Kurt Elster, he is currently helping Shopify Plus merchants like HOONIGAN make more money at his Shopify Partner agency, Ethercycle. He is hosting a podcast with over two million downloads: The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. He is developing public Shopify apps. And he is investing, advising, or both with: Govalo, PostPilot, and other select clients and P.E. firms.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Kurt Elster, a seasoned Shopify expert and host of the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Kurt shares his journey from retail arbitrage to becoming a Shopify specialist, offering valuable insights for Amazon brands transitioning to Shopify. Key strategies discussed include the importance of email marketing, leveraging Google Shopping, and utilizing podcast advertising to drive traffic. Kurt emphasizes the need for a long-term approach, focusing on content creation and customer engagement to build a successful Shopify store. This episode is a must-listen for business owners aiming to scale their e-commerce operations.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

1. Secure Your Brand’s Digital Presence Early – Reserve your domain and variations as soon as you file for a trademark to prevent future challenges in securing your desired online identity. This simple step avoids costly setbacks and protects your brand’s online presence from the start.

2. Prioritize Consistent Traffic Generation – Transitioning to Shopify means proactively attracting customers. Focus on creating a robust traffic generation strategy, leveraging a combination of paid ads, SEO, and Google Shopping listings to draw in visitors and increase sales.

3. Build and Engage Your Audience Through Email Marketing – Begin growing your email list early, as this channel is vital for nurturing customer relationships and boosting repeat sales. Set up automated emails like welcome sequences and cart abandonment reminders, and prioritize plain-text formats for a personal touch.Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Stephen Pope from My Amazon Guy. Today I am speaking with Kurt Elster. He is the host of the unofficial Shopify podcast. He has got a wealth of wisdom in the world of Shopify. He’s going to be pulling back the veil and helping us understand how to Amazon brands transition into generating more of their sales on Shopify than they are on Amazon. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure e-commerce companies to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a partner who can help take your business to the next level, my team and I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for an investment partner or consulting, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough.

Josh Hadley 00:00:50  Com that’s E-comm with two M’s. And then let’s turn your dreams into reality. But today I am super excited to introduce you all to Kurt Elster. He is currently helping Shopify Plus merchants like Hoonigan make more money at his Shopify partner agency, Aether Cycle. He is hosting a podcast with over 2 million downloads, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. He is also developing public Shopify apps, and he is investing, advising and both with host pilot and other select clients and PE firms. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Kurt.

Kurt Elster 00:01:18  Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. You do sound effects on the show.

Josh Hadley 00:01:21  I love it. You’ve got sound effects. Like obviously you are a very experienced podcast host, so I’m genuinely excited. I think like from what the conversation was that we had before we hit the record button, I think our audience is just going to love this episode, so we’ll banter back and forth and have some good times here. But Kurt, why don’t you give people a little bit of background? How did you get into the ecommerce space and what have you been doing for the past decade? All right, this is wild.

Kurt Elster 00:01:43  I think I was 15, it was. I’m in my 40s, I’m an elder millennial, but I was a teenager in high school and the Furby craze happened. And prior to that was the Beanie Baby craze. And I was in the Chicago suburbs, which was ground zero for the Beanie Baby craze, did not realize it. You know, being there and saw, you know, how much money people made on eBay. Essentially, what’s retail arbitrage is what we call it now. And so I was like, I’m going to do that again. But for Furbies, which were hard to get. And so I like would take a bus to a mall like after school and just try and buy Furby stock and like pretty soon all the KB toys or these like couple local toy retailers, them all knew me and I would go buy Furbies and I’d flip them on eBay and like, you know, it was not Beanie Babies. I did not get rich doing this, but I did make money and it didn’t feel hard.

Kurt Elster 00:02:20  It felt exciting. And so that like that is an early experience of like, hey, any anyone with the right opportunities and, you know, a little bit of risk taking can make some money for themselves. And so that would have been a side hustle. But you know, when you’re like a teenager and oh man, I could buy like Dreamcast games with this. That’s very exciting. and from there like that. All right, now I’m like, interested in e-commerce because to me it feels real accessible and easy. And so I always sought out e-commerce opportunities where I could get them. And by the time I went to college, I got, went to graduate school, got my MBA, and as soon as I was doing some 1099 contracting in my 20s, I became, eBay channel manager at a large auto parts dropshipping store. And. But it didn’t. I was working at full time. Didn’t feel right because I’m like, I want to be my own boss. And I didn’t feel like I was.

Kurt Elster 00:03:05  And there’s this distinct moment where it’s like tying my shoes to go to work. You know? I was like, I don’t know, 27 at the time. I start crying, it’s time my my Chuck Taylors, they remember this and I put in my two week notice. I had no plan. And then I like the next day I’m in the shower and I’m like, I’m going to start my own e-commerce platform. Well, of course I know what they know is like just a wildly insane decision, but sometimes not knowing there’s a big benefit in that, because now I’ve started and I’ve got the momentum and it didn’t work. But locally, people misunderstood what I was doing, and we had rented an office and like local small businesses knocked at my door. They said, well, we think you do websites like that’s how small the world was, just like, Google it. It would be like, oh, there’s this web developers just missed categorize at Google or something. They knock at my door and I’d be like, we don’t build websites, get out of here with your money.

Kurt Elster 00:03:42  Ridiculous. Meanwhile, I cannot get this e-commerce platform off the ground. And then I suddenly I got to pay the rent. And so I’m like, well, maybe I’ll sell one of those websites. And it was like 800 bucks. It was a static HTML brochure site. And then another one shows up and I’m like, well, let’s put this on WordPress. And now pretty soon I’m charging 5000 and then like 10,000. I’m like, is this even legal? And I had all these leads and like getting business through it with local businesses because I, I stuck letters under all their doors introducing myself. And I had to address them. And I thought, well, what if I just did this again, but with a bigger client? And I did the same thing again, but with large advertising and marketing agencies in downtown Chicago, which was accessible to me. And the same thing worked. Only now I’m doing huge projects, only they’re a lot harder and they’re bigger budget. But I ended up we did.

Kurt Elster 00:04:21  We did work for Verizon via an agency. The NFL. An agency had no business doing it but cut our teeth and did it right. And then, the last project before I said, we’re just doing e-commerce at Shopify exclusively, we did a site for Hilton Hotels, and it was just, like, so painful to be in that world because it’s subjective and it’s squishy. E-commerce is not. E-commerce has KPIs. Your success is what’s my revenue conversion rate, average order value. You could point to those things and there’s science behind it. And I was really attracted to that. And so I said, all right, let’s take that web design development skill set. Let’s take that business experience. Let’s take that love of of, you know, and that history of buying and selling online. And let’s go all in on Shopify. And I tried all these e-commerce platforms. Shopify the best documentation. It had this phenomenal partner program. We built a custom theme. Again, not knowing what I didn’t know, I was like, I’ll just build a custom website for a friend who had a local bike shop, and that was our first Shopify project and they took notice.

