Ethan Haber went from dorm room to 750 retail locations. Took 7 years and almost didn't happen. He incorporated in 2019. His molds got stuck at the Port of Long Beach for nine months during COVID. A packaging supplier switched materials on him without telling him and he had to eat the cost. He burned money on Meta ads targeting an audience that mostly didn't own hamsters and just wanted to argue in the comments. He ran near-zero on Shopify, like $2,000 a year in sales on a site that looks great. For three or four years straight the conversation at year-end was do we shut this down. "There were three or four years straight where we were like, if it doesn't go the way we need it to go, we'll close it down at the end of the year, and then year end comes and we're just like, close enough to keep going." Then he stopped fighting the wrong channels and doubled down on what worked: -> Pulled all ad spend from Meta and social. Gone. -> Focused exclusively on Amazon, Walmart, and Chewy. -> Went from 200 to 600+ units/month on Amazon alone -- just in the last few months. -> Landed 750 retail locations including Pet Supermarket, Petland, Pet Value Canada, Petco Mexico. -> Filed a utility patent in 2021. Got it granted in 2025. Four years of back-and-forth with the patent office -- worth it. -> Cold DM'd the founder of PetSmart on LinkedIn. The guy called him back. Now they talk every few months. 2026 is his first profitable year. Seven years in. His new product, Burrow Bricks, a snap-together small animal habitat system, is launching with a major big-box retailer in the next six weeks. If you sell a physical product on Shopify and you're bleeding money figuring out Meta, this episode is required listening.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Technology, Information and Media
NEW EPISODES EVERY TUESDAY, SUBSCRIBE FOR UNBEATABLE ECOM RECON – LETS GET PAID
About us
NEW EPISODES EVERY TUESDAY, SUBSCRIBE FOR UNBEATABLE ECOM RECON – Explore the world of ecommerce and online business, with a focus on the Shopify platform. Each episode features interviews with successful entrepreneurs, experts, and thought leaders, sharing their insights, tips, and experiences on building and growing a successful online store. Join host Kurt Elster and his guests as they share their stories and learn from each other's successes and challenges. LETS GET PAID.
- Website
-
https://unofficialshopifypodcast.com/
External link for The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
- Industry
- Technology, Information and Media
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2016
Employees at The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Updates
-
Patrick R. got a Shopify brand cited by ChatGPT 70% of the time and by Google AI Overviews 86% of the time. In six months. "It's a Wild West where a lot of this stuff just works." Here's what's actually moving the needle in GEO (that's SEO for AI overviews) right now: -> Web consensus: get your brand mentioned across listicles, Reddit, review sites, and press releases. AIs are crawling all of it. -> Listicle outreach through affiliate programs. Send product. Get included. Be transparent about it. -> Structured data and JSON-LD. Makes your content easy for AI crawlers to ingest. Big wins for low effort. -> Pick sub-niches you can win. You're not outranking Nike for "best running shoes." But "best running shoes for [specific need]" is wide open. -> Reddit and YouTube are the two most-cited sources in AI answers right now. Be there. The playbook looks a lot like early SEO before the filters tightened up. Patrick calls it a resurrection. First-mover advantage is real, and it won't last forever. If you run a Shopify store and your organic traffic dropped 30-40% this year, this is the episode that shows you where the new traffic is coming from. New episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Link in comments.
-
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast reposted this
"We are actually giving you money to acquire a buyer, which is a complete flip of the narrative." That's what Amanda Engelman, Shopify Director of Product for advertising and channel expansion, told me. So what does the Shopify Product Network actually do? Other Shopify merchants' products show up on your store, matched to your catalog and brand. You earn commission on every sale, you keep the customer for remarketing, and you get category expansion insights before you commit to new inventory. Shopify handles the multi-merchant checkout. One merchant she works with spent a full year developing a shoe just to expand into a new category. SPN lets you test that demand in days instead. The app is free, US-only for now, three steps to turn on. International is coming in 2026. If you run a Shopify store and you're not using this yet, this episode will change that. New episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Link in comments.
