What the f!ck is happening in ecommerce with Lucas Walker

Hello and welcome to E Commerce Growth Stories. This is your hostess with the mostest, Juliana Jackson, aka the CLV lady. And also I am the Chief Evangelist for OmniConvert. And this is Valentin Radu, CEO of OmniConvert. Thank you for tuning in today for a new episode of ecommerce Growth Stories. Do you like snooping around?

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So we're live on a Tuesday for another episode of E Commerce Growth Stories because Valentin is on a vacation. So we're not doing anything this Thursday. But I'm here with Lucas Walker to have a great conversation about what the fuck is happening in E commerce. Lucas is the founder and host of Roll that podcast, Pit Stop Podcast. And he's one of those guys that been around in e commerce for a long time and they know everything about everything and I don't know about that. Come on. You said you paid me to say that.

I know it's. Well, the truth is less sexy. You just, it's a 10,000 hour theory in practice, like a pilot, if you stay in the cockpit long enough, you just, you encounter every kind of weather scenario there is. That's like me. I've just encountered every e commerce scenario that there is pretty much and how they replicate to different places.

How did you get into E commerce man? Because everyone that I asked this question to, it's an accident.

So how did you get the first? Are we calling e commerce like making money online or like selling products like pure Play E commerce like on Shopify? Because those are two different stories.

Let's go to the classic definition of selling ship online and getting paid for it.

I just, I had some friends selling stuff online and I wanted to create a store to make a little bit of extra money, maybe write off some stuff for my taxes. And then it just kind of kept on ongoing from there. So it was never meant to be a career at all. But my first like money selling online is even more accidental. It was a video that I did for a course. So just like we're streaming this to YouTube. We, I uploaded the video to YouTube just so I could play it in class.

Yeah.

Just literally that's why it was easier to just load it from their laptop and it ended up getting featured in a couple of different things. Got, got enough views at YouTube and this is in 2011, YouTube. Google sends me an email saying hey, give us your bank details. We want to pay you money. And I think sure buddy, sure. This is efficient. If I've ever seen one like just go. You're like no, easy there Nigerian prince. So I won't be able to make like a thousand bucks off this video which I did for a course which paid for like the class, the textbook, everything for that one course which was pretty cool. And so that's really where I, I realized like hey there, there's money to be made here. It's, it's a thing. So that's kind of how I, I got the bug. And that was a decade ago now which is an E Commerce Time is a lifetime pretty much. Yeah.

I mean just in the last two years everything that we knew.

Yeah, well, I mean there are people who have been more successful than me doing it, doing it for less time and there are people who have been doing it longer but not, not many on, on either front. So I think I'm a pretty good representative. Representative of sort of what's. What the going on in E Commerce.

So tell me, tell me about, because like right now we're experiencing a lot of changes when it comes to how you can advertise and how you can grow your brand. But let's go, let's take it back to 2011, 2012 where everyone was, you know, showering in the Facebook organic love and the ads love. And people were making crazy money out of advertising. So they just, you know, spent a lot of money. And how did this habit of spending so much money on acquisitions started? Can you tell me about that?

Yeah, and I mean I've never really been much of paid acquisition my myself a lot of organic. Whether it's through, through Google work, word of mouth from customers, I always really optimize for that. Like it's kind of like a never ending funnel just have like you never want to come to a dead end with your customer story. So if a customer makes a purchase, give them something to do. Maybe it's follow you on Instagram, maybe it's sign up. Nowadays sign up for sms, we always join a Facebook group and little things like that. So I've never been one for huge paid acquisitions. But having said that, I wish I got into that a few years ago when it was seemingly simpler. But the thing is that we're seeing this with iOS 15 as well. So sort of my two things are that I'm really good at is high conversion emails and just high converting copy once the audience has been prospected. And I think that something that really comes with that with sort of paid acquisition eight, nine years ago versus today is, it's always changing. So if you could learn something eight years ago, you can learn it today. Like it's not going to take you that much time to get ready and qualified to buy Facebook ads. If you think of going to a company and going through a corporate training program, some of that is, is getting to know your co workers and some of that is getting to know the internal processes and some of it is just learning how to do your job. Like if you go to petsmart and you want to be a groomer, they'll put you through a four week course. You can learn to buy ads today with all the changes going on in probably four to six weeks, it's not going to take you more than six weeks to start like profitably buying ads. It'll take you a lot longer that to master that and become the best at your craft. But, but you can do it. And then you start optimizing for, for how to, how to be better and how to improve. Because at the end of the day money that you can find at the top of funnel is money that you're putting in your pocket at the end of the purchase.

