Stop Wasting Money on Shopify Apps - Platter CEO Reveals Game-Changing Store Strategy | Ben Platter

Hello everyone. My name's Isaac. Welcome to a new episode and a new format for Talk Commerce. Before launching into our interviews, we're now going to have a brief introduction segment led by me where I talk about the guest and the theme of the week. And before I get into that this time around, I'll also add an introduction to myself. So I'm Isaac Mori. I'm the co-founder and chief editor of Content Cucumber and now Content Basis. I help companies tell their stories online with creative content from blog articles to short-form videos to graphic design and everything in between. I've been a writer and an editor for about 10 years, and I'm excited to bring that experience to Talk Commerce to help explore the newest ideas and trends in the world of content and commerce. Today's guest is Ben Sharf, CEO and founder of Platter. Platter helps Shopify brands upgrade their storefronts for speed, simplicity, and growth. By replacing clunky tech stacks with their own streamlined solution. They even have agency services to help clients implement these changes seamlessly. What stood out to me in this conversation is how powerful that combo of tech and services can be. Most companies tend to pick one of those two paths, but Platter stands out by doing both and doing them really well. That's helped them launch over 150 storefronts in just a few years, all while helping brands reduce complexity and move faster without sacrificing any functionality. So without further ado, let's dive into the interview with Brent and Ben.

Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Ben Sharf. He is the CEO of Platter. Ben, go ahead, do introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life.

Love that. I, uh, my name is Ben Sharf. I'm one of the founders and CEO of Platter. We're an e-commerce software company aiming to build more profitable storefronts for Shopify brands. So our business was born out of this thesis that if we can consolidate a lot of the most popular tools and functionality in the Shopify ecosystem into one product suite, we can build you a storefront cheaper and faster without compromising quality. And to date, we've worked with over 150 brands, uh, ranging from one SKU startups all the way up to the Mrs. Meyers of the world and everything in between. My day-to-day, I like to say, is I'm the chief firefighter officer. So my job is to unblock everyone in our organization and make sure everyone has what they need to be successful. And then the other part of my job is storytelling and marketing. So everyone in the ecosystem knows who we are and I can recruit the best talent to help us build. And then one burning passion of mine, I would definitely say it's fitness. I was a Division I athlete in my past life. I was a Division I ice hockey player, which I think molded me into the person I am today. And so I continue to challenge myself both physically and mentally because I find a lot of fulfillment in doing so.

That's awesome. Which, which school did you skate for?

Colgate University.

Awesome. Good. Yeah, I'm originally from Minnesota. So we have a few D1 hockey teams in Minnesota and the Hockey Hall of Fame is in Minnesota, although Canadians will often say It's in Canada. Ours is in Minnesota, or the US one is. Anyways, one thing, Ben, I forgot to tell you that we were going to do. I do this thing called the Free Joke Project. I'm going to tell you a joke and all you have to do is give me a rating on the joke, 8 through 13. It'll take us about 15 seconds. So I'll tell you a joke. Give me a rating, 8 through 13.

Okay.

So here we go. I went to a bookstore and saw the book titled How to Solve 50% of Your Problems. So I bought two. Perfect. Thanks. I appreciate that.

All right.

So tell us kind of about how you've— tell us your founding story. Tell us how you got started and a little bit of background on Platter.

Yeah. So before starting Platter, I was working at a company called Gopuff. For those of you listening who aren't familiar, they're basically an instant delivery platform for convenience store goods. So think like Uber Eats, but for convenience store. And while working there, I was building out a business unit to enable instant delivery for e-commerce websites. So imagine if you can go buy a case of water from liquiddeath.com and get it delivered to your doorstep in under 30 minutes. Pretty revolutionary business model. But during that time, all I did was talk to Shopify brands and people in the Shopify ecosystem. And every time I would get on the phone with a brand to talk about this integration that we were building at GoPuff, they all had complications with building and managing their website. And I could never understand like why there was no like blueprint or gold standard for how to do this effectively. I'm talking brands doing $50 million plus in revenue. So that kind of sparked my curiosity to go down this rabbit hole to explore that a little bit deeper. And in tandem, I have two co-founders. They were both working in e-commerce in different capacities as well. One of them, my technical co-founder, was consulting with brands on building websites, and the other one was doing sales, selling products for brands on marketplaces. So we kind of just basically brought together our different skill sets and insights and locked ourselves in a room knowing intuitively we wanted to build an e-commerce software company. Just started consulting with brands and ultimately wanted them to, we started working with who we wanted to make our future customer and really just take their input and their feedback on what pain points they had and what solutions they needed. And we kind of, you know, the rest is history after that. We're 3 years into the journey now and it's, it's kind of taken, taken its own shape in terms of what the business is today based on what we've learned from the market.

That's super interesting. So do you have that same model now that works with Shopify? That sort of purchase and buy and get delivered in 30 minutes?

No, I mean, that's like a GoPuff thing. I wish we could build that, but you need like billions of dollars and a crazy infrastructure to make that possible. It was more so just my first step into the world of e-commerce and recognizing that there was a better way to be building and managing online storefronts, which is ultimately what we do at Platter.

