Explore every episode of the podcast Leaders on Shopify with John Readman
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
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| When is Shopify the right choice? A dev agency’s honest answer | 15 Oct 2026 | 00:44:37 | |
Brad leads strategy and consultancy at Remarkable Commerce, a Nottingham-based development agency of nearly 100 people that has been building ecommerce technology for 27 years. Its own platform powers around 100 retailers. Brad started out in marketing, then spent a year brand-side as a head of ecommerce, so he knows exactly how it feels to grill an agency. In this episode, Brad tells John Readman how one retailer went from £6m to £250m online in just over a decade, after the infamous “what colour is the dress?” moment took its old site down. He also explains how Remarkable launched the UK’s first Shop Pay checkout on a non-Shopify storefront, and why he thinks personalisation might be making us all a bit stupid. In this conversation, Brad and John discuss:
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| The unglamorous secrets behind luxury brands on Shopify | 15 Oct 2026 | 00:50:22 | |
Tom is the founder of WIRO, a Shopify Plus agency for luxury fashion brands. In just over 10 years, WIRO has worked with hundreds of brands, grown to a team of 30 spread across the UK, Europe and Southeast Asia, and become one of a handful of top-tier Shopify partners in the UK and Europe. Tom started out running a design and print studio, convinced that great ecommerce was all about how beautiful a website looks. Now every project starts with data, CRO and SEO. In this episode, he tells John Readman why being selective about who they work with built a stronger agency, why “on brand” can quietly damage a luxury website, and why the next big thing to optimise might not be a storefront at all. In this conversation, Tom and John discuss:
His advice for anyone choosing an agency: why you should only speak to three, and always talk to their past clients Find out more:
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| Headless vs native Shopify: when it's worth it, and when it's a waste of money | 07 Oct 2026 | 00:28:39 | |
Five years ago, headless was the hottest thing in ecommerce. Then it went out of fashion. Now it's coming back. So should your brand be doing it?
Tom Mucklow-Norell is the co-founder of Superco, a London-based Shopify Platinum Partner working with brands like Represent and Funkin' Cocktails. His view is simple: for most brands, native Shopify is now so good that headless just isn't a smart use of time or money. But there are exceptions, like the famous chef whose recipe content drives such huge organic traffic that headless was the only sensible choice.
Tom also explains why big brands are finally leaving Adobe for Shopify, the one part of a migration you can't easily walk back, and how Superco built a B2B trade hub for bartenders on Funkin' Cocktails' first move to Shopify. Plus, why he ignores any tech partner that leads with commission, and why AI agents won't replace the joy of shopping.
In this episode:
Reach out and connect:
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| Why chasing revenue can make you a "busy fool", and why Google will never tell you to spend less | 06 Oct 2026 | 00:35:23 | |
Revenue is up. Margins are down. And you're working harder than ever to stand still. After 18 years in ecommerce and eight Shopify stores selling trade tools, workwear and building materials, Reid, founder of Trade Counter Direct, knows exactly what it feels like to be a "busy fool". In this episode, he shares why chasing revenue can quietly cost you money, why Google will never tell you to spend less, and what he's learned about protecting margin in a market with around 7,000 to 8,000 competitor price changes every week. He also opens up about the trademark dispute that wiped his business off Google for nearly two months, and how it forced a 175,000-product move from Magento to Shopify, done in-house in just three to four weeks. In this episode:
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| The surprising benefits of adding insurance to your Shopify checkout | 30 Sep 2026 | 00:34:06 | |
What if adding insurance to your Shopify checkout could increase conversion, reduce returns and create a whole new revenue stream? John Readman is joined by Jamie Hamer, serial entrepreneur and founder of Loxa, to look at the surprisingly powerful psychology behind product insurance at checkout. Loxa is an insurtech business helping high-value Shopify merchants offer insurance on everything from furniture and tools to bikes, glasses and catering equipment. Jamie explains how the model works, why simply offering insurance can increase conversion even when customers don't buy it, and why insured products see around a third fewer returns. They cover:
If you sell high-ticket products on Shopify, this is a side of the customer journey you probably haven't thought about enough.
