Navigated to 16: What Shopify’s Latest Updates Really Mean for Product-Based Businesses - Transcript

16: What Shopify’s Latest Updates Really Mean for Product-Based Businesses

Episode Transcript

Melissa Pikul

Hello and welcome to the Product Growth Lab podcast hosted by Andrew George and Melissa Pickle.

This is the podcast for creative product-based business owners who want to grow their businesses without overwhelm or massive investment.

Each episode, we explore actionable strategies, real life stories and insights from business owners and.

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We are here to help you grow your business on your own term.

Subscribe and join us each week as we dive into practical advice and inspiring stories to fuel your growth journey.

This is the Product Growth Lab.

Let's get started.

So, hello everyone, and welcome.

Today is like Juicy Tech Day because today we are going into Shopify updates.

If you didn't know Shopify just did their new launch with 150 plus new features for their summer 2025 update.

And honestly, this is the first time that Andrew and I are pretty excited about a good portion of the Shopify updates, right.

Andrew George

Yeah.

And they're, and they're here.

Yeah.

Like they, sometimes it's like, oh, this thing will be here eventually.

But most of like, I think everything we're gonna talk about today is already available.

Melissa Pikul

Whether you want us take advantage of it just yet or not is debatable, but it's all there.

So let's jump

Andrew George

And even though there's 150 different updates.

We are gonna cover five.

That's the ones that we're like, this are the ones that are probably worth listening to, and you might know you want to use all of them.

So don't get overwhelmed in the 150 update next site,

Melissa Pikul

plus a lot of that 150 is really for Shopify Plus members and like the higher up tiers as well.

We mostly work with the standard tier of Shopify.

Andrew George

Yeah, and there's always a bunch of, there's a lot of POS updates which aren't gonna cover because we talk about online selling here.

If you use show BS, there's some great stuff there, and there's a bunch of developer updates, which are also great, but I don't know what any of them means, so we can't cover them.

There's also, if you look on the page, everything's there apart from one that says, update unlock June 12th, and I really want to know what that is.

It's probably gonna disappoint me.

But like you gimme that piece of excitement.

I need to know.

Melissa Pikul

Alright, let's jump into our top five things we're excited about in the Shopify summer update.

Andrew George

Yeah.

Kicking off with number one is the new horizon themes.

And I know I'm excited about these, these are really awesome.

But when we first talked to our clients about them there was a little bit of panic and we're here to say.

And you don't have to, well, you don't have to change all if you don't want to.

But you don't have to change immediately.

And quite often when there's big tech updates, it's a good idea to give it a little bit of time to let the, the dust cell and the bugs be found out and fixed.

Melissa Pikul

fight the bugs, not us.

Let let them settle it out.

Andrew George

So Shopify have been busy working under.

Keep their themes up to date with all of the new things they want to include, including oil tox, these AI generated star blocks and they needed like the new kind of foundation to the theme to be able to make that all work.

And if you are, if you're on a paid theme, if.

You kinda have to ignore this for now, because we don't exactly know what they're gonna do and how, if you're gonna be able to implement these things in that, and eventually you can't at the moment, but if you are on a Don theme, you're probably gonna want to update to a horizon theme.

And if you're like, do you have a don theme?

If you didn't pay for your theme, it's from the, it's just from the Shopify shop, it's Dawn, or it's a customization of Dawn.

They're all secretly the theme, same theme.

Melissa Pikul

Just

Andrew George

just, it's just a customization.

Applied to them, just color changes and some things like that.

Melissa Pikul

Okay.

Andrew George

they've introduced 10 new themes, but they're all horizon and customizations of them.

So you still just have the one free theme, but it's added a ton of different stuff.

And eventually Dawn isn't gonna get any more updates gonna be depreciated and you're, they might force you over, but they're not doing that for now.

So it's probably something you're gonna want to do in the future, but because it has this new base.

And the different elements don't translate over.

You do have to build your pages again from scratch.

That's kind of why everyone

Melissa Pikul

That's

Andrew George

wants to cry and panic, but during rush into it, you can do it slowly and kinda wait for things to see how they go.

But the really big awesome thing about this is because it kinda works in a new way.

You can place things within things.

It's.

Really hard to explain.

I dunno why I decided to this on a podcast where we can't give you any visual adaptation of this,

Melissa Pikul

So like

Andrew George

but.

Melissa Pikul

and I come from the world of funnels.

