Build a High-Converting Shopify Store that Drives Profit

Hey, welcome to another episode of the DDC Insider Podcast. I'm Brian Barrison, your host, and today I'm going to interview Ben Sharf. He's a co-founder at Platter, a platform that helps e-commerce brands build high-converting Shopify stores that drive profit. Hey Ben, thanks for being on the show. It's a pleasure to have you.

Thanks for having me today, Brian. I appreciate it. Excited to chat.

Yeah, likewise. So why don't you start by telling the audience more about you and Platter?

Yeah, so Platter is a storefront accelerator for Shopify brands, uh, with the goal of helping you make more money and save more money at the same time. And we're a theme and app bundle that natively builds a lot of the most popular app functionality into one solution around all the functionality around marketing and conversion to unify your support teams, unify your costs and your app stack to make your store faster and to make it easier for you to manage. And then we layer in best practices around how to increase your average order value and your conversion so we can quantify making you money and saving you money at the same time. Uh, we've been building Platter now for about 2 years, and this started a few years back when we were working with a handful of brands as an agency and recognized that a lot of the same issues were coming up over and over where brands were having to pay a lot of money to build high-converting storefronts. It was taking a long time for them to do so, and they didn't necessarily know who to trust or what to do. And so we wanted to build an infrastructure to allow you to build a high-converting storefront cheaper and faster.

Awesome. And I don't know about the audience, but I, I think that the, the main difference you recognize here is that you offer a theme, not only the apps and the features that everyone gets, uh, separately or together with some other companies, but But in this case, you offered them the theme as well. Is that correct?

Yeah. So our product is a theme and an app bundle. Uh, and so the way that that works is there are limitations around the theme editor in terms of what you can build into it directly. So any features or functionality that's too complicated to go into the theme layer, we build into the app layer directly. Uh, but the idea is that the theme and the app work in conjunction with each other. So you extract more value by using both products instead of one or the other.

Yeah, you mentioned two interesting things I spotted, at least for the founders listening, to, you know, sell more and to decrease costs, right? So it's what everyone wants right now. Do you see the same? What do you see that's happening in the DDC space in this crazy year and the past year as well?

I mean, look, there's just not as much of an abundance of finances available to brands. And so they're having to figure out how to be more profitable and figure out scrappy ways to stay alive in, you know, a downturn in a market. And so I think what's happening is we're starting to see some smaller brands get weeded out. And because of that, it's more top of mind now than ever for brands to focus on profitability, figuring out ways to cut costs in places where there's maybe solutions they're using that are nice-to-haves instead of need-to-haves. And then ultimately figuring out how to make more money to stay afloat.

Yeah. What do you think they should focus on moving forward? I mean, we have, you know, many, many brands and I would think most companies, not only DTC brands in general, they all want new customers. It's a shiny object and it's great to pursue, by the way. Everyone needs new customers as well and a healthy pipeline. But is that the only important things for brands or what they should focus on mainly in this year?

I think brands need to go back to the fundamentals and ask themselves the basic questions that sometimes we get away from when you get carried away and start thinking about growth. You know, what— do you have a high-quality product? What are your customers saying? What are the things that are lacking? Like, where is there maybe a misstep in your customer journey that's causing you to see a decrease in average order value and conversion? And like, what are the fundamental ways that you can make more money and save more money because profitability is more important now than ever.

Yeah. So how does Plottr help them with that? Could you please give us an example on, let's say we install Plottr in one of the stores, what can we get there? What do we see? What are the features that people like the most?

Yeah, so the way that we operate is when we engage with a brand, we will take in their brand assets, understand their requirements, And then we'll do what we call a productized delivery. We'll actually build a new set of wireframes for your storefront, taking into account everything that you tell us in onboarding and then layering in best practices around CRO to make sure that we're maximizing opportunities to increase your AOV and your conversion. But there's a couple other components to it that make it interesting. So the first one is oftentimes we can remove certain apps off your existing app store because there's certain functionality that we have built natively into the theme or into our app. And so you're able to remove those apps. We're also able to unlock new functionality that either A, you didn't know existed, or B, you couldn't afford. So you benefit from the economies of scale of using our product because we've been building features for the last 2 years. And so you get access to all of that as a fraction of a cost on a relative basis, because if you tried to go build your own storefront that had parity with all the functionality that we have, it would cost you a lot more money and take you a lot more time. And the last thing I'll say is that we improve your operational efficiencies. So our product is built in a way where we can actually enable and empower non-technical team members to make contributions to your Storefront with the drag-and-drop editor and the way that our process is set up. So if you're a brand that maybe had an agency build a custom Storefront for you and now you're beholden to them every single time you want to make a change, we're able to unlock that for you to where you can now make changes yourself. But what's nice about it is if you do ultimately want to add other apps onto your store or add custom code, you can still do that. We're just giving you a cleaner infrastructure to start from.