Find out more at loxacover.com, connect with Jamie Hamer on LinkedIn, and check out his podcast, Retail is Detail. Find out more:
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| Forget TikTok Shop: Go live on Shopify instead | 23 Sep 2026 | 00:41:01 | |
Live shopping is working, but you don't need TikTok to do it. More Shopify brands are now streaming live sales directly from their own stores, keeping the customer, the data and the checkout for themselves. Sharon Lee Thony runs SLTC, a Shopify-first agency working mostly with fast-growing beauty, health and wellness brands. She joins John to share what's actually driving results right now: how live shopping on Shopify works in practice, why Meta's returns have quietly slipped for a lot of brands, and why Reddit ads are converting far better than their tiny ad spend suggests they should. Sharon also has one of the more unusual founder stories around. She started SLTC in 2018, sold it to Fiverr in 2020, spent five years as an employee inside her own business, then bought it back at the start of this year. She explains why she did it, and what she's changed now she's back in the founder seat. Listener offer: free live shopping consultation Sharon and the SLTC team are offering Shopify brands a free live shopping consultation. They'll:
Book your free consultation: Contact Us - Let's Work Together | SLTC Find out more:
Clients for Live Shopping examples:
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| How to spot a good Shopify app in an age of AI generated apps | 20 Sep 2026 | 00:35:18 | |
700 apps launched on Shopify in a single week this year. Most of them shouldn't exist. Some of them are brilliant. And almost nobody can tell the difference. Martin Cox, CEO of Shopify App Co has spent fourteen years on Shopify. He built an agency, sold it, then walked away to start again from nothing. This year alone he's launched four apps, with a fifth landing next week. Every week he sits down with the independent founders behind the apps that actually work. He knows what the junk looks like. He also knows why the best app you've never heard of will probably never get found. In this conversation we get into:
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| Showing your search bar on mobile can lift conversion by 30-50% | 16 Sep 2026 | 00:44:18 | |
Most Shopify stores hide search behind a tiny magnifying glass in the corner. Adam Pearce has the data on what that's costing you. Adam Pearce co-founded Blend Commerce about a decade ago and has worked on around 450 stores. Blend does one thing: conversion optimisation, Shopify brands only. He's blunt about what he still sees on sites turning over two or three million a year. Search that's desktop-only, or buried behind an icon nobody can hit with their thumb. Exposing the bar lifts conversion 30-50%, and customers who use search show 35-40% higher lifetime value. Social video sitting at the bottom of the page instead of second or third in the product gallery, where it moves average order value. Product pages that are still blocks and blocks of text when an accordion would take people straight to what they're actually searching for. He also argues most e-commerce teams are watching the wrong number. He recently told a client their revenue per session was up 78% in three months. The first thing they asked about was conversion rate. Inside this episode: the three apps he recommends to almost everyone, why Blend won't build headless, what a redesign should actually be about, and why brand obsession is the biggest barrier to getting results. The three tools he recommends
Ecom Collab Club: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/ecom-collab-club-37836312093 Blend Commerce: https://blendcommerce.com/ ASK BOSCO® Shopify app: https://apps.shopify.com/ask-bosco | |||
| Scaling your Shopify store? The bit everyone forgets. | 16 Sep 2026 | 00:35:01 | |
Most brands scale the fun bit first. More ad spend, more traffic, more orders. Then the warehouse can't keep up, returns pile up, and the bit nobody planned for becomes the bit that breaks the business. Tom Gatenby, CEO of Squashed Pixel has been building on Shopify for 17 years and were one of the first ten partners in the UK. Squashed Pixel now spends as much time on warehousing systems, ERP integrations and order management as it does on storefronts. He's watched a lot of brands find this out the hard way. Useful if you're scaling or thinking about moving platform: How to work out what a platform really costs you — 12 months minimum, three to five years for the truth, and count the apps and conversion fees, not just the monthly bill | |||
| Too many Shopify apps? What your tech stack is really costing you. | 16 Sep 2026 | 00:42:48 | |
