16: What Shopify’s Latest Updates Really Mean for Product-Based Businesses
12 Jun 2025 · 34 min
In this Product Growth Lab episode, hosts Andrew George and Melissa Pickle walk listeners through Shopify’s Summer 2025 Editions, which introduce over 150 new features. They focus on the five updates most relevant to creative, product‑based businesses: (1) Horizon themes – a new theme foundation that replaces Dawn, requiring a full site rebuild but offering advanced layout capabilities; (2) AI‑generated store blocks – a sandboxed block builder that lets non‑developers create custom sections (e.g., countdown timers, sliders) via natural‑language prompts, currently exclusive to Horizon themes; (3) Sidekick – Shopify’s in‑dashboard AI assistant that now handles discount code creation, analytics queries, image generation, and troubleshooting; (4) Centralized campaign tracking – a tool that generates unique links and QR codes for each marketing channel, consolidating performance data for campaigns like Black Friday; (5) AI‑powered Knowledge Base app – an FAQ/knowledge‑base app that surfaces answers to shopper questions, improves AI‑driven search snippets, and supports emerging AEO (AI‑enhanced optimization). Throughout the conversation, the hosts advise a cautious rollout: wait for minor version updates (e.g., Horizon 1.0.1/1.1) before migrating, test AI blocks in a sandbox, and leverage the new tools even on standard Shopify plans. They also promote community resources (Facebook group, flash‑sale guide) and encourage listeners to experiment and share results. The tone is conversational, practical, and enthusiastically supportive, with measured caution about bugs and developer compatibility.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to the Product Growth Lab podcast hosted by Andrew George and Melissa Pickle. This is the podcast for creative product-based business owners who want to grow their businesses without overwhelm or massive investment. Each episode we explore actionable strategies, real-life stories, and insights from business owners and experts who know what it takes to succeed. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale, we are here to help you grow your business on your own terms. Subscribe and join us each week as we dive into practical advice and inspiring stories to fuel your growth journey. This is the Product Growth Lab. Let's get started. So hello everyone and welcome. Today is like juicy tech day because today we are going into Shopify updates. If you didn't know, Shopify just did their new launch with 150+ new features for their Summer 2025 update. And honestly, this is the first time that Andrew and I are pretty excited about a good portion of the Shopify updates, right?
Yeah. And they're, and they're here. Yeah. Like they, sometimes it's like, oh, this thing will be here eventually. But most of like, I think everything we're gonna talk about today is already available.
Whether you want to take advantage of it just yet or not is debatable, but it's all there.
Let's jump right in. And even though there's 150 different updates, we are gonna cover 5. That's it. The ones that we're like, this are the ones that are probably worth listening to and you might know you want to use all of them. So don't get overwhelmed in the 150 update. Exciting.
Yeah, plus a lot of that 150 is really for Shopify Plus members and like the higher up tiers as well. We mostly work with the standard tier of Shopify.
Yeah, and there's always a bunch of, there's a lot of POS updates, which we're not gonna cover because we talk about online selling here. If you use Shopify POS, there's some great stuff there. And there's a bunch of developer updates, which are also great. That I don't know what any of them mean, so we can't cover them. It's also, if you look on the page, everything's there apart from one that says update unlocked June 12th, and I really want to know what that is. It's probably going to disappoint me, but like, you give me that piece of excitement, I need to know.
All right, let's jump into our top 5 things we're excited about in the Shopify summer update.
Yeah, kicking off with number 1 is the New Horizon themes. And I know I'm excited about these. These are really awesome. But when we first talked to our clients about them, there was a little bit of panic and we're here to say, don't worry. And you don't have to, well, you don't have to change all if you don't want to, but you don't have to change immediately. And quite often when there's big tech updates, it's a good idea to give it a little bit of time to let the dust settle and the bugs be—
let the people with big teams fight the bugs, not us. Let them settle it out.