Kurt Elster 00:05:04  They said, you should join the partners program, and then we got to lead through it. And Abandoned Dunes Golf Course for golf. It’s a big deal. And so just, you know, I’m awkward as hell, right? I have social anxiety disorder. And so my brilliant idea was I’ll host a podcast. I had no business doing this. I had listened to one podcast in my life. It was serial. and you know what? You try anything, enough time, you get pretty good at it. And so it worked out. I had a lead gen source, I had experience, and I had a niche focus, and that was Shopify and a love of entrepreneurship. And, you know, that’s how I got here.

Josh Hadley 00:05:31  Oh man, I love that journey. And I love that, you know, through your journey, you know, you had to pivot and make adjustments along the way. Right? And sometimes you do have to step out into that darkness, so to speak. Right? And you’re like, I don’t know.

Josh Hadley 00:05:41  I hope something, you know, I hope as I take this step of darkness that like the path lights up ahead of me or that I step on solid ground. But I think that that’s honestly where your business grows. And if you just stay in the light where it’s only things that you know and you’re not pushing your comfort zone, that’s where you just plateau. And actually, if you’re not growing, you’re actually declining. Right. And so I would just that’s every encouragement to every entrepreneur. And that’s what I love about every entrepreneur’s story, is that they are full of pivots. And my story is the exact same, full of constant pivots and finding, you know, where that path, leads you to. So I love that. Now, Kurt, let’s sink our teeth into the the world of Shopify, because you’ve been living and breathing the world of Shopify. The listeners of this, the majority of them are Amazon sellers. They got their brands launched on Amazon. They experienced success seven figures in revenue on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:06:29  That’s great. But guess what? The world of Amazon is only getting harder. Increased competition. Amazon’s raising their fees. Everything like just margin compression everywhere you look. So everybody likes the idea of man, it would be great if 50% of my sales could be generated on Shopify. Is it as simple as reaching out to Kurt and saying, Kurt, build me the amazing website so that I get 50% of my sales on Shopify. What do I need to do, Kurt?

Kurt Elster 00:06:54  If you build it, they will not come. That is the problem here. The Amazon is a phenomenal way to to validate an idea, to build a business, to get those initial sales, because I think it’s coming. The ideas are free, right. Product development. All right. Expensive, time consuming that like that. Depending on what you’re selling. That’s harder. that’s the part that scares me. Jeez, I don’t want to have to develop a product. But then once you’ve got it out there, you’ve got, you know, the messaging of the brand and the positioning.

Kurt Elster 00:07:20  And maybe ideally, you’ve tried to sell it locally so that you could talk to people face to face. You’ve got this understanding, and then you build these Amazon listings based on that information. and Amazon does the really hard part for you, like the listing fees, all the fees you pay to Amazon that you hate that, that you’re paying them for the traffic, the top of funnel. That’s like the insanely hard part that you are absolutely missing out on and potentially not appreciating the difficulty of once you build that Shopify store. If you’re successful in Amazon and you never market that Shopify store at all, so long as you know the brand names, match reads the content, you know you will get some sales for people who found you on Amazon, bought from you, then googled it or saw you on Amazon and thought, you know, maybe I’ll buy direct for whatever reason. We do see that. Like for sure, sales come through natural and organic, but hardly enough to justify it. If you want to see that same success, you have to be a man.

Kurt Elster 00:08:06  You have to master the sales funnel and the heart. You know, you’ve got like the middle of the sales funnel is going to be your website, right? But that top of sales funnel where you acquire that traffic, where you go out, interrupt people and what they’re doing, or get yourself in front of them at whatever watering hole they hang out at on the internet, and then get them to your website. And then maybe if you did a really great job, 1 in 50 people will buy. That’s what’s so tough about it, because Amazon, everyone on Amazon has an extremely high buyer intent. I didn’t go to Amazon, you know, because I was looking for trivia, right? I went to Amazon with the intent to search for a product. It’s high intent customers and that’s cool. But that’s Amazon’s customer, not yours. Right. And so I think that’s always. We’ve built a number of Shopify stores for people who were very successful on Amazon, and that that’s the thing they always underestimate.

Kurt Elster 00:08:53  It’s like, is building that sales funnel, acquiring it, because either you’re going to hire someone to figure out pay per click ads for you, or you’re going to spend some money figuring it out on your own. And honestly, I don’t I think both approaches are correct. Like, you probably want to burn some money figuring it out on your own so that you could be comfortable speaking the language. When you’re you’re talking to an agency or a freelancer or someone else that you hire to manage those Facebook ads for you. Now, what’s nice is you own the customer. You own the experience. You are responsible for everything except maybe fulfillment. You could have. You can use fulfilled by Amazon and have them, do the fulfillment off your Shopify store. I think that part’s cool. I’ve set that up. Not it’s not as tough as you think.

Josh Hadley 00:09:32  Yeah, I like that, Curt. So I love that you’ve got these experiences where what you’re saying is just because you open up your Shopify storefront doesn’t mean everybody’s going to come rushing now.

Josh Hadley 00:09:41  Right. And to your point, I think that people do undervalue the immense amount of high, intense search traffic that Amazon brings to brings to the table. And they know it. And they know that, like, you ain’t got nowhere else to go. Right? And so for them, don’t.

Kurt Elster 00:09:55  Try shopping on Walmart. Let me know how it goes. That Walmart Marketplace are brutal.

Josh Hadley 00:09:59  But what what else do you expect if you are the business? If you are the CEO of Amazon, would you not do the exact same thing? You’re like, we’re giving free handouts to everybody. Like we could we could increase this until there’s some significant like pressure and pull back and we genuinely start losing market share. Maybe then I’m concerned. Right. So I think my rule of thumb is this guess what? Amazon fees are only going to continue to increase right until until something there’s truly a genuine competitor where Amazon feels like they’re losing market share. Amazon’s going to continue pushing that envelope. So appreciate what Amazon brings to the table.

Josh Hadley 00:10:30  But also at the same token I think it is wise once you get to a certain stage and maybe we can have that conversation. At what point is it worth it for a brand to maybe diversify onto Shopify? Because it sounds like from what you’re telling me, it’s kind of two very different kind of like skill sets you need to have. I know how the game of Amazon operates really well. I know the how to get the keywords built into my listings, how to have the I read the listings. I know how to target the right customers. I know my PPC advertising strategies. That’s Amazon, but sounds like Shopify is totally a in in a lot of ways, a very different ballgame. So at what point would you recommend somebody that had success on Amazon moving over to Shopify versus maybe doubling down on Amazon? Any thoughts there?

Kurt Elster 00:11:11  It’s all right. So this is a good question. And I’m not necessarily sure the right answer. But I’ve got a theory. And so when people have come to us that have successful Shopify stores it’s kind interesting.

Kurt Elster 00:11:20  They always they’re never necessarily mad about the fees. It’s that they’ll have heard a story from like a forum from a friend that in which the person is like, hey, here’s the problem we had with Amazon and basically our very successful business. And it’ll be like a misunderstanding. You know, there’s always a reason, right? It’s never anybody’s fault. they lost the sales temporarily. Permanently. You know what? They hit a very painful hiccup. Yep.

