speaker-0: Man, it’s a play that you can just keep on doing, I guess. It’s with movies, it’s with technology, it’s with everything. So

speaker-2: If you want to kind of see what’s next in commerce when you’re in a market that isn’t unfortunately like the American market, you can just look to that market, see what are the apps that people are adopting and reach out to them and try to use them on your store in these international markets. Honesty Commerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start. Grow and scale an online business today. ⁓ hey, all of you people coming in live from dot dev, ⁓ another episode of Honest E-Commerce. Today I am welcomed by not one, but two amazing partners in the Shopify ecosystem. And that’s what I really want to dive into with today’s conversation. Yap is joining us from the app side of things. He is the founder of Upsell Plus. I’ve also got Sam. Joining us from Dear Digital, an international Shopify partner, ⁓ and excited to talk about what makes Sappi so special, why we chose to dedicate too much of our lives to this platform ⁓ and build here and grow here, make some awesome partnerships and awesome friends in this community. ⁓ so as we dive in, I guess I’ll start with you, Yap, because you’re the furthest from me. What’s the quick introduction to your product and how you kind of ended up in this Shopify ecosystem?

speaker-1: I think it starts a couple of years ago. ⁓ I used to work at a bite out by layer company. ⁓ and through doing that, I got to know the Shopify ecosystem. It was clear that among the e-commerce platforms, Shopify was growing the quickest. More specifically, Shopify Plus. we by doing that, we learned that the checkout is a place they care about a ton. And customizing that checkout makes a big difference, right? It’s the speed, it’s the customizations, it’s the experience. ⁓ that makes a person click buy or drop off. ⁓ and so that’s how we got into the ecosystem. We saw an opportunity to build customizations for the Shopify Plus checkouts. That’s where our product started. Now it grew to all the extension points across the Shopify storefront, ⁓ which allows merchants to customize, optimize, and generate revenue ⁓ from recommendations and customizations.

speaker-2: Absolutely. And Sam, ⁓ when did you first, you know, get into the Shopify ecosystem? When did you first hear about it? So

speaker-0: Actually, we had our own ⁓ e-commerce company. So we sold ⁓ furniture before. ⁓ and we did it on Shopify. So basically we grew it from zero, we started to sell desks online. Yeah. I remember. Yeah. On ⁓ we had like a crowdfunding, right? Yes. And ⁓ probably you bought it there. And then we moved to Shopify Plus, then our company actually got acquired by an American company. They were on Magento, and that’s sweet. We were on Shopify and Udo.

speaker-1: Bought one.

speaker-0: ⁓ and so after the acquisition we got acquired again. So it was becoming a big ⁓ American corporation. It was a bit too big for us, and then we started an agency and we fell back to our old love, which was Shopify and Udoo. So that’s what we’re actually doing today. We ⁓ implement Shopify and Udoo. ⁓ yeah, and that’s how we got into the ecosystem.

speaker-2: And how long ago did the agency start at

speaker-0: ⁓ five years and a half ago and ⁓ four years before that I was working on my own e commerce company.

speaker-2: Absolutely. And I wanted to ask that because ⁓ you’re coming to us from the European perspective. You’re not necessarily a lot of the merchants or even the folks that work with Shopify listening or watching right now live, ⁓ they’re dealing with e-commerce and Shopify in the American or Canadian market, which I would say is a little further ahead than the European market as far as adoption of Shopify as a solution to commerce problems. ⁓ so could you explain a a bit more to the audience about kind of the what how you have to approach Shopify as a solution in Europe versus what might just be like expected solves in America? Yeah.

