Ep 5. – Shopify – E-Commerce’s New Frontier, with Cole Atkinson.

Transcript

Intro
Welcome to another episode of The Elusive Consumer. Today, Ellie is speaking with Cole Atkinson, Senior Product Manager at Shopify. Join us as Cole delves into the fascinating world of consumer behavior, sharing insights on understanding diverse customer perspectives, translating these insights into effective marketing strategies, and glimpsing into the future of e-commerce with AI and augmented reality.

Ellie:
We’re really excited to have you with us today and hear more about your personal and professional journey and your role at Shopify. I want to start off with your personal journey. Being a fellow expat, I always find it interesting to hear about people who moved from their original country into a new market and how that has shaped them as professionals. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Cole: 

You know, so I’m from New Zealand originally, and it’s almost, for a lot of people in New Zealand, it’s somewhat of a rite of passage to live overseas at some point. New Zealand is such a wonderful, beautiful country, but it’s also very small. And, so, my motivation for moving overseas here to Canada was that I was very fond of North America. I’ve spent a lot of time in the US. I’m a former representative water skier, so I often went to the US. For New Zealand’s winters and train there. So I grew very fond of it, but also my sort of professional motivation led me to Canada to expand my horizons into technology, which is how I arrived. Part of the reason why I arrived at, you know, Canada is fantastic. There are many similarities culturally between New Zealand and, you know, obviously, Canada itself is a lot bigger.

Cole: 

Our proximity to the US in terms of my career and professionally what I’m able to do. I’m just afforded so many professional opportunities that would be very difficult or may not even exist in New Zealand. And that’s what’s led me to stay here. I came here on just a work visa initially and turned into a permanent resident, so, yeah, Canada is fantastic. And I look back, New Zealand will always be home, but it’s kind of like I’ve almost lived, in some ways, two lifetimes. It’s so different. And I look back, it’s almost like starting over when I moved to Canada. And, yeah, can’t speak highly enough about the country and the people, and really enjoying my time here. And I know we’ll talk about a little bit, but Shopify as well, right?

Ellie:
Speaking of Shopify, you transitioned into that role from your original role in sales. Talk to us about that and how you then went from a user of the platform to now building the product yourself.

Cole:
Yeah, for sure. I always struggle with this question a little bit. I’m not sure how far is too far back to go, but basically, I fumbled my way through university. I took a lot of time off through university and didn’t really want to study. And after taking time off and, like I mentioned, traveling to the US. And doing a lot of training over there, I came back, and I think I had 18 months left on my degree, and I was just like, let’s just get this done. But because I had been, I guess you could say, lazy and just wanted to have fun, all of my friends had already graduated and were in the workforce, and I was still a poor student. So, I negotiated a deal with a local software vendor to do sales for them, and they were very good. I think I found a bit of a cheat code with the university, and I probably only attended about 20% of my lectures.

It was all recorded. So, I worked during the day, and then I watched lectures in the evening that were recorded to finish my degree. And that’s sort of how I fell into sales, I guess. My initial sales job was going around to retailers in New Zealand, actually selling them boxes of compact disks of Internet security software for a company called Symantec. And then that was a highly rewarding job, a great start to my career. But I think my first year in that job, I took close to 100 flights around New Zealand because I was traveling and seeing customers all the time, which was extremely tiring. And I thought, is this something I see myself doing long term? And ultimately, the answer to that was no. And I had a very good friend who was actually the best man at my wedding, who had and still has his own business selling interior automotive accessories online.

So you think about like a weather tech or car seat covers, car mats, all these things. He had a very niche business, and he gave me the opportunity to work alongside him. And that’s how I got into e-commerce. He had a pretty strong wholesale business, but Direct-to-Consumer was sort of an afterthought. So, it was just the two of us. And as probably a lot of your listeners know, when there are two of you in the business, you wear so many different hats. So, there was sales, there was operations, there was customer support, all of these things. But I grew really fond of Direct-to-Consumer and e-commerce and stumbled across Shopify from a Facebook ad, and, yeah, really got to know the platform during my time. And I sort of arrived at a similar point where I was really enjoying my time there.

