Gavin Ballard: There's a lot of buzzwords that get thrown around in the commerce world at the moment. Composable Headless Flexible Flexible is my personal favorite. Actually, it was pretty nascent back then. You still had Toby the CEO jumping into the forums and helping people out. We've got these Lego building blocks and the philosophy of the platform is we let the merchants put them together how they want.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to add to cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast mo world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Composable Commerce Flexible Commerce Headless Commerce Omni Commerce Buzzwords Industry Wankery well, today you can make up your own mind because today's guest actually differentiates them better than
Nathan Bush: I've ever heard before.
Nathan Bush: Gavin Ballard is the CEO and the founder of Submarine. Submarine is a Shopify app that helps brands and agencies push the limits of what e commerce platforms can do for subscriptions, memberships, crowdfunding and more. It's a really unique and fascinating approach because it is essentially giving developers and agencies the keys to create unique experiences rather than delivering it straight out of the box like many other apps. It's doubly interesting because Gav is also the founder of e commerce agency Disco Labs, which has helped develop e commerce experiences for leading brands such as jb, hi Fi, you Foods and Lovisa. I really wanted to get e commerce
Nathan Bush: nerdy in this episode and drill into
Nathan Bush: what composable commerce, flexible commerce, headless commerce actually is and how retailers should consider it. So if you're like me and you have a basic understanding of these terms and you can kind of talk dangerously about them, but you're still a little bit foggy on how they're all different. This episode should help clear that up and it is important the definitions of them and the differences between them, especially if you're making decisions around tech investments, tech partners and skill sets you need for your team. We also cover Gav's favorite Shopify themes from his bestselling but now out of date the definitive guide to Shopify themes. We also talk about how he ended up in the office of Shopify CEO Toby Lutka.
Nathan Bush: Juicy.
Nathan Bush: All right, thanks to our partners, Shopify plus and Paclio. Here's our conversation with Gavin Ballard, CEO of Submarine. Gav, welcome to Add to cart.
Gavin Ballard: Thank you very much. Nath Good to be here, mate.
Nathan Bush: We have been lining this chat up for a long time and so glad we get to do it now. And it's probably a really good time because I'm hearing about so many people questioning their tech stacks at the moment and we're going to get into composable commerce. But before we do, I was doing a bit of research and having a look, you know, doing the Google search for Gav Ballard and Submarine and Disco, and the first article that pops up is around you being an ex lawyer
Gavin Ballard: now an engineer, trained, never practiced, I will have to say, although I did have a gig lined up at a corporate law firm and decided that wasn't for me.
Nathan Bush: How close did you get?
Gavin Ballard: I mean I was, I literally, I had the job, I took a year off and in that year off I decided that, yeah, building things was more interesting than, I don't want to say tearing things down because I still have friends that are lawyers but not as constructive in industry, I'd say.
Nathan Bush: Okay, and did you have these thoughts in the back of your head as you're studying law? Because that's no mean feat in itself, right?
Gavin Ballard: So I did a double degree in law and software Eng. And that was actually a really nice and interesting balance. And I think, I mean people will always say this, that doing a law degree has benefits even if you're not a lawyer. I think that's probably true. Running business, there's certainly a few things. Although you do get tempted to do your contract review yourself, which you would never ever or should never ever do.
Nathan Bush: Worst thing I could think of, you do better than me. I did 18 months of law and then dropped out. So at least you got to the end.
Nathan Bush: So tell me, tell me why the
Nathan Bush: path to an engineer was what was your first gig then? So you've gone year off not doing law. I'm going to follow the engineer slash developer route. Where did you go from there?
Gavin Ballard: I'd actually done a bit of work at a startup while I was doing my. My uni degree at Service Central, which was sort of like the first system in Australia for posting tradie jobs online. Quite common now, but it was kind of the first of its kind back in 2005 and that really got was an education in software development and business, I think, and sort of took that long love with me post University, worked at that company for a little while, went off and did a digital nomad thing for a while. At one stage, a couple of friends and I moved to New York to start our own business. The business Went terribly. We had a lovely time in New York though. But at the end of that I basically had to eat and started consulting again. And it just happened that the first client that I had was a Shopify merchant and we still work with them to this day. And that's sort of like 11 or 12 years. Years. It's a company in Portland, Oregon that makes custom badges and magnets and stuff. They're called One Inch Round. Very cool business guy who runs at Scott is. I mean, he's friend now, but yeah, a very entrepreneurial type of character. Interesting business. Yeah. There's basically no one else that's locally manufacturing the stuff that they do in America. It's all outsourced to China. So they've got. When it comes to quality and interesting production stuff, it's pretty cool. There's a case study on them in the. On the Shopify blog somewhere from years back. So if anyone wants to check it out, it's an interesting read.
