Latest / Leaders on Shopify with John Readman / When is Shopify the right choice? A dev agency’s honest answer

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When is Shopify the right choice? A dev agency’s honest answer · Leaders on Shopify with John Readman

• John & Brad Leaders on Shopify: So welcome, Brad? for those who don't know you or don't know Remarkable Commerce, can you just give us a bit of who are you? Who are Remarkable Commerce? Yes, of course. so Remarkable Commerce are a dev agency. We're based in Nottingham here. we have just shy of a hundred people in this office. and we do Dev work and have done dev work for the last twenty-seven years. doing loads of weird and wonderful stuff with lots of different technologies. in recent years, spending more time on Shopify, like most agencies But our pre our pedigree and where we came from was building our own stuff. So we have a proprietary ecom platform that's used by about a hundred retailers. we have a warehouse system, we have loads of other sort of technology. But yeah, in recent years we've been leaning into Shopify and doing some really interesting projects. Okay. my role in that and my background. So currently I lead on strategy, I lead on all of our consultancy work. And my background is marketing. So I started off 15 years ago in a marketing agency doing traditional PR and you know, digital marketing, learning my trade of PPC and SEO and you know, all those kind of channels. And then kind of fell into e com about ten years ago. and then went brand side for a little bit. I went and did some client work as a head of e com, which was quite fun. And probably gives you really good context. Like I've sat in your shoes. Yeah. I know you're the questions you're going to ask me and why that's important and yeah, actually what's the problem you're really trying to fix. Yeah. And why are you really wanting to migrate away from where you are. When you put the shoe on the other foot, you learn how to grill an agency or a technology. So it's quite fun actually to do that with some of the agencies that we had in place. That was fun. did that for about a year and then got serenaded back to Remarkable and I've been here for the last seven years. So yeah, I lead all the account managers here. I lead on a lot of our strategy consulting. work with about five or six of our clients on a daily basis almost, just sort of making sure they're doing the right stuff and on the right path. And Remarkable's Pretty remarkable. Thank you. Yeah. I like that. Yeah, see what I did. Yeah. so you do have some really robust pedigree in some really good brands. I think we've chatted before, it's like the niche sort of isn't the start-up guys, it's more the scaling up guys. Yeah. And a lot of what we're talking about on the podcast, we're the we'll get to the Shopify stuff, but I suppose this is your opportunity to talk about the remarkable stuff. so Who's been one of the big sort of success stories? Sure. and what have you done from them? Sort of where did it start? What was engagement and now what you're doing. So who's the one that you really shout about? I'm gonna talk about Roman first and then I'm gonna talk about SGS. Not the ones I always thought you were gonna talk about. Yeah, I was just gonna follow you. Yeah. So Roman are interesting because they Do you wanna explain who Roman are? So yeah, Roman are a ladies ware brand. Yeah. Based over in Birmingham. they were the retailer who back in the day had that dress which was is it white or gold or is it blue and black? And it was that weird, if you remember it, it was like a campaign. It was like, it do which colour do you see? And it blew up in social media and they they were the retailers of this dress. It sold out in minutes and it took their old site down. And they kept having this kind of situation where they couldn't rely on vendor, their old e com platform back in the day. That gives me shivers. It's old school. Yeah. And they came to us and said, we want reliability, we want to be able to scale. We have this ambition of growing to be a much bigger business than we are now. We have we have a good store estate. I think they had about sixty, seventy stores and some concessions. But we want e com to be a bigger percentage of our business. So back then they were turning over about six million turnover online. So not a small business. No. And they were doing they were doing some good stuff. and they had a lot of they had a lot of drive, a lot of ambition to grow quickly. And they we gave them some case studies, we gave them some guarantees as well and said, you know, we believe we can get you to this point by this this this growth trajectory. And then we superseded that by a silly amount. And in the last just over ten years, they've gone from six mil to two hundred and fifty mil. All down to you all down to remarkable. Of course not. No, but our our technology has enabled that type of growth. Because We basically unlocked their sort of ceiling because they had this sort of rigid ceiling on them where they couldn't grow. They were running around in circles, putting out fires. And instead, they wanted technology that would let them grow. So for them, we we launched an e-com platform and a custom front end. And then about a year or so later, we rolled out our warehouse system. They have three, two or three warehouses that all use remarkable technology. In recent years we've integrated with AutoStore, which is a robotics solution to run all their fulfillment in one of their