So Shopify have been busy working under the hood to keep their themes up to date with all of the new things they want to include, including Layoutify Next, these AI-generated store blocks, and they needed like the new kind of foundation to the theme to be able to make that all work, and if you are, if you're on a paid theme, you kind of have to ignore this for now because we don't exactly know what they're going to do and how, if you're going to be able to implement these things or not, and eventually you can't at the moment. But if you are on a Dawn theme, you're probably going to want to update to a Horizon theme. And if you're like, do you have a Dawn theme? If you didn't pay for your theme, it's from the, it's just from the Shopify shop. It's Dawn or it's a customization of Dawn. They're all secretly the theme, same theme. Just a range of different— It's just a customization applied to them, just color changes and some things like that. So they've introduced 10 new themes, but they're all Horizon and customizations of them. So you still just have the one free theme, but it's added a ton of different stuff. And eventually Dawn isn't gonna get any more updates, it's gonna be depreciated and You're, they might force you over, but they're not doing that for now. So it's probably something you're going to want to do in the future, but because it has this new base and the different elements don't translate over, you do have to build your pages again from scratch. That's kind of why everyone wants to try and panic. But don't rush into it. You can do it slowly and kind of wait for things to see how they go. But the really big awesome thing about this is. Because it kind of works in a new way, you can place things within things. It's really hard to explain. I don't know why I decided to do this on a podcast where you can't give you any type of visual adaptation of this.
So like Andrew and I come from the world of funnels. If you have any experience with funnels and funnel builders, you know that you have like sections and rows that are— this is also hard visual, but you can put things, but you can have one section that has like a picture and a headline and stuff stacked on top of each other. And moved around in multiple columns all within there. That's really, really difficult to do in Shopify. And if you came from a funnel world, really damn frustrating about Shopify that it's like, why is your builder so old?
Even though it's new. Yeah. And like, that's totally gone. The, all of the different blocks you add into your page are completely updated, completely different. That, that's why it doesn't automatically translate over. You can have like so many things that are within things that are within things. So if you're like, so into the thing with that, think about when you had the big header on your homepage, everyone probably has this, and it had the, you go into it and you could change some text and you could change a button, but they chose where it was, what it was in—
the order it was in.
Now you can— Yeah, now you can take all of the other elements, so pictures, buttons, text blocks, and drag those in to the header element. So things within things. If you have like products on your page, you can drag in your own like text blocks for the name, for swatches, for reviews, you can, and they all exist within the same part of the page. So it's a little bit hard to explain. You might want to go to, I think it's shopify.com Editions slash Summer 2025, something like that. Google Shopify Editions Summer 2025.
Yeah, they've gone big on this time.
Yeah, there's a game and it's really difficult. It's a driving game. If you go down to the bottom of the page, don't waste your time on that. Fix your shop. But yeah, but there's other things in there, so it's, you can now right-click which feels like this really tiny thing, but it's really nice. You can copy sections, you can duplicate them, and you can also copy them. So like, say you have a section on your homepage you built, you can click copy, then go into your product page and click paste. So you can have elements that are like on both. Before you had to make it, customize it and stuff, and then do that all over again. Now you can just copy and paste. So it's like a really nice, really tiny thing. Like in this day and age, telling you that you can now right-click. Feels really basic, but you can now do that.
All right, so that's Horizon's theme. We're so excited. Also though, because it has to be a complete rebuild, depends on how big your site is, how much individual content you have on your site, how customized you are. We are looking at doing this because we're just— this is released in June. We want to give it at least a month to get the bugs out, right? Or it was released in May, So June, July, we are headed straight into heavy duty season. So are we looking at like doing this ourselves in January, Andrew, or are we thinking we're going to probably do it earlier than that?
What I would work— focus on is if you look at the— in Shopify, you'll see the themes, customize and themes and all that. But I'll say like Horizon 1.0, like when you're doing an update, the 1.0 is one to watch out for. And what, and it shall, it'll probably have like 1.0.1, 1.0.2. Wait for 1.1 is normally the kind of thing to do. It's not a little, like there's the point ones are like the little bug fixes. The point one is like a big kind of update.
So 1.1 point. We want, we want the middle number to at least have a 1, not a 0.
