Shopify1Percent - The Best Shopify Podcast To Make Your Ecommerce Business 1% Better Every Episode

Why do my Shopify subscribers cancel after the first order? Thomas Lalas has analysed real-time data from more than 2,000 ecommerce brands, and he says most lose up to 80% of their customers inside 90 days. The best ones still lose half. He also found the biggest cancellation spike lands on the exact day you rebill, which usually means the customer never knew they were subscribed. He calls it the accidental renewal. If you run a subscription on Shopify, that one is worth sitting with. We got into the math, the fix, and the one stat of his I pushed back on.

So if you're asking yourself "How do I get more repeat customers on Shopify?" or "Why is my Shopify subscription churn so high?", this episode is for you.

- Why the biggest spike in cancellations happens on the exact day you rebill, and what your billing reminder should say instead

- Retention Economics (the book) on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Retention-Economics-Customers-Escaping-Unlocking/dp/B0FR3T3HC7

🎁 LISTENER OFFER: The first five people who comment on YouTube, comment on Spotify, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts with one thing they learned from this episode get a free copy of Thomas's book, on me. Email me at [email protected] once you've done it and I'll ship it out.

The undo button for Shopify. I’ve watched merchants lose entire catalogs to one bad import or an app update... Shopify’s own terms make your store data your responsibility. Rewind backs up your products, themes, orders, and customers automatically, and restores one item, or your whole store in a couple of clicks.

In my opinion, if you're actually serious about your Shopify business, you absolutely should have Rewind running on it. There's no excuses not to have it backed up. Rewind is trusted by 25,000+ businesses including Olaplex and Dr. Martens. Set it up once and have peace of mind forever. 

🚨 Our listeners get an extra month FREE. Use code JAY when you sign up here: https://bit.ly/s1p-rewind 

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

PLUS, you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

I clicked the subscribe option on a coffee brand's Shopify store and found exactly one sentence underneath it. Not a benefit, not a reason to commit, just the legal disclaimer, ending in the words "if permitted." That's the most common subscription setup on Shopify by a mile: somebody installs an app, switches on a 10% discount, and waits for recurring revenue that never shows up. In this episode I walk through the five places on your store where a subscription should be sold and probably isn't, why a credit beats a discount every time, and the fifteen-minute fix you can ship before dinner tonight.

This episode is brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. 

70% of influencer-driven revenue isn't showing up in your dashboard. Codes are leaking. Affiliates are ghosting. And you're paying commissions on sales that never should've counted.

SATHI fixes all of it. Built by the incredible team behind SARAL (200+ top brands, $59M in revenue with influencers).

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

But here's what has me genuinely excited lately: you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

How do I recover abandoned carts on Shopify? Ask anyone at a trade show and they'll tell you the answer is AI. My guest built a company doing the exact opposite. Steve Lequerica is the COO of LiveRecover, where real humans text the customers who bail at your checkout. Baymard says just over 70% of carts get abandoned. Steve's agents convert 21% of the conversations they start, roughly triple what a good automated Shopify SMS flow pulls on its best day. One brand recovered $147,000 in a single week. Real people, apparently, still work.

So if you're asking yourself "Do abandoned cart text messages actually work on Shopify?" or "Should I use AI or real humans to recover abandoned carts on Shopify?", this episode is for you!

* LiveRecover: https://www.liverecover.com/

Steve is giving Shopify1Percent listeners what he's calling "Free Summer." Sign up through this show and you get LiveRecover free through the end of the summer. No charge, no catch. Mention you heard about it here, or reach out to Steve directly.

This episode is brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. 

70% of influencer-driven revenue isn't showing up in your dashboard. Codes are leaking. Affiliates are ghosting. And you're paying commissions on sales that never should've counted.

SATHI fixes all of it. Built by the incredible team behind SARAL (200+ top brands, $59M in revenue with influencers).

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

But here's what has me genuinely excited lately: you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

Most Shopify stores run the same reorder strategy: one reminder, 30 days after purchase, sent to everyone identically forever. So the customer who bought one bag of coffee and the customer who bought six both get pinged on day 30, when one is out and the other has five months in the cupboard. In this episode I break down why the second order is the most important order in your entire customer relationship, and why almost nobody works on it. You'll get the four plays that actually earn it, starting with the big one: timing the nudge to each customer's real behaviour instead of a fixed day. Plus how to build it yourself in Shopify Flow (now free on every plan), and a new number to start tracking that most merchants have never measured. This is episode four of the Repeat Commerce series, and it adds two lines to your Repeat Commerce Scorecard.

Each episode of the Repeat Commerce Series we'll be adding a new section to the scorecard. Follow along and listen to all episodes, and by the time you're done, you'll have a full Repeat Commerce audit done on your store!  - https://www.shopify1percent.com/downloads/repeat-scorecard/ 

🌟 In the episode I mentioned an exclusive offer for rePete with $10,000 in free reorders. You can access that directly here: https://repete.me/jay 

This episode is brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. 

70% of influencer-driven revenue isn't showing up in your dashboard. Codes are leaking. Affiliates are ghosting. And you're paying commissions on sales that never should've counted.