Yeah, so it just reminds me in my past life, I had a Magento agency, which is another e-commerce platform that got eaten by Shopify. Or that lunch was eaten, lunch, whatever. And we had a client in the Dominican Republic and they have things called colmados, these little tiny stores. And the company was called AB InBev and they, they had a headless application that ran on top of Magento that somebody would order and you could get your beer or Pepsi or whatever that thing was delivered by a motorcycle driver within 30 minutes. It was geofenced. It was really cool. They had a really great solution, you know, during like football or soccer things like that, they would get, they would get 40 or 50,000 users within minutes to order some of these things. So it was also a fun experience for a high volume. So tell us a little bit about your Shopify solutions that you have now and kind of how does that push you outside the boundaries of what Shopify offers natively?

Yeah, so we have our product suite as a Shopify theme and a Shopify app. What we found historically, how brands operate today, they do one of a couple things. One is they either Go to an agency and get a super custom storefront built where if they're not technical, that basically means they're beholden to whoever built that site for them every time they want to make additional changes. Or they go to the Shopify theme store and buy or use a super basic out-of-the-box theme that has very minimal functionality. And then they go to the Shopify app store and download a bunch of third-party applications or a combination of the two. So what we found is, is brands scale, they end up hitting that implosion point. Because their storefront's too complicated and it no longer can meet the requirements of the business as it is in the current state. So what we did was build a lot of that functionality into one product suite. So instead of brands needing to go get apps for every single piece of functionality, if we can build a lot of that into one solution and provide you incrementality where it's a few less apps, a few less monthly expenses, and then a drag and drop editor that makes it more intuitive. The whole idea was to have an infrastructure and solution that appeals to the middle market and enterprise that's also super user-friendly for non- technical people to make contributions. And we've built over 150 storefronts in the last 2 and a half years, which as a previous agency owner, you know that most agencies probably hit that number in like a decade. So that speaks a little bit to the process and the product that we have because we can move really quickly and have a lot of functionality baked into it already to allow us to do so. I would— the last thing I'll add is that the one unique point about our business is most traditional agencies build on top of third-party tools. And then most tech vendors that build software don't have like a professional services team. We're unique in that we're a services business and a software business under one umbrella. So we have a Shopify theme and a Shopify app, and then also a professional services team that builds these storefronts on top of the tools we built.

Yeah, that's interesting because a lot of people, I think, get into Shopify and then pretty soon they've added 20 or 30 apps. They're, especially if you're on Shopify Plus, pretty soon their bill is 4 or 5 grand a month on it. Doesn't seem as inexpensive as it was first presented. So are you both solving the pricing and complexity problem?

Yeah, I mean, I would say that depending on the size of the brand you're working with or the pain points they have, I would say different parts of our product resonate, right? Like saving $1,000 a month for a $50 million brand isn't really something they're going to get out of bed for. Not to say it doesn't happen, but I would say it's really relative to like, what problem are you facing? Like, I'll give you an example right now, a brand that we're talking to that's top of mind. They do like $70 million a year on their Shopify storefront. They haven't, they've had the same, same code base for 10 years. And they're like, we just need a new infrastructure. There's so much legacy code. There's so many apps that have been installed and removed in different agencies and freelancers. And like every time you want to change something now, it's such a production. So it's like, how can you maintain the integrity of it having that enterprise feel and infrastructure while actually giving you something that empowers you to move a lot faster? And then the other piece of it is just keeping a pulse on the ecosystem in terms of like what type of functionality is relevant so that what brands are asking for, we already have, right? Like our product is really effective for brands that have medium to large catalogs and mid-price point items because a lot of what we do is around gamification. So think cross-sells, upsells, where you could do bundle builders, checkout extensions, post-purchase upsells, like incentive progress bars, really all driven around like, how do we increase your average order value and increase the amount of revenue for every visitor that lands on your store?

And how many typical extensions would you replace then? I mean, let's back up a second. Is the extension market a problem with stores that just go and buy or just get and download every extension they possibly could want in their stores? That is that a problem in Shopify?

Yeah, because what people don't realize is there's over 12,000 apps in the Shopify app ecosystem. And a lot of those are lifestyle businesses when there's nothing wrong with that. But like, you don't need to pay $6 a month for a color swatch app. Like, that should just be a feature that's built into the theme. And so like, that concept, if you extrapolate that out, all of a sudden you find yourself having a different app for a card drawer, a different app for an incentive bar, a different app for like Instagram feed videos, a different app for a menu. And it just goes on and on and on. It starts to become a problem when you scale. So our product is more relevant, I would say, for, like I said, to, to the middle market brands. I'm all for being scrappy when you're a new brand, maybe minimal budget, like just find a way to get it done. But you don't necessarily anticipate the problems you're gonna face when you're doing $5, $10, $15 million in revenue. And to be honest, like you don't need to anticipate those. Like once you get there, you can deal with it.

