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Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
Building your eCommerce Tech Stack in 2022 with Derric Haynie
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95 - With over 6500 apps in the Shopify Store, and some 250 new apps entering the market every month, building a profitable and effective tech stack is more challenging than ever.
Vira is joined this week by Derric Haynie to break down the process of building out your tech stack in 2022. He’s a wealth of information on how eCommerce brands can use technology to better their business.
We’re covering a lot this week. Grab a notepad or your laptop, and let’s dive into the wide world of tech apps!
Hello world. I'm an email marketer at an agency called Flowium. Here at Flowium, we are very passionate about email marketing and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is actually one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world and we specialize in providing premium full service e commerce email marketing experience to all of our clients. We deliver the right message to the right person at the right moments. That's, that's what we here are all about. And stay tuned for the amazing guests that you don't want to miss today. Thanks for hanging out with all of us today. Today on the show, we'll be talking to Derric Haynie. Derric is the chief E commerce technologist for E Commerce Tech. This is basically the platform that connects E Commerce store with the right tech, apps and partners and all for free. Yay. Say hi, Derric.
Derric:Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Vira:We are excited to have you on the podcast. Before we go to all of the juicy questions. And we do have like a gazillion of them. Let's do a quick blitz Q and A game just like to get to know you better. Okay.
Derric:Yeah, let's do it.
Vira:Let's do this. So Derric, east coast or west coast?
Derric:West coast. Forever.
Vira:Yes. Same here, same here. Early bird or night owl?
Derric:You know, I go a little bit both ways, but I would say when it comes to work, my most productive hours are in the morning. And then when it comes to play, I can stay up all night.
Vira:Right, right. There's actually more, more types than like two early bird and night owl. I know that they're like wolves and dolphins or like there is this like huge system actually existing. So I'm like somewhere in between.
Derric:My middle is the worst because.
Vira:Oh, I know, I know. I need, so I need my nap. I need 2pm Nap, you know?
Derric:Yeah, exactly. That's. That is my thing. My My background here actually turns into a bed, so I can actually just hang out and drop down on that.
Vira:That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I have a. I have a couch on the, on the back too. So that's my. That's my secret nap spot. Cool. Shopify or Magento?
Derric:Always Shopify. For now. Both platforms can serve merchants just as well. Just depends on what you're looking for.
Vira:Awesome. What's the last book that you've read?
Derric:I'm in the middle of. It's the Rise and Fall of Nations. No, it's Ray Dalio's second book, which is Escaping Me. Not Principles. World Order, Changing World Order.
Vira:I was about to read it too. I think he was writing it on the blog or on LinkedIn or something. He was posting the chapters of that book. Was that the one?
Derric:He's really. Yeah, he's predicting, you know, that there's a new changing world order coming. We're seeing all of the precursor elements to it. And he's not, you know, some pie in the sky, you know, nut job kind of person. He really took a long time to study the like 30 odd different factors that go into the changing world order and understand how in the past it was actually the Dutch were the like kind of reserve currency of the world and invented the first stock exchan. Then England became the, you know, the kind of world power and then the US later on. And now we're, we're looking at another change here on the horizon. So it's really interesting to understand such large macroeconomic principles and then, you know, could be good for investing. It could be good for life. It's. It's just helpful to know how the world around us has been working really since the dawn of civilization because it, it looks like chaos at least you know, when you live with just one life cycle. But we have history, we have knowledge, and, and so sharing that over time you see the same pattern over and over and you get to extrapolate.
Vira:It's interesting to see that this, like patterns, they're not new actually, but it happened in the past and it will be happening again. And this book is certainly on my list, Derric, so thank you for reminding me about that. Cool. Okay. This one is kind of silly, but I'm curious to know who would play you in a movie if there were ever a movie about you.
Derric:Oh, I have. I don't even know. I could have. I have no idea.
Vira:Just go with Brad Pete. He's a. He's a good one. I. I always pick him as yeah, yeah, right. I can see the resemblance.
Derric:So I have no idea.
Vira:Cool. Let's. Let's get.
Derric:I can't even think of an actor like Matt Damon. I don't know.
