Most Shopify brands are chasing the next shiny AI growth tactic. The ones actually getting recommended inside ChatGPT and surfacing in Google’s AI Overviews are winning on something far less glamorous: clean, structured, AI-readable product data.
If you’re a founder doing between $500K and $50M and your catalog still lives across spreadsheets, supplier emails, designer hand-offs, and a minefield of Shopify metafields, you’re effectively invisible on the surfaces where buyers are increasingly starting their search.
Trever Chidester is the Director of Partnerships at Plytix, rated the number one PIM on G2 for years running. He’s spent his days inside real Shopify implementations, watching exactly where merchants break and what changes when product data finally becomes a single source of truth that humans, internal teams, and the LLMs can all rely on.
In this conversation, Trever makes the case that the LLMs crawling your store want a very different version of your product page than your buyers do, and that the brands getting found in the AI era are the ones feeding each audience what it actually needs. We get into why the data most catalogs run on is quietly broken, what that’s costing you, and where the tooling most merchants lean on falls short. Whether you’re running 200 SKUs on a single storefront or thousands of products across multiple markets and languages, this is the playbook for getting found in the AI era.
Let’s dive in. 👇
✅ Why your product data is quietly becoming your most important growth lever. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews are pulling from structured catalogs to decide what gets recommended, which means messy data isn’t just an operations headache anymore. It’s a discoverability problem, and Trever pinpoints where that line gets crossed.
✅ The PDP split almost nobody is talking about. Your buyers and the LLMs crawling your store want two very different versions of the same product page. Trever breaks down why, and what serving both looks like without tanking conversion.
✅ Where Shopify’s built-in bulk editing quietly burns your team’s hours. The real limits show up around bulk replace and remove, image formatting, metafields, and multi-language workflows, and most merchants don’t feel it until they’re deep in a launch. We get specific on what’s actually broken.
✅ The exact merchant profile that hits the PIM inflection point first. If you’re past 200 SKUs, running multiple stores, or selling across markets and languages, you cross a line where spreadsheets stop scaling. Trever names who feels it first, and what to watch for if you’re not there yet.
✅ How an enterprise-grade tool got within reach of early-stage brands. Plytix built its reputation on serious mid-market and enterprise catalogs, then packaged that power into a far more accessible Shopify entry point. We dig into what that actually unlocks for operators who could never justify legacy PIM.
✅ A realistic crawl-walk-run path to adopting a PIM without the scary project. From the first import to knowing when it makes sense to graduate from the Shopify app to the full platform, Trever lays out a low-risk way to test it on your own catalog before you commit.
Plytix gives you a single place to create and manage all your product content on Shopify.
Import your entire Shopify catalog in one click, and from there, you can bulk edit thousands of products, variants, metafields, and images with AI that actually knows your products.
Create new listings, optimize for SEO and AI search, translate and localize content, generate and enhance images, and sync everything across your Shopify stores and markets without breaking a thing.
Your whole team can work from the same place with unlimited users, commenting, and version history, so everyone stays on the same page. With Plytix, your listings stay accurate, your products get discovered, and your product catalog finally feels under control.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth running underneath most AI strategy conversations right now. While everyone debates agentic storefronts, AI shopping assistants, and which large language model will win, the actual lever for getting recommended in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews is far less glamorous. It’s clean, structured, AI-readable product data. And most Shopify catalogs simply aren’t there yet.
Trever shares what he sees when he gets inside real Shopify brands, and the pattern is familiar. One ecommerce manager juggling spreadsheets from merchandising, buyers, and suppliers. Fighting Shopify upload errors. Navigating a minefield of metafields built to patch missing attributes. Layer on the constant scramble for fresh imagery from photographers and designers, and you get launch workflows that slow down at exactly the moment AI surfaces are rewarding brands that can publish clean, attribute-rich catalogs at speed.
