete - Glass Atlas: I've been client side of the same business for like fourteen years. basically an online retailer. Well, we weren't just online, we had we had actual physical stores as well, bathroom retailer. I was like head of IT head of IT and head e commerce there. I'd seen the business grow from basically nothing to, you know, seventy eight million at its peak. I think I kind of I wanted to see the side of it. I obviously work really close with Space 48 as it was with my agency for you know for like nine, ten years and then John Woodall for a long time. and I think John spoke to me and he really wanted somebody to kind of come in and work at the agency who've been client side, who understood the client side of things so that that could come in and try and influence the team within the agency about look, this is how the customer thinks. Obviously we're an agency who's building solutions for customers and dealing with customers on a day to day basis but it's our customers. but sometimes how the customer's feeling gets lost. Is it in an agency? You don't really realize that actually the e-commerce manager that day might be having bad day. Maybe the sales aren't, maybe the CEO's on the back or whatever. So I wanted to go in and and try and influence the agency side to say, look, this is how the customer thinks, this is this is what they're going through, this is their all their processes they've got. They don't just think about the website all day, every day. There's other things going on in the business, whether it's problems in the warehouse or customer service or whatever it was. And I wanted to get the business thinking more broadly about what a retail business is doing and what it goes through and some of the things that maybe we as as an agency you could actually help and influence and and and sit and have conversations around. So yeah, it was being that kind of customer voice, I think. and also using my experience in 14 years in retail from a business that was doing you know, a growing business that's been through all sorts of you know, trials and tribulations, just sort of then I can use my experience to help other customers. So, not saying that I've been there and done it, but we went through a lot, you know, in forty, fifty years in in retail. So like I think actually with my first week at Space 48 I went and did talk at at at the e commerce show in in the the North West e commerce show about the top ten mistakes that e com retailers make. And that was like 'cause I've been there and done it and trying to revise people that don't make the same mistakes. So yeah, a bit of influence and just kind of like, you know, giving people that customer view I think. John - Leaders on Shopify: And are those... Right, so you came on board for giving the client's perspective of what people want to do and and went agency side and obviously loads of Magento experience in the past. And one thing I find really great about Glass Atlas and what you and John talk about is you are a Shopify big partner, but also you sort of openly say Shopify is not right for everybody, and you also partner with Adobe Commerce, Big Commerce, So when a sort of big mid market retailer walks in the door with no strong view, what questions do you sort of need to ask them to decide which platform's best for them? 'Cause a lot of other agencies are just all in on Shopify and you're still sort of like, Well, it depends. So what what does it depend on, Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah, we pride ourselves on being we call ourselves agnostic. We pride ourselves on not being tied to a particular platform. We've been that way for for quite a while. I think we always start this sounds everyone says this, but we all start with like what the actual business is where where the business is at, what the challenges are, like why they're even looking at moving in the first place. So we do constantly we do these things for platform evaluations. So if a customer comes to us and not doesn't know, or even if they think they know. what platform they should be on in make in this case Shopify, we challenge it. not because we don't want to move from Shopify, but want to make sure that it is the right thing because, you know, a lot of retailers might get sold on that kind of Shopify dream. It's a very, you know, there's a lot of marketing out there about Shopify, but we try and cut through the noise. And this is saying if it Big Commerce or Adobe, we try or whatever platform it might be, we try and give that the honest take on it. So we we tend to start with like we always do a session around the call of vision admission of like where's the business at today? Where's it trying to get to? What's its ambition? what are some of the challenges that are going on even related to e-com outside of e-com, if it's operational or whatever's going on the business, it is starting to scale. But we also try to understand all of that because if you're just trying to choose a platform based on what it does functionally, the features and stuff that it does, you would choose Adobe Commerce every time, pretty much, or Salesforce or some enterprise platform, because you know, it's it's been built, it's established, it can do everything. But often often it's like we call it the non-functional requirements of to help us make the decision. So you know, if a customer's like bought a brand and they want to want to go and deal with brand acquisitions and they want to spin up websites for all these different brands they've got, is Shopify really the right platform for that? Because you know, it's traditionally great at internationalization and markets and that kind of thing. But multi-brand on Shopify's not always been the most straightforward thing to do, especially from a license perspective. we would dig into, the team, how big's the team, what's important to them about is it like content creation, are they heavily driven by marketing? how big's the product set? How complex is the products they're selling, how complex the distribution, because all of these things kind of factor into whether Shopify is is the right platform or not. And a lot of the time, like Shopify comes out, great. B2B is probably an area where it's still lacking. If you if you're a B2B business with a bit of D2C or you've got some B2B and you plan to grow B2B, again, where Shopify is today, is that the right platform? We we we question that. So we we try and understand the business before we start talking tech. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Pete - Glass Atlas: the tech comes into it obviously at some point, but we we always start with that sort of business requirements and business challenge piece first. be and and cost is a big thing. a customer that's John - Leaders on Shopify: And how how do you how do you look at cost? Is it total ownership over three years? Is that the best way to do it? Because again, some people think, Shopify's dead cheap or this is cheap and that's cheap. And I think the answer is n there isn't cheap, right? It's about what's the best fit for your business over time and what's Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: going to give you that sort of functionality that you need to grow your business. How do you how do you sort of price sort of total cost of ownership? Pete - Glass Atlas: So we do look at we yeah, we look at it over three or five years generally. and we look at not just the the build of the platform, because the there's a cost there with from it's like yours year zero cost for doing the build. We look at guess the licence costs, which for Shopify is pretty much well known and dependent, it can be a bit more convoluted if you if you start going with a certain revenue amount. So we look at licence costs over five years. And again, if you one of the things we ask the business is like, How are you planning on scaling? Because you might start off in year one on Shopify's you know, standard two thousand $300, a month plan. But as you scale and get to certain revenue, then you'll start looking at percentage of GMV. So we look we look at that projection of where you're going to be, so we can try and track where the license fee might end up. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Pete - Glass Atlas: transaction fees is one of the things that most Shopify people who look in it comes to Shopify really underestimate is the transaction cost for Shopify payments. And the whole complex piece around markets and you're doing nationalization stuff, and you've got FX rates and different currencies and stuff. We go into a lot of detail around how much is it gonna cost you per transactional point of view, let's say you're on I don't know, World Pay right now on your legacy platform and you're with Shopify. You've heard Shopi's great, shop pay's amazing, the checkout's brilliant, that's with the Shopi. But actually you might be taking a significant jump from you're paying now as your incumbent to Shopify. Now Shopify will say, well, our checkout's great. So we'll convert more customers and we accept more transactions, which is fair to a degree. But that can be the transaction because we look at that as well. So we look at like, you know, what's your what's your growth going to be with again the next five years? How you're gonna grab a good order value and revenue, and again, what does that look like from the transaction costs? So that's factored in. And then it's like apps, apps, third-party apps you're gonna need to support the platform. We look at that as well. Again, again. factor in growth because you might be doing a thousand orders a month now, but if you get to ten thousand orders a month in three years, that app license cost might jump significantly. So we look at all apps, we look at app costs and then obviously ongoing support of the platform, whatever it might be. Generally with Shopify John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah. So Pete - Glass Atlas: you don't need that much hands on support the idea if you should be able to probably run with it yourself. But we look at, what does the ongoing support John - Leaders on Shopify: Well I also think that's a bit sometimes w I talk to lots of agency leaders like yourself and I think sometimes th there is a misconception that with Shopify we can just do everything ourselves. I still think you need some trusted advisors in the background somewhere. because it's it's never as simple as just doing everything yourself. and you've probably seen over time, like years ago, when I first met John, it was all Magento and it was all we were And we were in at the Magento conferences in Vegas and this, that, and the other, and it was all Magento. And now it seems the shift is going in the Shopify direction. Shopify have got five or six thousand developers, it's like they're building this machine. When you're getting clients coming to you, what percentage are sort of just turning up going, I need a Shopify? Or are they saying, I need a I need a website? What's the sort of what do you sort of feel from that point of view? Pete - Glass Atlas: think that's shifted over the last for twelve, eighteen months. I think previously it was we don't know. We don't know where we should go. Now I'd say it's more the hypothesis is Shopify is right platform for us to tell us why it's not. So I'd say in most cases if it's B to C we do a lot of B to B right as well as an agency. If it's B to C you're probably looking like if let's say they're moving for let's say they Adobe or some legacy platform, it's like I'd say ninety percent, ninety five percent of the same We wanna move Shopify. It's again a lot of that's board driven. a lot of if it's depending on the size of the business, the C level, somewhere on the boards Shopify heard everything about Shopify, we need to go on Shopify. If we don't go to Shopify, we're gonna fall behind. So a lot of it's driven at that top level because the whole marketing hype and don't get me wrong, Shopify