I was very grateful to my good friend for the opportunity he had afforded me, but I’d always had this itch to live overseas. I knew that Shopify was a Canadian company, and through using their platform, I had grown to learn a lot about the company itself. And love the company as much as I love the platform. So, it became a bit of a dream for me to work for Shopify, and luckily enough, I was afforded the opportunity to move from New Zealand to Canada to work for Shopify, which I’ll be forever grateful to them for. And, yeah, went into a job in account management with them. So, I had a book of business where I would look after anywhere between 30 and 50 brands using the platform and from them. I’ve been at Shopify coming up seven years now, and I slowly transitioned myself from account management and technical account management and used a lot of the skills I had gained, and I guess you could say customer empathy I’d gained from interacting with customers every day and applied that to a goal of getting into product management. And the same thing. I’d like to think that I work hard, but I’ve also had a lot of luck along the way. And I met my current lead, Rohit, who I basically said, hey, I want to be a product manager. I’m not asking you for a job, but this is really what I want to do. I love this company, I love the platform, I love helping our customers with the platform, but I want to be one of the people that makes it better. I kind of figured out at 30 years old, finally, that I’m a builder and I enjoy building things. And so, he just said, Right, let’s go. I was very lucky, but really refreshing to have that from a lead who there wasn’t really anything in it for him.

He’s like, I had no experience in product management, and he sort of took me under his wing, and I’m now still on that same team as a Senior Product Manager. And again, I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunity because, as with everyone, there are good days and bad days, but I wake up every day and reflect, know, like just saying to Ben, reflecting on what we’ve been able to achieve this week this month, and we’re making a lot of progress, which is extremely satisfying as a builder.

Ellie:
Right, that’s an amazing story. And the passion that you have for building things is probably shown in the products and services that you deliver to your customers. And I want to talk a little bit about the love that you feel for the company. You mentioned that you use them and you really enjoyed working with their platform. What specifically do you think are the key factors to Shopify’s success? Do you think it’s the ability to customize or the ease of use? Or what would you say is the key differentiator?

Cole:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, I think, first of all, our executive leadership team, and specifically Toby, our CEO —Toby’s the founder, and he’s a technical leader. And what drove me to the company and what keeps me here today is really the mission and the motivation behind the mission. Shopify is an extremely strong product-led company, and we have a principle here that we say make great products, earn money sorry, I’ll start that answer again because I always get this mixed up start with number one, which is making great products, do more of one, sorry, two, we need to make money. Do more of one so that we can get more of two, but never reverse those two, never reverse the mission. And I think that’s why Shopify is a public company. We need money, and we need revenue to be successful and to survive.

But I think what I have strongly felt here versus any other company I’ve ever worked for is that when our customers win, we win. And I think I could go into all sorts of details about product functionality, design, ease of use, and those things are important, and they do set Shopify apart. But I think rooted in our mission is this principle: helping our merchants and our customers win. And if they win, we do. Simply put, it’s that for me.

Ellie:
The fact that you talk about understanding the customer and the customer empathy that you had from a previous account management and sales role is very much aligned with the purpose. Of this podcast and trying to figure out really how to better engage and connect with your customers, whether they’re consumers or merchants, like in your case, so, if you were to talk about some of those challenges for Shopify, specifically in understanding your merchants, what would you say those are?

Cole:
Yeah, that’s also another really good question. The challenge is always scalability. So, we have more than 2 million businesses around the world using the Shopify platform. Right now, we’re a multi-tenanted SaaS platform, so we don’t build one-off custom solutions for people. And that has traditionally been what software was, right? Hey, you need a piece of software, hire someone and pay the money to build what you need. But that also doesn’t scale. So, we have a very scalable technological solution. Talking to customers is always difficult in a scalable way because all I want to do is be on the phone with them every day. But if I did that and that was all I did, I’m not going to get much of my actual job done. So it’s definitely a balance and, I think, a big, I won’t say struggle, but a challenge we’re taking head-on right now is that Shopify was a company born out of helping entrepreneurs.

