Build Better Website Experiences | An Interview with Ben Sharf

Welcome to Subscription Prescription, the podcast where you get the information you need to scale your subscription program.

I want to take a moment to talk to you about B2B subscriptions. For those of you out there trying to add the B2B element to your subscription program, you know very well how complicated this is. Most companies trying to offer B2B as a solution need something more along the lines of custom pricing based on user as opposed to product, the ability to approve orders as they come in instead of just having them processed dynamically, and that a lot of your orders are a lot larger in dollar value size, but they're a lot less frequent. Frequent, cuz they're not happening as frequently as D2C subscriptions are. In addition to problems with integrating with ERP and shipping and timelines, B2B as a subscription offering is incredibly complex. But I'm here to tell you that there's actually an option on the market that has simplified those things dramatically. In the show notes, you'll see a link to an article created by Kewpilot about a solution that they put together with Shopify Plus and their agency partner Rees Group for Nimbus Dental. It dives into all of the problems related to B2B subscriptions and how they're actually able to be solved and managed in a dynamic way that you would expect from a software solution. So if you're in the business for a B2B solution for your subscription program, I highly recommend reading this article so you can read more about what is possible and what is not just possible on Shopify Plus, but also with QPilot. And for those of you that aren't aware, I am a co-founder at Kewpilot. It's an amazing tech platform. That's actually how I first got into the subscription business. My partner there, David Bradley, is one of the smartest subscription people I know, and he and I ultimately founded Subscription Prescription because we saw an opportunity, or a need rather, for education and empowerment in a niche space inside of e-commerce.

Hello and welcome to another dose of Subscription Prescription, the podcast where we try to help you understand everything related to D2C subscriptions. I'm really excited for today's dose where we're gonna be talking about website conversions, customer experience, and we're gonna be doing that with Ben Sharf. He's the co-founder of Platter and co-host of the Turning Pro podcast. Ben, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me today, Matt. Happy to be here.

Absolutely. So I'm glad we were connected. We definitely have a mutual friend, one of your newer, I guess not so newer employees now, but I think it's something that with subscriptions, we talk so much about retention. We talk so much about all these different tips and tricks. And yet the thing that I feel like gets left out in the cold all the time is website experience, conversion rate optimization, trying to understand like how people want to buy stuff. So I'm excited to have you on the show. Start by telling us a little bit more yourself and how you got into Platter.

Yeah. So Platter has been around for 2 years. Um, just for those listening, Platter is a theme and app bundle to help improve profitability on Shopify storefronts. So to give you a quick backstory on how we, how we came about, one of my co-founders, Mike, is a childhood best friend of mine and our other co-founder, Kieran. I was working with him at an early-stage COVID testing startup in early 2020 that scaled to $50 million in revenue in 5 months. And he was the head of product and growth. And so when I met him, I was like, I need to figure out a way to work with this guy. We became buddies and we were there, and I realized very quickly that we both were doing some consulting on the side with e-commerce businesses. Long story short, I ended up joining a company called GoPuff, if you're familiar, and I was building on a business unit there called Powered By, which was essentially figuring out how to unlock instant delivery for.com websites. So the idea was that if the SKU in the basket was in the fulfillment center that was geofenced within your delivery address, we would surface GoPuff as instant delivery option, which is revolutionary for D2C. So I'd spent a year just talking to Shopify brands, talking to people in the space, and very quickly realized the same problems and pain points were coming up over and over. My co-founder Mike was working at a marketplace consultancy with brands, and Kieran had his own agency working with e-com brands as well. So ultimately what we ended up doing was starting as a development agency with the sole goal of working with the people that we wanted to make our future customers on a software business. And ultimately through those intimate relationships, we basically just synthesize all of these pain points coming up over and over and productize those into what is now Platter.