is brilliant, but there is a lot of people buy into the marketing piece. if we're not on Shopify, we're not gonna be found through Chat GPT or Gemini or whatever, Shopify's dominate. I don't want to talk about John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Pete - Glass Atlas: AI, but that that's what people fear and they're like Shopify is all in on that and they've got a relationship with chat and they've they're leading the way from some of the agentic pieces supposedly. So it's now for B2C, it's definitely a case of why not Shopify. And B2B is also going sort of a similar way. Like a lot of B2B businesses we work with are trying to shoehorn their business into Shopify because they just believe in the product and where it's going, even if a bet a platform is better functionally elsewhere, like Big Commerce or Adobe for B2B. People and I make a decision actually don't really wanna be on those two platforms for for whatever reason. John - Leaders on Shopify: And do you think they're backing Shopify's gonna catch up and an overtake on B to B, so we'd rather be in now so when it does surpass, we don't need to migrate then, we can just do it now. Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah, there's there is a there is an element of that and there's a hope that they've seen obviously where the weight of that Shopify has invested in both B2C and B2B. B2B has has been a strong focus with for Shopify. People have seen what's happened over the last two, three years with the Editions that are coming out, the the the biannual releases they're making. But also, one person that I work with recently, we recommended there's so heavily B2B. I won't name them, but they're in the sort of renewable energy space. And no, I won't because I won't I don't wanna yeah, I won't make them for John - Leaders on Shopify: You can't you can f if you can name them if if it if it makes you if it makes you look if it makes you and them look good, feel free to name them. Pete - Glass Atlas: No, well, we so we gave them some advice and said, Look, you're pure your pure B2B, if you want to continue the way you are and operating the way you are, you Shopify is not the right platform for you. It just does not have the flow of your business in terms of the way you do quoting and the whole ordering journey if you're B2B buyers. Big Commerce was a far better fit because it had the quoting for B2B for Big Commerce is strong. So it's Adobe, but they didn't want to be on Adobe. It was it was SaaS and they still chose Shopify because they were willing to adapt their business, the way their business works, it's legacy business they've been going for fifty, sixty, seventy years, they wanted to adapt the way that they worked internally with their customers to be on Shopify and they were willing to take that hit and sacrifice sac functionality or whatever just to have Shopify in the door and be have that. It honestly, John - Leaders on Shopify: Wow. Wow. Pete - Glass Atlas: it it surprised me. We went against our advice as in terms of obvious if you want to replicate what you've got, Bircommerce is the only or Adobe was the only solution. If you want Shopify, you're gonna have to change the way you work. And they did. John - Leaders on Shopify: it does feel a bit like the board in a lot of businesses, it's like nobody gets fired for buying Shopify. A bit like IBM in the eighties sort of thing. Pete - Glass Atlas: It was a it was Adobe in the nine into two thousands, like no one ever got a fired point Adobe in on Magento as it was, because it could do everything. And it's now Shopify. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what sort of you've obviously taken a lot of people from Magento now Adobe onto Shopify and everybody goes, right, it's gonna be super easy and it's all gonna we'll have a super fast website, we're gonna have this, that, and the other. What are the things people either forget to ask or don't consider in your experience that are sort of like the elephants in the room that people really need to be thinking about and considering the sort of Maybe the stuff that's less sexy and less interesting to the front end shiny bits, what are the common themes that you see that people maybe don't think about? Pete - Glass Atlas: I think I touched on one already, which is the payment side. if you're gonna have to Shopify payments in your in specifically your international early B2B, there's some complexities around Shopify payments set up. And a couple of years ago, one of our merchants decided to was gonna or was gonna move to Shopify. they had entities in they sorry they were trading in the US and Europe, but they didn't have entities in the US and they wanted to shop over payments and reconcile payments in USD but they didn't have an entity in the US. And Shopify wouldn't let them do that. That was part of their makeup. You wouldn't, you couldn't settle, you have to do FX conversions. They didn't realise that at the time, Shopify have changed to a degree now that there's some other rules around payments and entities and stuff like that. But payments can get quite complex if you don't know what you're doing and and you don't ask the right questions. So payments is there's a payments. We do a piece piece around payments consultancy when we look at migrating. businesses to to to Shopify just to make sure we've covered all the bases and there's no surprises. So that that's not sexy 'cause it's like reconciliation and John - Leaders on Shopify: It's well, it's important. It's like I think s someone once described on this is like when you move to Shopify, you're almost giving them a small percentage of all your future revenue, right? And it's it and actually, depending on which f forum you're following Shopify on, a lot of people say it's not an econ business, it's a payments business. So Pete - Glass Atlas: Bank, basically, financial distribution. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and and I suppose in that it the devil's in the detail, isn't it? Pete - Glass Atlas: 100%. Yeah, if you and if you get that wrong, you might have already committed by that point and then you've hit with some crazy FX rate for converting currency. So it is that that is again specifically why we we we do payments consultancy because it is quite if you don't payments is complex enough as it is, we have blended rates and ICC and all this there's so much jargon around even people in finance don't always get it. This is where my kind of ex retail piece comes in because I used to deal with our finance teams all the time. I got to understand payments complexity and stuff. So anyway, yeah, payments is one. I think migration of data is always another one. So again, it's not sexy, but getting data from your old platform into Shopify, and it's not always, we just want to migrate the last 10 years worth of order history or customer data or whatever it might be, that data migration piece can't be underestimated. There's tools to help. But the reality is trying to take legacy data out of an old econ platform, even like Magento, and trying to shove it into Shopify doesn't always work. And there's this expectation that that that It's gonna be seamless. And all customers can just log in with details that before and it doesn't doesn't work. And specifically, I'd say product data is is migrate product data is always a challenge. I'm a massive advocate of PIM, PIM solutions, product information management solutions, and product data specifically. You know, if you're coming from a legacy platform or you've got like unstructured product data, they're just throwing in some HTML WYSIWYG editor and try put that in Shopify, you're not gonna leverage Shopify to its full extent if you just literally putting unstructured data into the into Shopify. So when we look at platform migrations, we always try and look at what states to put our data in. That's one of the number one things we look at because often if it's really unstructured trying to get it into Shopify is structured in it it it's challenging. So PIM, we always look at potentially PIM as part of a Shopify solution. It doesn't always need it. It depends on how big the catalogue is and how complex it is, but we often see and advise customers to do a PIM project before they do a migration or or at least do it in tandem. We don't that's worst case scenario, but yeah, product data and structuring it and optimising it for Shopify is and not just for Shopify but obviously you should be doing it anyway for, you know, John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, we've worked with a client who's got sold on the Shopify Dream of like the whole front end experience, faster payments, better conversion rates, all that sort of stuff. And they've got tens and tens of thousands of products that also have multiple variants, multiple components, hugely complex product inventory. And they massively underestimated it, what's involved. and I suppose in that scenario, what are the options? Is it a PIM app? Is it a partner? Is it something like a patchworks? Where does all this sort of come in? And and what would you guys be recommending in in that scenario? Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah, it depends. Shopify does have some limitations, like a lot of platforms around comp complex product configurations, is is can be challenging. It can be done. again, we generally recommend a PIM of some variety. We were with Akeneo I'm gonna shout them out. A few others as well. But a combination probably of a PIM plus again you mentioned patchworks there, I was gonna say like they're one of our go to partners for integrations from like from transformation point of view. rarely you can just go and buy a can like a pre-made connector that just works and connects your PIM to e-com. There's some that exists, but generally if you've got complex data sets, you need to do a lot of manipulation. So having some middleware, some integration platform, middleware layer, even for connect and ERP, Patchworks is is is a platform we we we thoroughly recommend and we we work with ourselves. But yeah, it I mean it depends on one thing I'd say and one thing that we're we're passionate about and we won't sacrifice a Glass Atlas is discovery. So we will try and work all this out up front. So a lot of I guess boutique Shopify agencies and a lot there's some great ones out there that are brilliant at spinning up, beautiful looking Shopify sites. When it comes to more complex stuff, that's where we tend to to do really well because we understand complexity and we do a lot of describing, work out that complex stuff first to figure out, okay, how are we going to achieve this? Is there another way around this? Can we do this in a different way? Again, challenge the business and say, look, do you actually need all of this configuration in complexity and priorities is are you actually looking at the data and actually how much of the stuff's actually been sold and how how much how important it is. So challenging something we always do to make sure is it actually needed? And if it is, okay, well what's the not even the quickest way to do what's going to give you the scalability and make this work long term as well. It might get more investment up front to get a solution, but actually then long term it's it's it's a scalable solution as well, which you can then take kind of anywhere. