Interview with Marouane RHAFLI the founder and C.E.O of Plak Theme

As a Search Engines Optimization expert, I was always fascinated by successful entrepreneurs who provide a great value to the eCommerce community, and among those entrepreneurs, there is an exceptional one who built his company to solve many issues in eCommerce and especially for Shopify merchants, this person is Marouane RHAFLI, the founder and C.E.O of Plak Theme.

In this article I’ll highlight the most important parts of my discussion with him via Linkedin so ! Let’s go !

Hey Marouane could you introduce yourself and tell us when was your first step to eCommerce?

First of all, I would like to thank you first for this interview, I was born and grew up in Morocco, in 2010, I moved to Quebec city in Canada to continue my studies in engineering mechanics at Laval university. Few months after my arrival there, I discovered ebay and I remember I listed a camera for sell. Just few minutes after that my camera was sold, and I was like wow ! that was fast.

I was an international student, my studies at that time cost about 2000$/month, my father who is a lawyer in Morocco was financing my studies, unfortunately at this period my father had some financial issues and I couldn’t continue my studies, so I was like obliged to quite the university and I start doing small part time jobs here there, it was difficult for me, because my dream was to be an aeronautical engineer, and now I stopped my studies and I can’t even afford a good living, even if I was doing mathematics research independently and I solved many mathematics conjectures, that brought me nothing in my pocket, so I turned back to ebay.

At that time in 2010–2011, there was not a lot of documentation about eCommerce and very few Youtube videos to learn, I had no choice to learn by myself to be a self-taught online entrepreneur…With a solid determination to succeed, I could make many sales on amazon and I became a Top Rated Seller on ebay in 2012, and this was my first success in eCommerce.

That’s awesome, and when did you discover Shopify ?

Well ! I discovered Shopify in about 2016, before that I was planing to create my own brand, I jumped from an eCommerce platform to another, it was difficult for me as I didn’t know anything about coding at that time.

After discovering Shopify, I started many Shopify stores, all of them was a failure… I learned from my mistakes, I started knowing that to build a sustainable online business, I need a solid supplier, who ships out items quickly and be CA or US based, this is why I partnered with a famous original perfumes dropshipper in 2017 and built my own brand on Shopify, and it was a success.

Great ! And how did you turn to Shopify development ?

One of the biggest challenge I was facing with my perfumes store is the development part, fixing bugs, optimizing the features, speeding up the site, optimizing the SEO, … And as I was not a tech-savvy I started hiring freelancers from upwork, fiverr & freelancer. My theme was not a good one, and even changing a text color, I needed to hire someone, spending time & money to make a small change was a hassle for me.

So I started learning coding (html, css, javascript, liquid), and I could finally tweak a little bit the theme I was using.

After few months of learning coding, I noticed that the theme I was using was not well coded, not SEO friendly, slow and I was losing conversion dues to these technical issues

When did you built Plak theme?

of the biggest issues I had with my theme is the site speed, as I had about 10 000 products on sale, I was using a filter sidebar bar which was drastically speeding down my site. Speeding up a site was a bit difficult to me, so I decided to switch my theme, but all the themes I found were all slow or didn’t have a good filter sidebar.

So I started learning the Technics to speed up a Shopify website and I applied those Technics to my current website. My site speed was optimized and I started gaining organic traffic and my sales increased.

few months later I had an offer and I sold my business, and instead of creating a new brand, I decided to create an account on fiverr and listed some gigs to help other people speeding up their site and increase their organic traffic.

It was good, until the day when someone left me negative review, the guy took the work I did, removed the access to me, and asked for a refund, I was very upset, but this was the biggest turnover, because at this time I was determined to leave fiverr and build the fastest and best converting Shopify theme

I took me several months of hard working, sleeping too late at 4am to build a theme that is SEO friendly, fast, robust with all the necessary features for large businesses to run an online business on Shopify

Lately in 2019 the theme was ready to be online, and in January 2020 the site www.plaktheme.com was officially launched

What are the main advantages of Plak theme over the other themes?

99% of the other themes were built by developers who have never run any eCommerce store in their life, Plak is different, I was a seller on ebay, amazon, bonanza, … and on Shopify, Plak was developed based on 10+ years of experience, every feature was carefully studied to let the visitors stay longer in the site, all the features are speed and SEO friendly, so the merchants can benefit from the Free organic traffic.

For example, Plak is the only theme that has the product videos SEO friendly, no other theme has this, and since one of biggest struggle was with the filter sidebar — which is a must for large inventories, I designed an unmatchable filter sidebar, which is very smooth and fast on mobile devices.

Beyond the speed and the great features such as the blurry coupon, I designed Plak blog template in a way to resemble to Wordpress blogs, I am also proud to be the first person to build a Table of content on our blog templates.

In two words, the themes developed by Plak Theme LLC are exceptional that we feel, we don’t have any competitor.

That’s awesome ! What advices could you give to the new Shopify merchants

Before starting an online store on Shopify, they need to chose the best theme provider, who offer a great customer support, because a theme occupies 20-50% of the success in eCommerce, build a solid relationship with your supplier, and build a community around your brand. With a continuous learning, determination and surrounded by a good team, the success will be closer to achieve