So people that are getting started, and if you look at Shopify’s sort of growth trajectory, they had a lot of success around the GFC in 2008, 2009 because people were out of jobs, and they’re like, I need to make money. At a time when a lot of other companies were declining, Shopify was actually growing because all of these people, out of necessity, were starting businesses. But the balance we’re now striking with that is that we have been so successful as a platform that we now have multinational brands using the platform, enterprise brands who are generally accustomed to what we would normally call custom solutions, where they need something, and they can just pay someone to build it. And that is not something that we do, it’s not something that we’ll ever do because that’s just not a scalable software solution. So, the challenge for us is how we speak to enough customers while still making enough time to do the core of our role.

And how do we come up with solutions that are representative of our entire merchant base? So, how do we come up with products and solutions that will scale to helping brands like Gymshark, but also helping someone who’s just starting their first business? And how do we balance the time that we spend on each of these? So, we have a big thing here when we speak to customers, and if you go on direct-to-consumer Twitter and SaaS Twitter, you’ll see people arguing about feature requests all the time. Do you take feature requests? Do you have a public roadmap? I hate feature requests because you can have three different customers with the same problem, the exact same problem, and they suggest three different features to you to fix them. So when we speak to people, it’s always challenging to scale it. But we try and speak to people who are representative of the overall customer base, but also really delve into their problems.

And as a customer, that can be quite frustrating sometimes because they’re just like, no, just give me this feature. But that is not something that we can do scalably. And so, for the health of the merchant experience and the health of the platform, it’s really challenging for us to make sure that we stay focused on what are the problems that we’re trying to solve.

Ellie:
Right. One of the things you mentioned there is incredibly interesting, and I don’t think enough organizations do this, but gathering insights and data from enough of a diverse range of customers, so it’s not that biased outlook and targeting purely what you believe is your typical customer, your typical consumer. So I want to move on from that in terms of you gather data, and you clearly gather insights from your customers, but then how do you translate that into effective marketing strategies?

Cole:
Yeah, that’s interesting too. There’s definitely to use a cliche: no one size fits all here. So, I work on a team focused on helping merchants with global selling. So if you’re selling domestically and you want to reach other parts of the try, we speak with customers from a lot of different countries. And so the way we conduct business in North America is, in a lot of ways, completely different. In some cases polar opposite to the way that they operate in Europe and the same for Asia. So for us, what is really important is translating our knowledge, literally translating, but translating our message as well into something that’s going to be received in these different regions around the world. And so it’s really important again to make sure that the value that the customers see is going to be different in different parts of the globe as to how we do this.

And I think this is a strong suit of Shopify as well. And it’s not anything groundbreaking or complex, but it’s really listening. At the end of the day, you can run into companies and individuals who worked at companies who are so married to the solution or the idea that they’ve come up with that they can overlook the customer feedback they’re actually hearing, maybe not intentionally. So I think that what’s been really important for us is not being too married to a certain product or a certain solution to translate that into a marketing message, but being willing to say, hey, no, we started investing in that. That’s actually the wrong thing. This is what we’re hearing from our customers, and we’re not afraid to delay or pivot when we realize that what we’re going to communicate is actually not going to resonate as we thought.

Ellie:
Right. Can you talk to us about some of those examples of some surprising findings or insights that you found during these consumer insights sessions?

Cole:

Yeah, absolutely. So the majority of our, or sorry, like a large part of our merchant base is based in the US. And so for the product that I’m working on now, sometimes getting people in the US to sell globally is they consider it a distraction. They have such a large economy and such a large market domestically that, for them, it’s not as important. And it was really, I guess you could say, surprising to me, but more so just, I guess, enlightening. Over the past 18 months, I’ve started speaking to a lot more customers in Europe, and they’re thinking of things that we haven’t thought of. Because you’re in Europe, you sell across borders by default. You find very few businesses in Europe that are just selling within their own domestic market. So I get on a call with a customer, and we have an ecosystem of partners that do apps and solutions that are plugins and sit on top of Shopify.

