Samuel Rieder
The top examples, they're actually in America, so we can learn quite a lot from a European perspective from the Americans, or the northern American people.
Jaap Vergote
It's a great hack. You look at the US and then you go and implement it in Europe.
Samuel Rieder
Man, it's a play that you can just keep on doing, I guess. It's with movies, it's with technology, it's with everything.
Chase Clymer
If you want to kind of see what's next in commerce, when you're in a market that isn't unfortunately like the American market, you can just look to that market, see what apps people are adopting, and reach out to them and try to use them on your store in these international markets.
Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today.
Hey, all of you people coming in live from DotDev, another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today I am welcomed by not one, but two amazing partners in the Shopify ecosystem, and that's what I really want to dive into with today's conversation.
Jaap is joining us from the app side of things — he's the founder of UpsellPlus. I've also got Sam joining us from dear digital, an international Shopify partner, and I'm excited to talk about what makes Shopify so special, why we chose to dedicate too much of our lives to this platform and build here and grow here, and make some awesome partnerships and awesome friends in this community.
So as we dive in, I guess I'll start with you, Jaap, because you're the furthest from me. What's the quick introduction to your product, and how did you kind of end up in this Shopify ecosystem?
Jaap Vergote
I think it started a couple of years ago. I used to work at a buy-now-pay-later company, and through doing that I got to know the Shopify ecosystem. It was clear that among the ecommerce platforms, Shopify was growing the quickest — more specifically, Shopify Plus. By doing that, we learned that the checkout is a place they care about a ton, and customizing that checkout makes a big difference, right? It's the speed, it's the customizations, it's the experience that makes a person click buy or drop off.
And so that's how we got into the ecosystem. We saw an opportunity to build customizations for the Shopify Plus checkouts — that's where our product started. Now it's grown to all the extension points across the Shopify storefront, which allows merchants to customize, optimize, and generate revenue from recommendations and customizations.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And Sam, when did you first get into the Shopify ecosystem? When did you first hear about it?
Samuel Rieder
So we actually had our own ecommerce company. We sold furniture before, and we did it on Shopify. So basically we grew it from zero — we started to sell desks online.
Jaap Vergote
I bought one.I remember.
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, we had like crowdfunding, right? And probably you bought it there.
Jaap Vergote
Yes.
Samuel Rieder
And then we moved to Shopify Plus. Then our company actually got acquired by an American company — they were on Magento, that's sweet, we were on Shopify and Odoo — and so after the acquisition we got acquired again, so it was becoming a big American corporation.
It was a bit too big for us, and then we started an agency and we fell back to our old love, which was Shopify and Odoo. So that's what we're actually doing today — we implement Shopify and Odoo. Yeah, and that's how we got into the ecosystem.
Chase Clymer
And how long ago did the agency start?
Samuel Rieder
Five and a half years ago, and four years before that I was working on my own ecommerce company.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And I wanted to ask that because you're coming to us from the European perspective.
A lot of the merchants, or even the folks listening or watching right now live, they're dealing with ecommerce and Shopify in the American or Canadian market, which I would say is a little further ahead than the European market as far as adoption of Shopify as a solution to commerce problems.
So could you explain a bit more to the audience about how you have to approach Shopify as a solution in Europe versus what might just be expected solves in America?
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, a very interesting and broad question. We do see — or I heard, I think last year when I was here, that Shopify actually was the biggest in Europe. I'm not quoting this out of numbers that I know…
Chase Clymer
As far as percentage-based use of the platform versus other ecommerce platforms?
Samuel Rieder
No. For Shopify, Europe is the biggest market as of last year. But maybe I'm not — or the most growth.
What I'm saying is I heard last year that for Shopify, Europe was a very big market. But you're a hundred percent right that Europe just differs a lot from America. America is one market, right? One big market, one currency.
And we dealt with that when we had our own ecommerce company — we worked together with American guys, and they were like, how complex can stuff be in Europe? Why do you have different kinds of currencies and different kinds of VATs and different kinds of electricity sockets and stuff?
