Leaders on Shopify with John Readman

For the first time on Leaders on Shopify, John sat down with a guest that isn't human. Meet Boardy, an AI "superconnector" that spends its time talking to founders, operators, and investors across the ecommerce ecosystem, built specifically to spot patterns most people miss.

Boardy and John talk about whether AI in Shopify is real or hype: it's real where it's reducing manual merchandising, improving forecasting, and helping lean teams move faster, but "fully autonomous growth" claims are still ahead of the evidence. On the App Store, now sitting at 18,000+ apps: still viable, but a generic clone won't survive.

This episode discusses agentic commerce. When a shopper buys inside ChatGPT, who actually owns that customer, the brand, or the AI platform they bought through? Boardy's answer: it depends entirely on what data gets passed through, and who owns the first-party relationship is something brands need to actively protect, not assume.

Podcast description: Golf used to mean black trousers, black tops, and zero personality. Ben from Function18 helped change that, building a pure-play online golf apparel retailer from the ashes of a struggling bricks-and-mortar business, and riding out two decades of platform migrations, agency relationships, and a completely reshaped industry along the way.

In this episode of Leaders on Shopify, John sits down with Ben to talk through the realities of running an ecommerce business for the long haul: why they moved from OSCommerce to Magento to Shopify (and what each platform taught them), the tension of competing with the very brands they stock as those brands go direct-to-consumer, and why golf's changing demographic, driven by younger players and pros being more open about their love of the game, has reshaped who they're selling to.

They also get into where AI is already earning its place in the business, from product imagery to number-crunching, and Ben's refreshingly honest take on agentic commerce: useful for some purchases, a hard no for others, and a genuine unknown for everyone in ecommerce right now.

Mary-Anne Danarzo, founder of FireBelly, talks about building brands from the ground up, and what it actually takes to scale them. Mary-Anne shares how a career that started in mobile phone accessories sales led to an agency that's helped brands like Color Wow scale on Shopify all the way to a L'Oreal acquisition, including a Magento-to-Shopify migration that doubled their conversion rate overnight.

In this episode, we talk about why nobody actually owns conversion rate inside most businesses, the difference between quantitative data and getting on the phone to real customers, and Mary-Anne's approach to building "brand brains". They also cover the AI tools reshaping ecommerce creative, why Shopify keeps winning against platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud for fast-scaling brands, and what medium-to-large brands get wrong when they hesitate to migrate.

What has eight years of working with scaling ecommerce brands taught Nathan Lomax? In this episode the co-founder of Shopify Platinum agency Quickfire Digital, sits down with John Readman to talk about the patterns he sees repeated over again on Shopify.

From bot traffic skewing metrics and creating the illusion of a conversion problem, to brands obsessively acquiring new customers while ignoring the ones they already have, Nate is candid about where DTC brands go wrong between £1M and £30M. He also talks about decision paralysis, the temptation to in-house too early, and why some of the fastest-growing brands he's seen simply stopped procrastinating.

The episode also covers Quickfire's own journey, from doing social media for a local chip shop to becoming one of a handful of Shopify Platinum agencies in the world, working with Tala, Reebok, Juicy Couture, Beaver Town, and Wrexham FC.

Plus: honest takes on headless builds, the AI noise versus AI reality gap, agentic commerce, and how to know when a client relationship isn't working for either side.

When do you know it's time to leave your ecommerce platform? Neil Campbell, Chief Growth Officer at Smol, has been through it. His direct-to-consumer cleaning brand built a £45M business on Shopify, with every customer on subscription, starting with a free trial, and then made the call to leave Shopify.

In this conversation with John Readman, Neil breaks down the full Smol journey, from early days on Shopify with Recharge as the subscription engine, through to the point where they were building so much custom development around and beyond Shopify that leaving started to make more sense than staying. He shares the moment Shopify's new checkout rollout forced the decision, why being half-in on a platform is often the hardest place to be, and what brands considering the same move need to think about before they take the leap.

Why are brands that went headless or bespoke quietly migrating back to Shopify?

Liam Quinn, Director of Innovation at Visualsoft, one of Europe's largest Shopify partners, has watched the platform go from startup tool to enterprise default.

In this episode, John and LIam get into the real cost comparison of Shopify versus Magento, Salesforce, and the other legacy platforms, including why brands that chose the headless or bespoke route are quietly migrating back. Liam shares what a £5,000 monthly agency retainer used to buy versus what it buys now and what the app ecosystem actually looks like for brands trying to scale past five million.

How do you grow an online shoe business to £65 million and what nearly breaks along the way? Stuart Paver has been selling footwear online since 1999, making him one of Europe's earliest ecommerce pioneers. In this episode he gets honest about the hidden costs of scaling online retail, why warehousing becomes your biggest headache, how AI is already transforming product photography, and what 25 years in the game tells you about surviving whatever comes next.

The infrastructure secrets behind scaling stores, why AI just crossed a critical quality threshold, and the hidden 4% cost lurking inside the future of ecommerce. Keith Matthews, founder of one of Ireland's leading Shopify Plus agencies, joins John Readman to reveal the infrastructure secrets behind scaling stores, why AI just crossed a critical quality threshold, and the hidden 4% cost lurking inside the future of ecommerce.