SATHI fixes all of it. Built by the incredible team behind SARAL (200+ top brands, $59M in revenue with influencers).

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

But here's what has me genuinely excited lately: you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

Your Shopify dashboard says forty percent of your customers come back, but that number is quietly answering a different question than the one you think you asked. In this episode I pull apart the three behaviours Shopify blends into one returning customer rate, and I show you how to build the honest number underneath it: your elective second-purchase rate, the share of customers who chose to come back without a subscription doing the work. We build a proper cohort on the whiteboard where a proud 40% becomes a 25% that tells the truth, I show you how to pull yours with Sidekick in about ten minutes, and I give you a simple four-profile grid to know exactly what to do next. This is episode three of the Repeat Commerce series, and it adds two more lines to your Repeat Commerce Scorecard.

Each episode of the Repeat Commerce Series we'll be adding a new section to the scorecard. Follow along and listen to all episodes, and by the time you're done, you'll have a full Repeat Commerce audit done on your store!  - https://www.shopify1percent.com/downloads/repeat-scorecard/ 

This episode is brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. 

70% of influencer-driven revenue isn't showing up in your dashboard. Codes are leaking. Affiliates are ghosting. And you're paying commissions on sales that never should've counted.

SATHI fixes all of it. Built by the incredible team behind SARAL (200+ top brands, $59M in revenue with influencers).

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

But here's what has me genuinely excited lately: you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

Episode two of the Repeat Commerce series, and this is the one where retention stops being a vibe and becomes a dollar amount. Last episode you pulled two numbers from your Shopify admin; today those numbers earn their keep. I build a fictional coffee brand on the whiteboard and run the experiment everyone quotes but nobody calculates: what a five point lift in repeat purchase rate is actually worth, and what buying that exact same growth through ads would cost instead. Same top line, opposite sign. Plus, your sticky note from episode one officially graduates into the Repeat Commerce Scorecard, a running retention audit of your own store that we'll add to every episode. It's a free download so you can follow along for the rest of the series.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

This episode is brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. 

70% of influencer-driven revenue isn't showing up in your dashboard. Codes are leaking. Affiliates are ghosting. And you're paying commissions on sales that never should've counted.

SATHI fixes all of it. Built by the incredible team behind SARAL (200+ top brands, $59M in revenue with influencers).

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

But here's what has me genuinely excited lately: you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

What's the one thing AI can't copy about your Shopify store? Everything else is up for grabs. AI can clone your site in a weekend, rewrite your product pages, and undercut your ads before lunch. Matt Edmundson has built, sold, and failed at 20+ Shopify and eCommerce brands since 1998, generating over £75 million in sales, and he's convinced the only real moat left is you. With 61% of Google searches now ending without a click and ad costs climbing every year, the brands winning on Shopify aren't the ones spending more. They're the ones nobody can be. This one gets tactical fast.

This episode is brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. 

70% of influencer-driven revenue isn't showing up in your dashboard. Codes are leaking. Affiliates are ghosting. And you're paying commissions on sales that never should've counted.

SATHI fixes all of it. Built by the incredible team behind SARAL (200+ top brands, $59M in revenue with influencers).

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

But here's what has me genuinely excited lately: you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

This is episode one of my new Repeat Commerce series, a run of about 20 episodes all about the business of the second order, the third order, and the tenth. I'm starting with the argument the whole series is built on: repeat commerce should be the default way you build a Shopify store, not the thing you get to later. The average new customer now costs merchants around $29 in losses while the average repeat sale makes about $39 in profit, so the second order isn't a bonus, it's the actual business. In this one I break down the three lies that got ecommerce hooked on acquisition, and I walk you through pulling two numbers in your Shopify admin that most merchants have never looked at. Grab those numbers before the next episode, because we're going to spend this series moving them.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

This episode is brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. 

70% of influencer-driven revenue isn't showing up in your dashboard. Codes are leaking. Affiliates are ghosting. And you're paying commissions on sales that never should've counted.

SATHI fixes all of it. Built by the incredible team behind SARAL (200+ top brands, $59M in revenue with influencers).

I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion.

But here's what has me genuinely excited lately: you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.)

⭐️ Try SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. Our listeners get early access at MySATHI.io  20% off with code: JAY ⭐️

So if you're asking yourself "how do I add a shop by color feature to my Shopify store?" or "why don't my Shopify color filters actually work?", this episode of Shopify1Percent is for you!

🎁 Special offer for listeners: Bridger and Carson are personally running live demos and walkthroughs for brands right now (the actual founders, not a sales bot reading a script). Grab a time at https://hoppn.com/get-started

⭐️ Brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands. Listeners get early access at MySATHI.io  20% off with code: JAY ⭐️

Shopify just shipped its Spring '26 Edition with over 150 updates, and most of them won't touch your store this quarter. So I read every one, clicked into the help docs behind the marketing, and pulled the 11 I'd actually turn on if this were my business. The idea running through almost all of them is that there's now a fourth place your customers buy, inside AI chats like ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and the Shop app, and those assistants read your product data, not your beautiful homepage. I cover what each feature does, who should care, and the exact next step, then hand you the single 1% job to do tonight.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

CHAPTERS

0:00 The fourth place your customers are buying