2026 Ecom Vibe Check: What's Working on Shopify | The Unofficial Shopify Podcast

本站添加: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]If your product sucks, you're never going to succeed, right? Entrepreneurs in general, some of them have kind of shiny object syndrome and AI is the biggest, shiniest object ever. If you had to describe the general mood in e-comm right now, 2026, what is it?

[00:00:25]>> [music] >> Today on the unofficial Shopify podcast, let's do a vibe check. I am curious, what's the word on the street? And so, to help me figure that out, I'm joined by one of my colleagues, Chase Climber, a fellow Shopify partner, Shopify agency owner, Shopify app developer now, from Electric Eye, Chase Climber, in Ohio. And I've known Chase a while, and we met at a Shopify event in New York some years ago and have stayed in touch, you know, through online communities and Shopify events, especially, you know, what's now shopify.dev, their conference in Toronto every summer. Chase is in a special position where, man, he goes to way more conferences than I do. Like me, he hosts a podcast, he's guesting on podcasts, he is doing biz dev for his agency, talking to Shopify merchants and partners, you know, like vendors and app developers.

[00:01:18]And so, he has a really good sense of, you know, how people feel and kind of, you know, what are the trends, what's going on. And so, I want to pick his brain on the topic. Chase, welcome to the show. How you doing? I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me. You're at Well, how many events do you do a year? I do a lot. Last year, I was trying to hit one a month. This year it's changing though. Luckily, we have hired someone new. He's going to start to take some of that stuff off my plate.

[00:01:44]I am going to go to the ones I want to.

[00:01:47]Sounds like a cop out, but there are certain ones I feel that it's a better idea for me to go and then there are certain ones that I can delegate to our newest team member helping out on kind of, you know, the sales side of things for lack of a better term. But I do feel, especially if you're in the service game, there's so much noise out there on the internet. It is really hard to break through to your ICP, especially if your ICP is highly sought after, especially if your ICP is, you know, the type of work you're doing is not necessarily cheap. The easiest way to kind of turn those relationships into, you know, clients is by meeting them in real life and having genuine connections and just kind of playing the long game. Yeah, nothing beats face-to-face. Like meeting someone face-to-face makes them real.

[00:02:36]And you just you can't replace it with telepresence. Absolutely, yeah. Um and that's it's getting to the point where we are considering if it's a good fit, like client that's ending up on our on our calendar through, you know, inbound or whatever, you know, however we made the connection and we have not met, it's we're thinking about like a I'll hop on an airplane and I'll go buy someone dinner, you know, just it's it is worth it in in a certain extent for the right for the right client. It's powerful. Yeah, it is. You know, that's the stuff you remember.

[00:03:06]So, all right. So, but the point though is you're talking to all these people, what if you had to describe the general mood in e-com right now, 2026, what is it? Uh I mean, I'm going to say it's resilient would be like the overarching word.

[00:03:21]Um but, you know, there's like some other stuff I I feel like that also comes up.

[00:03:26]Like obviously, we're still on like the the tail end of recovering. I mean, the pandemic was over 5 years ago, but, you know, all of the expenses going up and right now everything's getting more expensive, too, and that affects everybody. So, stuff is just so much more expensive and it's making merchants kind of look into certain things and look at it through a a very very discerning lens when it comes to where they're making their investments. And so like obviously the ad cost spiked during the pandemic. I believe they're around like $11 was like the average CPM on Facebook and then afterwards it ended up it's like right now in 2025 it's 1966 I think is the average CPM. So that's like almost a 100% you know change of cost per metric on just Facebook meta alone.

[00:04:16]Uh but not only that cost living goes up everything's more expensive. We're more expensive. I'm assuming you're more expensive, right? So there's just everything costs more these days. This isn't even like an anecdote like we've lost business because we were the most expensive person as a pitching lately, right? So I think people are are still watching watching their bottom line.

[00:04:36]Your value really needs to be there in that conversation to to win the business right now.

[00:04:41]Um but I say all that with people are still doing the business. They're still building brands. They're still looking for help. They're still trying to build their career, their lifestyle, their business in e-commerce. Uh so I still think we're at the end of the day the entrepreneurs that are into this they like the grind, they like the grit, they're resilient. Yeah, I've been doing this since 2009. So when we started we started into a recession. And so this really you know just feels like more of the same to me.