Nathan Bush: Go get into the archives. So what year are we talking there where you're picking up Shopify for the first time?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, it's 2012ish, I'm going to say. Yeah. So nearly 11 years ago. So it was pretty nascent back then. You still had Toby the CEO jumping into the forums and helping people out with liquid templating questions and things like that, which does not happen all that often today. But it was a much more primitive platform back then, but it was new, so there was lots of stuff to work out and I sort of cut my teeth writing blogs on how to do Funky things like add respond js so you could do responsive websites. Back when IE8 was still something you had to deal with. Didn't explore A six was something you still had to deal with. That blog post kind of got a bit of traction and that kind of led into the path from there, which I got more and more work as a freelancer. At a certain point I was like, hey, the next logical thing is to hire some people and start an agency. And so that's how we started Disco Labs, which was and is an agency that's really focused on building more complex software for larger merchants. Really focuses on the backend side of things because of my software engineering background. And that in turn has led to Submarine. Now our product that is our main focus these days.
Nathan Bush: Gotcha. And we're going to explore all of that. Was your first reaction as someone who likes to build and tinker with things when you discovered Shopify back in 2012, was how do I tinker with it because it was like the first kind of all encompassing, fully hosted, put aside, up, ready to go. Very different to what was around in terms of the magentos of the world back then. Did you immediately want to tinker around?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, I mean that's exactly what drew me to the platform is that it was a tinkerer's playground and just trying to. It was quite limited. So there was an element of trying to work out how to do this crazy thing that you saw that people were asking for. And there is a thing in commerce where you can see pretty direct impact of what you're doing if you're working for a merchant and something you do means they're able to sell a product they weren't able to sell before or are able to grow their revenue by X percent. While that's what we all claim that we do, when you actually do it and see it, it's kind of cool and to know that you've been creative and innovative in the way you've solved a problem. And I think, yeah, Shopify has kind of attracted that community of like minded people and I think that's been the past few years. One of the biggest things about Shopify is its ecosystem. It's just such a vibrant big ecosystem with very different size players. It's changed a lot over the years, but ultimately I think it's still one of the most positive elements of the Shopify world. And definitely, I think their secret weapon, not that secret, but their big weapon against some of the other platforms.
Nathan Bush: And having two players in the game, Disco Agency Partner and Submarine and App Partner. How are you finding the experience being within that ecosystem? Being in the two worlds?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, running two different types of business at the same time is kind of tricky. As an agency, we were always quite engineering focused. I mean that's again, that's our background and the type of work we were doing was complex integrations and build. So we weren't moving a button two pixels to the left or changing the color blue. So from a production and development standpoint, we actually run pretty similarly across both sides of the business. A lot more of it is about the marketing and the sales element of it. So really I think the product that we have, it's lent on our experiences of being an agency and it's something that we, we target towards agencies themselves. So we've been in those trenches, we know where the pain points are. So we actually keep a pretty similar sort of sales cycle and target market and merchant that we work with. So there's maybe Less difference than you would think on the face of it. And I think having been an agency is an absolute superpower when it comes to building a really useful product for merchants. Because again, we've built this because we got asked to build it 5, 6, 7 times before by our clients. So we sort of, we know it's solving a real problem for people.
Nathan Bush: Ready to go back and flip burgers for a living.
Nathan Bush: Nah, me neither.
Nathan Bush: But one of the most surprising results that came out of Shopify's recent global survey was that despite the cost of living pressures on customers, 2/3 of customers are still open to splurging on themselves, at least monthly. The most common splurge?
Nathan Bush: Takeaway food.
Nathan Bush: But even if you aren't in the grease game, it is promising. Because no matter how price orientated the market is, customers will find opportunities to treat themselves. You've just got to find the right moment to wave the the smell of
Nathan Bush: that juicy burger under their noses.
Nathan Bush: Something to think about as you're planning 2023. To view more resources to help with your 2023 planning and see how Shopify can take your e commerce business to the next level, visit shopify.com au today.
Nathan Bush: Have you had that awkward moment, I'm sure you have, of other leading agencies in Australia wanting to use Submarine and you having to go up and help them and train them and help clients that aren't disco clients?
Gavin Ballard: At the end of the day, we want Submarine to be an incredible tool that all agencies use and want to use. And we don't see that as disco labs working out, losing out on work. We see that as a submarine enabling another agency to succeed and help their merchants succeed. So I'm stoked if and when that happens. So no issues here.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. All right. I want to drill into composable commerce because it's a term that I've seen you talk about in detail, I know you're very passionate about, but I think a lot of our listeners would have gone, oh, yeah, I've kind of heard about that. But I don't really understand what it is or the role that it can play for e commerce businesses. So if it's okay with you, I'd love to dive into that. Starting with, how do you define composable commerce?
Gavin Ballard: There's a lot of buzzwords that get thrown around in the commerce world at the moment. Composable, headless, flexible. Flexible is my personal favorite, actually.
Nathan Bush: But more so than composable.
