Click, Drag, Sell — E-commerce Made Simple With Brizy — Bogdan Condurache | How No-Code Website Builders Work, Why Website Building Gets Easier, Why Site

Click, Drag, Sell — E-commerce Made Simple With Brizy — Bogdan Condurache | How No-Code Website Builders Work, Why Website Building Gets Easier, Why Site Speed Matters, How Brizy Boosts Shopify Sites, Why Built-in Tools Help Marketin Speaker 2: This episode is sponsored by Ahrefs, the all-in-one marketing intelligence platform trusted by SEO professionals, content creators, and digital marketers around the world. Whether you're doing keyword research, checking backlinks, or analyzing competitors, Ahrefs gives you the tools to make smarter marketing decisions. Explore what Ahrefs can do at Ahrefs.com. Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today, we want to talk about website building. We want to find out what is the best way to keep your content actual online and how to make it very easy for you. A lot of people are not technical, educated. For them, it might be very difficult. They're not developers. I want to dive a little bit more into this topic. Joining me on the show today for this is Bogdan. He is the co-founder and chief product officer at Brizy. With over 15 years of experience in tech and design, he has previously worked for ventures like ThemeFuse and PixelKit. He specializes in creating innovative user experiences and leading product management. At Brizy, his mission is to democratize website building by making powerful design tools accessible for everyone, and that's what we want to talk about. So, let's welcome him to the show. Hi, Bogdan. How are you today? Speaker 1: Hey, Claus. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for the invite and hello to everyone watching the podcast. I'm Bogdan. I'm a co-founder at Brizy, and right now I'm a chief product officer, but I wear many hats in here, initially on the design front, and it's what I actually love to do most. But yeah, we need to do most of the stuff here being a startup, and it's a pleasure to be doing what I do right now. And for those who don't know Brizy, the Brizy builder ecosystem, we are a website building tool. This is a multi-platform. Basically, you can install it in WordPress as a plugin or use the standalone version. We call this the Brizy Cloud, which is similar to something like Wix or Squarespace or something based on cloud, not on WordPress. And we also have an app for Shopify, which is interesting for our topics. And lately, we've been working on the e-commerce functionality for the Brizy Cloud. So we have multiple tools and ways to build anything in web design from, I don't know, websites to landing pages to pop-ups to blog magazines, anything like that. And we are always looking for new stuff, the AI right now. And we are trying to be a tool that Agencies, freelancers, medium to small businesses use as a cost-effective solution in the white label one as well. Speaker 3: So let's dive a little bit into specifically for listeners who may not have any kind of experience in web development or very little. What makes it so difficult still nowadays to come up with a professional-looking web page, website? Speaker 1: I'd say the first thing that hits people that want to do it is that they don't actually know what to do and their content is not very specifically structured in a way that it makes sense. It's hard for people that are non-technical or not used to the space to build it. But now with many tools, AI, not necessarily AI, you can just make a plan and create stuff. And then with tools like ours, you can actually do it without the help of a specialized person that will work on you, on your website. But the thing is that we wanted to bring something very easy to use, and we've done it. But, in the end, for agencies and people that work on this professionally, it's also a nice way to build stuff easier, quicker, without having knowledge of code and having to hire super specialized people for this one. So, it's a win-win for non-technical people, like persons that want to build their own website, but also for agencies and even enterprise level. Speaker 3: Now, when it comes to website building, there's a lot of things involved. People talk about SEO. They talk about non-code. They talk about landing pages, all of these things. Obviously, integration in Shopify is a topic. Where does your help? For instance, a lot of our listeners are on Shopify. Where helps your tool with creating more content, more pages on Shopify? Speaker 1: Exactly. This is what we've done with our integration with Brizy and Shopify. It's a standalone app that helps people that already have a shop, let's say, but they don't have a theme or a template that is very easily customizable, and they maybe want a landing page or an about us page or something that needs to be created with some tools that are From the space of website builders, where you have all these tools and all these interesting elements that you can create and build pages and animations and stuff like that, and that's what we brought to the Shopify system, their structure with the products and catalog and everything is great, but they don't have that We bring easily workable pages and simple stuff and also pop-ups and all these kinds of notifications and stuff like that. We bring it to them, and it's easy to use, and it's drag and drop and no-code, and it's quite fun, I'd say. But yeah, it's what we do with Shopify. On this other solution that we have right now with Brizy Cloud Shops, it's an entire e-commerce solution that brings the functionality to our platform, let's say. Speaker 3: Okay. Let's clarify this. So, you have an app that integrates with your Shopify store, with your existing store, and then you are able to create more pages very easily in there. And then talk me through what's the cloud solution. Speaker 1: The cloud solution is an alternative, let's say, to Shopify or to other products like that, but it's meant to help our users, our existing users that already bought some of our plans in cloud, let's say. We host everything. We do everything for them, and