Kurt spent a day at Beanstalk, an invite-only ecommerce conference at Industry City in Brooklyn, recording 15-minute conversations under a tent. Seven made it to tape. Every guest is on Shopify. Not one led with paid ads.

The lineup: Matt Butcher of Adam's Polishes on why he comes. Jay Wright, who spends about a billion dollars a year on Meta, on why your media buying is "completely cooked." Maria Lopez-May, VP Marketing at Nugget, on life after the pandemic lottery. Vivek Kumar, CEO of Articore (Redbubble and TeePublic), on their new Shopify integration and a $20 million turnaround. NJ Falk of APL on $400 sneakers and the thing she noticed about Sidekick. Robbie Bent of Othership on building $15 million bathhouses and marketing through the local dentist. Ali Weiss, former CMO of Glossier, on launching NoBiggie and choosing not to turn on paid.

Paul was not there. He asks what you would ask.

What you'll learn:

• Why a curated conference beats a big one: "everyone I bump into here is worth chatting with"
• Jay Wright: Meta is an auction, someone is winning at that CPM, and it is not the person buying like it's 2022
• The biggest mistake Jay sees: founders abdicating growth to a $1,000-a-month retainer
• How to label your ad creative so your own account tells you what to make next
• Maria Lopez-May of Nugget: right product, right time, then the dupes, then Amazon and CTV
• Articore's first profit since listing and a Shopify integration that launched ten days before the interview
• Why print-on-demand sellers should not put "the kitchen sink" on their store
• APL: Magento to Shopify Plus in a week, then a flagship store opened four months before lockdown
• The Sidekick detail NJ Falk noticed and Kurt never did
• Othership: a horse trough in a backyard, 90 people screaming in a dark sauna, and why brick and mortar takes two decades
• Why local influencers (the trainer, the stylist, the bartender) beat wide-reach channels for a neighborhood business
• Ali Weiss on unlearning beauty margins, "playing on hard mode" with two buyers, and why getting on a Target shelf is the easy part
• NoBiggie Neighbors: free product for your kid's birthday party as the whole acquisition strategy
• The hard decision to not turn on paid until repeat purchase shows up across channels

Hosts: Kurt Elster and Paul Reda, co-owners of Ethercycle, a Shopify-exclusive agency.

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• Beanstalk: https://www.beanstalkevents.com
• Adam's Polishes: https://adamspolishes.com
• Ecommerce Equation: https://ecommerceequation.com
• Jay Wright on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaywrightofficial/
• Nugget: https://nuggetcomfort.com
• Articore Group: https://articore.com
• Dashery: https://www.dashery.com
• APL: https://athleticpropulsionlabs.com
• Othership: https://othership.us
• NoBiggie: https://nobiggieplease.com

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Discounts are the biggest line item on your P&L that nobody approved. Kurt and Paul answer the questions merchants keep asking, then lay out the Black Friday plan.

Part one is a mailbag pulled from r/ecommerce, r/shopify, and the Shopify Community: the Combines With checkbox that wiped the profit on 60 orders before lunch, influencer codes showing up on Honey, welcome codes reused by new Gmail accounts, and the eternal free-shipping-or-20%-off question. Part two is what to fix in September, and what three consecutive Black Fridays of gift-with-purchase data say about thresholds, gift size, and who actually takes the gift.

What you'll learn:

• Why discounts deserve the scrutiny you give ad spend, and why almost nobody gives it
• How one Combines With checkbox stacked free shipping, 20% off, and a bundle script into zero-profit orders
• What to do about influencer codes on coupon sites (and why single-use codes don't solve this one)
• The rule Kurt uses on every code he creates: a 12-month expiry, no exceptions
• Why you can't stop welcome-code abuse, and the one-line fix from the top Reddit reply
• Free shipping vs discount codes: if you have to ask, you don't know your contribution margin
• The September checklist before code freeze: SEO metadata, alt text, accessibility, Core Web Vitals, and a discount audit
• Three Black Fridays, one $50 gift threshold, and carts that landed at $98, $101, and $111
• The surprise in the data: gift-with-purchase skews to returning customers, free shipping to new ones
• The segmented strategy: free shipping code for first-time buyers, gift for everyone else
• Threshold math: gift at 2x AOV, free shipping 50% above AOV, gift retail value 10 to 15% of cart
• Why Shopify's agentic catalog mapping did nothing on two stores for 14 days