So what is making Platter different from a theme perspective then? I mean, because obviously, I mean, the common Shopify users like just thinking a theme is just the type of style on your, on your site, but obviously there's a lot more you can unlock with a good theme. So what's Platter doing that's a little bit different than say somebody—

Yeah, so our business is built around a couple core theses. The first one is that a lot of apps in the ecosystem are features, not products. So as brands scale, they get stuck with too many apps, too many support teams, a bloated tech stack, which means a slower website and less conversion. The second piece of it is the fundamental misalignment between most development agencies and brand owners, where a lot of agencies get paid for their time. So their incentives are to make things more expensive and drag things out and complicate them. And brands are looking for cost-effective and efficient. And so what we've done is natively build a lot of the most popular app functionality around marketing and conversion into one solution, which is a theme and app bundle. To unify your app stack, your support teams, and your costs, and then layer in best practices around conversion rate optimization. So increasing your AOV and your conversion rate so we can actually help quantify making you money and saving you money at the same time. So I think to bring that all together, like 5 years from now, if Platter is successful, it's because we debunked this myth that building a high-converting storefront is really expensive and takes a long time. That isn't true. That's just the status quo in today's market because of that misalignment.

Yeah, there's a lot of custom development that's out there or being pitched out there that you need to spend $50K, $100K to build your own custom storefront to be able to like effectively will convert at an effective rate. So that's really cool to hear. So I'd love to like start picking your brain then on some ideas, like talking like specifically related to subscriptions. Like, are there, what are some tactics that you're seeing that are being effective, like either using Platter or in general that when it comes down to like customer experience in that conversion cycle that happens on the website?

Yeah, so what's really interesting is that we, because we power the base infrastructure of the storefront, we've worked with just about every single subscription provider in the ecosystem. And so a lot of what we're able to do, number one, is build technology and tools within our product that better helps them like suit the needs of customers, right? So like an example for you, we have a mix and match bundle builder that helps gamify the shopping experience to increase the average order value. That can then be integrated with different subscription players. We're like, we're powering the bundle, but we're using their subscription tech.

Is that, is that like similar, like a single page bundle builder or is it more like a step form bundle builder?

So we have optionality. It depends what the brand wants. We have multi-step. We also have single step. And so that's it.

Just for some context, anybody listening, like when, when the subscription apps tell you that they do that, they do enable that, but it's not like something you just flip turn on and you get like this Dr. Squatch, like build a bundle experience, right? It's, it's actually, there's tons of custom dev work that goes into that. Like, um, a lot of the bundle builder subscription apps don't do that well. Like Atomic's pretty good. Loop does stuff, but even theirs is like, it's all a single page and it's very, very like somewhat limited. So what Ben's talking about is basically taking all the design work that your developer would have to do to make it front end and look right and work the way your customers would want to do. That's already something that Platter is offering that integrates with the subscription app. That's what, am I, am I reading everything or hearing everything you're saying correctly, Ben. I mean, obviously it's not quite that simple, but, but pretty close.

It's, yeah, I mean, it's basically, it's basically that we build a lot of the logic and the infrastructure to enable it to be a lot more smooth for subscription players that are integrating into a store that's built on top of our theme products. I think it's one of the things we learned about the bundle specifically, it's that it's very hard to build an out-of-the-box version of a bundle builder that a brand is going to want without wanting to add any sort of customizations around aesthetic. User experience, like, do you want it to be vertical, horizontal? Do you want it to be multi-step, single step? Do you want like your actual products to like drag into the incentive progress bar? Do you want just like little circles, right? So there's all these different features that we realized that brands are asking for. And so for us, it was like, how do we build that base logic and basically build the sandbox, if you will, that a brand could play within and then we'll help you configure that. To be very effective for what it is that you want and then plug in your subscription provider to help actually power the idea of like the incentives around ordering more at a more frequent rate.

No, that totally makes sense. So what are some other ways like, are you guys doing stuff with like enabling like bundling features, like not just like the build a bundle, but like on single page quantity, like quantity-based discounts? Being able to make design changes. Like, I mean, that's again, the frustration part of like the subscription app scene is like I might have a widget that gets turned on, but I still have to customize it. I still have to make it match or look, match the on-page aesthetic that I'm going for.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of what we offer is around gamification, right? So like, I, I think it's such a huge part of human psychology in terms of just like making someone feel like they're rewarded for a certain behavior. Right. So we, we have upsells on product pages. We have upsells in our cart drawer. We have checkout extensions that upsells at the checkout page. And then post-purchase is something that's going to be released very soon, all within the same product suite as well. And so I think in that regard, it really just like depends on the brand and it depends what they're looking to accomplish. But as far as like upsells and cross-sells go, it's important to me that we're able to offer that at every step in the buying journey.