Vira:Maybe it's a good one. It's a good one.
Derric:Keanu Reeves is one of my favorite actors because I love the Matrix. So maybe, maybe I'd get him to play me. Yeah, actually, Will Ferrell could be. Cause I'm more on the comedy side, so.
Vira:Okay, cool. What's your power song if you have one?
Derric:I. Well, I listen to trance music a lot. There's. There's a lot of different songs in trance. Just some old school Armin Van Buren. I put that on in the background and listen to it. He has a radio show called A State of Trance. So I've listened to like every episode a hundred times.
Vira:Awesome. Awesome. Okay, Derric, so let's go to some serious and like, juicy questions. We won't do a huge amount of the talking here. It will better if you hear it directly from the source. But to put it blindly, Derric is doing big things to shake up the e commerce world. So Derric, tell us a bit more about yourself and about what you do and tell us a bit more about your platform. E commerce tech.
Derric:Yeah, well, because of my kind of. I don't know if it's that unique, but unique enough past where when I ran an agency, I looked at a lot of different technology tools and a lot of my clients for e commerce brands. So I felt like I was obligated to understand the ecosystem for them. Then I was in house in e commerce and again saw lots of problems with how to run implement onboard different technologies. And then I was in e commerce technology where I saw all sorts of different problems and opportunities for high growth like commerce enablement brands or companies. And so I kind of like came to this realization that no one's really like the ecosystem has grown so Fast. You know, 6,500 apps in the Shopify app store, over 15,000 different technologies serving merchants. It's growing at 250 apps a month or more. And so it's like it's impossible to map all these things. And I said, you know, there needs to be a company dedicated to that. Right. Like, I just kind of wanted to make it my mission to really understand the e commerce technology landscape better than anybody else in the world. And I figured if I can do that, I'll figure out how to be successful off the back of it. So I started on this mission in like 2019, trying to map it out and met with a lot of technology providers and to date I've done something like 200 independent technology reviews where I actually demo the product and then do a write up and post the review on my website. And from this whole process became more discovery. I was like oh my God, there's so much obvious like mistakes merchants are making. They're making the same mistakes over and over. So I've Talked with over 300 merchants on E commerce technology and what they should be doing. A lot of merchants get shiny object syndrome. So they see a tool, they install the tool and then they start paying for it. And either they don't get any results and uninstall and give it a one star review, blaming the tool, they didn't onboard it properly or whatever it is, or they might even pay for it in perpetuity without using it properly, thus wasting money. And so like really, really common mistake. And it's totally okay. I've done it, I've done it in my own business. When my business is about making sure that other businesses don't do this. I think type form I paid for for three months while we were trying to move over to HubSpot forums and it's like oh that's, that was like 300 bucks. I could use 300 bucks, you know what I mean? Like so I was like, you know, there's a way, I know that with technology we can better understand this and solve these problems. So that's what we started to do. We've created now the technology backbone to track merchants. We do this by tracking their bank statements so we can see what you're spending on all sorts of various tools. And we also track your Shopify so we can see what you're spending on Shopify apps. And through that process we can see how much you're paying per month for each of your tools. That's the start. Because once we have that data and we also are tracking things like pricing features and integrations and also this thing we call the bill by. So like a tool like Klaviyo bills by contacts under under management or something like that and some, you know, an SMS provider might charge by SMS sends, we track all these factors on the technology landscape. And so with that data from the merchant and that data from the technology provider as well as with a good understanding of the ecosystem we can really start to shortcut the decision making process on discovering new tools. Is this tool going to be successful? Is this the right stage of my business to implement this tool or not? Do I already have A tool like this installed in my stack. Right. Like is how much overlap happens too.
Vira:Yeah.
