Paul Drecksler on LinkedIn: Somehow I got onto this PR list where scammy companies send me "press… (2024)

WHAT'S NEXT: Learn how Trudy MacNabb, cofounder of Design Packs, helps Shopify merchants add customization superpowers to their existing themes. ⁉️ WHAT IS DESIGN PACKS?Design Packs is a Shopify theme toolkit with ~200 highly customizable sections that integrate seamlessly into any theme, as well as pre-built templates for pages, collections, blogs and articles. We have a tool to add custom fonts and multiple ways to add custom CSS so sections can be easily tweaked.💲 ARE YOU FUNDED?No, we're bootstrapped🤩 WHO DO YOU SERVE?People who are looking to differentiate their store's look from others. Savvy small business owners who don't have the budget for custom development.🌟 WHAT'S STANDOUT ABOUT DESIGN PACKS?We've created a tool that fits so well into your existing theme no one can tell. We focus on integrating the most useful features of Shopify storefront to help merchants get the optimal experience.⏭️ WHAT'S NEXT AT DESIGN PACKS?Looking ahead, we're preparing for Shopify's Online Store 3.0, which introduces new theme editor features such as nested blocks. We're excited about integrating these innovations into our existing sections to offer enhanced functionality and flexibility for our users.Another goal is to create a user-friendly experience for dynamic content and pages using Metafields and Metaobjects. While Metaobjects offer extensive capabilities, we recognize the need to improve user intuitiveness to maximize their potential.Additionally, we're working on automatically adjusting styles based on existing theme settings making the setup with Design Packs even easier and faster from outset. We’ve created a tool that will help with custom fonts and unifying font styling across the whole theme including the Design Packs. We’re looking at creating a similar tool for custom buttons across the whole theme as well.One emerging challenge is that changes made by developers or apps may not carry over with them📈 WHAT'S NEXT IN YOUR NICHE?Mobile design has been big in the industry for a while, It will become increasingly important and more innovative mobile experiences will emerge.Video is becoming hugely popular in ecom for various use cases - Shoppable videos, User Generated Content for social proof, or instructional videos showcasing and explaining products.Personalization is becoming more popular as competition increases and merchants are looking to increase their conversions and AOV.More engaging and shoppable blog experiences will become common, especially as merchants migrate from platforms like WordPress to Shopify.Dynamic and robust product pages are quickly becoming the norm as a lot of traffic is driven directly from social media and having all the relevant info there increase conversions❤️ WHO SHOULD I INTERVIEW NEXT?Prakhar Shrivastava 🦊 - Co-founder at FoxSell Bundles PlusDaniel Patricio - Co-founder at Abra (already in the works!)Thanks Trudy!#ecommerce #shopify #shopifyapps

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Stuff like this always makes me laugh as a fellow marketer (and this screenshot below is from a fairly large company). Make sure your auto-inserted text matches the formatting of the rest of your e-mail!

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I'm currently obsessed with "Sibling products" on Shopify right now. Someone on LinkedIn turned me on to them a couple weeks ago (can't remember who, sorry), and I've been meaning to dig in ever since. Yesterday I finally got around to implementing them on a new store, and I'm like WOW - that's a bit of a game changer!Sibling products let you use metafields to connect multiple products together in a way that functions like a product variant, but actually links you to different products. OLD WAY➡️ You've got a sweater (one product) that comes in 3 Colors and 4 Sizes. ➡️ All those variants are hidden behind one single primary image that appears in the collection, and from there, visitors can click through the color options. ➡️ Sure, some themes have a color swatch underneath the thumbnail image, but either way, there's just one primary image to capture a visitor's attention when scrolling through the collection. The age old question for Shopify merchants has been: ➡️ Do I make my sweater colors individual products or variants of a single product? ➡️ The challenge with the former has always been that there was no easy way to show customers that the sweater also comes in 3 other colors, without sending them back to the collection. ➡️ The struggle with the latter is that is that housing the other colors as variants brings less attention to them, and only lets you showcase one variant photo, as opposed to a whole selection of lifestyle photos in that color. NEW WAY➡️ Create 3 different products (one for each color) and connect them as "Sibling products." ➡️ Each color appears in the collection and gets its own set of secondary images, but the products are linked together. ➡️ Plus you can offer different sizes or different options for each product, whereas before, all the options had to work for each color. So it kind of works a single-layer of conditional logic. ➡️ Lastly, you can set complementary products specific to each color!I told you, I'm obsessed with this right now. So thank you to whoever turned me on to this strategy a couple weeks ago!