That’s the problem Plytix has spent the better part of a decade solving. As one of the highest-rated PIMs on G2 for years running, Plytix has lived in the mid-market and enterprise layer, giving brands a single source of truth that feeds multiple stores, marketplaces, languages, and B2B distributors. What’s new is the part that matters for the rest of us: a new Shopify app, a free tier covering up to 500 products and 500 AI credits, and an AI Content Studio that can bulk-generate LLM-optimized descriptions, transform images, and even create studio-style product photography without leaving the platform. In practice, that puts enterprise-grade infrastructure within reach of merchants who could never justify a $10K to $30K a year PIM contract.
Trever also lays out the strategic case for separating LLM-facing content from buyer-facing content. He walks through how Plytix becomes the source of truth that feeds your Shopify catalog, which in turn feeds the LLMs. And he explains why the content-led growth philosophy championed by Plytix founder Morten Poulsen reframes product content from a maintenance chore into a genuine growth engine.
This isn’t a pitch for yet another app. It’s a blueprint for treating your product data like the asset it has quietly become.
👉 Product data is the new SEO. The brands getting cited and recommended in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews aren’t winning on clever tactics or bigger budgets. They’re winning on structured, attribute-rich, AI-readable catalogs that LLMs can actually parse and trust. Get the data right and discoverability starts to compound on its own.
👉 LLMs and humans need different PDPs. Your buyer wants emotional, visual, conversion-focused content. The LLM needs depth, structure, and answer-shaped fields before it will confidently recommend you at all. Forcing both audiences through the same field set is exactly why so many brands underperform on AI discoverability.
👉 S preadsheet sprawl is a silent growth tax. Every hour your ecommerce manager spends chasing designers, reconciling supplier files, and duct-taping metafields is an hour not spent on positioning, merchandising, or launch velocity. The cost shows up as slower launches and inconsistent data, not as a tidy line item on your P&L, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed for so long.
👉 The Shopify bulk editing gap is real. Shopify still can’t natively replace or remove product data in bulk, format imagery at scale, or manage multi-language attributes cleanly. Any brand with a real catalog outgrows the native admin far faster than most founders expect, usually right around the launch that finally breaks the spreadsheet.
👉 PIM has finally moved downstream. What used to cost $10K to $30K a year now starts with a free tier and a $149/month Shopify Special for up to 10,000 SKUs. That shift hands smaller merchants the same data infrastructure that $50M brands have quietly relied on for years.
👉 A crawl-walk-run rollout beats rip and replace. Install the app, let the import pull in a sample of your catalog, validate the workflow against your own products, then scale into the full platform when it earns it. That progressive path consistently beats trying to judge enterprise software from a single sales demo.
Trever Chidester
Director of Partnerships, Plytix
Trever Chidester leads partnerships at Plytix, the product information management platform that has held the number one PIM ranking on G2 for years running. He joined six years ago as one of the company’s first account executives, working hands-on with merchants to implement PIM across both B2B and B2C channels. That gave him a front-row seat to how product data workflows actually break inside growing brands, long before AI made the stakes this obvious.
That implementation background is what makes Trever’s perspective so useful for operators. He can speak fluently to both the early-stage Shopify merchant drowning in spreadsheets and the multi-market brand trying to push clean data into ChatGPT-era discovery surfaces, because he’s sat across the table from both. As Plytix moves downstream with its new Shopify app and free tier, Trever sits at the center of the effort to make enterprise-grade product data infrastructure accessible to merchants who could never have justified legacy PIM pricing.
Featured in This Episode:
Over 9 seasons, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to chat with some of the brightest founders building amazing Shopify brands, as well as the partners shaping the app and marketing ecosystem. Every conversation has taught me something new, and I’m grateful for the chance to learn alongside you.
What matters most is that this podcast helps you solve real challenges and discover new ways to grow. Your support, feedback, and stories have made this journey truly special. Thanks for tuning in, sharing your wins and losses, and being part of the eCommerce Fastlane community.
