Stora Sessions #1

Okay, so the point of, I suppose going through some of this stuff at the start is that we speak to customers all the time and often find out, especially customers have been with us for quite a while, that lots of the new stuff we've released over the past two years or even three, three years since we started, lots of people aren't using them because they just haven't. They're not in their account that often. They maybe miss some of the email updates about some the of of the new features and we just want to have a time to share them with you so you can see them. You might be using lots of them or all of them, but I think there's a good chance some of you might not be using them all. So hopefully everybody can get something out of this and if you have any questions or anything, then, you know, ask away during the call and we'll either stop and take them or we'll keep them to the end. So feel free to ask away. Okay, so I think we're going to start with Stephen. You're going to talk us through some of the. The more recent releases.

Yep. Cheers, Gavin. Thanks for coming, everybody. I'm just going to walk you through a few things that you probably have seen before, you may know about, but also then a few things that we've released in the last few weeks that you may not quite be aware of yet. So I'm going to start with dynamic pricing. So dynamic pricing is a feature that you can turn on for any unit type. You can come to your unit types and set up rules which will allow you to increase the price on the storefront of a unit type based on the occupancy level. So you see here for this rule, when a price is greater than or equal to 95%, the storefront price is going to increase by 20%. And then you can see below here that the base price is being increased. And you can set up as many rows of these as you like and you can set it up to decrease as well if you like. So if you were to save this form, you would see that that price is going to change. I'll quickly jump over here to the actual unit type in the store and you can see that this price here is a storefront price and that is a dynamic price. The best way I would advise to check in if your dynamic pricing rules are active would be to come down to this page and you'll see here the rules and you'll see what's active. So active is always highlighted in this orange color. So, yeah, that'll be active on your storefront until your occupancy changes, and it'll change based on unit becoming available or unavailable when it takes it beyond one of those thresholds that are set.

This is. Yeah, it's a really interesting feature because it's. Lots of the big, you know, big operators use stuff like this and they're changing prices all the time. So I suppose one of the things we've always wanted to do is try and bring, you know, these. The tools that the big guys use to optimize the revenue and to, you know, build a great business and make it available to all operators, smaller operators, you know, people who've got one site, people have 10 sites all using stores. So this is a really important thing to, you know, to play around with. Even if it just boosts revenue by 2 or 3%, you know, that goes straight to the bottom line. So it's a. It can be a very valuable feature. And some of our biggest customers have been using it now for a few weeks and getting some good results. So definitely a good one to check out.

Yeah. And I think there's a question there from Richie and we'll probably take questions at the end, if that's okay. We'll just wait and do those all at once. We'll do a bit of a Q and A. Okay. So the next feature I wanted to show you is what we call action nudges. So again, on the unit type, you can set what we call an action nudge. This is a tool we're giving you to let you draw attention to specific unit types that you're selling on your storefront. And you can see here it can be toggled on and off. You don't have to use this, but you can turn it on like this. And basically it gives a frame and text around you type based on what you set. So here we have a preset for most popular, but you can click to something else, say, like a free welcome gift. Change the text, change the color to wherever you want. We recommend only doing this for as few unit types as possible because it really needs to draw attention. And if we were to save that, then go to the actual, say, booking form here. You'll see that that appears on the form that'll appear anywhere on the storefront where the unit type appears. So that's Action Nudges, definitely worth checking out.

And one little thing to mention on that is there are some UK regulations around what you can say here. So, I mean, we've enabled this, but make sure. You know, like I think it's. There are, there are some recent regulations in the UK about saying, you know, it's the last one, if it isn't the last one. So just be aware that you can use this but use it, use it responsibly.

It's. The regulations aren't quite confirmed yet. It's still, it hasn't actually come into UK law yet. Okay. But it's potentially to come down the line. Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

So, yeah, so the next feature I want to walk through was deposits. So again deposits are set per unit type. If you come in here, you can see there's a security deposit section and you can set this up for each unit type of any amount you like. And what this is going to do is bill the customer immediately upon booking whatever deposit amount you've added. So if you come again to the booking form, you'll see Here we have £50 deposits on this and you can see it's going to be coming out based on the text here. And you can withhold this if there's a reason why the customer may have left the undone clean or whatever and you want to take a cleaning charge or you can refund it in full. There's a full system in store to track that. Anything that's withheld will be tracked against your revenue correctly too. The next up we were going to talk about capital and Gavin's going to run you through store of capital.

Yeah. So I don't know if anyone's had a chance. Well, we've seen quite a few people have applied. I don't know how many people on this call have had a chance to check this out but we've partnered with Approved Finance who do a lot of financing for self storage operators in the UK and what we've got to do here is, I know from my own sites there are times whenever you want to grow or buy some containers or do some more fit out or even just have working capital, we want to make that as accessible as possible. So what we've done here is if you're in your store account, you'll see here in the top left, there are four options here for funding. The top left is working capital loans and that's based off the revenue that's going through your store account. So it's that you've pre qualified for that amount of a working capital loan from Approved Finance. So there's working capital and then there's container capital and they have a specific funding agreement there in place for containers where I think it's the first six months or £18amonth for a container. And that's designed specifically because they know that it's the first six months that it, it might sit empty to keep the cost down. So that's also a really interesting option. You can also get funding for an indoor fit out and you can also get funding for the purchase of land or warehouses or anything else for new sites. So lots of our operators are opening up new sites. Lots of you watching this, probably in the middle of doing that and this is just an option for you. If you find that the terms are suitable and work for you, then great. So this is here and it's in your account, so feel free to apply. It'll put you in touch with the team from Approved Finance. They'll get in touch and that's all managed with them and they will move it forward from there. But it's just really to try and help people get access to finance if they need it.

