Shopify as a Scalable Strategic Commerce Foundation

Speaker A: Welcome everybody to today's session. This is a brand new thing for you and hopefully for a few of our partners as well. This is Master your toolkit from our, uh, X30 series. We're here today to discuss how you build a Shopify centric digital stack. This is going to be a master guide for everything that you need to know. Whether you are considering moving Shopify, whether you've already done it and you're looking to get the most out of what you've already invested in, or whether you're still making open decisions on what the future of your commerce stack is going to look like. We have a hell of a lot to get through for this today. There are six whole sections covering the strategic foundations of Shopify for E commerce, Unified customer data, personalization, automation, multichannel engagement, and how to future proof your tech stack as well. So we have a lot to get through. Thank you very much for joining us and welcome to Master your toolkit from ue. We're here today to discuss how to master your Shopify toolkit in particular. So how to get the most out of your E commerce stack centered around Shopify. I am, um, your host, Rohan Smith and I'm delighted to be joined today by experts from both Shopify themselves and also from Shopify's excellent partner on the marketing automation side, digital as well. So let's do a quick round of introductions to start ourselves off with then. So uh, Yael, if I can come to you first. Thank you very much for joining us.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you for having me. Excited to be here today and talk to you.

Speaker A: Can we just start off with a little bit about who you are and what you do? What brings you here from Shopify today?

Speaker B: Of course. So I'm a partner solutions engineer at Shopify and I'm specifically focused on the EMEA region and um, even more specific on northern Europe. So I work with agencies, partners, tech partners to leverage Shopify as a platform, overseeing all the tech stack architectures and so on. So I'm happy to be here and talk.

Speaker A: Thank you very much. Also alongside you there as well, we have Niels from Dot Digital.

Speaker C: Welcome Niels, thank you very much.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me Today, same question, let's start off with who are you and what do you do?

Speaker C: Yeah, so Niels, I'm a partnership manager at Dot Digital. Have been doing that for the last five years. Before that I was a customer of Dot Digital. So I was on the marketing side. I, uh, was in a role of the digital marketeer, which felt like five years ago that Meant everything that had a little bit of a digital element to it. So yeah, I know how that looks like from that perspective and it's really interesting to see it from this side of the table, uh, where I work closely with partners like Kiwi, uh, and a lot of other agencies in the commerce space.

Speaker A: So I've got to ask the question, which do you prefer being a customer, being on the vendor side there.

Speaker C: Vendor side. I also have to probably add that the previous work experience was in a B2B corporate, which is a very different environment. So yeah, I very much prefer this

Speaker A: and on that yo for yourself. Shopify is a big old entity these days. There's a hell of a lot of people across the world all working on this. So how have you found being part of that Shopify environment? What's it like working there?

Speaker B: I think it's so great to be part of a company that focuses on commerce, which is what I personally really am passionate about. But not only it's like thinking what the customer needs, that is our sole focus and um, what we care about. We start there and start working. The fast pace, the trends, just the innovation around it is so exciting and everything. Every day I feel like I learn something new. I get exposed to a new cool merchant or an interesting tech partner, an interesting product or just like a new team in Shopify that's doing something amazing. So there is so much going on and it's great to be part of it.

Speaker A: Fantastic. That's certainly my experience as well. It's interesting and it's fast paced being on the client side but one business and when you're with a vendor or with an agency, you get to see so many different challenges, so many different kind of dropping in and out of different businesses as you go. So yeah, I think it's certainly more entertaining on this side of the fence. But thank you very much for joining us, both of you. That's it for our intro. We're onto our first uh, section now. And so to get started with, I've been calling them categories, but section one of master your toolkit with Shopify and digital. We're going to start off with Shopify as a scalable strategic commerce foundation. So we're building a new future proof tech stack here. You're either already looking into Shopify as an option for your business or you've already made the leap. Your Shopify licensee, something like that. And you're looking to see how to get the most out of the stack that you've invested in. So as a central point of your E commerce stack and that kind of structural foundation. Let's get really into the detail now of where Shopify's position is in that E commerce landscape. So Yael, if I can come to you first, what do you see as the biggest technical or operational challenges that you're seeing E commerce businesses face with their, uh, legacy platforms today that are driving that move towards Shopify?