And so I went to this customer in Sweden with something that we had built, and he said, yeah, that’s great, but how is it going to work with solution X? And I went, oh my goodness, that hadn’t even thought about that. And so this part of know, we have our core product, but then we have our ecosystem, and we really need to ensure that we’re bringing the ecosystem along with us. And so, they had thought about every part of their business and how it impacts their international selling strategy. Whereas I had been just focused on Shopify, the other one that has been really enlightening to me has been how different customers around the world pay for goods. So again, in North America, it’s a world credit card. Pretty much everything on credit card installments is becoming a really hot topic. So if you want to buy something online, and maybe I’m a golfer, so maybe it’s a set of golf clubs, so it’s a larger purchase, and so we’ve become pretty accustomed.

Yeah, put it on the credit card. Oh great. Not only can I put it on a credit card, but I can split this $1,500 purchase over four interest-free installments. But again, you go to a lot of other countries like Europe and India, for instance, and they are very much opposed to debt. And so, credit cards are far less common. And so, offering a credit card processing gateway is not enough in some of these countries. In India, so much is done by ‘cash on delivery.’ Everyone is coming to pick things up, and it’s all done by cash. When you look at Belgium, when you look at the Netherlands, they all have their own local payment methods that connect directly to their bank account and just take money straight out of their bank account. So there’s, compared to North America, very little credit card usage when you go to these other areas of the globe.

And same thing again, it’s, you know, we don’t need to just think about how to get people to or how to help people selling globally. We actually need to regionalize this product strategy because it’s one thing for the merchants to adopt it, but then it’s another thing for the buyers to actually receive what they want. And so if you don’t regionalize that strategy, you’re going to gain very little.

Ellie:
Does this align with the importance of being data-informed rather than purely data-driven? Or what does that mean to you?

Cole:
Yeah, and that’s another principle that we live by here at Shopify. Data-informed, not data driven. Because if you look at the numbers and you look purely at the data, I don’t know the data on this specifically, but the majority of transactions globally go through credit card networks. Okay? So that’s what we’re going to focus on. We’re going to focus on credit card networks. But when you look at the nuances of how this breaks down by region, it tells a very different story. And that’s been one of the things that for me to work on personally is going slightly deeper into data than I’m comfortable with. So oftentimes, I’ll want to know how our product is performing. So one of the key things we look at to know how successful or how much we’re improving our product is how quickly are merchants on the Shopify platform getting their first cross border sale.

And obviously, we want to reduce that, and we are seeing success with that, which is really great over time. On aggregate, merchants are getting their first sale quicker and quicker each year, which is great news for the product. And so I presented this fact, this finding, and I said, that’s great, but how does that vary? And I mean, what do you mean, how does that vary? Well, for instance, is that number being influenced heavily by China? Because China is they’re almost 100% exporters. How is this being impacted by Europe? What is it in America? And so when you go a level deeper, you actually see quite a different story where your product is helping people more in different regions around the, you know, then we identified a gap. Oh, okay. On aggregate, this looks great, but for example, the US is lagging behind. What are we missing here with the US?

Cole:

And to me, that is data-informed and not data-driven is going a level deeper to reveal the complete story, not sort of looking at everything in aggregate because our job’s never done. Toby, our CEO, came up with a saying once, and I’m probably going to butcher this as well, but it’s something known, Shopify is far more likely to die from indigestion than starvation. 

Ellie:
And that goes in hand with trying to decode the mystery of the elusive consumer or merchant in your case and how businesses can attract and retain them. In some of the previous talks I’ve listened to, you mentioned that the key factor or one of the key factors is optimizing for the experience or the experience. What does that mean for you, and what does that mean for Shopify?