[00:05:10]You know, in 2020 I thought wow, you know, the entire world seemed to have shut down. Things are going to continue like this and it's not going to be good.

[00:05:17]And then now you know, it's 2026. I'm still I've been doing the same thing the whole time, right? It's a being able to just spend through it, keep going, you know, purchase things day-to-day has always seemed to work rather than just going well, uh forecast not so good, outlook not so good. I quit.

[00:05:36]Right? I mean if you just keep going like maybe it's just it's last man standing. Maybe it's survivorship bias.

[00:05:41]I don't know. I definitely think obviously there's there's always the survivorship bias element to anything in e-com just because you just don't hear from those brands anymore. But like um I do specifically remember conversations with brands where they were scared to make decisions and scared to make moves and they they paused for a while and I'm talking about early on in the pandemic not necessarily now, but I still draw some correlations between that because now we've got tariffs, war. It's the same general uncertainty just in a completely different package. Um and the difference is those that are betting on themselves and they're continuing to make choices. I think the paralyzation of not making a choice thinking that that is a good choice is just making your business stagnant and it stops growth in its tracks. Yes.

[00:06:35]Yeah, I think the the businesses that spend through a downturn recover faster.

[00:06:40]That's my belief. I I think that is a proven fact. Actually, I think that's a proven fact that had it's in a couple business books and I wish I wish we went down this rabbit hole in the first conversation so I could have pulled that for you.

[00:06:53]Yeah, the the brands that spend during a downturn come out on top and I'm going to I want to believe it's something like Good to Great might have been the book that that's from. It's a fantastic read.

[00:07:04]Yeah, I've no I've I've heard it before.

[00:07:07]You know, I'm sure if we Googled it we could figure it out. I think you know, my version of it I think I got from Leo Burnett, but I could be wrong. But that you know, if I go on Twitter right now start X the all the discourse is going to be around AI and then like what's the next AI tool and that really eats up a lot of discourse. Is there a disconnect between you know, what people are talking about online and the conversations that are happening in hallways at conferences at dinners? I would say there is a bit of a disconnect, but AI is always coming up. So they are they're like, "Hey, what tools are you using now?" And I've actually heard people ask like how are you using AI, right? And which is a very fun and interesting conversation, but it always is coming from like one step above that is just like how can I make my business more successful. So they're always at the end of the day, these merchants specifically are looking for ways to lower costs, to increase efficiencies, to, you know, stack the cards in their favor so that they can basically make more money, become more profitable, spend less on things that they don't need to spend, right? So it's the every conversation, I believe, that we ever have around apps with merchants, at the end of the day, their goal is just like this needs to make me money.

[00:08:30]Or if you want to put service providers in there, too, it's like will this partner make me money? And so that's kind of like the North Star of all the conversations is like how does this actually affect my business? But yeah, I think that entrepreneurs in general, some of them have kind of shiny object syndrome, and AI is the biggest, shiniest object ever. Yeah, though it's it's definitely addictive, you know, and then once you it's this black box that you could just give commands and demands, and then maybe it gets it right and helps you out. So would you say the the sentiment around AI, is it, you know, it's positive, it's negative, they're scared of it, they're excited, they're anxious?

[00:09:12]I think it's a little bit of all, right?

[00:09:14]So I think it's a certain type of merchant, it's a certain type of merchant person, it's a certain type of entrepreneur, right? So there are certain folks that are super tech forward, they're all in, they're testing everything, and the results are to be determined, right? I've heard some cool things about it. I've heard people deleting lots of code because they let Open Claw do whatever it wanted, right? So, there there's a lot of stuff happening, right?

[00:09:40]But, those tech-forward people adopt early adopters, they're always survivorship bias again. There's always success stories around the early adopters. Now, there's that camp of folks, which I don't know about you, Kurt, but we end up not working with them that often. The folks that are kind of a little more DIY, they do have a bit of a developer brain.

[00:10:01]They're not really our client. But, this other camp, it's you know, a a product-obsessed founder. They are locked in on what it is that their product is doing for their customer and how it solves that problem for them to where technology takes a backseat.

