Latest / Leaders on Shopify with John Readman / Why chasing revenue can make you a "busy fool", and why Google will never tell you to spend less
Transcript
- John - Leaders on Shopify: So welcome back to leaders on Shopify. And today we're going to be talking to Reid from Price Master, who's also got his own brands and has built an app from seeing a need with his own brands. I'm not going to do the full introduction, any justice. So Reid, if for those of my listeners who don't know you, who are you and what businesses do you represent? and why you authorize to join the leaders on Shopify? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: So yeah, I'm Reid and I've been in e-commerce for about 18 years. originally started TCD, Trade Counter Direct which is an online store. We sell power tools, hand tools, plumbing tools, a whole range of trade tools. And then we also over the time have sort of developed niche websites around that. So we have a workware website, a Haikoki Power Tools dedicated website, some building material websites, and some tools storage websites as well. So we're running eight stores, all on Shopify now. and also originally we kind of we developed out from a wholesale business, which is our own brand of plumbing tools, and we do we we sort of get that into independent merchants nationals and and also sell as a brand and from there we have now also developed Price Master which is a SaaS software which is an app available on the Shopify app store which is a pricing automation and margin strategy tool John - Leaders on Shopify: Perfect, so I'm just now thinking how do you find time to do all that stuff? I thought I was busy, but you're like mega busy. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Well, so the the wholesale business has been a is been going for over 40 years. It's family run business. My dad started that when we came back from the States and that is had solid customers for a very long period of time. And we just do product development and stuff in that side. So it's not too resource heavy. the eight stores are resource heavy. obviously parcels going in and out every day, price changes, lots and lots of SKUs. You know, at one point we were managing over a hundred thousand different SKUs. and The reason that Price Master became is because we were so busy doing so much stuff that we developed Price Master to help us manage all of this. And and then once we did it, we realized how successful and good it was for us. And we thought, let's share that with, you know, any other e-commerce store. Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: with the ecosystem. Yeah, so before we sort of dig into your experience and expertise as a sort of online retailer with TCD, so you built Price Master to fix a problem in your business. What was the problem and why did it need fixing? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Well, we had a lot of suppliers, all with their cost prices moving up and down, that wasn't feeding into our system and then the RN price wasn't adjusting. So our cost price would go up and our sale price would stay the same and we'd be selling it a lot. We'd get crushed or go John - Leaders on Shopify: and your margins getting... yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: negative. so that was one thing that was a constant. So we built a minimum margin protection in Price Master that solves that one problem. But we're also in a very competitive market place where, you know, prices are moving all the time, people are getting different deals. The the you know, I think just on T C D alone, in seven days, we have around seven to eight thousand price changes happening in the market in seven days. So everything's moving around us. Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: Wow, it's full time, that's a full time job for maybe two people. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, and also you know, we c we kind of we didn't want to just do flat increases to to for margin because you know we we want to granularly look at how we can get the most margin out of every individual product. Some of them we are market sensitive, some of them we just sell well and we want to price discover and see how much margin we can get out of those products. And it's just it's physically impossible to do at scale every single day and sometimes, you know, multiple times a day, and stay on top of it. So again, that's that's why we sort of develop Price Master. And then now we we wanted to do the opposite of other pricing tools, which were quite often race to the bottom type tools where it's like just be a penny cheaper, penny cheaper, penny cheaper until there's no money. So John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: With our background as e-commerce stores, we had a different mentality, which is like, okay, well, how can we get it to go the other way? We we don't want our prices just and everyone's prices to sink so we've kind of built in margin miners, it loads and loads of different sort of tools that will look at the market and try and get prices up. also will identify fast movers and say maybe this isn't a market sensitive product. Maybe we go to price discovery mode and we try and see where we get to without upsetting sales. So it's just developed into a a really granular profit sort of mining or profit looking tool. John - Leaders on Shopify: Well, yeah, that's something we're absolutely passionate about as well is on the advertising side of the world. People often just focus on revenue versus ad spend, right? Return on ad spend. This ROAS is the thing everybody's been chasing, but that masks lots of potentially unprofitable sales, especially if you've got thousands of products. And it's, I'm pretty certain all online merchants, if they could join their profit day, focus more on profit, whether it be the pricing end or the advertising and sales end, they actually had the right data. to focus on and had the right tools and approach, they could definitely make more money. yeah, it's complicated Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Well there's so many moving parts and y you know, like John - Leaders on Shopify: and hard, yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, I I mean the the sort of idea out there is you know, just get a Shopify site and sell stuff and you make loads of money. yeah I think anyone who runs John - Leaders on Shopify: Is it not that easy? Is it not that easy, Reid Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: It's not actually no. It takes a lot of and and the bigger you get and the more you want to scale, you know, you've you've got like you said, your marketing costs, then you've got your fulfillment movement costs, you've got everything else and all of these costs are it's hard to a attribute them to the right things and make sure that the margin's there and you know, yeah, it's a task to dig into that and hence why I you know our two companies exist. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you're now imagine we've got listen, merchant, other merchants listening to this, who's the perfect merchant for Price Master? And how could they find you and how could they test it out? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: So you know, we would say anyone with a Shopify store it would be beneficial, but we you know, the more SKUs you have and the more more The more data you're dealing with, this is where we really come into play. So if you're 2,000 SKUs or above, you know, this tool is going to be essential, really, we we think to to keeping you on top of everything and making sure your margins are protected and everything's everything's moving. but we deal with companies way above that and some below. And then sometimes people reselling other people's products, which is market driven. So looking at the market, we pull that information in. And then analyze that. But on the flip side, if you have your own brand and you're doing good numbers, we do the price discovery mode where we look at your sales. If your sales if you're selling 20 a day, we then try a price increase of one percent. We validate that with the sales, make sure the sales say the same. Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: me see if the sales drop off or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Once it's validated, we try again one percent and we just slowly creep the price to where it doesn't affect your sales. And all that time we log the sales to the price. So then we can start to actually identify where your biggest if you want to churn a lot, this is your price. If you want stable profit, this is your price. And and yeah, we just kind of gather all of that data together. John - Leaders on Shopify: almost giving people these different price elasticity models all within the inside. And how much is clever automation? And I suppose there's a big definition now about the definitions between AI and automation, but I imagine this is far more than just a complicated pivot table. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, yeah, but it's extremely complicated but again we haven't passed the whole thing off to AI yet. It's a programmatical situation and when we're dealing with John - Leaders on Shopify: And I suppose that's all trained off your team's logic, experience and knowledge that has been Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Exactly. John - Leaders on Shopify: fed into this programmatic logic. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah. But also we give the freedom to the customers. So they can build their own price strategies, they can build their own thresholds, their own e everything. And it's all pulled in from their data. What we use AI for is to recommend what they might want to do with these things. So we identify what's slow moving, fast moving, good market price, bad market price, and then kind of make suggestions for them to go out and do the do their own thing. So we we we don't take over the the pricing strategy. We just allow them to build as many pricing strategies as they want and test them and control it on mass. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, okay, no, understood it. I get it. going forward, and again, you might not be able to answer this. What are you most excited about? Your Shopify brands or your Shopify app? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: at the minute I'm heavily into the Shopify app, you know, and I but it wouldn't exist without the Shopify stores. And the main reason I think where where we have a an advantage over anyone else trying to build this is that we have real live data that we test it on. So we we are our beta testers. So John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: every new idea gets run on all of our stores first. We take the hits here when the wins and then we build that and when we we know it works, then it rolls out into the software. So John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: in my mind they they coexist and strategically they will always need to coexist 'cause the minute I step away from running Shopify stores, I don't know what Shopify store owners need. John - Leaders on Shopify: Well, you've got to eat your own dog food sometimes, haven't you? Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: That's it, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's really beneficial having the the whole the whole ecosystem. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, no, I completely see that and completely get that. And I suppose you've got your own retail businesses and you've got your pricing tool helping you set the prices on that. Has Price Master ever recommended something that you're looking at and you got wasn't right, but actually the data was right, but because sometimes it might be counterintuitive. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, mate, lo loads of times. So, you know, essentially what we do is all of our competitors in all of the market data that we pull in, we analyze those and we can figure out who else uses pricing tools because we can see the volatility and we can just make an assumption that if they're making this many changes, they they'd probably have an automation tool. So then we get Price Master to figure out if you're surrounded by people with tools, and then we can then maybe manipulate the market so it's like Okay, don't don't go down on that price because they're gonna follow you. Go up and John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: see if they follow you. So it's it's smarter in the sense of it's trying to avoid the the downward spiral, and it can only do that and by looking at all of this data and making those decisions. But I would never out of my own head know. how you know, out of a competitor who has another thirty thousand products, how often they're moving their prices. We have the we are are it it's impossible. Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, there's just no way you can just... And how much of an influence would stock have? And do you take into account like stock levels, sell through rate and all those sorts of things? Because we see it quite a lot, people are like, this is a bestseller, let's spend more on the ads and this, that and the other. And then suddenly they sell out. And actually we could have probably sold out without pushing the ads and we could have probably held then not. And actually they're like, yeah, big win. We sold loads of stuff, but yeah, well you probably were going to sell those anyway. And you probably Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: You run out. Yeah, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: didn't need to give Google or Facebook all that money. So I don't know how, how, how does stock play in all this? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, well so we externally we look at stock. So if a competitor's out of stock, we don't price to them. So that's an external John - Leaders on Shopify: Yep. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: stock look. Internally in the minute we're running on sort of flags, so we have a rule to say if you're low on stock, then yeah, slow it down, put the price up, change the strategy. But we've just partnered with Limworks actually, which has been a really John - Leaders on Shopify: I like it. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: yeah, really interesting sort of integration and in that integration that means we get more data. So stock is is something that we're going to develop with Limworks to make sure that 'cause at the minute we can see if you've got low or high stock. We can look historically over what stock you have if we're logging it, but not off the bat. But then what we kind of would really like to work to is let's say you've got a container coming in, is that we would have access to stock on its way in in due dates and then current stock in potential run rates. And to then really sort of smooth that transition that always keeps you in stock until the stock comes in. And then if a thousand lands, you probably want to switch to a different. pricing strategy and get those John - Leaders on Shopify: Twice a year. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: sales moving. So the ever-evolving Price Master sort of what we want it to be is that it looks at every data point from stop, cost, you know, internal things, your your your ad spends and everything like that. And John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, I know. Makes sense. Fascinating. Super exciting. And if I'm a merchant listening to this or even another ecom partner I'm thinking, hang on, I've got a client for this. Do they just go into the App Store and type in Price Master and you're there? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, so you can either go straight to Shopify App Store and we're in there, but we also integrate with any e e-commerce platform. So Magento, WooCommerce, Custom platforms, and now LimWorks as well. So if you're a LimWorks customer, we we're we're straight away available as well. John - Leaders on Shopify: I've got some potential people I think I need to introduce you to who I know have significant amount of skews. So I will do that for you. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: And like going back now to your brands, so these brands have been around a while. You said it was sort of over 40 years when you were like actually sort of actually at the sort of trade counter side of things and as a wholesale business. What... What's your sort of e-commerce journey been? Were you straight on to Shopify? Were you playing around with other things beforehand? What's sort of been your journey? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: So I was eBay to start with. So I was selling Jordan trainers and stuff on the side and just doing my own sort of side hustles. And then what's that? Yeah, John - Leaders on Shopify: You're aging yourself there, Reid. You age yourself there. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: yeah, definitely. All the retro ones. There's a retro, but they were cool for me when I was young. And John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Then I was working actually as a designer for my dad's company. but he was he had the plumbing side of the business. And then I saw the tools out in the warehouse and was like, let me get those on eBay and let me have a go. And this is when this is when eBay, this is probably when Amazon was only selling books. Maybe Amazon just started this you know, 18 years ago. And we were successful on eBay, and then I thought, let's build a website. So the my co-founder for Price Master, Ed, who's our lead developer. Actually, I worked with him 18 years ago to develop the first version of TCD, which was a basically Shopify, but it was an old PHP custom custom store that we built. And we were on that for about 10 years. But Ed went his own way and was doing his own things, and we were very reliant on you know trying to do the updates ourselves. So we switched to Magento. So we were on Magento for maybe six years, seven years, something like that. And that was fun. And it helped us get to a it it definitely helped our growth trajectory. but it was a it was a struggle at times to to manage such a big store. through Magento. And then we did Hoover and we did all the the other things. And then we finally, all of our other stores we started on Shopify. So John - Leaders on Shopify: Bye. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: we had all of our smaller niche stores on Shopify and then our monster was on Magento. But finally now we've made that transition and we're fully Shopify on all. We did have an open Shopify John - Leaders on Shopify: And I suppose... Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: as well at one point. John - Leaders on Shopify: If you're a merchant and you're sort of thinking about migrating, because a lot of people get distracted by how easy the front end of Shopify is and think, this is going to be a doddle. But you've been through a migration where you've got thousands of SKUs and loads of different data points and lots of different pricing issues and et cetera, which is obviously why you built your app. But what are the things people maybe forget or forget or don't even know they don't know in a migration? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, I I mean I put off migrations because I just built it up as a massive job and I always found something else to be doing and just suffered along on certain platforms, whether it be our old PHP one or Magento for too long. Instead of just saying, right, bite the bullet, it's not gonna be that bad. Let's just get on and and do it. And we we did it in about four three to four weeks from a hundred John - Leaders on Shopify: Wow. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: and seventy-five thousand products to from Magento to Shopify. We did it under stress because we had a big issue happen. we had a trademark issue where that basically just ex we we disappeared from Google, we couldn't run ads, we were suppressed, and we had a real nightmare, essentially. And at the time we didn't know what the issue was, so we thought it might be a Magento issue. We'd been hacked or something. So we we basically said we're gonna have to rebuild the site on a different domain. We're gonna do it. Let's do it on Shopify. And then we found out that this was a incorrect trademark issue from one of our suppliers to say that we were selling a tr a trade counterfeit product that we weren't, John - Leaders on Shopify: Ugh. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: that that for nearly two months disappeared us from the internet and caused us unbelievable headaches and issues. John - Leaders on Shopify: There's probably a whole separate podcast just in understanding and unpicking that. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: when you sort of switched over in those four weeks, was that all done in house? Did you get support and help from anybody or how did you do that? That's amazing. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: All in house So we kind of luckily used Price Master in a sense, and it's because it's almost a PIM system for us now. And we actually it is a PIM system for the other side of the business, which we do with brands. So all of our data was on there. We have an enrichment program within Price Master for enriching data. We had all of our categories and everything in there. So we actually it was a very good vehicle for us to transfer the data straight into Shopify. And then obviously the Shopify app was already there, that linked in perfectly, so our pricing was done straight away. We had to get some other apps to fill what we were missing from the Magento side. But you know, I I'm not here to promote Shopify, but you know, they the Shopify is way easier, way cleaner. I much prefer the the platform as we are now. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, no, no, and this is the podcast is about people sharing their Shopify experiences. And we tend to have a lot of conversations about poor experiences on Magentra and then moving over and having positive experience. You're not the first person and I'm sure you won't be the last person on the pod to talk about that. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: No. John - Leaders on Shopify: And you mentioned just there you had other apps to fill in different business needs and business requirements. So sort of what are your sort of top five or six apps? And I'm assuming you then have a similar tech stack across all the eight websites. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, I mean a lot of them that are controlling feeds out into Google Merchant Centre and stuff like that. I think it's called Simprosys or something like that. I can't it's this silly name. we have just related product apps, you know, some customer service apps within there as well. Price Master obviously is the the the most important one. That's the key. Yeah, yeah. So John - Leaders on Shopify: That's the key. That's the most important app. Yeah, absolutely. What about like email or reviews or anything like that? What other things are you using? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, e yeah, yeah, all of those. Yeah. So yeah, review apps, some automation apps for and then chat apps. You know, we we c we kind of trail all lots of different ones. We'll try it on one store if it works, then we roll it out to all the other stores. and now we're trying ASK BOSCO® so we're just just gonna start playing with that one Another one within the app ec ecosystem that helps us out. And again, your John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: focus is very much ours, which is waste we don't wanna waste money on ads. We don't wanna waste money anywhere else. We we need to know where our margins are. So it it fits fits nicely into our John - Leaders on Shopify: And I think there's been talking to lots of different merchants on here, which is a real, I really enjoy the conversations. I think, I don't know if we've had it lucky, but for the last sort of 10 plus years, it's been a little bit more predictable. And also, we all thought Google and Facebook used to be expensive, but now it seems and feels that it's really expensive. And actually, the people who aren't on top of their pricing or on top of their ad costs or on top of understanding all the margins and all the moving parts, as you talked about, might not be here in the future because e-commerce is hard. And I think if anything understanding all your costs, whether it be your margin or your price or your advertising cost, is becoming increasingly important. And I think it's also educating the whole business on that. And that's something we see is understanding what are the right metrics we should be measuring and what are the metrics that matter for our business. And it's not all just about revenue. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: No, I mean you can have it and it's very easy just to get into the growth mentality. We need to do twenty million and we only want to get there. But, you know, after doing that for you know, I've been doing it for a long time. When you look at the management accounts and then you you know, look at the profit at the end of it, then you know, you don't there's no point doing twenty million if you're not making enough money. So, you know, it it's John - Leaders on Shopify: You can be busy fools. It's very easy to become a busy fool very quickly. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: is and and I going back to what you were saying about my advertising, you know, it's turned into a big black box now in Google, especially with P Max campaigns and stuff. It's you know, you don't have the level of detail that you used to have. and sometimes it does feel like you just give them money and they just return whatever you ask for to within a John - Leaders on Shopify: Well, I've been a Google partner in many different guises and different businesses and Google's been a big significant part of my life, but I've never sat in a meeting once Reid with Google where they've said spend less money on Google. I have never been to that meeting and Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, yeah. Why would they? No. John - Leaders on Shopify: also which fair play Google's a for-profit business, right? Absolutely. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: But I do think there is an element of and we weren't here to beat up Google, but I do have this view is if you set a target in Pmax for instance, and they're saying this is gonna change and we're now going to AI max, right? So it's gonna be all this new AI max and there's gonna be some new tracking and this and that, but is if you set Google a target to hit, right? And you say, I'm happy to spend this much as long as I get this much back, it will spend that much, right? It's not gonna spend less and get you that, right? It's, I sometimes... Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: I I cool. Yeah, yeah. It might for a day, but then the next day it will overspend just to level it back John - Leaders on Shopify: It might do. Yeah, Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: up. John - Leaders on Shopify: yeah. And I think it's a bit like putting the kid in charge of the sweet shop or you're Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: letting the A level student mark their own homework. Yeah, how many you've got two hours, how many sweets can you go? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, how many sweets do you think he can eat? Yeah. All of Yeah, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: But I do think if you get on top of all your other metrics in your business, you can get a little bit of control over that. And Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: with the sort of Shopify. side of the business. Where are you seeing growth and where are you seeing opportunities? Is it more range and more products or is it more markets or is it better marketing? What are you doing to grow those businesses? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: So for for for us it's optimizing our our ad spend is is g it's a key thing for us at the minute. And wait not too much wastage. And and we are using Price Master to help with that as well. So w we can identify if we're the the cheapest in the market, therefore, you know, we're gonna we've got a very good chance of converting because the price is right. Likewise, if we're tenth in the market and there's a lot of people cheaper than us, don't chuck ad spend at that. Pull it pull it back in and and you know, save your money. So we're John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: trying to get Price Master to to to control some of those things so we don't we we don't waste so much money. for us we are in an area where we're looking for niches more so than we are just everything and everything all at the same time. we're we we we work better and we have more margin when we focus in on these little niches and we do them right. we would we used to do a lot of power tools and that's a very cutthroat game. It takes up a lot of cash flow. rebate based, you have to buy lots, you have to sell lots for it to work. And th th that's a bit a bit of a busy fall game that we we kind of got into. So we're trying to just yeah focus where the margin is and focus on what the what the customer wants and give them that right niche amount of products. So John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. for your business now, and I know you say it's a very competitive in different markets and you're, and I suppose you're watching everybody on price. Are the people and brands you look up to who are on Shopify and go, right, that's pretty cool. They're doing some cool stuff. Yeah. And like, who do you go to and who do you look at for sort of inspiration and direction of like, yeah, that's quite interesting. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: I do it w with just w if I'm shopping myself, so like I'll get in t shirts or whatever, I always you know, I'll look at flows, little pop ups and things that people do and I just c I don't switch off on those sort of things. So no if I see something I like and it's cool, I'll I'll deep dive into it and find a way to do it. There's there's a lot of companies within our industry who are doing a great job. you know, we're quite I'm lucky enough to be friends with a lot of the competitors that we compete against and No, yeah, just look at look at what's going on. I suppose it's just not closing your eyes too much. We don't get too caught up in what everyone else is doing. but yeah, you've you've got to keep an eye on what's happening. Toolden are a great John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: one. Power Tool Mate again have been very successful and do really well. But then you look at the big guys like Screwfix and Tool Station, you know, they've got more data than anyone on on how to run things, but different business models completely, with store a thousand stores around the UK. So yeah, we just you you yeah. Just keep keep an eye out and yeah, I I naturally I'm a bit nerdy and I just wanna know what's going on anyway. So I just keep doing that. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, I know. I love that. And I suppose with that nerdy hat on, Shopify's got, well, I was at the conference last week in Toronto, they've got five and a half thousand developers at Shopify, right? They're releasing new stuff all the time. And I suppose thinking like your merchant hat on now as a retailer, how do you keep up to date with all the changes and how into that are you? because Sidekick's now gonna build this thing for you, or that's gonna happen, or this is gonna happen. And where do you see it moving in the next sort of year, two years time within, for your businesses and the use of Shopify? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Well, I mean, I definitely like I if you look in my TikTok feed or an algorithm, you'd you'd y like my missus looks as it and just thinks it's the worst thing ever. But I I keep up to date with all of the new little like apps and all the things by people on on TikTok in those places. I that's where where I hear about things first. In my mind, one of the biggest things it's going to be interesting is Google have released their sort of AI sh AI shopper agent, which John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: you can kind of choose a product that you're looking at, you can give it a threshold of what price you want to pay, it monitors the internet, and then as soon as a price hits where you're happy, it just triggers a sale there and then. And the agent goes and buys it for you, checks it out, and then it turns up at your door now when at the minute pricing is a it will increase your conversions and it's a very important to your conversion rate, but when it actually triggers a sale 100%, that's when the tools like ours might start having to evolve into you know finding where these thresholds are and triggering sales left, right, and center. So when we're John - Leaders on Shopify: I suppose, yeah, if you knew actually we know if we drop our price by two pounds, I suppose the question here being two sort of bit geeky data guys is how can we see how many agents are tracking our price? All right. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: and how many times have they tracked it over the last week or two weeks, right? And then if we could, you could test it like, right, we'll move it, but down by one pound and see how much sales that triggers. So then you can Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: start seeing what everybody's stress holds are. And then actually you're almost monitoring the agents who are monitoring you. That's super cool. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, yeah. Well, if you if you think Google will have all that back end again black box data where they'll know what the thresholds are. Then we'll have to reverse engineer that by running tests and seeing John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: what triggers and then storing that information ourselves. It's kind of I heard about the the Chinese Kimi Kimi K3 new model that came out and how it was test how it was getting so smart. And basically they were just opening up loads of accounts, asking Claude a million questions, getting the answers, and then training their model on the answers that that. came out so again they're kind of they were just spamming it getting the answers and then reverse engineering and training their own model off the answers to the output that came from Claude which is John - Leaders on Shopify: But you can't, can you possibly ask another LLM enough questions to build your own LLM? Surely that's not gonna work in token usage, that can't work. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Well, I I you'd think s you you'd think it wouldn't, but you know, this this is their explanation for why this one became so smart and you never know. John - Leaders on Shopify: Either they or I don't well we've to be careful or they've found a backdoor way of just sucking it all out I don't know that's you never know and you never know Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Exactly. Yeah. Well, the one thing you can know for sure is that China's very good at at copying, w whether it was TVs or kettles or electronics or whatever, they've always been very good at breaking products apart, remaking them at at a cheaper rate. you know, that's what they've been doing for decades. So they're they're just doing John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: the same thing in AI at the minute, which is interesting. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, it does feel a bit like a sort of arms race at the moment of like, and I'll suddenly be this one, right? I'm all in on Gemini, whatever. then it's today. And right now I'm fully Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: in on Claude, but then somebody only yesterday was like, have you seen the new chat GPT 5.4 or whatever it is? I'm like, I don't want to go and change everything again. All right. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: I yeah, we're we're very flip floppy in the sense that we'll we s a new model will come out, we'll go test it and then we get stuck on that one. But yeah, we're we're very much in the Claude space at the minute. Yeah. John - Leaders on Shopify: Well, I wear a fully in on Claude as well. So look, Reid, I could talk to you all day about these and maybe we need to go to for a pint and talk all about AI and where the future of all this is going. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Sounds good, right? John - Leaders on Shopify: So if people, we've already mentioned it, we'll put it in the show notes, but let's remind people, if people want to test out and try Price Master, where do they go find that? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah. Well you email us directly, go to the website pricemaster.ai or the Shopify app store. reach out to us. We can set up we normally do 14 day trials. We can it's very easy on Shopify. Download the app, we'll we'll set you up for 14 days trial, test it out, run it, and then yeah, see how you like it. So yeah, we're doing that with these many people as well. Yes. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, and it also works on other platforms as well. It's not just Shopify. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Yeah, so we're running yeah, WooCommerce stores, a lot of Magenta ones. So what whatever it is, the that process is easy. Just come to us and we'll we'll get you set up. John - Leaders on Shopify: Cool, and then if people want to get a hold of you or pick your brains, where can they find you? Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: I'm on LinkedIn, yeah, Read Archer. my email address is reid@pricemaster.ai at pricemaster dot AI. yeah, if you yeah, pick my brains, I I like to talk about nerdy stuff, so all good. John - Leaders on Shopify: Yeah, no, great. Well, look, really, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting about your sort of journey. But thanks again for coming on. And yeah, we'll speak to you soon. Reid - Pricemaster - TCD: Excellent. Appreciate it.