Josh Hadley 00:11:40  They got suspended or for whatever reason. Yeah.

Kurt Elster 00:11:43  Okay. And I’m sure if it wasn’t their fault, it never is. The. And that spooks them like it’s not happened to them. It’s happened to someone they know and they saw it and they’re like, oh, you know it can happen to them. It can happen to me. And so the oftentimes that like the the Shopify store that could spun up is just a, a result of trying to diversify risk. And it’s, you know, the danger of having a business with a single income stream.

Kurt Elster 00:12:04  If you sell on Amazon and you have like a single hero product, guess what? That’s a really risky business. because that listing doesn’t sell anymore. You run out of inventory, something happens or it gets suspended. So you got a problem versus all right, now, if I have it on Shopify, okay, I’m in more control. I still have to abide by Shopify is acceptable use policy. I still have to not upset the payment processors. Right. but it’s going to be I think there’s a little there’s less scrutiny and less shenanigans than you see with Amazon. and you now, okay, you own the customer, right? You can follow up with them is really the value after the first purchase I can email them. Okay. Great. But I want so when should I do that? I mean I think immediately if you have the brand name, try and secure the domain name. It doesn’t cost very much. There’s not no reason not to do that. And all right, if I get that brand name, you know, maybe just having the or I get that domain name.

Kurt Elster 00:12:51  If I have that, maybe it’s not a bad idea to spin up just a basic Shopify store, you know, or even something that has a little bit of content that for SEO value, if I can age that domain name that has some some value to it, some trust versus like I spin up the store all in one go and try to make sales 48 hours later a little tougher. you could use it as like a support portal or what? We’ve seen a lot of people do registration, right. I’ve got you send out the product and then you have to potentially it has a warranty. Okay. Well, how do I know the details of what’s going on here? Like the proof that the customer bought this. Right. So make a product registration form on your site. Have that as a pack in with a QR code on the Amazon product that they receive. Okay. Registered. Activate your warranty. Now if there is a problem with product okay, you could get in touch with them directly.

Kurt Elster 00:13:31  But ideally you have a checkbox and you can’t force them into this. It has to be voluntary, right? We don’t want to. The FTC has no new guidelines for these things, but optionally you let them get into your email list when they register the product. And so then, oh, right now I can siphon some of those Amazon customers and maybe on their repeat purchase. Now, if they’re on my email list, I can start selling to them. And so that could be a way to kind of like hybrid approach, let it naturally figure out when it’s going to happen. Like, all right, let’s say we buy some wild domain name or some wild extension 50 bucks a year. The most domain names are going to be 50 bucks a year. And then the, you know, hosting that Shopify store 80 bucks a month. If I’m on one of the fancier plans, there are cheaper plans than that. And then we just have to have, you know, a form on that site and then maybe that post to like Google Sheets.

Kurt Elster 00:14:14  And so now I’ve got my registration. Well, maybe we just watch that and as if traffic starts to go up or we start to see, you know, like, all right, it’s when I hit a thousand registrations, then we’re going to, we’re going to spend the time and build out a proper Shopify store. That might be a good way to do it. Yeah. Set yourself up for success with just a little bit of effort and work iteratively. Trying to do everything all at once is rough.

Josh Hadley 00:14:34  Yeah, I like that. And I really like the idea. Kurt as well is securing your domain name. So as early as you possibly can. So basically my recommendation would be as soon as you file that trademark registration, go and claim that domain name. Plus you should probably be looking like can I purchase the dotcom domain name of whatever term I’m trying to trademark to begin with? I think that’s wise and prudent. I remember so our brand as an example here, we started, we picked our brand name and we were doing custom wedding invitations to start off with.

Josh Hadley 00:15:01  Right. And then it wasn’t until like six months later they were like, we should have a website because we were just doing like, friends and family, right? Okay. And then it was like, oh crap, that dotcom is taken, right?

Kurt Elster 00:15:09  So many of them are. You got to get creative.

Josh Hadley 00:15:11  But then what we ended up doing is, well, we a sat on it for a while. We’re just like, all right. So we’ll build in an extra word is had the custom designs. So we’re like okay extra word in there. But we started having some success with like doing some Facebook ad traffic. And so all of a sudden and same thing on Instagram, there began to be a lot of search volume for just Hadley Designs itself. And what ended up happening is whoever owned that domain name, I can’t believe they ever got rid of it. But one day I just checked and it was available, but it was available for like $5,000. I was like, oh crap.

Josh Hadley 00:15:42  so we ended up having to pay it because all these guys, you know, they just sit on it’s it’s just like they’re speculating on land, essentially. Right? They’re speculating on these domain names, saying.

Kurt Elster 00:15:49  Oh, I hate it.

Josh Hadley 00:15:50  Here’s the Google search traffic. And because of this search traffic, I bet there’s a brand owner sitting behind it that’s going to want to acquire this domain name. So I’m going to jack up the price. So anyways, there’s my just short story to say. Like when you have that good idea for that brand name, get your domain name, then file your trademark. So I like that. And then Kurt, I also love your recommendation. Just like open up a basic Shopify storefront just so it starts getting some history behind it, right? That Google’s like, okay, this didn’t just show up yesterday. Do I trust it? Do I not trust it? And I also think it adds credibility to your your even your Amazon sales. Right. I was gonna say people might check, okay.

Kurt Elster 00:16:24  Google your brand name if there’s nothing there. Yeah. That doesn’t look as good as, hey, they at least have a presence and oh, look like I could register my warranty and I could submit a warranty claim here. And there’s, like an FAQ. You know, there’s at least, like, really? I think initially it should just be a customer support portal for the purpose of trust building, both with the customer and Google.

Josh Hadley 00:16:40  I like that. So all right. Great Kurt. So we’ve we’ve checked this box off the list I like that I want to spend some time on the juicier details, which I think you have a lot of experience with, at least with the number of brands that you’ve worked with. I would imagine that among all the Shopify stores, they all have very different ways that they are filling their top of funnel traffic to their storefront. And so that is, I think, where the missing pieces for a lot of these Amazon first brands, they don’t have to worry about traffic.

Josh Hadley 00:17:07  They’re not they’re marketers, but they’re not marketers in the sense of I’m going after cold traffic and having to stop the scroll on Facebook or whatever it is that somebody else is doing to push them over somewhere else. So with that being said, Kurt, let’s dive in. What do you see amongst all of the brands as some of the most successful ways that people are building their top of funnel traffic to their Shopify stores?

Kurt Elster 00:17:29  Well, so it’s still it’s still meta. Zuckerberg still owns this, right? For most stores, it’s going to be Facebook and Instagram ads. And then number one, just I don’t have to know anything about the store to know that’s what it probably is, especially if it’s apparel, fashion and apparel. Oh my gosh, live and die by it. and so that becomes a new thing that you have to understand and master. But then additionally, so that number one, it’s always it’s always better. Number two, I’m like, right now I’m just thinking of an eight figure store, that we work with that as a wild experiment, cut their ad spend in on meta in half, and then cut it in half again, and then dropped it to zero for 30 days.