Cole:
Yeah, that’s also another really good question. I think we always remember the bad experiences. We don’t often, I mean, we do remember the good ones as well, but we expect good, right? We don’t expect bad, but when we have a bad experience, that’s extremely memorable. I was a guest on another podcast recently, and I was not sure what it’s like in the US. But in Canada, we have extremely poor cellular and wireless operators. And when I say poor, they do a horrible job at retention because the experience sucks. I got sold into an Internet plan, which they said would be a certain price. Silly me, didn’t look at the fine print. The plan price doubled after, I think, six months. And that just leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth. That’s just a horrible experience. So immediately I’m shopping around. So I think sorry to come back to your original question.

What it means is that good experiences are just an expectation. You’re not doing your job just by providing a good experience. That’s the expectation. And so I think when we do our job by starting with the experience. There are a lot of parts of our platform that we’re not happy with. There probably always will be. There are lots of things that I wish I could fix right now. And if I was a merchant, they’re tough things to work around. We’re not perfect. But what we would like to think is that as a merchant, your experience with the software, your experience connecting with people at Shopify. So whether that’s me getting on a call with your experience is that your business goals are aligned with our business goals. And where they’re not aligned, Shopify, get out of my way, and let me tackle that bit, and you handle the rest.

And so I think, again, to answer your question, what it comes down to is that good experiences, they’re the expectation of the merchant, they’re the expectation of the consumer. And when you provide a good experience, you become part of that business. You become a partner in that business, not just a service they use.

Ellie:
What does a typical, if there is such a thing, Shopify merchant look like to you?

Cole:
I think that’s what’s great about Shopify is that we know, and through my time talking with merchants, I see wildly successful businesses selling products that I like. There’s a market for this. Oh my. You know, typically, what a good Shopify merchant looks like. They’re invested in their community. Shopify is very invested in our own community as well. They’re invested in the problems that they want to solve. And again, I think I’d like to stress the importance of the community aspect. So, one of our merchants that have been a great partner to us, and you might see in a lot of Shopify marketing, is Gymshark. And I think they have a wildly successful sense of community amongst their user base. And again, when it comes to a great experience, what better experience than buying something from a company and feeling part of that community? And like I say, Gymshark, I think, has done a massively successful job of that.

But ultimately, it doesn’t come down to just selling products. So again, using Gymshark as an example, they do. I remember back when COVID first hit, and obviously, we were all locked inside, they put out a free fitness app, so it was recordings in their studio with some of their lifters and their ambassadors running you through workouts. And they extended this out not just to their customers, but to anyone, for free. And I just thought, what a fantastic idea. And again, it comes back to not just a great idea but it comes back to our mission. For Gymshark, when their customers win, they win. When their customers are feeling fit, feeling healthy, and meeting their goals in terms of whether it’s weight loss or muscle gain, product sales are going to come. Because if I’m successful with whether it’s my weights program or my fitness program, I’m feeling good, I need workout clothes, and where am I going to go to get those workout clothes?

Well, I’m going to look to someone or a company that’s helped me achieve those goals. And if you look at a lot of the successful businesses on Shopify, they have an extremely strong sense of community. And I think those are the brands that are also highly aligned with Shopify’s mission as well.

Ellie:
Right? And the idea that doing good will lead to growth is a fantastic thing to see as well. Another fact that you have mentioned in the past in some of your talks was the importance of personalization to retain customers. Tell us a little bit more about that, and you could give some examples.

Cole:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think we all want to feel understood, right? So again, whether that is, I’ll go back to the example I had with the internet. I just want to be heard and understood. So whether I’m having a bad experience or a good experience, I want to know that the brand I’m interacting with or purchasing from understands my needs. And so personalization becomes incredibly important because without that, you just have one set of customers, and you’re kind of throwing out a fishing line and hoping that something sticks. So, some really great personalization strategies that I’ve seen have been for me in Canada. Canada is very similar to New Zealand in some ways. Like if you have New Zealand and Australia, which are kind of like the friendly cousins, and then you have Canada and the US. As you know, a lot of the time we’re buying from the US.