speaker-0: A very interesting and broad question. we do see or I heard I think last year when I was here that Shopify actually was the biggest in Europe. I think I I’m not quoting this out of numbers that that I know, but

speaker-2: As far as percentage base of ⁓ people using the platform versus other e commerce platforms? ⁓

speaker-0: ⁓ no, like for Shopify, Europe is the biggest market as of last year. But maybe I’m not framing up. Yeah. So but or the most growth or like ⁓ like what I’m saying I think is is ⁓ I heard last year that for Shopify Europe was a very big market, but you’re a hundred percent right that Europe is very much ⁓ yeah, it just differs a lot from America. It’s like America is one market, right? One big market, one ⁓ currency. And we dealt with that when we had our own c e-commerce company. So we worked together with the American ⁓ guys. They were like, How complex can stuff be in Europe? Like, why do you have different kinds of currencies and different kinds of VATs and different kinds of electricity sockets and stuff? So ⁓ Shopify needed quite a lot of maturity to try and power all of those things. But now you see with markets, etc. They actually played very ⁓ smartly into that trend. ⁓ but I think it’s actually true also with a lot of things that we see here around POS. Like obviously the the top examples, they’re actually in America, so we can learn quite a lot from European perspective from ⁓ the Americans or the Northern American people.

speaker-1: People, it’s a great hack. You look at the US and then you go and implement it in Europe.

speaker-0: Man, it’s a play that you can just keep on doing, I guess. It’s with movies, it’s with technology, it’s with everything. So yeah, that’s interesting for us. ⁓ but yeah, ⁓ I don’t know if that answered your question more or less, but ⁓

speaker-2: It did. And I think that Yap kind of took my ⁓ golden nugget that I was gonna take out of there from me. It was that if you want to kind of see what’s next in commerce when you’re in a market that isn’t unfortunately like the American market, you can just look to that market, see what are the apps that people are adopting and reach out to them and try to use them on your store in these international markets, which is my complete segue, the Yap, talking about internationalization with upsell plus, ⁓ when did that become important? You know, how what what would struggles were did you guys have to kind of overtake with engineering or with ⁓ you know, language barriers, with obviously the hundreds of different payments and types of payments across the world. How does that play into this upsell app?

speaker-1: What the funny thing is our first customer ever was a Dutch company. ⁓ Exter is a wallet, like the rich of Europe. ⁓ and so it immediately gave us a lot of feedback for the internationalization. They’re like, We need languages, we need different currencies. And that ability was kind of baked in from the start. Of course it was limited, it was euros and dollars, it was ⁓ Dutch, French, English, like pretty basic start. ⁓ but then we expanded from there. The interesting thing is that the European merchants are quite patient. ⁓ they’re willing to wait. ⁓ well, I think the US merchants are sometimes like I wanted it yesterday. but if you take that even like a level higher, what we’re seeing is that the product adoption in the US is just quicker. we see that in we recently launched a post purchase ⁓ ad network, Upsell Plus Earn. And in the US, that’s very known. ⁓ people know what this is, right? It’s it’s seeing ⁓ offers on the thank you and order confirmation page. In Europe, that’s very nascent, it’s new. It exists, but it’s not as familiar. ⁓ so you we just see that the adoption of new functionality that Shopify launches the market puts forward or that we put forward ⁓ are adopted a lot quicker by the US merchants. They’re willing to experiment and it’ll give candid feedback. ⁓ well, we see the European brands are more like, hey, this is all great, but let’s just do the basics and we’ll see if we want to try something else ⁓ later. of course markets helped a ton. ⁓ when Shopify launched markets, it solved a lot of our problems. ⁓ that we didn’t have to do ⁓ ourselves, which is great. yeah, thankful for Shopify for that. Because it’s ⁓ it’s a tough one for sure.

speaker-2: Sure. Absolutely. Now, Sam, what are some of the other problems that you’re helping merchants solve in Europe that maybe Americans don’t think about?