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and I and I think it's it people often this is more than just a website, right? This is there's a whole lot of other steps in this process that I think people forget about. And if you are then gonna scale, people then forget, well, what if we do get start getting a thousand orders a day? How are we gonna fulfill all of that? And how's that all joined up with our ERP or our warehouse systems and and and everything else? So so y you've definitely been on this journey around headless or not headless. what's we're seeing some clients in the industry moving from headless back to standard sort of Shopify. What's your view, what's your recommendation and when's Headless worth it, when's it not worth it? What would you say, Pete? Pete - Glass Atlas: most say the most common reason one of the most common reasons we see people go down the headless route is mainly for CMS. there are other reasons, but if you were to ask me, the common the most common reason is because people who want to do really strong content creation who've maybe got multiple channels distributing product content. So not product content but even like just gener just like even you know inspirational content, they've got maybe got multiple brands again, the brand thing and multiple brands. You've got again international to degree. like Shopify, if for Shopify is specifically headless, I mean the the section editor, the way that Shopify revolutionized that whole sort of sections anywhere, things it used to be called, and make content creation really great, that's good. But it comes to a point at a certain size retailer where they want to do like sort of scheduling and kind of more more kind of like, you know, centralized content and and sort of shareable widgets and stuff. That's when realistically you kinda have to go down the headless route because you need a premium CMS, which really if you want to get, performance and against scalability, you have to go down the headless CMS route, which means you your storefront has to be headless. So that's one of the main reasons. it's not less like Shopify you've got to have a really strong use case for it. If you wanna I mean we know listen, we know Shopify's checkout in the cart and the checkout is you know probably one of the best out there in terms of conversion. But if you want to build some amazing storefront experiences but but you'd not say you and you want to use the cart, that's a good other good reason. Like Shopify is obviously it's it's a generally great platform. But if you want to deliver really you know content and commerce journeys, I'd say that's probably where you want to go down the headless route and utilise Shopify what it's great for, which is the kind of thick the the sort of the cart and checkout side of it. Again, you can build some okay storefront experiences are great some great examples, but It's that it's when you get in that complexity of again multiple brands and if you want different, it having scheduled things to go out, that's another reason why I would say it's it's generally content driven and experience driven, is why you would probably go down the the headless route. 'Cause otherwise, Shopify's great international with markets and stuff. That used to be a reason why you would go down the headless route. But I think if you get the right support in tech, you don't necessarily need headlesses. We would always approach headless of like, why headless? why why you're trying to why is it a headless why would you go down this route? We would try and avoid it where possible. sometimes you can't and sometimes it's the right solution. But AI is now the buzzword for e commerce and digital, it's last been for the last two years. John - Leaders on Shopify: We've been doing really well, Pete. We've not we've not spent too much time talking about it. Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah. Well I've tried not to. But I'll say head headless was the thing three or four years ago. And like you said, we're starting to see people we've invested really heavily in the stack and now actually we probably we don't necessarily need the ongoing support and the realization of what headless actually means for a business. if you're John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Pete - Glass Atlas: if you're unless you're a medium sized enterprise business on Shopify you'd like headless you shouldn't even be looking at headless because it just younger it you've got to John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, it's it's overkill. Yeah, yeah. Pete - Glass Atlas: be medium sized enterprise to make it work. John - Leaders on Shopify: And you you work with some amazing brands, so I don't know, Made American Golf, Footasylum Beaverbrooks et cetera, et cetera. And you who are sort of like when you talk to people about what Glass Atlas is great at, who are the sort of clients you talk about and who are the sort of ones that you're sort of really pleased with in terms of either the build or the the project or the actual performance of the business? Who are the sort of marquee clients? Obviously all of them. Obviously some of the feels left out. Pete - Glass Atlas: well yeah. I mean we as I said we love complexity. Like that's where we are really strong as an agency. So if we can take a business that's got really complex requirements and build them a solution which works and for them and their customers, that's like our dream. That's you know, that's where the kind of customers we would shout about. there's a few, like not specifically Shopify, but in just in general. Like we one client we work with, they built like this The B2B as well. So they've built this kind of like they'd attempted to build this B2B portal. they're in the kind of wholesale drinks industry, alcohol industry. they built this, they've had a hack at this kind of B2B portal. It didn't get adopted at all by their customer base. Their B2B customers didn't want to know because it was not particularly great. We took it, rebuilt it, rescued it, sort of the UX out, actually understood what their customer wanted out of the platform because they basically just made assumptions of we think we need this. We actually got to the we actually got did the research okay, what why aren't your customers adopting it? What is it they actually want from this portal, this B2B portal? We took that, rebuilt it, and their adoption rate is upwards of seventy, eighty percent or something went from like single figures to, you know, high double digits. So that that's I wanna call I won't