they've built multiple websites, presentation websites, magazines, stuff like that. But they said, oh, my client wants a shop with this already made site. Mostly, these are simple shops. You won't see an Amazon with these clients, but simple stuff, gardening stuff, I don't know, jewelry, handmaids, they want a simple shop and they don't want to spend all this money on extra platforms. They already are here. Maybe they get an add-on with our plans and then just build something with the tools they already know and love. I think this is a solution for our existing users, let's say, but it's also something that somebody could come and get from scratch from us. But it's mostly for our existing users and agencies that wanted to build more stuff with our platform without having to resort to third parties and stuff like that. Speaker 3: I like this approach because sometimes you only have one or two products or just a product idea and you want to test it and then you don't want to build a huge store on Shopify. And as I said, with everything that comes with it, then you have to add all ads in Shopify and it becomes really expensive. Speaker 1: And not only that, but it's difficult to get your brand in there, move all the content, logos, the images, stuff like that that you maybe already have in this small site of yours that you already built with our solution and having to move everything. Maybe getting the same style of fonts and illustration is not that easy to start from scratch. Having it already here, it's quite easy to just add a shop. It's activate shop and you get a solution similar to Shopify, let's say, but easy to use. And it's meant for smaller shops. It's not meant for huge platforms. And yeah, so it's a solution that's perfect for our type of users. Speaker 3: It makes perfect sense and I like the approach because right now I think if you're on WordPress and you want to build something, then you're also like taking things from different suppliers and just try to build something together, which can become a little bit messy. Speaker 1: And all the plugins that you need to update and keep working on them to not get you in trouble in the long run, it's a bit stressful. I've worked on some of these shops and if you don't actually update them quite often, something breaks, something is problematic, maybe something is abandonware and yeah, it's very difficult. Speaker 3: You mentioned pop-ups. Is that something that you support in your solution as well? Speaker 1: Yes. The Bri builder has almost everything you'd wish for, meaning it also has pop-ups and these notifications and smart ways to show some pop-up after a certain number of scrolls or getting to a level in the page. We have all these tools that are easy to use and for marketers it's quite nice and it's built inside the platform so you don't need to get something external and the fonts maybe don't look the same, maybe the styling is different and people feel it. You might say people are not designers and they don't know what a good collaboration between the tools is, but I think many people know that this is something a bit different and not perfectly seamless in the design. But we do have this and it takes all the styles and everything. Speaker 3: You mentioned earlier AI. AI is all over the place. How does AI integrate into a page builder? Speaker 1: At this point in time, it's still early. We have introduced a solution with AI that builds you a quick website, basically a presentation website. We're not talking here about e-commerce because that's way more complicated and it would need some information, more information from you in regards to products and everything that's a shop, but a quick solution for a website. We're the only ones that use an integration with the Google My Business or Google Business Profile, which is, of course, those profiles that you find on Google Maps and stuff like that. You just need to add your name of the business. Let's say you have a coffee shop or, I don't know, something like that, a restaurant. You find it in a simple field, and you just press generate. Build me something based on my entry from Google. And we get from them, through APIs, we get some information regarding the address, regarding some images that maybe people use there or the owner uploaded in We generate some cool websites that you can, of course, bring them into Brizy and work on them some more and change anything you want there. But as a starting point, it's quite interesting and quite good for most parts, and it looks okay, and I think it saves a lot of people some time. But the most important stuff that we've seen with our customers using this type of AI shortcut, let's say, into building websites, is that they didn't know they They could build something like this quickly, and they don't have an idea of what my website should look like. And you can generate one or generate ten of them, and you can find something in these generations. And it gives them a quick start, and they hit the ground running, let's say, because it's something that they already see. It has their contact information and all this nice stuff, and they see their map in there and the working hours and everything we can get from Google Business. And it doesn't feel such a burden to start creating it. You have it like 60% there, 70%. I don't know. Sometimes if the website is simple, it's quite up there. They only need to maybe put their logo because we don't have it sometimes. And it's easy for them. But it's, of course, for smaller websites. This is our AI angle at this point. But in the future, I'm sure it will be much more interesting. Speaker 2: Let's take a moment to thank Ahrefs for their free web analytics tool, a free privacy-first analytics platform. It gives you a clear picture of your website activity, doesn't use cookies, and won't weight down your pages. It's incredible fast, easy to set up, and built by the same team behind one of the most trusted SEO tools in the world. Best of all, it's completely free and included in Ahrefs' webmaster tools plan. Head over to ahrefs.com slash awt to sign up. You will find the link also in the show notes. Speaker 3: I think it's a perfect angle because you start easy and obviously, if you have an idea and you want to have just a quick result and to test your idea, this might be just the right solution. It helps so much on time and you don't need to do the hard lifting because the AI is already doing this. That's perfect. Now, I want to touch on a topic about site speed. Back in the time, site builders were slowing down websites. So people were like, because site speed is so important for your search rankings, for user experience. How does your tool support a fast, lightning-fast website? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true in general because the way the website builders work versus an encoded website, let's say, that's very optimized and stuff like that, we do have some frameworks that we need to build into the product so it's easy to edit and work with in the backend, let's say. But we try to optimize for all this stuff and also use CDNs that work across the globe and serve content much quicker, and they get cached, and it's no longer such a problem, let's say. It's always going to be a problem technically to build something as optimized as a hand-coded website. We're getting there, and it's getting better and faster with each day. And, of course, the speeds across the website and the world are getting much, much better, and I think people will no longer feel the difference between something built with a builder and something encoded. Especially in e-commerce, I've read some statistics that each second that the page takes more time to load, it's losing customers and people don't have the patience to wait for a slow-loading website. So we are always working on this and trying to optimize it as much as we can to bring them up to speed. Speaker 3: Can you give some examples or stories about case studies about businesses that are using your page builder? Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. We do have multiple success stories, mostly from agencies across the globe and mainly in the U.S. and Western Europe. I cannot name names because our product is mostly used in white-label form, which means, of course, they bring their own branding to our product, and they use it as a solution for their customers, or maybe they are a SaaS that builds a solution that joins their product stack, and, of course, it's under their own branding. And what we've seen is that people tend to, customers, our customers tend to try it out and then they implement a small product of ours because we do have multiple ones with WordPress and Cloud and of course in Shopify. And then they get more and we get to see their progress and they onboard the customers of their own. And it's quite an interesting way to build this because we do have multiple products and Choose one at first and maybe then. And, of course, on the hosting side, we are partnering with the big hosting companies that want to offer especially this AI builder solution to their customers because what they've seen in the not necessarily WordPress, but in hosting, It's difficult for customers that buy a hosting plan to then get to the website that they want to build. It's pretty complicated. You either need to install WordPress or another solution that is installed on their hosting. We do this shortcut using the AI. Basically, after they sell the plan to the customers, just bring them into this flow where they can already build something and create something, and they use our solution, of course, white-labeled and integrated into their own user base and with their own SSO, meaning that they can, of course, Log in their customers into our solution and it's a shortcut and it works great because somebody from a hosting company told us 50% of our websites are the Hello World which is the WordPress default page when you create that because basically they install it and they don't know what to do and it gets... We're stuck in there, but people still pay the hosting plan because maybe sometime they will do it, but this is basically churning the end, and they want people to use it and get a quick website, and this is where our solution comes in, and it's quite good. Speaker 3: I like the approach that you're available on multiple platforms because I'm in the online business for a very long time. And still nowadays, because of different platforms, I have to work with different editors. And with your solution, you can start, as I said, with a hoster, and Brizy is there. Then you might do your own WordPress at some point, and it is there. And then you grow, and then you're going on Shopify, and it is there. So it really follows you around. Speaker 1: This is exactly, sorry to interrupt, this is exactly what our users and mostly agencies, multi-medium sized agencies say. They like the tool that if the customer, let's say, for some reason or maybe they have something on WordPress already, they want it necessarily a WordPress website. Then they have the Brizy tool in a plugin in WordPress and they can build it with Brizy, but maybe later on the client says, I need a quick landing page and I don't have this, another hosting space or something like that. People say from the agency, yeah, we can build it in Brizy cloud and it's not a problem and they just three clicks and it's done. And what we do have is a sync between the stuff that you built in WordPress and you can bring something very similar into our cloud. Basically, it syncs the content because it's the same tool and just the files are exported as a JSON and then it's brought into In 10 seconds, you get the website that you've built in WordPress and you get it in the cloud. Why is this important? Because you get all the styling and all the content from your website and just bring a few changes and make a landing page and stuff like that, and it's built on cloud. You can, of course, do it with Shopify. If you have the Shopify website already built, you can sync everything in there. And it's quite interesting that this multi-platform way, it's synced across an account, a Brizy account, and you can move content quite easily. Otherwise, it's a bit of a pain if you want to move something from WordPress to another platform or even Shopify. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's the right word. It's a pain. It's a massive pain because basically you're starting from scratch every time. Talk to me a bit about the Shopify app. What's the installation process? What's the onboarding process? How long does it take to get up and running? Speaker 1: It's not any different than a regular app on Shopify. You just install it or pre-trial it, and then, yeah, it's quite easy. And then if you know the Brizy builder, it's super easy. If not, the learning curve is also quite easy, so it's not a problem, and you build content with it. And you can even customize product pages and the templates in Shopify that you already have there, like a template or something like that, and you can build on top of them. And it's easy to use. It's drag and drop. It's no-code. It's quite easy. And this is what we pride ourselves with. It's the ease of use and everything. It's in front of you. And what you click, it's what you do is changing in front of your eyes. Sure, it's not a revolution anymore. This has been done for quite some time. For many years, plugins and website builders were in a sidebar. You've already done something in the sidebar, some drag, some text in there, and it updated. What we did is Remove everything from sidebar. It's all front and center. You click one element, it brings the options there and the drag and drop some stuff. It's quite easy. We want it in front of your eyes, not something in the sidebar. Speaker 3: I know you're on different platforms, but can you talk about the pricing structure for Shopify? Speaker 1: The pricing structure for Shopify and for Brizy Cloud Shops, it's very similar. It starts from $14 and we do have three plans. It goes up to $60 per month. So, basically, it's what the industry uses, and we are seeing some good traction. Of course, the space becomes very crowded, and without having a super easy-to-use tool, it's no longer simple. But I feel the next step is doing something with AI on the e-commerce front. I'm not sure how that's going to pan out regarding the content. Maybe we'll use some external spreadsheets or, I don't know, databases of some sort to make the product listing available, but it will be done and it's a huge… I'm 100% with you on that one. Speaker 3: AI will come in every corner of e-commerce or site building. Speaker 1: We will see this… Whether we like it or not, it's going to come, yeah, for sure. Speaker 3: It's going to come. Cool. Bogdan, before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? Speaker 1: I think people should be trying out multiple builders and in this space try to use something to create their own shop, for example, or website instead of just waiting for some time when they will be able to do it or will be able to get the content in front of their eyes. Postponing it always will mean that it's never going to be done. Better do something halfway, 60% of the way and see from there than just postpone it. I feel this is the best way. Don't wait for another good opportunity because everyone's online now but it's still time to get a good business and maybe a hobby project going on and making a living off of it. The tools are there. The help is there. With AI, of course, right now you can ask for a business plan to ChatGPT or whatever, Gemini, Perplexity, and it builds you something that you can follow and you can use tools like ours or competitors or whatever. Just build something. Don't wait until the business is too late or something like that. That's my advice. Speaker 3: I think it's a very good advice and I think a lot of people are looking into entrepreneurship right now and even if they are not technical skilled, it's much, much easier than most people think. Where can people go and find out more about Brizy? Speaker 1: On our website, Brizy.io, or just ask ChatGPT about it. I'm joking, yeah. But we've seen just a small anecdote here. We've seen some, and across the board, it feels like people are searching less and asking more about certain products or what's the best solution for a website builder and stuff like that, asking an AI rather than searching on Google or Bing or whatever. And it drops the website. So even people that are your audience with the shops and stuff like that, if they see less traffic, it's not only them, it's across the board. We are in a world where traffic is, for some interesting reason, it's getting lower because people no longer search like the old days. They do ask AI chats what's the best solution for that. Speaker 3: I think we can fill a complete episode with that, and I think it's great that you mentioned that. You're really on the forefront of what's happening online right now, and I have the same feeling like you. So maybe that's a topic for another time, but I will put the links in the show notes, and you will just one click away. And for our listeners, go to the website, try it out yourself. I think it's a great solution, and it makes it so much easier to get a website on there, to get your content on there, and hopefully build a good business. Thanks so much for your time today. Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you. Bye everyone. Speaker 2: Thanks again to Ahrefs and Ahrefs Web Analytics for supporting the show. If you're looking for a clean, fast, and privacy-focused analytics tool, try it for free at ahrefs.com slash awt. That's A-H-R-E-F-S dot com slash A-W-T. You will also find the link in the show notes. Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will also make it easier for others to discover the podcast. Simply like, comment, and subscribe. Subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter online seller in just 5 minutes. We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you to stay on top of your e-commerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends twice a week in your inbox, 100% free. Join now at newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. That's newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.