Martin Cox: There's not million dollar Shopify builds out there. Good data is the most important thing to make sure that your products surface well. Focus on actually bringing the fun back to marketing and sales. That's what I think is the most exciting thing. I'm Martin Cox from Native appco, and in this episode of Add to Cart, I talk about Shopify apps. Whether the App Store is dead or whether you should just vibe code everything.
Nathan Bush: If you've spent any time in the Australian Shopify scene, you know the type
Nathan Bush: of person that we've got on the show today.
Nathan Bush: They are the person in any meeting
Nathan Bush: where something technical comes up and someone says, we should just ask Martin.
Nathan Bush: That's been today's guest, Martin Cox for
Nathan Bush: the best part of a decade.
Nathan Bush: At the end of last year, he quit agency life.
Nathan Bush: He walked away, went out on his own and started building Shopify apps. He's two months in now, he's already got four apps in the App Store, all with animal mascots, and he's got no business plan. He's really good technically, though. Trust me, he'll be a good guest.
Nathan Bush: But he told me all of this
Nathan Bush: really proudly and I wanted Martin on the show because the world of Shopify and Shopify apps is shifting in ways that most of us haven't really caught up with. What does an app even do in a world where AI can connect directly into your store? What is the value of an app developer when you can build pretty much anything you want with AI? What does product discovery look like when someone might be buying through a chatbot or a checkout that doesn't even live on your website where your apps are?
Nathan Bush: Martin is building right in the middle
Nathan Bush: of all of this.
Nathan Bush: Two months in, 10 tabs open at once, and I wanted to get his
Nathan Bush: take on where all of this is heading.
Nathan Bush: Now, just quickly, before we get into today's episode, a big thank you to
Nathan Bush: to our partners at Shopify and Klaviyo for making Add to Cart possible. We always appreciate their support. And if you want the cheat sheet from this episode or any episode that we do, head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for the newsletter. We send the cheat sheet, all the stuff, all the links, everything that you need to know about the episode, even if you don't get to listen to it, we send it out on the day every episode is released.
Nathan Bush: All right, here is co founder Martin
Nathan Bush: Cox from Native App Co. Martin, welcome to Add to Cart.
Martin Cox: Thanks for having me, Bushy. It's fun to be on the other side of the microphone.
Nathan Bush: And yeah, look, we've traded a few little secrets around podcasting, but we're going to get to your podcast because I think it's a fascinating area and we're going to talk a lot about Shopify apps today. But your history knowing each other goes well beyond podcasting. You've been in. In the agency side for a hell of a long time. Not to make you sound old, but.
Martin Cox: Yeah, well, it is a while actually.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Martin Cox: Or I was. I'm not there anymore. But yeah, so yeah, it was about, like about 13 or 14 years ago, something like that. So yeah, Laura Jackson, who. I was sort of out doing my own thing a little bit like what I'm doing now. And yeah, was just trying to get a bit of money coming in on the side. And yeah, Laura, who'd been agency side herself and I was a client back in the day and I heard that she'd quit her job when she'd had her first baby. And so I caught up with her and said, look, why don't we just try and get a bit of work together? Thinking it was going to maybe a bit of a bit of freelance work and hopefully just get a bit of money in so I could chase my passion projects. But yeah, she was very good at sales and had lots of great relationships and network and so she just kept on winning and winning work and.
Nathan Bush: And you were obviously very good at development.
Martin Cox: Oh no, actually I'm not a very good developer, funnily enough.
Nathan Bush: All our conversations have been very techy, so I just assumed you're a developer.
Martin Cox: Yeah. So we got to the point. So we sort of were doing all kinds of work early days and then one of my first CL clients I signed was just a guy selling baby gear and needed. And he was a wholesale business and wanted to start a B2C store. And so I sort of stumbled across Shopify and just built him a website on there. So I'm not too bad at HTML, css, that type of stuff. But yeah, I just sort of fumbled my way through that and then, yeah, as Laura and I sort of started taking all kinds of work. But then it was just sort of a recurring theme. We just kept on winning a bit more E commerce work along the way and so I just kept on, yeah, doing more and more. And then we sort of had a. Had a moment sort of a couple of years in where our biggest client was actually like a publishing contract doing magazines. And we had. My brother was our designer at the time and he was almost working full time on doing These physiotherapy magazines. And then we lost that contract and it was actually the best thing that ever happened to us because that day just decided, all right, well, let's rename our business. We would do consulting. We changed it to do commerce that day and just became 100% all in on E commerce and building on Shopify. And yeah, here I am now, like yeah, sort of nearly 10 or 15 years later, whatever it is after that.
Nathan Bush: And I think that's fascinating because we're going to talk about the new world of Shopify and what we're moving into. But back then even that would have been a crazy decision to be to specialize an agency in Shopify because there were so many guardrails on it, you actually couldn't touch much back then.
Martin Cox: Yeah, it's interesting. Like there's people that have been doing it for as long as me who have been doing stuff a lot more technical than me. Like I just had Gavin Ballard on my podcast the other day from Disco Labs and Submarine, who's one of the OGs in the space and like he's building funky backend stuff back when there was barely an API to work with. And he's grown with the platform and so well respected in what he does. And so there's been a few people that are around. But like back in the day when I first joined the Shopify partner program, the onboarding emails actually came from Harley at Shopify. And I wish I'd built that relationship and nurtured it there. I don't think he'd remember sending me those emails but. And I don't have that email address anymore but like that's how. How small it legitimately was back then. It was really emerging. And yeah, I guess it's helped me too. As someone who wasn't really much of a developer, there wasn't much you could do in the early days. And so I've sort of upskilled I guess with the platform a little bit and got ridden on that wave and then sort of had to start hiring real developers when got real complex work. So I'm sort of more of a solutions guy I guess than a developer as such. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And I've had the pleasure of working with you on a couple of clients and you are always the go to. I can say hand on heart that the amount of times that we should just ask Martin this like that comes up in conversation. Like you are the go to guy whenever something technical or solution wise comes up for the platform. Everyone's like, Martin will know this. So I think you've got a great legacy there. But we're here to talk about your escape from agency. Even though you said you're not a developer, you've now taken a career path in developing apps. What was that about? You just sick of paying money to other app developers and to a stand?