Yeah, and that's something that I harp on a lot and people are, that's a great example of like other tools, whether you're using Rebuy or OneClickUpsell or something to try to make that happen, which doesn't always necessarily integrate the right way with your subscription app. So it's kind of cool to see that you guys are doing that on the website itself.

What are some, are there any other? The cart drawer and all the upsells and the incentive progress bars are at the theme layer.

Yeah.

Yeah, I like that. You don't need an app like Rebuy in order to have like all functionality in the cart. And it's part of like a fixed subscription cost versus transaction-based, which is typically pretty attractive to vendors or sorry to merchants. No, that makes sense. So yeah, I think that's like another important value prop is like trying to consolidate some of the fragmentation.

Okay, cool. Are there any, anything else that you guys have seen that, I mean, whether again, features from Platter or techniques that you're seeing subscription apps do that are improving like conversion rates, customer engagement?

I mean, I think the biggest, I think the biggest thing that I've noticed, uh, I've noticed, sorry, from the outside looking in at like some of the subscription players that we've, uh, had brands use is really just like the ease of use and the flexibility around like making things more bespoke and more custom. I know it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but like we're coming at it from the angle of like my engineering team is going through these integrations with like all the different subscription providers. And so like we've seen under the hood what all of them are doing. And there's certain ones where like people just have frustrations around like the most minor details. And so I find that like the ease of use on the backend tends to result in like the most effective outcomes on the frontend because you're giving the brand like the ability to be really flexible and move quick and like make things cater to their exact requirements. Right. Because for us, we're working with everything from like a pet food brand. It's like one of our subscription, probably our largest subscription customers today, uh, to like an apparel brand or like a supplements brand. So like it's all over the place in terms of price points, SKU counts, um, which changes like incentive thresholds, where in the buying journey you're wanting to add things like this. And so to us, like that ease of use and that flexibility, um, is very much the most attractive thing that we look for. But I would say ultimately, like just figuring out the best way to optimize incentives and thresholds and like thinking about bundling. I think there's a lot of work that brands could be doing that aren't doing it in terms of actually like analytically understanding like, okay, how much am I selling? Like for how many products? And like, what's the optimal way to like get someone to subscribe and save? Or like, I think if, you know, you might lower it $2 and you find that opt-in, opt-ins are way higher, like little things like that. Because we're so obsessed with like A/B testing different features that I think at the subscription level there's a really powerful way to just like figure out ways to maximize that opt-in percentage.

Does Platter have any like CRO A/B testing functionality involved in it? Or do you guys—

we, we have like an ongoing services team for brands on Platter that are wanting, that are wanting like ongoing work because, right, we always say that like you have that initial migration to a new store. And then from there you want to add a new landing page. You want to like, you have a new product, a new seasonal discount, whatever. So we'll do like A/B testing, heat mapping, all sorts of like CRO work for brands that are already on our product just to like help them get incremental improvements. Because with brands doing, you know, high 7 figures, even 8 figures, if you can make incremental improvements to bump their conversion by any percentage, it pays for itself 10 times over or more.

Absolutely. Is that something that's like native to the theme or is that a service that you guys are offering? Like, is that something that somebody accesses at a certain tier Or is it something like a service they have to add on and pay for separately?

That is in the current state, that is a service component, but we are working on some, some new tools in the background that I think are more later, later this year, early next year developments.

So next question would be, so when you mentioned landing pages, then people don't need to use like another add-on to do landing pages. They can use Platter for that as well.

Yeah. So we actually have a landing page builder within our theme product where you can actually templatize landing pages within the theme layer. So you don't need to use page external page builders.

Oh, that's cool. That's very cool. Okay. So you mentioned something as part of your introduction that I guess I didn't quite realize, like your work at GoPuff. I'm curious to hear your thoughts because you were talking about like this idea of like instant delivery and being like, have you seen any innovations within subscriptions for that? And I have a little bit of a loaded question because being in that space so much, I think of like the ideal scenario being like much more like Amazon where people have like full control over delivery outcomes and stuff like that. But right now subscriptions are like, like the shopping cart is kind of getting there, but subscription portals are still a ways to go. Like, like how have you seen any innovation around that or brands that are doing that well?