Thanks, Gavin.

By the way, Steve, I can't see any questions, so I'm not sure if I've looked in the wrong place, but you may be the only person who sees questions.

Yeah, no, but that's okay. Thank you. So now we're going to talk about some new features that we haven't announced yet. All of these are live in your account so you good chance you've come across it if you're already a store customer. But I'm going to walk you through them anyway just so you have an idea of how they work. So the first one is related to switching customers to Stora. So we're moving more and more operators across, especially from other software platforms. So maybe they have like existing customers with payment methods set up in some way other than card, for example. And we're encountering a lot of people have some anxiety about the switch and it's mainly just around the effort and making sure everybody's happy, the customer's happy, there's no issues in the switch. So we're really thinking about how do we develop more tools that make it easy for operators to bring their customers to store and and ultimately get them set up with automated payments. And to do that we have released a few features which I'm going to show you here now. So to start on a subscription now, when you're creating it, you'll be able to pick the option to automatically link their payment card. So this will only appear if you're adding it via manual payment method. So a lot of operators would switch their customers over to Stora on This first and then try to get their card added either by the portal or via the operator on a call or in person. And now whenever that happens, it's going to link it automatically. And so that's one aspect of this. And the next aspect is if we go to a customer here in store. So if the customer is being paid, is paying by a manual method, you'll now see this banner and this is going to give you a new tool which makes it easy to get them to add their own card. So here at the top we have the section about encouraging customers via welcome email. So this email is an email we've designed which is all about welcoming the customer to the new way of they will be interacting with your business via Stora and asking them to create their account and link their card. So you can see a quick example of this email here. You might be better sometimes talking to the customer first to let them know it's coming, or you can just send it and let them know after. But what will happen here, this flow is optimized from here to really get them to add their card themselves so you don't have to chase them for it or add it for them. So they'll come in here, create their account and there'll be a banner at the top of their customer portal when they're in there to say add your card. And that could be sent either when you're creating a subscription or at any time from here you just click this button and you can send it immediately to the customer's email and file. And hopefully that'll make your life a lot easier when it comes to getting customers moved over to payments card payments in store and.

Yeah, exactly. And the point of this is just that the more customers generally that you have paying by card, the, you know, the admin of chasing payments goes away. And so you know, if you don't have a card when you're signing somebody up or they want to pay by bank transfer, that's fine. But this will, this is a tool to help make it easier for you to get those people to put in a card at some point over time. So that ultimately it saves you a lot of time chasing people up and gets as many people as you can on the card because that is even direct debit's an option too. But the card payment flow just, it works very well with three tries. And we do see that bad debts and missed payments is lowest on the card payment method. So that's why we're trying to make that as easy as possible for for you.

Definitely. Yeah. So a few more small things for me before I pass over to Gavin. Next up is on the analytics platform. So to date, you've only been able to pick date ranges from our preset options here, but now we've got a nice handy date range picker. So you can come in, pick any date range and that will filter the data. And this will basically give you exactly what you need. And if you're going to report and use this, it'll export the data exactly those dates as well. And you can even pick a single day if you want. So you could come in and just click twice on the date and that's going to show you the data for just that day as well. So hopefully that makes it even easier to get just the data you need out of Stora. And next up, a small feature, but an important one that some of you will be happy to hear exists. If you haven't stumbled across already, you can now delete your own units from Stora. So you come in here now you can see that the ability to units is now right here. So any unallocated unit can be deleted. Until recently, we didn't want to make this available because we want to make sure that nobody was making a mistake. We want to ensure the customer experience for every operator's customers doesn't get affected. So that's why we, until now haven't made this available. But we have now, so it should work pretty well and you won't have to hassle us to do it for you. So next up is subscription cancellation reasons. So when you're canceling a subscription now, you'll have this option to add a council reason. The council reason is a preset list here, which we've kind of worked out. Hopefully we'll cover pretty much every scenario. And the great thing about this is it exports in your subscription data too. So say in a year's time you could take all of your subscription cancellation reasons, analyze them and see if there's any opportunities to. Maybe you'll spot a consistent issue in your facility or something else that could be improved. So hopefully down the line this will become a really useful bit of data that you start tracking. And two more small things for me. So if we go to the storefront here, to date we've had images for units, containers and things like that, but we get more and more customers come to store with different needs. And that's why we've got three different types of new images created that you can use completely for free. So we have safety deposit Boxes, lockers for anybody using smaller locker units and vehicles. So vehicles is quite a popular one. There's lots of car options in here. Campervans, boats, motorbikes. We've got pretty much everything there covered and they're just in the image library as normal. So when you're creating a unit type, you can just select that image and use it instead. And the last thing is, if you see, down here, we now have the ability to have your storefront in any language. So if you're operating in, say, Europe, and you've got customers with different needs when it comes to that, they can come to store it and just select the language that suits them. So it'll instantly update. You get to pick the options that they can select from and, yeah, it'll just change it instantly for them across the storefront. I think that's it for me, Gavin, if you want to take over again.

Sure, sure, yeah. We even. One of our Welsh customers asked if we have it in Welsh. It's even available in Welsh, so I checked. We actually also. It's also available in Irish, but anyway, I can't imagine that's going to be needed. But anyway, it's very flexible, lots of languages. I think before I go on, I'm just going to go down and try and answer some of the questions that have been related to some of the stuff we've gone through. So Charlotte has asked, could you let me know if the deposit needs to be manually refunded? So, yes, manually, in that you go into store and click a button to action the refund or not. Isn't that correct, Stephen?

