Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
This is episode 288 of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. In this episode, Bogdan Dogaru CTO and Co-Founder at VevolMedia.com joins me on the show, and we talk about how you can avoid costly technical mistakes with Shopify. So let's dive right into it.
Voice over [00:00:16]:
This is the ecommerce Coffee Break.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:00:21]:
A.
Voice over [00:00:22]:
Top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome.
Claus Lauter [00:00:41]:
Welcome to the show and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to find out how you can avoid costly technical mistakes with Shopify. You might think Shopify is straightforward, but there are certain things that you need to look into, and we want to dive into this today. With me on the show, I have Bogdan Dogaru. He's the CTO and co founder of Vevol Media at vevolmedia.com. Bogdan has over a decade of experience in development and leadership. He has learned healthy principles for successful delivery. He believes in a balanced approach to all his actions, leaving room for mistakes.
Claus Lauter [00:01:14]:
One of his mantras he likes to convey to others is keep it simple. And I'm 100% on the same page with him there. So let's welcome Bogdan to the show. Hi, Bogdan. How are you today?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:01:22]:
Hi. Hi, Caus. Hi, everyone. Yeah, I'm good. Quite excited to start sharing stuff and having a chat with you.
Claus Lauter [00:01:29]:
Great to have you on the show today. So let's dive right into it. Technical mistakes with Shopify. Now, some of our listeners might scratch their head and said, yeah, well, I'm on our platform and Shopify takes care about everything, so why should I worry about Shopify? Walk me through a couple of areas within Shopify that actually can cause headaches when it comes to the technology in the background.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:01:50]:
Well, sometimes it can be really simple if you think even from the start, when you choose a theme as a Shopify owner, Shopify store owner, when you choose a theme, even that can open you to mistakes. And I've discussed this with a lot of people, even with our clients, they need to be really careful because there's the, and I'm going to dive in a bit into the technicalities, but there's the official shopify theme marketplace having experience with that as we, for example, we build our own theme and we're in the process of launching it, hopefully quite soon. We've been going through the experience of meeting the Shopify standards. They really have high quality standards on this side. And if you don't get that, then you won't be an official shopify theme. So those standards, if they're not met by any theme, then from my experience, I would definitely recommend every entrepreneur in Shopify to avoid non official themes. When you think about the design, and I've met this scenario many times, the entrepreneur or the manager comes in and says, oh yeah, I like this design. I want to implement this in our store, even if it's a new story or if they don't want to do a revamp.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:03:06]:
But the thing is, they think for them, they think for them as a client, which is completely wrong from my point of view, because the client is the client, the user is the potential client. So you need to think about that instead of putting yourself in the shoes of the client. And yeah, it's one rookie mistake that some people do. And I would strongly suggest to revise this attitude when you choose a theme and it happens even with design changes, because they come and say, oh yeah, but I think I'd like this button to be slightly bigger or slightly smaller or not here or stuff like this. And then we come in and say, look, we have this experience. We're going to work with your marketing team. For example, if you've got an agency working on that, we get the data, and based on data based on past user experience, we can suggest changes. But it doesn't really have to be pleasing the owner, it has to please the user.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:04:09]:
And most importantly, it has to convert the user into paying customer. That's one thing. And going back to the official Shopify marketplace for themes and the standards, there's code standards, and really don't get me started on that, because having a full stock development experience, I've seen bad code and I've seen good code and I've seen a lot of bad code in the non official themes. And there's a lot of people having those themes on their stores, which is a big no no from my perspective. Obviously, I'm very subjective when I discuss this because we work at Shopify closely with the company itself. So like I said, I'm very subjective, but also we've got experience with stuff like this. So yeah, I would definitely suggest people to stay off the non official themes because it can bring trouble.
Claus Lauter [00:05:04]:
Obviously we have a new shiny and you mentioned that. It's like there is a very strict approval process from Shopify to get a new theme. Into the theme store. And then obviously if you start with a fresh theme, everything is fine. And then you said once the changes are coming in, the problems are starting. So what's your take on finding someone on fiver, on upwork, on all these freelancer platforms, as a developer to do changes for you? Is that something you would recommend or something you would shy away from?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:05:32]:
I wouldn't say you should stay away. At the end of day, as a shopify owner, I guess it's all about your costs as well. So if it's within your range to only go to upwork or fiver and people like this, then go ahead. When you go to an agency like we have, like Vevel Media, you get the benefit of multiple people working on your project, multiple people having experience working with different things in the platform. So that's one of the benefits. Another benefit that comes back to what I said before, the coding standards that we impose on our development team, they're really high and they are in line with Shopify wants and Shopify has on the checklist. So I would say, again, up to your budget. But I would definitely recommend looking for experts in this area.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:06:29]:
And don't get me wrong, we've worked with freelancers, in vivo media for things here and there, and we've found gems in those places. And I think if you look hard and if you know what to look for, then you can definitely get some good people on upwork or fiver.