So would you say that it was easier to start an E commerce business, I don't know, maybe five years ago than it is today? Because from where I stand there's a lot of obviously competition is always going to be there but I guess it has become a no brainer lately to start the brand and to start an E commerce business and a lot of people are jumping right in the bandwagon of selling online.

Yeah, I mean competition is because there's a few things. I mean the biggest misconception is that it was easier or better years when people say oh I wish I could be alive with 100 years ago and bring back modern technology.

I can reframe it a bit. Was the entry barrier harder than there is today to start and sell online?

I mean, it was still so easy. And you can always compare it to a generation ago. A generation ago, if you wanted a product, even T shirts, you would have to find. You have to go get it printed and call up a bunch of stores and just say, hey, do you want to buy. Buy some T shirts if you don't pay in 30 days, whatever. And all the operations and logistics that were greatly accelerated by. By having the ability to start a website, it's not that much different. It's just where people are. There's just more opportunity. Like TikTok as a channel did not exist five years ago and yet everyone.

Right now swears by.

There's always new channels. There's always something novel to is it easier or harder now? I think it's something easier to get started. I think there's a lot more opportunity at the high end and people say, well, people love to complain about apps or this and that, but at the end of the day it's still significantly easier than having to build it from scratch in house and doing your own thing. I think a lot of more opportunity on both the low end and the high end now, as well as just more consumers. Because as competitive as it is, there are just significantly more online shoppers. The number of Shopify stores didn't double in 2020, but the number of customers did. So I think that's something to really, really keep in mind that if you were succeeding in 2019, your customer base is that much bigger now and the market hasn't caught up. So I guess it's easier now than it was a few years ago, which is crazy for me. Over there, you see all those bananas or something like, what's going on? You kill someone?

No, I live exactly on the street. On the street right now. And yeah, there's a lot of ambulances and it's more in the city, my new apartment. So like every now and then you will get the sounds, but it's hot as hell so I have to have my window open because we don't have central AC in Romania. Yeah, it's just in the living room. The ac. I mean, the reason why I'm asking you is because I've been looking a lot on the CPG vertigo and there is where, you know, you see a new company every day that sells more or less the same shit. I think I lost count of how many companies sell Chaga drinks or I don't know, some crazy shrooms, drinks and so on. And I guess what I want to ask you is that do you think like the people that are jumping in right now in the CPG, for instance, are just forgetting to, you know, crawl before they can walk? Because a lot of them don't even think about stuff like product market fit, about, you know, what creator space in the market, about positioning. I just see people that have an idea, they just do this beverage, they put their brand name on it and say, come and drink my shit. Come and eat my shit. Come and, you know, buy my organic protein super drink.

I think that, I mean, 90% of CPG startups are going to fail anyway. Just the cold hard truth. And 10, 20 years ago you'd see the fancy food, show a bunch of new products, but 18 months down the road, where are they? On grocery store shelves? I think that there's just always been those plateaus that you can hit. So if you hit a plateau and say, well, this is it, maybe that plateau is small independent retailers. Let's say you're selling a, like a bar because it's a really hard market to crack. And they had Susie York from Love Good Fats on the podcast. She had $47 million of revenue her, her second year. And so like a non traditional entrepreneur of who you think, you know, she has two kids, she was in her 40s, I think when she started, a little bit older, but she still did 47 million. But a lot of it is just putting that legwork and the logistics of getting your product around. And so she was able to get into Costco and big retailers. And that's still where the majority of money is made, especially in cpg because for it to be profit, people really need to be buying by the case. If you sell direct, not everyone wants to buy things by the case.

Yeah, and it's also, it's a, it's a very, it's like a MeToo type of C. Everything is very, very similar. And we did some customer research on similar brands that were selling more or less the same stuff and people could not tell them apart. A lot of them were answering that they were thinking it's the same brand.

So we spend. Think about your team and how hard it is for your team to get to know what's going on with your brand and what you're going on. Like what percentage of. I'll just use Omniconvert because you work there. So let's say you do a blog post even here. What percentage of the Employees are tuned in, watching right now with what's going on with the company.

I think maybe like six or seven usually, which is my team and I'm their direct manager. So they come because how many, like.

What percentage of the team is that?

Oh man, it's like I don't know, 10, I don't know, 10, maybe 11%.

