Welcome to Dtcpod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you built. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. DTC Pod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok and Igorganic creative use the code DTC Pod. Ten for 10% off your next content purchase. What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Jonathan Solorzano, who is the founder of Solo Media Group. So, Jonathan, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in shopify development and a little bit about some of the brands and projects that you've worked on.

Yeah, okay. So I guess I'll give you the start of Solo Media Group and how we ended up here. We started Solo Media Group as sort of a way to do remote work. I moved to Columbia, hired my first developer over there, Richardson, and then from there we were white labeling for larger agencies here in the United States. So the idea was some of these larger agencies might have a contract with a company like Oatley, and then they'd outsource it to us, and we do the work behind the scenes and they'd pass it off as their own. Get the nice case study. After doing that for a little while, we got so good at shopify that we say we should just go directly to the customers. We have a good enough experience. So we're not like most agencies where we do a lot of things. We just do straight development and we do it just in the shopify ecosystem because it's where all the brands that we want to work with are.

No.

Absolutely.

And so one of the things that we're really excited to talk about on this show is just kind of what goes into building a shopify site, right? Like the core pillar of DTC is your ecommerce storefront. So that's going to be a really important component to get right. So what I'd love to do in this episode is first, let's talk a little bit about shopify, the platform, what you need to know if you're starting up a brand. So call it from once you've come up with an idea, you have a product you want to sell and you're going to create a shopify storefront, kind of what's that experience? What can you expect? How do you get started? And then after that, we'll get into where you come in for brands that are going north of $500,000 in revenue towards, like, ten mil and bringing on developers and looking for a bunch more customization. So why don't we start with what a brand needs to consider and how getting started on Shopify works?

Yeah, I think when you speak to other agency owners, people go around talking about design. We need to get a good design in. I think that there's a lot of overthinking. If you were to ask somebody that quote unquote, makes websites, but really, Shopify has everything it needs for you if you know no code to just start. So if I were to start a Shopify store tomorrow with my own brand, what would I do? I wouldn't even code, and that's that. I know how to do it. I'd buy a theme for $300. I'd throw that theme up. If you don't have a product design, get a product designed on fiverr, and then from there worry about marketing it. Because that's the one thing that I've seen so many people that start stores do, is they spend all this time with brand and design, and then they go down the hole and there's no sales. Right. They spend all this time idating, and they didn't worry about the first thing. It's sales. So, yeah, everything out of the box is in Shopify. How to fulfill orders. You can generate your labels there at tracking numbers, putting the tracking number in their order so that the customer gets it. It already has the email flow set up, setting up shopify payments that's already set up. Literally, you just plug and play. So if I was to start tomorrow, I would put a product up and start marketing.

Yeah, and I think that's such an important point because the Shopify site that you build is important, but really what they're providing is the back end for you to set up a commerce operation. Right. Like to be able to have a site stood up that can take orders that you can check out, collect a customer's credit card, get their information, make sure they get the email, make sure that they're getting their order, and that you can go ahead and fulfill what it is that they want to buy. What comes next. Right. What are some of the next components or building blocks that when you're building out a store that you're going to want to consider.

Yeah. So I think if we're looking at and we're looking at this from a strictly bootstrap perspective, right. I imagine somebody that might have funding might look at this completely different. But let's say you have inventory and you're fulfilling this out of your house. At some point you're going to want to figure out, how do I automate this fulfillment process? Right. And how do you do that? Probably with the three PL. So you go out looking for a three PL. Now this three PL, third party logistics is a warehouse that's going to take your inventory, store it for you, and then if an order comes in from Shopify, you want that Three PL to be able to receive that order, and then once it ships, it send that tracking number back to Shopify. Right. So what I've noticed is and that's usually when they start looking for developers, like, hey, we're looking for a Three PL. This Three PL might not connect as easy, or we don't want to go with one of the big ones like Shippo because it's too expensive. Can you guys help us connect this Three PL so that everything works seamlessly? I think that's what I've seen is once you start making money in a lot of orders, I think that's the first thing people want to offload, like fulfillment.

No, that's such an important point because it seems like the Three PL, they have a job of fulfilling orders, storing your orders, and there's like that whole operational component. But as far as the tech is concerned, if you're a founder, you need to make sure that information is hooked up to your central nervous system and what you're doing. Right. So obviously, one part of it is getting the order to the right person. And that's crucial, because if that doesn't happen, no one gets product. But as an owner and operator, you need to make sure that data is syncing up with your workflows.