Kurt Elster 00:18:03  And they’re like, let’s just see what happens. You guys are maniacs. Please don’t do this. They did it anyway. And the world did not end because they had a, it turns out, a fabulous SEO footprint. So there was a lot of just people searching for the brand name or product and then landing on the site, but that’s not a thing you could do overnight, right? Like SEO is planting a garden minimum. It’s like six months before that that takes effect. And in this case, that’s been around a decade. and then email, it’s like they have the list. And so I don’t necessarily need traffic to fill my top funnel, like at least not from the web. I could email people and those are much more qualified, interested parties because they at some point raised their hand and said, yeah, I want to hear from you. And they have to like take action in theory on the email in their inbox. Open it, ignore it, click it, delete it.

Kurt Elster 00:18:45  But they still had to have at least thought about it. And I think it’s easy to talk yourself out of doing email as a channel. This way, when the reality is like the content of the email often doesn’t really matter. It’s just like I just you just want to be top of mind, you know, on the off chance that the person was like, oh yeah, I was going to check that story. Oh yeah, I did need to reorder that thing. I need more coffee, tea, whatever. so I think like those for sure, a great email program, but that assumes that you have the emails. That’s why I like that warranty, that registration idea. to try and build that email list early. You’re never going to regret building an email list. The meta ads. But like, man, it’s tough because you’re going to just accept that you’re going to burn money trying to figure it out initially. and that’s frustrating. And I get it. And then, Google shopping, Google shopping can be like, it’s so straightforward.

Kurt Elster 00:19:27  It takes the creativity out of it. It’s just like, what’s your catalog? You know, mostly to you fighting with Google’s arcane error messages to figure out what’s missing from your catalog like age, condition, whatever. And you know, once you finally get through that, then Google shopping. Somebody’s going to want to strangle me for this. It just kind of works, right? It doesn’t have the same creative subjectivity that interruption style ads work. And the assumption is similar to Amazon. If they’re seeing that shopping ad, it’s because they searched like a high intent keyword phrase that matches, you know, like men’s ten and a half red wing boots. And you happen to sell those. Okay, clearly that’s what I was looking for. You weren’t. I wasn’t scrolling through my ex’s Instagram, and then I get interrupted by a cool video of boots. I’m like, oh, shop now, right as I’m on the couch. That’s the difference. so yeah, email meta, Google shopping. I think it’s those.

Kurt Elster 00:20:10  And then for some some brands, I have seen success with, podcast advertising where they’ll like, they’ll have a conversion pixel like iHeartMedia. We’ll do this or iHeart radio, I think the the podcaster that’ll do it. The podcast network. and they’ll put then you have like your conversion pixel and so you can actually track the success of it. And assuming you get like again you know, right ad right Joe. but those could be surprisingly successful as well. We’ve seen a lot of that, you know, higher end podcast advertising in the last 18 months.

Josh Hadley 00:20:38  Fascinating, I love that. All right, Kurt, so I’ve got Facebook and Instagram ads. Would you even throw in TikTok ads in there for sure.

Kurt Elster 00:20:45  The, you know, TikTok ads is a TikTok shop. You know that one. Just TikTok is so there. Your content has to look native, right? Like you, you need something that works. And you if you just start advertising on TikTok with no experience with short form video, I think you’re going to have a bad time if even if you don’t have that, if you can acknowledge it and then just go and like start researching by going through hashtags, trying to find similar stuff and then go, all right, like, what are these successful videos like that that relate to me, and what can I learn from that? And then try and do that yourself.

Kurt Elster 00:21:16  But right now you’re learning to edit video, which I think at this point probably an indispensable skill is to be able to edit video. At least everybody’s got a smartphone in their pocket and it’s got it probably has extraordinary quality. Like there’s really not a lot of excuses anymore to to not shooting video. Yeah, yeah I mean it works.

Josh Hadley 00:21:33  They are different though I think to your point though, I think there are some times where an ad does well, maybe on Facebook and Instagram. That’s not like a short form type of video. So you can’t just like copy and paste your Facebook Instagram ad over to TikTok. Now, maybe if they’re both short form videos, maybe they might work. But yeah, you’re right, I think like trying. Yeah. You got to test right the.

Kurt Elster 00:21:53  Yeah. And so no. All right. Well let’s.

Josh Hadley 00:21:56  Okay. So that’s number one okay. number two you also talked about SEO. So but from your perspective you’re saying like this is going to take you at least six months for the brand that did, well, turning off Facebook meta ads.

Josh Hadley 00:22:08  you said they’ve been around for ten years. What type of SEO are you referring to? Like, if I’m a Shopify store owner, I need to have a bunch of blog articles written on my site. Or where is this SEO coming from and how do you help?

Kurt Elster 00:22:21  It’s text content, right? When we say SEO, it’s got to be text content. and ideally it’s got to be educational or like very clear instructional. How to here’s a primer. It’s someone has a question, you’re trying to answer it. That’s like where the ideal SEO works, I think, where people get tripped up in any kind of organic content, especially educational, is they go like pure salesy. Don’t be Billy Mays, right. You can link to your stuff, you can retarget people through Facebook, through meta. You can have people sign up for the newsletter to get more info. You can even have like a content upgrade. Hey, get our PDF guide right with even more info. And then, you know, then you have captured that customer potentially, or that prospective customer.

Kurt Elster 00:22:59  The long form educational content works well, especially if it’s like a more expensive purchase. you know, I knew a guy who was really successful with e-bikes during the pandemic, you know, who wasn’t, but like, this guy was on was top of all these search results. And it’s because he had a 2000 word primer that was like, here’s everything you need to know about buying an e-bike. And it was like he had become an expert on it. He sold the things he’d never ridden one. It was like years before he ever wrote an e-bike. It’s funny, but he knew everything. So he wrote, you know, 2000 word article about it. And then you start chopping that up and you start doing variations on that and making it more specific so that it pops up and answers people’s questions. And when you’re leading with, like, hey, education, you’re automatically more trustworthy than the person who’s leading with trying to sell you something because no one’s your buddy who helped you out. And the other one is like some dude yelling at you at a street corner, like by my teacher.

Kurt Elster 00:23:44  I got a whole trunk full of them. Give you a credit card? I’m good. Thank you. And so I, creating the content. But the problem is, when you make the content initially, you really don’t know what’s going to be successful and what isn’t. My wife is a Disney World blogger. And the stuff that’s like, that’s been successful and the stuff that’s like, cited, cited by newspapers. Stunning. Never what we would have guessed like one is just like, hey, where are the princess meets? Is it not, you know, where do you meet them? Not like, where do you find their daily meets? like where the princess meets. That was like in, USA today or somebody quoted it and that was like a number one page, or there was one that was like the Disney for Parks Challenge, where you try to hit all four parks in a day. That’s number one last month. Okay. It’s never the stuff we think. And that’s the problem with is like, you got to publish so much to figure out what works.