So 10 of employees are interested in your marketing brand. Then you get into the retailers or the marketplace so you're even that more far removed from the customer. So it's hard to get customers to really care and know the nuances of what you're doing. For they buy for one simple reason which you may or may not know. And it could be because it's keto. It's most likely because it's right there and accessible to them at that time of purchase. Because I think bars are a great industry because maybe you sell online, maybe you sell on marketplace like Amazon and maybe you sell in some, some gyms you have a direct referral program so through some, some personal trainers. But after that you can't really get into mainstream brochure. You kind of plateaued. So I think they're just more of those opportunities to plateau and still make a good business. Each one of those channels could easily be seven figures of revenue. So you can start a business and do four or five million dollars of revenue, which is crazy when you think about it because the average business in Canada is about $600,000 a year revenue. Like if you think like the average business corner store, like an owner operator of a truck. So there's all different sizes in there, but you can start a pretty legitimate business. Not that difficult. But the biggest challenge is really logistics.

Oh yeah. It's an industry problem no matter where you're located. Logistics and fulfillment and shipping times, that's the biggest E commerce problem. Like sometimes, you know, people hear me talk about cov but I don't think clb is the biggest problem I think is fucking fulfilling your orders is.

Yeah. And I mean look at buying furniture the last two years or appliances. You. There's tons of stores that sell dishwashers or microwaves or whatever and they're just sold out until then for six months in advance. It's hard to get people to commit to buying something if they're not going to do their products in the next two days of free shipping, let alone six months. And they have to pay now. Like most people don't really want to do that.

It's true. It's the Amazon. In fact, we have In Romania, we don't have Amazon, but we have something similar to Amazon and I just order from it because I don't want to wait for three, four days or a week or two weeks to get something because this is the type of, you know, era that we're living. And a lot of times brands also are not very honest about their shipping times because they have to compete with the narrative in the market. So then the customer support gets overwhelmed by tickets, but where's my order? And all the questions.

And yeah, it's a lot easier to.

Just be honest money than to tell.

A customer it's going to be a while.

And yeah, because they're afraid they're gonna lose the customer. But in the end they will still lose the customer Anyway. So how was it when you were working for Gorgias? Because I know you've been working there, like, they've been growing a lot. How was it?

Yeah, no, it was amazing. It was fast. Just every day more, more and more stuff coming on and that's just a really good segue to. It's not always the problems that are different. It's the channels because we still want to know where the order is. They still want to know a lot of information pre sales. It's just, it's crazy. I would shake babies to get the message across. Like, I just want to like, say, take care, like, make it easy for your customers to buy, support them in their decisions. And so many brands are like, no, I don't want to do this. It's like you spend so much money testing ads for the same price that you spend testing ads for a month. Just hire someone to sit on your website chat and say, hey, if you have any questions, I'm a real person. I'm happy. I'm here to help you make your purchase. And what, like just knowing more that knowing the products that complement one another. And that's why people go to specialty stores, whether it's offline or or online. If you think of like cycling or you've got tattoos. I don't know anything about tattoos. So if I'm buying a tattoo bomb or something, like some, some tattoo care or whatever, I'm just buying bandages from Amazon or Walmart or whatever. But you had a couple tattoos. You've probably seen like what the budget stuff gets you versus, like the better stuff. So you're going to a tattoo shop like, hey, I just got this tattoo and they're asking questions like, was it dark ink is outlined? What kind of tattoo is it that makes a difference and if you sell a specialty product, having the, the right suggestion does two things. One, it mitigates unhappiness in the future. If people are buying a social product, they don't care about the price, they just care about the quality.

Yeah.

Like they just don't. They remember if they buy a crap product or it's been sitting around for six months and it's unopened, they say, you know, I'm just, I'm not going to buy most of them do my research next time. And it also increases your car value because you say, well, you know, you've got this cream, but you might also want the, the oil or the special bandages that allow the skin to breathe or whatever it is. So then you're like, that's how to increase your car value. Just people buy more stuff. So I think those are really the two trends that I've, I've seen that maybe the market isn't quite ready to adapt to yet.