Right, exactly. And then it starts getting a little more complex when you start going through I think that the tech term is Omnichannel. Right now we're looking at Amazon. Okay. Where's the inventory for Amazon? Where's the inventory for Walmart? Are you selling on ebay? Now, once you start creating those different sales channels, how do you keep track of all this inventory? Right? Now, there's a now you have an ERP system, and then this ERP system connects to the Three PL that then also connects to Shopify. Right. So once you start adding these complexities is when you start that's where, you know, me and my team come in. Once we understand the the kind of ecosystem that you have in Shopify, we we help kind of maintain that.

Why don't we talk about that a little bit? Because I think what we're starting to see is brands first were Omnichannel brands that found out about Ecommerce and could start selling their Omnichannel product online as a new channel. And then Shopify also gave rise to a whole bunch of brands that could start digitally native. And then as they grew up, they started to look for different distribution channels in retail, et cetera. Right. So if you're a brand today, you're starting, you've got some online interest, and now you're looking at other marketplaces and opportunities to sell like you mentioned. Maybe you want to set up an Amazon storefront. Maybe you have a Whole Foods or something who wants to take you on. What are you looking at from a Shopify perspective? Where is your customer data living? How are you setting that up? What is the set up of that system look like?

Yeah, that's a good question. I've seen two types of brands right there's brands that are native to Amazon that then are like, we need to start working on our own brand because they're taking so much margin from us. And then I've seen brands that started on, for example, Shopify with their own brand and they're like, well, we're missing out on a sales channel or at least some sort of traffic if we're not on Amazon, right? So I think I'll talk first about the brands that started without Amazon. We have this customer, JJwinks, over in California and they sell sort of like lounge wear for women. And they're a really strong brand with their own they have their own list. They've been working through Shopify and they never had anything on Amazon. But now they're planning on putting a couple of things on Amazon just because they're saying, well, we don't want Amazon to take our whole business. But we do feel like if somebody is searching our brand on Amazon, we have no presence. Right? So what I've noticed is a lot of these brands are putting a couple of SKUs so that Amazon doesn't cannibalize their business. But they do recognize there is that fear, right? We don't want to put all our stuff there. And then on the other end, we've seen brands we have a company called Mother Love. Mother Love that we work with. Mother Love. They sell like nutrition for birthing mothers postpartum and during during pregnancy. I could be saying that wrong, but their 90% of their business was on Amazon. So when they, when we got in contact with them, they started really trying to invest in their Shopify store. They were worried about, they still are, what's going to happen with Amazon, right? So they've invested a lot in their shopify store and automating that I don't know if that answered your question. I might have veered off a little.

No, I think that's a really good point in terms of how these stores start. Some are maybe Shopify native, some are Amazon native. Others want to use Amazon as almost an acquisition channel, put a couple of Hero products over there, drive traffic back to their DTC instance. And those sort of decisions ultimately come up to you as a brand owner understanding what your unit costs are, where it makes most sense for you to set up your mix of sales. Right? Because if you are a CPG brand where it's really heavy to ship and you need a bunch of eyeballs that people are already searching for this one particular thing, maybe you have one sort of product line that you sell on Amazon that's easier for them to fulfill. And then on the other hand, for your really good customers who want these really specific things from you, they can come and get those only from your site. So that's really interesting. The other thing I'd like to kind of start thinking about is, as a developer, what are some of the most common requests that you're getting? Right? What are people looking for? Because obviously, as you start to build out, as you start to have more channels, that just introduces way more variables into your mix of what you're trying to solve for. But what are some of the most common things that people come to you for and how do you get started within an engagement with those customers?