Gavin Ballard: More so than composable. Yeah. And I'll explain why. Okay. But to give you what my take on Composable Commerce is, it's, it's an observation that over time commerce has become more complex, both because customers have become a lot more sophisticated, merchants have become a lot more sophisticated or they've needed to become more sophisticated because they've got more channels or they need to be smarter about where they're spending their money and getting return on investment. And also global commerce is so much easier today than it was five, 10 years ago. So there's definitely a lot more complexity involved. And it kind of means that this trend that we had over the past maybe five or ten years of bundling of commerce functionality into these single use platforms, I guess Swiss army knife platforms that'll do everything for everyone that's starting to get unbundled because merchants really need a best in class tool for everything. You can't have one system that is your checkout and your order management system and your PIM and your content management system and your email platform. They're all quite specialized things and you really want to have the ability to pick the best in class across that. So to me, composable commerce is saying, given that, how do we make sure that these different tools work together? Well, they talk to each other that if I want to swap out one email marketing provider for another, that I can do that with minimal disruption to my business. And as a result I'm able to respond to changes in the market. I'm able to deploy an E commerce site to a completely new region in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. And so it's all about having some sort of common framework or glue that says this is how these different pieces work together and how they do that well.
Nathan Bush: And when you're talking about a framework that. Are you talking from an ability to connect from a data perspective?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, I mean data is a very big part of it. And something that you need to think about in the composable world is where your source of truth for each different piece of data is like where do your customers live, where do your orders live, where does your fulfillments live? And lots of different systems will have that data somewhere and need to touch that at some point. But there really can only be one sort of source of truth for that. And increasingly it's the different types of data, it's different platforms. You know, maybe Klaviyo is your customer data platform or maybe it's Omnio, maybe Shopify is your order management system because you don't need anything too complex or maybe you've got it out in an external NetSuite ERP. So, yeah, a lot of it is how data flows through that system and where the source of truth is, but also just what plays nicely with what, you know. Does Klaviyo recognize a date of birth field in Shopify? Can Nosto use the data that exists in Klaviyo to personalize content for customers when they're browsing your website, all that sort of stuff?
Nathan Bush: Is it a case of often you go, oh yeah, we can plug bad example Klaviyo into Shopify, no worries, you got to do it. And you go, oh, why is this just not matching up? Like the date of birth example is a great example. I know it's not a real example, but where it can often trip up over the simplest of stuff that just isn't integrated. Do you come across those scenarios often?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, I mean, I think universally everyone says they work with everyone else especially, and there is a bit of a tendency, and I don't think it's necessarily wrong, but a lot of providers will be like, well, we have an API, therefore we can plug into anything. And to a certain extent that's true, but a lot of it is about the ease of that, because if you are, you're a merchant. And Klaviyo is maybe a bad example because it does integrate really nicely with Shopify and it's kind of. It is pretty plug and play. But for certain use cases, if a merchant wants to do something particularly funky, if they need particular fields, maybe they need Shopify to be the source of truth for a particular field rather than Klaviyo. And working that out and how the data flows back and forth is a bit tricky. But as soon as you as a merchant are like, oh, okay, I'm writing some custom code or getting a custom integration to bridge an extra gap between Klaviyo and Shopify, you're sort of increasing the lock in that you have into that system and you. It's not saying you can never move, but you've just made it that little bit harder for yourself. So in a like, idyllic composable commerce world, that isn't as much of an issue. And even if you do have to build something a little bit custom that bridges the gap between, say, Shopify and your esp, in an ideal world, you could actually swap out either of those things seamlessly. And getting to that ideal state is software is way more complex than that. But that's sort of what, what you're striving for with composable commerce.
Nathan Bush: I think that piece in the middle is that essentially middleware? Does it have to be middleware?
Gavin Ballard: You can call it whatever you like. I mean, yeah, middleware is a common one. I think one of the trends that we are seeing, and it's something that we're working on at the moment right now, is trying to reduce the overhead of building stuff like that, that middleware. And I think you can see that across the board in the way that platforms are trying to make it more and more possible for their end users to build customizations in the platform. So, I mean, Shopify Flow is a great example on the Shopify side, gives you drag and drop logic capabilities. It's, you know, it's never going to do everything that software can, but it can save you a lot of time in and solve a lot of problems in a lot of use cases. And then taking that a step further, we're seeing recently, so Klaviyo acquired a company called Napkin, which is a platform that lets you write custom code and upload that into an external provider and run it. So I imagine in the next year or so we're going to see Klaviyo expand their workflow tools to have, hey, if you've got something really custom, write some custom code and chuck it on our platform, we'll run it for you. And we're building actually exactly the same thing within Submarine at the moment because our use cases are very much, hey, we need something that's a lot more flexible than something that's off the shelf. To date, we have a lot of flexibility built into the platform, but there's just always edge cases. And the reason people are coming to us is because they've got a funky business or they really need something to work a specific way. So for us, the ability to remove the need to have an external piece of software is a, is a pretty big win for, for merchants, for agencies, and ultimately for us as well.