speaker-0: So I just had a discussion about payments, ⁓ because like we now have more and more ⁓ POS or unified commerce ⁓ customers and they’re obviously very interested in POS, but ⁓ sh you can only use ⁓ POS when you have Shopify payments, and Shopify payments is like a flat percentage rate in terms of how you pay for for Shopify payments. But you have Classic Europe, very specific ⁓ European payment methods, and they are typically priced on a fixed ⁓ cost base. So like a a fixed amount of cents that you pay per transaction instead of a fixed percentage. And actually you see that the pricing for ⁓ yeah, Shopify payments is like thirty or forty X more ⁓ compared to the local payment methods ⁓ costs. So it’s like a a big thing that we are trying to work through together with Shopify to try and make sure that we have more localized offerings in terms of Shopify payments for the new POS ⁓ POS ⁓ customers.

speaker-1: Has that historically also been the case just with Shopify payments for e commerce?

speaker-0: ⁓ yes, but they I think in the beginning it was more constrained, but then they opened it up for the online store. So that’s why also a lot of merchant they’re like, Yeah, probably this is coming for POS as well. But up until now it hasn’t been the case. ⁓ so we still see that there is a lot of adoption, but those are like the kinds of things that ⁓ local merchants are interested in.

speaker-2: Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven’t. We’re releasing interviews like this every week. So don’t miss out. Now back to the interview. To pivot a bit back to the reason ⁓ we’re sitting here in this giant room full of hundreds of people, ⁓ you know, dot dev, shout out to Shopify. Thank you so much for reaching out to me and allowing me to do this. ⁓ but I want to talk about the power of events, the power of going out there in person and meeting other. people in, you know, the community that you’re working with in. Yaf, we obviously met at a Shopify event years ago. Sam, I’m lucky to meet you at this event. ⁓ but what what would you say to the folks listening that want to further their career or their business ⁓ in regards to going to events like this?

speaker-1: ⁓ I think I wasn’t the best example of that in the first year that we ran the business, ⁓ was very much you can do almost everything from behind a computer, right? It’s the digital age. You just need to have the best product and the best offering and people will come. But I learned over time that in the end it’s about people, right? ⁓ it’s people buying a product, people trying to run a business, people trying to achieve a goal. and if they know you, that helps. And if you know the people too, you understand them a bit better. And it also comes down to if there’s two products and they’re quite equivalent in pricing and ⁓ f functionality, but you know the people behind, you know, one of the products, that’s who you go with. and to be honest, what I’ve learned is it’s a lot of fun too. You get to know the people, right? And the people I think in the Shopify ecosystem, I said it this morning to Sam, and was like, Are we lucky that we kind of like stumbled into Shopify? Or are all ecosystems you have so many big platforms like this? And I don’t think that’s true. Maybe it is, I don’t know. ⁓ but I think it’s a lot of fun to meet the people. ⁓ you you do build relationships and that makes it worthwhile.

speaker-2: Absolutely. I think that Sean, my business partner, who’s just out of frame here. ⁓ we stumbled into Shopify 10 years ago. but the reason we stayed in Shopify was because of the community, because of a shout-out to Sam, who’s no longer at Shopify, actually. She was an amazing partner of ours at Shopify. And it was immediately apparent that we were getting invited to be in rooms with other smart entrepreneurs and other smart builders. And We weren’t feeling that with any of the other platforms that we were looking at or technologies that we were we were on. So we quickly just went all in on Shopify and I’m glad that we did. Yep. ⁓ hindsight’s always 2020 though. ⁓ but you know, I I to your your kind of idea there, Yap, I was like, I do believe there’s something special about Shopify. I think there’s this big abundance mindset with most of the people that you interact with in this community.

speaker-1: Of course.

speaker-2: ⁓ obviously outside of the podcast, I’ve got an agency and there are hundreds of other agencies here. Yeah. And all of us just immediately start like, what problems are you solving? How are you solving it? And it’s all about a rising tide raises all boats. There is a little bit of competitive edge. You don’t lose that. But like it’s just such a fun exactly.

speaker-0: Healthy and good, I think, as well, right?