If you have any experience with funnels and funnel builders, you know that you have like section.

rows that are is also hard visual, but you can put things, you could have one section that has like a picture and a headline and stuff stacked on top of each other and moved around in multiple columns all within there.

That's really, really difficult to do in Shopify.

And if you came from a funnel world really damn frustrating about Shopify that it's like, why is your builder so old?

Even though it's new.

Andrew George

Yeah, and like that's totally gone.

The, all of the different blocks you add into your page are completely updated, completely different.

That, that's why it doesn't automatically translate over.

You can have like so many things that are within things that are within things.

So if you're like, so to think about that, think about when you had the big hedge on your homepage.

Everyone probably has this.

And it had the, you go into it and you could change some text and you could change a button, but they chose where it was, what it was, and you could, that was it.

Melissa Pikul

in

Andrew George

Now you can, yeah.

Now you can take all of the other elements, so pictures, buttons, text blocks, and drag those in to the header element.

So things within things.

If you have like products on your page, you can drag in your own like textbooks for the name.

For swatches for reviews, you can, and they all exist within the same part of the page, so it's a little bit hard to explain.

You might want to go to, I think it's shopify.com/editions/summer 2 2 5, something like that.

Google Shopify editions Summer two five, and you'll get,

Melissa Pikul

This time.

Andrew George

yeah, it's a game and it's really difficult.

It's a driving game.

If you go down to the bottom of the page, don't waste your time on that.

Don't fix your shop.

Melissa Pikul

I didn't even

Andrew George

But yeah, but there's other things in there.

So it's you can now right click, which feels like this really tiny thing, but it's really nice.

You can copy sections, you can duplicate them and you can also copy them.

So like say you have a section on your homepage you built, if you can click copy, then go into your product page and click paste so you can have elements that are.

Ch like on both before you had to make it, customize it and stuff, and then do that all over again.

Now you can just copy and paste.

So it's like a really nice, really tiny thing.

Like in this day and age, I'm telling you that you can now, right click feels really basic, but you can now do that.

Melissa Pikul

All right, so that's Horizon's theme.

We're so excited though, because it has to be a complete rebuild.

Depends on how big your site is, how much individual content you have on your site, how customized you are.

are looking at doing this 'cause we're, this, this is released in June.

We wanna give it at least a month to get the bugs out, right?

Or it was released in May, so June, July.

We are headed straight into.

duty season.

So we looking at like doing this ourselves in January, Andrew, or are we thinking we're gonna probably do it earlier than that?

Andrew George

What I would work focus on is if you look at the, in Shopify, you'll see the themes,

Melissa Pikul

Customize

Andrew George

version number.

But I'll say like Horizon 1.0 net, like when you're doing an update, the 1.0 is one to watch out for and what, and it shall, it'll probably have like 1.0 0.1 1.0 0.2.

Wait for 1.1 is normally the kind of thing to do.

It's not a little like the ip, the point ones or like the little bug fixes.

The 0.1 is like a big kind of update.

They pushed out where they work out more.

Melissa Pikul

point.

We want, we want the middle number to at least have a

Andrew George

Yeah.

Melissa Pikul

a ero.

Andrew George

Yeah, that's kind of the way to write that far.

They might already be there.

And then for speed of doing it, it's kind of up to yourself.

It's how fast can you do it?

If you want to use a bunch of these new features, like the, the whole AI generated block thing we're gonna talk about next is gonna be really nice for things like Black Friday.

And you might want like, 'cause of the.

The main thing I thought of to build with that is account deter.

Like there's a bunch of that stuff where you might be like, it's worth it to me.

I don't have a bunch to do, and the increase in income I can probably make on Black Friday by tailoring my shop like this is probably going to be totally worth it for me.

But if you have a ton of content to get through, or you're slightly more scared of the tech.

Definitely take it as slow as you need to.

And the other thing that's really good with Shopify is you can add a new theme, sit, customize it for as long as you want before you hit, I was gonna say deploy, but that's not what it says.

Publish before you hit, publish on it and actually make it the live version of your site.

So I'm looking on Shopify right now.

They're on 1.0 0.2, so.

Melissa Pikul

Two bug

Andrew George

We worked out a few of the bugs, but we're not there.

So you might want to wait till then.

That's just kind of a, what I say, it's totally up to you.

You can do it whoever you like.

But that's kind of our advice there.

So we keep talking about it, but just move on to AI drawing.