warehouses, which is a master operation. And loads of other sort of interesting internal stuff that we built for them. Mirakl is one of the latest pieces of work we've done. So they've become a marketplace. So they've they've done dropshipping for a long time. Many retailers do drop ship where they put product on onto onto other websites through Miracle. They inverted that and said we want other brands on our site. So I think they've got about 10 or 20 other brands now on the Roman site through through this miracle piece. loyalty is another thing they've launched recently in the last six months. So they're starting to really well they have been always very innovative in how they how they grow and they're doing some really good numbers at the moment. So yeah, Roman are a big one. Now we've got to talk about our joint client. SGS. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're awesome. Yeah, we love SGS. They really push us. great relationship with Neil. He's yeah, true advocate for for you know both of our companies and he's he's yeah, a great guy and he really drives transformation. You know, he's he's the type of person who it doesn't just settle. That's a good way of describing it, yeah. He's d had more there's him and the Stuart Paver, who runs Paver Shoes, are probably the two most influential people on where our products ended up now. Yeah. But I think as you've probably found, listening to your customers and building what they want, they're probably not the only people who've got that problem. And actually you could especially in certain types of retail. Well, if Stuart's got that problem and he's on Shopify how many other people have got that problem? Or if Neil wants that dashboard on a Sunday night and he's the CEO of a an e-commerce business, how many other CEOs of e-commerce business want that dashboard on a Sunday night? So I think I've learned over time Even if our developers are saying no, why would they want that? Yeah. It's like, well, the customer listen to the customer. We spend loads of time now and we schedule it in just asking customers, what would you want it what would you want it to do next? Yeah. Well, what about that? And this. And I and I know you exactly and I know but I I know you do exactly the same. We do. So what's the journey been like with SGS Yeah. incredible, to be fair. They've been with us for the last to say two years now? Two and a bit, isn't it? Probably, yeah. Yeah. they were Magento before us. So they'd run an Adobe store for a long time. It had been heavily, heavily configured. which is part of the benefit of Magento and custom technology like Remarkable, is that you can you know tailor it and really configure it how you want it to be. But it had been it gone beyond the point really and it started to show creaks and started to really fall over often and upgrades were very costly and time consuming. And so Neil walked into that business and and said the technology is just not fit for purpose, essentially. So we went in and did a huge sort of scoping piece, really got under the skin of the business. And at the same time, warehouse is a massive opportunity. So we we led a warehouse initiative and built out a warehouse system. and basically replaced with like yourselves replaced everything within the business in different ways. so they've gone from yeah, their numbers have grown substantially. I think within the first three months the conversion rate jumped by about thirty five percent. massively, yeah. So maybe even more. And then in the last yeah, in the last eighteen months it's just continuously grown. I think I think product diversification is really important. we're just onboarding a new brand right now, a a menswear brand. who are we're having that conversation with them, you know, and we're trying to encourage them alongside when you when you look at our menswear brands. five or ten of them that we have, most of them quite mid-market, they have quite a wide range of product. whether that's casual or whether that's you know a slightly different category mix or whatever it is. And I think I think it's a good strategy to to explore with your customer what works and what doesn't. for Neil and SGS, I think it's been in interesting for them to look up splitting out parts. I think that's part of the strategy. Where a lot when you buy tools, a lot of them are bundled together in a pack and you'll buy, you know, five or six items together. When you split them out and actually allow the customer to buy different configurations of that same product, those items with costs against them, that's that's when you start get really interesting because then you can start to understand what the customer actually wants in different sets, different bundling. so yeah, I think that's that's that's one thing I think they've they've really nailed around the product. they've introduced loads of different sorts of innovations to the site over the last few years, but they also understand their marketing mix. They do. And I think when you look at the performance and how marketing channels have sort of evolved in the last 18 months. I think it's really impressive how they've took a a data led approach. Yeah, I think what's interesting as well, and they've taken a lot of guidance from the other our sister business, but with the assistance of the ability of your blog on the is if someone's researching tool chests, they might go on to chat GPT chat GPT now. ChatGPT and start doing some in some investigation and actually I think the interesting