Every episode we cover a different part of the ecosystem. We’ve talked bundles, subscriptions, point of sale and lots more.

But what’s more important than any of these? Customers!

Customer data is your biggest asset. If you don't own it, or it's scattered across a dozen platforms, someone else can take it away from you whenever they like. 

Danny Phillips has spent his career proving that on the customer side. He co-founded Omneo, a platform that helps omnichannel retail brands own, control and actually use their customer data properly, and he was building zero-party data tools before "zero-party data" was even a term anyone used.

We get into what owned data actually means beyond the buzzword (Danny's zero-party data framework), why the humble newsletter pop-up is dying and what Omneo's QR-code Profile Portal replaces it with, the "red napkin theory" for turning one-off buyers into repeat customers, and why most loyalty programs are boring because they only offer stuff instead of status, access and power. Plus Danny's line of the episode - data is oil, but it's also toxic waste - and why that means you should be deleting more of it, not hoarding all of it.

Links

This episode is sponsored by The Support Heroes - dedicated Shopify support agents who actually know what they're doing. Head to thesupportheroes.com. 

You can learn more about Omneo and how it helps you grow sales and retain your best customers at omneo.io. 

Check out my apps, including Fish Wishlist, Product Pelican and Stork Credit at nativeappco.com. Apps that don’t feel like apps.

In this episode:

• What "owned data" and zero-party data actually mean, and why Danny built Omneo around them
• The Profile Portal QR code that's replacing the newsletter pop-up in physical stores
• Why "pick up where you left off" experiences matter more than AI recommendation engines
• The red napkin theory: how to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers
• Why points-based loyalty is stale, and what status, access and power look like instead
• Danny's take on Black Friday, and the four weeks after it that most brands waste

00:00 — Owned data: why it matters

01:09 — Sunny Torquay and the shiny topic of data

01:24 — What "owned data" actually means

04:30 — The payoff: a "receipt for their time" for every shopper

06:51 — Product data and customer data: two sides of the same coin

10:02 — Profile Portal: swapping the newsletter pop-up for a QR code

12:30 — Uniqlo, login with Shop and the "80% brand, 20% me" homepage

14:31 — Buy it again: the win that doesn't need an algorithm

16:55 — Winning the one-and-done customer with the red napkin theory

21:29 — Stop burning margin on first-purchase discounts

22:38 — Clean data starts on day one

25:53 — "Data is oil, but it's also toxic waste" (the headline moment)

26:06 — Status, access and power: fixing stale loyalty programs

30:26 — Why surprise loyalty credit annoys customers more than it delights them

31:00 — When loyalty turns into a retail media program in disguise

33:45 — Black Friday: the race to the bottom nobody wants to run

35:33 — The four weeks after Black Friday nobody uses properly

37:21 — Wrapping up

If recording one episode of my mid life crisis podcast at DotDev in Toronto wasn't enough, I got an email at 10.30pm at night saying that they had an extra slot open up. Kurt Elster, the OG of Shopify podcasting, wasn't able to make it, so they asked me if I'd fill the slot.

Obviously I said yes, and then I had to find someone to talk to. So I thought I should have some fun with it and do it my way, but wasn't quite sure who to have as a guest.

Then, I got chatting to this bloke after a DotDev session on AI Product Discovery, and it turns out we're both product data nerds. It turns out "this bloke" is Jay El-Kaake. Three time founder. Co-founded Smile back when it was Sweet Tooth, built and exited Fera.ai, and now he's running Osello, getting Shopify stores onto Nordstrom and Macy's.

We covered two main topics:
• Why 90% of "agentic optimisation" is stuff you should already be doing with your product data and content, and the value of taste when you're letting AI write your content.

• What it's like to be a founder in 2026. Jay is obviously a pro, I'm just starting out, so we shared our different perspectives.

This episode's brought to you by The Support Heroes, who support Shopify Apps all over the world.

And I would be remiss not to plug my own app, Product Pelican, which is helping stores enrich their product data for this new AI world.

This was the second Episode we recorded at DotDev, you can also catch our episode where we chat with Shopify's Head of Product Jonathan Zazove wherever you're listening to this.

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This is a big moment for my little podcast...

Shopify invited me to record the podcast from their special studio on the floor at DotDev!

Shopify's Director of Product, Jonathan Zazove, and an OG app founder, Mike Rossi of Smile (fresh off a Shopify Build Award) caught up with me to chat all things Sidekick, the future of Shopify apps and what is being done to make life better for app developers.