What do you think that happens? Because I've seen you, you pointed something really, really cool there. And it's something that I really believe as well. The fact that, you know, people are very easy to throw money out of their pocket or you know, bitcoins on ads, that's how I call it. But their customer support people are paid very bad. They're considered a cost center versus a profit center. And people don't, I mean not all the brands, but most of the brands don't really give a fuck about their customers or people. They just want to get rid of the customers. But those people actually have the power to change the way you're making money and the power of how you're perceived in the market. And I think, and this is what I want you to let me know what your thoughts are. I think the bad type of mentality when it comes to taking care of customers and the way they buy and the way they consume comes from the founder of the company that does not, is not capable of sending that message across to the company of how they are standing when it comes to customers. So what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think that, I mean, let's approach it with a little bit of empathy and take both sides of the, of the coin. And I'll share my opinion. I mean first off, startup founders are just have a million things on the go. I've never met a founder that's sitting around saying, well sure, what should I be doing? Like there's always something pressing, so everything's going to be rushed and there might be just eight, nine things that are priorities. Like if you're need to figure out how to run payroll, if you need. You're dealing with inventory shortages. Unfortunately, all that just in the business order of operations come. If you have no product to sell, you have no customer support issues. If you're out of money because you didn't pay your taxes two years ago, you have no product to sell. So I think that that's just something to be remindable with all the changes and everything. Like founders are going through a lot.

More than startup founders. But what you think about the messy middle and enterprise.

Well, even then, even messy middle, like that's the, the dangers. And once you get to the enterprise level, then it's becomes something I was reg. And again, if that's how the business is run and it's profitable and doing what the business is meant to do, I'm not, I'm not going to tell you to, to reop it because this one thing, my opinion might be nice. Like I just, I'm not. But I think that it definitely comes from a lot of the founders and realizing that nobody's willing to care as much about your business as possible. And people say, oh, I hired them because in the interview they're going to give 100%. Well, nobody's giving 100. I'm like, I run my own business. I've got a whole network of podcasts that I produce and host. I'm not even giving 100. So how could you ask an employee to give a hundred percent when it's not their business and they have no real reason to care? Yeah, and I think that it's that mentality of, hey, you know what, we know that you'll, you'll pay for yourself. We're tying it back to where we see you talking to all these customers. We can see that like these interactions have allowed to increase revenue. You've mitigated this. So just keep doing this and keep growing on your own stuff. And nobody wants to be a customer support agent for the rest of their lives. It's not necessarily a career destination. There are people that are happy at it. There are people who are excellent at it. And I say this from experience. I did customer support for a year and a half and it's a hard, grueling job. Like if I can filter out all the clients that don't know what they're they're doing and like just don't really get it or rude, sure. But like that's not really how the job, the job is. And I think it's approaching it with, hey, you're going to learn a ton at this job. But a year and a half, two years from now, where do you want to be? And if you give me 40%, if you can turn it up to 70%. When you're talking to a customer, use your downtime to focus on your goals, whether it's a little professional development, whether it's learning more about the industry so you can make a lateral move and bring all this experience of talking to customers with you. Yeah, a lot you can do with that, but it's approaching the. It's approaching everything with that. That mindset of, hey, you know what? It's. These people don't owe me anything. I owe them something. Let's get them happy. And at the end of the day, everyone can be replaced. Eventually, the Queen of England's gonna die.

And like, oh, no, it looks a.

Lot like she won't eventually. Like, I'll bet all the money in the world, eventually the Queen will die. Everyone dies. Right? Like Obama left office. The world went. Went on, like, stuff. Everyone is replaceable. So just know that and don't besides me.

Valentin, if you're listening to this.

Well, even then. But like, it's just one of those things where don't try to find someone who wants to be. Their life's passion is to do this one job. Like, five people are just passionate in general, will give you enough so that it gets the job done and they can help you find their replacement eventually as they grow. And you have that strong relationship with your. With your employees and with your team. So I know that's sort of a roundabout answer. My personal belief is your customer support team is the ones coming in between you and your customers. It's sort of like the SDR team and B2B sales you got. I don't know why they're trusting people fresh out of school who have no interpersonal skills. I get prospects all the time and I don't want to be an. But I'm like, come on, do, do. You're asking me for both money and time, my two most valuable resources. And you cut and paste a email. Try harder. Yeah, like, and at the end of the day, business is not a. It's not a house league sport. It's not the score. Like, I went golfing this weekend. I didn't even count the strokes. I don't care. It's not a tri league. It's a get it done league. And it's. It's hard. It can be Ruthless sometimes. That's just how it works. So my opinion is the people who your customers remember and are leaving that, that aftertaste in their mouths, how would you want that aftertaste that your customers have be? Do you want that they were rushed and you didn't really care or do you want them to feel taken care of?

Yeah, and I think, I think it's about making people. I mean, I was talking about this with my friends earlier. It's like one thing to create a great shopping experience and buying experience, but you also have to create a great experience for me to be your customer in general. Like that's, that's one thing that people need to think about and you know, consider. I kind of ask, I'm kind of proud of myself because I've asked you questions to segue in a subject. So thank you for being respectful of.

My time as a host. I appreciate that.

