Behind the Scenes

Shopify – Know Your Customers

by Ezra Firestone



If you’re a business owner, you need to understand your customers.

That’s why Shopify just flew me out to their company headquarters: Like me, they’re fully invested in understanding the experience of the people they serve.

So I’m here to help their support staff better understand what it’s like to be an ecommerce business owner.

What are our goals? What are our pain points? How can they improve our lives?

They know that continuing to ask these questions is crucial to providing us with the industry’s best ecommerce platform.

And at Smart Marketer, we ask the same questions so that we can provide you with the best training, software, and customer support

Our tagline here is Serve the World Unselfishly and Profit.

You might have seen it on our website, or in one of our emails—but what does it mean?

It means that the best thing we can do for our business is to truly provide our community with the most value possible.

Which is why all of our trainings and software come from strategies and solutions that have worked in our businesses. If we didn’t know they worked, we wouldn’t sell them.

And if I no longer ran a successful ecommerce business, then I would stop producing content and software for this community…

Because I would no longer be able to answer those questions, and I would no longer be able to provide you with the value you deserve.

But for now, I do! So I can and I will!

And it’s an absolute pleasure to serve you and be a part of this wonderful community.

Video Highlights
0:24 Behind The Scenes from the Office of Shopify’s COO
0:46 We are Married to Shopify
1:27 Our Mission
2:01 We are Committed to your Success
2:46 We do E-Commerce to see What Works
3:09 The Shopify Plus Summit
3:41 Shopify is Investing in their Customers



Click Here For Video Transcript

You ever wonder what it’s like to be the chief operations officer at Shopify. Think about this for a second. Dozens of offices around the world. Maybe not dozens, maybe about a dozen, 2500 plus employees, the technology staff, the apps ecosystem, the integrations to third parties. I mean, it just must be a massive job. Well, this is the actual office of the COO of Shopify. Smart guy, amazing guy, super cool dude, agreed to let me sit in his office and kind of show you what it’s like in here. Just being in this office and kind of feeling what that experience must be like is super intense. And I’m coming to you from Zipify Apps. You know, it’s what I’m here to talk about mostly with them amongst other things. It’s how it can make our apps work better with Shopify. We’re kind of like married to Shopify, right? All of our development we do is on Shopify. All of our stores are on Shopify, we believe… We’ve really gone all in and said, hey we believe in these products. So, I think it’s really important that we have a close connection and communication with this company, which is why you always see me here.

I have known these guys for a long time since before they were huge. When it was just a couple of hundred employees, now it’s a couple of thousand. But it’s really intense to think about what it might be like to manage operations for a business of this size. Now, I am not the COO of Zipify or Smart Marketer, right. I’m the CEO holding the vision. I’m not actually managing all the operations, but we take our operations very seriously. What we’re looking to do is create the best software and best training for e-commerce businesses in the world. That is our mission. That’s what we’re up to. Serve the world unselfishly and profit. And so, we’re in the roll of service. We’re looking at, how can we best serve you? We believe that’s where our profit will come from. We can actually serve you like really, really have better solutions than anyone else. Better support than anyone else. Better education than anyone else. That’s what we’re going for.

So, I kind of just wanted to show you this wild behind the scenes of what it’s like to be in the office of the COO of Shopify, and let you know that, I am committed to your success. I’m committed to making the Zipify Apps the best, whether you use in Zipify pages, or coupon countdown or OneClickUpsell or any of our apps. I’m committed to making sure that they are the best in their category. There’s always gonna be a bunch of options for different types of applications that you could you use for your stores. And my goal is to have it be a no brainer that you would use our apps. Because, you know we’re gonna be here, you know you’re gonna be able to live chat with us, you know we’re gonna have the actual best app in the game and also make sure that we have the best education. And the way that we do that is we actually have stores. That we make more money, significantly more money on our e-commerce friends, than we do from education and software. Now, hopefully that will will start to balance out at some point as we get even better education, even better software, but what we do, is we do e-commerce. And then we look at what works and we share that, right?

And then we have free and paid stuff, and then we take the revenue that we make on the information and software side, we put it back into our e-commerce businesses. So, we kind of just volley back and forth to ensure that we are doing the same thing that you are doing, so that we can really understand how to serve you. So, I spoke… I actually came up here this time to be at the Shopify Plus summit. The brought… Shopify plus is their bigger…for bigger stores. It’s like Shopify normal and then if you make a million bucks or more, they put you on Shopify plus which is their higher-end offering at Shopify. There’s a virtual team. There’s 80 of them and they’re all virtual and they support all the plus merchants. They support me, and they asked me to come up and kind of talk to them about what it’s like to be a merchant. So, I gave a speech yesterday at the summit, it was super fun, but that was a really interesting thing that Shopify is investing and flying people out here to talk to their support staff about what it’s like, about how to have empathy, about how to understand the experience that the people that they are serving are going through, and that is why I run e-commerce business. And that is why if I ever stop running e-commerce businesses, I won’t teach or sell software because I need to understand the experience that you are having, that I am having as an e-commerce business owner to really be able to serve you. So anyway, thanks a lot for watching this video. Behind the scenes here at the COO’s office at Shopify, I appreciate you being either a Smart Marketer subscriber or Zipify customer. Thanks for hanging out with me and i’ll see you in the next one.