Derric:And then, and then in our distant future, not too distant, two year distant future, we'll be able to see usage on the tools. So that SMS provider, if you're spending, if you're paying$500 a month for 5,000 SMS settings, if you only use 300 SMS's, we'll give you a really low usage score and say hey, you could probably move down in tiers and in fact we know you can move down in tears because we are, we've mapped the pricing out so you could save like you know,$380 by just moving down in tiers on this one tool. Or maybe you just want to cancel altogether because you're really not using it to its fullest. Right. So bringing more transparency to the ecosystem and of different fronts is really what it's all about. And helping merchants be their technologists. That's why I kind of dubbed myself the chief E commerce technologist is because we're trying to. Every e commerce company is built on technology but no e commerce company has a dedicated technologist in the organization. It's often the CEO who has to figure it out. And I can tell you, since my entire business is centered around it and I've been doing it for over three years and I still haven't mapped a lot of the ecosystem, I can be certain that if you're a merchant that has to go back to your actual work, you cannot map the ecosystem as well. So you really need a centralized source, a trusted resource for this type of work. And so that's what we want to be.
Vira:Agree and app overload is like a real thing honestly. And sometimes that something that my clients don't necessarily understand is that having like too many apps or like wrong apps on their Shopify, it's not only expensive but over installation of apps can also like compromise the experience. Also compromise, compromise even like the safety like the security of the store. Right. And the website can, can be slower and it can break down the other apps and that's like something that people often don't understand necessarily. So I love what you guys are doing. I think that's huge.
Derric:You know we mentioned like just shiny object syndrome, installing like a one off app to solve for I don't know, maybe swatches or, or order or social proof like a banner bar or something like that. A lot of those tools, they meet the requirements to be posted in the Shopify app, but they might not have been like developed or worked on in the last few years. So some sort of update might crash them, which could cause the entire site to not work. And obviously if you're doing thousands of dollars a month, having a day of the site not working could be detrimental. And then of course you meant, you hinted at like page speed load time is an extremely big concern of merchants. Everybody's trying to get shave a second off their page speed load time. And many of these apps run JavaScript and especially if not installed properly, those JavaScript snippets will end up slowing down that overall full load of the page, which leads to a worse experience. So yeah, conversion rate is actually dropping. And so it's a delicate balance kind of a game. Is this tool going to make me money or cost me money? Am I going to remember that I installed it? Who's in charge? Like, ownership is the other thing that our tool solves for because you can actually assign owners of each tool in the back end of our platform. And so if you know, in a one person company, not a big deal, but even after five people or so, you want to know, okay, this person is in charge of these eight tools. And then you can ask them, you know, every quarter or so, hey, did you use all eight of those tools or should we, you know, uninstall one of them? And then if they leave the company, you can say, okay, which of these tools should we keep? Which of these tools should we remove? Because this person no longer works here.
Vira:Okay, I see. So Derric, you mentioned that there are like 6,500 apps approximately on like Shopify,
Derric:probably 700 by now.
Vira:Yeah, probably while we are recording this.
Derric:Yeah, exactly.
Vira:Ten new ones, they are like growing like crazy. So like, how do you and your team remain like unbiased, analyzing, reviewing, testing those tools? It can be really hard, especially considering that they are big platforms, big tools that have higher commissions, lower commissions. How do you guys stay unbiased?
Derric:The goal here is to get the merchant the tools that they need for growth and success. So I think the first and most important part about being unbiased is decoupling the revenue component from the recommendation component so we don't tell a merchant, hey, install this app, because it's going to make us the most amount of money. We say we look at their tool stack, we object objectively, kind of analyze what they're doing. And then we say, and typically we'll say like something like, okay, you're doing over 3 million a year in revenue, you have 4,000 SKUs and you have no personalization tool on your Website, you are throwing money away, right? So then we show them the landscape of personalization. We don't just say go with this tool, they're the best. We say, okay, these are some like lower end tools that work really well and grow as you scale. These are some higher end tools that have bells and whistles like visual search or search and which is merchandising components which, which like, they're just like more enterprise solutions, right. And so we show them the landscape and then we say like, let us know if you'd like an intro to any of these. And some of them we might not even be partners with others because we've studied a lot of these ecosystems. We're partnered with every partner or every company in the space. So to us it doesn't actually matter who you choose, it matters that you're getting the right fit. And all we're trying to do is just shortcut your decision making process by presenting the facts and the information to you.
Vira:What's your process like of learning, like what tools, specific brand needs? Do you guys have some sort of like process for wetting technology products in place?