speaker-1: In a way, Shopify has done a really good job of like sporting their, I think, their culture of making commerce better for everyone. And then you kind of start to think like, ⁓ they’re not they’re a really amazing partner. ⁓ it’s amazing to work with them. They have great ideas. I should interact with them and then interact with the other partners. ⁓ and once you start doing that, it’s just yeah, it’s just great. You just learn like, ⁓ it there’s no reason to be fearful or protective. the the sharing creates opportunities and insights.

speaker-0: Yeah, I wonder who’s behind this actually because like like you say, I think it’s like a culture and they ⁓ probably think about it. Maybe not, maybe it’s ingrained in their DNA, but it’s like it’s quite impressive.

speaker-2: And the culture kind of starts from Europe, if you really want to think about it.

speaker-0: Yeah, no, but it’s a lot of fun to meet people and ⁓ yeah, to challenge each other and to just talk about how we can move forward, I guess. And there are so many challenges, but it’s it’s cool to be able to talk about it openly, I guess, yeah.

speaker-1: I definitely think here at Dot Dev, ⁓ what’s really valuable for us is we started working at the forefront of what Shopify was doing three years ago, which was the checkouts. They introduced checkout extensions, they went from an old checkout to a new version, and we were one of the first partners to work with them on that. But today there’s so many more other opportunities. POS is is blowing up. There’s agenda commerce, ⁓ there’s Sitekeep. There’s so many things happening that they introduce. And you can just come here and talk to the product teams that are actually writing the code and deciding on the roadmap for these functionality for this for these features. ⁓ and that’s so valuable. Like there’s they’re not trying to hide anything. They’re just like, this is what we’re building, this is probably what we’re gonna build next. We’re literally showing you where the opportunities are, and it helps us prioritize our roadmap. I’m like, okay, this is a business opportunity for us, or this is just a feature. and that’s really amazing that they’re so open and transparent about that.

speaker-0: Yeah, they basically keep on increasing the surface area on which you can build, right? Yes. As a partner or as a app developer and that’s quite amazing. And somehow they keep on reinventing themselves and keep on expanding the surface, which is kinda crazy.

speaker-2: Absolutely. And it’s funny that you say that you can come to this and you can learn and talk directly to the team. ⁓ I was just talking to Josiah from Helium Apps. If he’s out there listening, he’s gonna be mad that I said his name probably. ⁓ but he was go he was he straight up was going to the team that was responsible for the API behind a product that they’re working on and con and and iterating on and improving. It’s already live. It’s ⁓ he’s like, he was like, Hey, this exists in the admin. Can I please get an API endpoint for this? This is my use case. This is why it and he That’s what you can do here. You can just kinda go this will just make everyone’s life easier. Just do this. You can get stuff on the roadmap. Yeah. Yes.

speaker-0: And I guess with AI maybe everything is gonna be way faster. So maybe it is even more valuable that everybody comes together and really yeah, shares their ideas, I guess.

speaker-1: Yeah, I think ⁓ Shopify sees the partner ecosystem as a pipeline of feedback and opportunities of what their end kind of customers are asking for, the merchants, right? And that’s what’s so amazing. They’re willing to listen because they know it’s gonna create value for the merchants, for the partners, for the shoppers, for Shopify, make commerce better for everyone. It’s it’s so simple, but it’s it’s true. Like it sounds cheesy if you just read it, but then if you come here, you’d be like, Okay, it makes sense. You really feel it.

speaker-2: Yeah. Yeah. And just to reiterate on a point that you made, Yap earlier, which was about if it comes down to, you know, ⁓ obviously we’re all in this it we’re all in business, right? We’re c kind of we’re here to make money, right? And when you go to events like this or other trade shows or conferences or whatever, and you start to meet your customer where they are and just to learn from them, and it is a situation where it’s you versus somebody else, like it it is often you go with who you know and who you like. You hear to that, you the old band, no, like trust before you buy. It’s that like part really matters a lot. ⁓ but there’s another thing that I like to remind, you know, younger entrepreneurs, which is just like if you’re not in the room, you’re not in the conversation. So you really need to get yourself out there and you really need to go, you will grow so much faster if you start to surround yourself with like-minded individuals. It is true, you can build a business from your bedroom, and that’s a lot of people’s dreams. But it’s gonna ex the growth is explosive when you start getting out there and interacting with your community.