Nathan Bush: So is the principle there for composable commerce that if a certain part of the E commerce experience, whether that be checkout, email fulfillment, whatever it is, needs something unique, something customized in terms of that experience, the first port of call should be customizing it in the platform that handles that part of the experience rather than in the platform that's passing the data through or interrupting it on the way through?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, it's going to be situational. I think, if possible, it's nice to not have to add a little another node to your technology stack graph. So if you can do something inside a platform, then that's great. On the flip Side, if it, if it is something that you think might survive for a long time and you kind of want to own it, then maybe it makes more sense to pull it out as a separate custom app or custom database or something. But then another part of being composable is the fact that if you've done that, then you should be able to plug it in relatively easy. So in that Klaviyo example, if you're writing say custom code to fire off a birthday card on a customer's birthday, yes, you can write that inside of Klaviyo. But if you think, well, this is actually applicable across every part of the business and we might want to change email providers at some point, extracting that, building it as a separate service and knowing that that's going to plug into these different systems easily is just as important and just follows composable just as much, I think. Gotcha.
Nathan Bush: So if you're thinking that, hey, we're kind of plugging some gaps here and we're picking on Klaviyo, but let's keep picking on them, none of this is actually true, but if we went, oh look, we'd love that if it had this date of birth feature, all the other platforms out there, digital mailchimp, they actually have this feature and if we were able to replace Klaviyo, we would replace it with one of them. There's no point actually building that as a, as outside of Klaviyo because if you brought those in, they would have it. Whereas we'd build on top of Klaviyo here in this instance.
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, yeah. We might be pushing the hypothetical now a little bit, but ultimately the idea is composability. You can swap things in and out relatively painlessly. And you know that in theory means that you can pick the best tool for yourself at the particular stage you're at. And you know, as merchant grows and expand to different markets, their needs change. So it's about being able to pick the best in class tool for what you need right now. But then there's also an element of if you're switching costs are lowered, then you've got less capture within any particular provider, there's more competition because it's easier to switch between people. And ultimately in theory, that lovely hypothetical capitalist theory costs a lower emergence, which again is the idyllic outcome. But that's what, what we're inching towards, I think.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, gotcha. You've given us a really good overview of what composable commerce is. Is it different to headless or flexible Those buzzwords that get thrown around.
Gavin Ballard: Headless is I think the most misused word in commerce at the moment. People really use it in a very tech like specific tech focused way. And the way I think that a lot of people use it, they're saying basically I can build the front end of my website in completely separate language, it's a standalone website. And then it talks to my Ecom platform via an API and I pull in the data and then move out to checkout and do it. So it's very focused on the way that you're set up technically on a front end. But the origins of Headless and what it originally meant was much more about less the front end of your website and more about decoupling the business logic of your business from the customer touch points. So the idea was if you've got, let's say you've got a particular two for one discount regime that you run across your business, that logic lives in one specific place. Maybe it's in your ecom platform, maybe it's in an API you've created, but it lives in one particular place and it's then exposed to customers wherever they're interacting with your business. So whether that is the online front end of the website, whether it's in store when they're checking out with a cashier, whether they're in a computer game and interacting with your brand there. So that's kind of the ultimate goal of Headless is just that decoupling. And it's much less about the specific tech that gets used. And so I think that idea is very much in line with the idea of composable commerce, where you've got business logic in one spot and you're swapping in and out these different components, whether it is the front end of a website or your point of sale system or what have you. But that's, that's sort of how I see headless, the promise of it and what it's really meant to be. And I think it fits in very well to the composable commerce narrative and then the flexible commerce. This is my kind of favorite term because I think composable headless, they are quite focused on technology solutions. So I don't know if you're familiar with the Mac Alliance M A C H. They're kind of a group of technology vendors that are pushing composable commerce as a concept, which makes sense. But their, their whole focus is around the technology part of it. So it's like Mach microservices, agile. Now I need to remember what that stands for off the top of my head.
Nathan Bush: I've seen it thrown around, but I've never understood it.
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, yeah. I mean they're basically advocating for composable commerce, but they're doing it very much in a tech and they're sort of, they're an industry group. So it's very much like you're a technology vendor, you pay to become a member of Mac and you get promoted to Mac people and you get a stamp on your, on your software box that says Mac certified.
Nathan Bush: It's a great business model. I love those models.