Derric:It's been the same, you know, for every merchant. And this is why I had to build technology because I kept asking the same questions merchant by merchant. I was like, you know, I don't need to ask these questions. I could just use a tool to grab the answers to this because I, we always start, how much revenue do you have? What's your current tool set? What's your average order value? How many SKUs do you have? What's your orders per month? How much are you spending on advertising? What channels are you, how are you on retailer, on Amazon? These types of questions really dictate how you're going to go about executing on implementing new technology. The speed of growth of your company is also important. And then we actually ask other questions like how many people are inside marketing, how many people are inside operations? How many customer service agents do you have? Things like that help us better understand the organization to understand how you can execute on each of these tools successfully. Do you actually have the bandwidth to install this? So with a larger growth stage brand, with a, with a like 50 plus people, you might be able to implement two tools simultaneously, right? Because one's over on customer service, one's on conversion rate optimization. So not interfering with each other small brand, you really want to do one tool rollout over usually every month to every quarter, depending on the business. And I'm talking about the larger kind of technologies that are really fundamentally changing the growth and business operations. So we get all this data and of course, what are your tools? And then we just start saying, okay, what problems are you seeing in the business? And then from there we just come to really natural conclusions. Okay, you're concerned, a lot of people concerned about page speed load time. Oh, my reviews app is slowing down my page speed load time. No, your reviews app is not slowing down your page speed load time. It's loading after the moment to first interact, which is fine as far as Google cares about. And nobody's scrolling to the bottom of the page so fast that it needs to load any faster. So at the end of the day, your conversion rate is probably not impacted and you can split test that to prove it. They forgot that they don't care page speed load time. They care about conversion rate. Right. So we have to redirect and we do a little kind of training and kind of overall growth strategy with merchants and stuff in these calls. And so once we've agreed that conversion rate optimization is the goal, not pagespeed load time, we then go, okay, you want to go to headless commerce, but it's going to cost this much and take this much time and you're a little short on the revenue front. You'd probably want 5 to 10 million before kind of flipping the switch. So. And you're only at one and a half million. Right. So I kind of map that out for him. It's coming, but like maybe not. Now, here are the other things that you can do that'll be more impactful in the business at less cost and faster time to recoup that cost. Right. And so that's, that's how I look at it and think about it. And I've just, I've, I've kind of been able to do that because I've looked at the market for so long and I've been in E commerce. I know exactly, you know, the problems merchants are facing on a, on a daily basis, even though it is always slightly different for everyone. So it's, yeah, that's, that's kind of about the process. And then by the end we send a follow up email. This is the, the kind of ways of the past, our tool. You know, once, once our actual technology is in market, we'll solve for a lot of this. But the ways of the past, we send them a follow up email kind of mapping out the next three months to one year of the tools that we think will be most impactful in the business. And then we schedule another call, usually every quarter to say, okay, what did you implement? What did you, what, what advice did you not like from us? What tools, you know, what changed in the business and how should we change your tech stack strategy moving forward?
Vira:I see. Are there any like requirements for the brands to work with you? Do you work with like all kinds of businesses or they need to have some sort of like threshold.
Derric:We, so we, we definitely prefer Shopify and Shopify plus brands. Our sweet spot is in the million to 10 million revenue range with direct to consumer being the primary channel usually. But we've worked with brands of all sizes including starting stores. The one thing I will say, and I'm sorry to those, those listening, if you're just in the idea stage or you don't have unique differentiated product, it's some sort of side hustle business for you. We typically say no to the engagement just because we're, we do, we have time constraints and, and unfortunately, while remaining unbiased in a call with a merchant, I do get to choose which merchants I take which merchants I do based on my expected return of the call essentially. And so of course, so, so yeah, we, we tend to, we have a self serv at the beginning. You kind of typically have the same 10 to 15 tools. So we have a whole video and process for getting started and so we send the starting stores over that way. But everybody else we love to talk to, even you know, a hundred K in revenue, like really trying to figure out your channel strategy. I've been there actually and I've seen it and it's, it's one of the hardest things to do is break out of some of those, you know, kind of stuck cycles because you're making money but you're not taken home a lot, you know. And so I feel for the merchants like that and I try and help them as, as much as I can.