Brands. But the way that Canada is very similar to New Zealand in the sense that they don’t want to be bucketed in with Americans; they’re kind of like the smaller little cousin. And so, buying from some online brands recently, I’ve loved how even just their automation campaigns when it comes to retargeting and emailing have been hyper-localized for the Canadian market, even though they are US. Brands. So things that are really basic, like table stakes, like please give me my pricing in Canadian dollars, I don’t want to pay for something in the US. Dollars. That is one thing, but also considering things around local events. So, I got an email from a brand recently that is based in the US. But it was a Canada Day email. And so I knew that the brand was from the US. But I just thought, again, that might be a stretch to say personalization because Canada is an entire country.

But the fact that it wasn’t a 4th of July email, it was a Canada Day email. And to me, personalization doesn’t have to be complex. It can be very simple. And like I say, understanding as such that people in Canada don’t want to receive American promotions is particularly important in Europe as well. And so I come from, again, a bit of a biased lens where my examples tend to be across borders because. Of the product that I work in. But understanding your customers and making them feel understood is very sticky. And so that’s why I always use the example of a lot of our wireless and internet companies here, because I think they provide a necessary service, which they do, and everyone’s just going to buy it anyway. And I just think that’s a horrible experience. There’s no personalization there. I got an email from my internet provider the other day providing an offer for new customer sign-ups, and I was like, I believe I’m already a customer.

Am I meant to pass this on to my friends so they get a better deal than I do?

Ellie:
Right?

Cole:
So if you understand your customers and you make them feel understood, it’s extremely sticky.

Ellie:
Right? I want to talk a little bit about the future of e-commerce. And with everything happening around AI and machine learning as they reshape various verticals, some of which are on your platform, what do you think the merchants need to be doing today to prepare for a more competitive tomorrow?

Cole:

If you’re not investing in augmented reality, you will be so far behind, that it’s not funny. We recently released a bit of an experiment called Shop AI, which is based on our Shop app, which is our marketplace app. I’ll talk about AI, and then I’ll talk about augmented reality because I think in the case of physical goods and physical e-commerce, augmented reality is so much there’s so much potential there. But I’ll talk about AI first because AI is also going to be a personalization strategy, too. But I logged into shop AI. I typed in show me people who are selling self-tying shoelaces, and self-tying shoelaces sound silly, but I didn’t even really know what I wanted was the stretchy shoelaces. I don’t want to tie my shoelaces. I’m lazy. So, I didn’t even know self-tying laces. I thought about that after I was like, what a silly term.

There’s no self-tying laces. But then Shop AI returned me a bunch of results of these laces, which are you tie them once, and they’re basically seamless, and then you can just slip your shoes on and off. And I just thought, what an incredible way to discover new products, as opposed to going into a search engine where I’m going to be served a whole bunch of ads, sift through all the irrelevant content, open up four or five different tabs, select the right product for me, and then go out. And so the thing about AI is that, again, we talk about personalization. AI is going to be a horrendously, important personalization strategy because it’s going to learn about you. It’s going to learn about your preferences over time. It’s going to know where you’re located, it’s going to understand your spending threshold, so it’s going to know when to recommend more expensive versus cheaper products.

And so it’s going to be a huge conversion optimization tool as well for merchants. So, I struggle to see the end of the potential of AI when it comes to e-commerce shopping. I think, again, if you haven’t visited, just type in Shop AI into your browser and have a play around, even if you don’t buy anything. I think that is just absolutely scratching the surface of what is possible here. I think the other thing is, like I say, augmented reality in combination with AI as well. So, we posted a video recently, an example of someone of what it could look like for someone shopping for a new coffee machine. And they speak into the Shop app and say, hey, I’m looking for a coffee machine. It must have an espresso maker. I drink two to three coffees daily, which should be within three to $500.

And then you put your camera over your kitchen counter, and it brings up three options in augmented reality. You can drag them around, put them in place, see what the color looks like, and how does it fit into your kitchen. In Canada, we have a furniture retailer called Structube. They’re like Ikea, but normally a little bit more upmarket than Ikea. And they do a great job. You go into their stores, and they have these beautiful displays and setups and everything. And one thing that Structured does great is they give out free tape measures to people. So if you go there and you’re like, oh, I left my tape measure at home, I need to buy this couch. But I don’t know all these things. What a great idea. But augmented reality is just going to replace the need for that entirely. I’m buying a new couch.