Starbucks.

This is like the really big, really cool, really flashy thing is, so you had all these blocks for now and it's like text box and all that kinda stuff, and you're like, okay.

I want something different.

I want something fancy.

I want something cool.

You can now go in to Shopify and just tell it what you want.

And this is exclusive to Horizon themes.

That's probably why you're gonna be really tempted to upgrade really quickly is you can say, I want a giant bar across the top of the screen that says my sale and I 1:00 AM.

If you're seen, if you sell a product that does it before and after and you have the little slider thing in the middle and you like drag it along to see the two images, you can custom build that.

Like before, that would be like, you'd need a developer to buy some kind of

Melissa Pikul

apps.

Andrew George

thing or,

Melissa Pikul

paid apps are probably panicking right now.

Andrew George

yeah.

The only thing, like it still is a, like, if anything goes wrong, you have to edit code.

Like they're still, if you're not a developer it might be a little difficult, so you're still.

A little while before you're completely replacing them because you do kind of, if you don't get it to work like Shopify, because it's not their code, they won't help you with it.

It's a little bit sucky, but it's kind of just how AI works.

So if you do build something, test it on desktop, test it on your phone and just make sure it all looks okay before you set it live.

And also back and forth a little bit like chat, GPT.

So if you say, build me countdown timer, and it does it, and the.

Say the text is on top of the numbers and you add it to the left and that on the right, like you can go and say, okay, move this here.

I want you to change this color so you can do little back and forth with it to try and fix it and then isn't perfect.

But if you want those announcement bars, something on your product page and just like there's so many, it's always that need to think of example.

There's one that things where I'm like, house and the Facebook group.

You want me to do, I don't know, like a little, like a list or a workshop or a, maybe like a digital product or give you a bunch of prompts for things and be like, okay, here are all the things you might possibly want to build.

I think that would be really helpful.

But it's like, I dunno, they always throw these exciting new things at, you know, it's like, okay, what do I do with this?

Melissa Pikul

Mm-hmm.

Andrew George

I have this problem with all the AI agents and NN and Zap and stuff.

I'm like, these sound really cool when someone shows it to me.

But I don't know what taught me.

I have no ideas what to do with this.

So let start in the Facebook group.

That's something you would be interested in.

But now you can do all this.

You don't need to know code.

You don't even have to, 'cause you could do this in chat to T before, you'd have to like try and copy and paste it and break the backend of Shopify.

But you can do it in here and it's kind of,

Melissa Pikul

If it doesn't work, you just

Andrew George

I dunno, sandbox I think is the word.

Melissa Pikul

exactly.

Andrew George

doesn't, it's just a little section.

You can do it and it doesn't break your whole shop,

Melissa Pikul

have to worry about

Andrew George

which is very nice.

Melissa Pikul

and all of the itch, Mel, and be like.

Andrew George

Yeah, because that was a before.

If you ever customize your code and did an update, it lost all of the code.

You customized.

That's when a thing with Shopify, and I think that kind of changes with this update, but don't do that.

Especially if, if you do it in any AI square block, that definitely stays there.

It's a block and that the actual code of the shop.

Melissa Pikul

Alright,

Andrew George

and I think that's all we have to say there.

And like these are all, like, we're still in the,

Melissa Pikul

section of

Andrew George

we haven't had a Yeah, we haven't probably played with it.

We can't tell you a ton.

These are just like the fast,

Melissa Pikul

We can't

Andrew George

here's what's updated.

Yeah.

We can't give you all the, our client did this and we tried this and give you all the nice examples we'd like to okay.

Next one.

Sidekick just got smarter and if you haven't used it yet, it's one of that things, it's like hidden there.

It's hidden there and you kind of ignore it.

But it's actually quite useful.

It's Shopify's AI system.

If you are on your shop, there's a little kind of, it's like a little hair man, not like ha, I a fan with hair and I think it maybe has like a, like a raccoon mask kind of thing on.

It's a really tiny symbol and you're probably gonna look at it and be like an Andrew.

What are you looking at?

Not worries.

Melissa Pikul

It's just official name now.

It's a little hairy, man.

Okay.

Andrew George

The little hair one with the think

Melissa Pikul

Sasquatch,

Andrew George

a superhero.

No, but like they look like it looks like a raccoon with hair.

Melissa Pikul

your feral assistant.

Andrew George

Someone at Shopify who spent ages designing this is crying somewhere.