Kurt Elster 00:24:26  There’s a shotgun approach here. And that’s kind of the theme here is experiment until you find you push the right button, whether that’s meta ads, subject lines, short form videos, blogging no matter what. It’s a lot. It’s either a lot of time or a lot of money either way. And so where do you prioritize? I think you just pick the format, the medium, the thing you’re most comfortable with at first.

Josh Hadley 00:24:42  I like that. That’s that’s good recommendation and I like that we’re digging it. We’re diving into these rabbit holes just to uncover like how much work actually happens in these areas. And that’s what I want to help you know the listeners understand. Right. If you’re like, oh, you know, this SEO thing, I’m just going to take my Amazon listing and just plug it into my description. Surely those keywords are going to populate and that’s SEO, right? And the way you start.

Kurt Elster 00:25:05  To tell people like, hey, with Amazon, sellers have phenomenal product descriptions. So I usually start with like, all right, let’s just take all of that.

Kurt Elster 00:25:11  And we’re putting this in a Shopify theme, right. Like you already did the work. Let’s get it all in there and then maybe work a better layout out of it or like tweak a little bit so it doesn’t feel quite so Amazon like there’s definitely a look to the Amazon listings. I think that’s a good start. But then, like outside of the product page, the Amazon brands, I always say the content is thin. It feels thin. You know, like I want it about people want to know who they’re buying from, especially when they’re buying direct and potentially like that’s why people Google you Google the Amazon seller before they make a purchase. It’s like, who is this? Who am I buying from? People buy from people, not brands. I think that’s why celebrity spokespeople exist, you know? Yeah, target’s just a circle and a noun. Meaningless. But you attach a celebrity to it. Somebody funny, a brand name, someone you can relate to. It makes it easier to make a purchase.

Kurt Elster 00:25:52  Small businesses have a huge advantage here, where they try to hide themselves because they think that’s what will make them look bigger. Like know present yourself as this small business as who you are, I think makes you trustworthy. I like those, those founder driven, founder led brands. The and it’s like, all right, they’re about us. Your recommendations. That starts to give you a story. And I bet there’s a lot of info in your head and you get a lot of common questions. Okay. That’s where you start for your blog articles, your primer, like whatever that is. And you don’t have to be great at writing. Like you could just transcribe it and then have ChatGPT copy of it for you, but God help me do not have GPT write the initial draft. It’s not creative. It isn’t, and it makes stuff up. But it’s phenomenal copy editing and it’s really good at it. Like that’s its skill. It’s just arranging words. And so I like that approach. Like, you may hate writing, it may feel like schoolwork, but you’re an expert at something.

Kurt Elster 00:26:35  Dictate that and then have to rewrite that for you.

Josh Hadley 00:26:38  I love that. And and to that point, I think the challenge that Amazon brand owners would have is that, look, success on Amazon, you’re getting instant feedback constantly, right? I launch a product, I’m running ads, and I can know within 24 hours what might how well my ads are performing. I know in general, the first seven days or 30 days after I launch a product, whether that’s going to be a winner or a loser, right? Like I can know very quickly. All right, I’ve got $1 million product on my hand or yeah, this one’s not going to be very good. Let’s move on to the next one. Right. I think the challenge here with especially the blog articles is like you’re playing this infinite long game and you’re not going to know what what will get picked up because it may take literally years. And the one blog article that you wrote five years ago about where the Disney princesses meet, or something like that is going to get picked up by a bigger publication or Google indexes.

Josh Hadley 00:27:30  It loves it, you know, whatever it is. Or maybe I indexes it and picks it up in perplexity, blah blah blah, right?

Kurt Elster 00:27:36  I love perplexity, that’s like replace Google for me. Yeah. There was a time that that Disney World blog site where if you Google Disney World Covid restrictions, she had done a better job of Disney at explaining it. And so Google gave. She was like not only number one, it had like the snippet where like the content snippet before they did the AI overviews and that, that we didn’t expect that at all. You know, but you just, you make the content and you kind of set a calendar, like, all right, once you figure out the thing you’re good at, the thing that’s least painful for you to do or is like most accessible to you, then you you got to start doing it consistently. And so for me, it was like, I have to make publish a podcast weekly. And now I’ve been doing that for ten years.

Kurt Elster 00:28:10  Well, when you go, hey, I got 2 million downloads. That sounds really cool. Divide it by ten years of podcast episodes. And you see, it was like, oh, like, this guy’s just been just put. He’s got a bucket and a dropper. You know, an eye dropper to five gallon bucket. You do it. After ten years, you have a full bucket. You have to treat content the same way. Like, not everyone’s going to be a winner. But problem is, you don’t know which ones are going to be winners. Even with the podcast. To this day, I’m terrible at predicting the episodes that will be that will resonate, that will be very successful because the stuff I like is not necessarily what the audience likes. And, you know, you figure it out over time. But if you’re not, if you’re just talking yourself out of creating the content and doing the work, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Josh Hadley 00:28:42  Yeah, this this is great, I love this, but ultimately I think the the story is you’re going to have to dive in and do the work.

Josh Hadley 00:28:49  Right. So we’ve talked about the top two. So Facebook meta ads tick tock ads. We talked about SEO. And now let’s talk about email list. So okay an email list I loved your idea of look I don’t even care what product you sell. I highly recommend that you put on a registration like QR code, right? Or a product warranty. Even if you know you sell something as simple as, you know, paper cups, right? Does that need a warranty? Arguably, no. But if you have it on there right now. The conversions on this are extremely small, I realize that, but if you are, if you’re doing, let’s say you’re doing 100,000 units of sales every month, right? Like that can add up, especially if you’re just doing high volume products, paper cups, you know you’re still going to get some conversions. And this is I like the analogy of like even right now, if it’s just a drop in the bucket, right, like pick up the ten people that are going to subscribe per month or the 100 or the 1000, because that will build up over time.

Josh Hadley 00:29:44  What do you see working best in terms of email? Do you do you see much in terms of the clients that are doing really well with email versus not?

Kurt Elster 00:29:51  It’s fine. Email is is ubiquitous. You know, it’s part of the web. You know, it’s as natural to the internet as HTML links. It’s been around forever. And because of that, I think we take it for granted. And it’s also like it’s not trendy. It’s not sexy. Like TikTok shop is a very is the hot topic right now. So that’s what you hear about and that’s people chase trends. But the reality is all of these successful brands have are spending huge sums of money to maintain these huge email lists with very fancy, sophisticated CRM programs like Klaviyo is going to be the number one on Shopify. for starting out, you don’t have to jump straight to that. You can do Shopify email is a quite affordable, useful, accessible solution. And then that way everything lives in Shopify. but not without a doubt.

Kurt Elster 00:30:29  Every every 7 or 8 figure brand we work with has email automations in place, has email welcome flows in place, has email pop ups, and then is also sending campaign emails whether those are, you know, announcements and sales or ideally they’re mixed in with with product. Now, the counterintuitive thing, that I wish more people would do send plain text emails. They’re so easy. They’re so simple, and they’re way more effective. When I see the really glossy one that you had your designer spend a ton of time on, it’s like all JPEGs. I don’t even hit display images on it, right? I never even saw the damn thing. I just archive it and move on with my life versus the plain text email. It just appears it looks like an email from a friend. Ideally, you wrote it that way. You wrote it in the first person. Is you the owner? now you’re building a connection with someone, right? And you’re building trust. And ideally you’re getting feedback because that’s the kind of email people might reply to if they reply to it, or your inbox rate just went way up, so I think it’s easy.