Speaker B: I would say there are a few and it can vary between the life cycle of the specific business we're talking about. But as a general note, we're seeing lots of challenges around of total cost of ownership. Legacy platforms usually include very complex tech stacks and updates and needing to code and develop everything from scratch. So businesses are struggling with the costs and uh, basically lacking innovation because they're all the time keeping lights on rather than working on like how can we innovate, how can we grow? So I would say that's the one piece and the other piece is like keeping up with the need of new commerce features. How do we get that fast? How do we consolidate a lot of our systems M and just focus on what grows a business?

Speaker A: Definitely. And niels, from your side as well, are those challenges from a legacy platform base from E Commerce? Do you see that impacting on a marketing automation side as well? Do you start to see the businesses have less to invest in marketing and in marketing growth because they're held back by another E commerce platform?

Speaker C: Yeah, we're obviously on the side of the business or east side of the E commerce space where we are implemented after an E commerce platform. We definitely do notice speed to market and ease of use are things that are becoming more and more important. And we also see that in recent years I think margins have shifted. So with that there is a lot more focus on that growth piece rather than the maintenance of things, which is very much what yield just referred to. So we do see that with customers and yeah, they're becoming more critical as well of their martech stack in that sense. So everything that's happening in E commerce has an effect on the entire ecosystem essentially. So yes, different demands, different requirements from customers for sure.

Speaker A: Perfect. And Yael, if I can come back to that TCO piece, that total cost of ownership. So I would assume that for some people listening or watching along to this today, that has either been a key driver for their business change or it's something that they're really considering. So how do you go about calculating what that genuine TCO value is, finding out what the real cost of a legacy system is for a Business.

Speaker B: So it starts with mapping with the current stack looks like what is it used for and is it optimized or not really understanding the customer requirements? What are they looking to get out? But not only in the current state, but looking for customer experience is a huge thing for E commerce businesses and it's something to take in consideration when looking at the tech stack and the cost of the uh, third state. We start there and then we start mapping out like where what would that look like on Shopify being SaaS platform? What can you generally utilize things from out of the box? Where can you consolidate some systems, eliminate them, make them redundant and really utilize that uh, to be more cost effective but not compromise complexity or what you need.

Speaker A: Nils, I guess from your side then when businesses start to open up those cost areas and they're spending less on staying still or staying on the treadmill, that then gives more budget and more freedom to invest in growth. For marketing.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's obviously what we want to see, right? I think in reality there is a huge struggle around the cost of acquisition. So within the marketing landscape there's more and more emphasis on retention and loyalty because of that reason. So it's a slightly different space to that extent, but very similar to everything that you're seeing in the E Commerce or other, the more ecom platform side of things. And I think very often licensees, they will look at it as a cost. But similar to the question you just asked about total cost of ownership, it's much more about what's the money that you're leaving on the table rather than what does a license cost. And that's something that we can also on our side we can show that very clearly with a couple of easy tools and easy tactics.

Speaker A: Is that opportunity cost, right? Of what could you be doing? What are you currently spending money on that maybe isn't quite giving you the return that it was two, three, four, five years ago as we're still seeing businesses that made digitization transitions or E commerce transitions during the pandemic or prior to uh, well into the 2010s onto growth and what was good for scale and investment then, maybe not the same as it is now. Gael, if I can come back to you on that scaling point because for Shopify you have grown as a business into more enterprise scale clients, more B2B clients. It's not that mum and dad, company, entrepreneur, startup platform anymore still. I'm sure you still have plenty of customers on that side, but there's a wider scope of clients now. So when we're talking about that scalable strategic commerce foundation at the middle of that stack. How does Shopify handle those kind of peak season moments? Your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas period, How do you guys handle that, uh, kind of scale?