So Shopify needed quite a lot of maturity to try and power all of those things, but now with Markets, etc., they actually played very smartly into that trend. I think it's actually true with a lot of things that we see here around POS— the top examples are actually in America, so we can learn quite a lot from a European perspective from the Americans, or the northern American people.
Jaap Vergote
It's a great hack. You look at the US and then you go and implement it in Europe.
Samuel Rieder
Man, it's a play that you can just keep on doing, I guess. It's with movies, it's with technology, it's with everything. So yeah, that's interesting for us — I don't know if that answered your question more or less.
Chase Clymer
But it did. And I think that Jaap kind of took my golden nugget that I was gonna take out of there— it was that if you want to kind of see what's next in commerce, when you're in a market that isn't unfortunately like the American market, you can just look to that market, see what apps people are adopting, and reach out to them and try to use them on your store in these international markets, which is my complete segue to Jaap talking about internationalization with UpsellPlus.
When did that become important? What were the struggles you guys had to overcome with engineering, or with language barriers, with obviously the hundreds of different payment types across the world? How does that play into this upsell app?
Jaap Vergote
The funny thing is our first customer ever was a Dutch company, Ekster — a wallet, like the Ridge of Europe. And so it immediately gave us a lot of feedback for the internationalization. They were like, "We need languages, we need different currencies."
And that ability was kind of baked in from the start — of course it was limited, it was euros and dollars, it was Dutch, French, English, pretty basic to start, but then we expanded from there. The interesting thing is that European merchants are quite patient — they're willing to wait — while I think US merchants are sometimes like "I wanted it yesterday." But if you take that even a level higher, what we're seeing is that product adoption in the US is just quicker.
We recently launched a post-purchase ad network, UpsellPlus Earn, and in the US that's very well known — people know what this is, it's seeing offers on the thank-you and order confirmation page.
In Europe, that's very nascent, it's new. It exists, but it's not as familiar. So we just see that adoption of new functionality — that Shopify launches, that the market puts forward, or that we put forward — is adopted a lot quicker by US merchants. They're willing to experiment and give candid feedback.
While European brands are more like, "Hey, this is all great, but let's just do the basics and we'll see if we want to try something else later." Of course, Markets helped a ton — when Shopify launched Markets, it solved a lot of our problems that we didn't have to solve ourselves, which is great. Thankful to Shopify for that, 'cause it's a tough one for sure.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now Sam, what are some of the other problems you're helping merchants solve in Europe that maybe Americans don't think about?
Samuel Rieder
So I just had a discussion about payments, because we now have more and more POS or unified commerce customers, and they're obviously very interested in POS. But you can only use POS when you have Shopify Payments, and Shopify Payments is a flat percentage rate in terms of how you pay.
But you have classic European payment methods that are typically priced on a fixed-cost basis — a fixed amount of cents that you pay per transaction instead of a fixed percentage. And you actually see that the pricing for Shopify Payments is like thirty or forty times more compared to local payment methods' costs. So it's a big thing that we're trying to work through together with Shopify, to try and make sure we have more localized offerings in terms of Shopify Payments for the new POS customers.
Jaap Vergote
Has that historically also been the case with Shopify Payments for ecommerce?
Samuel Rieder
Yes, but I think in the beginning it was more constrained, and then they opened it up for the online store. So that's why a lot of merchants are like, "Yeah, probably this is coming for POS as well." But up until now it hasn't been the case, so we still see a lot of adoption, but those are the kinds of things local merchants are interested in.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, just a quick reminder — please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week, so don't miss out. Now back to the interview.
To pivot a bit back to the reason we're sitting here in this giant room full of hundreds of people — you know, DotDev, shout out to Shopify, thank you so much for reaching out to me and allowing me to do this.
I want to talk about the power of events, the power of going out there in person and meeting other people in the community that you're working within. Jaap, we obviously met at a Shopify event years ago. Sam, I'm lucky to meet you at this event. But what would you say to the folks listening who want to further their career or their business by going to events like this?