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Steve Hutt:
All right, welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I am your host, Steve. Today, I want to get into this big narrative that everybody’s talking about: this whole AI thing. You think about ChatGPT recommending products, you think about Google AI mode. It’s now pulling from the shopping graph, and Shopify is rolling out these agentic storefronts. I’ve been talking about this, I’ve been writing about this. The way people discover and buy is starting to shift, and it’s shifting quite quickly.
Steve Hutt:
And I think the brands that have very clean, structured product data are the ones that are starting to show up more in these new surfaces. It’s incredibly important. So if you’re a progressive brand thinking, “Hey, yes, fair enough, paid, social, organic reach, all these things are really important,” I think brands that have a clean catalog that’s not scattered across multiple spreadsheets and craziness are set up for a lot of success. That’s one of the reasons why I have my guest on today. It’s Trever Chidester, and he is the Director of Partnerships at a company called Plytix. They’re one of the top-rated product information management platforms in the market. It’s referred to as a PIM, but they’re much more than that. The nice thing about Trever is he’s spent a lot of his days inside real Shopify brands, implementing and watching what actually works and what actually breaks.
Steve Hutt:
And I think that’s one of his value props and his superpower. I’m hoping that today we’re going to get a case to understand what product data quality really is and why it’s becoming a large growth lever. That’s one of the big hero ideas they have on their homepage at Plytix: why it’s important and why it’s a growth lever, or why they believe it is. I’m a proponent of the product. I think it’s fantastic. I’ve known about Plytix for a really long time, even when I was inside Shopify, and I’ve been recommending it since the early days when it was very narrowly focused on what it does. But it’s expanded. So it’s really great to have you on the show today, Trever.
Steve Hutt:
So, welcome.
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, thanks, Steve, and thanks for having me. I’m a big fan of the podcast, so it’s exciting to be here.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, this is really cool. So let’s talk about what the average Shopify brand’s product data actually looks like. We’ll talk about the platform in a minute, but I’m curious: when a brand comes to Plytix and says, “Okay,” and you go have a little sneak peek at where they’re at today, what do you see that tells you there are some challenges in the average brand today?
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, we’re usually looking at a pretty messy situation when it comes to brands trying to do this on their own. In Shopify, what we usually see is an ecommerce team, or one ecommerce manager, who’s just managing the Shopify listing. Maybe they have their own spreadsheet of data that they get from a merchandising team, from buyers, or even from suppliers. They send them that data, and the ecommerce manager has to use it to get products ready for a new launch. In Shopify, they’re trying to upload that, and they get a lot of errors. A lot of times it’s difficult to get all that information properly set up in the spreadsheet so it goes into Shopify the right way. I know a lot of merchants who just do it manually. They add SKUs and their variants one by one within Shopify because that spreadsheet upload is so cumbersome. And that’s just the basic information Shopify requires for any given product.
Trever Chidester:
But a lot of times, when I get into these Shopify stores, it’s a minefield of metafields. There are so many different pieces of information that they’ve had to create metafields for because Shopify doesn’t have attributes for them built into the platform. So they use metafields to do that. That ends up being a whole other section where they hold information unique to different product categories or different places they’re selling products. Then on top of all that, of course, they have all their digital assets. That’s usually either somebody else on the team or the ecommerce manager bugging designers or the photographer to get new product images in for the next launch. It really ends up being this ecommerce manager who’s running down everybody on the team for all the different information they need to properly list products on the Shopify store. So what we’re really doing is trying to slot in a tool there that can make that whole process much more streamlined for the ecommerce manager.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, that’s amazing. One thing I did just before recording today is I noticed that Plytix has really expanded from the original days, like I mentioned at the top of the show. You’ve gone way beyond the traditional PIM, this product information management solution. I know there’s a built-in DAM, which is a digital asset management component. But can you walk me through the full platform as it is today? I do want to focus more narrowly on enriching and improving the whole workflow of product data as it relates to AI and discoverability in these solutions, but I want to make sure those listening today can understand what Plytix actually is as a whole, as a larger platform.