Gavin Ballard: They are relentlessly focused on the tech. And you know, is this a microservices piece of tech? Does it have an open API? Does it follow that? Which is fine. I think that's important. But I think flexible commerce is much more broader than that. And it's, it's. Yes, the tech is part of it, but it's much more about like I guess the principles and the approach you use as a business to building out your, your tech stack. And so to me the composability element of it, but there's also the ability to be agile. So like being able to iterate really quickly and having not just tech that lets you iterate really quickly, but having business processes that let you iterate. So if for you as a business deploying a shopify site to a new geography and a new region to sort of test product demand in that market, if that's a thing that's taking six months rather than six days or six weeks, then that's an indication to me like you need more agility in your processes. Stuff that's global I think is another big part of flexible commerce as well is understanding that basically every merchant is a global merchant from day one, whether you, you kind of think you are or not, people will be buying your product from overseas if you're doing the right things and going well. And then openness is another really big factor to me as well in that idea of flexibility, which is not just saying hey, we've got an API and you can talk to it, but about making sure that that API really does expose the full features of your platform that you're making it, you're avoiding vendor lock in and making it easy to move between providers, which obviously disincentivizes you as a provider. But ultimately, you know, it should be about what's best for the merchant. And that's something that I think the tech space is trending in the wrong direction in, at the moment.
Nathan Bush: Did you say wrong direction?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, I Think so. I mean, if you look at say, the social, social platforms and Facebook, Google, Apple, they're increasingly walled gardens, I mean, Apple infamously in the last couple of years with their privacy controls. In theory, great for you. And realistically, yes, there is improved privacy for users, but it also makes Apple's own ad network infinitely more valuable. So, yeah, there's definitely. You can see how those tech companies have closed things up more and more. Twitter closing off its open API or making people pay for it. Facebook increasingly cuts off API points and things like that. And I think you're sort of seeing a similar sort of thing in the, in the E. Comm. Platform space as well. As platforms are realizing where they're making their money, they want to defend that and they're open to the point that it benefits them. But where there are situations where it becomes unpalatable or there's an opportunity for them, it can sometimes be less than open. I would say.
Nathan Bush: Are there any platforms or technology other than submarine, obviously that you'd like to call out as being open and embracing the principles that you've talked about in composable commerce there?
Gavin Ballard: I actually think one of the most interesting developments in the platform space at the moment is commerce tools as a platform, which I'm not sure if you or the listeners are particularly familiar with. They're very much a headless, composable platform play. They're really, it's not for the faint of heart. They're very dev focused. They're all about spinning up individual services to handle unspecific requirements and stitching a lot of that together with. With dev work. So it's as customizable as you can be. It's almost like you're building your own bespoke tech stack, but being able to pick out some components and having a common framework to stitch them all together. But that I think is very interesting in the sense that there is no single part of that platform that you have to use. It's very flexible in that sense. And yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think where Shopify sort of done something a bit similar with its recent release of Commerce components, which I think is a recognition that at a certain scale, particular merchants are going to want that level of decoupling. So everyone else, you have to use Shopify checkout exactly the way it's built. For some of these larger merchants, they want a bit more flexibility than that. So yeah, that's kind of a step towards more openness, but I guess it's a step towards more openness for really large merchants rather than everyone.
Nathan Bush: Do you have to be a large merchant to do composable?
Gavin Ballard: Well, so this is something that I argue which is that if you are using Shopify, you're using a composable commerce system because you've got a platform that takes orders but you can plug in all these different apps and there's an API there. So I think composable commerce is not a black and white rule, it's a matter of degrees. And so yeah, Shopify is composed and I think you can do that well and Shopify, you can plug in one email provider and then a week later be like, no, I want to use something else and swap them out. So I actually think yeah, Shopify has a quite a good composable narrative. It's just that it doesn't fit into the definition that a lot of people are using, which is it has to be like completely decoupled and you're picking these individual components and playing with the APIs and they all need to be open. So I think maybe where you were headed with that question is maybe more looking at something like, okay, something like a commerce tools or even something like doing a headless build. Like when does it make sense for a merchant to do that or who does that suit or not? And I mean I think for me, headless in the sense of how people mean it in day to day parlance with I want to build a completely custom front end for my website and hook into my back end via an API. Very, very few merchants, like 1% of merchants, less than 1% of merchants. I think it makes sense for at the very least you need ongoing dev capability and not just sort of like one freelancer that you call on every now and again. I think you, if you're going to make the most of it and take advantage of the fact that you've got that flexibility, you want a full time dev, if not a team there and able to maintain that system and keep it up to date, keep it performance. When it comes to something like commerce tools like you definitely want to either an agency or in house dev, but you know, ecommerce tools, you know you're going to be spending half a million bucks to build a site. So there's a pretty clear you need to have the ROI for doing that. And for so many merchants, rather than trying to build a headless site that they then have to maintain, take that money and time and stick it into doing CRO and your product page and doing, you know, using a liquid theme and customizing it a bit. So yes, I definitely think there's a lot of agencies out there that have wanted to do a headless project. So they sell a customer on a headless project and the customer thinks, oh that's a, that's a cool buzzword. I've heard that I need to be headless and there are all these benefits. But yeah, the trade offs are pretty intense so you need to think about it a lot I think.