thing now is the volumes are still small, but they're growing significantly month on month. And you must see this across all your other clients. And but the conversion rate's really high. And they're landing directly onto the product page and they're coming really well informed. So but I think what we've seen from the remarkable side of things is the speed of the site has really helped all of that in terms of visibility, indexing, SEO. So we can go on all day about how great remarkable are. However, this is called the leaders on Shopify. And I know, like many agencies, you've at some point had to make the strategic decision of, hang on, we're turning away business here. We could do that business. And actually we might be better having a percentage of something than a hundred percent of nothing. And we've already been through and had on the podcast Liam from Visualsoft who we used to be at Vervaunt and he's like Mr. Shopify. And he's talked through their rationale, their thinking. And it was at one point, and again, this is no secret, the percentage of clients they were losing at one end to move to Shopify, but then also the percentage of new business pitches that they won't even be able to get involved because people didn't want the VS platform. So I suppose you're not doing maybe what they're doing and migrating everybody over. You're absolutely keeping remarkable and it's fit for purpose at big scale for some of the UK's biggest retailers. But when's Shopify right? When do you recommend Shopify? And then we'll get into all the other cool stuff you're building around Shopify. I think it's been a tidal wave, I would say, like the Shopify world in the last five years. You know, and when you look up We know this 'cause you know, we live and breed this world, but when a retailer looks at that landscape, I think what they see now is very different to what they saw five years ago in technology. And Shopify is is is at the forefront of that. and others, you know, in fairness, but I think we we started to recognise that a while ago and we thought, well, the the retailers who are looking for something simple and something quick and quick to market, then Shopify makes a lot of sense. And I think when you're a s when you're a scale up business and you're doing maybe, you know, a few hundred grand a year or probably up to a mil or two, then it makes a lot of sense. A lot of sense. so for some brands Shopify so speed to market, ease of collection and I suppose ease of maintenance for them and all you and then the Shopify app world Which is the world that we live in, but I know you're sort of skirting around the edges of. What's the big thing that you've just done for a big retailer with Shopify that's just hit the news? Yeah, we just launched, which is really exciting. We've launched the very first UK retailer with Shopi, which is Shopify's native checkout. On a non-Shopify checkout storefront. So they are a Yours clothing are a remarkable retailer, been with us for many years, have grown astronomically over that time. They have five or six different brands, they have about 30 odd storefronts. we run all their warehouse, we run their full technology stack. And There was an opportunity where Shopify was saying we're gonna componentize elements of the Shopify world. This was about two years ago, I think, when they started to release Shopify components. I think it was in their Editions 24 I think it was. I know all the words. I know all the keywords. And we looked at that and thought that's quite interesting. Maybe this could be an avenue to explore. So yeah, we talked to several clients and they said, you know, we're taking note of Shopify's sort of you know voice and megaphone in the in that landscape. And To understand the power of that, perhaps we should have a look at installing the shop checkout into your site, which we did. So there was, we looked around, there were about two or three retailers in the US, like big retailers, doing it in the US, which were on like other custom-built storefronts, and they had Shop Pay So we reached out to Shopify and said, We're interested in doing this. And they were like, you're you would be the first. No one else has talked to us about this. So we thought that's quite interesting. Is there a reason why no one else has no done this yet? Yeah. Is the is it just brand new? Is it what's the kind of what's the so we decided to talk to them? Well or I suppose are some legacy platforms. 'Cause I think a lot of there's a there is still a world of people like the shoplines and the Big Commerce's of the world and everybody else out there who still think, right, we've got a shot at the title. Well it's not many of those anymore. But Yeah, yeah, but you know what I mean. They they're still and then there's other people like you who've got a specific perfect client Then you've got everybody else. But actually if you can piggyback off all their experience to improve the customer experience for your customers' customers. Yeah. Improve conversion. And it's a bit like if we r rewind and Amazon's UX is terrible. Right? But we've all got used to it. We all know where the buttons are. And the reason we keep shopping on Amazon, I don't even know if it's cheaper anymore. No. But half the time is got all my data in and I know it's gonna turn up tomorrow. And almost by adding the shop pay into an existing retailer, you almost get that Amazon-esque, well, ShopPay knows who I am, knows where I live, it's got my credit card details, boom. Yeah. And that's that's that's