I haven't seen anything interesting about it. Yeah, I mean, I think something that I find interesting about it, but I haven't necessarily seen it is just that like, I'm sure if you looked at people's purchase behavior on a a lot of these like instant delivery apps, they're buying like the same things all the time, but it's not actually in the form of subscription. So I think like that concept of recurring orders via instant delivery is actually a really interesting idea, but I don't actually know if that exists today. Um, right, like for example, I always use GoPuff when it's like we run out of a case of water or we run out of paper towels. But it's like if I had a recurring GoPuff delivery every like Monday at 2 PM, just like with a case of water, like I actually think that's very attractive to me, but it's, I don't know if it's something that actually exists today. But I think what, what GoPuff was working on in terms of this business unit that I was alluding to was being able to unlock their fulfillment network for brands. So there's an interesting case to be made that what I just said can actually be enabled where you have brands using the instant delivery unlock via the.com while leveraging a subscription tool. Right? So now you can actually use the formal subscription on the D2C that's plugged into the instant delivery backend, which actually allows that.

Yeah, you get national, like local delivery coverage using their network. Yeah, that's where I think some of the things are really interesting and why I think maybe some of the problems with like people trying to take on Amazon or not, because Amazon's distribution network, customer experience, the trust, it's harder for brands that say like are typically shipping out of 1 or 2, 3PLs to feel like they can get that kind of like access or delivery reach. So that's really interesting. I think I had a— I was sitting next to the head of subscription for— was it Uber Eats like 2 years ago or something like that? And he was saying it was one of the big meal delivery companies. And he made an interesting statement that they weren't even necessarily really worried about churn because people were still just getting used to the idea of getting groceries delivered that way. And so the market becomes more and more comfortable with it. It's just expanding their TAM. Over time because right now they have very, very small penetration. Like I feel like in our household, we started using Walmart deliveries like a year ago and I can't imagine ever going back. But the idea of you getting groceries, like fresh groceries dropped off like later this today or tomorrow used to feel so like— anyway. So yeah, it's definitely changing and innovating.

The subscription is a convenience thing, right? Right. The same reason, the same reason that I'm buying any product on subscription, it's because I know I'm going to need more of it in the future. So why not just like buy it now at a future date? And now they're unlocking that for like basic essentials that we've been trained to like walk to the grocery store to go buy. It's like if I can just have the, you know, the fresh produce at your doorstep every week at the same time, what— it's almost like hard to turn it down, right?

No, absolutely. And that's a good question to think about, like the difference between convenience or like what value being able to get it when you want it. That's really cool. I'm curious, like with, with Platter, like, and I mean, what you guys have seen, like, how do you view this? I feel like that, I mean, my opinion, there's like kind of two different movements happening in the Shopify app ecosystem is you have people that are consolidating and people that are still just going more and more integration focused, right? Like they'll, they'll have 50 apps as long as they all integrate really, really well together, as opposed to others that are just like, Nope, tired of it. We want to go. I mean, obviously you guys are falling more into the camp of like consolidation, but how are you guys seeing that? Are you seeing both of that happening or are you just seeing consolidation kind of across the board?

Consolidation, because what usually happens is brands that go the other route, they eventually hit a breaking point. And at which point it's like, we need to fix this, right? Like there's, there's some pretty large brands right now that we're talking to that from the outside looking in, you'd be like, They're crushing it. Like, why would they ever want to like change their website? And you talk to them and they're like, hey, we've been building the same codebase for 5 years. We've had 100 apps installed and deleted. We have 4 different agencies and 6 different freelancers. And there's no like cohesive cohesiveness in terms of how people are writing code, the QA of the codebase. And I'm the new e-com director and I don't know how to manage the store or change things. Right. And so not having that like clean infrastructure typically presents a challenge to a brand at some point. Usually it's a function of like, are you big enough to actually feel that pain? And did you even get to the chance to be big enough to feel that pain? Um, but I would say largely speaking, like profitability and consolidation is such a top of mind topic for so many people today, just because of like, obviously the market downturn, not as much cash available to D2C brands, people having to prioritize profitability. What's the easiest way to do that? Look inward at your P&L. Figure out nice-to-haves versus need-to-haves and ways that you can make incremental improvements to improve efficiencies, both in terms of making more money and saving more money.

