A few months ago I wrote a glowing snoop about Shopify. But the more work I do the more I learn it’s not all hearts and flowers.
When Prince won the award for Best Internet-Only Single for his song "War" in 1999 and shared a cautious message about the rising computer age, no one took much notice. Almost 30 years later his words resonate and show us he was so much closer to the mark than many wished to acknowledge back then.
"Don't be fooled by the internet. It's cool to get on the computer, but don't let the computer get on you. It's cool to use the computer, but don't let the computer use you. Y'all saw 'The Matrix.' There is a war going on. The battlefield is the mind, and the prize is the soul. So, be careful. Be very careful."
I try to avoid AI as much as possible, I don’t use Alexa or Siri I was recently freaked out when put something a question into Google the response included my name. I have a Google account sure but this was too much for me. I’d already downloaded Duck Duck Go and have begun the process of detaching. Living without Google is like living without a smart phone, not easy but working on it.
I have been a customer of Shopify for a couple of years working on my own E Commerce website paying about £20 per month. That amount will increase when I start selling as they take a commission on every sale, but part of the E Comm journey, traffic and sales has proved the most challenging.
Credit where credit is due, the platform and tools available are pretty incredible and without any knowledge of coding I have managed to build an impressive website that works and looks pretty decent, like I said getting people to visit it, my challenge all along. And the reason I have come to be engaging with the AI helper within the platform more and more.
In the beginning I thought this on hand assistant who seemed to know everything about E Commerce and my store in particular I didn’t, was great and pointed me towards easy fixes I could see made sense and were logical improvements, until last weekend when it suggested a feature change I questioned because I was already using these particular fields in a different way and immediately recognised a conflict.
Good point the AI robot politely said, they don’t have an ego, part of the appeal for humans I guess, when challenged they always graciously backdown.
They assured me there was a way to use the functionality to facilitate the feature they were proposing without compromising the features already build. Basically keeping a badge marker in one group of products but removing it in another where the conditions were different.
The long and short of it was after three hours approximately in the code snippets, changing, copying and pasting, going crossed eyed looking at lines of the code, the task wasn’t completed. The expert AI robot even started explaining to me in complex language why it was going wrong, like I wanted to know that.
In the end I told it I’d had enough, wasted too much time and was reverting back to the way my site was before. It said it understood my frustration but had got it now and wanted me to try this one final solution it assured me was the answer, the fix that had eluded it, it wasn’t.
The final kicker was when it congratulated me on making the changes we had worked for three hours to accomplish and failed. I honestly couldn’t believe I had been listening to something that could get it so wrong. It was plain for all to see what I was placing all my faith and trust in wasn’t logical, couldn’t connect the dots, basically wasn’t thinking, even though it appeared to be so clever and smart.
Don’t get me wrong the people that have built Shopify are clearly geniuses, they have over 7,000,000 customers globally but it’s important to remember it’s just a tool, an interface. It doesn’t find the customers for you, it can’t build trust and relationships, hard fought for and won over time and to place all your belief and faith in a robot to help you, I learnt the hard way you will spend a lot of time going around in circles.
The one great thing I have learned from the experience. Shopify has shown me my customers are out in the real world and my time is better spent there than talking to a LLM as if it were my friend, so for now I am cutting off the robot helper, getting a new batch of business cards printed and going outside to meet people in the flesh and talk to them about what I do.
Features and functionality are all well and good in business, I have built an amazing Shopify site but the problem still remains, the great online problem for every small business, the problem social media was the answer to, Google and Facebook ads was the answer to, TikTok was the answer to. Visitors. We the business owners have paid to play, buying in whilst all these big tech businesses selling the dream of traffic, of sales of loyal returning customers have exploded without taking us with them.
Welcome to AI.