Most Shopify merchants have no idea what their tech stack is costing them. Gareth Allen, Founder of Herd Agency, has been building on Shopify since the late 2000s, back when every enterprise brand insisted it was no good for SEO. Thirteen years on, with Herd now a Shopify Premier partner, he's seen what happens when merchants treat the app store like a sweet shop. The cost isn't just the subscriptions. It's the speed hit from apps you uninstalled months ago that left their code behind. It's the external dev resource you need to keep it all hanging together. When Chilly's came to Herd, their stack was what Gareth calls a spaghetti junction - and the biggest win from the migration wasn't the redesign, it was how much came out. | |||
| How brands like Gymshark and Castore scale with better data infrastructure. | 16 Sep 2026 | 00:32:52 | |
Shopify may be easy to launch on, but scaling brands often hit the same wall: messy integrations, broken data, and tech stacks that can’t keep up. In this episode, Jim Herbert, CEO of Patchworks, breaks down what really happens when a brand grows from $5 million to $20 million and beyond - and why the right infrastructure matters long before Black Friday exposes the cracks. With 26 years in e-commerce and leadership experience spanning Sceneric, Hybris, BigCommerce Europe, and Patchworks, Jim explains why apps work well at the beginning, why they start to fail as complexity grows, and how enterprise brands build a foundation that can scale without creating integration debt. | |||
| The £/$/€ millions ecommerce brands are losing by ignoring accessibility | 09 Sep 2026 | 00:22:38 | |
What if one of the biggest untapped growth opportunities in ecommerce isn't better ads, better AI, or better conversion optimization, but simply making your website usable by more people? Imogen from EnableAll joins the podcast to make the case that accessibility isn't a compliance exercise. It's a growth lever. One luxury retail client discovered that 6% of its revenue was coming from customers using an accessibility toolbar, and those customers were converting at 6x the average ecommerce benchmark. So why are so many brands still treating accessibility as a legal checkbox? Imogen breaks down what's actually happening behind the scenes: how inaccessible code excludes customers, what EnableAll changes at the code level, and how tools like screen readers and AI sign language can fundamentally change the way people shop online. Imogen and John also cover the global wave of accessibility legislation, why accessibility 'overlays' have developed such a bad reputation, and why fixing the underlying code matters. Plus which ecommerce verticals are leading the way, and why rushing into agentic commerce before fixing accessibility could actually make the internet less accessible, not more. | |||
| An interview with an AI: what Boardy really thinks about Shopify | 18 Aug 2026 | 00:22:31 | |
For the first time on Leaders on Shopify, John sat down with a guest that isn't human. Meet Boardy, an AI "superconnector" that spends its time talking to founders, operators, and investors across the ecommerce ecosystem, built specifically to spot patterns most people miss.
Boardy and John talk about whether AI in Shopify is real or hype: it's real where it's reducing manual merchandising, improving forecasting, and helping lean teams move faster, but "fully autonomous growth" claims are still ahead of the evidence. On the App Store, now sitting at 18,000+ apps: still viable, but a generic clone won't survive.
This episode discusses agentic commerce. When a shopper buys inside ChatGPT, who actually owns that customer, the brand, or the AI platform they bought through? Boardy's answer: it depends entirely on what data gets passed through, and who owns the first-party relationship is something brands need to actively protect, not assume. | |||
| Inside Function18: Golf retail's digital success story with Shopify | 10 Aug 2026 | 00:37:44 | |
Podcast description: Golf used to mean black trousers, black tops, and zero personality. Ben from Function18 helped change that, building a pure-play online golf apparel retailer from the ashes of a struggling bricks-and-mortar business, and riding out two decades of platform migrations, agency relationships, and a completely reshaped industry along the way.
In this episode of Leaders on Shopify, John sits down with Ben to talk through the realities of running an ecommerce business for the long haul: why they moved from OSCommerce to Magento to Shopify (and what each platform taught them), the tension of competing with the very brands they stock as those brands go direct-to-consumer, and why golf's changing demographic, driven by younger players and pros being more open about their love of the game, has reshaped who they're selling to.