Yeah, so I think there's a really good app ecosystem in Shopify, and you can solve a lot of your problems with apps. What starts happening, though, is when you want to customize that app, right? When you're like, well, it kind of does what I want, but it doesn't do exactly what I want. Now, that's where I think they have to weigh out. Is the investment in doing this custom worth what I would be investing in? 40, 50, $60 app a month? Right. And when they do that cost analysis, I imagine they have to think about how much manual labor is going to have to be put into fixing the small little thing that the app doesn't do. So I always with people before they enter an engagement with me, I'm like, hey, have you explored this app? Right? Because I think it's always better to present the easiest, least path of friction. But sometimes it's like, no, we need to do this custom. And at that point, you need to create sort of like a private app using Shopify's API to do exactly what they want. Right. I think I gave you the example earlier, like reward points. Sometimes the app out of the box has its things that it does, but customers like, no, we want it to do XYZ automation and we want it with our branding and whatever the case is. Then they'll have to call a developer. Right. So a lot of these apps also have APIs that let you customize it further. So I think those are the two situations when people are like, well, you know what? I need a developer.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I think the way you think about it in terms of making sure that you really need to build things before you build them, it's so important because once you start building, you have all sorts of technical debt. You become dependent on what it is that you build. But at the same time, if it's something that's really essential to your business, you need to build it. And like you said, you need it now. But understanding it from a product perspective, what the costs are of taking something on. And I think that's why Shopify even itself, is such a great example. Like, you could go out and you could build a lot of the stuff that Shopify enables, but out of the box, it's getting you 99% of the way there. So you're better off just sacrificing a couple of those things and not having to worry like you're paying shopify so you don't have to worry about building all those things. The reason that ecommerce platforms weren't a thing back then was because everyone was building them custom and it was a hard thing to do. Right. So I think understanding that when is the right time to bring in development to your store is something that's super, super important 100%.

And I think that's how I approach it to people that try to engage with us. And I think that they appreciate that honesty because it's not like this. Like you might go to somebody else and of course I can estimate a bunch of hours and it's worked for us. But long term, that's not going to work for the, for the merchant. And then when they do find out that an app could have did everything they wanted and they spent all this money, you look like a liar. Right. I think that's why having people that specialize in shopify is important. Because you're in the ecosystem, right? You understand what apps are out there. We know what other customers are using. And so sometimes it could be ignorance from a developer not being in that ecosystem where they're just like, well, I guess I'll just do it from scratch because I don't know better. Right. The other instance, believe it or not, Blaine, is some people really are stickers for design. There are some people that really want their site to look like, I know magic spoon is always one that comes across our tables. Like we want this to look like magic spoon. And you know, they spent a lot of money on development, right. To do those kind of animations and things. That's not cheap, that's not out of the box.

Yeah, that's another really important point. Let's talk a little bit about front end, right. Site, especially in brand, is something that's so important when it comes for consumer brands. Like a brand is the product and one part of it is build a great product. The other side is build a great brand. Right. What on the front end? Are you able to get out of the box? Why don't we talk a little bit about shopify themes? If you're thinking about coming up with a site the way I think about building product, for example, I do it all the time. I think of it pretty iteratively prove out the important things when those are working, then have a general idea of where the design you're going is, and then slowly, over time, really mold and crystallize that design and then make it whatever it ultimately will end up being. I think a lot of people, and I could be wrong, right? A lot of people do think they want to get that design 100% right out of the box. The design is their brand is everything. So for those people. Why don't we just talk about what front end development in Shopify looks like? What's available out of the box? How do you kind of customize these themes? If you want to kind of get fancy, what are the things that are what is getting fancy, like magic spoon even mean? And then what is the cost and what are some of the solutions to go one step beyond what's available out of the box?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think out of the box there are beautiful themes that theme developers have spent a lot of time designing so that you can go and start with something, I think the top tier. Right. I think that even some of the free themes look amazing. Where I was like, wow, this looks expensive. And ultimately that's what you want, right? You don't want your brand to look cheap or something that was developed offshore. So I think out of the box, those things work really well. They make them really modular so that you can move these modules around. They make it so that you can adjust fonts, you can adjust images. So for me, if you're not selling, I think themes are a great way to start. Your question was, when should we start design or how much can you design inside of Shopify?

Yeah, my question was more about what are the options for customization when it comes to Shopify, right? Are the front ends built on Shopify? Are there any other front ends that you plug into? Like, have you ever seen it where a site builds on a web flow or build something custom and then Shopify is the back end. What is the front end kind of what are the options look like?