Nathan Bush: Yes. And I love how you framed it around. Composable can be a sliding scale. You don't have to be traditional or composable. There is a path towards there. And if you're starting to think, all right, well if this business gets to 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, 100 million, what are our stages to get there? You don't have to go all the way in straight up.
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think it's just about factoring that in when you're making tech choices and let's say you like, I mean Shopify is an obvious choice for a smaller business that's starting out. And then Shopify email is a perfectly serviceable tool for email marketing for a small brand. But I guess, yeah, it's picking the tools and thinking about okay, this is what I need right now. If I get to this stage, what am I going to need or what do I think I'm going to need and how difficult is it going to be to switch and could I make a different choice now that's just going to make that a bit easier down the line. And that's I think all it takes to really sort of been taking a composable approach to how you're building your tech stack. As a merchant,
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Nathan Bush: one of the key benefits you called out was the ability to bring in new innovation and to kind of move with customer as they're moving. We've seen a lot of innovation in E commerce especially over the last five years. Everything from, from ChatGPT what ChatGPT 4 now through to augmented reality data mining list goes on. What gets you most excited around composable commerce? What have you seen new being able to be introduced to that e commerce experience that you go oh that retailer was able to jump on this really quick because they've set up like this. What's exciting about it?
Gavin Ballard: I think it's about like the tech not getting in the way of the merchant anymore. Like if you've got a truly flexible system then so many times these like we say say it day in and day out and we saw it day in and day out as an agency because merchants would come to us to basically build custom software to get around the fact that the tech they had made them or forced compromises on them in terms of how they ran their business. So whether it was like I'm a meal delivery subscription business but or I'm a meal delivery business and I can't run subscriptions because none of the subscription options that I have will integrate with my delivery zone management tools. Like that's a real world example which is you foods when we and we worked with them for about five years so you know, for a ready made meal delivery service to not have a subscription offering seemed insane. But they were tech limited by doing that and it was only by building completely custom software that we were able to do that and in a, in a more composable world. And where we would be now is that yes, they might need to do a bit of customization but they've got tools that are a lot more powerful that they can stitch together to get them 90% of the way there and they just need to add a little bit of a sprinkling of their custom business logic on top. So that, that's pretty huge right? Is is businesses being able to make decisions that are based on how their businesses work and how their customers interact with them and not have to then worry about oh no, we can't do that because Platform X doesn't allow it. Like that's huge. And yeah, definitely so much innovation in tech space in general whether it is AI. Thankfully web3 seems to be a bit behind us now which I've got my own opinions on. But you know there's interesting stuff happening and the idea that that can get deployed really quickly for e commerce merchants where it makes sense is pretty cool.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's great. You mentioned the The U Foods example there. And I'm assuming that's part of the Submarine story and build out there. So let's dive into submarine because I think it's really interesting. From what I've seen, you're helping out with subscriptions, memberships, crowdfunding, pre sales, that kind of customized payment methods. How did that come to be the area that you focused in the world of composable?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, I think this is where the advantage of being an agency for so long came in because so that you foods story was basically the origin story for submarine as a product, which was, hey, we should really be doing subscriptions, but we can't. Can you work out how we can do it? And we did. And from that experience, we saw more and more customers that were coming to us with similar needs. Whether it was subscriptions or pre sales or crowdfunding, we kind of, we lump it all into, I guess, customer experiences. So anything that's more than a one time transaction and for a lot of businesses, that's a really important part of their business model. So another big client of ours, Hasbro, does pre sales and crowdfunding. And that's a really like, that's something like 70% of the orders that go through their platform have a presale or a crowdfunding campaign in them. But yeah, it just came down to we need some. We've got a business requirement that says we need a flexible experience and we can't do it with the tech that we have. So over time, seeing this crop up again and again, we extracted that into a platform and we used that internally as an agency is like, we will deliver a completely custom subscription experience using Submarine on the back end. But the big transition that we've sort of been making over the last 12 to 18 months is to make that a product and a platform that others can use to build on top of it in the exact same way. So our dream is that like the stuff that we were building one on one with you foods is suddenly something that any Shopify focused and eventually any E Comm focused agency is able to just pick up our tools and have a really powerful tool in their. In their belt to be able to whip up a really innovative business model or customer experience for their customers.