That is correct, yeah. So if you were to come in here, say we go to invoices, you can select type. I'll find a deposit invoice here just to show you. So if you view this subscription and scroll down, it's as simple as really, you come in here, click, settle deposit, and you can refund it in full. Or you can say, let's say you want to refund £20 and you can then send the customer an email about that automatically and confirm that. And that's. It's basically as simple as that. And it'll track how much has been refunded and you can keep doing that as well. So if you want to say, come in and refund the rest of it, you can do that for another partial amount.

Yeah, yeah. So, exactly. So we have to action that once you're. Once you work out, if you're giving them the money back or whatever, then you take the Action.

Yeah and it's worth send home on the home screen as well. It will flag that there are outstanding deposits to be refunded once the subscription's been cancelled.

Right. I'm going to come back to Anthony because he's got a few and I'll do them all in one go. So Carl asked can dynamic pricing also be applied to protection? So that's insurance sales at the moment? No, it's just applied to unit but that's a good idea. Richie has asked dynamic pricing. Richie Miller is the only option to link rules to occupancy. For example airlines increase the cost of tickets the more you go to the website without buying. Is this possible? So that's a good question Richie. And so the dynamic pricing we've released I would refer to that as supply based dynamic pricing. So we are changing the price based on your supply, what supply you have and that's I would say the sort of step one for dynamic pricing. It's the easiest one because we've access to the data, there's a there this product will continue to evolve and in the future we'd like to move it towards demand based dynamic pricing which is what you see on Airlines and booking.com where they're able to take some data like for example how often you visited the website and use that to assess the demand from you, an individual customer and then adjust the price based on that. So that is, that's a much more complicated piece of technology but it's on a roadmap and it's where we want this dynamic pricing to eventually go to because every other industry does it. So we want to give you the option to turn it on if you want, if you want to. So I'm just going to come back to Anthony. Carl asked is delete a unit type active? A unit type active? No, it's units isn't it Stephen?

Yeah, we haven't done unit types yet. There's more to that. Obviously there's units, there's units associated with unit types. So there's things we want to make sure are covered there before we unlock unleash that ability on you too. Yeah.

So Richie, then we come back to Anthony, all your questions. So Richie asked are deposits held in stripe or our banks? Can we link a new bank account for just holding deposits? It's processed through your stripe account and sent to your bank the same way all the other payments are taken. So it's exactly the same. So it doesn't go into a separate account, it isn't held by stripe. It's processed by you and it's up to you then to manage that. So I'm just going back to some of Anthony's questions here. Is there potential to automate which units get action nudges based on rules similar to the dynamic pricing? There is potential. We don't do that yet, but we do at the moment. And some of you might have this turned on. You can connect your, you can automatically have your unit type delisted from the storefront if there's none left. So we already have that connection storefront to supply. So that would be something we could look into. Or ultimately you really would like the action nudges to be automatically turned on. When you actually have three left, the action nude comes up and says, last three. That would be. That is probably a better way to do it. Or even, you know, if you're two away, two away from the price going up, it might say last two. At this price. We will be working towards automating all of that and letting you set some rules and choose which ones you want to be on and off. But for now we've just released it so that you can manually do it yourself. Anthony also asked in, when moving from another system, is it possible to bulk email customers get card details or do they have to be done one at a time for now, one at a time, Anthony. But one of the things that we may do is kind of something where you can sort of click, you know, anybody that, anybody that isn't on card, email them all at once. We haven't released that yet, but that's something that would be sensible for people moving from another system because you might have 2,000 customers to be sending those emails to. So, yeah, that is a sensible thing for us to do and we have talked about that already. Anthony's question, why does the security deposit get charged at booking rather than alongside the other move in charges? The reason for that is that the other move in charges are charged on the morning, sorry, the day of the move in. So, you know, somebody's booking for next Thursday, they're not going to be charged. They're moving their actual rental until the Thursday morning. And so the point of the deposit is that, you know, you're getting that earlier, it's signaling a commitment. So that's done at the time of booking. Because of that, if, you know, if it was done at the same time as the other charges, you wouldn't be getting it until the morning we move in. And most of the people we've spoken to wanted the deposit at the time of booking because they wanted to signal, signify a kind of a commitment. That's why we haven't done that. But I'll be happy to talk to you about that a bit more Anthony, after what you're thinking there. So I'll do a couple more and then I'll get on with the plan to take the puzzles with direct debit. That's from Fin. It is. So it's not possible at the moment, Finn, like you've noticed. Yes, I think we, I don't see why we wouldn't in future. We just haven't done it yet. There's one from an unknown. Is there a way to remind clients to update their card data once the card ending date is approaching? So that's an interesting one. So Stripe generally I'd be interested to talk to that person because Stripe in the background are normally getting the updated cards. So for my sites I've never seen some of these card expire but for that reason now maybe Stripe don't always do it, maybe they miss. Maybe there's some banks maybe don't can't do it with. But I've never seen a card expire because Stripe have that bit of of tech in there to, to go and do that. So we don't have that because, because of that feature from Stripe. But whoever that is, if you let me know if, if that's happened to you, I'd be interested to know when that has happened. I'm going to come to other three in a bit. Well, maybe I'll come back with other questions shortly. Okay, so where am I? Okay, the first, I'm just going to mention two quick things before I get into top 10 tips here for how to maximize the benefit of Stora. Two things are I released a video yesterday and it is an enthralling video talking about insurance. So I'm sure you've already seen it because it's so exciting. But it was a 10 minute video where I spoke with Adam from Basil Fry and we went through a step by step guide for how to change your insurance. If you're insured with Basil Fry, you will be aware that they're moving from insurance to store protect for your what you're selling to your customers. There are some changes you have to make with your contract, with the terms and conditions on the website and with what you're telling customers. So that article is a step by step guide for how to do that and there's a video too. So if you go to that article, let me see if I Can, I'll share the link here now if I can find it. I don't know if you can find it, Stephen, but. Oh, I've got it. Maybe, maybe Stephen, if you have it. I don't actually have it in front of me at the moment so if you'd be able to share it in the, in the chat there, that's a link to the step by step guide and we're here to help. If any questions, give us a shout. So that's a really important thing for anybody renewing insurance to make sure you get that right. The other thing is we, we have a lot of people, customers with using Paxton Net2 for their gates. If you are one of them. Where, where that is, it's, I think we've, I think it's ready now packs integration for gates. So if you have any, if you want to get it turned on in your system, reach out to support and we'll start the process of getting that turned on. So Paxton net2 is a very popular git system and we've been being asked for it for I think almost since we started the business three years ago. So we finally got around to doing it. It was a trickier one than some of the others. So that's also available. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen now. Let me see.