name them, but again, that's one we mentioned. But Clients like Bensons for Beds, again, not on Shopify, but there's another but there's a reason why, because they've got a very, very complex product set in terms of, variants. If you think about a bed, you can configure it in so many ways with storage and king size and all this kind of stuff. Again, we did a whole omni channel piece for them of like joining up their in store experience to online, that that the whole there's a whole personalisation aspect going on there. I guess there's there's there's so many clients we've worked with like Dubarry who are on Shopify, we replatform them. They've been through we they're we've won a customers. They were on Magento, they migrated to Shopware, and then obviously finally went to Shopify and have absolutely flown since they've been on Shopify. Again, international brand, they've got physical stores. they from day one on Shopify, they just they started flying. I mean they were doing well already, but like John - Leaders on Shopify: What what w apart from obviously the amazing work that Glass Atlas did, what what do you think was it about that migration and that for Dubarry that that really took off for them? Pete - Glass Atlas: think it was just giving them control. the they've been on those these two platforms like Shopware and and Magento, which really needed every time they wanted to do something, it was like we need to involve the agency. Now we obviously you it's great for us 'cause it's it's retainer work for us, but I think for them it was giving them control and self ability to self self serve and spin up storefronts, if it's international and i it this it was giving them the scaled ability to go and if we want to launch in Poland or Germany or wherever it was. the ability for them to very quickly scale up. I think again, with trying to build new storefronts on Magento or or Shop of Shopware, yeah, it's doable, but it it's not it's not efficient for them, it was being able to quickly launch new markets. John - Leaders on Shopify: So they can test a market really quickly and see right and spin it up on then go for it or not. So Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah. Hundred percent, yeah. And they're just they're not that complex of a business. They sell footwear. John - Leaders on Shopify: Pop posh fancy leather wellies. Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah. And there was realistically, but the the thing for them was, and this goes back to the point you made before about, why we made the move from Magento to Shopify, back when we started working with those guys, Shopify was and Big Commerce back then were not we're not even in the conversation. There were smaller platforms not fit for medium sized enterprise businesses. But, f when from single we started working with them about, eight, nine years ago and we went through three re-platforms with them and Shopify now is caught up. We've got other businesses we've worked with where know, three years ago we would not we didn't recommend Shopify, it was too many gaps in the platform. I did a piece of consultancy one, we look, no, still on Salesforce is the right place for you to be. They came back to us three years later and said, Okay, we think we should reevaluate Shopify now and we did it and now we're on now we're migrating Shopify. it's that again go back to the journey of Shopify. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah. And we're seeing that a lot. We're seeing that a lot is is the bigger firms like River Island are moving to Shopify, all the Pentham brands are moving to Shopify, and it's it's now I think like we said before, and I think some of that is a the platform's caught up, but I also think some of that is the ecosystem around it and the sort of the lead around this structured data ready for AI. So Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: On on on sort of like you partner with Klaviyo and lots of other big apps, who are the sort of go to apps in your tech stack when you're doing your discovery on Shopify? Pete - Glass Atlas: I'm gonna start with a geeky operational one, which is Matrixify. So it's it's literally you would it's a it's a back end thing for data migration. It's great for getting data in and out. We I don't think we would ever do a Shopify build without Matrixify. We're like it's it's such a good app and Most people maybe have never heard of it or maybe use it once and never use it again. So that's that's a geeky operational because I'm an operational guy, right? I'm a techie the marks and stuff's great, but like that dirty kind of like get transforming data and getting data in. So Matrixify is like probably my number if you ask me for an app for every build we we do, it's probably that. that's pretty common. You've got your Klaviyos and you from an ESP point of view, obviously they're so tightly integrated with Shopify now. from an ESP point of view, yeah, we we were with those guys. But I guess some other ones that are off I guess slightly Shopify search and discovery, which is like Shopify's own free kind of like search and discuss search and merch app. Really good. I used to be an advocate of never using the out of the box search on an e-commerce platform. Don't ever use it because it's never that good. Shopify changed my thought process and that's pretty great. I think it's great to start with. Again, it depends on what you're coming from, but Shopify Search Discovery is a free option, really good, and they keep innovating it. Outside of that, if you need something a bit more expansive and a bit more control from a merchandising perspective, Advanced Commerce, Advanced Commerce is a merchandiser's dream. Honestly, if you're in merchandising, it's John - Leaders on Shopify: Andre will be Andre will be very happy that you've given him a shout. Pete - Glass Atlas: He yeah, I also have to shout out Athos as well because they're both they're both good, but Brave The Skies Shopify Agency the