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been in the PIM space for a little over 10 years. I joined the team six years ago as an account executive, so I was one of the first account executives working with new merchants, trying to get started with PIM. In a lot of cases, we were working with brands that were selling both B2B and B2C. We didn’t work with many brands on Shopify in the very beginning because we didn’t have the app at that point. A lot of our customers had the classic PIM pain point: they had so much information coming from different suppliers they worked with, and many of them, selling B2B, had to get that information out to their different distributors or retailers.
Trever Chidester:
So they had information coming in in a lot of different formats and information going out in a lot of different formats, and they needed one place where they could easily manage all that data. That’s the bread and butter of PIM: giving you a single source of truth to manage and organize all that information in one place when it’s coming in really messy and needs to go out in lots of different formats. We’ve been in that space, perfecting this one solution, this one source of truth, this one tool to manage that information.
Trever Chidester:
And we’ve seen this rise of Shopify in these last few years. It’s been incredible. At the beginning, it was just an SMB tool for entrepreneurs, and now we’re seeing some of the biggest brands in the world on Shopify. That’s been a cool story to follow, I’m sure, for you as well. For us, we’ve seen that growth and noticed how Shopify did this by offering a very approachable solution for smaller businesses while also creating and designing a powerful solution for big brands. We’ve done something similar, just in a different order. We started with a powerful solution, and now we’re packaging it in a smaller way for smaller brands to get their foot in the door with a solution that can really help them manage their data better. So when you talk about a larger solution, that’s where we’re looking at Plytix as a PIM. We’ve been the number-one PIM on G2’s review platform for the last five or six years. Now we’re packaging the tool into a Shopify multi-store bulk editor that makes it easier for brands to manage their information on Shopify.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s nice to see the full scope of what’s available. I think that’s one of the nice things about the solution. There’s a bit of a crawl–walk–run scenario here where it’s not all or nothing. It’s literally, “Hey, you have this particular challenge right now. If you’re truly playing in spreadsheets, think about the time that takes—team members spending time importing and exporting and making changes—where a lot of that can live directly inside the Plytix solution.” I think there’s a time benefit you get from that.
Steve Hutt:
And one thing I love too is the single source of truth. Especially when different team members are touching different things, if Plytix is the source of truth for product data, that adds a lot more consistency and accuracy. I think that’s really important.
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, that’s exactly it. One place where everybody can go and know, “Okay, this is the most up-to-date information.” That’s exactly it.
Steve Hutt:
So let’s talk a bit about this whole AI situation, because that’s the key I want to get across today. I’ve seen it firsthand and I’ve been talking about this, and you’re involved in the platform that’s solving this problem, but the data is broken to a certain degree. I think that’s costing a lot of real hours, trying to manage things one by one and hacking away, a little bit of duct tape going on. I also believe there’s a financial impact happening for brands that don’t have clean, proper, structured data that’s usable for these AI systems. Can you talk about that? Because you’ve seen one side of the equation, and now you’re seeing the upside when people implement Plytix and what that means for their AI discoverability and starting to get some revenue from that.
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, I think this ties in really well with what you had on a recent episode about shiny, distracting strategies—shiny objects. That’s exactly it. Merchants can get tripped up because there’s so much hype. I think agentic storefronts might be something we get to in the future, but it’s not really an actionable thing merchants can do right now to increase revenue. What they can do is improve their product discoverability. I think all of us, as online shoppers, can say we do this now in our own way. We go to ChatGPT and start asking it to recommend products. I was just getting a new faucet this weekend. I went to the specific website where I wanted to see products and asked it to show me the top five products that matched what I was specifically looking for, which was a new faucet for my kitchen.