the concept. Yeah, that's it. I think people, consumers, are they like familiarity and they like to know, okay, that's going to be easy. And I think that's why when you actually zoom out of e-com, when you look at an e-commer store today. And look at it five, ten years ago, especially Amazon actually, not that much has changed. Like your filters are still down the left, your buy button's still on the right. You know, the overall UX hasn't really changed. There are some outliers. And it it's a bit like you could say the same, 'cause I was I do I I look at a lot of this stuff. I get obsessed about UX, whether it's like online or whether it's in the physical space. And I used to do a lot of work with supermarkets, and the reason booze is at the back left normally is because you wanna walk past everything else and everybody's going in for one bottle. Right. And the fresh fruits in the middle and and this is and there is and we've all just got sort of used to that. Yeah. And then when they move something, it's a nightmare. And it's the same I think. We've almost got used to a lot of UX. Well, I know where the search bar should be. I know the burger menus on the top right. And And I was discussing luxury design with someone the other day and then sometimes luxury designers start messing with all of this and conversion rate drops because we just where where's my search box? Yeah. Yeah yeah. And where's my burger menu? Yeah, yeah, this familiarity thing. O on the flip of that also, I think there's still an element of people enjoying sort of the gimmick of innovation. And I think and I think retailers sometimes get sidetracked by that. I think that's something that I've noticed. retailers perhaps spending time on or rather wasting time on is trying to be a little bit too innovative and especially in the last six to twelve months with AI Giving you the the ability to be a bit more gimmicky and launch stuff on your storefront that might be a little bit more, you know, interactive perhaps to the customer, but is that actually improving conversion rate? You know, first and foremost. Is it a hypothetical question that I don't know the answer? I've got no data behind this. This is just me sort of looking into a crystal ball. At some point over time, if you think about the number of customer Details that Shopify have got in Shop Pay Yeah. It'll be millions, if not billions, globally. Is there going to get to a world where I land on a Shopify site, or maybe a site with Shop Pay on, right? So it doesn't have to be Shopify. There'll be some coding and go, it's Shopify data enabled. Yeah. And it knows who I am the second I land, and then it personalizes everything based on John Readman or on Brad. And then Is that as a user is probably a better experience potentially? Because everybody's looking for this hyper personalization. And I'm like sitting in the back of my mind, well, arguably. And I don't know if there's a data reason why they wouldn't do this. But if that you look at the Shopify, so you've got 10 Shopify sites, and I might be on 10 databases. Yep. But Arguably somewhere in some server somewhere, somebody knows that I'm on all of them. And could go if I then went to a new I could potentially go to a new one that's on Shopify and it could just pop up going, connect shop shop pay. Yeah. And then it just personalises all my experience. And I'm if you're listening, Shopify, you can have that. I I don't think there might be a data privacy issue, there might be loads of other issues, but I just think the w the world we I live in is a tracking and measurement world. One of the biggest issues are people opting out of cookies. Right. So we've got loads of gaps in the data and we've got to work out how to how to actually accurately measure everything. Facebook's claiming one thing, Google's claiming another thing, the answer's a different one in the till, finance are obsessed with what's in the till, marketing are picking whatever number makes them look good. And we've all got this problem. And I'm wondering, are we gonna move to almost the first thing you do on a website is log in. And actually with the speed at what you can do with like either an OAuth or a facial recognition or a thumb. And then there's no tracking issues because you're logged in. I don't know. What's your view as a an e-commerce professional on that? Or am I barking mad? I'm I can see technology wise, there is absolutely no challenge with doing any of that. Like that is almost that is very achievable. Is that a business we should set up? I'm gonna say no, and I'm gonna say no because I don't believe and I'm gonna back this up. I don't believe the consumer wants that. I feel, and I have a gripe with personalization. Because I don't just always end up in the same old jumper and the same old pair of jeans. There's a bit of that. And there's also a bit of the consumer pushing back against that. I I feel that when as retailers or as agencies or technologies, we believe that we understand what the consumer wants and we should therefore personalize that to be exactly what they want. And perhaps it's different per. Women's web versus men's web. It's probably different per category. But I think the the broad stroke is that perhaps personalization isn't all that. That's my gripe. And I feel like So the it's interesting. So I was listening to some TED talk or something in the car. Like you and I, like you, drive around a lot, see clients listening to thing about is AI actually making us all more stupid? And I thought And