to Athos Commerce, which is used to be Klevu now Athos, both of them from a search if you want to have a l elevate your search emerge experience, those two. one that's recently come about, which is the recent one it's on my radar is order editing. and if you come across it. John - Leaders on Shopify: from Australia they Australia or new were Yeah, really nice guys. Yeah, really good Pete - Glass Atlas: Think it's Australian, yeah. I think yeah, it's great for for if you've got a if you've got a business that's constantly doing customer service crisis, but I to change the delivery address or whatever, the app that they've got now, making changes before the orders actually hit in your ERP. it's it's not it it's it's it's got the whole thing around the withdrawal of contract as well, which is now an EU piece of legislation about giving customers easy or easy opt out cancelling an order. That is a great is a great solution. we've got some merchants starting to adopt that on to check order editing out is it can save hours and weeks of time from a customer service team and refunding orders. I have to shout out a couple more if I've got time. B2B, John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah yeah. Pete - Glass Atlas: if you don't really show wise B2B, Sparklayer is a brilliant B2B add on that that I've got a couple of guys I know developed. So Sparklayer. I have to shout I have to shout out Patchworks who did that before, again from an inspiration perspective. John - Leaders on Shopify: J Jim Jim will get you a beer now. That's it. Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah, it's it's yeah, we we love working with those guys. I'm gonna shout out Product Caster 'cause I have to because it's part of our business. Summit Media we bought product casters for CSS, but they also have a data feed optimization tool and again whole the whole AI. Let's optimize our product data for AI. John - Leaders on Shopify: I was I was actually talking to John and maybe this is something we can talk to about the podcast. I I think there's an opportunity for product cast to actually spin up a Shopify app, right? They they should just have it straight in the app store. and then I don't I don't know if that's on Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah. I think the plan is to get a data feed. John - Leaders on Shopify: yeah, get the feed manager tool in there or something. Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah, so yeah, a hundred percent. and then last two very quickly, Elevar for server side data tracking, and yeah, I don't know if sort of customer data and insights is key to what you guys do, or you know, what your your business does as well. Elevar's John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Yeah, we're a big big fan of Elevar. Yeah. Pete - Glass Atlas: brilliant for server side tracking, hundred percent recommend that. And then I guess finally Akeneo for product data. So there's a mix in there of like operational and kind of like marketing stuff. So but I'm a I'm a techie guy, I guess that so you can John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Yeah, no, no, it's great. There's some I will put all of those apps in the show notes with links. but just so we've managed to have a really good detailed conversation about the practicalities of like the back end of all your big e commerce stuff, which has been great, Pete. But everybody's banging on about AI, agentic commerce. You're in the the weeds of this day to day with your clients. What are you actually seeing Are peop do people have AI agents buying stuff? Is this all smoke and mirrors or is it actually the future? Pete - Glass Atlas: I think it depends. Two parts to that question. First of all, are we seeing it? Not in the UK. It's obviously in the US it's it's it's big it's supposedly a thing. We are seeing some use use cases and stories around it. I'd say that it depends if it when it does if Agentic is finally going to take off in the UK, in Europe, I'd say it depends on the products you're selling. I think if you're i in the can you're in the market for considered purchases like I mentioned some of our customers like Richer Sounds who sell TVs or Bensons who sell beds or if you're gonna be spending eighty nine hundred quid and plus on a product or even even not in that amount, are you gonna trust an agentic agent to go and spend that money for you and buy that product for you? Probably not. If you know what you want, let's say you want to go and buy a branded Omega watch, I know it's expensive, right? But if you know you want it or you want the specific exact model of a product, would I trust someone to go and buy it for me if they just 'cause it's a price comparison. If I said, I want to buy this product, this particular model, go and find me for the cheapest, it can get me delivered tomorrow for free. I would probably trust it. I would probably and I think John - Leaders on Shopify: I've d I I've been umming and ahhing over what would you and it and it was like if you know a specific I don't know, I want this particular pair of trainers in this colour on this brand, this is my budget. As soon as it hits this price point, if you can find it and you can get it delivered within the whatever buy, that could save you a huge amount of time. And I I do sort of see a world where that could be useful. But I agree with you. I'm not gonna let it buy me a car or a sofa or kitchen. but It's it's quite interesting around product research and discoverability and we're seeing a huge amount of zero click attribution stuff where where stuff's just happening because people have done all their research over here now in the LLM and then they just arrive and buy, which is exciting, but also from a it's a marketer's nightmare because Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah, so John - Leaders on Shopify: they haven't got the visibility that they used to have. Pete - Glass Atlas: Yeah, the tr the tracking of that is the an attribution for that is is a nightmare. yeah, we're starting to figure out how we're trying to figure out how we can we can do that. And it's you know, the same as you, like a date data and insights is crucial to everything we do, making recommendations and without that data it's it's hard. so yeah, I think what I'd say is that and I said this to everybody, and this is readiness is the word everybody uses. Readiness, getting your product data ready, getting your site optimised. The product the product information piece is the key for all of this. And I've always been a part of advocate of product data for a long time, but it's not just now the specs of the product, given it. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. and and and I think you need to give the machines and the platforms, whether that's Shopify or whether that's Shopify's connections to OpenAI or in the all the other AI LLMs, it's only going to be able to ingest structured proper data. It's not just scraping your site, it understands and so you're absolutely right, but you and the winners are gonna be p potentially the The winners will win by doing the boring hard work in the background. Right. It's less about the shiny front end. That will yeah, everybody loves that. But actually it's that boring product. Have we got all the right fields? Are they all named correctly? Are they all organised correctly? Have we actually got all our pricing margin data in so actually we can take advantage of all the features that platforms like Shopify or ASK BOSCO® or whatever offer? but yeah, it's it's it's gonna be fascinating, I think, over the next few years. so a few quick fire questions to close, Pete, before we got sort of get into where can we find Glass Atlas, where can find you, who's the perfect client. But if you had to tell clients to focus on one metric as an e-commerce agency, and you were talking to an e-commerce business What's the one metric they really need to pay attention to? Pete - Glass Atlas: I'm gonna say cost of acquisition. That's a performance related thing. I think if you can get cost of acquisition under control, you can accept a level you're happy with, then you can John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, that's that's a clever one 'cause that's a combination of lots of metrics. That's good. I s I Pete - Glass Atlas: Thank you, guys. John - Leaders on Shopify: see what you've done there. right, so if you've got to back the rest of your career on one platform, so Shopify, Adobe Commerce, Big Commerce, what are you backing your rest of your career Pete - Glass Atlas: well I was gonna say PIM because I think I think management product data is like I actually think so the reason I've said that is because I actually think the e commerce platforms are gonna be dead in five years. Maybe maybe maybe longer. But the platforms that will still do well is stuff that make in polar data optimization enrichment. So PIM. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, well we we in your opinion, what's the biggest waste of money in e commerce right now? Pete - Glass Atlas: I'd just say investment in tech and not resourcing it in general, that's a very broad thing, but the biggest waste of money is people buying tech and then not having the people to resource it and use it properly. John - Leaders on Shopify: That makes sense. Yeah, you see loads of people sticking in apps or tech and then they just renew, renew, renew and never actually use it. Yeah. Pete - Glass Atlas: gets a fancy C D P but they can't even use it and use it. So yeah, that's quite broad, but that's honestly it's common 'cause that could be any tech, it's just if you don't you if you invest it and don't use it properly then John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and what's the one thing you learned at Better Bathrooms that it taught you that you still use every week? Pete - Glass Atlas: talk to your customers. And that's because honestly, the biggest amount of insights we used to get was listening to our customers and actually finding out where the problems were, not just like having our head buried in the sand and actually look using data and listening to customers to make decisions, basically. I mean still advocate that today. We listen to our customers, we actually look at the data and we give them advice based on data. John - Leaders on Shopify: so one question I ask all our guests is. Who else should we be inviting on the podcast in in this world? If if you were me, who else should we be getting on? Pete - Glass Atlas: in e commerce. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, e commerce. So it's either apps, brands, or agencies. Pete - Glass Atlas: I would get this is a bit left field, guy called Richard Jackson. He's former he's been in a few places, actually he's former agency owner. He got he was at in Inviqa for a while. they've got he's working for a company and the name's gonna escape me now. it's gonna be my head in I should have got the copy name first. they've got John - Leaders on Shopify: We'll look it up. Pete - Glass Atlas: they've got a brand new product which is focused around it's an AI product but of obviously which focuses around like margin optimization and focus on where margin's being lost to within a business. I saw it not so long ago. And I was really impressed. It's something that again a lot of businesses don't don't think about or don't realise where they're losing money out the back door. John - Leaders on Shopify: and if people want to find you will find Glass Atlas. Where where can they find you, Pete? Pete - Glass Atlas: I'm on LinkedIn, obviously Pete Robertshaw on LinkedIn. Glass Atlas is on LinkedIn and obviously got glassatlas.com but yeah, LinkedIn web, you know, email me at Pete.Robertshaw@glassaplas.com or LinkedIn, John - Leaders on Shopify: Pete, that's been fantastic and really enjoyed our conversation. And yeah, thank you for coming on. Pete - Glass Atlas: Cheers, John, thanks for having me, mate.