Vira:Awesome. Yeah, you do have a lot of amazing resources on your website, on your podcast as well. And we will link them all in the description box, guys. So you can like scroll down to the description and check out all of the links. Definitely go through them. A lot of information there. Derric, big question and this is like the debate that we have with my colleagues all the time. This big dilemma. Having one tool that does everything versus having a lot of specialized tools. You know, that like cliche that there is like a master of one or you can be a king of okay at everything. Does it actually work for Shopify apps? And like, let's discuss this. I want to hear your, your thoughts on that. Big platform versus specialized tools.
Derric:It all starts at the beginning of E commerce and, and so in the beginning, you know, before even platforms like Shopify, the, all these tools, if you look at the like Lifecycle, I've, I've demoed like, like three or 200 plus technology products. They've all, almost every single one of them has started in like the last four or five years. But there a lot of the, let's say larger, more established platforms you look at, I don't know, HubSpot, Salesforce, those kinds of things, those have been around now for like 20 or 30 years. So when we look at the proliferation of technology from the early 2000s to let's say 2010, maybe even 2015, every app that's launching had to be hyper focused in one one specific activity. Email marketing. Right. SMS marketing was barely even a thing. Personalization. Shopify is the platform they really only built the backend infrastructure platform only recently having expanded into things like buy now, pay later installments and fulfillment and other aspects of the business. Right. So everybody had to be focused in one thing because they were all small. Now over time we now have the consolidation of markets where it's proving to be more beneficial to the user or the merchant in using one tool that maybe has a more centralized view of the customer and then putting all of, let's say your marketing automation into that tool and one tool for all of your inventory management, order fulfillment warehouse management, it makes sense to have that tool linked up together because it's all centered around your products and where they are and who's got them and who doesn't have them and then over here on your customer because it's important to understand where they are in their journey, what messages they're receiving and all that stuff. So when you have disparate sources for all of that, you have to have a whole bunch of integrations, a hodgepodge, hopefully data warehouse and you might be creating reports in looker or you know, something like that to get it all done and that's expensive. But when you have them centralized and working well to be masters of many, which now you can be, you can have one tool that rules them all. Now that's not to say there is no true answer to your question. It's a case by case basis. Like thinking about for instance Klaviyo sms. Last year when they launched it, it was not so good. I wouldn't have recommended it as a replacement, but they've actually come a long ways with it and they've brought costs down as well, which was a small problem for them. And so they've started to become a competitor in SMS now, whereas earlier I wouldn't have necessarily recommended it. Maybe to answer the question, the best answer is that over time you can be a master of many. So it can be beneficial to have multiple tools under one roof. But you have to think why are they under that one roof? Are they are the tools talking to each other or centralizing information or data that's going to make it easier for me to do my job. And so marketing automation is just a classic of this because you want to send them the email this time, the SMS that time, the WhatsApp message over here, the messenger message over there. You want to see all those things in one place. It really, really isn't quite as powerful to have them spread out across multiple tools.
Vira:Right.
Derric:So yeah, that's kind of my initial thing.
Vira:Being the Klaviyo like nerd myself. I do believe in those like big platforms that can create that like omnichannel experience for the customer. And I love that. Like in Klaviyo you can connect the email and the SMS and person will only receive the SMS if they haven't opened email or they will receive the SMS as a follow up to that email based on the action that they took. So I love that aspect of like Klaviyo and big platforms, but a lot of my clients still prefer those like other platforms when we speak like specifically about SMS like Attentive and Postgrip because they do have like more opportunities I guess for SMS heavy brands. So I can see how it can be the case by case.