Okay. Okay.

The. So this is a 10 top 10 tips and actually end up with 11. Always have a hard time getting down. I get carried away. Okay, so the first thing I was going to say and this really isn't anything to do with store except store does make it easy to change your prices. But this, we're coming into a busier time of year. You know, when we look at the industry report after this you'll see that it is sort of April, May, June, July, they're the times you get lots more move ins, lots more square foot moving, more revenue growth. So there is more demand at this period of time. So the first thing I would say is review your pricing if you haven't already. It may be a good time to pump something up a little bit. If you think that you know you can handle that. That's just one thing. So number one, review your pricing at this time of year. Number two, I was going to say take a look at so in analytics if we go to this is just a demo kind of these numbers aren't the real numbers or anything. But take a look, take a look at what your insurance sales are as a percentage of your storage sales. So on average across store, I think it's about 7.4% but the industry average is more like 10 or 12. So you know, I think a lot of people have sometimes left insurance pricing just at kind of default prices. So I would just review your insurance pricing. If it is below 10% it may be worth bringing up some of your insurance pricing as well. That's always a good place to just be aware. It's a nice revenue line. So take a look at that too. Number three is all website related. So there's. We have a lot of, we've done a lot of work to the website over the past sort of six months. The website and also the online checkout. And one of the things we do come across when we're talking to customers sometimes is there hasn't been a lot of, I suppose there's a lot of easy wins on the website. So Stephen has. Where is the. Up here. Okay, so in our, in our academy. So if you go to this link, there's a lot of stuff here about tips. There are guides in here, lots of stuff about ways to optimize your landing page. And the reason this is so important is this is the first thing your customers will often see and you know, a bad impression here can, you know, can just destroy your conversion rate. So it's really worth taking the time, taking the time to invest in optimizing your website. A few tips here. We have now in the online store you've got different fonts. So you'll be able to go in, change your fonts and make you know, let your website look a bit more, bit different, a bit more personalized. You can change layouts, you can add video now, embeddable video to the homepage, lots more personalization options. So take a look and if you're, you know, take a look at what's available now and maybe take a bit of time personalizing the site. One of the things that Brian mentioned to me earlier is he sometimes sees people with quite bad pictures on the website. So grainy pictures, grainy images, pictures that the place doesn't look very clean and tidy. So make sure whatever you're putting up there, you know, it really is putting the, you know, the best foot forward for the business. And we also have an info bar now. So if you go, to go here, the info bar, this is a pop up announcement that will go along the top of the page. So I'll turn that on here, save this. It's not going to be the right time of year for this but you can see that'll pop up there and this is really good for anything, like any sort of discount or promotion or anything that you're trying to draw attention to. It can be a good way to get people to take a certain action and draw attention to something. So that's in the info bar and you can set that all up here and have a link to something here. So I would recommend take a look at that. And finally, SEO is so important for people's websites. You want to get found. You may already have done this, but if you haven't, it's really worth doing. So you can now customize your SEO metadata for your site. So if you go to your, your site here, I'll go to Coventry, I'm gonna go down to Search Engine Preview, you can change this. So this is important because this is the sort of stuff that Google is seeing and using to help you get found. So if you know people are, if you've got multiple sites, especially, especially important to be putting in the name of the place and getting the right stuff into that, that section there, you can add SEO metadata at a site level, even at a unit type level, you know, so you know, if you've got a 20 foot container of 50 foot, you can even go in here and do it here. So you know, go in and make the time to do these things because it will affect your SEO. If you're struggling with SEO, it's really, really worthwhile going in and doing this. You can also put SEO data onto every one of your pages too. So go in and do that at the, at the page level too. Okay, so that's tip three is lots of stuff for optimizing your website. I would take a start at those things I've gone through. But also check out a lot of this guide which a lot of it's written by Stephen, who you know, has a massive amount of experience of online optimization and website and design number four. And some of you will have set this up as well. But the pop up form, now the pop up form is, this is when somebody's on your website, you can pop up a form and ask them a question or do something, especially if it looks like they're going to maybe leave the page. Can be quite useful. Now these were very popular five or ten years ago and there's, you could argue that sometimes are annoying. They're so annoying. Pop ups are annoying. I find them personally find them annoying. But you can do them in different ways with our product and you can have them in the bottom corner like little nudges. So they're not quite as in your face. And one of the ones that we find most successful for pop ups is asking them if they'd like a callback. So if you ask somebody if they'd like a call back with any help, that's a good way to get a lot of leads so that you have details. If you are running your business where you're contacting people and you're there to call them back, that is a way that we're seeing is getting a lot more conversion of people's details. Get them on the phone, sell them some storage. So yeah, I would look at the pop up forms and that one in particular is one I would recommend taking a look at. Okay, so number five, optimizing your checkout. So I don't think we covered this really Stephen, but we've also a few months ago we