[00:10:18]Shopify is just a tool in their business tool set, and then they're like, "Chase, we want your team to just own all this stuff, and you tell us what of this AI stuff is important to us." And they are just heads down doing the same thing they've been doing and seeing great success. And to that camp We're using AI all the time, and we're very open about it.

[00:10:40]But, I think that, you know, uh us kind of technologists, we get distracted by the shiny objects sometime. The those founders that have that focus to like keep the main thing the main thing, I'm almost jealous of, and you can kind of see it in the results of how their businesses grow.

[00:10:55]How are you personally using AI in your agency? Well, this isn't me. This is AI right now. This is my Chase bot. No, I'm just kidding.

[00:11:03]>> [laughter] >> Dude, we're using it all over the place.

[00:11:05]Well, first of all, we've been doing this before AI, but we record every sales call. We use Fathom. It's free.

[00:11:12]We're probably the product. I don't care. It's a fun little tool. Actually, we're paying for it now.

[00:11:16]Um but, we record every sales call. That gets dumped into kind of our AI of choice. It was ChatGPT for a while.

[00:11:23]Right now, it's Claude. Might start to explore some other ones.

[00:11:27]All that gets synced into our CRM combined CRM combined with like all of our discovery notes. Basically, all that does is it gives me better, more specific information to use with pitching that client our services and writing our statements of work. I hate writing statements of work. This has made it a lot easier. A little more into that process just cuz I know you Kurt you'd be curious is like I would do a rough draft of it and then I send the rough draft against that like module that knows all this stuff about the conversations with the client and all the discovery stuff and the emails. I'm like, "What am I missing here?" And then it's like let use the client's words and their feelings about these things to help craft my responses to this stuff and obviously edit everything AI says because it sounds like AI half the time, but it still gives you the lot of really good answers. So that system has been a lot of fun and efficient for me kind of in the sales process and I'm currently training Paul on like how to use this. I I was one of the the people that, you know, left ChatGPT for Claude and and you know, the last couple weeks and there is a noticeable difference between the quality of the memory and the quality of the copy. I will say that ChatGPT is a better writer from what I've found, but it isn't something you know, you could probably train Claude to do things better, but everyone Claude is definitely more tech technical and we are using it all the time for our project managers on our team are using it to solve kind of simple tasks before, you know, tagging in a subject matter expert because it's like Nice. when you can speak the common language and you know, you can just it'll tell you how to fix the thing and you know, we'll hop into the code and make sure we you know, GitHub all that jazz, make sure we do it the right way, but just a few other examples I had of things that we're doing.

[00:13:14]CRO data analysis. Ooh, buddy. That is where we have so much fun. All of this stuff that you're using to get all this like data for CRO that you know, so you're talking about customer reviews, support tickets, user testing recordings. We're trying to play around with ways to pull out insights from analytics and from like heat maps.

[00:13:35]But, it will dive into that stuff, and if you prompt it correctly, it will find kind of the sentiment analysis, and we're really getting in the rabbit hole here with like how we use the PXL framework and have it try We're trying to see how much we can get it to do for us.

[00:13:48]Um but that is super fun, and it's really giving us awesome kind of like backlogs of test ideas for our retainer clients. Uh or, you know, more recently, we've also been doing similar approaches to redesigns. It's like, all right, we're going to do a bunch of data up front to understand how your website is working well and also what isn't working well. Take those insights into now the design of the new version of the website. Claude for sentiment analysis has been like really fun. Yeah. No, I love giving it uh exporting product reviews. That was like one of the the early things I figured out with ChatGPT before it was, you know, anywhere near as smart as it is now. It was like, man, there is a treasure trove of info in those product reviews, but as a person trying to read through hundreds or thousands of them just is not practical.

[00:14:30]>> Yeah.

[00:14:31]>> And that's where like, ooh, AI could do sentiment analysis on it and do a really good job. I got one more cuz I know your audience is just like mine, so I'm just going to start rambling off cool things we've done on all these other AI things.

[00:14:41]Rattle off tools? Yeah, have you played with Nano Banana yet? Oh, it's Yeah, I tried to I've got Adobe Firefly so I can like try all the different image generators, and by far, Nano Banana is the best. Yeah, we've got a client right now that uh And this is This is quite common, right?