Yeah, that's kind of the way to write that for. They might already be there. And then for speed of doing it, it's kind of up to yourself. It's how fast can you do it. If you want to use a bunch of these new features, like the, the whole AI-generated block thing we're going to talk about next is going to be really nice for things like Black Friday. And you might want like As the, the main thing I thought of to build with that is account deterioration. Like there's a bunch of that stuff where you might be like, it's worth it to me. I don't have a bunch to do. And the increase in income I can probably make on Black Friday by tailoring my shop like this is probably gonna be totally worth it for me. But if you have a ton of content to get through, or you're slightly more scared of the tech. Definitely take it as slow as you need to. And the other thing that's really good with Shopify is you can add a new theme, sit, customize it for as long as you want before you hit publish. I was going to say deploy, but that's not what it says. Publish. Before you hit publish on it and actually make it the live version of your site. So I'm looking on shopify.net. They're on 1.0.2. So, 2 bug fixes. So right out of YouTheBug. But we're not there. So you might want to wait till then. That's just kind of a, what I say, it's totally up to you. You can do it wherever you like, but, and that's kind of our advice there. So we keep talking about it, but I just move on to AI Journey at Starblocks. This is like the really big, really cool, really flashy thing is So you had all these blocks for now and it's like text box and all that kind of stuff. And you're like, okay, I want something different. I want something fancy. I want something cool. You can now go into Shopify and just tell it what you want. And this is exclusive to Horizon themes. And that's probably why you're going to be really tempted to upgrade really quickly. Is you can say, I want a giant bar across the top of the screen that says my sale ends in an hour. I want, um, like if you're seeing, if you saw a product that does a before and after and you have the little slider thing in the middle and you like drag it along to see the two images, you can custom build that. Like before that would be like you'd need a developer to buy something.
All the paid apps, all the paid apps are probably panicking right now.
Yeah. The only thing, like it still is like, if anything was wrong, you have to edit code. Like they still, If you're not a developer, it might be a little bit difficult. So you still got a little while before you're completely replacing them because you do kind of, if you don't get it to work, like Shopify, because it's not their code, they won't help you with it. It's a little bit sucky, but it's kind of just how AI works. So if you do build something, test it on desktop, test it on your phone. And just make sure it all looks okay before you set it live. You can also back and forth. It looks a little bit like ChatGPT. So if you say, build me a countdown timer, and it does it, and the, I don't know, say the text is on top of the numbers and you want it to the left and not on the right, like you can go and say, okay, move this here. I want to change this color. So you can do a little back and forth with it to try and fix it if something isn't Perfect. But if you want those announcement bars, something on your product page, just like there's so many things. It's always that. I need to think of an example. There's one of those things where I'm like, tell us in the Facebook group. If you want me to do, I don't know, like a little, like a list or a workshop or maybe like a digital product where I give you a bunch of prompts for things and be like, okay, here are all the things you might possibly want to build. I think that would be really helpful. It's like, I know they always throw these exciting new things at you and it's like, okay, what do I do with this? I have this problem with like all the AI agents and NaN and Zaps and stuff. I'm like, these sound really cool when someone shows it to me, but I don't know what to automate. I'm like, I have no ideas what to do with this. So let us know in the Facebook group if that's something you would be interested in. But now you can do all this. You don't need to know code. You don't even have to, because you could do this in ChatGPT before. You'd have to like try and copy and paste it and break the backend of Shopify. But you can do it in here and it's kind of—
If it doesn't work, you just delete it.
Sandbox, I think is the word. Yeah, it doesn't— it's just a little section you can delete and it doesn't break your whole shop.
You don't have to worry about going into that liquid code and all of the HTML and be like, ahh.
Yeah, because that was before, if you ever customized your code and did an update, it lost all of the code you customized. That's been a thing with Shopify, and I think that kind of changes with this update, but don't do any of that, especially if you do it in an AI-generated store block, that definitely stays there because it's a block and not the actual code of the shop. All right. Um, and I think that's all we have to say there. And like, these are all like, we're still in the discovery section of this. We haven't added. Yeah, we haven't properly played with it. We can't tell you a ton. These are just like the fast insights.
We can't tell you the pitfalls yet.