If you weren't able to make it to Toronto, or want to head back there, tune in!

This episode is sponsored by The Support Heroes - dedicated Shopify support agents who actually know what they're doing. Head to thesupportheroes.com.

It's also brought to you by my company, Native App Co - apps that don't feel like apps. That's Product Pelican, Stork Credit, Fish Wishlist and Omnibus Owl. Check them out at apps.nativeappco.com.

• Shopify's new penalty for incentivized reviews: apps lose the reviews outright, not just the listing
• The push to stop copycat apps trading on real brands' names
• Why Built for Shopify became more important, not less, as Smile moved upmarket
• Admin UI extensions, admin actions, and how apps stopped being "second class citizens" in the admin
• Sidekick app extensions explained: data access plus the "action experience" that fills in forms for you
• Smile's real-world Sidekick build: turning it into an AI loyalty program manager
• Why Jonathan modeled Sidekick extensions on MCP, and why most of Smile's users won't touch MCP directly
• The shift in loyalty from cheap acquisition to proving lifetime value, plus the POS/retail expansion play
• Josh Bitossi and POS Cafe as proof that niche, unsexy problems can be a whole business
• Where to actually start an app business today: agency-first, or go hunting for niche enterprise problems

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Agentic shopping is already here. While Shopify rolls out things like the global catalogue, UCP and Agentic Channels, some platforms are already a couple of years into that journey. Michael Tutek is one of them. I remember loading up the Arc'teryx site one day and there it was - an AI shopping assistant, live and working, while most of the industry was still writing think-pieces about whether this stuff was even real.

Michael is the founder and CEO of Preezie, the guided-selling and agentic commerce platform working with brands like Puma, Lorna Jane and Arc'teryx. He started on the sales floor at The Good Guys, clocked that 30% of in-store visitors bought something against barely 1% online, and has spent the best part of a decade trying to close that gap.

We get into why Michael thinks a chat box bolted onto your store isn't the future, and why agentic commerce is. Plus how you stop an AI assistant confidently making things up, why feeding it your old human chat transcripts can make it worse not better, and the out-of-stock feature that's worth 20-30% of the whole tool's value on its own. We also get into why Michael flatly refuses to build products that try to change shopper behaviour.

This episode is sponsored by The Support Heroes - dedicated Shopify support agents who actually know what they're doing. Head to thesupportheroes.com.

Also brought to you by Product Pelican (https://apps.shopify.com/product-pelican), the native PIM for Shopify. Michael's whole point is that good AI starts with good data - Product Pelican keeps your catalogue clean and consistent at scale, so whatever you bolt on top of it, agentic or not, has something solid to work with. Install it from the Shopify App Store.

In this episode:

• From throwing-water-on-your-face mornings to The Good Guys sales floor: the 30% vs 1% insight that started everything
• Why Preezie pivoted from e-commerce quizzes to a full agentic shopping platform after one day with Microsoft
• The case against conversational commerce: why agentic beats a chatbot box
• Keeping AI honest: onboarding it like a new hire, and why your old human chat logs can make it worse
• The out-of-stock play worth 20-30% of the tool's value on its own
• Why it still matters to let shoppers scroll through 10 pages of products
• Turning real shopper questions into user-generated FAQs for SEO and GEO
• Why Michael refuses to build products that try to change shopper behaviour
• The roadmap: an "e-commerce brain" built natively for the AI era

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If you've tuned into The Shopify App Show, you'll know that The Support Heroes have been great supporters of the show, and also great supporters of Shopify Apps all over the world.

When they approached me to sponsor the show, I couldn't have thought of a better fit. The Shopify App Show is all about showcasing independent apps, founder-led businesses who have built their business from the ground up. And for those who are successful enough to hit scale, maintaining a customer support team who can deliver as good a service as the founders of the business is nearly impossible.

That's where The Support Heroes come in.

So I thought it was worth catching up with Anggy from The Support Heroes to talk about how they work, where they fit in and what they do for Shopify app developers all over the world.

It's a bit of a different format to our usual episodes, but if you're an app founder, this one is for you.

Shopify Editions is basically tech's twice-yearly keynote moment now. The Everywhere Edition dropped 150+ updates, and landed on the same day I'd booked Emili Horncastle of Zapiet, so we hit record three hours later and got the early takes while the dust was still settling.

