Shopify is now on ‘Easy Mode” in 2025 (here’s why) transcript

If you want to grow your brand faster on Shopify, I'm going to explain exactly how you can do it. And the honest truth is, if you're struggling to grow, you're probably just approaching the game of e-commerce with a suboptimized strategy. In fact, I've skilled almost every brand that you can think of out there. From jewelry supplements, clothing brands, candles, men's grooming, women's hygiene, fragrances, and huge national chains, even to small bootstrap startups.

You name the brand, I've scaled them. We've done a little over $2 billion in client revenue. And personally, I've advised on over $200 million in ad spend. And the secret is I actually went down the rabbit hole to completely understand how each component actually works and how it actually turns itself into cash. All the way to the psychological buying triggers, the algorithms, the customer journey, the messaging and offers, and the retention models, and the core fundamentals for how to actually grow.

So, in this video, I'm going to give you the full secret sauce. These are the five non-obvious learnings for how e-commerce actually works. And now, these are the same lessons that all of the big brands deeply understand and that you may not. And the first unccoming learning is that e-commerce isn't actually one on the first purchase. No, it's one on the second, third, and fourth purchase. Let me explain. When you optimize for repeat purchases, subscriptions, offering your existing customer base new products and upsells, you aren't just optimizing for a one-time purchase.

You're optimizing for higher conversion values. And by the time they make that second purchase again, you've already liquidated all the product and ad costs where you are now playing an almost pure profit. So, let me break down exactly what I mean. So, that way you can understand how to be more aggressive on the front end and outspend your competitors while you actually make more profit on the back end. increasing your AOVs, LTVs, customer returning rate, conversion rates, and this is going to impact your return in ad spend without spending a single extra penny on paid ads.

So, here we are on a website called Road. They sell beauty products, and they just recently were required for a billion dollars. And whenever you're running ads and sending people to a website, you're not just looking to get them to come and buy this Blush because we have ad cost, right? And we have profit margins, how much it costs us to actually make the product. Maybe we pay for, you know, packaging and shipping. These are all things that, you know, even to our margin, it make it much harder to have cash flow to scale in the long run, right?

So, whenever somebody comes to the website and they buy a product for $24, that's not the end of the story. So, what we really want to do is not just get them to buy one product. We want them to buy multiple shades of that one product. We want them to add the additional product upsells that we have below the product. going from $24 to now adding in glazing milk for $32 where we're now at $80, not just 24. Maybe they end up adding in this product and before you know it, that one purchase has now resulted in $142.

And it doesn't stop there. That is just the beginning gateway into the brand. What we want to do from here is now implement retention flows where you actually email them afterwards and give them a welcome email series where you're actually thanking them for making the product purchase and then offering them a special offer to give their friends to also try out. Right? That gets them to come back in potentially either buy again or get us to introduce another user to come by without us actually spending any money to do it.

And then we can retarget this individual to bring them back to the site. We can offer them a loyalty program where they get special offers the more they shop with us. And essentially after each person purchases, we want them to come back a second, third, and fourth time because it doesn't cost us very much to get them to return, right? Because if we pay somebody, if we spend $15 to acquire that customer, and then we email them a month later, it cost us nothing to email them, right?

Through the email marketing tool, well, as soon as they buy again, now we're getting pure profit off of that. So, the name of the game is you want to get people to, you know, not only make the first-time purchase, but you want to retain them on the back end and build a community to actually get them to buy over and over again. And the second most uncommon learning is that multi- channelannel marketing is a trap. If you're a young brand, and young brand meaning under a million dollars per month in revenue, that is a lot different than what you probably have been told.

And here's why. rather than just looking to spend a little bit on every platform. Let's say that you have, you know, a $5,000 marketing spin budget. It's much better to master one platform than try to master them all. Here's an example. Let's say that you spend $1,000 on Meta. Well, you're going to have to spend time creating content for Meta Platform. You're going to have to spend a little bit of time in the ads manager, maybe two to six hours a week setting up campaigns, writing ad copy, getting those campaigns actually live, maybe some retargeting, and okay, yeah, we're getting a, you know, pretty good result of a 3x return in ad spend.

Every $1,000 we spend, we're making back 3K. Well, now let's also do that on TikTok. Now, we take a $1,000 budget. Well, we have to get video creatives now, which takes a lot more time, right? And we're also setting up campaigns here and structuring it. And maybe those campaigns are only generating a 1.6x return in ad spend. So, we're not making as much money there. We launched some Google Shopping campaigns. Well, we have to set up the Google Merchant Center, get our creatives connected so that way the Google Shopping images can show up.