speaker-0: Yeah, I think it’s also it the digital part creates leverage on the parts that you do in person, the parts that you do in person as well. ⁓ so it’s like both channels that you need to I think double down on basically. Like I I would also ask you the question, like you have an agency, right? Yes. Like how much do you do ⁓ in terms of getting together with maybe some merchants around a certain topic and stuff? Like those kinds of things I think could help. ⁓ and then you can scale it digitally, maybe because

speaker-2: I kind of did. Yeah. So, you know, I’ve obviously we got the podcast and this is a bonus episode. This will come out. ⁓ we do two bonus episodes a month, but I do fifty-six interviews a year with merchants, and most of them I haven’t met before. ⁓ I’m lucky enough that the show is big enough that PR teams will pitch us cool brands. ⁓ but I also I go to events like, you know, Shop Talk or ETAil or we go to trade shows. Shop object is go we’re going to in New York at the end of the month. I know we talked to you about that. Yep. ⁓ and we go there and we we go to meet merchants. Awesome. ⁓ and not only is it just with the podcast, but we we host dinners at these events too. ⁓ I think ⁓ Shopify actually Yeah. Well, not only the partner dinners, but we do dinners with merchants and Shopify loves us because we, you know, put in a lot of sweat equity sweat equity to bring Shopify involved with these dinners. And so we probably do 10, nine or ten events a year.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-2: Where we’re trying to put ourselves out there to meet these people, to it’s I think because it’s so easy to talk to anybody on the internet, people kind of ignore it at times. But when you meet someone in real life and you have a genuine human interaction, it’s a lot easier to do business with them. Yes.

speaker-0: Thanks.

speaker-1: For sure. Yeah. And it’s it’s ⁓ if you want to go fast, go low and ride. But if you want to go far, go together and it’s it’s a silly, it’s almost silly, but it’s true. It it is actually true. And in the beginning you’re like, ⁓ whatever, you don’t really need to meet people. But if you would start from the beginning, it would compound over time and you’d have so much so many people that believe in what you’re doing and wanna help you, ⁓ that it yeah, it would only be through your benefit.

speaker-2: Absolutely. Now, before we wrap up, I do want to ask you guys some other questions. Now, what is one of the key things that you were coming to dot dev for? I’ll start with you, Sam. you know, why did you make the trip here? What were you trying to learn from either the content or learn from the community of amazing builders that are here? You know, what brought you to the event? Yeah, so

speaker-0: I think last time we went to a lot of ⁓ talks, ⁓ which is great. And now it’s also two days instead of one. So you can go to more talks. But I also ⁓ thought that it was nicer to ⁓ get in touch with more people here on the product floor. ⁓ because those interactions, like we discussed before, are actually very important. And so I tried to push myself a bit more to really interact with all of the people here. ⁓ so yeah, I just wanna meet the people behind all the things that we see in Slack in our Shopify updates ⁓ and see where things are going and really go in conversation with them and obviously with other people in the partner ecosystem. So talk to as many people as possible. and then obviously I also want to read the room a bit in terms of where AI is going, like the UC UCP ⁓ and then also just what Shopify is doing with AI. So I think it’s interacting as much as possible and then seeing where AI is going, more or less.