Martin Cox: Yeah, no, not. Not really. It was sort of something just. I guess I always had that little burning inside me, wanting to do my own. Like, I was very lucky to go on a journey, growing a team and working in a big agency and, like, learned so much and worked with so many great people there. But, yeah, when I threw the towel in at the end of last year, just not. Not even necessarily knowing what I was going to do, but just thought, you know what, I've got the desire to go back to just doing my own thing, have a fresh start. And yeah, I've got a mate who's over in Poland who sort of has been building apps for a little while. So he's the real developer behind it all. Yeah, he sort of rode the wave of being able to build a few apps a few years ago when you probably didn't need to actually get out there and market as much. It wasn't anywhere near as competitive as it is now. And I'm probably underselling him a little bit because he has built up a great business by building relationships and doing all those things. But it was a bit different back then. Whereas now we're in a state where, yeah, you've really, and I think you used the term the other week of SaaS, instead of being software as a service, it's almost services a software now. And so he's built some really great apps and we've sort of bundled it all up now under the native appco umbrella. Yeah. With the view that he sort of goes and builds amazing stuff and then I go out there and, yeah, help to connect it to merchants and just seeing where the opportunities are and filling them and so just having a massive amount of fun with it, to be honest with you. Yeah, I've been at it for sort of two months full time now, and just every day, yeah, it's a new bunch of surprises and meeting new people and finding interesting problems to solve.
Nathan Bush: I could imagine. And knowing how your mind works, I can imagine you've got a list of apps that you want to build and your developer must be saying, martin, just settle down, leave me alone for a bit.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Martin Cox: Oh, look, it's interesting. Like, I did think, like I thought when I finished up Agency side. Like I thought it's a good chance to reset my brain a little bit and like focus on a couple of things. But I think having that background, I actually have just realized I've got to embrace the fact I'm a 10 tabs open at once kind of guy and roll with that. And so we've got four apps in the App Store and I met with another guy yesterday about building something new and I didn't say no to it. And so, yeah, it's also like, I think whenever anyone starts their own business like you, I look back to when I did it last time and everyone else that does it the first six months, you never know exactly where it's going to land and what you're going to end up doing and where the money's going to be. So yeah, I've sort of just got taken the approach that I just get out there and see what works and what doesn't and then yeah, like I haven't written a business plan and I've kind of, I'm doing that kind of unashamedly because I've written business plans when I've started businesses in the past and yeah, they didn't really achieve much.
Nathan Bush: You're a real 2026 entrepreneur, aren't you? You're like, I won't write a business plan but I'll start a podcast.
Martin Cox: Yeah, I. So, yeah, well, look, it's a bit cliche, isn't it?
Nathan Bush: Oh look, two middle aged men talking about E commerce.
Martin Cox: That's it. I did call it my midlife crisis podcast. But yeah, it's actually just been like, the podcast was a bit of fun. Like it was something I sort of probably wanted to do for a while. I'm actually the only formal qualification I've got in this world, funnily enough, is a journalism degree, which I did 20 years ago and then never used.
Nathan Bush: So you're 100% more qualified than me, put it that way.
Martin Cox: But I certainly don't feel like I've brought much from that education into what I'm. But the thing I wanted to do with it too was like, I think. And the message I have about the Shopify ecosystem is like, I think there's just so many great independent people out there that do amazing things. It's always been a community driven platform and particularly probably working big agency. You end up having partnerships with like a group of there's. And this is not to discredit any of these businesses too, but the enterprise level platforms and stuff where it sort of ends up Being the same people over and over again in the. In the community and. Yeah, and also I think sometimes there's actually really great, interesting products and great stories to be told that don't rise to the top because, yeah, there is a lot of really good big businesses that kind of steal the space. So I decided to do something that sort of shines the light on, yeah, some of those more independent people around the world. And, like, it's just been a great learning curve for me more than anything. Like, I've learned so much out of it and hopefully have shared a few good stories in a bit of a different way.
Nathan Bush: I think it's a great thing because it's a good chance too, just to get nerdy and to get technical around the problems that you're solving. A lot people wouldn't see when you open up the Shopify App Store and you see the headlines or the bullet points of what, what an app's doing, but just going into the thought process and the problems that you came up with in how we're. We're solving this in different ways because you can easily open the App Store and go, God, there's 50 wishlist apps. But there's all nuances in there that you really need to understand between the difference. Now I want to go into the native app co and we're going to unpack some of your apps and some of your ideas, which, which are fascinating. But first, before we do, I want. I need to ask the obvious question. It seems to me a silly time to start an app business because with the advent of AI and I was literally speaking to someone from Shopify and they might not like me saying this, but last week and they were saying the cues for Shopify app approval at the moment is all time high. Like, it's crazy trying to get through that list because everyone can create an app, everyone can create an app in inverted commas, but there is so much competition. You alluded to it before. Why go into Shopify apps now?