That takes a little bit of time. And yeah, we're getting a 2.5x rorowaz. Maybe we jump up to a four at on some days. And then, you know, we start testing Google at $1,000 and that requires, you know, longer form video creatives and now we're having to make more content for this and we're spending even more time here and maybe that result didn't even happen and we didn't get any sales. And then we have Pinterest and we're putting another $1,000 here.

We're having to come up with, you know, lifestyle creative, spending more time, zero rorowaz. Well, we've now spread ourselves so thin with our budget. We've spread our creative capacity so thin where we're not even making iterations on that. Our time is now being two plus two plus two plus two. You know, we're spending anywhere between 10 to, you know, 30 hours just managing ads and not really focusing on much other things in the business.

You know, you don't want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. What you want to do is focus on one platform at a time and get it to a really good stable point. Because if we take all this time that we're spending on Tik Tok, Google, YouTube, Pinterest, and put all that time into making the best creative formats possible for meta, iterating on the winning ideas. Well, we're not just going to get a 3x rorowaz. we're going to get a much higher rorowaz and be able to spend much more because we're putting all of our emphasis on creating the best content possible and iterating on those winning ideas.

And maybe we spend a little bit more time, but we're not spending 10 to 30 hours doing this. It's just a few extra hours of, you know, really refining the process and getting it to the point to where we're able to generate, you know, amazing results. And I see this time and time and again where people will, you know, come to us and they have Facebook, they have Google, they want to do Tik Tok, maybe they want to test Pinterest or Snapchat.

You know, these are so many different platforms and it's very easy to get lost in the process. You need to master one channel first. And the old saying still stands true. The jack of all trades is a master of none. And the same thing applies here. And the third uncommon learning is don't build a brand, build a community. When you buy from Aloe, they don't just send you a confirmation email and that's it. You immediately are met with invites to run clubs, yoga classes, get ready with me videos, outfits of the day.

You see skincare routines, diet tips on their social media, their emails. Aloe doesn't even sell consumables, yet they are educating you on your very diet. This is all by design. When you bring them into your world of Aloe and you give all the Aloe stands for, that makes that brand a part of your life. If you're a customer and you go to a yoga class wearing only the leggings you just got from them, but everyone else is decked out head to toe in Alo gear, what are the chances you buy more from the brand to fit in?

But the beauty is not in the repeat purchase in this case. It's the fact that you acquired a purchase without paying to acquire it. When you strategically design your business to be a part of your customer's life, your products now become a need in their life instead of just buying a product online and forgetting about it. The real game is played inside of retention. You want to retain, retain, retain. And the more you retain, the more profit your brand makes without having to spend more money on paid ads.

Which leads me to my fourth uncommon learning, which is spending more doesn't necessarily mean you make more. Let me break this down. So, what I mean by spending more does actually result in making more in a lot of cases is here's our profit and here's our profit zone. The red line is our ad spend. The blue line is our return ad spend. And the higher rorowaz, the lower our rorowaz. And the higher our spend, the lower our spend.

Okay? So, whenever you are just starting out and you start spending a little bit, some of your creatives are working, you're getting a really high return in ad spend. Maybe you're spending $5, $10 a day. You're seeing a few purchases at a really good rorowaz. And so, you're excited about that. So, you end up scaling up your spend and your rorowaz starts to slightly come down. Nothing too crazy. Maybe you get to about $40, $50 a day.

Rorowaz is still really good. You're getting more sales. You're in the profit zone. You're excited. So, you continue to scale that spend. And at a certain point, your rorowaz really begins to dip. One week it was amazing, the next week it's not. And you find yourself in this position as soon as you start to get to 150 daily spend, everything breaks. And now you're wondering what just happened because I was getting really good results and all of a sudden everything tanked.

And so many of you find yourself in this position. And what is happening is you're crossing the equilibrium point. And the equilibrium point is this yellow dot here. It is the point at which how much you spend and how much you get in return in ad spend crosses. Meaning this is the most you could spend at the highest return in ad spend. Meaning it's the most profit you can make in this exact point. And anything where you spend more results in less profit and a lower rorowaz.

And when you scale up, you see your rorowaz drop. And a lot of people can't figure this part out or figure out how to break out of this area. And they have really thin margins in this, you know, marginal profit zone. And they're having a hard time getting their spin here. Maybe they launch different campaigns, redo their audiences, and they find an extra 15 bucks and maybe move this bar just ever so slight. This is the problem that most people face.

