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Scaling your Shopify store? The bit everyone forgets. · Leaders on Shopify with John Readman

• John - Leaders on Shopify: So welcome back to another episode of Leaders on Shopify. I'm really excited to have Tom from Squashed Pixel on. Tom's been building Shopify websites, I think, since Shopify actually launched Shopify. So he's got some stories to share with us and hopefully lots of learnings and inspiration and ideas and advice. So looking forward to sort of digging into this one. So Tom, for those who don't know you or don't know Squashed Pixel, Do want to give us a bit of background and a bit of who you are, how long you've been doing it what's Squashed Pixel famous for? Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. So we've been going 17 years this year. we got into, got, we got into Shopify back before Shopify even had like a partner's ecosystem. So it was, it was when they'd kind of first launched in like version one of Shopify really. yeah, for us at the time, it was brilliant. It was, we were building on Magento and kind of OpenCart kind of sites back then. And Shopify was the first platform we'd come across that it was built. for the people managing the sites rather than the developers. So was kind of an easy, well, it was a no brainer for us at that point. And we've not looked back since really. I think we were one of the first 10 Shopify partners in the UK. was kind of, yeah, sort of the Wild West back then. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. So you were in early, is that luck sort of judgment or what you sort of mentioned that it was built, you felt Shopify was more built for the person managing the store rather than the developer. Why was that so sort of important for you and your clients? Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. So at the time I'd, kind of started off life in e-learning and e-assessment. So I kind of started off as illustration kind of went into it was kind of flash game design and that sort of thing back then. kind of went from there sort of into websites, just as websites. Okay. It makes me sound really old, but websites were starting to become popular at that point and starting to become like an actual kind of business tool. I jumped around quite a few different agencies, as much as you do kind of early in your career. And a lot of the agencies back then were all kind of they're aimed at locking people in. So everything was like propriety platforms. You own the code, you own the platform, but anytime you wanted to change anything, you had to go back to the agency. You had to pay for every, every change, every amend, every update. and what we found at the time was people were jumped. So as I kind of jumped from agency to agency, clients were actually kind of coming with me. And I just kind of hit that point where it's like, actually. I could do this on my own. The people follow me anyway. It kind of made sense to kind of start up. And at that point, there was only me. So I needed something that was easy. It was easy to manage, easy to keep on top of. And I didn't want to spend my life making price changes, kind of explain to people how to edit the website and Shopify at that point was a million miles away from where it is now. But compared to Magento at the time, it was, it was brilliant. You could set it up. You had full control over the front end. And within a couple of hours, clients pretty independent on it, which meant my, my job was more about the marketing. was more about the look and feel and the functionality than just kind of doing the day-to-day management for people. And I think that resonated well for people at the time. I think it still does now, to be fair. don't think anyone likes the idea of being locked in. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Yeah. years ago, Shopify was sort of for startups. People's perception was it was a startup small sort of platform for do it yourself type businesses. Now some of the world's biggest brands on Shopify. What have you sort of seen change and how's Shopify had to change to support that? If you're an enterprise brand listening to this and you're thinking, right, well, we're on Salesforce commerce cloud or we're still on Magento, Shopify is not right for us. What would you say to them? Tom - Squashedpixel: We do a lot of migrating people away from particularly Magento the last couple of years onto Shopify and the biggest thing we always hear is the ability to be reactive. You've got an idea, you can test it, especially with like new rollout stuff that Shopify brought in. you can reiterate, you can expand, you can change a lot quicker. It's like a new idea can be done in anything from kind of a couple of hours to a couple of weeks, whereas with something like Magento, you might be looking at like a six, seven week rollout. for a new bit of functionality or a new feature. So the ability to be reactive makes a huge difference. The biggest shift for me, mean Shopify when it first started out, it was aimed at those kinds of small businesses. was very off the shelf. It was kind of a cheap way to get into it. I think we've been lucky enough to work across a lot of small brands, lot of big brands, startups and kind of everyone sort of in between. Fundamentally the same, they're all trying to do the same thing. So the actual front end experience and what they're working on isn't massively different across all those where Shopify kind of does really well, it's that backend integration. So actually you'll hit a point where you need order management, you need ERP integrations, you need more from the data and that side of things. And I think that's where Shopify kind of excels for those enterprise brands. Cause it's not just an e-commerce platform. It's got multi-channel kind of built in. And for everything else, it's got the API integrations to, in fact, there's not much you can't integrate with Shopify at this point, either natively or with a custom API. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. And the whole ecosystem around Shopify, people are building businesses around Shopify to support Shopify. And I think that's great, but it also can be really confusing for some merchants because there's however many thousand apps. And one thing people were talking about in Canada in Dot Dev last week is Shopify are aware and concerned about the volume of vibe coded apps that are just appearing and trying to get on the app store. And they want like humans, Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: humans behind this, who can be sort of the experts to support their apps. So they're going to be really doubling down on the built for Shopify app world. And then you also see this thing where Shopify now building more functionality into the platform. So actually you don't need that app or Sidekick can just build you something. What's your sort of. Squashed pixel over time. There'll be certain things you say well, we're not gonna build that We're just gonna recommend this or we're gonna recommend that because that's it does the best What's your sort of go-to tech stack if I was a brand migrating across to you? What sort of things do you build yourself? What sort of things do you recommend? Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah, it's, it's a hard one. We've, I mean, there is an app for everything and well, that used to be the same. There's a, there's an app for that. That was always kind of the sort of the early days of Shopify. And it's now hit a point where there's, 25 different apps for every possible thing you could want to do in your site. And it is, it's easy to get carried away. And I think people don't necessarily realize adding 25 different apps on impacts, well, your monthly cost as a starting point, these three, $4 here and there kind of massively add up, but the the front end experience as well, because especially the vibe coded apps, a lot of them look like vibe coded apps without sounding horrible. It looks like an app that's kind of being bolted onto the site. doesn't feel natural. It doesn't feel native to the site. From our point of view, we try to be fairly minimal in the number of apps we kind of install. So it's, it's not that we're anti app, but it's the right app for the right reason. So there's There's very few we recommend on all sites. There are a few. when it comes to like data, I mean data is probably one of the biggest things, certainly at the moment with all the cookies and GDPR and all that side of things. we, we recommend a Little Data on pretty much every site we kind of work if they do like server side tracking. so they kind of pull all the data out and they don't, I suppose you've got people like Triple Whale that they kind of, they create their own dashboard and they kind of pull it all out. What we find with things like Little Data is they're really good at making sure the right data goes into the right platform. And then the kind of sharing that and enriching that with the right data. There's almost always an email marketing platform. That's just not something you can kind of replicate yourself. So Klaviyo is obviously the big one at the moment. Shopify emails actually, Shopify Messaging, sorry, they've just renamed it, haven't they? That is quite a good one. They've just released WhatsApp integration. this month as well, I think, if I remember rightly. I've not John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so then. Tom - Squashedpixel: had a chance to have a play with it yet, but it's an interesting, think WhatsApp definitely is the next big thing after email, I think. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, as we see more and more, customer service messaging and other things, or even like basket abandonment, people are starting to use WhatsApp. More WhatsApp is becoming, it's becoming more and more a sales channel as opposed to just a communication message platform. I definitely would agree with that. Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah, there's a definite generational shift as well. And it's, don't know if it's an age thing, but for me, my phone number is quite a private thing. I don't like anyone having my number and I don't like getting messages where email doesn't bother me where I know my daughter's 14. They would much rather get a text message than, an email. So there's a definite shift in, what people are expecting, think. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and what when you're talking to brands now, what sort of why are people migrating? What's the fundamental shift? Is it total cost of ownership or is it they actually want to sell more stuff or because the often is. The argument is, well, it's better the devil you know, we're in, we're in, and we're doing what we're doing. Migrating, if you're a medium large business or an enterprise business, migrating a website isn't just a, let's change websites. It's a big concept of Tom - Squashedpixel: Lift and shift, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: project, right? There's going to be some investment. What are you tending to see? What are the things that are causing that shift? Tom - Squashedpixel: There's two, I suppose there's two main reasons actually. Whenever we speak to someone that's been around for five, six years, they've got a decent following, a large number of orders. The biggest reasons most people are using is either, well, stability is the big one. They've had, they've been hacked or the site goes down, they hit Black Friday and they have traffic issues and things going down, people not being able to check out. Shopify has had some downtime in the last couple of months. It's probably, it's not faultless, but... Compared to a lot of other platforms, it's by far the most stable out there. And I think that control side of things, I think with platforms like, I keep using Magento as an example. I think it's just because we've done so many Magento kind of migrations recently, but it's... John - Leaders on Shopify: No, we can be some magento. In a former life, I used to be a guest partner and I've had some terrible experiences both with clients and being a partner. And over time, I just can't see what or how Adobe is going to change that to compete with Shopify. just, it seems like one way traffic at the moment. Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah, I definitely had a time and its place and there's a few, there's a few times we've kind of pushed people towards it, but normally it's when they're doing something so bespoke and probably more on the B2B side of things. Whereas Shopify can do B2B, but it's not, it's not a B2B platform kind of natively. It's definitely getting there and they're making massive sort of strides in that direction, but it's, it's not that Magento doesn't have its place. It's just not the one size fits all solution it used to try and. kind of presents itself as, but yeah, John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and Tom - Squashedpixel: the, I'd say the cost of ownership. think everyone's always scared that Shopify is going to cost a lot. But when you look at, we have this argument, a lot of people moving WooCommerce commerce where they, where WooCommerce is technically free, but then you start looking at the downtime, the server costs, the SSL costs and all these extra little bits kind of here and there. It normally works out about the same cost, if not more than managing the Shopify site. John - Leaders on Shopify: potentially for a better solution and a better platform. Tom - Squashedpixel: Exactly. John - Leaders on Shopify: And how long would you sort of look at that over if you were recommending to a client? it a three year, a five year, a two year? What's the sort of thing? And, and, as an agency business, it's interesting because you've been in Shopify, like one of the first 10 in the, in the UK, traditionally agencies were excited about someone going, I need to change something. we can charge them a couple hundred quid for that. Whereas you took the view. Actually, it's easier if they change themselves because I can go and do something else. So I suppose two questions. One is what period you look at total cost of ownership and then I suppose you seem to be excited about enabling your clients to do more stuff themselves so you can focus on the bigger more interesting strategic problems. Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah, from, from an ownership point of view, it's a minimum 12 months. We kind of look at it out because you need, you need at least 12 months to kind of see where all those costs are coming from. Ideally, depending on the business, sort of three to five years kind of gives you a more true cost of everything. And those, I mean, that whole Magento, Magento two to Magento three update, the amount of people getting charged in that was almost obscene from some of the people out there, but that's not the sort of thing you can spot over a six month. kind of analysis. So you need, you need those kind of longer periods to really understand it. with Shopify itself, you've kind of got to take into account all the stuff around it as well. So you've obviously got the Shopify costs. You've got the conversion fees and currency side of things, but then you've got all the extra bits around it. So you've got. Klaviyo and things like that. People kind of forget about those apps and those kinds of extra add-ons. So we, we tend to take quite a holistic view and kind of look at all the app costs and everything kind of worked in. So it's hopefully like this is black and white as you can kind of make it. From a management point of view, is, I mean, when we first started out, it was very unusual and everyone thought we were mad for doing it. But for us, it's good customer service. If people can kind of manage the site themselves and it's, I suppose, with all our clients, most of them can do everything themselves, whether they... choose to do it themselves or not is a slightly different thing. Some people still want us to manage it all and do it all for them. We've got others that are kind of fully self-reliant and we just have kind of regular kind of touch points with, but yeah, for us, if we're working on something, it should be generating money or it should be increasing conversion rate. should be, there should be an outcome for it. If we're just changing prices and managing customers, it's not the best use of our time. So our time obviously does come with a cost as well. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I suppose it's interesting because some people are sort of nervous about like isn't Shopify with its new AI and Sidekick and this that they're trying to let the users just do everything themselves. But I'm still of a world, a lot of the people who are on Shopify are actually excited and obsessed about the products they're selling. and still need some expertise and help and advice and maybe don't even know the right question to ask the AI. Tom - Squashedpixel: And I think that's where the expertise kind of comes in. It's like we've, we've, you, have you built any apps with Sidekick yet? It's, it's a fact. John - Leaders on Shopify: attempt. Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. If you know how to ask it and it's not, it's not quick, just to one prompt and you've kind of got something, there's a lot of iterations and you've got to understand. It's intelligent and it understands Shopify, but it doesn't understand how to tie everything together. So you've got to know what you're asking it to do and why you want it to do it. So there's a lot that kind of goes into it, but once. Once you've got your head around it, the amount of, and they're all tend to be admin side apps. It's amazing what you can kind of do with it. It's, I'm a big fan of Flow. It's Flows got its weak points, but the apps kind of fill in those gaps where Flow doesn't quite, quite fill all the gaps really. From a front end point of view, I'm not fully convinced by Sidekick, but on a selfish note, has created a lot of work for us because people have, people have tried to do stuff and it's kind of worked and then yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: break it and then you have to go back Tom - Squashedpixel: So you end up kind of, yeah, it ends up kind of generating work in a degree, but what it does mean is people can play about with ideas. They can try to do something themselves. They can get it to a certain point and you've not had to go through 15 iterations yourself to kind of get what they're wanting. They've already kind of got that idea on paper and it gives you a good starting point. It's almost like an interactive wireframe to a degree for those customers that are using it. it's, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: It's almost like the Santa Claus, like a play pit, people. Yeah. Tom - Squashedpixel: But it means, I mean, we've all had those conversations where people have, you've done something, they've explained it perfectly and it's not quite what they wanted. That's kind of, that's almost kind of gone with this side of things. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and you've worked with clients of all shapes and sizes. If you were to sort of showcase a really interesting client that's been on a journey with you over time, it could be a household name, it might not be, who would you sort of pick out as a sort of showcase, right, this is really interesting because... Tom - Squashedpixel: there's a lot to kind of talk about, I suppose. One of my favorite at the the moment, actually, is Poppin' Candy. They do like pick and mix sweets. they're, it's quite an interesting one. They sell globally, but they sell like American sweets to the UK. They'll sell UK sweets to the US. European sweets get sold everywhere. they sell sweets from all over the world, but not to the countries those sweets are from. John - Leaders on Shopify: to everybody else. Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. But for them, they've, I mean, they've got a massive kind of product range. So they've got everything from salty sweets to giant gummy bears and the American Illuminous drinks and sort of everything in between. We've worked on them with like some custom pick and mix builders. We're looking at a lot of the conversion rate and the upsells and cross-sells, but we're, yeah, we're experimenting with a few platforms at the moment around the personalization element, which I think is going to work really well for them. So. If you come to the site and you, the only thing you ever buy is salty, licorice sweets. You can start to kind of tweak the landing pages, the recommendations. all starts kind of being tweaked into your, your likes and your dislikes. So in theory, that should just get more and more intelligent over time. And with that data being shared between Klaviyo and all the different platforms, it's a really, it's a really interesting kind of problem it's trying to solve. It's complex. There's a lot of different calculations and stuff being worked out, but. I think the payoff for that is gonna be really, really good. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. So we've, we've sort of touched on AI a bit with Sidekick, but we haven't sort of dug into it. One thing that came up recently at the Dot Dev is like Shopify is going all AI first. We're going to build and protect our merchants from this AI agentic world and enable them to move forward in this new world. I suppose from a realistic point of view on a day to day, how do you see And we'll start probably with like LLM visibility and agentic commerce, but is that a thing for your clients? Is that a thing in your agency? You're talking about it? How is it now or is it in the future? Where does that sit in your world? Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah, it's, it's a conversation. happens every day. Everyone's worried about LLM visibility and getting into chat GPT and all the rest of it. Of all the clients we work across, we're starting to see all sales through it, but it's on such a small scale. It's hard to give it kind of a real kind of focus at the moment. we don't get involved in like the PPC and like the ungrain SEO and that side of things. So that might be why we're not kind of as exposed to it as other people. It's. It's something we're aware of. I suppose from a technical point of view, we're doing a lot of work around like the schema and like the, the mark up of the site to make sure it's easy to crawl, easy to understand, and all the kind of the data points are there. I wouldn't feel comfortable at this point going all in on it. I don't think it's enough, it's big enough or popular enough to kind of take over the business and be the sole focus, but it's only, it's only going to get bigger. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, it's interesting because it's getting boardroom attention, but it's still a fraction of a percent of total anything. But it's Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: growing. I was it was quite funny. The Shopify guys are like, this 800 % growth and this and this and I'm like, if you're growing from five, it's quite easy. Tom - Squashedpixel: This is the problem, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: growth. It's like we're growing from a really low base. I think it's a bit misleading, but I also think people need to be organized and prepared. But I suppose the one thing it seems to be is Shopify are going to enable all their merchants to be organized and prepared anyway. So you shouldn't have to panic too much. I think is what I'm hearing. Tom - Squashedpixel: That's kind of our approach. And as long as you're kind of aware of it and you're not, you're not ignoring it or willfully trying to not kind of show up. It's, I think it's changing every day. Every other week, there's something, there's a new platform coming out. There's a new way of doing it. There's, there's already a million one kind of optimization platforms for AI. it's, it's, hard to know what, what you're optimizing John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, Tom - Squashedpixel: for. It's still so new. No one knows what, what the end goal is yet. I don't know. Yeah. I don't fully get it yet, but I might be old fashioned. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, I went to, this is a funny name. Well, it's not funny. I went to the Brighton SEO conference, but in San Diego last year in America, because we've recently launched, ASK BOSCO® into to America. And I think every other booth and every other stand at the event was some sort of LLM visibility platform or how to Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: optimize for LLMs. was like, hang on, where have these all come from? This is like, wow. The other side of AI is obviously content generation, image generation, video generation. Everybody, there's so many different mixed views on should we, shouldn't we, whether that be a brand or an agency. What are you seeing within your business at Squashed Pixel Tom? Tom - Squashedpixel: I mean, we use it, everyone uses it. It's like, can't, I don't think you can exist and not kind of use it at the moment. From an image point of view, it's a hard one for product photography. It's definitely replacing like the need for big product shoots and fashion kind of setups. I suppose my approach to the image side of things is as long as it doesn't feel AI and it's kind of been done well, it tends to work quite well. I don't think people are bothered by it. I think... I think where we've seen issues with it previously is where someone's just just in they've taken the first image that comes out and they've not really given it any more kind of thought than that. I think it's like anything you get you get out of it what you put into it. So there's a lot work that goes into crafting these prompts, which is a weird thing to say. It's such a new kind of isn't it? It's going be a job in itself at some point. John - Leaders on Shopify: no, think this is coming back to what is it's the issue isn't necessarily the AI. The issue is the human driving the AI or just accepting Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: the first output of being lazy. and one thing we were discussing with a with another person on the podcast before was actually AI used well in an intelligent way is hugely powerful. But if you're a bit lazy, and you're not that intelligent, how you use it, it's really dangerous. Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah. And it's the same. mean, I remember people saying the same in Photoshop came around and you suddenly had all these filters and stuff you could kind of do back then. And it's, there was always that kind of pushback from it. But I think if you're a natural lazy person, it's just making it easier to do the same thing. But I think if you're, if you're creative and curious, it gives you a massive tool set that you can actually really kind of expand on. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, so 100%. So you're, I suppose, by trade, a technical founder within within your business. How involved are you though, with the sort of still in the day to day work versus actually sort of running the business, scaling the business? How do you get how do you split your time with all that sort of stuff? Tom - Squashedpixel: I've, I mean, we're several years in and I've still not got that perfect by any stretch of the imagination. It's, there'll be periods where I'll spend three, four months kind of being involved in the coding, the actual kind of the day-to-day side of things. And there'll be other months where I'm kind of more focused on the business. I'd love to say I've got it worked out on like a daily kind of weekly basis, but it does, it changes so much and so often. Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: I don't think anybody's gonna work out Tom, but everybody's winging it. We're all winging it. Tom - Squashedpixel: But no, I. I still find the coding side of things interesting. And I think AI has actually made me a better coder as deft as that sounds. know there's a bit of a fear that it's making people lazy and it's you kind of losing that skill of the coding. But for me, it makes you focus more on the structure and what you want it to do. So it becomes more, not necessarily about writing the divs and creating all the classes and that side of things, but actually thinking bigger picture, like how does that tie to the rest of the site? How does it all tie together? What is the overarching kind of concept? And it's, it makes it a lot quicker. It does a lot of the dull, the dull work in which you focus on the bigger bit, I think. And that's, I think that's the bit I kind of enjoy. It's the problem solving. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and if you were to sort of go, right, this is the perfect client for a project with Squashed Pixel. What, Who are they? What do they look like? Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah, so for us, working with founders is definitely where we kind of excel. They're the people are still kind of in love with the brand and they're of emotionally sort of attached to it. So it's a lot more personal. I think when you're dealing with founders, it's almost like an ADHD thing. You've kind of got a million and one different ideas kind of going off and trying to work out where to focus and helping them kind of focus on the bits that matter. What we tend to find as well is those Those businesses are growing quite quickly. They've, I mean, we've been going 17 years. So we, we obviously do the onsite side of things. do a lot of conversion rate kind of optimization and just helping people engage with customers. But I think, I think through the nature of what we've done, we've ended up getting involved in warehousing systems, ERP integrations, order management, and solving those kinds of bigger, bigger business decisions. So I suppose for a lot of people. When you're scaling a brand, first thing most people kind of focused on is acquisition. So they'll spend X amount more on ads, they'll focus more on Meta and that side of things. Not forgetting, forgetting about the fact that they need to fulfill all these orders. And then suddenly the warehouse is overwhelmed and it has that kind of knock on effect. So I think we're quite good at being the devil's advocate almost as we're kind of talking to clients, they're kind of really focused on this fun bit and we're kind of filling in the gaps behind that. John - Leaders on Shopify: But whilst the practicalities of when someone sends something back, what are going to do? Yeah, all of that. Tom - Squashedpixel: Exactly. And that side of things. then suddenly expanding out into EU sounds like a great thing, but then you've got a million and one different bits of forms you need to fill out legislation you need to kind of miff it and dealing with Trump's ever-changing mind on tariffs and all the rest of it. It's all those dull bits that the founders don't want to think about. John - Leaders on Shopify: Probably not the people who are listening to this because they're more sort of scaling up type things but I think a lot of people think e-commerce is easy, right? And it's Tom - Squashedpixel: It's John - Leaders on Shopify: not. Tom - Squashedpixel: yeah, I think the front end bit of it is probably easier than it ever has been. You can spin up a shop, you can get something that looks half decent and looks like it's been around a while fairly easy. The customer service, the products and all that stuff that actually makes an e-commerce business work is easy to gloss over, but that's the bit that makes a business successful. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. And if you, where do you see the sort of next chapter for Squashed Pixel? How's the business going to evolve and change over time as sort Shopify evolves and changes? Tom - Squashedpixel: I think because we're small, we've always been quite kind of adaptive, I think, and we've kind of embraced technology and kind of grown with that side of things. We started up in the middle of a recession and everyone said we're mental back then for kind of starting up when everything was kind of terrible. I think this industry at the moment is probably the only time I can kind of compare to when we kind of set up where no one really knows where it's going to go. I think it's changing at such a pace. I couldn't even guess what the next six months, two years are going to look like in the ecom world. I don't think Shopify is going anywhere. think Shopify is so far ahead of the game. I can't imagine anyone kind of catching up to them at this point. But yeah, I don't know. We're just kind of adapting as we go. I feel like we're winging it to a degree sometimes, but I think there's an element that's all you can do. John - Leaders on Shopify: I think you've got to... with the speed at which technology is changing. Someone asked me to put this thing together about a potential project and it starts in January and you're talking about it's got to embrace loads of different AI and agentic it this and I'm like, I can't possibly tell you Tom - Squashedpixel: I can't. John - Leaders on Shopify: what is going to happen and what is going to be the best thing to do in January because it's going to change about five times between now and January because it is moving so fast. I think what's interesting for you guys is because you are small and agile