Jaap Vergote
I think I wasn't the best example of that. In the first year that we ran the business, it was very much "you can do almost everything from behind a computer, right? It's the digital age. You just need to have the best product and the best offering and people will come."
But I learned over time that in the end it's about people, right? It's people buying a product, people trying to run a business, people trying to achieve a goal. And if they know you, that helps, and if you know the people too, you understand them a bit better. It also comes down to… if there are two products and they're quite equivalent in pricing and functionality, but you know the people behind one of the products, that's who you go with.
And to be honest, what I've learned is that it's a lot of fun too. You get to know the people, right? And the people in the Shopify ecosystem–I said it this morning to Sam–are we lucky that we kind of stumbled into Shopify, or are all ecosystems like this?
And I don't think that's true, maybe it is, I don't know, but I think it's a lot of fun to meet people. You do build relationships, and that makes it worthwhile.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I think that Sean, my business partner, is just out of frame here, we stumbled into Shopify ten years ago. But the reason we stayed with Shopify was because of the community, and a shout out to Sam, who's no longer at Shopify, actually. She was an amazing partner of ours at Shopify.
And it was immediately apparent that we were getting invited to be in rooms with other smart entrepreneurs and other smart builders, and we weren't feeling that with any of the other platforms or technologies we were on. So we quickly just went all in on Shopify, and I'm glad that we did.
Jaap Vergote
Yep.
Chase Clymer
Hindsight's always 20/20, though.
Chase Clymer
But to your kind of idea there, Jaap, I do believe there's something special about Shopify. I think there's this big abundance mindset with most of the people that you interact with in this community.
Jaap Vergote
Of course.
Chase Clymer
Outside of the podcast, I've got an agency, and there are hundreds of other agencies here. And all of us just immediately start like, "What problems are you solving? How are you solving it?" It's all about how a rising tide raises all boats. There's a little bit of competitive edge, you don't lose that, but it's just such a fun ecosystem. Healthy and good, I think, as well, right?
Jaap Vergote
Exactly.
In a way, Shopify has done a really good job of exporting their…I think their culture of making commerce better for everyone. And then you start to think, they're a really amazing partner, it's amazing to work with them, they have great ideas, I should interact with them, and then interact with the other partners. And once you start doing that, it's just great — you just learn there's no reason to be fearful or protective. The sharing creates opportunities and insights.
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, I wonder who's behind this actually, because like you say, I think it's a culture and they probably think about it– maybe not, maybe it's ingrained in their DNA– but it's quite impressive.
Chase Clymer
And the culture kind of starts from Europe, if you really want to think about it.
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, no, but it's a lot of fun to meet people and to challenge each other and to just talk about how we can move forward, I guess. There are so many challenges, but it's cool to be able to talk about it openly, I guess.
Jaap Vergote
I definitely think here at DotDev, what's really valuable for us is we started working at the forefront of what Shopify was doing three years ago, which was the checkouts. They introduced checkout extensions, they went from an old checkout to a new version, and we were one of the first partners to work with them on that.
But today there's so many other opportunities. POS is blowing up, there's agentic commerce, there's Sidekick. There's so many things happening that they introduce, and you can just come here and talk to the product teams that are actually writing the code and deciding on the roadmap for these features.
And that's so valuable. They're not trying to hide anything, they're just like, "This is what we're building, this is probably what we're gonna build next." We're literally shown where the opportunities are, and it helps us prioritize our roadmap. I'm like, "Okay, this is a business opportunity for us, or this is just a feature." And that's really amazing, that they're so open and transparent about that.
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, they basically keep on increasing the surface area on which you can build, right? As a partner or as an app developer, that's quite amazing. Somehow they keep on reinventing themselves and keep on expanding the surface, which is kind of crazy.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And it's funny that you say you can come to this and learn and talk directly to the team. I was just talking to Josiah from Helium Apps. If he's out there listening, he's gonna be mad that I said his name probably.