Emili's the real deal: Zapiet invented store pickup and local delivery on Shopify! She now runs six apps including Zapiet Eats (you guessed it, basically Uber Eats for Shopify).

We get into what Editions actually means for developers - why Sidekick makes good UX more important, not less, the gap between cool catalogue-API demos and genuinely useful experiences, and the glaring silence around the online store and themes.

Then we go deep on Zapiet Eats: how it lets restaurants ditch the brutal Uber/DoorDash margins for their own loyal customers, why one app became six, the new Shopify billing API and per-order pricing, and the Zapietosaurus - the dragon-meets-T-Rex mascot Emili designed that kids now drag everywhere.

If you build apps and you're trying to work out where to actually point your energy after Editions - and after the Mantle news - this one's for you.

This episode is sponsored by The Support Heroes - dedicated Shopify support agents who actually know what they're doing. Head to thesupportheroes.com.

In this episode:

• Editions three hours in - Sidekick, the catalogue API, and why "everywhere" is the whole point
• The Sidekick paradox: why AI-driven setup makes clean UX and consistent terminology more critical
• What Editions left out - nothing for the online store or the theme ecosystem that's still most merchants' lifeblood
• The Mantle wind-down, the scramble to replace it, and rebuilding reporting in-house with AI
• The new billing API - per-order vs percentage, and why Zapiet won't take a cut of every order
• How one app became six, and why merchants need a bike, not a rocket ship
• Zapiet Eats: restaurant ordering on Shopify, ditching aggregator fees, and pulling Wendy's onto the platform
• The Zapietosaurus - and why a dragon-T-Rex mascot matters more than you'd think

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Product data is the plankton of ecommerce — the bottom of the food chain that everything else feeds on. Your content, your search rankings, the LLMs, the marketplaces: they're all eating what's at the bottom. Feed them junk, get AI slop. Few people understand this better than Ole Thorup, who built Accentuate Custom Fields as a solo developer back in 2016 — when metafields were just strings and booleans.

Ole's also just launched Kairos Protect — bot detection and checkout protection that keeps card testers and price scrapers out of your store and out of your analytics.

If you've ever fought with a 30,000-product catalog, managed product data in a spreadsheet you're scared to open, or wondered how the merchandising teams at big stores actually do it — this one's for you.

We've put together a playbook to go with this episode: Your Shopify Products Are Being Read By Machines. Find it on Substack, and if you're not subscribed yet — do the thing.

This episode is sponsored by The Support Heroes — dedicated Shopify support agents who actually know what they're doing. Head to thesupportheroes.com.

And if you're talking product data, you should be managing yours properly. Product Pelican is a native PIM for Shopify — manage and audit your entire catalog at scale, with missing data, broken images and SEO gaps flagged before your customers find them. Install it from the Shopify App Store.

In this episode:

• Building Accentuate in 2016, when metafields were strings and not much else
• Growing to 20,000+ merchants and the Shop Circle exit
• How Live Metafields works (and the lesson about not over-engineering)
• Conversion and merchandising use cases merchants love
• Metafields as the trigger for Shopify Flow automations
• Inventory, ERPs, PIMs and getting data into the right shape
• AI, MCPs and where apps still win
• Kairos Protect: bots, card testing and checkout protection

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Compliance. It's the 4PM Friday conference slot that clears the room faster than a fire alarm. But get the right person talking about it and suddenly it's actually kind of fascinating. Elena Tsacheva from ConsentMo is that person — she makes cookie banners and GDPR regulations genuinely watchable, and she's built one of the most sophisticated consent platforms in the Shopify ecosystem to back it up.

We get into why 20 US states now have their own privacy laws (and why that number keeps climbing), what's actually broken about the vibe-coded cookie banner approach, and why Shopify's built-in banner is fine right up until it isn't.

We also discuss

• the Digital Omnibus directive
• why compliance and AI are increasingly at odds with each other
• why the future of consent might not involve cookie banners at all.

Outside the product, we hear about running team brainstorms in a toddler café, dressing for Paris Fashion Week at an e-commerce conference, and getting surprised with a birthday cake by the Zapier team in the middle of the Wide event.

We've put together a Compliance Playbook to go with this episode. Search for The Shopify App Show on Substack. And if you're not already subscribed, do the thing — like, subscribe, share, all of it.

This episode is sponsored by The Support Heroes — dedicated Shopify support agents who actually know what they're doing. Head to thesupportheroes.com.