released unit type groups and I know lots of you are using this already, but the point of groups are that you may have two different types of 25 square foot units. For example, ground floor, first floor at the front, at the back you might have a, you might, you might want to charge more for your 20 foots at the front gate than the ones away at the back. And you can now group them, it'll show the price from and then select and then you'll have them listed here. So people can then choose. So this is really popular in the U.S. it's called good, better, best pricing where you can kind of say you know units from 10 pounds and then you've got a choice, 10, 15, 20 week, whatever it might be. So it's really, that's one way to do it. And we've got a bunch of different examples here. You can also, if you prefer to break them down by basic and premium, you can do it that way. It's very flexible how you do it. So it's up to you to implement this whatever way you like. You can break down by indoor, outdoor deposit boxes, lockers, vehicle parking here. And then I think this one has a different one which is small, medium and large. So it's up to you how you group them. Depends how you're selling your units and everything. But it's there to flexibly help you get people through a flow and ideally upsell a little bit where, where you can as well. So take a look at that. The other thing I would just recommend or something new that's was a kind of a smallish thing but could be, could be really worth taking a look at is you can edit the wording in your discount Code hex. Now I'm just trying to see if I can find one here with a, with a discount maybe that aren't in here. I'll bring up, I'll bring up store stuff which is. I know we have discount running there. Okay, so in this, so in here, this 50 off first month you can now go in and edit the text that's shown there. So you know it. It allows you to be a bit more flexible. Some like when was that Fidesa there? In October we went to sureguard I think it was October. Went to suregard and sureguard in where was Vanessa Rotterdam sureguard there are. They do a thing where it's a pound for the first month. And you know, I don't think anyone's doing that in the uk. We might not need to. It's a heavy discount. But it. This gives you the flexibility to do whatever you want. So you could say you're £1 for the first month and you just saw our little thing pop up there as well. So if you are running any sort of different type of promotion, want to try different types of promotion, this is. You can do that here as well. And that will be done from discounts. This is the store context. You can edit it right here. Okay, so that's more connected to this kind that could be impacting your conversion rates as well. Okay, so that's number five, number six. So the next six are a little bit quicker. So tasks. We know that some people are using Tasks Manager. This is a relatively new feature but friendly people use this for callbacks to customers. So using this for callbacks you can connect it to customers or unit types. People are also using it for maintenance. So you know, checking a unit's clean, you can have it there, you know, make sure to do that. And also people can use it, you can use it for business tasks. So potentially, you know, write a blog article and maybe you set yourself a plan for the next six months and you put one in a week where whatever it might be and you can use this for that as well. This is the start of something a lot bigger that we'll be announcing quite soon. So it's sort of feature one of, of a load but it's, it's useful already for, for managing your tasks. Okay, number seven, lots of people probably doing this already again. But let's say you're closed on Sundays and you don't want people moving in on a Sunday because maybe if you're like me, sometimes people moving in you get calls and you don't want to be bothered on a Sunday you can turn off the date people can move in on, sorry the day of the week. So if you go in here, you can down here, you can, you can unselect Sunday here. So that means that people can't book a Sunday as a move in day. Now if you're open Monday to Friday and you're a manned site, you might just, you might not want people moving in Saturday or Sunday either. So you can do that too. So it's just flexible there about what, what way you let people move in and when. I wasn't going to mention this but you can also edit when, how soon people can move in and how far into the future. You know, if you're pretty full, you probably don't want people booking two months advance because who knows if you'll have availability. Okay, auto allocations, another one then. So I don't know if anyone has this turned on. I know some people do automatically reserving units from bookings online. So this is auto allocation of units. So if somebody books on your website, our system can move the unit into a reserved state for you automatically. So the way we do that is we, if somebody books a 50 square foot unit, it will look at all your 50 square foot units and it will pick the next one in reverse order alphanumerically. So you know, if you have a hundred one to 100, it'll go to 100 and give them out 100 and it'll keep going back until it finds one. That's a very interesting feature. If you have smart entry at your gate then this combines to actually mean that if you let people book on the same day and people can book the same day, they could actually book from outside your gate, pay, pass their ID check, sign the contract and just our system will instantly give them the code and they can move straight in. So it's an important part of what we call one minute move ins, which is sort of group of features that allow you to get people to move in, let people move in straight away. And I've had that on at my sites sometimes as it sort of tested out. And it's great because you know, sometimes on a Sunday I just see in my email somebody's moved into 100 square feet and they haven't phoned, they haven't called, I haven't, I haven't had to have spent any time and they've gone in and moved in. So that's automatically allocating units and then also automatically deallocating units at move out. So this is once If a subscription is still allocated at the end of the move out day, it will automatically deallocate the unit. So that makes it available. I'm actually not entirely sure whether it's available then or whether it's kind of ready to be. It's in a sort of a hold state, Steven. Maybe. I presume it goes. Becomes available.

Yeah, it's available.