But he was straight up going to the team that was responsible for the API behind a product they're working on and iterating on and improving. It's already live, and he was like, "Hey, this exists in the admin, can I please get an API endpoint for this? This is my use case, this is why,"
And that's what you can do here. You can just kind of go, "This will just make everyone's life easier, just do this," and you can get stuff on the roadmap.
Samuel Rieder
Yes, and I guess with AI, maybe everything is gonna be way faster, so maybe it's even more valuable that everybody comes together and really shares their ideas, I guess.
Jaap Vergote
Yeah, I think Shopify sees the partner ecosystem as a pipeline of feedback and opportunities for what their end customers are asking for — the merchants, right? And that's what's so amazing. They're willing to listen because they know it's gonna create value for the merchants, for the partners, for the shoppers, for Shopify, "Make commerce better for everyone" it's so simple, but it's true. It sounds cheesy if you just read it, but then if you come here, you're like, "Okay, it makes sense."
Samuel Rieder
You really feel it.
Chase Clymer
And just to reiterate on a point that you made, Jaap, earlier, which was about, if it comes down to, you know, we're all in business, right, we're here to make money. When you go to events like this, or other trade shows or conferences, and you start to meet your customers where they are and learn from them, and it's a situation where it's you versus somebody else, it's often you go with who you know and who you like.
You know the old line, "know, like, trust, before you buy" — that part really matters a lot. But there's another thing I like to remind younger entrepreneurs, which is just: if you're not in the room, you're not in the conversation. So you really need to get yourself out there, and you will grow so much faster if you start to surround yourself with like-minded individuals.
It is true, you can build a business from your bedroom, and that's a lot of people's dreams, but the growth is explosive when you start getting out there and interacting with your community.
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, I think it's also that the digital part creates leverage on the parts that you do in person, and the parts that you do in person as well — so it's like both channels you need to double down on basically. Like, I would also ask you the question. You have an agency, right?
Chase Clymer
Yes.
Samuel Rieder
How much do you do in terms of getting together with maybe some merchants around a certain topic and stuff? Those kinds of things I think could help, and then you can scale it digitally, maybe.
Chase Clymer
I kind of did. Yeah, so, you know, obviously we've got the podcast, and this is a bonus episode, this will come out, we do two bonus episodes a month — but I do 56 interviews a year with merchants, and most of them I haven't met before.
I'm lucky enough that the show is big enough that PR teams will pitch us cool brands, but also I go to events like Shoptalk or eTail, or we go to trade shows — Shop Object, we're going to that in New York at the end of the month, I talked to you about that— and we go there to meet merchants.
And not only is it just with the podcast, but we host dinners at these events too. I think Shopify actually…
Jaap Vergote
Great dimsum.
Chase Clymer
Well, not only the partner dinners, but we do dinners with merchants, and Shopify loves us because we put in a lot of sweat equity to bring Shopify involved with these dinners. And so we probably do nine or ten events a year where we're trying to put ourselves out there to meet these people.
Because it's so easy to talk to anybody on the internet, people kind of ignore it at times, but when you meet someone in real life and have a genuine human interaction, it's a lot easier to do business with them.
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, it sticks. For sure.
Jaap Vergote
And it's… if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. It's almost silly, but it's true, it is actually true. In the beginning you're like, "whatever, you don't really need to meet people," but if you start from the beginning, it would compound over time and you'd have so many people that believe in what you're doing and wanna help you– it would only be to your benefit.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, before we wrap up, I do want to ask you guys some other questions. What is one of the key things you were coming to DotDev for? I'll start with you, Sam — why did you make the trip here? What were you trying to learn? Either the content or learn from the community of amazing builders that are here. What brought you to the event?
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, so I think last time we went to a lot of talks, which is great, and now it's also two days instead of one, so you can go to more talks. But I also thought it was nicer to get in touch with more people here on the product floor. Because those interactions, like we discussed before, are actually very important.