Remind me if I'm wrong, but what I see, I mean, as a benefit for, for especially new brands is that they have the opportunity of either hiring a company to develop the store or let's say install your theme. One, it will depend on them and their knowledge to develop something that makes sense, that is optimized and that converts pretty well. And then the other, they can leverage your expertise to install something that will work best for them using everything that's in the market currently to, I don't know, encourage, I don't know, increasing the AOV, LTV, etc. Is that correct?

Yeah. So, yeah. So brands have a couple of options today if they wanted to build a store. And I want to note that we usually work with brands that are already existent, but we can touch on that in a minute. But when brands think about building or managing a Storefront, you have a couple of options. You can either download a basic theme and then go to the third-party app marketplace and integrate a bunch of apps. You can go to an agency and have them custom build everything for you, or you can do something that's a hybrid of the two where you have a couple apps, you have an agency that builds a couple things, and you're kind of between the two. What we realized is that there's issues with every single one of those alternatives. If you go the route of just a bunch of apps, you end up with a slower storefront and a very clunky backend. If you go the route of someone building something entirely custom and you're not technical, you're beholden to them every single time you want to make a change. And then if you go the middle route, once you start adding custom code on top of a store and adding new apps, if something goes wrong or you want to change something or add something later on, and maybe you're using a different agency now, you have like historical code that has been built and it just makes it harder to make new changes and updates on top of it if you're not fully privy to all the things that have been added on your store to date, right? So what we're trying to do is give you a base infrastructure solution that has significantly more functionality and flexibility on day one without compromising quality. Uh, so we've always said, if I can make you money and save you money, it's pretty hard for you to say no to the offering that we can provide you, right?

I, I have a background in computer science. I used to work as a developer for many years, so I can guarantee that what you're saying is that way, you know, is super tough. You know, relying on developers is One thing is more expensive and of course it takes time. Of course there are pretty good agencies and they can deliver on time, but most times it's not that situation. They have delays and they don't end up doing the things as you want it. And if you hire another one, they need to touch on the code of somebody else and it's not the ideal stuff. So in this case, I think it's great. What you said, Is that you work with people that had an existing website or that they have currently an existing website. So why would they make the change? What's the main reason?

Yeah, I would say that our ICP, like our ideal customer profile, are brands that are doing between $5 and $20 million in revenue. There's like a realization we had within that customer segment that when you get to that threshold, you're now in a place where you have budget to spend to make improvements to your online store. So when you talk about smaller brands, sometimes they just don't have the budget that is required. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? Like we just have to cater to a certain customer. And then as you start to get bigger, call it into like the $50 million plus range, at that point you might have like a full in-house team and like a full custom build where it just doesn't make sense for you anymore. So we tend to work best with brands in that middle ground where it's like you're not just a small brand anymore, but you're not quite at that like household name, high 8-figure, low 9-figure brand. You're kind of right in that middle ground. And so the reason that that works well for us is because those are the brands that are starting to think about what are ways that I can increase my, you know, conversion rate, average order value as I start to grow. Are there areas where I can improve my operational efficiencies within my own team? Are there ways that I can continue to stay cutting edge with technology without having to spend so much time focusing on it? And also, those are just the, the trailblazer brands that are always trying to stay at the forefront of technology to make sure they're doing the latest and the greatest to give themselves the best chance to win.

That's great. You work with a specific niche or every DTC brand or e-commerce brand in that revenue range. Work?

Revenue is the main driver. We have brands across a lot of different categories. The thing I would say is that our recommendations for brands will vary depending on like their price point, depending on their SKU count, and depending on their category, because not every feature we have makes sense for every brand. But the idea of our business model is we're just giving you the platter of all the different options, and it's on you to craft your own experience to suit you best.

Right. I don't know if you have this handy, but do you, do you, do you recall any, any case study or any, any brand that increased, I don't know, the AOV or LTV or anything like that that you can tell the audience about?

Yeah. One, one that is top of mind for me is a brand called, excuse me, a brand called Caged, which is a, they're an 8-figure supplements brand. And that was a brand that came to us and they basically told us that they had another offer to build a new storefront that was going to be 6 figures and it was going to take 6 to 12 months to build. And they were basically just seeing if there were any other options out there. And that was when we, we met with them and they ended up moving forward with us and we were able to build them a new storefront from signature to live in under 60 days. And they saw a 45% increase in conversion rate in the first 30 days of being live.

Nice. Okay, that's awesome.