Melissa Pikul

They should,

Andrew George

But it's right in front of your screen.

Click it and it pops up down the side of your screen.

There's like a little chat assistant and before it could do a few things.

It could like add discount ghost to your shop and things.

Now it really does a lot.

And I'm pretty sure it's 'cause they've ai I, but you can.

Say things so you can't say like, okay, I need a discount code that runs from the 21st to the 20 and for 20% off.

And it will do that for you in like a nice kind of chat style.

Instead of you going through things, you can say, something's broken in my shop, how do I fix it?

But now you can say things like about the day in your shop.

So how are my sales doing your wrong year?

How is my conversion rate?

How many people are coming from Facebook and like asked to compare things?

You can kind of look at all this data without having to go into your analytics and get a headache because there's 8,000 things in there that don't make any sense.

You can do it and you can also say, okay, my conversion rate is down 10%.

One, why, and two, how do I fix it?

And it will give you stuff and it will reference your shop, and it will also reference the Shopify knowledge base.

So you can do.

Things there you can ask it to.

If you use like Shopify's inbuilt market and stuff, you can ask it to build segments and things for you.

I think you can,

Melissa Pikul

That's

Andrew George

you can also use it to create images.

Yeah.

You can use it to create images if you want to.

Anything, it's not as fancy as like the chart, GPT and stuff.

You can't make it through project images being sick.

I need a, like a banner for your homepage that, it's summer, like you want a nice beach and you can say, Hey, make an image of a nice beach.

We'll do that for you.

And I don't know a ton about this, but I've seen it listed as a thing you can do.

I don't know if it's not there yet.

I think it's like rolling out and I don't know.

But you can like screen share your shop and ask it specific things and talk to it.

So to be like, Hey, I have this page with this error message or something.

How do I fix it and actually talk to it so that like, it'd be like having a support person on Zoom, but you're using Shopify and it should like, it should be really knowledgeable 'cause it's, it's accessing all Shopify's own support stuff

Melissa Pikul

That is really neat.

Andrew George

and they like, there's ways to do that with chat GBT and any, like within any kind of software.

Melissa Pikul

But chat, Has outdated.

I like, I ask directions and it'll tell me to go to someplace that doesn't exist.

It's like, well, I don't see that option you're giving me.

Most recent one was navigation disappeared.

It moved somewhere ridiculous.

That make no sense at all.

Where I was trying to create,

Andrew George

Yeah, but

Melissa Pikul

like, why?

Andrew George

But yeah, Shopify one will be really up to date and know everything.

So you're seeing people, like I know someone who is doing Facebook ads and it's like they.

If you ever tried to follow someone's Facebook ads tutorial, there is a 98.9% chance that the interface that you're seeing, which all of our ads is not the one they're seeing, it's not the one you had last week.

It like something is different.

Melissa Pikul

you

Andrew George

And if you do the like, live share thing and or screenshot or do whatever you need to do to get into t, it can figure it out for you.

So I know they've had success with that.

So I think having this option in Shopify will be really useful.

And it's probably something we should test.

Melissa Pikul

When we switch,

Andrew George

Maybe we'll do a video in the Facebook because like it's not really a podcast thing.

Melissa Pikul

Gonna be a

Andrew George

No.

Yeah, so why know if you want that?

I'm giving, I feel like I'm gonna give you enough to give you like a to-do list of all things I keep telling you to, to us in the Facebook group.

And I show notes for your to-do list.

Yeah, that's the most there.

Number four, the new campaign.

Chalk.

This is one of those things that I got super excited by and I'm always like, I don't know if anyone else is gonna care about this as much as I do, but.

If you're into stats and analytics and all that, like I was gonna say fun stuff, but that might not be what people normally call it.

Melissa Pikul

is the data that

Andrew George

You can now set up.

Melissa Pikul

here.

Andrew George

Yeah.

Melissa Pikul

makes you money or loses you money and you wanna know it.

Andrew George

But you can now track that all in a specific campaign.

So say.

Black Friday is the really obvious example, and I'm gonna use it 'cause that, why not?

You can say, okay, I'm gonna set up my Black Friday campaign in Shopify as a campaign.

Then you can have one specific place for all your tracking of all of the things you do to point your Black Friday.

Every time you share a link in an email.

You can generate a specific link so that all of the people who click that link, are tracked in your campaign.