Claus Lauter [00:06:50]:
Okay. I still would recommend to go for a Shopify service deferred partner. Then you don't have this headache. Now let's dive a little bit more into the different areas where technical mistakes can come up. Talk me through which kind of parts of your business, of your online business do you need to look in? Is it like the performance of your store? Is it apps? Is it customization? Where do you see the most mistakes coming up?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:07:13]:
Probably the first part someone hits in the process of setting up shopify or changing a shopify. So migrating to shopify again, that's a good scenario. And then there's this scenario where people come with existing Shopify stores, or like I said, migrating them and say, look, our website is quite slow, the performance is bad. We want to move to Shopify because we've heard that it's much better, the checkout is better, the old performance is much better, or they have an old theme and they want to change it to improve the performance. And that's a very common request we have from clients or potential clients or our current clients. And I'd say you have to give a lot of attention on this area too. And we do have, for example, we have a few aces up our sleeves. We know how to do some white hat tricks with code.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:08:08]:
So no old school black hat hacking. It's just things that we improve. But also, I want to point out to this, because it's quite important, the people managing the stores, either if it's the owner itself or if they have an in house person or a whole team doing it, they have a huge responsibility to understand the platform, because what they do is sometimes by not understanding the platform, their action tend to negatively balance on the performance. And the simplest example is the images they upload. They keep pushing large images, for example, and multiple images on the same page, and it will impact the performance of the page speed. So you have to think like this. And I consider that to be a gap in training and not understanding the platform fully. Obviously you can't fully understand the whole Shopify platform, but that's where a team of experts can come in like ours and say, look, okay, let's follow these guidelines.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:09:11]:
Let's impose some documentation that you need to follow in order to actually not break the performance of your website. And yeah, this happens a lot. I've seen it so many times that we kind of productivized this service of website. Shopify improvement. Shopify performance improvement, I think.
Claus Lauter [00:09:32]:
Good point that you mentioned there. A lot of merchants are not developers, not coming with a technical background, but obviously they need to have a basic understanding on what they should do to prevent mistakes on the site. Now your mantra is keep it simple. And I really like that. I'm totally on the page with your keep it simple and stupid as mine. So when it comes to the implementation or of the process itself, going through and finding issues on a store, what's your process there? What's your approach there?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:10:02]:
This keep it simple mantra comes from my coding background, because traditionally we tend to write many lines of code to fix one simple thing. And having that experience in my background has taught me that sometimes you don't need those many ten thousands of lines of code to fix one issue. If you have to be smart about it, you don't have to hack it, hack your way to fix a thing or add a feature. You just need to be smart. And it comes back to what I said before, understand the platform. Even as a developer, you have to fully understand what you have on your plate. What's Shopify, for example, offering you in terms of coding and standards? So if you understand that, then you'll find better solutions with simpler implementations. That's one thing I keep telling my team.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:10:59]:
Can we find a simpler solution to this? Do we really need this complexity of code or this complexity of features? Can we break down stuff into smaller bits of code or smaller features? Because at the end of the day, you want to deliver success. You want to deliver a good thing, and you can't do it by overcomplicating yourself.
Claus Lauter [00:11:23]:
Hey Klaus, here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter ecommercecoffeebreak.com. I score and create 50 news sources so you don't have to, saving your hours of research. Grow your revenue with ecommerce news, marketing strategies, tools, podcast, interviews and more, all in a quick three minute read. So head over to newsletter ecommercecoffeebreak.com to subscribe as said, 100% free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show you mentioned before that customers approach you. Your customers approach you when they feel that there is technical issues with their store, with their website.
Claus Lauter [00:11:58]:
Who's your perfect customers? Whom are you working? Are there certain industries or verticals that you work more with than others?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:12:04]:
The perfect customers? It is the one that understands the platform and what we're doing and understands the value of what a Shopify development agency like ours does and understands how to use that value. Because we've built stuff for years that maybe sometimes they forget about things we've built and they don't use it to the full power of what it could be used for. And same thing for what Shopify builds. The whole platform is huge. It's got loads of features and tools and technologies, and I haven't met yet the store or the customer that uses all the tools. It's probably impossible at this point, but the tools are there. So if someone understands how to use them and how to leverage our experience, I think that's the perfect customer.
Claus Lauter [00:12:55]:
Can you share some success story with a client you worked with and you don't need to name the brand, what kind of results they got?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:13:01]:
We have a few success stories. One that's really close to me personally is actually a friend of mine that a few years ago, I've just keep pushing him to start a Shopify online store. They had a physical presence, have a physical store, and I said, look, let's put you up online. And we did that. And now they're thinking about closing the physical stores and only keeping the online shop because it just gets more and more traction and people, obviously during the pandemic and after the pandemic, people just flocked into online. So it's coming to this point where physical stores are very redundant. But yeah, I think that's a really good success stories, especially of moving to online.