Derric:Yeah. And it's not necessarily a preference so much as perhaps they've determined that these tools make them more money. And I know that both Attentive and postscript have really slick optimized in flows, makes it easy to sign up for sms. And so if you're increasing that opt in rate, you're often increasing your conversion rate off of it. And a 1% boost in conversion rate is worth, you know, the extra 10 hours of work you have to do because the tools aren't perfectly connected or something like that. So it also comes down to bandwidth of the team I would say where all in one is better for smaller teams that need simpler flows and sometimes not always having multiple best in class of different categories can increase overall revenue because if you're doing a hundred million a year getting that 1% conversion rate boost, that's a million dollars. But if you're doing 1 million a year it's actually going to cost you more in time for then that$10,000 boost is is worth. So it really interesting becomes about elements of scalability. And then I guess I should also mention the other option in SMS specifically is two way SMS really coming in and disrupting all these one way SMS providers. So if you're and again it's about conversion rate more than anything else. But in two way you also you have components of brand and conversational kind of commerce that that come into play. And so you could be looking at implementing a two way conversational tool even on top of your klaviyo or attentive SMS because you want to handle objections in the pre sales process or have all your customer service issues managed through SMS because you think it'll be a better experience which you can track that through to you know, retention metrics and repeat purchase metrics and stuff. But I guess the, the, the true answer is no one should have a preference so much as being a trying to predict that of however much more you're spending. And also I'd recommend on that front don't forget about the costs of the people involved because your team costs money and time costs money and try and calculate that into those equations.
Vira:Yeah, it's easy to forget about those things when you see the new shiny app. I'm like that too. So it's easy to forget about all of the work that will need to be put into that app and all of the team that will have to support that. So Derric, you started talking a bit about the Shopify app ecosystem and I went through a few of your blogs and podcasts and you have some pretty interesting ideas and predictions for the app developers, e commerce brands and consumers. So what are your predictions for the future of Shopify ecosystem?
Derric:Well, certainly in some respects I could start with a little bit more security on the app front and making sure that the tools are working in the best interest of the consumer, not opening up to these data leaks or crashes of the system and things like that. But when we look at the ecosystem as a whole, the first thing is the move from like the way that we have been using our data over the last 20 years and probably the next 20 years. In the beginning you would just create a graph. You would look at it, probably sit in a room with three other people and look at it and then try and figure out what you should do based on that graph. Hopefully if you were any good said you would have comparative metrics and not just one upward sloping graph which always means nothing. You have to have some comparative metrics in order to understand how one thing is impacting another. And so that can be tough, right? You're trying to figure out what is the takeaway from this right now. What's happened in the last five years and I think will become a lot more prevalent in the next five years is predictive analytics and predictive data. So the AI is essentially saying, here's what we saw in your data and here's like here's the problem or you had a major conversion rate loss when your influencer traffic skyrocketed. Right? Meaning that influencer traffic was lower quality and that's what caused conversion rate to drop. And so it might give you the analysis in real time. Now you still have to go take action. And it might even tell you, hey, if you created a segmented email list of these 500 people that purchased exactly three months ago and you send them a target win back email right now, that'll increase your revenue, right? So they can predict these types of things based off of data from, from your own data as well as others in the next. So after that, that's all been going on for the last five years. In the next five years after that, the AI does it for you. So in about 10 years time, a lot of things in E commerce will be fully automated. Obviously there's, there's a lot on the operations side. You know, not every warehouse is run like an Amazon warehouse with drones and whatnot. But they, they probably will be soon. Customer service is becoming fully automated where you, you're talking to 90 to 99% of the time and a human's only needed for escalated tickets. Then you have marketing becoming a lot more automated. Not only can the AI write pretty good email content, it can write your Google SEO listings, Google shopping listings, and there's even AI to create your Facebook story videos. Think about this. We used to have to go hire like actors and shoot video content. I remember I worked for a bike company because beach bikes and they would pay people to go shoot video content in the middle of Hermosa Beach. Well, you can actually completely recreate that situation with AI and with a fake AI model and the product since the product's already been 3D modeled. So they can create the video content they need, they can upload it to the ad platform, they can track the return on ad spend and they can even tweak moments of the video in different ways, testing it out to figure out what has the best return on ad ad spend. And that can be done way better. By technology than by a person. People are slow, they're biased. It just costs more for them to get the job done. They're only going to be able to test a few limiting factors. They're not going to take into account every aspect or angle of it, et cetera. So I think E commerce media agencies, sorry to say, slightly at risk because the future will be what's good. There's a good component of it which is because I ran a social media marketing advertising agency and I had to have a team of seven to support like you know, eight merchant accounts or something like that. The good News is that one person might be able to support 50 merchant accounts. But the bad news is, is that those merchants might just be able to support themselves a lot easier because the AI is doing all of the heavy lifting. AI, segmentation, automation, like, you know, all sorts of cool things are coming in the next 10 to 20 years. Years because the data is there, it's very clean data, very powerful. And, and it's very easy to see how a basic machine learning algorithm with when it has the right permissions. So it has the permission to write and publish let's say a blog post on your site or something like that. Right. Or whatever it is an email for you. When it, when it has the permissions to do that, it can create them, test them, iterate and improve all on a team its own. So that's my prediction for the future.