It's interesting. I'd like to get your opinion then on something like how— if somebody's like coming, thinking about eliminating an app, right? Say it does like— it has 3 key features and say Platter or, or whatever they're using has— does 2 or 2.5 of them. How are you seeing like the evaluation of does that, is that third extra feature really a huge difference maker from bottom line? Or is it really just a question of that app overhead? It's not worth it. Like, are you seeing brands making those choices? Cause I feel like they should be thinking about that more with the subscription app specifically, like people switch app to app and they don't necessarily think too much about switching costs enough, or maybe the new app doesn't quite do as much, but it costs a lot less. Or, you know, like there's always this balance of like how much of this is actually going to affect revenue or not if I don't use it or don't do it this way.

Yeah, so I would say one of the biggest things that we found that gave us conviction in terms of our product strategy, because I would say any like product mind would tell you that we're taking a contrarian approach where it's like a master of all is a master of none and you should just go extremely deep on one thing and be the best at it. Our belief that there's— our belief is that there's a unique case within the Shopify ecosystem to that product strategy that I think holds true in most cases. And that is the drop-off in terms of utility after the core functionality of a lot of these apps. Right. So like, take a, take an upsell app, for example, most brands are going to download that because they want to be able to offer an upsell. But now you're going to start telling them that you're charging more because you're using AI and you're doing all these fancy things. Most brands don't have the time or the bandwidth to start figuring out how can they maximize every last inch of what this app offers. They only care about that core piece anyways.

Right.

And so for that reason, like, I think if you take the 90-50 rule of like, if I can offer you 90% of the functionality for 50% of the cost, it's really hard for you to say no to that.

Well, it's so interesting because one of my clients recently, we were just getting started and I said something about they were using Rebuy, their upsell, and like, hey, just like, it was like discovery call time, right? Like we haven't even gone deep in any of it. I said, hey, right now you're doing all these random product recommendations. You should just get rid of all the AI recommended ones and the recently bought product ones and just pick the 3 top products you're trying to push right now that you think go well with all of these other things you're trying to sell. And they were like, they, and I didn't realize that they went and did that before our next call and immediately saw results. And it was like just the basic, if you're buying product A, we know that product C, D, and E go well with it. That's what we're putting in the cart as an upsell. That is the amount of functionality we need. I think some extra things in there, like being able to add some of that gamification or some of those other elements of like how it gets presented can be important. But at the end of the day, like You know, how much control you need over that, I'm not sure is necessarily super—

we're also like, tell me this, if I told you, if I told you your two options were like, you can use our cart drawer and offer upsells in it, it's not like AI generated where you pick the upsells, but it's a flat monthly fee, or you can go use like an option like Rebuy where you might have AI generated upsells, but they're taking a percentage of transactions, right? Where like 3 months goes by and you scaled, you're still only losing $699 a month from us. You might have paid them $25,000 at that point. Yeah.

No, I totally agree with that. And again, it comes down to like what really like, I know there are certain instances where features like AI recommendation or an AI chatbot or an AI quiz or, and I'm harping on AI now. I do love AI, but you know, like there's a lot of really new tools that are always being innovated. That's the thing that's great about Shopify ecosystem. It's also one of the things that's annoying is because people see a shiny object and they think that they need that shiny object when the reality is like the core feature is driving 80 or 90% of the revenue or maybe 98% of the revenue and people are getting lost by, oh, it doesn't do quite this one thing that, that so-and-so at this other brand is doing. I mean, it happens all the time.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think there's two things to that. The first one is I think sometimes people get ahead of themselves in terms of what they need to be thinking about when they're just missing the core fundamentals. It's like, are you really doing enough revenue to have to be thinking about this incrementality? Or should you focus on like the core principles of like what is required to just start moving more product? Then of course, as you move more upmarket, it's all about like making these incremental improvements to get a better advantage. But like, if you're doing, you know, $1 million in revenue, I don't think you should be sitting here figuring out how to increase your conversion by 0.01. But if you're doing $50 million in revenue, like it makes a lot more sense. So I think sometimes brands find themselves in this hole because they get ahead of themselves, start downloading all these apps, trying all these things. And then once it actually starts working, they're like, wait, I don't even know how to use this concoction of like apps and freelance code that I put together. Now I need to make a change. And I think the other thing I'll say is that one of the biggest goals of Platter is to reduce the switching costs. Because there's one of the things we see all the time is the sunk cost fallacy where like a brand is so far down the road on like the wrong infrastructure that they can just not, they refuse to rip the bandaid off. So for us, it's like, if we can minimize that switching cost to make it just more bearable for you mentally, to like get over the hump to make the switch, then it makes it a much easier sell for us.