Okay. Yeah, so it becomes available. So I think it might be something for us to look at in future to move that into a kind of a pending state. You know, if you're as an operator want to kind of check that it's clean and then you know, you can move it, you can automatically move it to available. But for now it just makes it available. So those are, those are good features to turn on to save you time and hassle as well. Automatically updating the unit on the website. So that is, that is at a site level, I think is that if you want. Yes, this is it here. You can automatically update your storefront status. So if this is on and you've run out of units, it will convert the status to out of collecting leads instead of letting people book it. You can turn that on too. Okay, number, that was number nine. Number ten is this one that Brian mentioned to me just earlier is a few invoices. Well actually if you go to the homepage, this is a good way to see, you know, all of your awaiting payment invoices are sitting here. So you know, you can click on this and go straight to. All the invoices aren't paid. Now I wouldn't be very happy with this number if this was my real site. This is just a demo account. So. But what Brian was saying is it's worth just reminding people that if, you know, if there is an invoice that is in kind of retry mode, you can go in and retry it yourself anytime. So if you're in an invoice and click on View on Stripe, this is in demo mode, so it won't bring up stripe for me. But if you click View on Stripe, it loads up a page immediately where you can just retry a payment. You just click on a button to retry it and you can do that yourself manually. So if it is retrying, you can go in and retry these card payments yourself. And so that's always a good way just to keep on top of what's going on. That was number 10, final thing I was going to say is just on the site maps. So the sitemaps are color coded and if you know what the colors are, it actually is pretty helpful and it can be a really useful glimpse of how the business is going. So the just to say what the colors are. So green means it's occupied, red means it's overlocked. I don't actually have any here, unfortunately, but we'll have one that's showing this is a reserved state. So green is occupied. Light green means it's in reserved. So that is the status that happens if somebody books online, they're moving in three days, that unit is held for them. So it's reserved. So light green is reserved. Moving in. Dark green means it's occupied. Red means that it's overlocked. Purple means that it is in repossession mode. And then we also have, we also have, there's a blue. This. It's actually there's nobody in that status here, but there's blue, which means they have, they're moving out. Steven, if you can help me here, blue is moving on.

If you see there's a little key there on the right gal and you click the four square icon, it'll show you all of them the colors.

Okay. So moved out is blue and moving on is light blue.

That's it.

Yeah.

So.

It'S, it's quite a good way just to make sure once you've learned the colors, it's a good way to kind of just keep on top of what's happening at the site as well. Anyway, that is my, that's my 11 things. Let me just see. We're sort of running out of time here a little bit. I must have waffled on for far too long. So maybe let's look at, look at questions for a second here, just make sure haven't missed anything major. And then I'm just going to go on to just five minutes on the report. But I do want to leave some time for questions for another question. So Luke Davis asked will there be an automated late fee coming soon, a small penalty that gets charged? Yes, that's on our roadmap. We don't have a date for that. But yes, absolutely, that is coming soon. Richie Miller, can you set a limit for how far in advance customers can reserve book a unit that was answered there. So yes, you can Stephen, post that link. Paxton Penn from Liam, what about the Paxton tenant?

So I can answer. So it's only possible to integrate with Paxton Net2. So if you're using Paxton, there will be no option for any integration that isn't net 2 from my understanding. And this is a Limitation on the Paxton end, there's just nothing we can technologically do to achieve smart entry with any other Paxton system. So I think that's a good point to be aware of. If you're using Paxton, you will have to move off something like Paxton 10, I believe, and you can raise that with Paxton yourself, maybe request something. But there's nothing we can do on our end, unfortunately.

Richie Miller's asked, can we add the SSA logo to the website and can we add a font we want if it's not on the list? So SSA logo? I don't see why not. Stephen? Not sure.

Yeah, it depends where you mean. But there's obviously countless places you can add images. But we want to add more, so probably I've had it requested before in the footer. Definitely add more flexibility to the website in future for things like that. And on the font, Richie as well there we can add fonts if you get in touch. We can add certain fonts from Google fonts basically because we built on top of the Google Font system. So for something in Google Fonts you find that you would like added, reach out to support with a link and we can look into it and see if. See if it's okay.

Some really interesting questions actually here are just about things that we can do as we keep progressing this as we keep investing in the product and developing it. Question from Anthony. Will it pop up be made more customizable? Currently it collects data, but it'll be good if we could send customers to the page instead. That's a good point. I don't think you can do that yet. Stephen. Could we.

That's everything's possible. Yeah. It's just always. As you can see, this is part of our battle is everybody's got so many great ideas and we can't do them all at once, unfortunately.

But it isn't possible today.

But it would be the reason why it couldn't be done.

Yeah. Dave Jones has asked an interesting question. Can a move in day be restricted by type? So it can't. I think it's. It's set at the unit at the site level, isn't it Stephen?

Yeah. Technically you could set up different sites to do. To have different. For different types but obviously that's a bit of a hassle. So not currently? No, not currently.