Trever Chidester:
And it did a great job. It showed me those products. This product discoverability piece is where we’re seeing brands really excel when they’re looking for an AI-driven strategy. To do that right, it involves a lot of content. It involves having a lot of configurable information for the different problems you’re trying to solve or the different audiences you have. What AI wants—or what LLMs want to see on your PDP—is different from what an end buyer wants to see. If you can provide the LLM with its own feed of product information that’s customized for what it needs, and then have your PDP tailored toward conversion, so when someone lands on your PDP they see the data they need from a human perspective to buy that product, then your chance of getting discovered is much higher. And your chance of converting that buyer is much higher because you have custom information for each.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah. You know what I find interesting? The person who’s querying—just like with a traditional search engine, say you’re going to Google directly—when you type something and you’re looking for products, that’s one thing. But if you’re using Claude or Perplexity or whatever, you tend to be a lot more narrative and longer in what you’re trying to find. You’re giving a lot more context inside these chat solutions, these large language models. Because of that, it’s challenging for these models to triangulate and figure out, “What’s the true context here? What is this person actually asking for?” I think that’s part of the data problem happening right now.
Steve Hutt:
Maybe you go in and say, “I’m looking for a pair of sneakers. I have a high arch, I want them in white,” and so on. You’re saying all these things, and some people are even using the voice modes built into these solutions. Because of that, it’s just one big long narrative. So the question is, what are you doing with your product data so you can be discoverable for these sorts of queries, versus just thinking about head terms and a few long-tail terms? Everybody’s been fighting that in the SEO world forever. But now progressive brands are getting smart and thinking, “What are people actually asking for? Sneakers under $200 in white for those with a high arch.” Okay, that’s interesting. How do you get discovered in that? Is that part of your FAQs? There’s so much to unpack here.
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, yeah. If you think about it, it’s really cool because all of us are online shoppers, so we can all see those behaviors. If you plugged all that into old-school Google search, you’d get no results—you’d have nothing. You’d have to go for keywords that don’t really describe what you’re looking for. But now you can be so much more descriptive. It’s challenging for brands to face that and meet that need, but the cool thing about AI is we can use it to our advantage too. We can use it to transform information we already have into new content that’s optimized that way. That’s one of the really cool things the AI Content Studio within Plytix can help you with. If you have a list of all your products and their traditional descriptions, you can do a bulk edit to create new descriptions optimized for a particular LLM or a particular audience.
Steve Hutt:
Good stuff. All right, I have a question for you, because I’ve known about Plytix for a really long time. You’ve been in the PIM space for quite a while. Like I said, I’ve recommended it to many brands I managed when I was inside Shopify. Now I see an interesting add-on to it, or at least a new entry point, with your app and this Shopify bulk editor option. Can you talk a bit about the overall strategy and the fit in the marketplace? Clearly you’ve had your flag planted in mid-market to enterprise PIM, but now you seem to be opening up and being a lot more friendly to early-stage Shopify brands because of the Shopify app. So can you talk about that strategy and the migration path through the app store?
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, absolutely. It really follows this idea that we’re trying to lower the barrier of entry for businesses to get a PIM solution implemented so they can use these tools to manage their information more easily. We’ve been in this space for quite some time, and we’ve seen a lot of the reasons why businesses haven’t been able to get this into their tech stack. A lot of it has to do with the fact that it’s a big piece to bite off, a big project to undertake, and it can be quite expensive for many businesses, even if they see that the ROI is eventually going to be great. The connection between getting started and seeing that growth is often missing.
Trever Chidester:
So what we’re trying to do is separate this into something more approachable. Start with just their Shopify store: let’s make it easier to edit products in Shopify with an easier bulk editor and an AI Content Studio inside a smaller Shopify app that’s more affordable and accessible for Shopify merchants. Then, as you get used to using Plytix and the PIM, you start to realize how much more our solution can offer. Our CEO and founder, Morten Poulsen, has been working a lot on this concept of content-led growth—using your content to grow product discoverability and reach online. Using Plytix, and getting introduced to it through the Shopify bulk editor, really sets up brands to use it as a content-led growth platform, where data and product content become their growth engine.