-
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast reposted this
Free gift with purchase campaigns have been my favorite promotion for years. I've said it on the podcast probably a hundred times. And one day it finally occurred to me: why don't we just build the app ourselves? So we did. Karl Meisterheim, Paul Reda, and I spent over a year building Promo Party Pro. It seemed simple. Add a free gift to the cart. Discount it to zero. Done. Then reality showed up: → Cart state management across dozens of theme configurations (drawers, mini carts, page redirects) → The popup cooldown debate: show it again or respect the dismissal? We argued for days. → Discount combinations that silently break the free gift when a coupon code gets applied → Multiple campaigns qualifying at the same time from a single add-to-cart → Customers setting the gift product to $0 and getting cleaned out by bargain hunters "Even if it ends up being something that ends the universe, it at least will have been a fun ride." That's what Karl said when he took the call. We ran it on client stores during Black Friday. Zero downtime. No fires. It just worked. If you run a Shopify store and you've ever wanted to boost AOV without devaluing your products, this episode is the playbook. Three people who've been in the Shopify trenches for over a decade talking through exactly what it takes to build something that looks simple and isn't. New episode out now. Link in comments.
-
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast reposted this
Nicklaus Mertz started Pins & Aces with $6,000. No investors. No outside capital. Last year they did $25 million. This year they're targeting $30M. But here's the part nobody talks about: the Meta and Google ad auction nearly ate him alive. CAC kept climbing. The math stopped working. So instead of spending more on the same broken playbook, Nick went live. "Nobody wants to get rich slowly." Here's what actually moved the needle: → First Whatnot show: $10K in under 2 hours using an old iPhone → TikTok Shop in December: $400K (previous 11 months combined were $200K) → Committed to daily TikTok Lives for a month. By week 3, they had 400-500 viewers per stream → Grab bags went viral through TikTok affiliates. 300-400 orders a day at peak → Wholesale is shifting from 10% to 40% of revenue. Ecom won't be the lead horse forever → Licensing collabs (Coca-Cola, South Park, Hey Dude) don't dilute the brand. They legitimize it Nick now gets 15-20 million impressions a week from live platforms alone. That's not ad spend. That's employees with iPhones. He runs a 40-person operation, ships from his own warehouse, and still plans Black Friday a full year out. If you're a Shopify merchant feeling the CAC squeeze, this one's required listening. Full episode on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.
-
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast reposted this
Met Amer Grozdanic at Shopify Editions.dev in Toronto. Turns out he's an agency owner at Praella 20 minutes from my studio in Chicago, small world. So I got him on the mic. He ran a full-service agency for years, got good results, clients still weren't happy. Burned out and walked away from e-commerce completely. Then e-commerce pulled him back because referrals just would not stop. So he rebuilt the whole thing with one rule, only do stuff he could control. No paid media, no algorithm roulette. Just migrations, UX, and conversion work. Praella now works with brands doing up to $400M. Couple things that stuck with me. BattlBox built a 7-figure channel on Whatnot in 12 months. Whatnot buyers convert to Shopify customers at 20%. TikTok Shop does 2%. That gap is wild. Also most Shopify stores are sitting on features they've literally never turned on. B2B, Markets, Flows, Collective, all ship free and they actually work. This was one of my favorite conversations in a while. Link in comments.
-
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast reposted this
I had the opportunity to chat with Kurt Elster in person on his podcast last week. What a great time. We covered so, so, so much... Kurt and I do not live too far from each other, and this was the first time we connected and had an in-depth chat about ecommerce, Shopify, and everything in the ecosystem. He told me he cuts/edits the recordings down to 20 minutes, but this ended up being 55 minutes. I hope we can get to do it again in the future. https://lnkd.in/gC69YWqp
-
-
Kyle Hency scaled Chubbies Shorts past $100 million. His spreadsheet system was built by a former investment banker. Rows and columns for days. "Sophisticated." Then Nordstrom called wanting Chubbies in 10 stores and his team realized they had zero infrastructure to even accept the order. No wholesale system, no way to track what inventory was promised where. The spreadsheets went from running the business to actively holding it back. That moment pushed them into a legacy ERP implementation which Kyle describes as "the best of the worst possible options." Love that. Now he's raised $13.5 million to build GoodDay Software, an ERP designed from day one for Shopify brands. I sat down with him and we got into all the stuff most merchants are afraid to ask. What even is an ERP, how do you know when you actually need one, why legacy ERPs take 6+ months to implement, what happens when your COGS update dynamically, whether AI can replace the inventory analyst you can't afford. If you've ever stared at a spreadsheet wondering if there's a better way this conversation is going to hit different. Link in comments.
-
"Let the creators say what they want about your product. Don't try to tell them exactly how soft the flannel is. They're advocating for you, that's what they're good at." Brad Hoos has run influencer marketing for AG1, Chomps, and his own Shopify store. His advice: stop scripting creators. Start whitelisting. New episode explains how.