Martin Cox: Yeah. Oh, look, very good question. And I'll. I'll know in about six months time, I reckon. Either I'll be in the Centrelink queue or I'll. Yeah, it'll be starting to go well. But, yeah, it's an interesting one and it's what I think about at 3 o' clock in the morning if I wake up. But. No, look, I actually, I don't know, I'm. I'm an optimist about this type of stuff and I think actually I see more of the excitement about what's possible now. Like, yeah, like we just built the app that we most recently launched, Product Pelican, which is essentially like a. It's almost like a. I'm calling it my accidental pim, which I, yeah, started sort of just building a couple of audits for looking at product data on a Shopify store. And then as someone who's not a developer, I was able to vibe code it and get a really good prototype of it and then got it to a point where I spoke to Matt over in Poland. My mate who I work with, he's said, yeah, look, we can turn this into an app. We did it. We actually, because we've already got the built for Shopify status on one of our other apps, you actually get to jump the queue. So, yeah, I actually, I submitted it to the app store at 11 o' clock one night and then about 3am we got it approved. So we're very lucky that we sort of already got a bit of a head start there. But yeah, like you see the 700 apps getting approved every week or whatever it is and it sounds pretty scary. But yeah, I think like the ability to innovate with where we're at at the moment. And like, as someone who I guess has got the consultancy background as well, like as a single person you can go out and like create so much content and yes, solve problems so quickly with a lot of the tools that are available and I think there's just so much opportunity as well with AI and everyone's trying to grapple with it and it's just changing so fast. And as much as you can now connect Claude code to your Shopify instance and tell it to update all of your product descriptions, that's not a very safe thing to do. You're not giving a mid level E commerce coordinator a job to go in and use, connect Claude and go and update all your products. So I think the way I see the app ecosystem changing is apps are really about creating the guardrails for people to do what's possible with APIs and AI and that sort of stuff and create good interfaces for it. And so, yeah, that's sort of the vision I've always had is just to try and help people to leverage the platform better. And that was always the way that I felt about it in my agency days. When I first joined Overdose, we sort of got sucked into the path of like trying to build enterprise stuff on Shopify because the agency already built a lot of Magento sites and that was sort of the way of working and yeah, we realized about six months in we were like, geez, we're not making any money. We're behind timeline on everything we've designed beautiful stuff that, yeah, costs a fortune to build. And so, yeah, we had to flip it all on its head and go back to essentially looking all right. Well, what's the best thing about SaaS? And the best thing about SaaS is that you've got so much stuff out of the box. And so everything that we do became about, yeah, let's leverage what's out of the box and then, yeah, build custom stuff as we need to. And so, yeah, I'm sort of, I'm really strong on that philosophy and I think the ecosystem's changed towards that philosophy as well now. Like, I don't think you can. Yeah, there's not Million Dollar Shopify builds out there like they used to be and with some of the big enterprise platforms back in the day. And I think that's a good thing. I think it means people get to market quicker, can go and do stuff. Like the projects we've worked on together have been like that where like you've come in and your bit, I've come in and done my bit and our team's just solving problems that actually need solving. And there always are enough problems that need solving. You don't want to be having to solve stuff that doesn't need to be solved.
Nathan Bush: I want to unpack the philosophy around Shopify apps and when to use them, when not to use them for our audience. But I think it's probably important to give a bit of context around your Animal farm. Here at Nature appco, you mentioned Product Pelican, but there's also store credit Fish Wishlist and Omnibus Owl. Probably the best titles for apps going around.
Martin Cox: How good's Omnibus Owl? That's fantastic. What is going on?
Nathan Bush: Why are we all animals?
Martin Cox: Yeah, it's funny. I'm actually a Dr. Seuss fan. I love Dr. Seuss. It's probably my biggest inspiration. And so Fish Wishlist was. Yeah, that was thrown around. I just didn't want to have another. Like there's a lot of Wishlist apps on the store, a lot of good ones too. But they almost, when I was looking at into it, they all kind of had like a different pastel shaped heart as their logo and I thought, oh look, let's just try and have something that looks a little bit different. And yeah, I was reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and yeah, that just happened. So yeah, I guess like you're trying to build a bit of a brand and trying to, I like to have a bit of fun. I don't take myself too seriously. And so yeah, we just picked a different animal for each one. Like stork credit was a lot of fun. I thought that was a good play on words. It's maybe not great for SEO. And yeah, I did a podcast on that the other day and like going through and fixing up the subtitles on it because the auto subtitles really struggled differentiating store credit and stalk credit. And so we just had a bit of fun with it. And yeah, I had some feedback on product Pelican the other day that yeah, it's a terrible name but a great app. So that's, that's the best thing that I can. I, I take that as a massive compliment and I guess it means those people remember what it's called. So
Nathan Bush: here's a tricky one for you.
Nathan Bush: How do you maintain six different drinks brands, each with its own personality, heritage and audience without blurring them into one big beige mega brand?
Nathan Bush: Kind of sounds like a bush family reunion.
Nathan Bush: That was the puzzle for Casella Family Brands, the family behind Yellowtail and Australia's biggest family owned drinks company, Wine, Beer, Spirits, Ready to drink. They all needed to feel distinct. Their answer was Klaviyo. Instead of just email, they built what the team calls a customer relationship engine 60 lifecycle flows across six brands that
Nathan Bush: respond to what each customer is actually doing.
Nathan Bush: Browsing. Sparkling different experience to someone deep in the Shiraz. First timer, different again. And it works with automated flows now driving 43% of Yellowtail's Klaviyo revenue and a 35 times ROI across the portfolio. Six brands, one engine, zero fights. Head to klaviyo.com au and see how brands like Casella are doing it right.
Nathan Bush: You know what it made me realize even as I was doing a bit of research and emailing with you? I can't even spell stalk. I spelled it S T A L K. And that wasn't even Autocorrect. That was just me being like a weirdo. But it's S T O R K if you're searching for it in the app store. Just briefly, can you give us a little bit of an overview, a brief elevator pitch on the problem that you're solving with each of these?
Nathan Bush: Because they're all very different.
Martin Cox: Yeah, no, that's it. And like I'll start on stalk credit. I guess like that was just an example of something where like I see that as being. It's actually a relatively new and Untapped Shopify feature. So yeah, like I've seen so many people have to wrangle with using discount codes and gift cards and stuff for things where actually the best thing you could do is just have a customer be able to log into the site, have the credit already on their account and go through and complete their order with that credit. So it's actually a pretty simple mechanism. What we've done, we've basically just replicated the functionality that you use for creating a discount in Shopify, but made it that instead of getting a discount at the end, you get issued with store credit. And so people can run like say you've got a spend and save type promo. We had one retailer the other weekend do spend $100, get $10 store credit, spend $200, get $25 store credit and so on. And so it just creates some new promotional opportunities for people and I think hard to find new different ways to create those opportunities these days.
Nathan Bush: And yeah, obviously the benefit there is that you get the second sale or the follow up sale and then can you put an expiry on those credits as well?
Martin Cox: Yeah, that seemed to get techy. It's actually a really great feature of Shopify, the store credit, because it's tied in with everything like Shopify Market. So you can do it in multi currency, you can put expiry dates on it. It just lives in the customer account. So the actual functionality of store credit, we haven't done anything to change the way it works. We've just built a really good interface for creating things that reward customers with store credit. So yeah, we've got like, it can be everything from your Welcome 10 sign up. So you just, instead of giving people a $10 discount code or $10 off their first order, you give them store credit when they sign up for an account and they can use it whenever they want.
Nathan Bush: So dumb question, if it's a Shopify feature, what is the app adding on or enabling on top of that?
Martin Cox: Yeah, no. Oh, thanks for asking. Because I didn't sell it very well, did I? So essentially we provide the automation for it. So I can log or I can go into the back end of Shopify and give $10 store credit to you, no problem. But to build a system to then give $10 store credit to every person that signs up automatically or the actual awarding of the store credits to bit we handle. And then the redemption part is just all native Shopify functionality. So.