Claus Lauter [00:13:48]:
On that topic, what kind of emergent trends do you see coming up right now? Is AI a big factor or what other trends do you see?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:13:56]:
You can't deny it, it's everywhere. Everyone does AI at this point, even within Shopify as a platform, they've launched some AI features which are really cool. There's AI apps and definitely it's something that's going to be huge. It's already huge and it's going to be much bigger in the next few years. I think what I've been seeing happening as well is the visual experience of the user is really important and videos have been really important for ecommerce stores in the past few years and I don't see this going away for the foreseeable future. So definitely video shopping and telling brand stories with videos with really good imagery. I think that's going to stay and it's a given. Going back to AI, definitely.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:14:50]:
AI.
Claus Lauter [00:14:50]:
Yeah, AI is everywhere. You're right. Give me a bit of idea. Vivo video. What do you help clients with? What's kind of the portfolio and how does the onboarding process look like?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:15:01]:
We've evolved a lot because in the beginning we were much smaller, much less experienced, and we dealt with the simpler stuff. As the platform grew, we grew as well. Like I said, we have the bigger team, the broader experience as a team. So now we can help brands to scale, we can help brands to migrate, and that's a very big thing for brands, especially for enterprise brands, because I think traditionally, and there's some misconception here, I've been dealing with. There's a misconception of brands thinking Shopify is for small companies, and that's how I've been perceiving it for a while. And Shopify has worked a lot, has invested a lot of money in development and R D to overturn this, to make sure that all the businesses, all type of businesses, can use the platform and their tools. And that's what we did as well. We speak with more and more enterprise customers with highly complex delivery system and purchasing system that are looking to Shopify, to migrate, to Shopify.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:16:18]:
And that's very rewarding for us because we want to do the complex things. We want to work hard. Basically, as you evolve, we want to do harder things and go back to the onboarding process. You mentioned what we've done in the past year or so instead of just saying yes to all the clients, all the projects we've been doing kind of a process where we try to understand the business first, try to understand the requirements that they need in order to fully function on Shopify. And then it happened. And I have a real life scenario example that we discussed for months with a client trying to migrate to Shopify. And at the end of the process we said, look, I don't think this is going to work for you at this point. You need to sort out this and this and this if you want to migrate.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:17:12]:
And they decided to just give it another year on the traditional, the old platform they were. And yeah, if it gets to this decision, then it's fine. It's not for everyone, but it will be okay.
Claus Lauter [00:17:25]:
Sounds good. Before we come to the end of the coffee break today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:17:32]:
I think it all comes from the same place. The whole shopify experience we have and what I've been trying to convey today, and not just today, but in all the conversation I had, is that Shopify has grown so much that like I said, it covers all the types of businesses. And now you have this giant that you just have to put to work. You just have to pick up the tools and use it to the maximum to actually get more money. Because that's what at the end of day, it's what the entrepreneur wants, it's more money. And I think you can definitely do it. And our company, myself personally, we can help brands, ecommerce brands doing this in a very flexible and scalable way. And that's how we kind of put ourselves there.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:18:24]:
We're flexible, we know to adapt to things we discussed. AI is not going to deny AI when it comes to understanding a business and how AI can help that business. So I think working with us definitely would get the benefits of understanding the business and scaling it.
Claus Lauter [00:18:41]:
Yeah, you're quite right. I think the last update with Shopify, they had about 100 updates with the winter sessions or whatever it's called. So it's just massive flood of new features within Shopify and it really becomes difficult to keep an idea on what you can use. And working with an expert like yours definitely makes sense. Where can people find out more about you guys?
Bogdan Dogaru [00:19:02]:
I think the best way is to reach out to our website, but we're quite active, myself included, and my co founder, my business partner Dan, he's very active on LinkedIn, and our company is active on LinkedIn, and we're trying to engage as much as we can. We're actually now focusing a lot on Eastern Europe and Romania because both myself and my business partner, we were originally from Romania. So we want to make sure that Shopify gets a lot of brand awareness in that area because there's lots of potential business potential, and I think the market share would kind of change in the next few years. And we want to be there. We want to make sure that Shopify is there and we're next to Shopify.
Claus Lauter [00:19:51]:
That sounds like a good plan. I will put the links in the show notes, then you just want to click away, and I hope a lot of our listeners will reach out to you. Bogdan, thanks so much for your time today. I think that was a very overview on why you should have a professional partner on your site when it comes to Shopify to avoid any kind of technical issues with your store. Thanks so much for your time today.
Bogdan Dogaru [00:20:09]:
Thank you for your time, Claus.
Claus Lauter [00:20:11]:
Hey Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the e commerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast, simply like comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast, and even better if you could leave a rating. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.