Yeah, we can't give you all the, our client did this and we tried this and give you all the nice examples we'd like to. Okay, next one. Sidekick just got smarter. And if you haven't used it yet, it's one of that things that's like hidden there. It's hidden there and you kind of ignore it, but it's actually quite useful. It's Shopify's AI system. If you're on the shop, there's a little kind of, it's like a little hairy man, not like hairy, like a man with hair. And I think he even has like a, like a raccoon mask kind of thing on. It's a really tiny symbol and you're probably gonna look at me like, Andrew, what are you looking at?
It's its official name now. It's a little hairy man.
Okay. The little hairy man with the, what does this mean? Like a robber? A superhero? I don't know, but like they look like It looks like a raccoon with hair.
Your feral assistant.
Someone at Shopify who spent ages designing this is crying somewhere.
They should.
But it's right in the top of your screen, click it and it pops up down the side of your screen. There's like a little chat assistant and before it could do a few things, it could like add discount codes to your shop and things. Now it really does a lot, and I'm pretty sure it's because they've AI-ified it. But you can say things like, you can say like, okay, I need a discount code that runs from the 21st to the 27th for 20% off. And it will do that for you in like a nice kind of chat style instead of you going through things. You can say, something's broken in my shop, how do I fix it? But now you can say things like about the data in your shop. So how are my sales doing year on year? How is my conversion rate? How many people are coming from Facebook? And like ask it to compare things. You can kind of look at all this data without having to go into your analytics and get a headache because there's 8,000 things in there that don't make any sense. You can do it. And then you can also say, okay. My conversion rate is down 10%. One, why? And two, how do I fix it? And it will give you stuff and it will reference your shop and it will also reference the Shopify knowledge base. Oh, cool. So you can do things that you can ask it to, if you use like Shopify's inbuilt marketing stuff, you can ask it to build segments and things for you. I think you can.
That's nice.
I haven't used that. You can also use it to create images. Yeah, you can use it to create images if you want to. And I don't think it's as fancy as like the ChatGPT and stuff. You can't make it do project images, but you can say like, I need a, like a banner for your homepage that's like, it's summer, like you want a nice beach. And you can say, hey, make an image of a nice beach. It will do that for you. And I I don't know a ton about this, but I've seen it listed as a thing you can do. I don't know if it's not there yet. I think it's like rolling out, I don't know, but you can like screen share your shop and ask it specific things and talk to it. So be like, hey, I have this page with this error message or something. How do I fix it? And actually talk to it. So that like, it'll be like having a support person on Zoom. Oh, cool. That you're using. Verify, and it should, like, it should be deeply knowledgeable cuz it's, it's accessing all of Shopify's own support stuff.
That is really neat.
And they, like, there's ways to do that with ChatGPT in any, like, with any kind of software.
But ChatGPT has outdated, uh, like I ask directions and it'll tell me to go to someplace that doesn't exist. It's like, well, I don't see that option you're giving me. Most recent one was navigation disappeared. It moved somewhere ridiculous that made no sense at all. Or I was trying to create a URL, like, why?
But yeah, Shopify one, I'll be really up to date and know everything. 'Cause everything you do, like, I know someone who is doing Facebook ads and it's like the, have you ever tried to follow someone's Facebook ads tutorial? There is a 98.9% chance that the interface that you're seeing for Shopify ads is is not the one they're seeing. It's not the one you had last week.
It's not the one you had this morning.
If you refresh it. And if you do the, like, live share thing, and, or screenshot, or do whatever you need to do to get into ChatGPT, it can figure it out for you. So, I know they've had success with that. So I think having this option in Shopify will be really useful, and it's probably something we should test.
When we switch.
Mm-hmm. Maybe we'll do a video in the Facebook, because it's not really a podcast thing. Yeah.
Gonna be a mess.
Yeah. Yeah. So, let us know if you want that. I'm giving, I feel like I'm gonna need, do we have to give you like a to-do list of all the things I keep telling you to tell us in the Facebook group? In the show notes for your to-do list. Yeah, that's what I'm gonna say. Number 4, the new campaign tracking. This is one of those things that I got super excited by, and I'm always like, I don't know if anyone else is gonna care about this as much as I do. But if you're into stats and analytics and all that, like I was gonna say fun stuff, but that might not be what people on Harpo like call it.