Nathan Bush: So you're the marketing and the promotion side of it.
Martin Cox: Yeah, that's it. So yeah, it just gives people a heap of opportunities. And you can use Shopify Flow for building out more advanced stuff as well. Like I've got a demo I did of like actually building out like a gold, silver, bronze type loya using store credit, which I don't necessarily believe in is a good idea, but just to show that it is possible to do that. And so yeah, it's got a lot of interesting opportunities. And yeah, we're seeing like people, a lot of people are just using it to bulk import store credit to their stores and we're seeing quite a few sort of B2B businesses start to use it for rewarding B2B customers and different segments and that sort of stuff. So yeah, it's really fun to watch because it is not just selling an app, it's also selling the Shopify feature as well because not many people are really using that feature yet.
Nathan Bush: I love your point around loyalty because when we had Ed Hallen on the co founder of Klaviyo a few weeks ago, I was like, are you building a loyalty app? Because someone needs to come in and disrupt this tier model of loyalty. And even if you don't call it a loyalty program, having these loyalty nudges or these rewards for customers to keep coming back, that's beyond just a points collection, I think is a really smart move for retailers. So I love that angle.
Martin Cox: Yeah, I think too, like it's just a tactic. I don't know, I think we could you talk strategy and tactics and I'm probably more of a tactical guy than a strategic guy, as you might have figured out. But to me it's like it's the type of thing where you can have a program where people get points every purchase they make and they can redeem the points and do all that with it. And like it's obviously worked for some businesses really well across the journey. But to me, I think retailers are looking for. It's Wednesday and sales are down and you need to find a way to get some more money through that weekend and you need to try something new. So I believe in creating tools that just makes it easy for people to do that without any major technical implementation. Like it should be as simple as creating a, like to be honest vibe code, a really nice cool banner animation for your site, set up a promo, send an email out on Friday morning saying yeah, you get this weekend and yeah, apply it to a segment if you want to reward a particular customer group and just go and do it and then see if it works. And it should be Easy for people to do that. And that's not just applying to whether that's through doing store credit or there's great discount apps as well that do really good promos that you can spin up quickly. And yeah, things you can do in shopify flow to reward customers. It's. It's so easy to do that stuff. But I think if you've got that sort of traditional points based system, I think that can almost be more of a hindrance for some businesses than it is a help.
Nathan Bush: And I'm not trying to sell this for you. Cause you haven't even given me an affiliate code to sell this for you on your behalf.
Martin Cox: I'll give you one.
Nathan Bush: No, I don't want one. We don't do that. But I love it too, from a new customer acquisition perspective, because if you give a credit, all of a sudden your ROI on your acquisition cost is over two baskets, not over one. Which I think is a really smart move. All right, let's pick a new animal. Let's go into omnibus. Owl. I'm fascinated by the owl. What does the owl do?
Martin Cox: Yeah, I didn't come up with it. So Matt came up with the idea of the owl for it. He's bought into my. Yeah, bought into my branding strategy. But no, that one actually, that was something he built. He's based over in Poland and it's actually, it's a. Was sort of a bit of a niche play for the market over there. So in the EU zone, it's actually compulsory for you. If you put a product on sale, you have to show what the history of the price on that product is. So it saves you from. You can't go in and just say something's reduced from $100 to $50. You have to say this is the lowest price over the last 30 days. And Shopify doesn't actually track your price history on any product. So.
Nathan Bush: Well, based on what's happening here with the ACCC and some of our big supermarkets, it might not be far away.
Martin Cox: Yeah, that's it. So I've started trying to garner a bit of interest in it. And yeah, Coles have helped out a little bit there, haven't they, with some of the stu going through now. But like it's actually just. Yeah, it's actually really powerful just to track your price history. Like we've built in some analytics stuff to it now as well. And yeah, looking at helping also just some merchandising stuff built into it as well. But so it started off as sort of just a really specific lightweight app to do one thing. But yeah, I think the whole price piece is something I'm really interested in seeing what we could do with it. And yeah, just helping with things like automatically tagging products and adding them to collections and stuff when they're on sale. We've sort of started tackling all that type of thing, but. But yeah, it's interesting to see those trends around the world and what. What you can learn from different regions. Like, I think Europe's probably always been a bit ahead with things like gdpr. And yeah, they've got some laws coming in place in Germany at the moment which are forcing anyone who sells online has to provide a cancellation function on their site so you can go back onto the site and cancel your order. So there's already a lot of people build apps specifically to do that.
Nathan Bush: It's so funny, isn't it?
Martin Cox: Like.
Nathan Bush: Like the more that I've been working with European brands is they're ahead when it comes to regulation and protection, but if from an E commerce perspective, a lot of times they're behind and like Shopify doesn't have as much uptake in those markets as they do in the US and Australia.
Martin Cox: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's intricacies to any market. I think, like just the fact in Europe, the fact there's so many different languages and different currencies and yeah, there's different E commerce platforms that have sort of been prominent over there, but I think Shopify is starting to really mature there and I think Europe's actually probably the biggest market for our apps and sort of has been from when. When we started, which is interesting. And yeah, it does create interesting use cases and yeah, I've got very good at using Google Translate and stuff to respond to support tickets and try and do them in. In the right languages, mate.
Nathan Bush: There's some good options there if you need to go on work trips.
Martin Cox: Yeah, that's it.
Nathan Bush: Fish wish list. What does the fish do?
Martin Cox: It's a wish list. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Why do we need another wish list? There are so many wish lists out there.
Nathan Bush: And ob.