So I tried to push myself a bit more to really interact with all the people here — I just wanna meet the people behind all the things we see in Slack, in our Shopify updates, and see where things are going, and really go into conversation with them, and obviously with other people in the partner ecosystem — talk to as many people as possible.
And then obviously I also want to read the room a bit in terms of where AI is going, like the UCP, and then also just what Shopify is doing with AI. So I think it's interacting as much as possible, and then seeing where AI is going, more or less.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Jaap, what brought you all the way here from New York?
Jaap Vergote
For me it's not as far as for him, For us it was very specific, we are looking to expand beyond the storefront into POS, SMS, and email, so you can run offers on those surfaces towards your customers, all orchestrated with what you're doing on the storefront, but then also off the storefront.
So POS was a big one — that's a big topic here too, learning what's possible, learning where it's going, seeing what extensions we can use, talking to the product team, getting to know them, because we'd be working closely together.
And then the second thing was Sidekick. Everybody talks about MCPs, that's all great, but eventually we decided to start with Sidekick because it's basically like V1 of an MCP, because it's so well integrated that it can read the data from your application and let merchants take actions right there in the Sidekick chat, and it's something they already use.
It's also a discovery channel for us — merchants might discover us there, and that's a way we acquire customers — but it also gives them so much more flexibility, that they can just chat with our product and make things happen.
And that's something I wanted to get the product team's take on, like, how far will this go? Right now we can do X, Y, and Z — how far will you take this? Will it go all the way, that you can configure anything in any app right through Sidekick? We don't know yet, but I wanted to understand how they thought about that.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And now I want you guys to obviously shout yourselves out. Sam, what are you best at if someone wants to get a hold of you — how do they get a hold of you, and how do you and your company best help merchants? What are you good at, what are you looking to do?
Samuel Rieder
Yeah, we're focusing a lot on retail — POS for us is a huge deal, we wanna really roll out retail physical commerce. So if you want to talk about that, you should reach out to us — if you wanna roll out some big stores, a lot of stores in Belgium or the Netherlands, we're the team.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I do wanna highlight that Sam is joining us from Europe, so if you're listening to this and you're a European merchant and you aren't using Shopify POS, Sam is absolutely the person you should talk to. And if they're not close enough physically, he probably knows somebody that is, and he can make an amazing introduction for you.
Samuel Rieder
For sure.
Chase Clymer
So any European brands not using Shopify POS, reach out to Sam — his contact information will be in the show notes.
Jaap, we're huge fans of UpsellPlus, our partnership goes back so many years at the agency, but let the merchants get the elevator pitch real quick, and then tell them how to get a hold of you, what to do.
Jaap Vergote
Sure thing. I think a lot of brands are thinking, "How do we grow next year?" And a lot of brands underestimate the value of their existing traffic rather than spending double the amount on ads — you can look at the website and optimize and squeeze out another seven, eight, ten percent. Some brands it's thirty, it's really surprising.
But that's what we're best at, going and understanding what your goal is. Is it pure top-line growth? Is it profitable growth, the growth has to be profitable, but what's the margin you want to get? And then let's go and build a strategy around that.
On your website, what are you doing, what are you not doing. You have so many opportunities, all the way from the product page to the checkout page, and now POS, SMS, and email are coming too. What strategy should you apply to hit those goals? That's what we're really good at: building that strategy, implementing it, testing it for 30 days, seeing the result, and then iterating over time to help you get there.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, and I can actually give you firsthand confirmation about how awesome the team is at UpsellPlus. They will absolutely help you with the strategy, and make sure — I think a lot of people get stuck in this paralysis of "there's so many things you can do," and I think your team does a really good job of coaching people into just, "Yeah, sure, we can do all these things, but let's just start with one simple thing first."
And that zero-to-one is the leap they need to take, especially in upsells and cross-sells, which your app does a beautiful thing with.
As we close out here in Toronto with the live show, I can't thank you guys enough. Jaap, Sam, thank you so much for coming on.
Samuel Rieder
Thank you very much.
Jaap Vergote
Thanks, Chase.