Good question. Yeah. So you can pretty much do anything you want on front end. In Shopify. They've really expanded expanded their theming capabilities so you can make it look really nice and beautiful and then create these sort of schemas and blocks on the back end and create your own theme, right, and make it your own. So I think it was like five years ago, people had this notion that, well, we can't do that in Shopify, we can't make it look like that in Shopify. That's gone. And then there is this other option, which nine out of ten times I've noticed is not the best option for for merchants, is going headless. So headless is this idea of separating the front end with Shopify and throwing the front end in something that feels like an app, right? And I don't want to get too technical, but you could use a code like React or whatever, and it has this really nice app feel. But you start you you create all this technical bit, right? Now you have to you create the API that connects Shopify to this front end. Now, you got to manage this front end on another server. You got to manage this API that's being hosted somewhere. And what that does is now all of the data that you get inside of Shopify, you lose it because Shopify is using its native theme to track pixels and to easily install your pixels and to easily send product feeds. So what I've seen with people that invest a lot in this design and say, we want to go headless, we want to get this speed, is they end up saying, I wish we wouldn't have. Because separating the two takes away all the ease of Shopify product feeds to Instagram, product feeds to Google merchants, syndicating reviews, it just breaks everything. Right now you have to do custom everything. So we have a couple of headless customers that an engineer recommended them to go that way and now they're regretting it. So they're kind of like, hey, can we just theme this out? I hope they don't get too tech.

No, I love that. And I actually want to kind of dig in a little bit further on the whole headless thing because I know that was like a big trend that we started to see even from the venture community. It was always like, okay, headless commerce, it's the next big thing. Where is it going? So, yeah, clearly I think you definitely gave some sort of take on your thoughts on headless, generally speaking. But where do you see it going over time? Right? Is this something that's really here to say or do you think Shopify is good enough or is headless really important for brands of a certain scale?

Yeah, that's a good question. What I'm going to say is my own bias and doesn't have any data behind it. I probably should do some research, but I think that the only reason you'd go headless is if you have an engineering team working full time staff. To me, what I've noticed with headless is it feels like a flex. It feels like something I can tell my it's like a showing off. Right. Can you take your Honda from point A to point B? Yes. Can you do it with the lamborghini? Yes. Right. But what's important to you is the difference maker there. And so that's what I've noticed with Headlights, it's a flex amongst the tech people. But if you don't have a full time engineering staff and you don't want to spend that money, shopify does exactly what you need. Now, Shopify does have headless options at hydrogen and what's the hydrogen and oxygen. So hydrogen is its framework and then oxygen is what it uses to deploy it and it has that for that community. But from what I understand, it's not like Shopify's main focus.

That makes a bunch of sense. And I think the tricky part is, and I think this happens a lot in terms of the gap between tech and commerce, is that in the tech community, they're thinking about tech and all the different applications that great tech can have to commerce, whereas commerce is kind of like looking for the simplest and most straightforward way to get something done. Right. They have different budgets that they're using for tech, and they're using tech as like the means to the end, as opposed to, like, everything. Right. So, like, if you're a certain scale and you really want to go headless, and maybe your service incorporates a whole bunch of different elements to it that maybe goes beyond physical products and everything like that, and you have the whole engineering team and you're at a certain scale, then maybe those sort of solutions start to make more sense. But if you're just getting up and started, it seems like there's plenty to carry you through from just being able to sell to your customer perspective, right?

Yeah, 100%. To be fair, I work, like I said, between our brands that we work with are between 500,000 to 10 million. Right. And for those, I could tell you for sure with certainty that in that range, it's been more of a burden than it's been positive. Above that I wouldn't know. But I can tell you that it's definitely not something that they're excited when they're on it. They usually come to me because they were frustrated.

No, that's really great perspective, because again, you're the one in the weeds. You're doing this every day.

There is one thing that I think that would be fair. So the big thing around headless is speed. And at some point that seemed real, but now when you throw that into Google Page Insights or any place that you try to measure speed, most of these headless frameworks are in JavaScript, and JavaScript takes so long to execute. So it's actually these browsers and these, you know, the the crawlers. Google sees them as actually performing lower than the regular themes. So, you know, that that was a myth that even I believed. And after working on enough headless stores, I used to say, well, it's just that this developer didn't do it well, or this developer didn't do it well. But after a while, I realized, like, no, every headless site, well, 95% of them, have been pretty poor when it comes to the the speed rating.

Got it. And that's really interesting because speed is crucial for conversion, for SEO, for all these different for site experience, when customers are using it and everything like that. Right?

Yeah. And that's what everyone's looking for. Right. That's what I've seen most people go to handless. We need to get that Amazon study that 0.5 seconds can lose you X amount in conversion rate. Right. So that is when people start thinking about that.

Got it. And that starts to make a lot more sense when 0.5% has a much bigger hit on your bottom line and can support an entire dev team as opposed to a brand who's maybe going from starting to hit eight figures, right?

Exactly.