Nathan Bush: I'm really interested in how you productize that because I could imagine for most e commerce merchants, 90 to 95% they can get to the Shopify checkout and go, yep, it does what I need. Like it's world class. It's been tested, it's. It's doing its thing for those that minority that can't the you foods of the world. I could imagine that they all have very different requirements around what special snowflake they are. How do you combine all those special snowflakes into one product that you can then sell widely?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, it's a great question and it's probably the biggest challenge that we have from a product perspective, especially because the origins of product in agency land where it is very much like whatever you want, we will build it. We're now trying to work out how we have a product that does that for other people without us jumping in and being like, yes, whatever you need, we build it. In terms of how we handled that in the previous version of product, I mean it was, there was a lot of custom code that was specific to one merchant and the classic sort of stuff that you see from an agency driven product, but over time and where we were moving with that original version of the products, it was about opening up APIs internally, providing hooks where we can write completely custom code for clients. And that's one of the reasons that I'm so excited about Submarine functions which will enable those agencies to write custom code, chuck it in Submarine and have really bespoke experiences. So there's like specific features like that. But I think also more generally it's about because we're a product that is very much focused on these types of merchants and these types of use cases, we where we're not as worried about, oh, we need a perfect out of the box, one click install experience and try to do everything for everyone. We're not trying to do that. So the way we've architected the platform, the way we think about say a subscription, we see it as we've got these Lego building blocks and the philosophy of the platform is we let the merchants put them together how they want and some of that can be done just out of the box natively. With Submarine, some of it's going to require a bit of custom code, some of it might require an external API call, but yeah, it's about having the building blocks there and exposing them at the most basic primitive level to the people that need them. So that's very different development and approach than I think most apps on the App Store for understandable reasons. But because we're really targeted at those use cases, we can do a much better. Well, I think we can do a much better job of it than they can.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's different to what I thought and it makes total sense with what we were discussing before. That you've taken the platforms that are out there, added capabilities on top, which then allow agencies and development partners to come in and customize them in the way that their clients need it. So that makes a lot of sense. Do you ever worry that platforms. And don't worry about Shopify, they sponsor this, but they don't listen to it.
Nathan Bush: That I might come in and actually
Nathan Bush: start building some of the features that you're selling in Submarine.
Gavin Ballard: There's definitely platform risk if you're building on a specific platform. And over time, we'll expand to more than just the Shopify ecosystem. Even though I sort of see I'm very bullish on the future of Shopify as a platform, it has happened in the Shopify ecosystem before, where Shopify has released a feature and suddenly an app developer is like, oh, I'm. I'm kind of out of business. I think, where we're quite. And that's going to happen around the edges of our products. But I think the core philosophy of our product, which is we're a customization layer, and then a platform, especially one like Shopify, it needs to service all of the merchants that are there. So 2 million merchants, and that's a huge variety. And their product development philosophy, and I think they've generally stayed pretty true to this, has been we build what 80% of the merchants will need all the time, and we make the other 20% possible. And that we're not just playing that 20%. We're probably playing in the top 1% of customization needs. So I think that that gap's always going to be there. Software is just that complex, at least in my lifetime. I don't think we're going to get to a point where. Where a platform is doing it. Also where our customizations sit, what we focus on. I think that'll change over time. But I'm definitely not worried about the core essence of Submarine being superseded by a platform.
Nathan Bush: It's pretty exciting to be able to keep building the building blocks that are taking the platforms a step further. So let the platforms catch up with you and let them integrate some of those features as core components when the 80% need them. But you keep building the future.
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. And that's how it always kind of has to be. And at a certain point for Shopify, for example, it doesn't necessarily make sense for them to bring in a core component that's only used by 1% of merchants, and they can just say, hey, go and use Submarine, which makes Sense for everyone. Especially if there's no significant advantage to Shopify to bring into the core platform and at a certain point, like they can't do everything.
Nathan Bush: So, yeah, on a totally different note, you authored the definitive guide to Shopify themes. I discovered this on your personal page. I'm sorry for lurking. What's your favorite theme today?
Gavin Ballard: That's the one visitor I had this week. It's interesting, big disqualification qualification that the definitive guide to Shopify themes is no longer definitive because it's very out of date and themes have changed quite a lot over the years. But that was a fun experience writing a book actually, when I was in Ottawa a few years ago, snuck into Toby's office and he had a copy on his desk. So that was pretty cool.
Nathan Bush: Really?
Gavin Ballard: Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: You're in Toby's office.
Gavin Ballard: Yes, with permission. Cool. Office with permission. Pretty cool. Got a lot of snowboarding gear up there. But yeah, I'm not sure what they do with that office building anymore now that they're remote. But yes, theme developers that I like, two that spring to mind that I should give a shout out to one is Switch Themes which is run by local Melbourne chap Will they do some really nice stuff. We actually we built our demo store for Submarine based on one of his themes. So very cool. And Maestro who are French outfit, do very nice themes and very, very technically competent and know what they're doing on Shopify. So yeah, always like the stuff that they put out.
Nathan Bush: Can't let this one go. What were you doing in Toby's office?
Gavin Ballard: I was getting the tour of the Shopify office and a friend of mine who is actually trying to remember what her official role. She was sort of Toby's head writer at one stage. So yeah, just got a little tour and got to stick my head in.
Nathan Bush: There you go. Did you meet him?
Gavin Ballard: No, he wasn't in there. I have met him before. He used to come to Unite conferences all the time and talk to you about the performance implications of stripping white space in liquid and other fun stuff
Nathan Bush: like that, back when he was in it. Last thing I've got for you, it's been a bit of a week for submarines. Have you noticed any impact on SEO? Is it good, bad, indifferent?