Steve Hutt:
And then, how is the product itself priced? I think there’s going to be a full range of merchants listening. I’m sure there’s a low price or a free tier for up to a certain number of products to get people onboarded and learning the solution. And then does it scale based on the number of SKUs?
Trever Chidester:
Yeah. The app itself is free to download, so you can jump on the app store now and download it directly from there. Our Magic Import is going to pull products directly from your store. It’ll take around 50 products at the beginning, just to keep it quick, and then you’ll be able to see your products in the app. You can start to test the bulk editing and see what the connector looks like. You’ll even be able to test the AI features as well. We offer 500 free AI credits for free users so you can start to play around.
Trever Chidester:
Depending on what your catalog looks like, you can even stay on the free account. If you have fewer than 500 products, for example, you can use the free account indefinitely, with as many Shopify stores as you want. Then it grows based on your catalog, your SKU count, or the digital asset storage you might need. That’s going to determine the plan. We have a Shopify Special at $149 a month, and that gives you access to up to 10,000 SKUs in the platform. There are other parts of the platform you can add on, like AI credits if you need more translations or more digital asset transformations. If you want to remove backgrounds from your images or create studio-style images with AI, you can do that with AI credits. You can add those packages, and then there are other parts of the platform as well, like our brand portals and product sheets, which allow you to create digital catalogs and PDFs from the products in the PIM.
Steve Hutt:
Ah, very cool. So how does this relate to Shopify Catalog? I’ve talked a bit about that. Most people listening to the show are on Shopify already, but some are on competing platforms or WooCommerce or BigCommerce or who knows. They’re still signing up for Shopify Catalog because they want Shopify to send structured data over to large language models for discoverability. I think Shopify is trying to be the source of truth, at least as the connection point between what’s in your Shopify store—or your catalog if you’re not a Shopify customer yet—and these large language models. So how do Plytix and Shopify Catalog work together?
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, this one’s really interesting because Shopify is being really smart by offering this kind of solution as a way to get merchants selling on other ecommerce platforms to test Shopify and use it for this functionality. I’ve seen so many merchants lately with multiple stores on different ecommerce platforms. They’ve been on WooCommerce for the last ten years, but they’re now exploring Shopify and have two of their country sites on Shopify. I’m seeing that quite a bit. Plytix is a great solution for them because it lets them be agnostic about the ecommerce platform and just use the ecommerce platform as another endpoint for their product information. They have all their SKUs and product data in Plytix, then send the products they sell in certain markets or languages to their Shopify store and others to their WooCommerce store.
Trever Chidester:
The same thing works with Shopify Catalog. If you’re selling all your products on a Magento site, for example, but you want to use Shopify Catalog for LLM and product discoverability through AI, you can connect a Shopify store through Plytix and send all the products you have on another store into Shopify, creating them all in bulk from Plytix.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, it’s interesting too because, like I said, I wrote about this and even talked to one of the VPs at Shopify about this solution. They said—and maybe this will change in the future—that bulk editing is really challenging right now. Shopify only adds; they can’t replace or remove anything in bulk from within the catalog. They also mentioned that image formatting and similar tasks are all done one by one. Metafield management is still quite messy. You mentioned AI translation—they’re just not doing it. I think that’s one advantage of Plytix. You can still have the source of truth for all your product data, and it can be LLM-friendly and translated, and you can do all the things you need to do in bulk.
Steve Hutt:
But then, if I’m correct, once you’ve structured the data accordingly within Plytix, that can be synced over to Shopify’s Catalog and then synced over to these LLMs. Am I right that the workflow is: Plytix is the source of truth; you get things set up and do all your work there, and then from there you connect to Shopify and Catalog?
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, that’s exactly it. You can see how those tools that help manage product information within Shopify can be such time-savers because you can make big bulk edits, bulk-produce AI descriptions, and transform images, like I said, creating AI studio-style imagery. You can do that all within one platform. A lot of merchants right now are using five or six different apps to do all this. You can do it all from within Plytix and then easily sync it to your Shopify store.