Hosts: Kurt Elster and Paul Reda, co-owners of Ethercycle, a Shopify-exclusive agency, and makers of Promo Party, a gift-with-purchase app.

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• All three research reports: https://ethercycle.com/report
• State of Discounts 2026: https://ethercycle.com/pages/state-of-discounts-2026
• Q4 gift-with-purchase report: https://promoparty.app/bfcm-gift-with-purchase/
• The $2K Combines With thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ecommerce/comments/1qbvg5k/
• Free shipping vs discount codes thread: https://community.shopify.com/t/675799
• Welcome code abuse thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/shopify/comments/1u9i640/
• Influencer codes on Honey thread: https://community.shopify.com/t/222041

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He sells vapes with no nicotine. Every ad platform, payment processor, and carrier treats him like Big Tobacco anyway.

Conrad Kurth founded Cyclone Pods in 2018 after watching every friend he had get hooked on Juul. Eight years later the brand has grown every year with a 60 percent repeat customer rate, no paid ads, no Shopify Payments, and no USPS. This is what selling on hard mode actually looks like.

What you'll learn:

• Why a product with no addictive ingredient still gets a 60% repeat rate
• Where a new customer really comes from when Meta, Google, and TikTok won't run your ads
• Why "alternative advertising" on age-restricted sites sent traffic that never converted
• The Sunday morning Shopify Payments shut off with no warning, and the standalone store he keeps ready for next time
• How UPS and FedEx agreed to ship after seeing lab data, and why USPS never will
• Whether publishing third-party lab results helps SEO (his honest answer: he can't prove it)
• Why Wisconsin only allows vapes from Philip Morris, Altria, and Reynolds
• The Focus Pouch story: caffeine plus lion's mane, reishi, and cordyceps, two years before caffeine pouches were a category
• Vapes for dogs, the leaking device that got pulled, and what he'd tell his 2018 self
• His advice for anyone selling a restricted product: ignore the ad people, do the legwork yourself

Guest: Conrad Kurth, founder and CEO of Cyclone Pods, a nicotine-free vape and nootropic pouch brand based in Santa Monica, California. Former software engineer.

Show Links:

• Cyclone Pods: https://cyclonepods.com
• Email Conrad: [email protected]

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He's shipped over a billion units. He says your Black Friday gets decided in September.

Casey Armstrong, CMO of ShipBob, returns for his third appearance to break down peak season 2026. Five years ago the villain was Shipageddon. This year there's no single boogeyman, just tariffs that pushed brands global, an exploding channel mix, and AI quietly eating the back office.

What you'll learn:

• Why right now is "inbound peak" and what to send your 3PL before October
• The real warehouse math: when one node beats five, and why split shipments crush margins
• The only two levers that lower shipping costs (and you can only pull one)
• The subscription discount trap that trains customers to game you, plus how Rise Coffee and Momentous do it right
• How brands turn screenshots into warehouse receiving orders in 30 seconds with AI agents in Slack
• ShipBob Promise: delivery dates on the PDP and at checkout, built by the exec who ran Amazon's North America fulfillment
• The Watchmaster story: a crawler that undercut Rolex competitors $5 at a time to win Google Shopping
• The exact signal it's time to stop packing your own orders

Guest: Casey Armstrong, CMO of ShipBob, the global fulfillment platform with 70+ facilities worldwide. Previously VP of Marketing at BigCommerce.