Every time you share a link on Facebook, you can get a specific link that tracks it to that campaign, like everywhere you're sharing things and all of that tracking goes in that one place.

So also lets you go, okay, Shopify all of it shows that your market worked and any sales that came in that.

Stay or weekend from somewhere else or chat differently.

See like, okay, my actual campaign efforts generated 10% of that and 90% came from Google.

You can say, okay, you, my campaigns aren't so good.

So it's like a really nice way to tell you.

You can have, it also generates QR codes.

Like I haven't had a chance to dress out yet, but I think that is gonna be a really nice thing going forward.

If you're.

Doing like some real kinda campaign track and sales kinda stuff we might do.

I, it's not saying we're gonna do things

Melissa Pikul

And then not writing them

Andrew George

we might do.

Melissa Pikul

what we're gonna do.

Andrew George

No.

We have a transcript to ask.

But like a little project where we get everyone, I don't know where would we do this?

Maybe we won't do it for our clients, but we like do a.

We all do a sale, nice split date, and we all have like the emails and the marketing plan stuff and it's all chat campaigns and we kind of do a little sale test thing.

Melissa Pikul

to me, the biggest way to look at this is like so you ran that sale campaign and you put a post out on Facebook, you put, you put posts on Facebook.

I'm say that 'cause it's an easy one to put links in.

do posts on Facebook every single day of that campaign, maybe twice a day even.

then your campaign tracking comes in and says, great, you made a lot of sales from Facebook.

Don't know which things that you posted really worked and which ones.

It didn't, which ones got them to click, which ones got them to buy?

Those are two very different stats right there.

But now with campaign tracking and if you're able to put it within.

like Can't sales event.

So say like sales event that you've created that campaign and now you have all those different links.

So if each of those Facebook posts you did say it was four days, you had four posts, if each of 'em had that slightly different link in there that the campaign gave you, you'll know which one actually led to sales.

Not just clicks sales.

'cause that could be very different information.

And once you know that, you're like, okay, what did I do on that style post that made it work?

And can I replicate it for my next sale?

Andrew George

Yeah, and I think for doing, because I always talk about test and one thing I like to test is like different types of sales.

Like if I do bonuses, I don't do bonuses.

If I do a percentage versus an actual amount, or if I do the whole shop versus is a collection stuff and I can have all those sales and sending me, trying to check dates and figure this all out, I can go.

I track them all like the, here's the Labor Day sale, here's if I've ever done one of those in Scotland.

Here's the Labor Day sale.

Here's the Black Friday.

Like Black Friday's kind of an outlier.

Don't use that.

I compare anything else?

Yeah, Halloween Sale, I Mother's Day Sale, like all those things.

And I can track, go into each one and say which of these work the best?

And it's so much easier to track that if it's in a campaign,

Melissa Pikul

Mm-hmm.

Andrew George

Itself.

You could even, 'cause you can name your campaign at you once.

You could call it like Father's Day.

And then in brackets 40% off whole store Mother's Day, 10% off

Melissa Pikul

Rose's

Andrew George

Mother's Day items.

And that really helps you track things easily.

Melissa Pikul

All

Andrew George

I,

Melissa Pikul

so this is how we're talking, like that's the one we're actually most excited about 'cause we're data.

And if you wanna be successful, you either need to be a data nerd or you need to hire a data nerd.

Andrew George

Mm-hmm.

And if you're, if you are that kind of nerd and you want to try things out, talk to us in the Facebook group.

And like I Facebook, we don't make enough use of it.

Actually, no, I was gonna say it's pro, this is gonna be out time, but posted a couple of questions in there the past couple weeks going, answer them them.

But yeah, come in there and ask us.

Stuff is weird.

Okay, next is the AI Powered Knowledge Base app.

This one is like hidden in like a section, within a section on the page, but it's one of those ones where I'm like, this is one of those secret things that if you're like up on the, what's coming up and the AI stuff is actually gonna be something huge for the future.

So.

You need to go in and add this.

It's not automatic in your shop.

You need to go into the Shopify app store and add the Shopify knowledge base app, and it lets you add FAQs into your shop, which you're like FAQs.

I'm sure I have that already.

The way AI works 'cause people ask questions is when it's searching for data finger site.

It looks for answers to questions, so having your site set up where those FAQs are there and Chacha BT can help you can get those answers really easily, makes it far easier to show up in those results.

