The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
NEW EPISODES EVERY TUESDAY, SUBSCRIBE FOR UNBEATABLE ECOM RECON – Every Tuesday since 2014, host Kurt Elster shares the Shopify success stories that nobody tells you about, straight from the entrepreneurs living it. Subscribe for a raw look at what it really takes to succeed on Shopify.
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Agentic Storefronts: You're Already on ChatGPT
<p>"Being on Shopify means you get access to agentic automatically, out of the box."</p> <p>Your store is already selling inside ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Shop, whether you've noticed or not. Aaron Glazer, Director of Product at Shopify, joins Kurt to explain Agentic Storefronts, the new Admin experience that finally makes that presence visible and controllable.</p> <p>The buyer behavior has already shifted. Shoppers now have long conversations with an AI about a whole use case, a camping trip, a problem, a gift, and arrive at your store already sold. Agentic Storefronts shows you the traffic, sales...
How Shopify POS Got a Minute Faster Per Sale
<p>"I hear store associates asking people in person for their email all the time, and it always is a little bit awkward."</p> <p>Helen Mou runs product for retail at Shopify, and she just helped rebuild the thing every store runs on. This spring edition is the fastest POS Shopify has shipped. The rebuilt core selling flow saves over a minute on complex transactions, the kind with multiple items, stacked discounts, split shipping, and a customer attached for loyalty.</p> <p>Helen breaks down what actually changed on a busy floor: automatic email capture through the Shop network's 200...
Shop: The Sales Channel You Shouldn't Ignore
<p>Also on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bgrJVYiDQKc</p> <p>"If I don't see that purple button at checkout, bye-bye." That's what Shop's buyers tell Kenny Cohen, and it's a clue to why Shop has quietly become one of the most valuable channels a Shopify merchant has.</p> <p>Kenny runs product for Shop, and in this spring edition he walks Kurt through three updates. Agentic Shop Search now understands a buyer's taste from their real purchase history, not generic web guesses. Posts let you auto cross-post your Instagram reels into a feed where people actually came to shop. And...
Inside Shopify's "Everywhere" Edition | Spring 2026
<p>VP of Product Vanessa Lee joins Kurt to break down the 2026 "Everywhere" edition and the years of quiet groundwork behind it: taxonomy, attributes, clustering, and a universal product identifier that now power a search catalog of billions of products. The payoff for merchants is strange and good. You're already enrolled in agentic commerce by default. One real store is doing $60K a month through it.</p> <p>Inside this episode: why the catalog plus UCP makes every Shopify store callable by any AI app, how to use Agentic Storefronts to see exactly where you rank and what data to...
How We Built MKC's Montana Landing Page
<p>Also on YouTube</p> <p>Montana Knife Company was finally releasing its first folding knife, a $390 piece their fans had been begging for, and they wanted an announcement page worthy of the moment. Apple-style scroll animations. Exploding diagrams. Every element on screen doing something. The catch: you couldn't buy anything from it. The entire page existed to introduce the new product, build the hype, and capture emails before the drop. Then it had to survive launch day.</p> <p>Paul Reda walks through the build that crashed Safari before it sold out in minutes: why video was the obvious...
Top 1% of Shopify. 8 Figures. Profit in Year 6.
<p>Also available on YouTube</p> <p>"It was a mind and body brokenness. I'll just say like depression."</p> <p>By 39, Chris Lang was running 10 businesses and falling apart. He killed most of them and bet everything on Fresh Chile, his bootstrapped Shopify chili brand from Hatch, New Mexico. It cracked the top 1% of Shopify and 8 figures in revenue, but didn't turn a profit until Q1 of year six.</p> <p>Inside: why he started publishing his real ROAS on LinkedIn when the numbers were ugly, the 80% Meta cut that finally flipped him profitable, and how a 250K-follower organic...
He Reviewed 500 Deals Before Buying One Shopify App
<p>"You would probably prefer to take money from Tony Soprano."</p> <p>Jeremy Horowitz has spent a decade in the Shopify ecosystem, scaled brands at Gorgias, and now runs a PE fund that's reviewed nearly 500 deals. He acquired a WhatsApp marketing app called Coco AI and he's still hunting for his next Shopify brand in the $10-100M range. We get into what actually makes a business sellable (and what kills a deal instantly), how earnouts and seller notes really work, why DTC as we knew it is dead, and his scorching take on why Shopify Capital loans are...
The 3 Red Flags That Mean It's Fraud
<p>"I shipped the bike and a couple of weeks later, the real credit card holder got a statement, said I didn't place that order, filed a chargeback, and then the money was gone."</p> <p>Also on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6k4iyfvjuTA</p> <p>John Murphy's first-ever Shopify sale was a total scam. Two weeks into launching, he wired a $5,000 e-bike to a guy putting on an old man's voice over the phone. That single chargeback kicked off an eight-year obsession with not getting burned again. He grew eBike Generation into a $3M store and pieced together a...
Print on Demand's Real Playbook w/ David Hooker
<p>"70% of stuff never goes sold. So you have to be prepared to interact with that level of rejection."</p> <p>David Hooker is the brand director for both Printify and Printful, which merged in late 2024 to form FYUL. He's got access to the data behind millions of print on demand sellers, and what he's learned is both humbling and useful. The top 1% aren't more talented. They're more consistent. We get into AI-generated mockups that actually look real, why email marketing is still a "print money button," and how community-driven niche selling beats paid ads for customer acquisition in 2025.</p> <...
Ecom Vibe Check: What's Working in 2026
<p>"If your product sucks, you're never going to succeed. A lot of people are trying to solve product problems with marketing spend."</p> <p>Chase Clymer runs Electric Eye, a Shopify agency deep in CRO, redesigns, and migrations. He also hits about one industry event a month, which means he's got a real read on how merchants and partners actually feel right now. Not the Twitter version. The hallway version.</p> <p>We got into the real state of ecom in 2026: Facebook CPMs nearly doubling since the pandemic, why most brands under $5M shouldn't be split testing at all...