Cool. The next thing I want to talk about is some of the other apps that you're starting to see that a lot of your customers are using, that you really enjoy working with, that have really flexible APIs that add a lot of value to the clients. I know there's apps and enablement companies popping up every day and every minute. So what are some of the core ones that you swear by that are really crucial for brands that are going from 500K or even just starting off? So call it zero to ten mil?

Yes. Being working behind a computer and not doing a physical product or anything like that. One of the things that I really like to see is when people sell physical stuff that you can pick up or you can drop off. So here in Miami, I've seen a lot of meal prep companies, for example, or floral businesses, and they offer delivery, but they also offer pickup. And for a while, there wasn't a good option that says, hey, how do we set up these zip codes for certain ranges? How do we set up a pickup for this stuff? And then I found this app called Zapiat. So let's say you have sort of like, let's say a cookie business or something that you can ship, but also you want to do local deliveries. Zapiat is amazing app for that. I think we've done that on Magento and WordPress a couple of years ago when we would work on those. And the companies that built that spent so much money to build out that infrastructure of zip code radius and how much is it going to cost to ship here? And we want that to go through the checkout. So Zapier solved all of that, and I think it's like $20 a month for any business that's doing local stuff and local delivery. I love it.

That's really cool. And I'd love to talk a little bit more about local because local is an interesting side of commerce and ecommerce. So how do you see local fitting into the fold, right? Are people going to other marketplaces like a GOP? Are they doing this? Are they managing services themselves? On the smaller end? What are you seeing?

Yeah, and I could speak about here in Miami some cool brands that I've seen, right? And this started around when COVID people were doing I remember pizza shops were selling like at home pizza kits so you could make it at home. And through that, we started working with this lady that does charcutery boards, meats and cheeses with a little bit of wine. And they have their own audience that just that they've met and they get orders from they do deliveries. There's always these big players like GoPuff and all that. But what I've noticed is that once these brands create a little audience that they continuously buy from. So Charcoal Boards is one of those cool businesses that I've seen do really well using that. Zapia app. There's a floral business that I see here that does really well with local deliveries. Can they order from 1800 flowers? Yes, but they rather order from somebody local here in Miami. So I think that I've seen a lot of people complain about the behemoths like Amazon. I think that, again, I have no data. It looks like people are wanting to support somebody they could connect to, right? Like, I see Blaine. I know he's here in Miami. I've seen his Instagram post. I'd rather buy from him, and I know that it comes tomorrow than buy from Amazon. I'm seeing a lot of that more I have no data to say that this is a trend, but I can tell you that I've seen it here in Miami and with the businesses we work with.

Another cool thing that's, again, not necessarily related to apps, but it's more related to local, is I've seen Shopify being used for a bunch of creative solutions, right? So, for example, I shoot a bunch of film photography, and there's a local film lab I use here, and they process everything through Shopify, right? I drop off my film roles. They check me out through Shopify if I need to. Or I think what I do is I pay before I go through the Shop app, check out, can drop off my roles, and then they, like, ship me the negatives back, which is just, like, an interesting use case because they're not, like, really an ecommerce store, but they have the service listed in Ecommerce World. I buy it, and then there's, like, this local component, and they ship back the negatives. Also went to a workshop this weekend that was local in Miami, and it was like a lamp building workshop at this, like, really cool furniture shop around here. And they did all the like, he's got a store through Shopify where you can buy, like, furniture from, but, like, then he also added, like, tickets to this event. So I bought those through shopify. So it's like you're starting to see this cool local stuff where initially you're only thinking shopify e commerce, but also for local businesses, there seems like there's some cool and creative applications.

It's because it's just so easy to throw up a theme and start processing payments. It's literally, we can do that. We can do that in ten minutes. And that's why it's it's. And then generate labels if you want, and then install Zapia in the five minutes. And now you have local. Like, you could do that in 30 minutes. And I think that's why people are like, well, instead of having to do all these things, let me just throw up a Shopify store. Similarly, I've been really into a raw denim, and I needed to get a pair of raw denim hemmed. And there is an alteration service all through Shopify. You check out, it gives you a return label. You send your jeans and then they ship it back and everything, all the emails automated, and I was like, this is beautiful. They're over in Williamsburg. But yeah, I like that. I think that a lot of stuff is going to lean towards that, like e commerce, but with a local sort of component to it.