And it doesn't just help, it still helps on Google, especially Google, but it's new AI mode and stuff, and the, if you're on Google and you have like, it's, it's a nightmare to get to results these days.

You have the AI overview at the top.

That is looking for those kind of question things.

And then you have that like little dropdowns where it's like people ask this and it's like I, if you Googled us, like who are Andrea and Melissa, when it always has really random questions.

It's like,

Melissa Pikul

It does

Andrew George

what's Melissa's favorite food?

When did

Melissa Pikul

blueberry puff.

Andrew George

like, they'll always be like, they'll always be kind of normal and then they'll kind of start to get more hinge as you go down.

Melissa Pikul

Fantastic.

SEO resource, those things.

Andrew George

But they,

Melissa Pikul

with the knowledge base.

Andrew George

again, they're, they're all, they're all questions.

And it's grabbing the snippets, they're called snippets from paragraphs on your site.

And if your site is set up with an thing written like an answer, you are gonna show up there.

This is kind of the way AI is going.

A, it's not SEO, it's like a

Melissa Pikul

or something like that.

Yeah,

Andrew George

E-I-E-I-O.

Melissa Pikul

pretty

Andrew George

but what is it?

It's like a gen, a gentech engine to something like that.

It's got, yeah, but it's a slight change and like, we'll see how this goes.

No one's an expert in it yet.

This might all be a load of crap.

I'm talking, but like, from what I understand, what I looked at, this is kinda.

How things are.

And honestly, pro I think the same because they've developed a whole app for, it, and I think it'll, they'll continue to build it.

Like it's a fairly basic kinda app.

I think it will continue to grow.

Like Pro does that, if you look at the collabs app, the version one of it, when I first heard of it, like it was pretty cool.

Now it does a million things.

Melissa Pikul

To go

Andrew George

build over.

Yeah.

Episode idea collapse.

Melissa Pikul

I'll kick my butt to

Andrew George

It gives you a, like, it will start to pull out some FAQ things that thinks people will have from the data that's already in your shop.

It will give you suggestions.

It will, I don't know how much of this works yet, but it will also.

I don't even know how it's doing this, but it does have a section for it, so it must do something.

It will find what people are asking about your shop.

I don't know where it's getting the data from.

I know it's from chat, bt, 'cause I know they have some stuff going on in the background.

I don't know if it's from Google or what, but it will start to populate those and get you to answer them.

And I know one of the things that is coming is if you bought Ash Chat, GBT.

It already can, it does do some search stuff where it shows product listings, but you'll be able to sync your product catalog to chat GPT in the future and anyone shop like it's actively being worked on just now, and we'll see how that goes.

They'll probably end up adding ads and paid stuff, and that'll be,

Melissa Pikul

That'll be interesting.

Andrew George

yeah but it'll be there and it's, I just say it's a product feed, which if you know what those are, you probably already do have some you, you probably have one in your shop that's going to Google and one that's going to Pinterest.

Those take prides already.

Melissa Pikul

So I was gonna say if what Andrew said with snippets and all of that, you're like, oh my God, this is above me.

Think of it right here with the AI powered Knowledge Base app, as a direct pipeline of information from your shop going, speeding straight into Theis.

Andrew George

Yeah, and again.

Melissa Pikul

streamlined process.

Andrew George

Again, if you need any help with that, I just to, I'm like horrible on a podcast because I'm like, I have so much ideas for like, we could turn this into course.

We could do a workshop, we can turn, we could do a live thing.

We like, you need help with any of this, let us know and I'll probably build it for you.

Melissa Pikul

Andrew just likes building

Andrew George

Chapter saying, Andrew, stop building stuff, and made me start selling some of it, and I'm like, that doesn't sound good.

Melissa Pikul

You need a sales rep, Andrew.

Andrew George

Sometimes I'm like, gimme some advice and just roast me.

Instead, I'm like, I didn't ask for this.

Melissa Pikul

All right, so those were

Andrew George

Okay.

Melissa Pikul

things that we are so excited about in the new summer 2025 Shopify update.

Andrew George

Yeah.

And there's, there's a whole bunch more.

I'm like, I'm going to start to five.

But there's definitely a whole lot of things to talk about.

And I'm sure as they kind of come to the forefront and people are using them, we'll probably talk about them more over time.

But it's, this is one, the one where I'm like, there's really a bunch of exciting stuff.

'cause some, like, they do these updates every few months and sometimes they're Mm.