Kurt Elster 00:31:16  Similar to the other content that’s easy to go like, oh, to overcomplicate it and then talk yourself out of it. And you know, my idea is like start simple. Build the email automations like cart abandonment. I just I want cart abandonment. I want to win back campaign. And I want to welcome flow, whether that’s one email, 3 or 10, you know, do what you can to support. And it doesn’t have to be fancy design. It could just it could be plain text that may even perform better. Yeah. Has been my experience. And so I think it is I think it’s table stakes. I think email is 100% requirement if we’re where it’s like number one, register your domain name to spin up a website so we can with some customer support stuff. So we could we could start building that portal. Then number three I think is build, start capturing emails and build some email flows.

Josh Hadley 00:31:53  Yeah, I like that. And I think that the other thing that you can do through email is actually drive home your brand story.

Josh Hadley 00:31:59  Right?

Kurt Elster 00:32:00  Because the welcome.

Josh Hadley 00:32:01  Flow. Yep. You can tell people who you are. And one of my favorite things, especially if you’re a founder led, you know, brand owner, right. Tell the story. And I love. One of the things that we’ve done is like, my wife will record just like, hey, this is what’s going on in our personal life, right? And record it posted on as like a YouTube short or whatever. And then one of the email channels we’ve been using as of late is just beehive plain text emails. And it it allows us to like, embed a link to YouTube so that it would automatically play if people click on it. Right. And people just love the updates. And now are we game changing?

Kurt Elster 00:32:34  You’re being your real people. You’re not being a brand and you’re it’s plain text like, wow, that makes life a lot easier to create that content, doesn’t it? It also makes it easier to consume ten times.

Josh Hadley 00:32:43  And and I feel like that connection to the brand is there.

Josh Hadley 00:32:46  Now, is this, providing game changing amounts of money to our business? No, not right now. But is it building our brand story as we try to transition our brand that is primarily been Amazon first for the past eight years to something that is going to be, you know, ideally, I would love Amazon to only be 30 to 50% of my sales because we’ve got wholesale and we’ve got Shopify and we’ve got Tick Tock Shop and we’ve got all these other sales platforms in channels that we’re on. But that only happens if I have a customer base that loves my brand, and then I can just tell them, like buy from us wherever you would like. Could be Shopify, could be Amazon, could be TikTok shop could be a retail partner. Right. And I feel like that’s that’s kind of the direction we’re going. And so we’re trying to play that that long game. And guess what? Creating a text based email like you talked about there Kurt, it is simple. And it’s something that you could do just every morning like send out an email, let people know what you’re doing, what products you’ve got going on, send out some surveys, like just simple stuff.

Josh Hadley 00:33:42  People love to be engaged. So anything else to add to that? Kurt.

Kurt Elster 00:33:46  No, I agree with all of that. I like the assessment.

Josh Hadley 00:33:48  Okay. All right. You talked about Google shopping and you said just get your products up there and deal with the weird nuances of Google being like, where’s the age information and stuff like that? How complicated or easy is it to replicate your basically your Shopify listings to Google Shopping?

Kurt Elster 00:34:03  Oh, so I mean, largely I do like if you have filled out all the extra fields, It just works. But it’s similar to fighting with an Amazon listing. There are requirements like this is what they need to know, and it has to be in this format and look this way. And so with Google Shopping, you can create a Google Merchant Center account, which is free. And then in Shopify they have there’s an official sales channel that you can add from Google. Or there’s I think that’s a good one to start with. And then if you’re like, if you need more customization, being able to mess with it.

Kurt Elster 00:34:30  They’re third party ones like Data Feed Watch and others the but within it really it’s like you’re going to submit it and then it’s going to tell you these are the products that are approved, these are the ones that are disapproved. And they’ll tell you why. And then once you know why, then you got to go figure it out. The problem is it’s like I find it’s descriptions of what the problem is. Sometimes it’s clear, other times it’s pretty obtuse. And like, you could tear your hair out trying to figure it out because you’re just like, I’m just gonna start changing stuff and then submit it and see if they ever changes the. And what’s interesting about it, they’ll, they’ll check they have like a bot that’ll add the products to cart and then go to checkout to make sure the shipping and tax info matches what you put in the feed. They’ll verify it. And so you can’t just be like, that’s close enough. Like it actually has to be correct, as it should be. But these things are complicated.

Kurt Elster 00:35:10  And by like the fifth time you’ve submitted it, I can see where people get frustrated. They’re like, yeah, it’s close enough.

Josh Hadley 00:35:14  Fascinating.

Kurt Elster 00:35:14  Yeah. Google shopping that one. I think I like it because it’s technical. You know, there’s no it either you either set it up or right and your listings are approved or you didn’t. And then you pick a budget for how much it’s going to spend. There’s it’s nowhere near as fiddly as all the controls and Facebook ads. And there’s the creative on it is really like, okay, what’s the title of the product and what’s the photo? It’s just gonna be what’s from the listing. and then within that, like there’s other there’s extensions you can add to it and like, you can have it show sales. and so you want to research those, but initially you just got to get the darn thing in Google shopping to try and get that high intent customers through. Now what your budget should be had, I don’t know. You know, what’s total advertising? How do we want to set it up? What kind of risk are we looking at? But whatever your your total ad spend is, it’s a tough one because it’s like if the Shopify store isn’t necessarily making money yet is our budget.

Kurt Elster 00:35:59  And let’s say our marketing budget should be like 15% of revenue, gross revenue 10 to 15%. Do we do that off with the stores making. But it’s not making any money yet. Or do we do it like off of what Amazon is making? But we’re potentially cannibalizing those sales? I’m not sure what the right answer is.

Josh Hadley 00:36:12  Yeah I like so and the idea that comes to me here is Amazon. So you as an Amazon seller cannot create Google Shopping listings unless you own the domain where that product is being sold. So the advantage is if Amazon is not putting your products into Google Shopping, which they’re the only ones that can okay. If you’re trying to drive traffic to Amazon, then the advantage and maybe the first step I would take as a Shopify store owner is, yep, set up my products on Shopify. Before I do meta ads, before I do blogging, I’m just going to get my products listed on Google, just as though it’s another marketplace, because it is. And I can copy and paste my same Amazon information because those same search terms are probably doing at least decently well on Google as they would be on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:36:54  So then you’ve got a channel at least, that, you know, Google can at least send some traffic to you that way, and you can play with the same type of the way when you do your Amazon PPC budgets. You’re looking at the tacos metric, right? My total advertising cost of sale. It’s 10 to 15% of your total revenue. Right. And so go in there with that mindset and be like, I’ve got to prove out this Google shopping experience just like I prove out. Does this work on Amazon? So maybe that would be an easier way for Shopify or Amazon brands. Transitioning to Shopify is just to maybe have that top of funnel start at Google, and then people would maybe more natively start searching for your brand. Do you like that strategy? What do you think?