But that could be. We could look at that, Richie. Or moving auto moving. Sorry, does it do this only once the contract is signed, an ID verified or it's possible for customers to move in without signing the contract and verifying id. So currently you'll know that our contract will use a third party, so we don't have the ability yet. This is going to change very soon, but you don't have the ability yet to confirm if it's been signed. In Stora, you will get an email as an operator to say it's been signed. But we don't get that email and our systems don't talk to each other. Now, once we've done that, then the goal would be to allow you to set some rules. So whenever you want, if you're letting people just move in straight away, you'll set a rule, let them move in without doing anything. Now, I wouldn't recommend doing that because you should always have a contract. I was chatting with Rennie a couple weeks ago about the contract and they would really recommend you never let anybody go in without a contract. And I can see why. So we'd like to let you set some rules and that would ultimately, I think most people would opt for only let, only give them a code when they've passed their ID and when they've signed the contract. And that isn't available yet. But that I would say on the next. Pretty soon that will be one of our big priorities to make sure that's all done so that people can't move in without doing that at the moment, we leave it to you. So, you know, the system shows you if they've verified their id, you get an email to say the contract's been signed and then that's up to you to set rules as you see fit. But we could definitely make that easier for you. I have a question from Storage Den. It would be good if customers could upload a photo of the unit when they move out. Yeah. So if they upload a photograph when they move out, you could say it's empty and then you could make a decision on the contract. And it's funny, I remember talking about three years ago, Stephen, if you remember about all sorts of stuff we'd love to love to do, and even passing that photo into somebody externally to check, or maybe even AI can check it and then let you know. But yes, at the moment, no. But I don't see any big reason why that couldn't be implemented relatively easily from the customer portal. So that's another very interesting idea.

Which.

Sarah appears to agree with David Greer. So if a customer hasn't verified the id, can they be sent a message to verify? I can only see skip verification. I'm not sure, but that. Stephen, do you know what happens there. If they haven't verified the id, they.

Do get notified before they're moving again. So I think it's a day or two days, I can't remember. But it's before they move in. They will get re reminded to do it again. There's no currently manual way to do it but obviously you can message them directly too and just remind them to log in and do it.

Yeah, yeah. So it's 102 here and I did say to some people that I was going to share some of the industry insights from our report. So I'm going to just pause the questions for a few minutes. I'm just going to bring up our industry report which I hope you all had a chance to look at. We released this in January and this is, I mean it's. We're not trying to compete with the UK Hays Report. We just thought we'd take, you know, the 300 facilities we had in the UK, put it all together into something that would hopefully give customers insights. And our goal here is to get this to the point where a lot of this data is in your store account and it's visible there and you can see trends. So whenever you look at your analytics page you can see what's happening elsewhere. Like am I ahead, am I behind? That sort of thing is so helpful to let you know that maybe there's something wrong with my site or maybe you've gone down by 10% occupancy, but maybe the whole industry has and so maybe it's like, well actually it's an industry move or it's all about trying to help you run a better business. So this is the first sort of version of that and I hope you've all had a chance to look at it because of the time. I'm just going to put out a few things that I thought was we're interesting from this. If you haven't got this already then I would encourage you to go and download it. It's on our website store co. I think there's a bar at the bottom just to take you straight to get a copy of it. It's free, so go ahead and get it. One of the things that we saw, one interesting thing here is in square foot, moved in, moved out. You can see it really is July where the biggest amount of move ins happen but also move outs as well. So that's why we talked about this. Sorry, coming into a period where we're busy, this is a busy period for self storage. So potentially a time to review your pricing and you'll see that a bit further down as well. What we saw as well as containers, occupancy levels growing a lot with containers over indoor storage and we saw in general a kind of a shift to lower cost units. So we saw that 25 square foot units, the occupancy rates grew at 10% versus 130 square foot plus at 1% in 2023amongst our store customers. Whereas containers, you know, we saw a 30% bump in occupancy and containers which would, you know, we'll have to be careful about what data we're using here. And you know, some of our operators are growing quickly as well. But that certainly implied a move towards lower cost, more affordable units. We also. So the summer demand peak is just again here, you know, it's shown in the number of new bookings in the month of July. So something to be aware of the booking source data. Yes, I thought what's interesting here, I thought was as we've brought on more bigger customers, we have seen the bigger customers tend to be less inclined to show prices online and there's various reasons for that that we're going to talk about a lot more over the next few months as we release some of our new features. But we've just seen that the most bookings still come through the website. But there is a kind of a bit of a shift there as some people, if it isn't on the website, it's done over the phone and in the back office. So, you know, some of our operators are not showing the prices, collecting the lead data and then calling the customer and converting that way and depending what way, what way you run your business. It appears that that can also be a very successful way to run your business. It is more time consuming but can work well. Another thing I was going to say is I'm just going to go to. I have to go quite quickly here. Most people pay by card but I was going to talk about discounts. So here we have discount popularity which 40% of our customers are not discounting. And I think one of the things we hear quite a lot is it's very tempting to discount and sometimes there's an encouragement to sort of do you need a discount? Is it really? Because if you don't need to, then don't. We obviously enable any sort of discounting but it isn't always something you have to do. It shouldn't be the default. Lots of people don't do it and do very well without doing it. So yeah, there's lots more in that report, I would encourage you to take a look at it if you get a chance. Overall, though, occupancy levels are up. A lot rate per square foot is up. The average store customer grew their monthly revenue by 50% last year versus the year before. There's a lot of growth going on in this industry. It's a good time to be here and, you know, it's a good time to invest in it. So lots of good stuff in there for everybody to take a look at. Okay, with five minutes left, why don't we take a look at the. If there's any more questions at all. Reese Jones asked. Sorry, somebody asked, can you recommend electronic lock access for outside storage units? So this. It is a bit more of a. It is a trickier problem to solve this. How do you manage access for containers if there's no. If there are no staff on site? I actually had a call yesterday with a customer who's coming on board and he was asking the same question. I actually thought it might be a good topic for us to try and have a conversation on potentially on the community and try and get a few operators to sort of chip in with how they've solved this problem and then we could hopefully maybe write up some sort of a guide on different ways to approach this. One way I've seen it done, the most common way I've seen it done is have a gate system, a smart entry system on the gates and then people leave the containers unlocked with a padlock inside. Just buy cheap padlocks and leave it inside and let tell people your unit number 10 is a padlock inside. Bring your own padlock. I've seen that happen a lot. And then on the git, you can have any system like Bearbox is very popular. A lot of our customers use Barebox with PTI Open tech, there are quite a few. We've got a page now with interviews on them all. So you could use any for that. But yeah, actually having locks on the. On the containers, that's a bit trickier. I know. Janice, do they can. They can replace the end, put a roller shutter on it and then put a noki lock into the roller shutter. So that's an option. I'm sure there are other smart entry systems coming out now as well from I think Sensorberg, PTI and Opentech, I believe, from the top of my head. So you could use them on any of those. So that's an option. But I think we should put together an article, Stephen, a help article over the next month. Try and Write up different approaches here and how they work because it's not always that clear what the best way to do that is. Reese Jones was the answer to the question of how far in advance customers could book covered. Yes, it was. So it's up to three months and you can bring that down to any number of days. The question from Eve Williams is there a way we can char charge padlocks to move ins through Stora? So we do have an integration with a store. So you. So you can sell boxes and padlocks. We few customers who do that. So yes, you can do that integration. Eve, There's a potential other ways I've seen this done that we don't yet support but will soon as just having it in the. If it's just a padlock, having it in there, having it in the checkout flow and storing. So that might be an additional thing we could do. And we've looked at another thing I've seen people do is actually rent padlocks to customers which can be quite a nice revenue stream and something I'd like to add into our checkout as well as an option where you can, you know, add a pound a week or two pounds or whatever you want to charge into the the subscription. So yeah, the way to do that now would be the integration of our storefront Eve. So if you want to chat to our support we can talk to you about how we do that. Anthony, can we block move ins for on verified move ins? Yes, at the moment, no. Well, except you could turn off automated. You can turn off auto allocation. That's why I would do that. But for now we haven't just built that feature that I talked about earlier where you can choose. It would be nice to be able to just set some rules. You as the operator, you decide what are the rules? When do we let people move in? And I would imagine it would be once they pass their ID and sign their contract. Eve, not sure if I missed the answer, but if we press skip verification for the id, does this automatically send a reminder notification to the customer to complete it?