Steve Hutt:
This is amazing. So who do you believe is the sweet-spot merchant who’s listening today? There are people who are side hustlers, maybe dropshipping, just trying to get traction. There are a lot firmly in the mid-market, and then there’s that 10 or 15 percent in the enterprise, on the Plus side of the business. Who gets the best value compared to the typical spreadsheet approach a lot of people are using? Who gets the best value out of Plytix today?
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, I’d say if you’re selling more than about 200 products and you have either one store selling into a few different markets or languages, or if you have multiple stores where you’re having to make different edits in each backend, then it’s something you should check out today. It’s just going to make your life so much easier. If you’re a merchant with a small SKU count and only one store, it’s still worth checking out just to see if our AI content can make it easier to sell new products and get them up and running. But I really think the sweet spot is when you’re working with multiple markets or multiple stores, or you’re trying to add products quickly to your catalog and you’re getting slowed down by all the content creation you need to do. That’s where the AI piece helps so much. Using AI is really about creating space for you to speed up your product launches.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, I totally get it. I think it’s a mindset shift right now. A lot of people have heard of what a PIM is. What’s interesting—and you’re flipping the narrative, which I think is great—is that it’s always been a costly mid-market to enterprise technology. It just has been. When I was inside Plus recommending Plytix in the past, these were brands doing upwards of 5 to 10, even up to 50 million dollars, with large teams. There was a cost factor that went along with enterprise software. You understand that as an account executive, right? It’s interesting now that the narrative is being flipped. Now there’s a free tier—500 SKUs and 500 credits a month. That’s a really good entry point for someone to get access to an enterprise tool that, literally a few years ago, was thousands of dollars a month.
Steve Hutt:
Right?
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, you’re spot on. It’s really lowering the barrier of entry for merchants to finally use these tools to make their lives easier when managing information in their web stores. Before, this would have cost at least $10,000 to $30,000 a year to use. A lot of times these solutions would get pulled into other parts of the business, which slowed down adoption because they were too expensive and had to be justified to multiple teams. A lot of times you had failed implementations too, just because the tool was too difficult to get their data model and everything set up.
Trever Chidester:
So we’ve tried to lower that barrier by offering a free solution that everybody can start with, and by creating that Magic Import that automatically pulls all your products from your Shopify store and creates all the attributes and metafields you need within Plytix, automatically. It makes the process much more accessible for merchants. The really cool thing is PIM has been helping mid-market and enterprise brands scale for a long time. Giving smaller businesses and Shopify merchants those tools allows them to scale as well, because our tool has already helped those bigger merchants scale. Getting in with the Shopify bulk editor and multi-store management gives you access to a tool you can use for years to grow your catalog and sell more of your products on different marketplaces or list your products wherever you need them to be.
Steve Hutt:
One thing I want to throw out to those listening right now: this happens often. You listen to a podcast, there’s great information and knowledge, but then procrastination sets in. Not that the people listening are procrastinators—they’re clearly trying to educate themselves on the next move to grow their business. But what do you say to people who are a little apprehensive, knowing they have access to an enterprise-quality product that’s been around for 10 years, keeps iterating, and is now moving downstream? Is it truly that easy to go to the app store, install the app, have it ingest a range of products, and go from there? Do you believe it’s set up so it’s not going to be a complicated time-suck? I want to make sure people don’t think this will be some big, painful project. I’d like to hear it from you, because you’ve onboarded lots of clients who were apprehensive and their lives have completely changed because of it.
Trever Chidester:
Yeah. We know this has been a hard hurdle for a lot of businesses to overcome after working in the PIM space for so long, so we’ve really designed this to make that hurdle almost invisible. Part of that is the Magic Importer. It’s only going to bring in a selection of your products at first, so you can do it in about 10 to 30 seconds. It will create your Plytix account with a sample of your products. It’s a very low-friction, easy way to get started and test things out. Try the AI features, and if you like how it works and like the UI, then it’s as simple as downloading the rest of your catalog. You click one button to download the rest. That might take five to ten minutes, and we’ll send you an email when it’s done.
