Episode 405: Shopify Summer Editions 2025 Retail Playbooks with Ray Reddy

If you’ve ever felt bottlenecked by clunky systems or watched staff slow down as store complexity ramps up, the changes here are the toolkit we’ve been waiting for.

After my deep dive, I’m breaking down three playbooks you can act on now. Use them to unlock faster in-store service, join up data across online and physical, and actually customize your POS the way your business needs—no giant tech budget required.

Let’s get straight to the point: what’s new is more than features. Shopify is making enterprise-level tools, APIs, and unified data models accessible to brands like ours, not just the big names.

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Listen or Skip: Is This Episode Essential?

Here’s how I decide which conversations are worth my time or yours: does this episode offer strategic, high-leverage insight for any brand with in-store ambitions? My answer is yes—which is why I’m sharing these distilled takeaways and direct playbooks below.

If you have any retail presence—flagship, pop-up, or even seasonal—Ray maps out how we get unified data, faster staff ramp-up, and in-store agility our teams actually feel. This isn’t a product pitch; it’s a guide on putting new Shopify power directly to work.

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Meet the Guest: Ray Reddy

Ray Reddy, Shopify’s VP of Product for Retail, leads the unified commerce charge. I’ve followed his work for years, and he’s the guy who cuts through the buzzwords and actually puts feedback from brands like ours into the roadmap. His focus: make in-store tech as fast and flexible as the best ecommerce, without drowning us in vendor talk or costly middleware.

If you want his direct perspective, check out Ray’s LinkedIn profile or browse the official Shopify POS page for the latest updates.

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Playbook 1:

Maximizing In-Store Efficiency with Shopify POS 10

I’ve run enough shop floors to see where real dollars slip through the cracks: slow checkouts, confused staff, long lines, “where’s the item?” searches that grind energy and conversions down. When I heard Ray spell out how POS 10 fixes these, it hit home.

Our Shared Challenge: Store Growth = More Complexity

Here’s what stores like ours deal with as soon as growth hits:

• Checkout grinds to a crawl with staff fumbling on poor search or nested menus.
• Training a new hire takes hours, not minutes.
• We duct-tape together online and in-store tools, and middleware headaches slow us down.
• Staff churn burns time and morale, and friction breaks the customer journey.

I know because I’ve tallied up those lost weekends and rotting staff schedules myself.

The Blueprint We Can Use

Here’s how POS 10 lets us flip the script:

• Super-fast “Google-style” fuzzy search: No more dead ends, even with 50k+ SKUs. Search by fragment or partial name.
• Always-on action bar: The key actions—find, add, discount, exchange—never go missing. Staff don’t need to memorize nested screens.
• Clear, simple cart/order screens: You see every line item at a glance, access everything with your thumb, and staff actually build confidence shift one.
• Unified branding: Every UI touchpoint is in our store’s colors, not generic white labels.

I’ve seen teams cut cart build/checkout times by 5–8% after moving to POS 10—and the true win is how much less staff training is needed. People get up and running fast, with less handholding.

The Golden Nugget

It’s intuitive—training took a few minutes and in one shift people are ready to go. – Ray Reddy

The Action Step to Take

Audit your own busiest checkout moments. Where are we losing time—searching SKUs, navigating screens, managing bigger carts? Now, picture POS 10’s smart search or always-on workflows in that spot. If one of those new features would cut waits or boost confidence, you’ve got a business case to move. Roll this into your next hire’s onboarding and see the compounding effect for yourself.

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Playbook 2:

Building a Unified Omnichannel Experience

We all agree: disconnected customer journeys bleed loyalty and lull revenue. Every time a customer gets treated as “new” because the system can’t see their full history, trust takes a hit—and conversion rates never recover.

Where We’re Stuck

Most brands I talk to are running two separate tracks: ecommerce and physical retail. Data gets siloed, loyalty programs fall flat, and the in-store team has no visibility into online purchases or preferences. The result? We under-serve high-value customers and guess at what’s working across channels.

The Blueprint We Should Act On

Ray’s push at Shopify means there’s now a native, shared customer model. No more patching with middleware or day-late syncing. When I see a regular come to the counter, the staff can pull up their history—what they bought online, loyalty status, and even open carts.

We now have:

• Unified customer profiles at every touchpoint.
• Analytics that track cross-channel impact: See how online drives in-store and vice versa.
• Seamless buy/return/pickup flows: Buy online, pick up or return anywhere; rewards and order data sync in real-time.
• One brand experience: Whether it’s rewards, marketing, or receipts, we look polished and consistent.

When my peers started using this system, onboarding dropped, tech headaches faded, and retention improved measurably. Brand after brand sees the difference when staff can actually recognize customers and use data in the moment—without jumping systems.

The Golden Nugget

When we say one system we mean like there is a single customer model that spans online and in store. The way that developers build and the way that you would customize things work in the same way online and in store because they’re actually built on the same foundation and platform and were designed to work together. – Ray Reddy

Your Next Action

Walk through your customer journey start to finish. Can you or your team see everything they’ve purchased, everywhere? Are rewards, preferences, and returns handled smoothly on both sides? If not, now’s the time to dig into Shopify’s upgrade tools and support—because those who move first gain in loyalty and LTV while the rest chase behind.

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Playbook 3:

Real Retail Customization—Accessible to All

Let’s be honest, until recently, custom POS or workflow tweaks were only for the big brands with deep pockets. Most of us had to accept out-of-the-box “good enough” tools.

The Customization Roadblock

I’ve lost count of how many times personalizing receipts, adding a loyalty popup, or streamlining a workflow meant either spending big on devs or giving up entirely. APIs were limited. Custom UIs were locked down. Small and mid-sized brands had to play by someone else’s rules.

How We Break Through

POS 10 plus Shopify’s new AI-driven tools change the game:

• Hundreds of new API endpoints let us shape receipt layouts, loyalty, and cart workflows to fit actual store needs.
• Embeddable in-store apps and UI blocks let us match POS interfaces to branding and intuitive flows.
• AI-enabled workflow builders mean we can automate daily or repetitive tasks in just a few clicks or prompts. Think: triggering loyalty offers at checkout or setting up live micro-surveys—no coding required.

We’re no longer stuck waiting for the next big core update; we can experiment and iterate live, right on the shop floor.

The Golden Nugget

AI will democratize software—customizing POS will soon be as easy as creating a TikTok. Soon, it won’t matter if you can code or not; it’s all about the creativity behind the workflow. – Ray Reddy

What I’m Doing (and You Should Too)

Start by picking one repetitive, time-wasting task your in-store team does every day—maybe stock checks at another location or looking up loyalty status. Jump into the new POS app ecosystem and see if an embeddable app or API can automate it out of existence. Don’t overhaul everything at once; test, measure, and stack micro-automations. The brands who move on small wins now layer them into the fully adaptive in-store journeys our customers expect.

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Conclusion: Putting Unified Commerce To Work—Our Way

Shopify’s 2025 upgrades, led by Ray Reddy’s retail blueprint, aren’t just incremental—they signal the baseline for real unified commerce that we drive, not the other way around. By moving to POS 10 and adopting true unified data and customization, we finally get efficiency, control, and personalization—without depending on legacy systems or vendors.

These three playbooks aren’t just tactics; they’re the new fundamentals. Embrace them, and your store joins the leaders turning data into revenue, staff into brand champions, and omnichannel into reality instead of a slogan.

Thanks for building together and raising the retail bar.

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Listen to Episode 405 with Ray Reddy:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stream here

— Links referenced:

• • Ray Reddy LinkedIn
  • Shopify POS