speaker-2: Absolutely. Yap, what brought you all the way here from New York? Well

speaker-1: For me, it’s not as far as for him, but ⁓ for us it was very specific. we are looking to expand beyond the storefront into POS, SMS, and email. ⁓ so you can run offers ⁓ on those surfaces towards your customers. ⁓ that’s all orchestrated, you know, with what you’re doing on the storefront, but then also off the storefront. So POS was a big one. ⁓ that’s a big topic here too. Learning what’s possible, learning where it’s going, ⁓ seeing what extensions we can use, talking to the product team, getting to know them. Because we we would be working closely together. And then the second thing was Sidekick. ⁓ everybody talks about MCPs, that’s all great. ⁓ eventually we decided to start with Sidekick because it’s basically like V1 of an MCP, ⁓ because it’s so well integrated that can read the data from your application and let merchants take actions right there in the sidekick chat. And it’s something they already use. It’s also a discovery channel for us, like merchants might discover us there, and that’s the way we acquire customers, but it also gives them so much more flexibility. ⁓ that they can just chat with our product and make things happen. ⁓ and that’s something I wanted to get the product team’s take on is like, hey, how far will this go? Right now we can do X, Y, and Z. How far will you take this? Right. Will it go all the way that you can configure anything in any app right through Sidekick? We don’t know yet. But ⁓ I wanted to understand how they thought about that.

speaker-2: Absolutely. And now I want you guys to obviously shout yourselves out. Sam, what are you best at? If someone wants to get a hold of you, how do they get a hold of you? You know, how do you, you and your company, how do you guys best help merchants? What are you good at? What are you looking to do? Yeah.

speaker-0: ⁓ we are focusing a lot on on retail. So POS for us is like a huge day ⁓ deal. We wanna roll out like really retail ⁓ physical ⁓ commerce. ⁓ so yeah, if you wanna talk about that or yeah, you should reach out to us. Like if you wanna roll out some big stores, ⁓ a lot of stores in in Belgium or the Netherlands, we’re ⁓ we’re the team.

speaker-2: Yeah, I do want to highlight that. ⁓ Sam is joining us from ⁓ Europe. So this is definitely if you’re listening to this and you’re a European merchant and you aren’t using Shopify POS, Sam is absolutely the person you should talk to. And if they’re not close enough physically, he probably knows somebody that is and he can make an amazing introduction for you. For sure. ⁓ so any European brands not using Shopify POS, reach out to Sam. His contact information will be in the show notes. Yup. We’re huge fans of Upsell Plus. ⁓ our partnership goes back so many years at the agency. ⁓ but you know, let the merchants give us the elevator pitch real quick and then tell them how to get a hold of you, what to do.

speaker-1: Sure thing. ⁓ I think a lot of brands are thinking, right, how do we grow next year? ⁓ and a lot of brands underestimate the value of their existing traffic rather than spending double the amount on ads. You can look at the website and optimize and squeeze out another seven, eight, ten percent. Some brands it’s 30. ⁓ it’s really surprising. But that’s what we’re best at is kind of like going and understanding what’s your goal. Is it pure top top line growth? Is it profitable growth? The code has to be profitable, but what the what’s kind of the margin you want to get? And then let’s go and build a strategy around that. On your website, what are you doing? What are you not doing? ⁓ you have so many opportunities to go all the way from the product page to the checkout page, and now POS, SMS, and email are coming too. what strategy should you apply to go and hit help hit those goals, right? and that’s what we’re really good at is building that strategy, implementing it, testing it for 30 days, seeing the result, and then iterate over time to go and help you get there.

speaker-2: Yeah, and I actually can give you first hand confirmation about how awesome the team is at Upsell Plus. They will absolutely help you with the strategy ⁓ and ha make sure that I think a lot of people get s stuck in this ⁓ paralysis of like there’s so many things you can do. And you I think you your team does a really good job of coaching people into just like, Yeah, sure, we can do all these things. Let’s just start it with one simple thing first. And you know, that zero to one is the is the leap that they need to take, especially in upsells and cross cells. Yes. Which your app does a a beautiful thing with. ⁓ as we close out here in Toronto with the live show, ⁓ I can’t thank you guys enough. Yap, Sam, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you very much.

speaker-1: Thank you, Chase.