Kurt Elster 00:37:33  I like it. This is the first time I’m hearing tacos. I was familiar with MERS media efficiency ratio.

Josh Hadley 00:37:38  Welcome to the world of Amazon. Tacos is a tacos. Is the word tacos acronym?

Kurt Elster 00:37:42  No.

Kurt Elster 00:37:42  I think that, I when you don’t know what you don’t know, frameworks are really helpful to, like, just make an initial decision to get you unstuck. And then as you gain the experience and get comfortable, then you can adjust. But I think initially that frameworks exist to give us permission and get us unstuck. And so if you have presented us with a framework to answer this question, I was unsure of how to approach by all means.

Josh Hadley 00:38:06  Yeah, I like that. All right. So Kurt my other. So another question before we get into the last one which is podcast advertising. Do you see brands doing well or do you have any experience with like the Shopify collective, which is where like other brands can basically sell your products on their their website? Oh, I think.

Kurt Elster 00:38:23  It’s so cool.

Josh Hadley 00:38:24  Tell me about it.

Kurt Elster 00:38:24  All right, I love any I was lucky enough that the team that built Shopify Collective while it was at beta, we’re like, hey, can we show it to you? And so like we were talking about it with them and I said, the thing I love about this, and really any Shopify feature that could do this is Shopify has so many merchants and so many stores that so many products can you leverage network effects out of that and like their shop pay, you know, where if I’ve made a purchase on a different Shopify store and then I go to your store, it can just auto complete my payment address.

Kurt Elster 00:38:50  That’s huge. That’s leveraging those network effects. Shopify collective, same thing. Any two stores can install Shopify Collective, and then essentially they can dropship for each other. Right. Like we have a client Abstract ocean. They sell Tesla accessories, and certainly they’re not the only Tesla accessory maker. And like different ones, specialize in different things. And so there’s another one called test Burros that they sell. They have overlap in their catalog but sell different things. And rather than try and make competing products, they just use Shopify Collective. And they they fill in each other’s catalog that way. And it’s like, all right, we’ll sell these, these items that we don’t make on our site from you and vice versa. And it it works phenomenally well. It’s like fairly plug and play. But you say these are the products that are eligible. The other person that pulls it into their store, like the whole listing, makes it so easy. And then once they sell it, when they go to fulfill it, it sends the fulfillment request back to the other Shopify store.

Kurt Elster 00:39:38  And oh, I think I love when I see merchants collaborate with each other and Shopify collected like this very much, much the spirit of it.

Josh Hadley 00:39:46  That’s fantastic. And so with Shopify Collective, basically you’re getting an affiliate commission, so to speak, when you sell that product. And if I feature some, some someone else’s brand product on my storefront, I’m going to earn a commission, but they handle the fulfillment of that product, right? So what is the average commission? Do you know?

Kurt Elster 00:40:04  Well, you set it up however you want. You know, what you’re comfortable with. And so in wholesale it’s typically they’re going to be like cost of goods is going to be 50% of MSRP. But it depends on category. But again it’s left up to the merchant to make that decision.

Josh Hadley 00:40:17  And so is Shopify Collective like a what does it look like? Is it a place where you just go and say like, hey, my products are available, I’m interested in partnering or like, are you going is there a list of brands that you could potentially partner with? And you’re like reaching out, you know, cold emails, DMing these people be like, hey, can we collaborate?

Kurt Elster 00:40:34  We’ve seen it.

Kurt Elster 00:40:37  the way we’ve seen it done is, hey, they have the relationship, but it’s just you go and you’re like, well, you know, we want to sell this, or would you consider selling this thing? Or like, hey, let’s, let’s sell each other’s goods. But you make that process so easy to say yes to by going, we’re both on Shopify. Did you know we can use Shopify Collective to just to to make this happen easily. And once that friction is gone, suddenly it gets much easier now. Is there like a way to search for people? Like, does it make it public? I’m looking at the Shopify Collective app installed in a store, and there’s it’s called this one’s a collective retailer. So there’s two versions of it and the collective retailer. Like as soon as you log into it, it says, hey, we you can discover new products to sell and you can search, and so you can opt to list as a supplier, you can opt to list your goods in, you know, this big collective marketplace that people could search in.

Kurt Elster 00:41:24  I think that’s the coolest thing ever. So you could find goods that way. if you want to find them outside of this. I’ve searched outside of the app, just in Google. The trick is to just add like info powered by Shopify. And often Shopify sites have powered by Shopify in the footer, so you can get it that way. But in this app you can search any, you can search for products that other people are offering and then even make suggestions like pick for you, increase AOV by adding. And this is for a site that sells Tesla accessories. Increase AOF by adding car emergency kit to pair with your best sellers and they have from two different sellers. They have these like roadside preparedness kits kind of which. All right, that would work. They’re not wrong.

Josh Hadley 00:41:59  That’s cool. All right, so it basically almost is like a marketplace where you can raise your hand, say, hey, you can have my products, and then I can also go search for anything that I want to complement my own store.

Kurt Elster 00:42:09  And you can even make it you can automate it to where they’ll give you, a sign up link that pre-approved suppliers to connect and share products with you. So you’re like, hey, you know, I see you’re on Shopify and I want to sell your stuff. Can you here’s the link and it’ll just like ask them, oh, did you want to make these available to them.

Josh Hadley 00:42:25  All right I.

Josh Hadley 00:42:26  See a lot of potential with Shopify Collective. So I like that option. All right. Last but not least Kurt you talked about Shopify or sorry podcast advertising to drive traffic to Shopify. What have you seen working there.

Kurt Elster 00:42:38  Okay. So the there are networks of publishers out there. You know, many people there’s solo podcasters like ourselves, but lots of folks who publish as part of a larger network. And then within that, that network has to make money, and they do it by selling ads. And they they’ll also have systems set up in place where they could do dynamic insertion of your ads into a different programs.

Kurt Elster 00:42:56  And so again, it’s the same gamble as the other creatives, you know, like TikTok ads or Facebook ads or whatever. But if you can get the right, if you get the right, the right magic words in your ad and then run these in podcast advertising, the the what is it? The recall is extraordinary. I think I have the tip or I have this written here. Oh yeah, it was Nielsen. Nielsen found that top of mind brand awareness for popular brands was 70% among podcast listeners. And podcast audiences are the most engaged. There are. And a lot of that’s because of of the host. Right. And if you could get a host read ad that’s going to be more expensive than the dynamic insertion, but a host read ad drives the most brand recall. So that’s I think about the context there. The if I’m on Instagram, I’m just I’m just scrolling endlessly and hopefully the person stops scrolling for a second and a half, goes to my website, then bounces. That’s going to be the majority of the experiences versus podcasts.