Do you? Yes. So that skip verification is basically skipping the requirement for the verification. So it doesn't send anything to the customer and it might just. Usually it's used if you say the customers come in and showed you their ID in person or something like that and you just don't need that to be shown to them the portal or for them to get any reminders about it.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. So it will not Send any more reminders. Oh Anthony.

Yeah.

You mentioned the roller shutter door with Noki. Great. Yeah, that's. I haven't actually seen it but yeah, that is an interesting option for containers. And then we have one more question here from Christian. What's your experience of the 1 meter cubed lockers you stack 2 on every 1 meter squared. Is it a growing and popular type of unit? I have no experience of this locker personally in my site. I haven't put any in. I don't. I'm sure we do have customers doing it, but I don't. I've never actually looked into the data or know or spoken to anybody who does it. So have you know much about that, Stephen?

But we were looking into it recently a bit when we were deciding what additional images to get made and could see more and more people renting out lockers and trying and converting little spaces into lockers. It's definitely growing and I think we'll see more and more of it. Myself too.

Yeah. Anthony has said there and he'll have a lot of experience of this. He said they're great in student markets which you know I can, I can understand that it's even great just for.

Like people could. Might be like looking to rent a unit for a few days to store a bag or something like that. We even have people turn up at our own store office trying to leave a suitcase with us before. That's right. During the.

I think during the store at Christmas party with bottle of wine open. That's right. Although one of the things I'd be interested if anyone is using those. I was wondering about one issue that I've seen at my sites because it's on staff is letting businesses send deliveries and I've often wondered whether the lockers might be a. Might be interesting solution for out the front if you had kind of 10 lockers at the front and if you rent a business unit it comes with a free locker that you know you can. You can share code with whatever and take deliveries into. That was. It was just a kind of a recent idea I was thinking about. I don't know if anyone's any experience with that. I'd love to hear anyone who's been solving business deliveries at on staff sites. It's one of the things that you know, I think is a limitation sometimes to on staff sites. David has said that he has cubes and the uptake is very low. That's interesting. There's a couple of comments there then. Oh yeah, okay. Yeah. So yeah quite a few people are saying lockers haven't been. Been great. Okay.

Okay.

Okay. Well, it's 11 o' clock and I've done all my talking for the day. Nice. Unless any final questions, I think we'll leave it there. And thank you very much everyone for joining. It's great to have everybody on and anything more that we can do to help. Any other requests or features that you'd like us to focus on or things we can do to make your life easier, make your business better, let us know. The answer is, as anyone who's asked, it's not always a instant yes, but it's always. It's so important to get this information. It helps us develop this product a lot. Final thing, actually, in the next couple of months, we have some really big developments coming with the product and the company. From the product point of view, we're investing a lot of time in some big stuff around the task management, which is going to really bring that on a lot for operators. From the company point of view, we're growing the business a lot now. We're bringing in five or six people in the next month or two and we expect to double the size of business over the next nine to 12 months. So we're investing lots, lots more in the product, the team and everything just to try and make Stora work as well as we possibly can for you. So thank you very much to our customers for using us and thanks for all your support and we'll hopefully keep things moving along as well in future for you. Yeah, think that's it. Thanks very much, everybody.