See, I actually, you know, wanted to be prepared because you're a very good host. I wanted to open the Pandora box about iOS 14.5 and iOS 15. I know you like this topic and I see some familiar faces here in the, in the listeners area. And I also want to say hi to Adam Pearce from Blend Commerce because he gave us a shout on LinkedIn. So I have to do that. Thanks Adam. Adam, if you're still watching, you should reply on LinkedIn. I want to talk about iOS 14, 5 and iOS 15. So we know like the TLDR version, I never can say that word is that ads are not going to be as they used to be. Email is not going to be how it used to be. So I want to know from you, like, you know, what do you think about this? What do you think are the people that are going to get it bad out of this? Like who's gonna get it really bad? I mean, I have my own opinions, but this is not about me, this is about you.

Yeah, I'm guessing you're gonna say the drop shippers and people just rely on Facebook ads.

Oh, they don't even exist for dropshippers. Yeah, no, but they do exist and I'm very respectful of them. But they don't exist in the sense of what I'm calculating. I'm mostly thinking about mid sized and.

Enterprise businesses that have kind of gotten through the point of testing and it's.

A. Yeah, yeah, like who you do think is in danger right now the most when it comes as a company, like, you know, the way the company is built, like two years middle, you know, brand making. I don't know, 5 million per year. But also from a creativity type of perspective, like the way you do marketing. Because what I stand, I think not a lot of people are ready for what this, these things are gonna bring. And I think the shift is gonna hit the fan on Black Friday. Be a very surgical Black Friday. But I just want to. Because you have more experience than me, I'm mostly like niched in my own retention world and my customer life and value world. But you have seen it all and you know the layers of, you know, how you grow a brand and how you operate the brand.

Yeah, I did have my own e commerce company for a number of years, which is not easy to do and I wouldn't recommend that to anyone, but there are a lot of benefits.

So, so what is iOS 14.5? What is iOS 15 and how is gonna, you know, how is it gonna affect the companies?

Yeah. So iOS 14.5, if you're not familiar, is going to really impact your ad buying. IOS 15 is when it really impact your emails. And I've been just waist deep in iOS 15 lately, so that's what I'll talk about a little bit more just because I know and I don't want to bullshit my way through it. There's a ton of iOS 14.5 resources out there, but if your only paid channel is Facebook, it's a good time to.

Oh my God, I didn't even realize that one mine.

They don't want me to give away these secrets. They don't want me to say these truths. You know, I think that that's just test other platforms and if you, you start collecting your own data and running it like events for each ad campaign, like an event. When we did this creative, did it do better or worse than our baseline? You know what your baseline is? You know, if you just run any ad, what it will convert to what you're measuring is that delta. And so keeping your own data in your own business journal. I've been keeping a business journal since like 2011 of just website traffic, conversions, everything. And when I just go back and look at it and say what, what works, what doesn't work? And so I think that that's really the important thing is just try different channels and you might get some, some good results. I also think there's an opportunity with iOS 14,5 as bigger companies put the pause on it because it's not as measurable to take some chances. You have to roll the dice sometime. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs we're seeing, especially with the growth of the last couple years in E commerce are just too, too conservative. They're not willing to take any risks. Like if you have an ad that shows your product off in a funny way, it's worth testing. Like you should just always be testing some of the more out there stuff with iOS 15. And this really segues into Black Friday. So hopefully this tees up your your next question because you hinted to it. Start segmenting your stuff now. And the most important ways to segment is based on ltv. So find that that inflection point of where people you need to stop marketing them. And for us it was three orders. So after three orders people to go on subscription, the LTV or lifetime profit went from about 60 bucks to over 300. So if we get people between that second and third order, it was pretty profitable. If we knew that one out of three customers would go there, we can spend a decent amount of money. So for us what we did was just free samples. Just pay the shipping and you get two full size bags to try. Because for us our cost of goods sold was cheaper than the ads. So for your cost of goods sold, it's usually pretty cheap just given some extra. So customers try your products, they try everything and say, wow, I discovered a new brand. Look at everything that they sent me up for sure I'm going to order again. I love this one. Let's buy a mix pack, let's buy a bundle. And once you'll buy that, well, why not do a subscription? So I think looking at all the different ways to increase your revenues there is very important. I also think just segment into and this is actually Thursday's podcast episode of Pit Stop. So and this was what we talked about with Chase diamond are just different segments. So you can have segments of people who could be VIPs. You have your VIP segments and rather than based on the open tracking or their ip, focus on what you really know for sure about them. If I know if I own a restaurant and customer comes in and they come in every Friday, like I know what they probably want, I know what I know what they like they come in all the time. I'm going to comp them some free appetizers or, or something because they also are the ones that tell everyone else, like if you can start with that, that core. There's so many sides though that both anecdotal and scientific that like it takes 3% of a population to incite riots and change. If 3% of the population is protesting, like that's all that you need or there's that TED talk with the second or third follower. Once a few people do it, it establishes enough social proof that it.