Right. Yeah. No, there's a brand here in Utah that's not on Shopify. They've been in custom and they're paying like 20 devs a month. They're a fairly large brand. No way. And the idea that they're like, you know, that they don't want to switch because of how much time and money. And I'm just sitting on the outside thinking, Do you guys have any idea what you could do with those 20 salaries? Like you could hire a bunch of content creators and just go and go 10x your business.

But you should, you should send them, you should send them the latest case study we put on our website, which was a headless brand, a brand on headless spending $500K a year on dev. And we rebuilt their new store using Platter in 16 days.

Oh, geez. Okay. I'll check that out. I'll send it to him. Somebody from there usually at least reads the newsletter, so maybe they'll come across this Anyway, um, cool. I, I, I, as we're kind of like maybe getting close to wrapping up, I, I want to, a couple things. One is, what do you see as core principles? Like you've mentioned that a few times of like core principles on selling. And I know that's often like specific to each brand or, or, or industry, but like, are there stuff like if somebody's getting close to a million in revenue or, or like, as opposed to say the $50 million in revenue, what are things that brands from a website experience, purchase experience, what are core principles that they should be focused on?

Yeah, I mean, I think the first one is just like better understanding is your product like a nice to have or a need to have? And like, where is that tipping point of like how much more room to grow do you have? Like, are you just like force feeding ads at people or do you have like retention with a product that's clearly solving an issue for people? So like, I think that's unrelated to like website. That's just like a fundamental business principle that I think ties into how you think about managing it. But then in terms of the actual brand and the e-com experience itself, like I think the most important thing is just the quality of your assets and the social proof. It's quality of assets, social proof, and education, right? So like you want high quality assets because a really nice architected website with bad assets is a bad website. Second piece of that is social proof and education are the two things that will start to bring in new customers because when they land on a product page, if they don't understand what they're buying or they don't actually trust the product based on what other people do, they're less likely to come back. So I think increasing revenue tends to mean increase in eyeballs and increase in visibility. So then you start to think about how do you maximize the behaviors of those people that are starting to hear about you or see you.

No, that makes a lot of sense. Cool. Ben, thank you for coming on the show. For anybody interested, I'll drop the website for Platter in there so you can go check it out, especially if you're working in Shopify, obviously. And then tell me a little bit more about your podcast too before we sign out for anybody else wants to go check that out.

Yeah, I have a podcast called Turning Pro where we interview mostly founders and creators about just the turning pro moments in their life. So I always say the analogy is getting up from a poker table and going to a more high stakes table. Like what were those moments in your life where you decided to take things to the next level?

That's cool. I really like that. I know a lot of people listen to this are entrepreneurs that are working and doing that. So, uh, just go check that out too. Cool. Well, uh, that's it for this week's dose. Uh, again, thank you, Ben, for coming on. Um, and everybody please stay tuned next week for another edition of Subscription Prescription.

And finally, for those of you that are working on B2B subscriptions, I highly recommend you go take a look at Kewpilot's case study to see how they're solving that problem for brands like Nimbus Dental and how it could potentially work for you. Uh, it's incredibly informative article going through all the different problems and what a solution looks like.

That's it for today. Thank you for tuning in. Please subscribe so that you can get notified when new episodes come out each week on Tuesdays.