But this is the data that makes you money right here. Data that makes you money or loses you money and you wanna know it.
But you can now track that all in a specific campaign. So say Black Friday is a really obvious example, and I'm going to use it because why not? You can say, okay, I'm going to set up my Black Friday campaign in Shopify Advisor Campaign. Then you can have one specific place for all your tracking of all of the things you do to promote your Black Friday. Every time you share a link in an email, you can generate a specific link so that all of the people who click that link are tracked in your campaign. Every time you share a link on Facebook, you can get a specific link that tracks it to that campaign. Like everywhere you're sharing things and all of that tracking goes in that one place. So also lets you go, okay, Shopify, all of it shows that your marketing worked and any sales that came in that day or weekend from somewhere else. Tracked separately, seeing that, okay, my actual campaign efforts generated 10% of that, and 90% came from Google. You can say, okay, maybe my campaigns aren't so good. So it's like a really nice way to tag it. You can have— it also generates QR codes. Like, I haven't had a chance to try this out yet, but I think that is going to be a really nice thing going forward if you're doing like some real And campaign tracking, sales kind of stuff. We might do—
I need to stop saying we're gonna do things and then not writing them down. We don't remember what we're gonna do.
No, we have the transcript to ask Dr. PG, but like a little project where we get everyone, I don't know, where would we do this? Maybe we won't do it for our clients, but we like do a, we all do a sale. Nice fruit date, and we all have like the emails and the marketing plan stuff, and it's all chapter campaigns, and we kind of do a little sale test.
It's like, to me, the biggest way to look at this is like, if, say, you ran that sale campaign and you put a post out on Facebook, you put, you put posts on Facebook. I'm gonna say that because it's an easy one to put links in. You do posts on Facebook every single day of that campaign, maybe twice a day even, and then Your campaign tracking comes in and says, great, you made a lot of sales from Facebook. Don't know which things that you posted really worked and which ones didn't, which ones got them to click, which ones got them to buy. Those are two very different stats right there. But now with campaign tracking, and if you're able to put it within one, like, can't— sales event. So say like sales event that you've created that campaign, and now you have all those different links. So if each of those Facebook posts that you did, say it was 4 days, you had 4 posts. If each of them had that slightly different link in there that the campaign gave you, you'll know which one actually led to sales, not just clicks, sales. Because that could be very different information. And once you know that, you're like, okay, what did I do on that style post that made it work? And can I replicate it for my next sale?
Yeah. And I think for doing, because I always talk about testing, one thing I like to test is like different types of sales. Like if I do bonuses, I don't do bonuses. If I do a percentage versus an actual amount, or if I do the whole shop versus a collection of stuff, and I can have all those sales. Instead of me trying to track dates and figure this all out, I can go, I track them all, like the, here's the Labour Day sale, here's, as if I've ever done one of those in Scotland. Here's the Labour Day sale. Here's the Black Friday sale, like Black Friday's kind of an outlier, don't you think?
Halloween sale.
Like compare anything else to it. Yeah, Halloween sale, Mother's Day sale, like all those things. And I can track, go into each one and say which of these worked the best. And it's so much easier to track that if it's in a campaign itself. You could even, because you can name your campaign what you want, you could call it like Father's Day and then in brackets 40% off whole store. Mother's Day, 10% off roses collection. And that really helps you track things easily.
All right. So based on how we're talking, like, that's the one we're actually the most excited about, 'cause we're data nerds. And if you wanna be successful, you either need to be a data nerd or you need to hire a data nerd.