Okay? Place the couch in my living room, change the color, change the specs, change the size. How does it look, how does it fit? Send that to my wife, or my girlfriend, or my partner and get them to weigh in on it as well. And you can have an entire in-person shopping experience virtually. And I think that is the key. That is always the challenge with e-commerce. Right. Especially for larger purchases. Buying a TV, I kind of want to go and see that first.

Ellie:
Right?

Cole:
And so it’s going to completely blur the line between in-person and online shopping.

Ellie:
That’s super interesting. That leads me to my other question about scaling. As businesses, including Shopify, continue to scale, do you believe you’ll be able to maintain the sort of customized user experience and serve both the smaller and the large players? And what do you think merchants need to consider when looking to scale their businesses?

Cole:
Yeah, that’s a good one too. Shopify is very realistic about the fact that for a lot of businesses, we’re the hub, but for a lot of other businesses, we’re a spoke. And so that’s how we achieve flexibility and scalability, is that we’re not going to be everything for everyone. For some of those entrepreneurs, even for some of those larger businesses, there are a lot of large businesses that are extremely immature. And I don’t mean immature in a bad way, I just mean they have grown so quickly, so fast, that they do not have all of the tools and all of the resources that a lot of other enterprise businesses do. So Shopify might be the hub for a 500 million dollar business, but it might be the spokes for a 100 million dollar business. And so, to answer your question, we’re very realistic about the fact that we will invest in something that we know that we can be the best in the world at.

I still remember the answer. So, one thing about the Shopify platform for a little while, there are several things, but one that stands out for me is we once posed the question, why don’t we build like a booking platform? So, people that have personal trainers or hair salons or car detailers, whatever it may be, people that need to take appointments, why don’t we build something for them? And we ask ourselves the question, can we really be the best in the world at it, or should we be the best in the world at it? There are some great solutions out there, like MINDBODY, for instance, which is big in the fitness area. And so we’re like, well, that’s a great solution, they’re the best in the world. Do we want to beat them in that game? No, we don’t need to. We’ll have them sit on top of Shopify instead.

And so we’ll be what most businesses need most of the time, and then for the other pieces, we’ll get out of your way. We’re not trying to put our fingers into every single part of your business. We know that when we’re the hub. And when we’re the spoke. And so use us for what you need us for and then you know your business best, you drive the other piece. And this is highlighted like in a recent release we did. We released an enterprise offering called e-commerce components. So typically when you sign up for Shopify, you sign up, you pay a monthly bill, and you get everything. But a lot of businesses might not want that. Hey, Shopify, you’ve got a great checkout. Get out of the way of my online store. I just want to use your checkout. And so a lot of things like e-commerce components and composable e-commerce will enable us to scale into those enterprise-level businesses.

And over time, they may adopt more of Shopify’s offerings. But that’s a big piece of how we’re going to still be the entrepreneurship company. But we’re going to scale up into the enterprise as well. And to my knowledge, there isn’t anyone in the e-commerce space who has done that well. There are very good enterprise companies, there’s very good entry-level SaaS software. There’s not anyone that’s yet scaled across that entire spectrum.

Ellie:
And in terms of your merchants, what advice would you give them when they’re looking to grow their business?

Cole:
It definitely just like we focus on problems with our customers. That would be the same piece of advice that I would give an understanding that everything’s not going to be perfect. So some of my favorite merchants to talk to are some of the most successful ones. And not because they’re successful, but because of why they’re successful or in my eyes, why they’re successful. They also make my job a lot more fun and a lot easier because we talk with a lot of these merchants about lacking functionality problems that they have things that they would like us to invest in and fix for them. But when we tell them very transparently, hey, we understand the problem, it’s actually not going to be something that we’re investing in, or at least it’s not going to be something that we’re investing in now. They’re happy to make that concession.