Nathan Bush: One of our partners is the Wishlist, which is more of an omnichannel solution, so a bit different to where you're at.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Martin Cox: And look, it's just a space that I think it was sort of just a bit of a hobby project to start with and just wanted to build mainly something actually to sort of. That worked really natively nicely in Shopify. So yeah, it stores all the Wishlist data in Shopify Metafields and yeah, syncs that makes it really easy to sync that data to everything. So something I think I believe really strongly in for if you're selecting any app is making sure that it connects with Shopify Flow. And so yeah, rather than have integrations with every single marketing platform, different POS systems, all of that sort of stuff, we've just made sure it integrates with Shopify Flow and so the data all gets stored in Shopify Metafields. It can sync across nicely. It also just means it works natively with things like Shopify Markets. Yeah there's the POS extension just is completely native as well. And so yeah it's just really lightweight and it allows us to do like our niches sort of been like building out sort of some B2B experiences with it and yeah like doing just sort of custom things around if people want to do like pre order lists and stuff like that. So it's sort of I guess taking a bit of a niche place there in that part of it. But yeah, it's also something just like hand in heart. I can't say that that's a million times better than anything else. There's a lot of options out there in that space and yeah, I'd take a lot of interest in what, yeah guys like the Wishlist and I'm gonna say Wishlist King, they're called Swish now. Like they're run by good people that share lots of good content as well. And so yeah like there's good options for everything and it really comes down to finding the one that fits for your business. And yeah I think also like that have that provide good service as well and good people in the same time zone as you. That's almost as important as the actual product itself.
Nathan Bush: The market is shifting, costs are climbing and the pressure to do more with less is very real. But when resources are tight, you can rely on Shopify, the platform that's consistently first with new capabilities. Shopify invests significantly in R and D and drops more than 150 updates every year. Evolving with you and absorbing complexity so that you can focus on what moves your business forward from AI powered insights to the world's best converting checkout. Shopify is designed for the next era of commerce, helping you sell more, scale faster and future proof your brand build for what is next with Shopify. Visit Shopify for Enterprise to learn more.
Nathan Bush: And what's the smartest use you've seen of someone using Wishlist data? Because I think it's one thing like for me and you touched on it then the Beauty of a wishlist isn't that the customers have a little love heart on a product that they can come back to and save. It's what you can do with that data and how you can personalize the experience. How have you seen that being used in a really intelligent way?
Martin Cox: Yeah, look, I think it's mainly just like, I think it's a great way to capture demand and capture like also just to capture people at those different parts of the order journey. Like pre orders is a really obvious one. Like if you've got a product that's coming in and you're trying to build hype for that product but you can't necessarily capture the revenue at that point in time, which sometimes people can do that, sometimes people can't. Like just building that sort of customization into the experience so that people can go and do that. Because once that data's on the customer account it becomes just so easy to then market that to them. So I don't consider that really rocket science. But yeah, it's just finding ways to create that good experience and meaning that you've got data on the customer account. You can also then use that to feed. Yeah. Feed your decisions around future products that you offer. You can, yeah. Use it to create recommendations and yeah, like we just have other things that we dealt into the lists too. Like for example, just like if someone purchases an item we just add it to a wish list on their account just so they can go back and buy it again. Like it's not. Yeah, again not, not rocket science stuff.
Nathan Bush: I don't think that's smart though, isn't you buy it once and then it's on your wishlist forever. Well not forever, but it automatically added.
Martin Cox: Yeah. And so like there's other things we've tried as well. Like we've got a checkout upsell widget where you could get things pop up from your wish list and you can add them at the checkout and funnily enough it's been a, it's never really performed that well. So that's just sometimes you do things. I thought that was the most brilliant idea and would be the cutting edge thing that made it different to others. But yeah, if you don't have any other other upsells on the checkout, it works. It's better to have it than not. But yeah, it actually hasn't really moved the needle too much for anyone. But yeah, you've got the data there and you've got the ability to use it and try those things and yeah, it will work differently for different businesses as well.
Nathan Bush: All right, that makes sense. We've got the last one here for now. I'm sure you've got another bunch of animals in your head. But the product pelican, what does the pelican do?
Martin Cox: Yeah, so I think this is my favorite child at the moment for sure.
Nathan Bush: Pelicans are just cool. There's something about pelicans. They're just good to look at, they're interesting. I've just got a thing for pelicans. So you're aware.
Martin Cox: Yeah, it's definitely the one I'm going to start wearing on my merch at events and stuff. I was researching pelican hoodies the other day, but yeah, look, it's probably been the one that's been most interesting for me because I've been working with product data on Shopify stores for so bloody long and yeah, back in the day when like even Matrixify could barely existed and yeah, importing CSVs and the manipulation you had to do just to get data into Shopify and sort of the apps you had to use just to make meta fields and stuff work, it used to be such a headache. But yeah, it's actually there's so much you can do to optimize your product data now and it's also, it's probably the most important thing for all, whether through all the acronyms, ucp, mcp, AI Agentic, all those things like the thought process around what is best practice. ED seems to change every day almost and it's evolving so quickly. But the one thing that people. Yeah. All certain about is that good data is the most important thing to make sure that your product surface.
Nathan Bush: Well, everyone's saying doesn't matter what you're in for AI to work properly, whether you're connected, it's all comes down to data. When it comes to product data, where do most people get it wrong and what's the problem that you're solving?
Martin Cox: Yeah, so there's sort of two sides to it, I guess. There's actually some technical stuff. Like there's just things like Shopify rolled out their own taxonomy, which is hard to populate in bulk. So we've built some tools for doing that stuff. And yeah, there's just some AI rules where you go in and you can populate the categories for all of your products and even the category meta fields that fall out from under that. So that's sort of the technical side of it that's important. Yeah, I think the challenges people have, like, firstly, just like consistency is really Hard like you've got other systems feeding data in, you've got humans involved who despite their best intentions, it's really hard to make stuff all consistent.
Nathan Bush: We'll get rid of the humans soon, don't worry.
Martin Cox: Yeah, that's it. We're just trying to eliminate humans, that's what we're doing. It's not the bots that are going
Nathan Bush: to take over the world, it's the animals.
Martin Cox: Yeah, but yeah, so like we've just built some stuff to like for populating stuff like your product descriptions for example and image alt text which like image alt text is the most, most boring thing to do but it's kind of handy from an SEO perspective. And so we just built tools to populate that stuff automatically. And like as I was saying earlier, you could theoretically populate all that stuff using Claude and say hey Claude, make all my product descriptions SEO friendly but that's, yeah, pretty cowboy behavior and got massive risk to it. So we tried to put sort of guardrails in place where you log in, you go into the app, it gives you a health check and tells you all those different areas of your product data and where there's gaps or things that need improvement. And then yeah, we also open up all of the AI prompts in there as well. So yeah, we've got some built in logic that you see around. Yeah, what we use to populate product descriptions. But if for example you want to include messaging in your product descriptions that you offer free postage on all orders or you have a three year warranty on all of your fridges or whatever it is, you can go and actually just change those AI rules yourself. And so we're trying to find that right balance where you can use the power AI but also so know what's happening and have some control over what's happening there as well.