Vira:That's, that's powerful. That's powerful for sure. We are using like internally a lot of klaviyo predictive analytic. And just like comparing the regular replenishment flow versus the predictive analytic one, I can tell you that the dollar generated per customer is sometimes three times higher than the regular.
Derric:Well, this is a problem of attribution. That's, that's why you can't trust any individual visual tool for attribution modeling because it's taking full credit for a sale where there are other channels at play. So you need attribution modeling and that's where you know, the, the CDP starts to break down if they're not calculating the, you know, by channel activities. There's a cool tool called Rockerbox that helps with that multi channel attribution. There's a few others in the space as well.
Vira:That's awesome. In one of your podcasts you also mentioned that there will be a growing competition competition between Shopify and Amazon. Can you say a few words about that?
Derric:Yeah.
Vira:And why do you think this will be happening?
Derric:The, you know. Well, you look at Shopify's acquisition strategy as well as in recent, I think it's been about a year now, they stopped comparing themselves in their quarterly reports to Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce. Right. Those are the leading e commerce platforms. They started comparing themselves to Walmart and Amazon and ebay. They started. So they started comparing themselves to other, like to E commerce instead of E commerce platforms. Right. It's, it's almost a subtle difference, but it's actually quite huge. So they acquired a shopping fulfillment center. They have made investments into lots of different tools and technologies that essentially allow them to centralize the experience. And so it's only one logical conclusion. They even. They've launched their Shop app. But I don't, I think that's just the beginning. But I think that they will eventually have an Amazon competitor type product. So, you know, I'd love it to be shopping, but that's already taken. But like, you know, you just go to go to shop.com and instead of going to Amazon for all the white label cheap stuff, usually from China, you actually go to shop.com and get all these cool indie brands. Right. And so it creates a different experience and it feels less corporate, even though ultimately it'll be more corporate. And I could even predict the future in which Shopify will have, you know, there's Amazon vans on my street every single day. There'll be. There could be Shopify vans on my street in the next 10, 10 years.
Vira:So I hope so. That'd be nice if they had like fulfilled by Shopify, you know, like Amazon has where you can just like send all of your products to their, to their facilities and they will take care of everything for you.
Derric:Yeah, they have that for the 3 PL side of it now. They're just, they don't have their own. They don't have their own. They're not UPS or usps. They've, they've stopped there. Right. They just partner with UPS to send out the packages. But with enough volume, volume they could seriously disrupt Amazon, which is obviously the biggest player in the space.
Vira:Yeah, I mean I love Amazon, don't get me wrong. But I love that personal aspect of Shopify and that's actually something that Amazon sellers are trying to do more and more to add that like personal aspect to their communication. A lot of Amazon sellers are trying to somehow redirect the traffic to their Shopify, capture the email there. So they basically like own that content.
Derric:I actually met with an influencer manager at Amazon Live Live, which is live streaming so you can Live stream on your Amazon page and you can draw people in and sell products there.
Vira:I heard about that.
Derric:Yeah, it's really, it's. I think it can take off and it'll be, it's, it's almost like a mix of like Twitch and, and QVC actually.
Vira:So very, I think it actually came, came from Asia because like they had this in China for a while now they have, they are like top influencers on their Amazon like platform. Like talking about the different products. That's super interesting. I've never like seen it on our AM yet but that would be interesting to see.
