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Kurt Elster shared thisChatGPT referrals to our Shopify stores were virtually nonexistent in March 2025. By December, one store hit 2,183 sessions from ChatGPT with 140 orders. That's a 6.4% conversion rate, roughly 3x the typical Shopify average. These are high-intent visitors. And this was *before* the new integration went live.
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Kurt Elster posted this12+ years of consulting for Shopify merchants gave me one specific skill for building an app: a low tolerance for software that sounds good in a demo and falls apart when a merchant is trying to launch something on a Friday. When you've watched enough promos go sideways in real time, you stop caring about feature lists. You start caring about what happens when things get real. That's basically the entire product philosophy behind Promo Party Pro. We'd already seen the failures. We just built around them.
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Kurt Elster posted thisMonth one of building Promo Party Pro, I said the words "how complicated can it be." I would like to formally retract that statement. A year later we'd wrestled with cart behavior edge cases, reworked flows we thought were finished, and spent what I can only describe as a concerning number of days on popup cooldown logic alone. I'm not proud of that last one. Actually, I'm a little proud of that last one. The app feels simple to use. That simplicity was not simple to build. Just ask Karl Meisterheim
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Kurt Elster posted thisShopify's Agentic Storefronts went live on ChatGPT yesterday. I've been looking forward to seeing this integration go live with our own client stores, and its finally happened. Here's what you need to know... Your Shopify products are now discoverable inside ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode, and Gemini. Shoppers find your stuff in conversation, then check out on your store. That's it. Discovery happens in the chat, purchase happens on your site. Quick backstory first. OpenAI originally tried "Instant Checkout" where the whole purchase happened inside the chat. Didn't work. People browsed and compared but wouldn't actually buy in-chat. So they pivoted, ChatGPT is discovery-only now. When someone's ready to buy they land on your actual store checkout via an in-app browser on mobile or a new tab on desktop. What do you need to do? Nothing. It's on by default for eligible stores. Your products are already being syndicated through Shopify Catalog. Orders show up in your admin with ChatGPT referral attribution so you can track the channel. The stores this rewards are the ones with clean catalogs. Clean product titles, structured data, accurate inventory, real product descriptions, category fields actually filled out. If you've been doing your SEO and catalog hygiene you're already positioned. If your product data is a mess, this is your wake-up call. Here's the detail most people will miss. You can't explicitly opt out of ChatGPT. It's classified as a discovery channel, not a sales channel with built-in checkout. If you want your products hidden from ChatGPT you'd have to set them as Unlisted, which also removes them from Google and your site search. That's a pretty aggressive tradeoff. No extra fees either. You pay your standard Shopify payment processing rates. Not on Shopify? They launched an "Agentic Plan" so any brand can add products to Shopify Catalog and show up across these AI channels. Shopify is positioning itself as the commerce infrastructure layer for AI whether you use their platform or not. We've managed Harney & Sons' Shopify store for years. I asked ChatGPT for the best earl grey tea and they came back #1 with a full product card, variants and pricing pulled from their store. All that catalog and SEO work just found a new surface. I have memory in ChatGPT disabled, try it for yourself. This is early. Attribution is limited, volume is unknown, and we don't know how these AI channels will rank products yet. But the infrastructure is live and the direction is clear. I'll be watching our analytics.
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Kurt Elster posted thisI've been running free gift with purchase promos on Shopify for over a decade. Which means I've also spent a decade being annoyed by the apps that are supposed to make it easy. There was always something. A weird limitation, an awkward setup flow, some part of the experience that was more complicated than it had any right to be. Promo Party Pro didn't start with a vision or a whiteboard. It started with 10+ years of the same friction and finally deciding to fix it instead of complaining about it. Most useful software starts that way. Someone got fed up and solved for it.
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Kurt Elster reposted thisKurt Elster reposted thisPins & Aces is getting 11% of new orders from TikTok Shop. That number didn't happen by accident. 💡 Kurt Elster broke down how they got there on the DTC Podcast this week, and the playbook is worth paying attention to. They started by seeding creators with product. 📌 Golf accessories have a natural advantage here because the price point is low enough to give them away at volume. One piece of creator content hits, goes viral, and then something interesting happens: copycat creators start making similar content unprompted. The brand didn't pay for it. They just benefited from it. 📌 On top of that, they built a live selling show they call Power Hour. Best customers show up, there's a live video, the team talks through merchandise, people order in the chat. It sounds like QVC but it works because the audience already knows and trusts the brand. 📌 The through line is that none of this looks like a Meta campaign; there's no single ad, no single landing page, no single funnel you optimize. It's volume, testing, and channel-specific behavior. Kurt's observation was that the brands succeeding on TikTok Shop tend to share a few things: lower price point products that are easy to seed, willingness to give creators room to make their own version of the content, and a founder or team that shows up on camera. If Meta CAC keeps climbing and you're still looking for the answer inside the same ad account, that 11% number is worth sitting with.
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Kurt Elster reposted thisKurt Elster reposted thisShopify merchants, you can now sell in ChatGPT. You heard that right. Starting this week, any merchant who sells to US buyers can have their products discovered and purchased in ChatGPT. So the next time someone searches for sustainable skincare, your products will be automatically shoppable. The best part: it’s your online store and checkout inside ChatGPT. Buyers get the full shopping experience with all your branding, customizations, and payment methods. Commerce is happening in AI chats. Now your brand is there too. For more on how we’re powering agentic commerce → https://lnkd.in/e3y-Qu-m
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Kurt Elster reposted thisKurt Elster reposted thisEthan 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.
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Kurt Elster shared thisTraditional SEO is becoming answer engine optimization (AEO). The biggest lever most Shopify merchants are ignoring: structured data. LLMs spend massive resources parsing unstructured web pages. JSON-LD gives them your content in the format they prefer. Every Shopify store has it by default, but most merchants have never verified it works. Talked through this on the DTC Podcast with Eric Dyck
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Kurt Elster liked thisKurt Elster liked this🥁 🥁 In anticipation of what's coming tomorrow... I highly suggest subscribing to Deborah Mecca's The App Collective email newsletter before tomorrow's edition drops: https://lnkd.in/e8xywc86 🎉 🤫
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Kurt Elster liked thisKurt Elster liked thisPins & Aces is getting 11% of new orders from TikTok Shop. That number didn't happen by accident. 💡 Kurt Elster broke down how they got there on the DTC Podcast this week, and the playbook is worth paying attention to. They started by seeding creators with product. 📌 Golf accessories have a natural advantage here because the price point is low enough to give them away at volume. One piece of creator content hits, goes viral, and then something interesting happens: copycat creators start making similar content unprompted. The brand didn't pay for it. They just benefited from it. 📌 On top of that, they built a live selling show they call Power Hour. Best customers show up, there's a live video, the team talks through merchandise, people order in the chat. It sounds like QVC but it works because the audience already knows and trusts the brand. 📌 The through line is that none of this looks like a Meta campaign; there's no single ad, no single landing page, no single funnel you optimize. It's volume, testing, and channel-specific behavior. Kurt's observation was that the brands succeeding on TikTok Shop tend to share a few things: lower price point products that are easy to seed, willingness to give creators room to make their own version of the content, and a founder or team that shows up on camera. If Meta CAC keeps climbing and you're still looking for the answer inside the same ad account, that 11% number is worth sitting with.
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