Kurt Elster 00:43:49  You’re at the gym, you’re mowing your lawn, walking your dog, doing the dishes, driving your car, and listening to something you enjoy, right? Your mind is you’re generally going to be actively listening to it. It’s just a different medium and format. But the downside to it, if I’m driving in my car listening to this thing, I can’t go click like I can’t just then, I mean, I could it’s not a great idea. Go make a purchase.

Josh Hadley 00:44:09  Yeah, yeah, I love this, especially as a podcast host.

Kurt Elster 00:44:13  So I do podcast hosts like, yeah, high five. We’re the coolest.

Josh Hadley 00:44:16  I’m a big fan of podcasts obviously, so this has been such an inspiring conversation. Kurt, I’ve absolutely loved this. We could record for probably another hour, but we’ve got to bring the show to a wrap here, so I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are my three actionable takeaways. You let me know if I’m missing something. If you’re a successful Amazon brand owner action item number one, I would recommend at least getting your Shopify store up and running as soon as possible, even if it’s with a basic template and basic images.

Josh Hadley 00:44:46  You’re not too worried about SEO. Like acquire that domain and just start creating some history behind it, right? So the A you have some credibility when people search for you on Amazon. but you also have credibility when people are just googling that brand when they order it. thus you also had the idea of having that product warranty registration. So that’s as simple as that first version of your Shopify site should be, would be to just be it more, support related. Right. You’re assisting anybody that might have had issues with their Amazon order. So that’s that’s action item number one. Now action item number two, you want to start actually implementing or start generating some sales onto your Shopify store. Here would be my recommendations based off of what you discussed today. The easiest, lowest hanging fruit I would recommend would be do the Google Shopping integration. Okay, because you’ve already got your product titles, descriptions and all the stuff you need for Amazon. So replicate it there onto Google that can generate you some sales.

Josh Hadley 00:45:40  In addition, I love the low hanging fruit, potentially of the Shopify Collective. Allow other people that maybe have dedicated email channels. They’ve got really good Facebook ads. They’ve got really good blog articles that are already driving traffic to their site, but they’re willing to offer your product even if it’s at a 40% commission, you’re going to pay them. It’s the same as Amazon. They’re bringing the traffic to you. Why not take that extra sale? Right. So those would be my lowest hanging fruits to get started. Because if you want to really ramp things up and I think scale on Shopify, you’ve got some big hurdles to overcome, which is the amount of work and time and energy that it’s going to take and the money investment, especially to create and refine yourself for meta ads and TikTok ads and for blogging, you’re just you’re you’re waiting a long period of time for those to pay off. Okay. So those would be my recommended actions there. My third and final recommendation is to play the long game here and understand that on Shopify it is a different animal.

Josh Hadley 00:46:37  You need to approach it with a very different mindset. And the most successful Shopify store owners that I know of. Guess what? They have dedicated blog teams that create amazing blog articles Because they know that’s where their traffic comes from, but they’re pushing out tons massive amounts of content. In addition, the people that are doing really well with Facebook and meta ads, those guys are testing hundreds of pieces of different content every single week. So if you’re thinking like you’re going to figure it out with by just like creating a few pieces of content per month and you’re going to strike gold and you think you’re going to you’re going to take that brand to the moon, it’s probably not going to happen. Like understanding the scale at what other successful people are doing helps provide that, that observation or what really takes to require in order to succeed there. So anything else that you feel like I missed there? I think you’ve.

Kurt Elster 00:47:25  Just put together the the SOP, the standard operating procedure for Amazon sellers or like all right, now you got to start brand building direct to consumer via Shopify, my own channel.

Kurt Elster 00:47:33  I think you just laid it all out.

Josh Hadley 00:47:35  All right. Well Kurt’s words there’s the SOP for you getting on there. So that’s what we’re trying to execute right now Kurt. My favorite time is to ask these three questions to ever guess. So number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Kurt Elster 00:47:47  Yeah In an instructional How-To manual called How to Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck. I bought this several years ago. I found it in Barnes and Noble, and it was the first time that I felt comfortable editing video like I had experienced as a photographer. I love the gear that like, the hard part is, how do you actually make something with all those toys? And we’ve all got the phones in our pockets now that are usually can be as good as a DSLR. But then what do you do? How do you make video that doesn’t suck as this booklet or how to shoot video that doesn’t suck? well, it gives you like a really easy to use, step by step walkthrough and exercises on figuring out.

Kurt Elster 00:48:20  And now I’m very comfortable with editing video and shooting video coming up with a concept. and I think as of 2025, you if you’re selling online, I don’t think of a choice anymore.

Josh Hadley 00:48:29  100% agree. Yeah. I think that skill is going to be a timeless skill. It’s only going to be adopted more and more. So love that. All right Kurt. Question number two. What’s your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using and why.

Kurt Elster 00:48:40  All right. So it’s ChatGPT. But the butt is like all the time fine. But you can get it to work inside Google Sheets. And there’s some like Chrome extensions that’ll do it that. They’re overpriced I just with a little bit of app add on code and the ChatGPT API. I’ve got this thing for pennies writing SEO titles, SEO meta descriptions for thousands of products in a Shopify catalog. Right? That’s often an overlooked thing. Pages, blog posts, products, collections can all have a unique meta description and title for Google to show, and it should probably have a call to action.

Kurt Elster 00:49:11  And so I’ve I don’t want to write that. I have to do it. And it takes it like a few minutes on a thousands of products cost me like a few dollars. And then I upload it back into Shopify. And now, in theory, when someone searches for a product that we rank for, they’ll see this like succinct meta description that probably ends with, like, you know, click to learn more. Right. And that makes a big difference in click through rate to get people to the site. I once I figured that out earlier this year, I’ve been doing that all summer. And those sites are seeing SEO benefit from it.

Josh Hadley 00:49:37  That’s brilliant I love that. All right. That’s that’s a that’s a wicked smart hack there, Kurt I love that we could have a podcast just on that. All right. Last question. Who is somebody you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following in? You.

Kurt Elster 00:49:49  All right. At the risk of being in chaos, I’m going to go with Shopify President Harley Finkelstein, because the man has demonstrated over and over his willingness to bend over backwards to help merchants and help Shopify partners in that ecosystem.

Kurt Elster 00:50:04  Years ago, I would have been like, yeah, you know, obviously, like he has he’s got a dog in the fight here and it’s in his best interest. Like, I would have taken it with a grain of salt. But, you know, I’ve talked to the man enough times. He’s helped me enough times and I’ve seen him help friends and merchants and other people enough times that I’m like this guy when he says that he’s passionate about entrepreneurship.

Josh Hadley 00:50:20  100% genuine love that great recommendation. All right, Kurt, if people want to learn more about you, they want to follow your story, your podcast, where can people find you?

Kurt Elster 00:50:30  Well, of course, Google Me will test my SEO. Kurt Elster, realtor.com. You can grab my newsletter there. I’ve got links to everything else there. Or search the unofficial Shopify podcast wherever you get your podcast.

Josh Hadley 00:50:39  I love that, Kurt. This has been an amazing conversation. Thanks so much for your time today. Thank you.