Yeah, it was at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time on a relative basis. So I think we— because I think our solution is relatively new in the market in terms of the type of model we've created, we've had a couple of brands who were like, I don't understand how this is possible. And then once we do it, they're like, oh wow. So I think my goal, and I've said this to my co-founders and my team, is that a couple of years from now, if we're successful, it's because we debunked this myth that building a high-converting storefront is really expensive and takes a really long time.

Yeah, I don't know about you. This has nothing to do with Plotr specifically, but today everything is more dynamic, right? And I know people say that all the time, but I really feel that we can't wait probably a year for a website to be built, right? Some, some probably big companies can, or depending on the use case scenario. But at DDC brand, I don't know if they can't, if they can wait, right? I had a client I work with, they hired like a fractional CFO or something like that to help them with analyzing something that they put it to work on some report related to which channels drove most revenue and some attribution-related thing. And they said that he was going to be doing it for 3 months or so. And I said, that's crazy. I mean, of course, we need to take time to do things seriously. But sometimes when you start doing something and when you finish doing that, probably it's not valid any longer. And they ended up firing that guy because when they presented a report, it was another movie we were watching by then, right? So things need to be more dynamic. And waiting a year for a website to be built when you can have it in another 60 days and performing real well, It just doesn't make sense, right?

Especially because the market moves fast. It's like by the time you get your website, there's probably new technologies and there's new ways to do things. And so you need to be able to have a solution that allows you to, to move fast and stay relevant with what's happening.

Exactly. So what's next? What's, uh, sorry, next for Plotr? Yeah.

So as I mentioned, our product suite is a theme and an app bundle. We just launched our app as a self-serve product now. So what's really cool about that is brands now have the ability to use the app functionality without having to migrate their entire theme. And we have some really amazing features built into the app product that I'm really excited about. And so for us now, the focus is going to be to continue to grow, grow the customer base on the app product and release some really exciting features in there.

Right now, if I got it correctly, you sell them separately, the themes and the app.

So we have a bundle offering where you get both of them, but we never had an offering where you can buy them as standalone. And now for the first time, you can buy the app as a standalone.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, so I got a question, you know, marketing question, not a Plotero question, let's say now. So, but it's really, you know, I told you before, I was a few minutes late for this recording because I was probably gonna have a client call in which we were trying to help them, you know, try to look at the business layer, not only the paid ads or email marketing layer, try to analyze when people bought A, when they bought B again, or when they came back to buy B or C, et cetera, and what they bought. What was A about, B about, etc., and how to improve that process. Do you see many brands doing that nowadays? Do you feel they need it? They need to do more, or what do you think they, they need to do in order to improve the AOV, the LTV, and grow their revenue?

Yeah. So I think it's a couple of things. I think the first one is that it's really important as a, as like a brand founder to go through your customer journey periodically and like try to put yourself in their shoes and get a better understanding of where things are falling off, why things are happening. Um, so I think it's important, number one, to make sure that you, you know, you can always be making improvements, and so you should be critical with yourself in terms of doing so. I think the second thing is understanding what different types of levers are available to you that have a focus on AOV or conversion or both, right? So just to touch on a couple of the things that we highlight within our product suite and just our methodology. The first one is just broadly speaking, the concept of gamification. So we're always, we're always recommending using incentive bars and gamifying the experience where customers feel like they're earning something, right? So an example, one of the features in our Platter+ app is a mix and match bundle builder where you can set multiple incentive thresholds. So it's like add one more product and get 10% off, add two more products, get 15% off. And so by doing so, you're kind of playing a game of psychology with the consumer where they're like, oh, I might as well just buy one more thing and get another discount. And that concept can exist in multiple different touchpoints throughout the journey, whether that's a bundle page, whether that's an incentive bar in the cart or an incentive, incentive bar on the checkout page. Right. So there's different ways to do gamification. The other thing that we are very high on are just upsells and cross-sells, right? There's a lot of opportunities within a storefront to do those things. And a lot of brands aren't doing it. One of the examples would be putting an upsell in the main product detail page frame. So like below the add to cart button of the main product, you can put like a little complimentary product that has like a low, a low ticket item where from a consumer's perspective you're like, oh, this is interesting. It's only $12 more. I might as well just hit the radio button and add it. We've seen brands have like a 6 to 8% uptick in AOV just off of that feature alone. When you're doing enough traffic on your storefront. And then there's also opportunities to put upsells in your cart. So one of the mistakes we see a lot of brands make is they use a page load instead of a cart drawer for their checkout experience, which is a huge mistake because you're adding another click to the funnel, which is then in at large going to decrease your conversion rate because you're forcing more friction on the customer to get to the end of the journey. But within a cart drawer, you can add upsells in there to gamify it even more. And then when you get to the checkout page, You can add upsells again. There's just a lot of touchpoints in that journey where brands don't even realize that they can be doing things like that. So I think for us it's about giving you the optionality, tell you what we see is working, and then you just taking that and cater that to your brand because, you know, there's different recommendations for different brands depending on where they are in their lifecycle.