They understand what are the critical problems for their business, and they understand that they need to focus on those critical problems. There are other pieces that are not going to be perfect. So, never focus on perfection. Prioritize the customer experience and think about spending your time on critical problems. That meme, which is there’s the dog sitting at the table, and there’s a fire going on. And the way that it was described to me once is that this happens in my job, but this happens when you’re running a business as well. There’s going to be so many things on fire. Imagine a street with houses, and they’re all on fire. Now, the one that it’s got people in it, there’s a lot of danger going there, whereas you got one over here which is just kind of starting to smolder.

It’s pretty obvious which one you’re going to pick, right? You’re going to go save the people. You’re going to put that fire out. It’s critical. Focus on that problem. And so I think that understanding that there’s always going to be fires around, you don’t focus on the one that’s smoldering. Focus on the one that’s burning. Might be a bit of a negative when I look at it, but I think it also reflects reality, right?

Ellie:
Yeah. I love that meme, by the way. And finally, what advice would you give to businesses who are looking to maximize their use of Shopify or other similar e-commerce platforms?

Cole:
I think spend a lot of time understanding what your platform does well, so every platform has its strengths and weaknesses. So like I say, this is probably more important for more established businesses. I think if you’re starting a brand new business and you’re selling something online for the first time, obviously, Shopify does a fantastic job of this, but your decision is going to be kind of far less critical. Most of these platforms offer the same basic set of features that are going to allow someone to begin for the first time. Shopify is the best in the world at that, but largely, you’re going to get what you need. But as a more established business, thinking about what I was saying before, figure out what that 20% is, figure out what the platform is not good at, and how you’re going to what’s the word I’m looking for?

How are you going to supplement? Yes, exactly. That’s it. Thank you. Figure out what the 20% is and how you are going to supplement that. And if the 20% of that platform, something that they don’t do very well, is critical for your business, it’s probably not the right platform for you. So let’s say you do a lot of your business wholesale, and you sell wholesale online. You need LTL shipments, which is basically know, instead of a USPS or a FedEx coming and picking up a single package, LTL is, they’ll come, and they’ll pick up an entire crate, and they’ll put it on the truck. If your platform doesn’t have built-in LTL options and that’s critical to your business, that shouldn’t be part of the 20%, that should be part of the 80%, and it’s not quite right for you. So, understanding everything that they offer, but more importantly, understanding the things that they’re not good at.

The other thing I would focus on is what your platform is going to do to help you get customers. When I was building my first ever website, I had a friend back in New Zealand, Daniel Phillips, who’s a very experienced digital marketer, and I was building this website, and I was showing it to him, and he was like, Stop. He was like, Would you rather spend $1,000 on this website and have ten people look at it, or spend $10 on this website and have 1000 people look at it? And I was like, oh, yeah. And he was like, you’re thinking about this the wrong way. What is your platform going to do to get eyes on your product? You’re only going to learn about how you can iterate and how you can make it better by getting eyes on the product. There’s another saying, I think it’s the CEO of LinkedIn who said this.

He said, if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your launch, you launch too late. And so that would be my advice as well, is think about getting eyes on products. Not thinking about it, I need the perfect functionality. So again, evaluate your platform based on how it is going to help you get customers.

Ellie:
I love that. So that would be extremely difficult for a perfectionist, I guess.

Cole:
Exactly.

Ellie:
Any final words that you want to leave our listeners with before we wrap up?

Cole:
No, I think this is, to a certain extent, another cliche, but fall in love with the problem. And I think that applies to so many different areas of business. Whether you’re like me and you’re working on software, and you’re speaking to customers, whether you’re selling a product online, whether you’re working for a large corporate entity, whatever it may be, really fall in love with the problem that you’re trying to solve. Avoid getting married to a solution. Because if I look at all the most successful individuals, whether people that I know personally or I’ve just observed in the media, they are so obsessed with falling in love with the problem. And I think that can apply to so many different industries, so many different verticals, and so many different careers.

Ellie:
That’s fantastic advice. Thank you so much, Cole, for joining us today. We really appreciate it.

Cole:
Yeah, thanks for having me. That was fun. Thank you.

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