Nathan Bush: What models are you using? What AI models are you using to generate the product information?
Martin Cox: Yes, we actually, I started, I built it using a free Groq API key and I'm thinking I'd change it. And we've, yeah, I hadn't actually really even used Groq until I found that you could do an API key for free. And when we first launched in the App Store it was actually using that still. But we've been experimenting with, yeah, with Claude and Gemini as well but ended up going back to. We've got the, you can actually switch the model or we do it behind the scenes anyway. Switch the models easily to any user. But yeah, we're using, we've actually Just got the Groq library of API keys at the moment and we found them to be pretty fast. And yeah, we're sort of like. I think the thing with decide is you've got to be nimble and able to change because the models and what they return changes. And yeah, we've also like, you gotta watch the cost side of it as well, make sure that we're not using API keys that are gonna end up costing a fortune. But yeah, so it's always changing. But yeah, mainly GROK ones at the moment.
Nathan Bush: That's fascinating. I love it that it's interesting, I think especially for product Pelican, because if you think about. You touched on it, there is that Shopify's moat is essentially going to be this huge catalog of products. Like it might not be in the future so much about being the front end or even the payment, but this one catalog of products that's available anywhere across the web, you know, whether you're checking out via Claude OpenAI, whatever it is, or you've got a headless. Well, I mean headless isn't really the term anymore, but. But it's, you know, you can checkouts everywhere. Is that kind of how you're thinking about product?
Martin Cox: It is a bit like that's it. Like, I think no one's really quite nailed like with the global catalog and stuff. I don't think anyone's quite nailed how to best use it. And yeah, I've seen like people much smarter than me have built out like tools where you can browse the whole Shopify catalog, but you actually type in a product that you want and it returns absolute junk. Like it returns stuff from like TEMU type stores that you would never buy from. So there's. There's a bit of work to go there. And like, I think when I went to Toronto last year for the Shopify conference, like the sort of. The use cases I thought sort of came out of that global catalog will be things like if someone wants to build like a furniture marketplace or a. Yeah. A particular niche, then there's potential to build out like some of those sort of experiences. But I don't know what the commercial model will be around it. And I don't. I'm not sure anyone's quite nailed it. But yeah, having data that is in the place it's meant to be, that uses a standard format, which Shopify's data format's obviously universal and they're using the UCP framework is sort of the adopted global framework that, yeah, Google and all the big Retailers have sort of agreed to. So yeah, just having stuff where it should be using plain English is something that's actually become really relevant again. So if you've got a yellow T shirt, call it a yellow T shirt, not a musky tobacco T shirt or, or whatever it might be. So yeah, just things like that are actually really valuable.
Nathan Bush: If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, what is it?
Martin Cox: It's a new app called something duck, a muskie tobacco. But yeah, so no, it's really just about trying to help people navigate to that sort of common sense approach. And I also think too like, it actually makes it better for humans if you've still got a human going onto your website, having clear information on there that they understand is actually quite quite, actually quite helpful.
Nathan Bush: There's something big brewing here, right. In terms of obviously you got AI as the engine doing all of this, but over here we've got this huge growth in social and content and influencer content creation that's just bubbling and growing and growing, growing. Still not connected to checkout properly. Unless you're a TikTok shop in the US mainly or bit of Europe. And then you've got this disruption over here. On traditional websites and the product catalogs and the global product catalogs. Those worlds have to combine at some point. Like I love your, your example there around, hey, maybe you can spin up a furniture marketplace, but maybe marketplaces aren't even a thing in the future. There's no such thing as a marketplace. There's just someone who's really great at content and can bring through whatever products they need to bring through from the global catalog. And we don't have this breakdown of, well, this is a marketplace for furniture and this is a website for a furniture brand. It's like actually this person talks a lot about furniture. What products can they surface?
Nathan Bush: Yeah, exactly.
Martin Cox: And I think even like I look at retailers even like and there's potential even for businesses to try different storefronts with their own products. Like if you've got a large catalog with yeah. That stocks 50 brands across different genders, different age groups, different target audiences. Like that catalog's so powerful and it's actually so easy to spin up like a little offshoot site. Like have a. Yeah, spin up a separate site just for your kids products. Or yeah, if you're launching a new range, just spin it all off and you can run it all through a single Shopify instance. And I think that's where like the headless wave, which I could have another whole conversation about the ghost of the headless wave of a few years ago. But like, to me that was. Initially I thought that would be where headless went was like it actually gives the opportunity to spin up new experiences really quickly. And that's something you can do so easily now with like build a Claude website that shows a few of you your products and you can use it for a single email campaign or a single marketing campaign and just drive those people through the checkout. Or yeah, build like a funky product builder or yeah, things like those quizzes and stuff which could be so difficult to custom build back in the day. Like, I don't know, I just think there's so much opportunity to have fun in e commerce at the moment. And yeah, I think that's what people need to be thinking about. Like, it's not about whether you've. Yeah, you don't need to just think about your ERP integrations. If you've got all of that right, you've got your data in place, then focus on actually bringing the fun back to marketing and sales. That's what I think is the most exciting thing.
Nathan Bush: That's fun. I like that. How have you priced all of these? Because obviously app pricing is so elastic, you can get apps from $9 a month all the way through to a few thousand. Where have you landed?
Martin Cox: Oh, I'm still working it out. I don't know if I meant to say that or whether I should sound like I've got a. Again got a strategy behind it. Like it's SaaS, kind of has that freemium model essentially where you've got a. To find the right balance between letting people get in and try it, letting small stores even have it for free and give them something to work with. But yeah, also just be respectful of the fact that people creeps up pretty quickly if you've got 20 or 30 apps on your store. So, yeah, finding people that you can offer value to and yeah, so it's like we're not going in trying to be enterprise and sell things for thousands of dollars. Our play is probably more around scale and just making it easy for people to get. Get started. And I see the price as almost being the secondary thing to just the ease of use. The ease of actually getting value out of it. Yeah, the good service we provide and making sure that people can just get in and use it to benefit their business. Did I skirt around that enough?
Nathan Bush: Yeah, you did. You did.