Mm-hmm. And if you're, if you are that kind of nerd and you want to try things out, talk to us in the Facebook group. I'm like, not in the Facebook group. We don't make enough use of it. Actually, no, I was gonna say this, this is gonna be our own time, but I'll just do a couple of questions in there the past couple of weeks. I'm going out to them, but yeah, come in there and ask us stuff. It's very fun to chat about. Okay. Next is the AI-powered knowledge base app. This one is like hidden in like a section within a section on the page, but it's one of those ones where I'm like, this is one of those secret one of those things that if you're like up on the what's coming up and the AI stuff, is actually going to be something huge for the future. So you need to go in and add this. It's not automatically in your shop, but you need to go into the Shopify App Store and add the Shopify Knowledge Base app. And it lets you add FAQs into your shop. Which, you know, like FAQs, I'm sure I have that already. The way AI works, because people ask questions, is when it's searching for data from your site, it looks for answers to questions. So having your site set up where those FAQs are there, and ChatGPT can help you, can get those answers really easily, makes it far easier to show up in those results. And it doesn't just help that, it still helps on Google, especially Google with its new AI mode and stuff. And the, if you're on Google and you have, like, it's a nightmare to get to results these days. You have the AI overview at the top that is looking for those kind of question things. And then you have that, like, little dropdowns where it's like, people ask this and it's like, I dunno if you Googled us, like, who are Andrew and Melissa? When, it always has really random questions.
It was like, it does.
What's Melissa's favorite food? When did Blueberry puff. Like, it'll always be like, it'll always be kind of normal. And then those kind of start to get more unhinged as you go down.
Fantastic SEO resource, those things. Well, and think about it with the knowledge base.
Yeah, they're all, they're all questions and it's grabbing the snippets, they're called snippets, from paragraphs on your site. And if you're site is set up with a thing written like an answer, you are gonna show up there. This is kind of the way AI is going. It's not SEO, it's like AEO.
AEO. Or something like that.
Yeah. EIEIO. It's pretty much. What is it? It's like agent, agent engine.
Optimization. Yeah.
Something like that. It's got that. Yeah. But it's a slight change and like, we'll see how this goes. No one's an expert in it yet. This might all be a load of crap I'm talking, but like, from what I understand, what I looked at, this is kind of how things are. And obviously Shopify think the same because they've developed a whole app for it. And I think it'll, they'll continue to build it. Like it's a fairly basic kind of app. I think it will continue to grow. Like Shopify does that. If you look at the Collabs app, the version 1 of it, when I first heard of it, it was like, it was pretty cool. Now it does a million things.
To go back in and check.
What? Episode idea?
Yes. I'll click my button to do it.
It gives you, like, it will start to pull out some FAQ things it thinks people will have from the data that's already in your shop. It will give you suggestions. It will, I don't know how much of this works yet, but it will also, I don't even know how it's doing this, but it does have a section for it, so it must do something. It will find what people are asking about your shop. I don't know where it's getting the data from. I know it's from ChatGPT because I know they have some stuff going on in the background. I don't know if it's from Google or what, but it will start to populate those and get you to answer them. And I know one of the things that is coming is if people ask ChatGPT, it already can, it does do some search stuff where it shows product listings, but you'll be able to sync your product catalog to ChatGPT in the future, and your shop, like, it's actively being worked on just now. And we'll see how that goes. They'll probably end up adding ads and things like that.
They'll probably end up with ChatGPT. That'll be interesting.
Yeah.
But it's what Andrew said.
Yeah, I just say it's a product feed, which if you don't know what those are, you probably already have some. You probably have one in your shop that's going to Google and one that's going to Pinterest. Those take product feeds already.
So I was going to say, if what Andrew said with snippets and all of that, you're like, oh my God, this is above me. Think of it right here with the AI-powered knowledge base app as a direct pipeline of information from your shop going, feeding straight into the AIs. Could be like that very streamlined process.
Yeah. Again, if you need any help with that, you just to, I'm like horrible on the podcast because I'm like, I have so much ideas for like, we could turn this into a course, we could do a workshop, we could do a live thing. You like, you need help with any of this, let us know and I'll probably build it for you.
Andrew just likes building.
Tatjana Vitić is saying, Andrew, stop building stuff and maybe start selling some of that. And I'm like, mm, that doesn't sound good.
You need a sales rep, Andrew.
I know, sometimes I'm like, give me some advice. Sometimes they just roast me instead. I'm like, I didn't ask for this.
All right, so those were our 5. Things that we are so excited about in the new summer 2025 Shopify update.