Trever Chidester:
After that five to ten minutes, you’ll have all your products in Plytix. Then you can start using the AI functionality to bulk create descriptions or images, or use the bulk editor to bulk edit products, do find-and-replace actions, and then easily sync that with your store. The connector is automatically set up as well, so you don’t have to do any attribute mapping or anything like that. It’s all automatically configured. Once you make those edits, if you want to see the changes in your store, it’s as simple as clicking the process button.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, this is amazing. Thanks for sharing that, because I think it really sets the stage for the overall platform and where you’re headed. I love seeing a native Shopify app. The barrier to entry to be approved as a proper certified Shopify app is high—there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get into the app store and ensure data integrity. But it’s a great entry point and a way to connect to the larger platform. Very, very cool. We’re just about at the end of today’s episode, but I know we had a quick chat before recording and I understand you’d like to offer a special listener-only promotion for those listening today, maybe even in lieu of the free trial that’s available in the app store.
Steve Hutt:
I’ll pass the baton to you. What do you think the next steps are for those listening?
Trever Chidester:
Yeah. It’s really as simple as downloading the app on your Shopify store. We’re public on the Shopify App Store, so you can find us by just searching for Plytix, and you’ll be able to download your products into Plytix automatically. We’re also offering 500 free AI credits so you can test the AI functionality. You can create studio-style imagery for your products and create new descriptions optimized for certain LLMs. So you can lean into that AI content right when you get into the platform. From there, for up to 500 products, you can sync to as many Shopify stores as you want, all with our free account, from one place.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, that’s amazing. All right, so it’s plytix.com/fastlane—that’s P-L-Y-T-I-X dot com slash fastlane—that will redirect, I think, to the app store. Or you can just search the app store right now, P-L-Y-T-I-X, and check it out. I always say this: you don’t know what you don’t know. I think it’s worth taking the opportunity to try it out and see what it does. I love that you have the same mindset I do, this crawl–walk–run mindset. I think the app is designed that way: install it, have it ingest a range of products, get used to the UI. How could this add to my daily workflow? How does it connect to everything else I’m doing? What are the benefits to me and my business? Then from there, if it works as expected, you can fully ingest the rest of your content, start using the AI tools, and go down that journey.
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, and one thing to add is that because we’ve been in this space for so long and have a full team of PIM experts, the tool is very easy to use and getting started is simple, but we also have a support team for any questions you might have. We can jump on a call at any point. So really test it out, get a feel for the UI, and if you get stuck, just send us an email or book a call. We’d be happy to talk you through getting the tool ready so it makes it easier for you to manage your products in Shopify.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, that’s amazing. All right, I’ll make sure I have links to everything in the show notes, even your knowledge base and things like that. You have a lot of great content. I think this is fantastic. I really enjoyed this recording. We’re in a phase right now where we’re bridging the gap between this enterprise tool that everybody’s been recommending for the longest time—clearly a winner in the marketplace—and the fact that you’re now making it much more accessible and clearly affordable for early-stage and extremely affordable for mid-market brands. So congratulations on getting into the app store and starting to make a difference in people’s lives in how they manage their product data.
Steve Hutt:
I love the concept Morten is working on with content-led growth. I think it’s so important to think about your content as it relates to discoverability and revenue. I think you guys are really onto something. So I just want to thank you for coming on the show today.
Trever Chidester:
Yeah, thanks, Steve. Thanks for helping us share this message. It’s been a long time coming that we’ve been trying to help merchants grow with Plytix, and we’re really excited to offer this to Shopify merchants so they can get their foot in the door and start using PIM.
Steve Hutt:
Beautiful. All right, that’s it for today. Thanks again for recording, and have yourself a lovely evening, and I’ll have a lovely morning.