Nathan Bush: I mean, it's all in the app
Nathan Bush: Store if you want to check it out. Because I think that's a tough thing. Depending on when people are listening, the price might be different. So go into the App Store, check them out. Tell me, are you ever worried about Shopify looking at what you're releasing and going especially like store credit, for example, is one example that I think could be is Shopify Go. Actually that's a really good idea. That app's doing pretty well. It's a good idea. We'll just incorporate it into native Shopify.
Martin Cox: Yeah, I'm actually not worried about that. And it's something I ask people a bit on my podcast as well is like, yeah, do you fear that Shopify actually have got a track record? The way they go about it is they get everything to like a 6 or 7 out of 10. And that's not to is bad. That's to say they nail the 6 or 7 out of 10 functionality perfectly. Like they don't launch something that is half baked or isn't going to work well, but then they leave it to the rest of the ecosystem to get stuff from the 7 to 10. And yeah, that's where the real innovation happens. It's where. Yeah, there's also just so many different use cases as well. Like you could build a product data structure that covers most of the fields you need to sell products, but there's a lot of different use cases out there there. So sometimes people need to build stuff custom still. Sometimes. Yeah, there'll be apps that do it and apps that can focus on that individual problem. And yeah, so I don't fear that really there'll be things that they do bake into the platform. But yeah, that's also like, that's part of it. You're not building an app that's just gonna. You build it and then it just sits there and generates recurring revenue and you go and can do something else.
Nathan Bush: We've been told differently. We told it was easy. You just spin it up in half an hour in Claude, put in the App Store and. And then you're set for life. It just works in the background.
Martin Cox: Yeah, that's it. I can show you my car. It's not a Porsche yet.
Nathan Bush: For people listening to this and I've always enjoyed your counsel on this when you're evaluating apps to add into your store, whether it's one of yours or whether it's broader than that from your agency background and the people that you talk to on your podcast, what do you think retailers and brands need to be most careful of when evaluating new apps to add into their store?
Martin Cox: Yeah, for sure. So I Think one of the things that I most value is I call it easy in, easy out. Like, I think that's really important and it's something I saw the trend even with big retailers over probably the last 12 to 18 months, people don't want to sign to a two or three year contract for a function that's on their website essentially. And so yeah, I also think it just goes to if your product's a good product, then it doesn't need two months to onboard it and set it up. It doesn't need to go deep into your code base. The way that Shopify stores in particular work now, it should be easy to build something that you can drop in and then take out at the end if you do decide to move on to something else. So I think that's really important. I think Shopify Flow is also not just super powerful because it allows you to connect so many things together, but I think it's one of the great indicators of quality on an app is that they've gone and built that into the ecosystem. So yeah, if something has its own Shopify Flow triggers an action, then yeah, you can connect it with almost anything. You can also put things in place to change the logic as well. So you're not beholden to just what the app does. So yeah, like with store credit for example, we've got the automation piece where you can go and create a promo really easily. But if you want to do something where say you give someone store credit three weeks after they place their order and haven't asked for a refund, you can just go and set that up in Shopify Flow and you just put in use all Shopify Flow's functionality to do it. So yeah, I think the Shopify Flow piece is really valuable and often better than when someone adds advertisers that they've got an integration with X, Y and Z. Those integrations are often, and I've been guilty of this too and I'm looking at some new opportunities to do it. But those integrations can often be a marketing play as much as anything from the apps wanting to shout each other out. So but yeah, and then the other pieces too, like just the other metrics. Like the reviews are obviously really important as an indicator and it's sort of the SEO rating for apps is it's all based on the reviews, but then I think the service is the other piece. Like, like just email them, have a chat to them. Like most good apps, they live and die by the support they provide and if you can't get on a call with people. And also can't leverage those people too, because the people that are running these apps live and breathe that particular function. And your success is their success. And so they actually want you to succeed. And you can get a lot of value just from talking to the people that run the apps. And if you're using an app that can't provide that, then just go and find one that does. Because, yeah, like, I could think almost any vertical, I can think of two or three apps where there's people you can talk to and get support with it. And like, it's an amazing ecosystem. It really is.
Nathan Bush: I love that. That's really good tips. Is there a hard number on how many apps is too many apps to have connected to your Shopify store?
Martin Cox: Yeah, I don't think so. There's also, like, you could have lots of apps that don't necessarily touch a lot of stuff that you might have Pixel apps and stuff like that. You kind of need to have an afterpay apps and stuff like that. But I think the main thing is that your team needs to be able to manage it. If your team can actually knows where to go to do stuff, is not overwhelmed, doesn't have multiple points of failure for the same thing. There's nothing worse than not knowing if your products aren't showing right, whether you need to log into your search platform or your merchandising platform or Shopify or your erp. And having that, like, that's the thing that kills teams. And it also just erodes trust in all those platforms as well. And they all end up. Yeah, there's that Spider man picture of them all pointing at each other. You don't want to have those situations. Like, you just need to be able to understand your tech stack. And yeah, I think also just like going back to the easy in, easy out. Like, I think some. You've got to make sure you cull stuff as you go as well. So if you're not using something or you're just not getting value out of something, make sure you do it as you go along. Don't just wait until your whole stack's a mess and you're like, oh, we need to rebuild our site. You should be, like, looking at stuff. Stuff that. Yeah, if you're not using it, like, just uninstall it and make sure that it's taken out. And then you can focus on something else or let your team actually focus on stuff rather than trying to manage everything.
Nathan Bush: It's a great tip. All right, next six Months. So first six months. Well, what do you got first two months under your belt? What are your priorities for the next six months?
Martin Cox: Yeah, I don't know. I really don't. And that's the sad bit for me. I don't know if I should have a vision or a plan. I'd never get a job cause I'd never be able to answer the where will you be in five years time conversation.
Nathan Bush: Anyone who does know is bullshitting anyway.