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If you're short on time to read this week's full edition of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter, here's a summary recap of the 186th Edition. This week's edition covers: ➡️ Shopify POS crossing $100B in GMV➡️ Amazon's partnership of the year with TikTok➡️ Google's illegal monopoly➡️ Elon Musk shuts down GARM➡️ PayPal Fastlane has arrived➡️ A rock road for new BNPL regulation➡️ Google, Amazon, and Microsoft making shady deals➡️ Afterpay brings BNPL to Cash App Cards➡️ Shopify won its patent case➡️ Amazon is raising fulfillment fees➡️ X is moving out of San FranciscoAll this and more in this week's recap. Repost if you learned something new!#ecommerce #commerce #retail #tech #business #shopify #x #facebook #meta #tiktok #temu #amazon #sanfrancisco #google #pinterest #ftc #CFPB #paypal #paypalfastlane #newsletters #bnpl #afterpay #block #cashapp #sanfrancisco

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How much of a company can you own without technically acquiring it? And how much control can you exert over a company without running it?Those questions what regulators are currently wondering about the thin line being drawn between Big Tech partnering with AI startups, as opposed to acquiring them. In a new piece by The New York Times entitled "The New A.I. Deal: Buy Everything but the Company," reporters Erin Griffith and Cade Metz share examples of how Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have made deals with AI startups for their technology and top employees, but have shied away from owning the firms. Griffith and Metz wrote: "While big tech companies typically buy start-ups outright, they have turned to a more complicated deal structure for young A.I. companies. It involves licensing the technology and hiring the top employees — effectively swallowing the start-up and its main assets — without becoming the owner of the firm."➡️ Example 1: In 2022, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left their jobs developing AI at Google to launch Character.AI, a chatbot startup, because they said Google moved to slowly. Flash forward two years and both founders are returning to Google, along with 20% of Character AI's employees, after striking a deal to join its AI research arm, , and provide their startup's technology. Despite getting their technology and top team members, Google didn't technically acquire the company. Instead, Google agreed to pay $3B to license the technology, of which about $2.5B will be used to buy out Character.ai's shareholders. ➡️ Example 2: Microsoft agreed to pay the startup Inflection AI more than $650M to license its technology and hire almost all of its employees, including its founder, Mustafa Suleyman, who now leads Microsoft's consumer AI business. Inflection subsequently hired a new CEO, but just two employees stayed on while the rest — roughly 70 people — joined Microsoft.➡️ Example 3: In June, Amazon inked a deal with the AI startup Adept, paying the company at least $330M to license its technology and bring many of its employees and its founder, David Luan, to the company. Teams working on product, sales and other areas did not join Amazon; the company only hired the researchers who built Adept’s tech.Regulators are watching: ➡️ In January, the FTC announced that it's working on a broad study of AI deals between startups and Big Tech.➡️ In June, the FTC, began investigating whether Microsoft should have notified regulators about the Inflection deal.➡️ Last week, UK regulators began investigating Amazon's $4B investment into Anthropic for whether or not the partnership has resulted in the creation of a merger situation. Justin Johnson, a business economist at Cornell University, said, "Large tech firms may clearly be trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny by not directly acquiring the targeted firms." But "these deals do indeed start to look a lot like regular acquisitions."What are your thoughts?