Yeah. And there's, there's a whole bunch more. I'm like, I'm going to start to 5, but there's definitely a whole lot of things to talk about. I'm sure as they kind of come to the forefront and people are using them, we'll probably talk about them more over time. But it's, this is one of the ones where I'm like, there's really a bunch of exciting stuff. Cause some, like, they do these updates every few months and sometimes they're, mm, and sometimes it's like, this thing's going to zoom. There's sometimes some of this stuff I'm like, I don't think it's there yet that they announced several updates ago. Like they—
maybe no one was excited about it, so they didn't do it.
Yeah. I can't remember. There's one of the updates that they announced in the last one and then ignored and then like announced it in this one again. Like, hey, here's this new feature that's ready. It's like, yeah, but what is it supposed to be a feature 6 months ago?
We're not excited about that anymore. Pink.
All right. So, but I feel like there's a bunch of useful stuff and useful for, I hate saying smaller shops that we're small, but like the people on the, like the normal plan who aren't, who don't have a giant team and developers and they're selling in 17 countries and all this Shopify Plus stuff that they like to add. They've genuinely added stuff for everyone. Because I remember the last update, I was like, oh my God, this stuff looks really exciting. I was like, you need Shopify Plus plan, you need Shopify Plus plan. It's like, okay, none of this is really useful to the average person. 'Cause where is it Shopify Plus starts at? It's like $2,300 a month. I'm like, okay, you need to be selling.
I didn't think it was that expensive.
Yeah. 'Cause what is it? There's Shopify— I always get very confused in the Shopify naming of the different plans. Is there Shopify— yeah, Shopify If you go into your own Shopify backend and look at the plans, I'll show you Shopify Basic, the Medium plan, which is now just called Shopify. They used to have a name, now it's just Shopify. And Shopify Advanced. Those are like reasonable prices. They go up to a few hundred. Then you have to like apply for and have a whole person on Shopify work on your shop and do like, it totally changes how your shop works. Ah, is the Shopify Plus. Gotcha. And they allow There's a whole bunch of really cool stuff you can do in there, but you have to make it worth it. You need to be making like 15, 20 grand a month probably for it to be worth it.
That's what I thought.
I don't know, like how much, like as a percentage of your total income, how much would you want your shop to go to? I know, I love you. That's not. Yeah. Okay. So you don't need Shopify Plus, you don't need a team, but you can start using some of these features.
And all of these features start with switching to a Horizon theme, correct? Or can we use any of them with the standard Shopify?
The, yeah, the AI store blocks is the only thing we need the Horizon theme for. The rest of the stuff. You're totally fine with getting on.
So Sidekicks is available to us for a knowledge base app, available to us right now.
Yeah, they're all available. Sidekick has been available for a while as well. So like, it's not all of it is new and you should be able to play with it in your old job anyway. But if you have a Dawn theme, you're not ready to upgrade, or if you have a paid theme that already exists, you can use all of these things. Because you're probably not in a huge rush to change themes. But I think there's a few pissed off theme developers because they're like, how do you make our themes work with this new stuff? And I don't think Shopify has given them a ton of info about that. So that's a kind of wait and see how it goes.
Remember our recommendation, do not switch to a Horizon theme until it says 0.1.0. You need a 1 in that middle number.
Yeah. But what was, if you, if you don't, if you're listening to us as someone who's about to start a shop, start with the Horizon theme. I would say that. Sure. Yeah.
Because you just have to rebuild something.
So pick one of these updates, start off the way I did, and see how it goes. Um, and blast them in the face with you. I don't know. I know anything to us, the things definitely.
Alrighty. Well, thanks for tuning into the Product Growth Lab podcast. We hope you were excited that you found today's episode insightful and inspiring. I'm also going to say for all the things that you can play with right now, go ahead. If you're not sure what to do for your flash sale to get that going, we have the guide all set up for you. You can go to theproductgrowthlab.com/flash to get our flash sale in a snap, guy, they'll walk you through how to have one up and running in time for this weekend so you can start gathering that data and playing with campaigns. It's gonna be so much fun. So beyond that, if you enjoyed the show today, leave a review. It helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs just like you. Stay connected and keep experimenting. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and don't forget to join our community, that Facebook group, for more resources, tips, and support. Until next time, keep growing and creating. This is the Product Growth Lab signing off.