and founder led, you can react and respond really quickly and be at the forefront of what is new and switch and change quickly. One thing that's come up a lot on all these different conversations is a lot of agencies obviously build bespoke integrations and custom apps for their clients, but actually are potentially thinking, well, hang on, is there a revenue stream in actually releasing these apps and selling them to other people? Is that something you're doing? Is that something you consider? Where does that sit on your radar? Tom - Squashedpixel: It's, we've got a few, if we've got quite a few apps and a few kind of custom integrations. We've, we've toyed with the idea of releasing them and kind of making them publicly available. But I think, I mean, I've got app fatigue with the app store. You can look through the app store sometimes, and even I don't know where to look a lot of the time. Customers must be feeling that as well. And it's, I think once you kind of go down that route, you become. You become a support business. You're having to maintain support, reiterate. It kind of changes the face of the business, I think. And you kind of, I don't know if you could do that well without having lots of different teams kind of employed and just looking after those different bits. It's the same reason. Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: It'll change the dynamic. You're turning from being an agency services business to being a software business. And that's a different thing. Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah, and I think the apps and stuff we've created ourselves, it's come around because of a genuine need. And I think if we lost that kind of customer contact in dealing with those people on day-to-day basis, I don't know how relevant those bits over there would be. I think you need both arms of that to kind of do it well. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah. And from sort of everything you've seen over the years, who do you think, and there's often a couple of common ones come up. So if you name the most popular ones, I might ask you to go, no, you've got to think again. But who Tom - Squashedpixel: You John - Leaders on Shopify: the sort of brands that you think are absolutely killing it in the Shopify world and the ones you sort of look up to for inspirational ideas? Tom - Squashedpixel: There's a lot of common ones. get people like, mean, Taylor Swift is the first person to take down Shopify from the amount of kind of traffic she generated. That's quite a hard one to beat You've got people like Gymshark that are obviously massive kind of Shopify advocates. The brands I prefer are the ones that are doing it quietly. They're not necessarily shouting about the fact they're on Shopify. They're just out there and kind of doing really, really well. John - Leaders on Shopify: Obviously all of them, but of your clients who's really sort of seen massive growth either since starting or moving across the Shopify. Tom - Squashedpixel: I think we've got quite a lot of clients that sell very non-sexy things like sellotape and plastic bags and they always seem to kind of do really well. I think in terms of brands that are embracing Shopify really well, have you heard of Drowsy Sleep? They do like the sleep masks. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom - Squashedpixel: They're doing really well at the moment and they're really embracing Shopify. So we're doing a lot with them with like A-B testing. We're looking at Shopify rollouts. They've, really raised Shopify markets to kind of simplify kind of the whole business side of things, really. historically they, they had a US, a UK and a EU site. was kind of pre Shopify markets kind of really existing, but they've recently merged back to a single Shopify site with markets kind of set up, but with all the different bank accounts and tax registrations and all that side of things. they're, they're a really good example of someone that's kind of using Shopify to its full full kind of potential really. They're using every bit of Shopify with, with minimal apps kind of on top. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, no, no, no, no. So look, it's been great chatting and we could chat all day about Shopify and about different clients. If people want to find Squashed Pixel or yourself, Tom, where do they go to find you and how do they get in touch? Tom - Squashedpixel: Yeah, I mean, the best thing is through our website, to be fair, we're always either on the phone or it's hello at hello@squashedpixel.co.uk if you want to have a chat. We tend to be fairly kind of laid back in how we don't have like a, we're not very sales driven. It's more kind of solutions driven. So. John - Leaders on Shopify: So yeah, you say no pitch deck, no this, just a good sit down, a cup of tea sort of thing. Tom - Squashedpixel: that tend to be? I tend to find more information just through a half hour long conversation. You can kind of get to the weeds of what people actually want. think pitch decks are great and they work really well, but I don't think they always kind of get to the nuts and bolts of what people are needing. I've been doing this long enough to know that what people think they need and what they actually need are usually two very different things. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, so I know we'll really appreciate you coming on and sharing your Shopify journey and what Squashed Pixel are up to. And yeah, look forward to catching up soon. Tom - Squashedpixel: Brilliant, cheers for that it's been a great chat.