it was like 'cause you no longer have to think to make choices because we've almost got too much personalization. You're getting personalized feeds on your Facebook, you're getting personalized feeds on your news, you're getting personalized ad based on what everything else you bought. I'm I'm partly responsible for this. Yeah, yeah. so something I've started doing is and even when you get your digital newspaper. They personalise the content based on what you normally read. Yeah. So I've gone to start buying the Sunday Times or the Sunday Telegraph or Sunday paper. Physically. Physically. Yeah. To read stuff that nobody's personalised to me that could be interesting editorial content. There you go. Because I can broaden my mind. Because otherwise I'll just become so narrow on Shopify or Google content and I won't say anything else. Yeah, yeah. But it is interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Is per over personalization going to make us a bit stupid? I think so. And also there's a there's a filtering thing there, like It really got to me when I saw that the you know the board the the football boards that were do you see that where they were like personalising them for different segments of people. Yeah. based on where you were or whatever. and it got me deeply and I was like I was I was thinking, I don't like that. I don't like that at all. I don't like that I'm only b only seeing what I'm being told to see. And there's there's something there's that sort of rebellious piece in me pushing back, going, So yeah, I I and I also think from a personalization point of view that it's really tricky to prove ROI. And I think that's where most personalization engines have always had to pivot to have different types of features and functions. Because like core content personalization systems really s have always really struggled. Well and I guess this is more of a tracking thing that we'll come on to. But I think they've always struggled to prove value and ROI because It's not quite there. Yeah. And I and I think part of that is the consumer pushing back against it and not not overly liking it. And we see a lot in certain again, different measurements and different demographics of people just opting out of because and also everybody well it was quite interesting, everybody said that the cookie banner was gonna be the end of the internet. Right? If you're the nobody's gonna buy anything, it's gonna be well that didn't happen. But if we go back to the yours clothing, the shop pay. How long has it been live? Yeah. so I think we so it's installed on the checkout on the on the UK site. it's on the basket, and then it's on the checkout as a payment option. there's an extra, there's a phase two to it that we're just putting in place at the moment, which is that whole email awareness thing that you talked about. So when you land on the site, basically shop pay initiating and saying, I understand that you are who you are. And then and then it then does some other little bit little bits. And that improves generally because the button changes and a few other things. so we'll get that live and then if the functionality then appear so does the order then appear in my shop app. Yep. And then it just sends me all that on that so that customer s service stuff that I'm used to. your parcels that yeah so there's like there's there's two or three really big Reasons why this is good. So I think the first one is you have to upload your catalogue into the Shopify ecosystem. That then unlocks you being on the Shop app, like the catalogue, unlocks you having all the shipping information through the Shop app if you have that, which is really strong. I think giving customers the choice of payment options, I think is a really strong thing. Like Yours Clothing they've always been pioneers in terms of payment options. I think they've pulled back in recent times. At one point there was six or seven. There was a whole concertina of like choice. But they were one of yeah, they were one of those retailers and there was a few that sort of known that were really big into that and they were one of them. But giving choice I think is is important. And I think I think sometimes you give two people too much choice and they get confused. Yeah, there's that is that psychological paralysis by analysis. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. so yeah, that's that's really good. The other thing obviously is when when you push Shopify when you put your catalogue against Shopify, Part of their ecosystem is around connecting that with ChatGPT and all the other LLMs because there's a native connection there between UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And ACP and the all the other ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's there's sort of three or four protocols that are sort of leading the charge and yeah, UCP is one of them. So when you do that, it then pre-formats basically into the UCP framework and then it connects it in. That said, whilst doing that, we've discovered a few things. We discovered that that UCP layer, the native one out of Shopify, is only basic. Yeah. There's quite a lot of missing fields in there. So basically out of the box, it's a it's a good connection. And Shopify are obviously talking about that as a good reason. But there's an extra layer to it. There's an extra sort of next phase, there's next step of optimizations you can do to basically better enrich that. And so that making sure that your product actually goes into LLMs and it goes