Checkout Consentmo for your privacy compliance needs, and for Price Tracking compliance, check out one of my apps, Omnibus Owl.

And most importantly, we featured my daughter's cookie business, Sophies Cookies, on this episode.

YouTube Chapters:

00:00 — Introduction

01:29 — Making compliance content people actually watch

03:12 — What ConsentMo actually does (it's a lot)

06:56 — What drives the roadmap — and what gets a hard no

10:02 — Saying no: the art of not shipping everything

13:34 — Will merchants just vibe code their own cookie banner?

16:19 — Why hasn't Shopify just built all of this?

20:35 — Why human support still matters (especially in compliance)

21:32 — What's next: Germany's cancel law and the Digital Omnibus

25:16 — Will cookie banners eventually disappear?

27:00 — Martin's daughter's cookie website makes an appearance

27:38 — The Wide Paris event: fashion week for e-commerce

31:12 — Wrapping up

Subscriptions are the holy grail if you get them right: recurring revenue from your best customers.

Gavin Ballard has spent 15 years tackling the hardest problems in the Shopify ecosystem, founded Disco Labs, and now runs Submarine — the platform powering subscriptions, memberships and pre-orders for some of the most complex Shopify brands out there.

This chat's timely - Gavin just got back from Sub Summit in Kansas City (the only conference dedicated entirely to subscription commerce), and Recharge just aquired Skio for $100M, a massive deal in thhe Shopify Subscriptions space.

We get into why slapping a "subscribe" button next to "add to cart" doesn't work anymore, what AI is actually unlocking (A/B testing your cancellation flows in real time, infinite personalisation segments that used to be impossible), and why you're not just competing with other Shopify subs — you're competing with Netflix, Spotify and every other line on your customer's recurring bill.

If you run a store, build apps, or you're an agency talking to merchants about retention — this one's loaded. Bonus: The Shopify Subscriptions Playbook goes with this episode.

Sponsor: The Support Heroes — trained Shopify support specialists who plug into your help desk, learn your brand voice, and handle your tickets like they actually give a shit. Tell them I sent you.

And one from me — Product Pelican. Audits your whole product catalog, finds the gaps — missing alt text, weak descriptions, uncategorised products, FAQ generation — and helps you fix them in bulk. Free to try or HMU for a demo!

In this episode

• What Gavin learned at Sub Summit in Kansas City
• Why "add subscribe button" isn't a subscription strategy
• You're competing with Netflix, not just other Shopify stores
• AI unlocking infinite personalisation segments
• A/B testing your cancellation flows in real time
• The Recharge–Skio deal and what it means
• Build vs buy your own subscription platform
• Memberships — the Qantas and Costco model
• How to actually get a subscription program off the roadmap

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Shopify POS is one of the biggest unlocks on the platform, but most merchants are scared to make the move — and honestly, a lot of POS apps are half-arsed. So this episode I'm going proper niche: POS Cafe, built by Carmel and Adam, who run the whole thing out of remote Queensland and service merchants all over the world.

We get into how two ex-agency operators stumbled into a gap nobody was filling (a merchant wanted to open a coffee shop inside their store), why the "do one thing well" advice broke down for them almost immediately, and how they've ended up with what's basically 5–10 apps in one, including an Uber Eats–style online ordering extension.

If you run a retail or food business, build apps, or you're weighing up a POS migration — this one's worth your time. Bonus: I've put together a Mastering the Move to Shopify POS Playbook drawing on this chat plus my earlier ones with Josh Bitossi and Jordan Finneran.

Sponsor The Support Heroes — trained Shopify support specialists who plug into your help desk, learn your brand voice, and handle your tickets like they actually give a shit. Carmel and Adam set night alarms to check their tickets — they could use these guys. Tell them I sent you.

And one from me — Product Pelican. Audits your whole product catalog, finds the gaps — missing alt text, weak descriptions, uncategorised products — and helps you fix them in bulk. Free to try.

In this episode

• How an agency side hustle became a Shopify POS app
• The cafe gap nobody was filling
• Why "do one thing well" didn't work for POS Cafe
• Modifiers, KDS, print servers and online ordering
• Building the "Shopify way" — metafields, metaobjects, draft orders
• Why POS apps have to be stable 100% of the time
• The POS APIs they're still waiting on
• Where Shopify POS caps out (and why they think it doesn't)
• The other niche POS devs worth knowing

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