[00:14:58]That you've great client, they just don't have the Maybe it's not even the budget, but time to do lifestyle photo >> photos. Yeah. Uh we We got one right now where we're like, Lance, dude, just give us Just go buy this and give us access to it. Like, we're going to have fun with it cuz we we kind of want to learn how we can bring this into our workflow.

[00:15:15]And that's what you get when you have a good relationship with your with your your like agency and like you're a good client. It's like, hey, we're going to just bend the crap out of our scope real quick because we want to play with something. And anyways, the content that we're producing for this for this brand is awesome and it's super and it's it's wild except this one lady has three arms, but we like her.

[00:15:36]Um >> [laughter] >> Yeah, you got it does do some strange things at times.

[00:15:41]But it's really really good stuff. We've got a another client, this where the idea came from. I don't know how many of their products are the entire kind of like lifestyle part of it are AI generated, but you could not tell. Their prompting is amazing. It's Nano Banana.

[00:15:57]It is a real person, five fingers showcasing their products in a lifestyle environment and it like blew our mind.

[00:16:06]And this is a big brand. Yeah, that that Nano Banana is really good, but they keep getting better. At what point do you and I get replaced? I am fully team embrace AI. It is a efficiency multiplier. It is a strategic tool, but it's not going to replace expert jobs, right? AI doesn't understand, like you said, visually how stuff looks. And I don't think that AI has kind of the connectivity yet to like see things through and I like I see a lot of people that are stringing together agents to try to do so, but it's just I think it they're just burning tokens right now.

[00:16:51]>> [laughter] >> I don't I don't necessarily see that the results are there just yet. Uh I don't know. I'm optimistic. I don't think that we're going to go anywhere. In your your vast experience here, what do you think merchants are getting wrong today?

[00:17:04]You know, you work with D2C brands, 1 to 10 million.

[00:17:08]Uh seems like mostly lifestyle brands.

[00:17:10]What's the common mistake you see in in your bracket right now? This is maybe for like a younger business in their kind of life cycle where it's like I see a lot of brands like around a million dollars a year, maybe a little bit higher, but they are This is coming directly from a I'm quoting a friend. Trying to solve product problems with marketing spend, which is a polite way of saying if your product sucks, you're never going to succeed, right? So, people are oftentimes will come in with this viewpoint that oh, I just need to CRO my way into a successful product, but like if you if your product sucks to begin with, like you aren't going to be a successful business. So, I think a lot of people uh need to do more work to make sure that their product is solving a real problem for their customer and a lot I think a lot of people do a lot of assuming that their product solves a problem without doing customer research and learning if their product solves a problem. One bold prediction for the next 12 months. This is a tough one. I don't have a bold prediction. I do because me and you you said something about it and I saw something about it and it is kind of playing off something that I saw you say, but I do think Shopify will fix the partner program. What's broken about it?

[00:18:27]Well, uh I do have some math here that Claude gave me, but uh back in January uh of this year, they laid off less than 100 people, but that's a lot of people uh from their partnerships division. It was about a third of the entire team. Uh the entire agency team was eliminated. The VP of partnerships uh then posted on X calling it a new chapter. I believe you had an interaction with her on on X as well.

[00:18:53]Ashley Clark? Yes, and so this is the pendulum swinging back. I love how we just keep talking about the pendulums. Before that, let's go back two or three years.

[00:19:03]Uh Shopify made a big bet on going all in on enterprise and the big four consulting firms, and it left us as kind of like the smaller partners that helped build Shopify to what it was today kind of in this weird position where they were bringing these people in and giving them so much access because Shopify really wanted to bring in these inner enterprise players to the Shopify ecosystem and what happened is they didn't give a [ __ ] Like they just were like, "Thanks, but we know we're just going to keep doing what we do."

[00:19:36]And it just didn't work out. It was a bad bet.

[00:19:38]Um and then so that has changed now and they also have admitted and there's there's articles about this that, you know, that's not a focus of Shopify anymore to be going after that that type of partnership. They still want those enterprise brands on the platform but not necessarily, uh you know, working with these enterprise and and huge consulting firms. And so I think in the next year we're going to see them do their best to improve the partner program. We've already seen that they've created more partner tiers, which I think everybody was looking for for a while uh regardless of where you fell in the tearing of it.