It'S a pattern basically.

Encouraging them to create and share UGC that will also help because and nobody really talks about this but there is a still in customer's minds like if it's a supplement or a is going back to the bar example something that you eat or ingest if you don't know anyone who's eaten it before, you don't really want to be the guinea pig yourself. There is something about seeing it in a store or even on Amazon that makes it just seem a little bit more credible. If I'm buying it from a website that I've never heard of, I don't know it has no review, I'm probably not going to eat it. I'm not. So I think that knowing just continuing to do what you know works and have and fuels your successes. For everything else, go back and look at your historical data of emails that have done well and compare your open rate to your your revenue. What was the goal of that email? Was it just to get people to open it to remind them that you still exist or was it do that? But like it's like that very. There's a very crass joke. What's the difference between jam and jelly? And it's that you can't jelly your promotions down someone's throat. You can only remind them so many times. Sometimes it's nice to remind them that you exist and sometimes that can be hey, we're in a new retailer. We just launched in Costco. If you see a send us a picture and we'll give you $20 to the website or whatever it happens to be.

Yeah.

And you just don't see that often nearly enough. It's always buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And I mean it also depends on your product. But if you do want to sell your business one day and 90% of your email list is churned, that's a lot of like top line valuation of your business. There's something to be said about having a very healthy list. So that's what I have to say about that. Just really for iOS 15. Focus on your best practices. Start segmenting now and start re engaging people now. If you know they haven't opened an email or clicked a link, say, hey, these emails just click the link here.

Remember when I was at pstop and I was telling you about RFM segmentation? This is exactly that type of segmentation is the Only shit that works for iOS. And it's funny to me now because when I was talking about this a year ago or two years ago, no one was giving a fuck, but now it's like, oh my God, Juliana, I read this article you wrote six years ago. You were right. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I was not.

Everything needs to be just in time knowledge. Try to learn a little bit skin now, explore different horizons now before you need it. So that when the time comes to make decisions, it's been kind of noodling in your brain for a little bit of what are some ideas that we can use? You know, she had some good stuff a couple years ago. I'm actually going to have some really good stuff now. I'm going to go back and find it. So, yeah, it worked.

It worked out for me really, really well. And when iOS 15 hit, I was probably one of the first software that made the public statement because our users came to us and asked us like, oh shit, you know, what are we gonna do? I was telling them like, you don't have to do anything because you already have all your engagement, you know, metrics here that you can watch. And it's actually better for you because you will start becoming more creative and using, as you said, user generated content, reviews using anyway quizzes.

You might like. We had a tab like a review and all it said was like, like crack for dogs. And so we just send an email saying, hey, I don't know if we can use this promotionally, but it's too funny not to share.

Yeah.

Sales and remind people that we have a good product.

Yeah, no, I like it. And I think, I mean this is, this is where creativity is going to come and I think it's going to be a purge of bad practices and all that. You know that we say that.

Joanne, I think about how many businesses still don't have a CRM.

One of my problems in the world.

Like this purge is going to come. Let's take a step back. There are. What do you think about a Yahoo email account?

I'm talking more about the consultants with the purge.

Yeah, well, I think so too. I think it'll still be a long time and I think that unfortunately you can still get away with selling what worked on necessarily what is working with the industry will have.

Yeah. What you think about the consent? I think you, you are in my roundup, but let me give people a bit of, you know, a flavor to it. So we're doing this roundup about consent based marketing and the new era of consent. So what do you think? What do you think people, you know, are. Do you think people are ready for this type of marketing based on privacy and consent? Because most of these e commerce companies don't even have a privacy policy on their website. When you sign up for that eternal 10 discount, you're not agreeing to no privacy policies. You're not, you know, brands are not telling their users what they're going to use their data for and so on. So do you think they're ready for this type of changes in the market?

I mean, nobody reads that. And look at what a lot of the telcos do with your data. Your, your credit card.

Yeah.

For instance. I don't think that it really like the nice answer is to say, yeah, you, I mean, you should have a privacy policy, but like, if you're a small business, yeah, bigger things to worry about. But once you get to a certain point, you should have it and just make it really simple and easy to understand. But also, just because you don't have a privacy policy doesn't mean that you're not a piece of shit. So you can also not have a privacy policy and not sell people's data.