into chat answers. So that's been good insight for us as well, to be fair. Yeah, yeah. And well it was great to see the joint case study with Shopify. And yeah, that is unusual. Yeah, yeah. That is they are that is and it's also interesting for them to be allowing their technology now into so are they a payments business or are they an e-commerce business and 'cause there were I know they had record numbers recently and then you had all the the the naysayers going, well actually if you analyse the revenue, most of that's payments and this, that and the other. But that's just their business model. Why? Yeah. Yeah, that I mean they've yeah, we've we've we've strong this we've we've formed this strong partnership with them. and we've done that through being very transparent with them. You know, we have, you know, many retailers who are absolutely happy with with the technology as they are. They've also recognised, I guess, the technical sort of complexities of doing components. Through talking to a few people, agencies have looked at doing components and shied away from it just from the levels of sort of complex development complexity that go into doing that type project. So I think Shopify have recognised that in us and said, actually, you know, this looks this looks good and this looks like worth shouting about. So they were they did a press release about it and we've sort of yeah got some really sort of nice PR around So that's been good. And And if we sort of focus in a bit on some of the brands that you've built on Shopify, yeah. Who's the one that you're like, yeah, I'm really proud of that one? Or that one's doing really well because Who are those? And then we'll sort of get into what the tech stack looks like around that. Yeah. So we've got about not not low, it was about ten or so merchants on Shopify at the moment. and the reason that we've got those is because they've all come to us either through like a referral or through someone we know, or they've kind of come to us said, We have this challenge. And well, we've had challenges. can you help us basically? Can you come and fire fight and sort this mess out? And are they already on Shopify or they're in something and they want to move and all of them were already on Shopify. Right. So picking up a a Shopify basket case. Yeah. And is that normally front-end, backend, or does it depend? Bit of both, bit of both. Yeah, we've got we've done a few back-end only situations. So we've done a few projects which are like custom integrations between Shopify and John Lewis, for example, where there's an existing Patchworks connector or something in place, which hasn't been quite working out. They need it to, and they've needed something custom. So we've come in and replaced that. or that type of sand of one-off development project from a back end point of view, we've done a few of those. probably about half of them are them and the other half are just front-end. So One that comes to mind I think is Fothergill's who are a seeds. Seeds. Yeah. So they are are in B&Q and and they've got an interesting model where majority of their business is offline through through. Yeah, you garden shops and things. and e-com is a is a relatively small part of the business, but it's growing substantially and they're putting a lot of money into it. So we worked we've been working with them for about two years now. we took them from a place of loads of bugs, loads of poor code, a really unhealthy site generally, with loads of sort of costs going out that didn't need to go out. So we replaced a lot of apps with third par with our own custom apps that have a low cost, basically rebuilt all their front end. So they have f three brands, and they have a UK, US, Australia, a few other territories. So a fairly complex kind of situation. but they had ambition and they had, you know, they wanted to grow. So we've worked with them really well. we rebuilt the product page. Complete from scratch, essentially. that drove a huge increase in conversion. I can't remember the percentage, but yeah, huge increase. we did PLPs, redone navigation. and you're sort of famous for building stuff. At what point or how did you decide in the tech stack and go because in the past companies like Remarkable and other I suppose dev agencies, as they would have been called in the olden days, will go, Right, let's build something. Yeah. Shopify is famous for this ecosystem of apps. Yeah. At what point do you sort of go, hmm, there might be a app for that? Do we partner with an app or do we build? How d how do you do that? Because where you've got a team of people who can just build anything. Yeah. It's interesting because There's so many apps on the marketplace. Like too many. Tens of thousands. Yeah, well, fair play. Yeah, there are. Yeah. and it's getting more and more because people just spinning up copycat apps using AI, sat in the back bedroom with Claude code Ten dollars cheaper. Yeah. And there's no customer success. There's no humans. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Agree. So I think there's always going to be a place for apps and plugins on any technology. I think there's always a place for that. One size fit all apps are fine until there are requirements beyond that. And I think there's always gonna be those. Yeah. Like always, always. So working with Fothergills we were looking at bundling and looking at promotions. the the native stuff in Shopify is okay. You know, you can build, you know, probably seventy percent of the promotions that you want to be able to do. But there are things you can't do where you probably want to put an app on. But then also there are apps that only do one or two things. So it's trying to work out where the overlap is and where you don't need something or do need something. Yeah. I don't think a retailer should ever have to be in a situation where they compromise trading or compromise their performance because of technology. Yeah. Like that is our fundamental belief that that technology should never, you know, inhibit that great. And I suppose, and I might be I might have completely misread this, but I'm looking at your business, looking at your skill set, looking at the world. You're gonna build some super cool apps for your customers. There's surely a not an opportunity here for you to just let and monetize those for other people to buy. Yeah. You're you're already doing that already. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So there's And what are the big apps? So people listening to this who want a super cool, remarkable commerce app, what what are the super cool, remarkable commerce apps and what do they do and how can they find them? So merch merch is one thing. We've always been really strong at merchandising and retailing. and probably about eight or nine years ago we built our a sort of a foundation level of a of a merchandising capability. we call that something else, we productized it and then we rolled it into back into the platform. And then in recent times, again, we've sort of added in AI levels into that and then started to plug it into other systems like Shopify. One of the reasons that you'd use our merchandising suite solution is that it's an API integration instead of a JavaScript integration. That means that sometimes when you come to a collection page on a Shopify site, There's a sort of flicker there. Or there's a loading. And that basically means that the JavaScript is loading the product in on the on the front on top of the platform. The way around that is to influence the product ordering on the s on the underneath in actual in admin. So you can do that through Shopify's APIs. So when you're in a collection, you can change the ordering of product by best-selling or price high to low, or you know, you can manually pin. We can also influence that ordering through the API, which is what we do. So you log into Remarkable, you build out a merchandising rule in Remarkable. So that might be let's use 10 different metrics like stock, obviously, and availability, margin, and also some performance data like click-through rate and add-to-bag rate, and all of your sales metrics. And also mix a bit of product data in there, so maybe season and colour and five or ten other metrics. blend those all together into an algorithm and then use that to basically rank a product by. So you've got a mixture of you know your seasoned stuff, your behavioral insight, but also still manual control because the retailer's still able to control it. Do all that merchandising in Remarkable. We feed that into the Shopify API and then that influences the collection ordering of the product. That's and that's native, so you don't have to have some JavaScript front end that's doing loads of wizardry on the front end and causing that sort of flickering slowdown. Also by not loading JavaScript and speeding up the site. SEO managers again, I love that. Yeah. There's always a battle between dev and SEO about JavaScript. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had this conversation only this morning with someone about that. Yeah. So and where could people find that if they want to have a play with that? Yeah, it's gives a gives a shout. Yeah. we've got a sort of private app that we can deploy. We'll have my link to really super quick. and Would you ever launch it in the app store and put some stuff some oomph behind it? Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I'd say no. Yeah. So yeah, merchandise is cool. Search is another piece. I I think it depends on the sector. Like in your world, tr you know, tracking and measurement and analytics and understanding all of that. I I I think that people probably look for that more. In the App Store. I think they're looking for. Interesting question for you, and I'm testing people on this now. There is no right or wrong answer. So you won't be judged. But where do you think we're either in a relationship like who no no who right should own the tracking of the website? Is it the dev agency, is it the performance agency, or is it the client? Who owns the tracking? That's a good question. It's client. Right, that I agree, right? Because ultimately they've got to be in charge of counting their own money. Yeah. And they've got to trust the measurement, the number. Yeah. How they get to that is a separate thing. I have this conversation with clients all the time is who in your business owns the tracking? well, it's marketing. You go speak to marketing, they go, it's e com. You go speak to e com and they it's the agency. Right, so the answer is nobody. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? The number of people who were onboard onto our platform, and then we go in and we look at the numbers, and we go, eight percent of your traffic's not set. And it's like, yeah, but we don't use that, we use this. But I'm like, that's sending signals to this. Right, and this and the one thing you may or may not be aware that got rolled out yesterday by Shopify was the rule currently. You can opt out of the duties if you're doing international shipping. Right? Anyway, they've flipped that now, and Shopify just said, no, in these countries where we've got the ability to do this, it's just opted in, the retailer will take the money and sort it all out for you. Right? So that actually in the end might make the consumer's journey better because they've got no worried about the parcel not turning up. But the interesting thing, we was we were sat being data geeks, nerding out in the office about what's the implication of this gonna be. So first of all, conversion rate might go down because now it looks more expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah. Right. So that's one thing. Yeah. So then people are gonna think, conversion rate's gone down and then they're gonna start looking and the but they won't necessarily be pulling in the additional margins and the additional delivery costs and things, and it'll probably settle down over time once people understand. And then they'll go and start adjusting all their media. But off the wrong numbers. Yeah. And this sort of brings us back to this tracking thing. Yeah. I think the I almost wanna start this manifesto for tracking. And I think where the interesting thing could come in is normally why do people want a new website? They want to sell more stuff. Right? Well, how do you know if you sold more stuff? Well, you've got to get your tracking right. So I almost think we all need to take a collective responsibility to almost name and set it up from the start. And then what we see happening is somebody makes a change here. And because there isn't any QA or process of like, have we checked the tracking still firing? We've had clients who've been spending money over here. Not tracking, not tracking sales or anything. And the tracking got knacked out two weeks ago and nobody noticed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you mean, no noticed? yeah, well we thought that. channel was down and it and it happens all the time. So that and it's it's it's become more common than normal. So it's just an interesting observation. And I agree with you. Somebody the client should own it. Yeah. But I think we as an industry need to take a collective pressure on going right which department and I actually don't think it should be marketing. No. I I think it probably should be somebody in ecom or who really understands trading who really understands it. Yeah. and understands the implication. Well if we are changing something on the site, where's that checklist? Yeah. And have we checked? And is someone gonna test transaction and is it still firing? Is it Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I also think maybe it's a alerting thing. Because it's so easy now to get alerts of what's happening, what's going on. Should there be some type of alert that says there's been a percentage drop on this channel? Go look at your tracking. Because I think We've all got too much data. And I don't think anybody wants more dashboards. No. What you wanted to know, the insight at the point it happens and and almost what do I do next? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we're gonna get to a world Can we have a one-click fix? Well, or does it just say you could put some tolerances in? If it's like this, just fix it. Just fix it for me. Or You can operate in these tolerances and these margins without my permission. If you go outside, I yeah, I want a one click approval. And I think we're not a million miles away from that. No. Well I mean Claude's already there. Yeah, well yeah, it's like well would but I suppose the question is is would your clients trust an AI to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on Google? it's an interesting question. It's that and but we're gonna end it. I think I was saying two years last year, I'm thinking it's three to six months. We've already got a prototype of like what we could do. And I d I'm looking for a client to go, yeah, I trust the AI more than I trust the team. It's like it's like we've both got electric cars and it's like the first time you use self driving, it's a bit scary. But actually you get used to it and it's arguably safer than we are. Yeah. All the science would say it knows it knows to stop quicker than we do. And so there's a responsibility on the client, but probably on the technology as well, like doing this setup, doing a new tracking setup in Tag Manager for a new client and using some AI tools to generate, obviously using some of the templates in Tag Manager. to basically create a new environment with all those setup and all those ready to go and then go and self test it as well. So I'm just conscious of time. We this has flown by. So if people want to get in touch with you, who's the perfect client and how do they find you? If a retailer is stuck on a Magento or a similar aging technology and they're doing three or four mil, then I think it's probably worth a conversation. we've got hundreds of case studies of how we've transformed businesses. So retailers in that world, give me a LinkedIn or give me a an email. we'll share your details in the show notes. Cool. And then Shopify brands who have got challenges with stuff that supposedly can't be fixed, or maybe data that's not connecting together, or retailing challenges, or something that is just a little bit more weird and wonderful, then we're probably the people for you. So yeah, give me a shout. Brilliant. Well, thank you very much. Nice one. Good to see you. Yeah, thanks for coming in. Thanks very much. Cheers John.