Show Links:

• ShipBob: https://www.shipbob.com
• Unpacked with Casey Armstrong, ShipBob's podcast: https://unpacked.shipbob.com
• Casey's prior appearances: Shipageddon (Dec 2020), 3PL ShipBob Sees Strong Black Friday Fulfillment (Dec 2021)

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"You think you know what you're doing. Like I work at Shopify. I should be better at it."

That's Atlee Clark, Shopify's VP of Partnerships, on running her own store, Pika Layers, for the past seven years. She's joined by Eytan Seidman, VP of Product for everything partners and developers touch. Together they just rewrote the deal for Shopify's entire partner ecosystem, and this conversation explains what that means for your store.

We get into the new revenue share that pays partners on merchant GMV growth (Plus upgrades finally count), why Catalog and UCP put the world's products in a single API, and how Sidekick app extensions going GA changes what apps can do inside your admin. Plus the two areas both VPs say are wide open for anyone willing to build.

Stick around for the complaint Eytan admits Shopify still hasn't fixed.

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"It's more than 2x that conversion rate coming from another referral channel."

AI shopping agents are already sending buyers to Shopify stores, and they convert at double the rate of your other referral traffic. Most merchants have no idea it's happening because the analytics show up as direct traffic. Archie Abrams runs growth at Shopify, and he's spent five and a half years building the infrastructure for exactly this moment: Shop identity, cart sync, and the Shop Product Network.

Archie breaks down why AI traffic lands on product pages instead of your homepage, the five-minute ChatGPT audit that reveals what AI actually understands about your products, and which product categories are winning in agentic search right now. Plus the free growth levers already sitting in your admin, and why the smartest money might still be in direct mail.

The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Your subscription program is adding customers every month—so why has it stopped growing?

Matt Holman, founder of Subscription Prescription and known as “The Subscription Doc,” explains how churn creates a hidden ceiling: eventually, the subscribers coming

Matt and Kurt discuss why improving the offer can produce a better return than obsessing over retention, including:

They also compare Recharge, Skio, and Loop—and explore how AI could change subscription management.

Guest

Matt Holman, The Subscription Doc

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"This traffic is nothing. It is a rounding error."

Kurt and Paul pulled 24 months of raw order data from 10 established Shopify stores: 94 million sessions, 2.2 million orders, $274 million in revenue. They went looking for the AI shopping revolution and found 0.1% of revenue. The catch: those referrals convert better than any other channel, and getting ready for them takes one afternoon of free work.

Then the discount data. Across $285 million in gross sales, nearly every store hands the same 20% code to new and returning customers alike, all year long, while the promo type that wins on every metric gets 7% of the budget.

Also covered: the channel quietly outselling all AI sources combined 35 to 1, and the leaked evergreen code that cost one store $349,000.

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"Man, what didn't I get wrong? It's so much harder."

Brian Nolan sold his SaaS company Sellbrite to GoDaddy. Then he bought Darren & Phillip, an Australian dog apparel brand built around viral matching dog-and-owner bathrobes, and found out that owning a store is a different beast than building software for stores. The founder was the face of the brand, and she left with the sale. The Google Workspace account was locked to Australian billing. Moving inventory from Australia to the US costs more than shipping it from China.

In this episode: what nobody warns you about when buying an 8-year-old brand, how customers with 80+ repeat purchases justify losing money on the first order, and the TikTok creator seeding playbook that works in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands.

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Kurt pulled the agentic sales numbers on a store doing $1.8 million a month. ChatGPT drove $4,200 of it. So he dragooned business partner Paul Reda into an unscripted reaction to Shopify's Editions announcements. No pre-cleared questions, no talking points, just two people who've optimized eight-figure stores for AI search comparing notes on what's actually real.

They get into why Universal Commerce Protocol is legitimately impressive tech still waiting for its payday, what the app store review crackdown means for honest developers, and a discovery buried in Shopify's dev docs: a commission-based paid placements program that might finally be the part that makes the money.

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.