In Europe would be fucked without it under gdpr. If someone, yeah, if someone tells.

Are they tracking down though? Because they announced Castle six years ago the Canadian Andy Spam laws and it's, it's a joke, it's a farce.

I mean, there's always, you know, workarounds around anything, you know, in terms of privacy. But here if you go and report the company that they, you know, took your personal data, they didn't inform you, they can really shut you down or they can find you wherever. It's happening a lot in Europe, but I see, you know, America, North America and I see, you know, in general that they're trying to, you know, come around the privacy policy. I mean, I think it's all about making people. And of course, this is the sixth ambulance in the last 42 minutes. What I'm saying is that I think in a way getting the people's permission to be marketed to, I think it's a big win that, you know, it should encourage you as a brand to become more, I guess, cautious or more.

To the original question. At the end of the day, if you're marketing to people who are opting in and raising their hand saying, yeah, I want promotions, it's just going to be healthier for the business overall. And that should be where you start is like, there's often not a big shortage of people who want to buy from you so much, how you're marketing to them, especially the farther they get down the funnel. If you have a customer who's ordered from you for the last two, three years, place a ton of orders. You just want to be really respectful of them. The last thing that you want to do is lose a customer by pissing them off. And just think of what pisses off customers. Better discounts for new customers.

I think just long shipping times.

Yeah. It's like just bad shipping times. Or unexpected. Any interruptions of what's happening. Usual.

Exactly.

It's just over. Over spamming. If. And this is just.

Especially if they're new buyers and you just bumped them, they didn't even receive your product and you send them 20 promotions in the last week.

Yeah. Ordering it, which I'm sure the data backs up. That, that's a smart idea. But you need to confirm it with like the human side. You should always just double check things. And when I was doing math in school, you always double check your answer by, by walking. Right. Flipping and reversing it. So you're doing something that works. Flip it in a reverse it and look at your own inbox. But you continue to shop at a store that does these practices. Like I'm sure it would work if I went into a physical store and they restrained you and they walked you around and said, here, you can only buy these things. But I'm not going to do there. It's why I hate going to Ikea. The whole place is designed to just trap you in and. Exactly.

You never come, come out of there.

That's why I just, I can't stand to go there.

And even if you order online, I think sometimes they just put random pieces in that, you know, in the box just to with you. Because I swear, like there's some pieces that make no sense in the overall construction of what you got to do in this record.

Great reminder to everyone that if you do something is that it's tell your customers if you give them something extra, if you give them a bonus, even if it's to make right that you screwed up their last order. So you say, hey, we're throwing in a bunch of things. Let them know so they don't think that they got the wrong order.

There's. There's so many things you can do. But as you said, I think someone told me yesterday when I love that type of feedback, that a lot of brands maybe understand 10% of what I say. And I get it because, you know, it's a lot of information. But I have a question before my last question. Do you think an ultimate question.

Sorry, the penultimate question.

Yes, my penultimate question. I didn't see. This is why you're the better host.

See, I gotta throw out big words once in a while so people don't know I'm a host.

So people don't forget that I'm not expeditiously. Expeditiously. SPI says. Where do you think education stands in E commerce today? I mean, we're both seeing that. I mean, what I don't like about software companies as being one is that we are trying to justify ROI for the users very fast and we're just trying to push them in these methodologies or push them into some things to do to make money so they can continue paying our software. So you have Klaviyo, you have Shopify, even us in the beginning. There's so many companies that do this, but they don't explain the actual value of the product. What I like about, for instance, when it comes to email service providers, what I like about omnisend is that they are placing a lot of time on educating brands how to use email as an engagement channel versus a sales channel. And I want to ask you, do you think that companies are really doing their deed in terms of educating merchants rather than just throwing them out there and make money?

Yeah, I think, I mean ultimately the question is how fast can you get to time to value? And education plays a huge, huge role in this. And I really like that about OmniSend. That's why I'm partnered with them. That's why they're the rolled up network. It's because they take a lot of time to really educate their customers and even like the Omnisend Academies. Right. What I did with Greg Co's in the podcast was if you haven't listened to current centers, it walks you through all the different automations and flows that you can use to get started. So I think that for customer education, basically the question is how fast can you get customers to understand your product?

How do you want, do you make them want to learn? Because there's people that do not want to learn.