Speaker B: Yeah. So firstly we work closely with our customers, but we know we anticipate things like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the Christmas sales and so on. And just generally we understand that each merchant has his own like whether they're planning a flash sale or launching a new product. Our system is very flexible. It knows how to expand based on really smart prediction. When is there going to be a spike in traffic or checkout can handle a lot of checkouts at one time. That is our, uh, pride. We say we have the best checkout in the world. We really do have the best checkout in the world. And I think when looking at today's customers expectations, if your checkout is not quick, it's not reliable, you're going to lose money. So our system is very flexible. It knows how to handle those checkouts per minute. I think it's per Merchant, it's over 40,000 checkouts per minute. And in some cases we know how to extend that when we need to support our merchants. So to your question, this is our bread and butter. This is what we focus on.

Speaker A: And Niels, it must give you a lot more confidence when you're speaking to a customer about this is how you drive growth, this is how you maximize your customer potential at, uh, a peak season when you know that the E Commerce foundation isn't going to fall over.

Speaker C: Yeah, we definitely also see those same peaks, of course, and it's much more about deliverability and then making sure that whenever we drive traffic to a webshop that the workshop sort of stays afloat, it stays alive when we drive all that traffic. So it's approaching the challenge from a different angle, which is much more about delivering the emails into the inbox and then making sure that on the workshop side of things, things are as stable as possible. But, uh, yeah, same problem, different angle.

Speaker A: When you're saying, Gael, that this is the bread and butter for Shopify and this is what the core of the offering is built on when it comes to that highly performant checkout that is the core revenue engine, the thing that makes Shopify so competitive and make sure that you get the maximum value out of that for the clients, how do you go about making sure that is as performant as it is what goes into an element of the stack like that?

Speaker B: So firstly, we have a very opinionated checkout if you compare us to other platforms or uh, where checkout can be totally customizable end to end fire gates, this a little with reasoning that we want to make sure it's performant, it can be resilient. So we have that whole piece in place. Although it is very much extensible. You can customize it, create your own business logic around it. But we're very opinionated with that and I guess that is the reason and we hear that a lot that conception where, oh, you can't customize Shopify checkup. You can, but there's a reason why we keep it so good. I want to mention that we have a whole team that its sole focus is to keep on improving the checkouts, the caching, the saving cards for a certain amount of time so you don't lose them. I, um, think just in our latest edition we improved checkout performance by 50%. So this is something that is ongoing all the time at Tokify.

Speaker A: Fantastic. And I think there's a lot of conversation going on at the moment about that customizability. And certainly in a composable commerce world of businesses deciding whether to build or whether to buy, how are Shopify dealing with that point of expansion in the market at the moment around headless, composable, these kind of architectures.

Speaker B: So we see ourselves as a composable commerce platform. We definitely understand that sometimes you might go all in Shopify because that's what the business needs and it's very straightforward, but not always. And we're always saying like with Shopify you can pick what you need to use and connect anything else that you want. So for that matter, you have the option of going fully headless, using our storefront APIs, enjoying the full suite of the back office and our uh, checkout and having that unique customer experience and headless setup that you want. Whether it's because you've got tech stack that you're obligated to and you still want to use it and you've got the developer know how, that's great. But you also can go fully liquid all in Shopify you really have that optionality and you can pick and choose a lot of things. You can either use our catalogs, order management system where you can connect to somebody else because you have more specific needs. So we're not saying you have to be online Shopify. We totally understand the composable piece here. And that's how we build our platform in different components. So you can simply either take something or replace it with something.

Speaker A: And I think that's a nice point to come back to yourself as well then. Niels, how do you find it is for complexity for your clients to integrate with Shopify? Because the Shopify digital integration's gone on this, it's been here for a long time now. Right.

Speaker C: We were one of the first to integrate with Shopify. And I think the difference with other platforms, for example, is that it's SaaS to SaaS, so it's an API connector and it's super quick to set up. It's a self serve integration as we call it. So it means a marketeer because that's our audience, that's the people we're talking to. They need to be able to set that up without too much technical support from anybody. So there is a lot of things that we've done to the integration to make sure that it is exactly that, like self serve and easy to set up and that it syncs across all of that valuable data that Shopify deals with on a daily basis.

Speaker A: So if we're looking at there'll be a section of our audience there who haven't quite made that leap yet and they're looking at elements of their tech stack and whether building around Shopify is the right thing for them to do, especially if they have existing technology in place like a dot digital or uh, maybe a PIM system or a pricing system from the kind of customers that you work with. Where do you see the risks of those migrations? Where does it tend to go wrong when people try to pick up an existing piece of architecture and move to Shopify at the core?