Yeah. It's a, should some of these things already, I guess I'm not super familiar with the Shopify ecosystem, but should some of these things just be inherently built in, like the color swatch, that would be something that a lot of platforms have out of the box where you wouldn't even have to—

Yeah, exactly. That's the point though. But like you might have a, you know, a Joe Schmo in the middle of the country country who's making $50K a month off of a color swatch app, which is awesome. And there's nothing wrong with that. But when you think about like these really large brands with a lot of complexities, like every incremental advantage you can have is really important. And like one topic that's super popular is like page speed and having a lot of extra apps and additional code in the store, in the code base that isn't needed is the exact problem to look for when you're trying to, to make a website more efficient and faster.

You mentioned—

describe it as a lot of these apps are features, not products. So as a brand, you should only be using products on your storefront in terms of software, not features.

That's a good way to look at it. I mean, earlier you talked about the big brands don't really care about the cost, but they probably care about the complexity. But I think knowing a lot of technology e-commerce managers, they don't always think about the technical debt. And I— you would— you kind of let off with that technical technical debt piece, how do you advise your clients to get rid of something by adding something consolidated? And it sounds like a lot of things you're doing is consolidating some of these, these bespoke apps that are unneeded.

Yeah. And I think it's getting brands over the hump of the sunk cost fallacy, right? Like sometimes brands are, they struggle to detach from something because they put so much time into it and so much money into it. But if it's not the most effective solution to put you in the best position to succeed, then you need to just like accept that for what it is. And so for us, like our KPI and our tagline you'll see on our website is around profitability. So like, if I can save you more money by eliminating a set of tools and by improving operational efficiencies, by giving you a more user-friendly experience to manage your storefront, and then I can also give you features you didn't know existed. And also give you best practices around how to increase your AOV and your conversion, I can actually save you money and make you money at the same time. And I don't remember the last time we spoke to a brand who saw that we could objectively make them more profitable and they weren't attracted to that opportunity.

Who is your, is your target mainly the CTO or the CMO or a mixture of both? Or how do you kind of introduce your solution to the, to the brand?

It depends on the size of the brand. I would say our title is typically founder, e-com manager, chief digital officer, chief marketing officer, e-com director.

I work a lot with Indeer. They're a little boutique CRM that their, their big thing is about clienteling and the idea that somebody at a POS is also going to help sell when you're to get, to get them online. Do you have a strategy for getting in-store people online to their Shopify store?

It's not where we focus. Our expertise is more once they get to the store, make sure the store is set up to help them be successful.

What have you seen is the biggest, uh, um, faux pas or mistake that a big brand makes when setting up a Shopify store?

I think there's a couple of things. I mean, I think the first one is not actually understanding like who their customer is. I think throwing a lot of money at ads to a leaky funnel is a huge mistake we see so often. Like, it's like people think spending more money is going to solve the problem, but actually understanding the root cause of the issue is really the solution. I would say oftentimes larger brands because they are larger. They just think that things need to be more complicated, but there's beauty in simplicity. And I'd say that's like a huge thing that we communicate with brands is like less is more in a lot of instances. I would say that's probably the biggest mistakes we see is like, why is it this complicated? It doesn't need to be.

Is that sort of the headless model where a brand was— some CTO is going to get into his head that the headless solution is the only way to go. And suddenly you have a separated front end from your backend and you're trying to maintain two code bases.

Do you know the brand Wild Earth? It's a dog food brand. We saved them $720,000 in operating expenses, moving them off of a headless storefront.

Yeah, that's amazing. All right. So if you have a brand, besides your own solution, what would be the, what would be the, um, for 2025, what's the kind of advice would you give to a brand that is that $10 million plus or $20 million plus? When they're reorganizing their existing Shopify store?

I mean, I think if it's, if you're saying like unrelated to us, I think like my broad advice is, and I know this is, it's not necessarily a novel insight, but like people need to start paying attention to the technological innovations that are happening right in front of our eyes around like AI, because I think like throwing people at problems is no longer necessary in every instance. So I think like really starting to challenge yourself about like what are the ways to solve problems? Because I think one of the biggest advantages you're going to see now with new tools available is just like efficiency, right? Like overall operating margins for a business P&L, because one person can now do 4 people's jobs if they actually have the knowledge and how to use the tools at their disposal. And there's so many tools out there, whether it's like personalization of the actual storefront experience, uh, generating creative using AI, like there's, there's just so many ways to go about it. So I think my, my, my, I guess my concise feedback or point of advice to people listening would be around like not being afraid to question things. Like that is the biggest thing. Like all because someone told you this is how you need to do something, like you should feel comfortable pushing back on that cuz there's definitely more than one solution and there's probably a more cost-effective solution too. You just have to like dig a little deeper to find it.

That's perfect, Ben. As we close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?

I mean, I'm just going to do a shameless plug for Platter. I think we're really good at what we do. I think our results speak for themselves. And if you're operating an e-commerce brand and you want a pro bono audit, I'm happy to sit down and tell you everything I think you should change about your conversion funnel.

That's great. Ben Sharf is the co-founder and CEO of Platter. Thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me, Brent.

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