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What's going on at OpenAI is weird, right? Co-founder John Schulman left OpenAI to join Anthropic. President Greg Brockman posted hours later that he's taking a sabbatical. Product lead Peter Deng also left the company recently. Co-founder Ilya Sutskever resigned in May a few months after leading the failed coup against CEO Sam Altman. So back to my question -- this is weird right?Sergey Brin didn't leave Google after 9 years to focus on "search alignment and return to hands-on technical work" at DuckDuckGo. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like co-founders usually have some sway at the company to pivot their focus and work on what they want to work on. I'm thinking that the option of returning to 'hands-on technical work' may have also been a possibility at OpenAI, the company Schulman co-founded. I feel like there are a LOT of half truths being told at OpenAI and that the inevitable big reveal is going to be shocking. * * * * *I asked #ChatGPT... "What's really going on at OpenAI? Why are all the co-founders and top leaders leaving the company?"It responded: OpenAI is currently facing a significant leadership shakeup, with several key figures departing the company. Greg Brockman, one of the co-founders and the company's president, has announced an extended sabbatical. Another co-founder, John Schulman, has left OpenAI to join Anthropic, a rival AI research firm. Additionally, Peter Deng, a product leader who previously worked at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, has also exited the company.These departures are part of a broader pattern of instability at OpenAI, following the controversial firing and later reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman in November 2023. The leadership turmoil has raised concerns about the company’s ability to maintain its momentum in the highly competitive AI landscape. Moreover, OpenAI is also dealing with legal issues, including a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk, another co-founder, against the current leadership, further complicating the situation.The recent exits, especially of co-founders and senior leaders, underscore the challenges OpenAI is facing internally, including strategic disagreements and the pressure of navigating its ambitious mission in AI research and development.* * * * *

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Squarespace is completely botching this Google Domains acquisition. They might have another class-action lawsuit on their hands soon because they are effectively shutting businesses down right now by locking customers out of their Google Workspace e-mail. ➡️ A friend sent me these screenshots below, and also shared his story with me: "I got an email 24 mins ago saying 'To ensure uninterrupted service, please update your credit card information in the Billing panel. If we can't authorize your payment in the next three days, your Google Workspace account will be suspended and removed from your site.'I go to login to my business email... it's already suspended. That's not 3 days. That's 24 minutes. They lied & f*cked me. I literally thought I lost all my emails. It was a big freakout for a moment."➡️ He also noted that the price given to him in the e-mail stated $6/month, but the only price visible on Squarespace's website was $7.20/month (with no option to upgrade to an annual plan to hit the $6 price.)➡️ Lastly he showed me a video of a never ending loop on Squarespace's website when trying to get support. ➡️ From the screenshots, it seems that some customers have been locked out of their e-mail accounts for going on 2 weeks now!I don't know about you, but I'd be in a world of hurt if I were locked out of my e-mail for 24 hours! Let alone 2 weeks. ⚠️ This is the risk of having your domain tied to your e-mail host. If something goes wrong, and the company isn't responsive, you're in a very difficult situation (like the folks in the screenshots). My rule of thumb is to ALWAYS separate my registrar / website host / e-mail host from each other. That way, in a scenario such as this, if my Google Workspace went down, I could temporarily point my MX Records to my web server and still access my e-mails via webmail. The above is unfortunately a failsafe that most people don't have, because companies typically push you upon domain registration to use all their in-house e-mail and hosting. "It's easier" they claim -- until it's not. ➡️ Have you been experiencing issues with your Google Domains / Workspace accounts since the transition? Comment below or e-mail paul@shopifreaks.com.

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Anyone else's kids love playing with their office stuff more than their own toys? Baby Mia loves my whiteboard, notebooks, and about anything else she sees me using!

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There seem to be two kinds of agencies: 1) The ones that send beautiful pitches via PowerPoint presentations, and 2) the ones that send ugly e-mails with a few bold items and bullet lists. I am 100% in that latter category! Substance & Speed over Style at my agency, and that's also how the vendors I tend to work with choose to operate as well.I'm not saying one is better than the other, but...

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