And sometimes it's like this thing goes in, there's sometimes some of the stuff I'm like, I don't think is there yet.

They announced several updates ago.

Like they,

Melissa Pikul

Maybe no one was excited

Andrew George

one,

Melissa Pikul

do it.

Andrew George

yeah, I can't remember.

There's one updates that they announced in the last one and then ignored and then like announced it in this one again.

Like, Hey, here's this new feature that's ready.

And it was like, yeah, but it's supposed to be a feature six months ago.

Shops.

Melissa Pikul

We're not excited about that anymore.

All.

Andrew George

So, but I feel like there's a bunch of useful stuff and useful for, I hate saying smaller shops that we're small, but like the people on the, like the normal plan who aren't, who don't have a giant team and developers and are selling the 17 countries and all this Shopify Plus stuff that they like to add.

They've genuinely added stuff for everyone.

'cause the last update, I was like, oh my God, this stuff looks really exciting.

I was like, and it's like, okay.

None of this is really useful to the average person.

'cause when the Shopify starts at it's like $2,300 a month, I'm like, okay, you need to be selling.

Melissa Pikul

I didn't think it was that

Andrew George

Yeah.

Because whether it, I always get very confused in the Shopify naming for different plans.

But what is there?

Shopify?

Yeah, Shopify.

If you go into your own Shopify backend and look at the plans, I'll show you Shopify basic, the Medium Plan, which is now just called Shopify.

Used to have Shopify and Shopify Advance.

Those are like reasonable prices that go up to a few hundred.

Then you have to like apply for and have a whole person from Shopify work on your shop and do, like, it totally changes how your shop works

Melissa Pikul

Ah,

Andrew George

is the Shopify Plus.

And they allow a whole bunch of other cool stuff you can do in there, but it's, far

Melissa Pikul

to

Andrew George

much,

Melissa Pikul

make it worth it.

Andrew George

You need to be making like.

15, 20 grand a month probably for it to be worth it.

Melissa Pikul

That's less than I thought.

Andrew George

I dunno, i'm like, how much, like as a percentage of your total income, how much would you want your shop to go to?

I know that's up to you.

That's not, yeah.

Okay.

So you chop h plus you don't eat a t.

But you can start using some of these features.

Melissa Pikul

And all of these

Andrew George

let us know

Melissa Pikul

switching to a horizon theme, correct.

Or can we use any of them with the standard Shopify?

Andrew George

yeah, the AI store blocks is the only thing we need.

The horizon themes.

The rest of the stuff you're totally fine with.

Melissa Pikul

is

Andrew George

Either you're done

Melissa Pikul

Knowledge Base app available to us right now.

Andrew George

Yeah, they're all available.

Sidekick has been available for a while as well, so like, not all of it is new and you should be able to play with it in your workshop anyway.

But if you have a Don theme, you're not ready to upgrade or you have a paid theme or exists, exists you can use all of these things.

Because you're probably not in a huge rush to change themes.

But I think there's a few pissed off theme developers 'cause they're like, how do we make our themes work with this new step?

And I don't think Shopify has given them a ton of info about that.

So that's a kind of wait and see how it goes.

Melissa Pikul

Remember our recommendation do not switch to a horizon theme until it says ero 1.0.

You need a one in that middle number.

Andrew George

Yeah.

But what would, if you, if you don't, if you're listening to us as someone who's about to start a shop, start with the horizon theme.

I would say that don't, yeah, that would be the

Melissa Pikul

in a

Andrew George

So pick one of these updates, start off the internet and see how it goes.

And unless in the Facebook group, I don't add anything to list of things, start on the Facebook group.

Melissa Pikul

All righty.

Well thanks for tuning into the Product Growth Lab podcast.

We hope you were excited you found today's episode insightful and inspiring.

I'm also gonna say for all the things that you can play with right now, go ahead.

If you're not sure what to do for your flash sale to get that going, we have the guide all set up for you.

You can go to the product growth lab.com/flash to get our flash sale in S Snap Guide that'll walk you through how to have one up and running in time for this weekend so you can start gathering that data and playing with campaigns.

It's gonna be so much fun.

So beyond that, if you enjoyed the show today, leave a review.

It helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs just like you.

Stay connected and keep experimenting.

Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and don't forget to join our community at Facebook Group for more resources, tips, and support.

Until next time, keep growing and creating.

This is the Product Growth Lab signing off.