[00:20:12]I think it there that is a good thing and they're going to start to hopefully everyone will start to have, you know, their partner person at Shopify to help them with the things that they need help with. I think we're already seeing evidence of that, you know, and you're right. I did have I had a conversation not on the show um but privately with with Atlee Clark at Shopify who's leading up this partner program now and it was very positive.

[00:20:35]And she very much was like, "Hey, you know, things got reorganized and we want we want to take what worked from the past and go back to that." I mean, they were always so good about building community and enabling people. You know, if you went to them as a as a partner and said like, "Okay, like here's my question. Here's where we're confused.

[00:20:55]Here's where we're stuck. Help us understand." Often they were able and willing to give you like a little bit of inside baseball. And when you could understand the reasoning behind something, you know, suddenly, "Oh, okay. Now it makes sense. Like now I can I can get behind it or I can work with it. Like whatever the thing was. And I think that's that's where they're going to try to go back to. Which, hey, I'm here for it. I'm thrilled to see it.

[00:21:16]Better for us.

[00:21:18]Yeah, the reason that we're still exclusively working with Shopify as our CMS of choice and in this ecosystem is because of the early partner program, the relationships we built then, and then obviously level of expertise in specific and specialization that we had acquired over the last couple of years.

[00:21:35]But, I had never known that in any other ecosystem, which I had before I dove all in on Shopify. I had dabbled in a couple kind of other CMS's. I you know, you and I had spoke before like how we both kind of knew WordPress and also hated it.

[00:21:47]But, you know, Shopify when I in back in 2016, 2017 was this amazing ecosystem.

[00:21:55]And it isn't that hard to emulate that again these days. The numbers and the scale has grown a bit. You know, do I think there are too many Shopify partners?

[00:22:03]I don't know. Maybe we need to you know, maybe once a year you need to check an email cuz I know half of these partners don't exist anymore cuz I can see them in the partner portal. But, you know, I I also am an abundance mindset guy. I think there's enough work out here to go around. And that was something I I I I I every time we talk I always I say this is like you really put that in my brain when we first met. Was that 10 years ago? Uh the you know, the the abundance mindset, there's a lot of work to go around. And uh I think that that was something that you find in the Shopify ecosystem that wasn't anywhere else. And you still find it. And I think that the people that have any sort of other opinion about, you know, abundance mindset, a lot of work to go around, and like we can be collaborative competition instead of like, you know, the the opposite of abundance mindset, which is scarcity mindset. Like those types of folks tend to like not do well here. I don't know. Yeah, well, it's it's the wrong attitude to bring. You know, the thing is very much like for community to work we can't all be sniping each other and holding our cards close to our chest.

[00:23:04]Yeah, it like those relationships turned into between other people turned into referrals and ideas and opportunities, right? It creates the luck sale and that helps propel your career and your business forward. And it works for merchants, you know, it works for partners and agencies. It works for everybody. All right, Chase, we got to wrap it up. Where do people go to learn more about you? Absolutely.

[00:23:26]I also have a podcast. Mine are a little bit more bite-sized.

[00:23:30]We're doing a lot more interviews with merchants. You can go check that out honest e-commerce.com or whatever your favorite, you know, podcast player thing app is.

[00:23:41]We have an agency as well. We're called Electric Eye electrici.io.

[00:23:46]We do a lot of the similar stuff that Kurt does. So, talk to us both. Make us fight over your business.

[00:23:52]>> [laughter] >> But we do a lot of Shopify migrations, a lot of redesigns. We are heavy into CRO, you know, and if you are, you know, that's something that's on your radar right now, reach out now. I can probably give away one or two of our, you know, paid diagnostics to folks before my business partner Sean catches on.

[00:24:10]But yeah, those are two things to do.

[00:24:11]Listen to us honest e-commerce [music] or reach out to us at Electric Eye.

[00:24:16]Thanks for listening. Chase Climber, Electric Eye and honest e-commerce.

[00:24:19]Check it out. Thanks for coming.