Yeah. And even I think you hear so much about community, right, from a lot of these other commerce brands. I think they're going to be able to use the infrastructure they have set up in Shopify to start leaning into more like local opportunities, whether it's like an event or anything like that. I think it'll be cool to see and start to happen more within the Shopify ecosystem. The next thing I kind of want to get into is some of the tools that Shopify offers, right. I think one of the exciting parts about the platform is there are so many products that they're working on commerce and being the nervous system of commerce is such a big responsibility, but they build out a whole bunch of different solutions, right. So why don't you walk us through some of the exciting things that they've been releasing lately and maybe some other things or rubblings that might be on the roadmap are just coming out and are just making their ways into clients hands.

Yeah. Shopify Editions is something that they release every quarter, I believe, either every quarter or every six months. And they've made it almost like a hype drop. It almost feels like if it's supreme or one of these sneaker drops, because everyone's anticipating it in the Shopify ecosystem. And they're like, oh, when it comes out, everyone's reading and sharing it. One of the most exciting things was with the trend of AI and Chat GPT was now you can generate product descriptions using an AI. And I thought that was like, they probably just designed this on the landing page and they probably don't have it ready. No merchants were using it. A week after that announcement, I had one of our customers, West Coast Corvettes, was like, hey, did you see this? This is so cool. You put a couple of keywords, you put the tone you want, and it writes out a product description. And somebody like West Coast Corvette who has 10,000 SKUs, he's like, Dude, this is awesome. I can go through all my SKUs and really rewrite it because before I was just doing lazy and typing one word sentences to get this done. So, yeah, that was really cool. I'll stop there. There's a couple more.

Yeah. I think that the AI stuff when it comes to the application, is so interesting because obviously we've seen what the capabilities are from OpenAI and the language that they're developing. But another really important component of AI is just like how you apply it and what's the environment it's being applied. Right. So, for example, you could obviously have Chat GPT or even if you're a developer. You could link into OpenAI's API and have them spit it out, but you would manually have to go plug those into each product description if you were doing that yourself. So when Shopify, the platform rolls out the feature within their product, all of a sudden you're able to execute it across your catalog, and now they've productized it, which makes a huge difference. Right, exactly.

It's not like I have to get a I think when you look at some companies, like use West Coast Corbett as an example, brandon is the general manager. He's a warehouse guy. He makes sure the shipment goes out. He's not up to date on Chat GPT like us, like the tech guys. Right. So it might be a couple of steps for him before he gets there, but just integrating into the system makes it accessible to Brandon right. Who's not a tech guy, but understands how to use those things. So, yeah, I agree with you 100%. Shopify has just been opening up their API a lot more, and as a developer, that's exciting. It was really a closed sort of cat. Like, it was really locked before and they didn't want people in there. But now I think I'm not sure why, but they're opening up a lot of endpoints and a lot of things in Checkout, and that just leaves so much opportunity for if you want to create apps or you want to customize things. So that's why I'm really bullish on Shopify, as opposed to some of the older platforms like Magento Woocommerce or Big Commerce. They're working really hard to let people create what they want in that world.

Yeah, I'd love you to talk a little bit about that in terms of what type of functionality is being opened up, what was closed before? What are they opening? Because that is a huge piece.

Yeah. So for a while, Checkout was a big deal, and it still is. Right. For Shopify, you could not customize anything inside of the Checkout. And now if you have Shopify Plus, you can customize, you can put testimonials in there. They're letting you kind of put blocks in there, and that's a big deal. Right. Because that's where people are putting their credit card and finishing. And then what does that mean for returns? Before, everything had to be worked around. Like when Recharge first came out, you didn't check out on Shopify, they had to create their own Checkout platform. So you would go from Shopify to Recharge as Checkout, and then it would bring you back. So it's come a long way from when it first came out, and now that just opens up conversations for how do we increase our conversions on Checkout? How can we create apps in the ecosystem that are valuable to merchants now that we have access to Checkout? So if you look at the big players, like, I don't know if you've heard of a return loop or recharge or there's a lot of those companies that only existed because shopify didn't let them use the checkout. But now that they have an open API, I think the competition is going to flood in. What else can we build in there? Right?

Actually, that becomes interesting. Do you see risk posed to some of those other bigger enablement companies that were maybe built their moat because parts of the API had been closed before? Or is this just more opportunity for new entrants to shopify build some of this stuff out internally? Where do we go from here?

Yeah, again, I don't have any data for this, but I could tell you that I see some of our merchants now shopping out recharge. Well, their fees are a little expensive. Where else can we go? And I've seen a couple of new players pop up in the last six months, and I think that to get to market really fast and to build that fast, I think they might need some venture money. But I think that competition is going to get steeper in that ecosystem.