Derric:Yeah. So I think that that's going to be on the rise and become a bit more mainstream in the near future. And Amazon is moving in this direction of like you know, branded content and all sorts of things like that. But Shopify can actually own it because of the brands that are on Shopify. They're all strong DTC players. Oh, here's another part of that prediction is Shopify recently stopped, they disabled their Amazon integration. I don't know if you heard about that one. But they have to go through a third party tool. Yeah. You can no longer use the native Amazon integration. Why do you think they're doing that? Because they're going to launch the Amazon. They don't want you on Amazon and Shopify and honestly I hope that they can really execute on this. Well because Amazon is taking so much on margin from sellers and they don't give you any customer information. It's not centric around your brand relationship. It's centric around the Amazon platform and that's why it's become such a giant of a company. But there is a, there can be a better solution. Like better for everybody. Everyone means that it's, it can win. So.
Vira:Right. Well I'm launching my own product on Amazon and Shopify soon. We'll start with Amazon and try to bring that traffic to our website. So I'll, I'll let you know how, how it went.
Derric:The two, two pieces of advice. Cause I, I meet sellers like this all the time. Um, you have to in, in product placement which includes hashtag and if you can put an insert into the product that says something like give us a five star review on our website which India you included to QR code that you got to send them back essentially you got to try and get them to the website and you want hashtag like on the product bottle or whatever it is. Those are the main.
Vira:We've added like the QR code on the product package that Says first purchase, claim your freebie. And if they scan the, scan the product, it will bring them to our Shopify where they will get like a freebie. But we're only doing it with the first batch because it's sort of like a gray area with Amazon. So we'll see how it goes.
Derric:Yeah, you, you, you're allowed to do that. Those, you're allowed to do some of that when it's on reviews. The freebie might be not allowed. But the other thing is though, right now people are getting away with this, but you end up getting banned later on. And so that. Which becomes a big cost in the business.
Vira:Only did it for like a few first, like few hundreds of products, the first ones. And then we'll, we'll figure out the better way. We'll see how it goes. That's a big experiment. That's a big gamble. Honestly, I've never done it before like this. So we'll see, we'll see if we can get away with it. But yeah, but we absolutely want to get that traffic to our Shopify then just because I don't feel comfortable about not owning that contact, you know, like. Yeah, not, not owning that customer. Awesome.
Derric:Big problem.
Vira:Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Derric. It was so much fun talking to you. And how can our listeners reach you, Derric? Where can they find. Find you?
Derric:You can go to ecommercetech IO if you want to. I think we still have the book a consultation button on the top which, you know, it's a free consult about an hour long talk through your tech stack and all that stuff. Always happy to connect on LinkedIn. You'll have to kind of find my, my funky spelling of my name in the notes of this podcast.
Vira:Actually, it's unique. Is it German or something?
Derric:It's, it's just. No, it's just my mom wanted it to be hard for me to.
Vira:Okay, that's pretty unique.
Derric:Yeah. And, and I'm always. I'm an open book. I'm derric@ecommercetechio. D E R R I C. Yeah. So happy to chat.
Vira:Well, thank you so much. It was nice having you, Derric.
Derric:Thanks for having me.
Vira:Thank you. Bye. Well, you guys, what are your thoughts? I hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did. Honestly. I'm gonna review my own technology stack probably after this podcast, but all of the basic information that we mentioned in this episode, it will be linked in the description box. So scroll down if you want to connect with Derric or if you want to learn more about his company. Definitely go to his website, check it out. There's a lot of lot of cool insights to learn. And also don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. You might have any questions and in that case, if you do have any questions questions, please talk to us. Reach out to us through our one of our social media channels or directly through my email vira@flowium.com I'm always happy to talk to a fellow email marketeer or to a fellow e commerce nerd. And of course, come back next Tuesday because next Tuesday we will be talking to amazing Emily Ryan. Emily is honestly, she's a mastermind behind a lot of beautiful emails. And actually next week we'll be talking about different practices, actually best email design practices in 2022. That's the episode you don't want to miss. So stay tuned and I see you. I'll see you next Tuesday.