Gavin Ballard: I haven't checked, to be honest. I will say that we are not the kind of submarine that costs $386 billion. I feel like this is going to be a very Australian focused quip or gag or bit. But yes, we do. We own the submarine trademark here in Australia and overseas and one of the things we had to do to get that trademark was to exclude actual submarine software from the trademark registration. So yeah, they were kind of worried that we were going to. I don't think our worlds will overlap, to be honest. Although in theory, headless commerce means that you could run a storefront on a submarine and have it work as expected.
Nathan Bush: Could be a very lucrative industry over the next 15 years in Australia.
Gavin Ballard: Very true. What domain do you own for submarine? Getsubmarine.com yes, submarine.com is a lovely movie studio that's had the domain for. Since 1997, I think. So I don't think we're getting. If you're listening and you're keen to sell, then let me know. But I kind of don't think you will.
Nathan Bush: Are they still using it?
Gavin Ballard: Is it still active? Yeah, they're active movies. They make mostly documentaries but they're really good stuff. I'll spruce them. Go check out submarine.com and then check
Nathan Bush: out getsubmarine.com get submarine and then probably don't Google Submarine at the moment until it dies down and too much noise.
Nathan Bush: All right, what is next for yourself
Nathan Bush: and the submarine crew? What are you excited about?
Gavin Ballard: Shipping more stuff, I guess. Yeah. So we had a really big product launch in January which was kind of like the next iteration of the platform making it much more scalable. New features around pre sales and crowdfunding. So that was kind of a big thing and we're iterating and cleaning up some stuff on that. But yeah, moving into leveling up our subscription stuff over the next year. Submarine functions I mentioned. So that ability to write, write code inside of the platform and a few other little, I won't say secret but ill defined projects. So I won't talk about them yet.
Nathan Bush: Don't dig a hole.
Gavin Ballard: There's a roadmap that's 40 years long for us, stuff for us to build. So it's that and then for me just getting the word out there, marketing, sales, other fun stuff that you need to do as a founder.
Nathan Bush: Good. Aye. All right.
Nathan Bush: And then on that, if people do
Nathan Bush: want to get in touch, talk to you, whether it's agencies, developers, brands, best
Gavin Ballard: way to do that, just Gavinetsubmarine.com I'm an inbox zero sort of person so you will hear back from me pretty quick or you can just find me and add me on LinkedIn.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful.
Nathan Bush: Gav, thank you so much for sharing
Nathan Bush: the submarine story but also giving us such a great rundown on composable. First, flexible versus headless cleared a lot up for me. So thank you very much.
Gavin Ballard: No worries. And thank you very much.
Nathan Bush: I hope that cleared up a few burning tech questions for you. It certainly helped me clarify some of the differences between those architectural terms that are often thrown in the same bucket and sometimes dismissed, but are actually quite nuanced and important. I hope they help me look as smart as Gav one day. All right, here are my three biggest takeaways. Number one Follow the pathway to composable it's not a case of whether you have a composable commerce tech stack or not. There are actually differing levels of composable and ways to get there. As Gav explained, most e commerce businesses are inherently composable, especially if they are on platforms such as such as Shopify. However, it is important to know where you are at on the scale and to plan your journey. Understanding the limitations of your current stack and planning out the next best moves as you reach milestones in your business will not only help you make the right tech decisions, it will also help you with the financial and team skills planning that you need. Plan your journey and know in advance the right stages of growth to move to the next stage of your composable roadmap. It will make everything else a lot easier with that plan in place. Number two Seek open relationships. No, not like that, you weirdos. This hasn't turned into a relationship podcast. When you are buying tech, I'm talking about Gav talked about the trend. Trend for some key players such as Meta and Apple to try and wall their technology so that they don't easily talk or integrate with other platforms. This is obviously bad for flexibility, innovation and delivering the unique experiences that your customers want. It happens also in e commerce technology, so be very careful of tech providers that have signs of walled gardens. Push hard on those walls. Ask all the questions when considering them to know exactly how you will be able to integrate and whether it is likely that those walls will get stronger down the track.
Nathan Bush: You obviously want to avoid all this.
Nathan Bush: Number three Collaboration for overall growth. Gav runs a Shopify agency, Disco Labs, out of Disco Labs can submarine a product that he sells now into other Shopify agencies to help them impress their clients. In any other business world, this would seem like a totally nutso strategy, but as Gav says, if you're trying to push the limits of what's possible and grow the total e commerce pie, it actually does make sense to ensure that everybody wins. And it's a really nice perspective. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday we will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, come and visit us at E Suite. We're a dedicated e Commerce talent talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to esweettalent.com au where you can download the free e Commerce Salary Guide and sign up to our weekly e Commerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to card.