Speaker B: It's an interesting question. I think whenever you do a migration, it's a good time to take a look at your stack, map it and see what you need to take from where. What is your source of truth for which data? And this is groundwork you need before any migration. So the risk in my opinion is not doing that groundwork and just thinking you can migrate in one piece, not determining what is your source of truth for each part of that puzzle or part of that stack. So that would be the risk in my opinion.

Speaker A: Okay, so to flip it around and to do the happy side of the conversation when people do move to Shopify, what are uh, the ur earliest kind of quick wins or low hanging fruit or what effects do you tend to see first when a business moves onto Shopify?

Speaker B: I think the biggest strength is consolidating the data in one place. Everything is streamlined, all systems are connected and talk to each other seamlessly. It's not patches over patches. So you know that those connections are running smoothly, information is going in and out from where it needs to be. And I think that's the immediate effect that we see. Plus the fact that merchants can all of a sudden handle certain things themselves and are not dependent on a developer or somebody specific who built that system to know how to actually operate it or configure it if they need to make a change, as simple as creating a different discount or anything else.

Speaker A: And I guess that kind of democratization of access to what makes the platform tick and the key element of what makes your E commerce operation performance and drive real revenue for it, that's a hell of a lot easier for businesses to get their heads around on Shopify rather than having to unpick legacy code from 20 years of development on a previous platform. And I guess that the app ecosystem on Shopify has to play a big part in that, right?

Speaker B: Of course. And we understand our merchants have different workflows, different needs, and the app ecosystem is a great place where they can go and find the systems that they need to extend the platform to their specific workflows. And the fact that it's there and it's just a click away makes things so much more simplified. We're seeing the impact of it.

Speaker A: And how do more sort of core elements of the stack like Shopify function, Shopify Flow, how do elements like that really help to allow that customization from the user without affecting the core stability of what's going on with their E commerce?

Speaker B: So we're a product first company, right? So when we develop these types of products, we're thinking about who's going to be using them. Um, so if we take Shopify Flow as an example, it's a tool for creating automated workflows and it works with all the systems not only within Shopify, but externally connected. So we can work with our apps, send information over there. The point is to make it as easy for somebody who's not tech savvy to create their workflow, choose one of the templates already there and have it up running in less than a minute. But you can also customize it with all our APIs and admin APIs and create these really unique workflows that still can go in and talk to all the systems. So everything is API based. So whatever you're creating within the platform is communicating externally as well.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Niels. I guess from your side developments like Shopify Flows, all these kind of workflow processes in E commerce, it must make your clients lives easier from a uh, marketing perspective as well. Right.

Speaker C: 100%. It's like anticipating on anything that happens on the website. Like any action taken by a customer can be met with a response and whether that is piece of communication through digital or something updated in our platform to reflect anything that's happening on the website. That's uh, super important to marketers is we talk a lot about data, we talk a lot about personalization. That's all driven by the data and all of the actions that happen in a lot of cases with merchants on the website. Yeah, it's extremely important to connect the dots and those flow builders definitely make it a lot easier.

Speaker A: Fantastic. And I think we've maybe touched on one major one there from the past. But just before we close out this section, if I can come back to yourself looking ahead for the future, what would you say the key commerce infrastructure challenges do you expect Shopify to be able to solve in the future? What's for the solutions architecture team at the moment? What are people excited about fixing in 2026, 2027 M?

Speaker B: I think in commerce things change rapidly. So what is right for now might change completely in terms of user experience, customer expectations, merchant expectations, economics in six months down the line. I think the key challenge is to be the first ones to be there to set the trend to already think of the solutions in place that we want to give our regions to handle that. Whether it would be integrating with a new social commerce platform that comes up or anticipating how AI is changing customer behavior or merchant, how they need to run their business. But I think to that point AI is a big thing in how we're looking to song or future.

Speaker A: Um, fantastic. That wraps up our first section of Shopify and partners as a scalable strategic commerce foundation. That's your introduction to mastering your toolkit with Shopify. We will be back very shortly with part two where we're going to look into unified customer data. So don't go anywhere.