You know, spending more doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make more. In a lot of cases, it results in the opposite. So, how do you break that path? Well, this is what a chart looks like from breaking that moment. What you want to do is whenever your rorowaz starts to go up, you want to delay your spend a little bit longer. So, let's say your rorowaz is spiking, wait 3 days and then increase your spend. and you'll see your rorowaz can actually hang a little bit longer.

In the moment your rorowaz starts to plateau and you start to cross that point of the equilibrium zone, you want to start introducing what are called sc curves. And this is where you input new creative ideas. So you would expand your messaging at this moment. You wouldn't continue scaling spend. You would actually pause on spend, let the spin stay flat, and introduce new creative concepts based off some of your winners. take those winners and break them into different formats that actually can be tested and see if they convert better.

And once you find a better creative that's holding at this spin level at a much higher rorowaz, you then start to scale your spin again. And when your rorowaz starts to plateau, what do you do? You continue to iterate on this process. Or you go to your website, you look at your conversion rate. Maybe your conversion rate is at a 1%. Well, you could really put a lot of emphasis there on improving your product landing pages, optimizing them.

Maybe you need to increase your AOVs by introducing bundles. You input a bundler app. You now have variety bundles. You now have upsells, cross sales, taking your AOVs from $ 20 to $50. And now, without doing anything on your ads manager, not spending a single dollar more, all of a sudden, your rorowaz spikes, but your spins remain flat. You've done nothing. And at this point, you cross the next equilibrium zone. Right?

We're still in the profit, and the rorowaz is getting better. The spin's gone up over time. But at this point now what you can do is well you could say hey I don't want to increase my budget much more. I'm just going to shift my spend from my lowest performing audience into one of my higher performing audiences at a better return ad spend and we get a much higher rorowaz without actually increasing our spend. So you find each of these breaking points and bottlenecks whereas most people will be like okay something didn't work relaunch my campaign or revert back and scale back spin just to get back to that zone. when in reality you need to introduce S-curves, which is iterating on your weakest pain point, which could be conversion rate, your creatives, it could be your messaging not appealing to a wider market.

It could be a low AOV that needs to be higher. It could be your backend retention systems. This will expand your profit zone dramatically and allow you to go to those, you know, 500 days, $1,000 days, $1,500 days in daily spend while also having your rorowaz creep up at the same time. Now, doing FS curves forever isn't going to happen. You're always going to hit a point or an equilibrium zone that will then result in you going backwards, but you can certainly move that range of profit even higher, move your rorowaz higher, and move your spend higher until a certain point.

So, you need to understand this that increasing spend doesn't always in result in making more money. No, you want to focus on improving bottlenecks without having to raise your spend to improve your results. And then you can delay your spending raises after. So you're fixing things and waiting on the rorowaz to go up and then you increase spend shortly after. You then fix some things. You implement new creative ideas.

You delay increasing budget. Once you see rorowaz climb up, you then delay again and then raise spend. This is the process that allows you to hack the algorithm and be super data driven and technically savvy with scaling your budgets. And that is how you spend less with paid ads and actually make more money. And my fifth and final uncommon learning is re-release products versus inviting new products in. Apple, who did over $390 billion in sales in 2024, they have re-released their iPhone over and over again with little to no improvements.

Yes, slight adjustments year-over-year, but nothing radical. And they do make those improvements. They try out new styles, new colors, and they make them over and over again. and they make them slightly better each time. And this brand has built brand loyalty yet again increases the repeat purchases year-over-year. Since the first iPhone came out, I've just about bought every single one, and you probably have, too. You've probably updated those devices tons of different times with them.

And all the big brands understand this and are making cash over fist using this strategy. Listen to your customers, get feedback, and re-release that product as a 1.0, a 2.0 know with slight improvements over time and you will see how quickly customers come back to your hero product which is still your hero just with a slight difference and you can continue to scurve your sales and get repeat buyers. This will give you a competitive advantage unlike anything you've ever seen.

I've seen this in the wallet space where they have wallet 1.0 2.0 they have the minimalist you know the even more minimalist the minimalist that doesn't break wallet. There's so many things Yeti does this. They released the Yeti cup multiple times just with slight iterations on it. So, go ahead and test out these five things and let me know how your results are. And if you want to learn on the next video the $ 1.3 billion e-commerce funnel that generates sales, then definitely make sure to click this video right here.

And once again, it's your favorite digital marketer here, Chase Chapel. Cheers in bal.