Honestly, I mean, I mean just a third of people who are really motivated, you've got a third who are kind of indifferent. We'll just go through emotions and then a third just don't care. Yeah, make sure that for that first third that they can find the resources, make it easy to find for them, that that middle third kind of motivate them to go and expand those two pieces of the pie as much as you can in the last. Or just, just unless you're have a ton of extra resources or you want to try some things out. Don't. Don't even worry about them. They'll see themselves out.

That's what I'm thinking too. Like, we honestly, like, we're thinking about going up market because it's been very hard for us. I mean, we're selling very complex shit. So I was actually talking to Valentino about how awesome. That's why I like Omnisend. Like they're really doing this and they're just, you know, know exactly where to go in the market. And I remember it was a conference and Reteus was talking and even two years ago they were saying that education is so important. I think they're a good example of a tech company. I wish other companies that sell email would do the same, but they don't. And that's why email is used a lot as a sales channel instead of a nurturing and engagement channel as it should be. Naturally. I have a last question, which is from our sponsors. This podcast is sponsored by Vitex. We just got listed. I mean, they just got listed at the New York Stock Exchange for a shitload of money. Yeah, they're awesome. They have the only E commerce platform that's also an OMS solution. And basically they have everything integrated in the same way.

How do you spell them out?

Vtex. Vtex.com. they're badass. They're from Brazil and they basically kind of. I want to say this because there are sponsors, but they're kind of cheating on everything that's E commerce platform at the moment. And I'm really, really excited for them to. It's a big win that they got listed in their public, but they asked me to ask you this question. Every show we get this question from the sponsor. So they asked me, lucas, tell us what are three things you love about what E commerce is today? And three things that fizz the shit out of you. I mean, they didn't use that, but they allowed me to use.

Well, it sounds like six questions. Yeah, I think that I'm just going to say what I like, but I don't like. Honestly, nothing. I. I bitch too much. Like, I don't like that more people don't listen to Pit Stop because I'm putting out a ton of value right there. So turn that into a promo.

I love Pit Stop. It's so easy. It's so easy to. To listen to it. And it's so easy to digest it.

You know, what do I not like? I don't know. I don't want to bring any negativity into it. I mean, everything can always be better. You can always find something wrong. But in terms of what I like right now is that it's. E commerce is really coming into its own and the industry is still so young. Like, go think of, like business categories. And E commerce isn't really there. It's computers and technology, it's retail, it's software, but there's not E Commerc. So. So I guess that's my like and dislike is that it's. There's still so much opportunity for us, but a little bit of respect on the industry would be. Would be nice. But I think that's still five or 10 years out.

Yeah, and that was like four.

That was like that. That's it. I'm not gonna force. Force too many answers, but I think that those are sort of the. The big ones. Just lots of opportunity. Still early and a little bit more. We're stacked. And some more downloads on Pitstop.

So you know what, guys, you gotta go and do this look for rolled up, which is extremely awesome. Lucas has founders of successful brands. I love that episode with Chris Mead. I love Chris. I love Presnet. You're doing a great job bringing best practices and Pit Stop. It's a pill like podcast that you will learn something that's gonna make you or save you a hundred bucks. So, I mean, you're wasting so much money every day. You just gotta go. And every time you listen to an episode, you're either gonna make or save 100 bucks. So it's a win.

Seems like a pretty good deal to me. Yeah.

I'm gonna drop the. In the episode notes you're gonna find if you're not watching and if you're listening to this tomorrow you will find or today, because you're listening today, you will find the links in the episode notes for rolled up and for Pit Stop and Lucas. Tell us where people can find you and get in contact with you or invite themselves to your podcast like I did.

Yeah, you know what? Just if you want to pander to me, like reference an episode that you've listened to, tell me that you've left a review that'll be the fastest way to get my attention and just give me a follow on LinkedIn. I think that's where I'll be the most active. Most active in the next few weeks. So find me on LinkedIn but make sure if you're listening to this and you are an e commerce merchant go find Pitstop. Just search Pitstop Shopify. It's the race car. You'll see it. And if you like podcasts on some easy listing go search for roll up look for the burrito.

Awesome. Well also you will find him on Twitter where he posts delicious delicious dishes. Pictures of delicious dishes where I may want to fat think about them but I I. Your ribs are still in my head I saw those ribs like those those delicious crispy ribs. Thank you for coming man. Like you're this was awesome. This was a very mature and delightful conversation. I think I needed this because you boosted my energy right back up. Thank you so much for being here.

My pleasure.

Thank you. This podcast was brought to you by Vitex. Vitex is the first and only fully integrated e commerce marketplace and OMS solution that offers fastest time to revenue and no upgrades ever. So go ahead check them out. Vtex.com.