Makes sense. Everything you said makes sense. And it's, it's as important to offer new things than it is to try not to get in the way of the buying cycle, right? Or the purchase process, right? Like, try to encourage them to buy more without getting in the way and encourage them to leave, right? So I think that you need to do it carefully. And that's why people should follow the lead of companies like Flutter that have been doing this for years for many brands. And you guys have optimized the process. So you can be a seamless experience for the user.

Yeah, it's partially an art and partially a science. And it takes a lot of time and research and iteration to, to really understand what it is that you need to offer.

Awesome. Well, this has been great. I learned a lot, so I hope the audience did too. But before you go, I wanted to ask you one more question. Do you have any book that you have read that you recommend to the audience?

I do. I actually have it on my desk all the time. It's called Chop Chop Wood, Carry Water by Joshua Metcalf.

Okay, I haven't heard that one.

It's a pretty easy read. I actually, uh, an old hockey coach of mine, uh, was the one who, who shared it with me. And basically what this book talks about, um, is just falling, falling in love with the process of becoming great. So the idea is to not be so focused on the destination and really enjoy everything you're doing along the way. Um, and it gives some really interesting anecdotal stories in here of people going through that, because I think oftentimes, especially as a founder, you find yourself in this situation where you feel like everything needs to be done yesterday, um, and you forget to like pause and be thankful and remind yourself that all the struggles that you go through are just part of the learning process to get to where you want to go.

I love those books, so thank you for sharing. I, I have never heard of— never heard of that one. It's not— I don't know if you, if you read Atomic Habits, of course, you know, I don't know if you read it. Of course, this is not about like building habits, but about enjoying the moment.

Yeah, it's not, not about habit building. It's more just like shedding light on, on the struggles that you need to learn to appreciate through the process of becoming great at anything you do.

It was Alex Hormozi recently said something like, you You know, we need to— most people don't know how to, you know, delay pleasure and pull, like, and put in the reps and delay pleasure. And they did the opposite, right? We are all probably happy creatures and we want the reward instantly and we don't know how to probably delay some pleasure, or in this case, how to add some pleasure to the moment that we are going through, that we are living, and then Uh, I don't know what they say. Well, probably I should read the book, but about the end destination, is there any destination or is it all part of the same cycle? Yeah.

I mean, the destination is really how you quantify it, right? Like if you have certain outcomes that you're going after, like that can be a destination as part of that journey, right? Like if your goal is I want to sell the company or like I want to run a marathon in under 4 hours. Like if you accomplish that, you got to where you wanted to in that specific moment, but I think the other thing to understand is that you're, you're on multiple journeys in your life, not just one, right? So it's about just understanding that whatever you do, it matters and it's all part of the process and you need to learn to just enjoy that.

And when, you know, last thing, when I was younger, 20-something, I'm 36 now, I used to have a startup, 40 people, like investors, all the craziness, 2 to 3 years, we sold it. And when we when we went to the fridge that we had at the office, there was a champagne bottle. And we, my partner and I, look at each other and say, we didn't even open it. Like, we have never opened this bottle that was gifted to us when we opened the office. Like, we didn't stop a sec to celebrate the small moments. And from that time on, I always celebrate the wins. In fact, I encourage, I don't want to say force, but I strongly encourage my team to celebrate the wins in every huddle we have weekly. What are your wins? Like, tell me the wins. It would be the smallest things. And I discussed the same thing with Matthew Stafford at BuildGrowthScale, great company, helping the D2C brands, you know, grow. And he said the same thing, you know, we need to look at even the smallest things and accomplishment we do in life as a win. And that's when we start, you know, feeling more pleasure about the daily actions that push us forward.

Yeah, I agree. I think that's great.

Awesome. Okay, man, it was a pleasure to have you on. Before you go, why don't you tell the audience where they can learn more about you and Platter?

Yeah, you can find me on all socials, Twitter, LinkedIn, @BenSharf. That's B-E-N-S-H-A-R-F. And then Platter is platter.co. And my email is ben@platter.co. That's P-L-A-T-T-E-R.co. Feel free to reach out.

Okay, for those listening or watching, everything Ben said will be in the show notes. So make sure to go to theddncider.com and find the episode in case you're not already there. Okay. Thank you, Ben. It was a pleasure to have you on.

Thanks for having me, Brian.