They also get into where AI is already earning its place in the business, from product imagery to number-crunching, and Ben's refreshingly honest take on agentic commerce: useful for some purchases, a hard no for others, and a genuine unknown for everyone in ecommerce right now. | |||
| How FireBelly's Mary-Anne Danarzo builds brands that scale on Shopify | 30 Jul 2026 | 00:39:04 | |
Mary-Anne Danarzo, founder of FireBelly, talks about building brands from the ground up, and what it actually takes to scale them. Mary-Anne shares how a career that started in mobile phone accessories sales led to an agency that's helped brands like Color Wow scale on Shopify all the way to a L'Oreal acquisition, including a Magento-to-Shopify migration that doubled their conversion rate overnight. In this episode, we talk about why nobody actually owns conversion rate inside most businesses, the difference between quantitative data and getting on the phone to real customers, and Mary-Anne's approach to building "brand brains". They also cover the AI tools reshaping ecommerce creative, why Shopify keeps winning against platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud for fast-scaling brands, and what medium-to-large brands get wrong when they hesitate to migrate. | |||
| Scaling a Shopify brand from £1M to £30M: what actually works with Quickfire Digital | 24 Jun 2026 | 00:42:39 | |
What has eight years of working with scaling ecommerce brands taught Nathan Lomax? In this episode the co-founder of Shopify Platinum agency Quickfire Digital, sits down with John Readman to talk about the patterns he sees repeated over again on Shopify. From bot traffic skewing metrics and creating the illusion of a conversion problem, to brands obsessively acquiring new customers while ignoring the ones they already have, Nate is candid about where DTC brands go wrong between £1M and £30M. He also talks about decision paralysis, the temptation to in-house too early, and why some of the fastest-growing brands he's seen simply stopped procrastinating. The episode also covers Quickfire's own journey, from doing social media for a local chip shop to becoming one of a handful of Shopify Platinum agencies in the world, working with Tala, Reebok, Juicy Couture, Beaver Town, and Wrexham FC. Plus: honest takes on headless builds, the AI noise versus AI reality gap, agentic commerce, and how to know when a client relationship isn't working for either side. | |||
| How Smol scaled to £45M and why they left Shopify to do it | 01 Jun 2026 | 00:48:08 | |
When do you know it's time to leave your ecommerce platform? Neil Campbell, Chief Growth Officer at Smol, has been through it. His direct-to-consumer cleaning brand built a £45M business on Shopify, with every customer on subscription, starting with a free trial, and then made the call to leave Shopify. In this conversation with John Readman, Neil breaks down the full Smol journey, from early days on Shopify with Recharge as the subscription engine, through to the point where they were building so much custom development around and beyond Shopify that leaving started to make more sense than staying. He shares the moment Shopify's new checkout rollout forced the decision, why being half-in on a platform is often the hardest place to be, and what brands considering the same move need to think about before they take the leap. | |||
| Why every brand is moving to Shopify and what comes next | 01 Jun 2026 | 00:43:28 | |
Why are brands that went headless or bespoke quietly migrating back to Shopify? Liam Quinn, Director of Innovation at Visualsoft, one of Europe's largest Shopify partners, has watched the platform go from startup tool to enterprise default. | |||
| He sold 1.7 million pairs of shoes online last year, here's what he wishes he'd known sooner | 21 Apr 2026 | 00:32:52 | |
How do you grow an online shoe business to £65 million and what nearly breaks along the way? Stuart Paver has been selling footwear online since 1999, making him one of Europe's earliest ecommerce pioneers. In this episode he gets honest about the hidden costs of scaling online retail, why warehousing becomes your biggest headache, how AI is already transforming product photography, and what 25 years in the game tells you about surviving whatever comes next. | |||
| The Shopify secret nobody talks about (and why AI could cost you 4% of every sale) | 21 Apr 2026 | 00:47:03 | |
The infrastructure secrets behind scaling stores, why AI just crossed a critical quality threshold, and the hidden 4% cost lurking inside the future of ecommerce. Keith Matthews, founder of one of Ireland's leading Shopify Plus agencies, joins John Readman to reveal the infrastructure secrets behind scaling stores, why AI just crossed a critical quality threshold, and the hidden 4% cost lurking inside the future of ecommerce. | |||