Martin Cox: But yeah, like I'm just getting out there talking to merchants and yeah, I say kissing babies and doing whatever I can to get the good word out there at the moment. But yeah, like, I don't know, I think the new parts of the platform are what excite me the most. Like the stuff we're doing with Product Pelican, like just every call I have about it has like new interesting scenarios come up and like the power that we've got to be able to build stuff that can actually optimize your data is just really exciting me. It's. Yeah, I've sort of been having little fist pump moments to calls with people about it and stuff, which is so exciting and fun and so probably like secondary to that. Like the stuff with store credit. I'm hoping that's going to sort of tick along and yeah, I'll see. Like, I don't know if we'll build more apps or we might find in six months time, you know, we go all in on one of them. I'm really not sure. I don't think anyone's very good at predicting stuff in this world at the moment. We don't know like if even nine months ago, I don't think Claude was barely a blip on the radar to most people. And I know like I spent the last three months of last year just deciding, you know what, I'm just going to focus on just using Gemini for a little bit because I'd used about five different AI tools last year and had 15 different. Yeah, so many different places to look for everything I'd done. I'm like, I just need to double down and focus on using one tool. But then Claude came out and like from the moment I started using that became a convert to it. And so I think stuff's just changing so fast. I think trying to be measured, trying not to jump at shadows and yeah, get overwhelmed and shadows or shiny objects
Nathan Bush: are pretty dangerous right now.
Martin Cox: Yeah, that's it. And like you can look at the doomsday as well. Like there's so much doom out in the world of. Yeah, people saying that we're all going to be out of jobs or. Yeah, everyone's going to vibe code everything that people have built good products for. But yeah, I think we've seen waves like that in the past with every, every wave of technology.
Nathan Bush: I thought that was the promise the day I was going to take my job. I'm like, this is awesome.
Martin Cox: Yeah, that's it. Well, you could. We could maybe try just doing another version of this to go parallel, just where we get the interview to do itself and just get bot one to interview bot two and I don't know, maybe it'. He'd be just as good. I'm not sure.
Nathan Bush: Definitely be smarter on this side of the camera. I'm not sure about the other. Tell me, Martin, for people who, like, I think this is such an amazing opportunity for retailers and brands if they want to pick the brain of someone who's very freaking smart. Like, where you are right now is really interesting because like you said, you're having those phone calls and I'm not selling this at all. I'm like, if I could have an hour with you once a month, I would love that because I think you'd always find something interesting. But if we've got people wanting to get in touch to talk about the animal Farm at Native appcode that you're building and some of the. Maybe the problems that they're facing and seeing how it might fit, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
Martin Cox: Yeah. Oh, look, I. I'm everywhere now. I'm out there. I've sold my soul on LinkedIn a long time ago, so you can hit me up there. I've started doing Twitter as well. And yeah, I've got email address, I got everything. Like, yeah, just bat phone, whatever. At this point in time, I'm. Yeah, like I said, I'm out there just chatting to people and yeah, like, loving every chat that I have. Like, it's the most. It's the most fun bit about being a. Yeah, those early days of starting a business, you're just out there hustling and having fun and I'm sure, like, if we have any success, I'll probably become a little bit more. Less accessible. But yeah, that's all right, that's great. But yeah, so hit me up anywhere. I've got the calendarly links on my website and all that stuff, so I'm not. Oh, yeah, I'm not hard to reach.
Nathan Bush: We'll put the links in the show notes and what's the name of the podcast again, so people can subscribe. All are here.
Martin Cox: Oh, yeah, there we go. The Shopify app show. So it should be. I assume that comes up pretty easily when you search for it. It's not too. It's not spelled funny or anything like that. But yeah, bit more niche than this one and so. But yeah, hopefully, yeah, people seem to enjoy it when they do listen to it for the most part. So, yeah, thanks so much for having me on here because these conversations are fun and there's just so much you can talk about in this.
Nathan Bush: In this.
Martin Cox: In this Shopify ecosystem. I feel like we're going to go on for four hours, so I think we could easily.
Nathan Bush: But I love your vision for Native app co, and I love that you're doubling down on what you're really good at, where you see a need and just being flexible around everything from what the business model looks like all the way through to what the apps can actually do. I think that's a real skill that we've got right now with all the disruption and the change happening. Being flexible, not having that set strategy that you've got to stick to no matter what, is a really exciting space to be. So I'm pumped to see what you do from here, Martin, and Hope. Hopefully in, you know, a year's time, you aren't accessible and you've got that Ferrari Porsche and we. We might never see you again.
Martin Cox: No, we'll see. I'm sure I'll still be. I'll still.
Nathan Bush: If.
Martin Cox: If all else fails, I'm sure I'll always be checking my slack in the bathroom in the morning. I can't break that habit. I should take up smoking. Smoking would be healthier, I reckon. Thanks, Bushy.
Nathan Bush: All right, three big lessons from the.
Nathan Bush: And this one, by the way, how
Nathan Bush: cool is Martin's backdrop? Just chilling in his backyard, recording podcasts, building apps. I reckon he's embraced post agency life with a flourish. All right, three things to take away from this episode. Number one, store credit. I know it sounds simple, but the way that Martin explained it really clicked for me. The old move is obviously the discount code. You fire it out, customer uses it, margins gone, customer has their product. But what store credit does instead is it gives the customer something that lives in their account post, purchase, and they have to come back to your store to spend it.
Nathan Bush: It's really smart.
Nathan Bush: It's an old retail move, but in a way, for the online world, you still get the second sale. Your acquisition cost spreads across two baskets instead of one. And you haven't just given away margin on the first order. With nothing else to show for his app Stork credit.
Nathan Bush: Get it?
Nathan Bush: Stalk credit is the easiest way to set this up on Shopify. So maybe take a look at that when you're planning your next promotion. Secondly, the global product catalog thing is still rattling around in my head. The idea is that Shopify's real long term asset might not be in the storefront or even in the partner ecosystem or even in the checkout. I think it's catalog every product accessible everywhere. Whether someone's buying it through an AI assistant or a piece of social content or some checkout experience that doesn't even exist yet. If that's where it's heading, then the question for every merchant isn't just how good is my website? It's how good is my product data? Because if the catalog becomes the distribution,
Nathan Bush: getting your products in great shape now
Nathan Bush: while making most people aren't even thinking about it is a huge opportunity. And the last one is just get on Martin's calendar. He's two months in. He's curious. He's one of those people who will give you a real view on the world and actually has the time right now to shoot the breeze about everything Shopify apps and animals. That window won't stay open forever. His LinkedIn link is in the show notes if you want to get in touch with with him. A big thank you to our partners Shopify and Klaviyo for making Add to Cart possible. We always appreciate their support. If you got something from this one, please do subscribe or leave us a review wherever you're listening. Until next time. I'll see you on Add to Cart.