Yeah, especially I've seen a bunch pop up in subscription. But then I think the tricky part for merchants and with more and more people building is in a lot of ways it also becomes a race to the bottom. But I think that as you right, brands are going to kind of gravitate towards the solutions that obviously do what they need them to do. But I don't personally believe that they're going to be excited about paying like 1% of total transaction or subscription volume to a subscription platform if another entrance enters the market. Right. So it'll just be interesting as so many of these players enter the market. I think the winners ultimately are the brands.

Right, that's exactly what I was going to say. I think if I was an app developer and my income was solely from apps in the Shopify App store, I'd be a little worried. Right. Because like you said, I think that there's going to be a lot more competition and once you get companies overseas that can produce these super fast, I think you're right. But the winner is the merchant, and at the end of the day, that's who they're serving. Right. So as a developer, if I wanted to create an app, that's a problem. But as a shopify advocate and people that likes to work with merchants, I think that's a w for them.

Yeah, absolutely. More and more and more tech and lower and lower prices. So that's a great thing. And then last point on the checkout thing, I think that's really exciting because I know Shopify wasn't opening up checkout to really anything. And I was even hearing things where there's like a new feature with Amazon where there might even be like a checkout with prime solution for if you land on the page so that the merchant can collect the first party data. If the traffic source becomes Amazon. Have you heard anything about that?

Yeah, actually, just an Amazon rep reached out to me, and I think that's what they want to talk to me about. Because I heard about it and I don't know how my my name was thrown into the mix, but somebody was like she reached out and she's like, hey, I want to talk to you about our Amazon solution that's going on with Shopify. So that way we can see if it's valuable to your merchants and see if you can help us implement it across the merchants that request it from us. So let's see. I get worried because like I said, I'm pro merchant, so I get worried about implementing something that can hurt our customers. But I'm interested to see if it works right? To see what that does, what kind of data is done. But for sure, I think everyone's just like, everyone looks at Amazon and they're like, do I want them in my stuff? Right?

Yeah, but I think this one could be really interesting. Again. I've just started to hear about it. But I think what's interesting here is one of the concerns of shopping or not shopping, but, like, listing on Amazon, it's like you kind of take that whole part of your business, you push it off to one side, and then you don't have the first party data coming back and this sort of thing. So I think it's like this interesting middle ground where you could actually acquire a customer through Amazon, right, and then you can get the data and they let the checkout happen so Amazon gets that purchase. But like, hey, as long as you have your email now, you've opened up your direct line of communication with them. So in a lot of ways, it seems like a win win, but it's not something where any merchant can just go ahead and like you were saying, they can't just install it in the Shopify ops or there's no install the prime checkout button. I think it's more like if a developer writes the script in, then it becomes accessible to merchants.

Yeah, as soon as I meet with this rep and I set up my first store, I'll let you know. I think it's exciting, for sure. I think it's going to be because there are like, I was talking about those Amazon first brands that they might be like, you know what, let's just do it this way so we'll collect our data anyway.

Yeah, it'll be really cool to see. And as we wrap up here, are there any other things that you're really excited about for building within the Shopify ecosystem or any new developments that you see coming out that get you and Solo Media Group really excited?

I think I spoke about a lot of them. I just think that there's so many use cases that go beyond CPG or just like the regular things we know in e commerce. I'm really excited about local companies using shopify to supplement their local business. I think that if smart young people can get into these old school businesses and set up a couple of shopify with a couple of things, I think that it could skyrocket to me. That's really fun. So I'm really excited about that.

Awesome. Well, John, for our listeners, where can they connect with you? And are you on social? Are you on LinkedIn, Twitter? Where can we find you? And where can we find out more about Solo Media Group?

Yeah, so I'm most active on LinkedIn, Jonathan Solorzano. Jonathan with A-J-O-H-N-I think that's where I post either daily or every other day. I'm not as active on Twitter, but yeah, check out my website, www. Dot solomediagroup. Co and yeah, thanks for coming on.

Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoyed this episode of DTC Pod. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love your support. A rating and review would go a long way as we continue to host Best Builders in DTC and beyond. Follow and subscribe to the show and make sure to check out our show notes where you can find our socials and weekly newsletter. Visit us on dtcpod.com to join our founder community and access resources from every episode. We'll see you on the next Pod.