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Increase Your Shopify Conversion Rate And Revenue Per Visitor By Serving The Social Media Generation With Michael Prichard Of Skafos

Increase Your Shopify Conversion Rate And Revenue Per Visitor By Serving The Social Media Generation With Michael Prichard Of Skafos in ecommerce fastlane 235.

In today’s episode, my guest is Michael Prichard, the CEO and Founder of Skafos.ai. They work with forward-thinking brands to stop shoppers from endless scrolling and leaving their online stores unhappy. Their platform simply asks shoppers what they like and dislike and gives them the product mix they want to see at that moment.

Skafos is the modern Product Discovery platform designed to work with the “social media generation.”

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What You Will Learn Today

  • How AI Technology provides a better shopping experience
  • Helping brands help the shoppers shop easier
  • Skafos’ origin and edge among others
  • Unique features and solutions of Skafos 
  • What’s the future for Skafos?

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This episode is brought to you by Recharge, the leading subscription payment solution for Shopify brands.

The subscription market is predicted to grow to nearly $500 billion by 2025. As the fastest growing area in commerce, subscription holds tremendous opportunities to build a community of customers who share your values. Recharge powers the growth of thousands of subscription merchants and their communities, turning one-time transactions into long-term customer relationships.

With subscriptions, merchants are able to experience predictable revenue, increased customer loyalty, and higher average order values. Whether you are a direct consumer business or an omnichannel brand, subscriptions strengthen your brand’s relationships with your customers and make it easy for consumers to make repeat purchases. Turn transactions into relationships and experience seamless subscription commerce with recharge. Get started now with a subscription payment solution trusted by over 45 million subscribers worldwide. You can check them out at RechargePayments.com/fastlane.

That is it for this episode. I would like to thank you, a loyal reader of the show. I hope this show is offering you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my goal to help you build, launch, grow and scale with Shopify. Thanks for investing some time in the show. I am so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.

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On today's episode, my guest is Michael Pritchard, who is the CEO and founder of Skafos.ai. And they work with forward thinking brands on Shopify really to help or stop shoppers from endlessly scrolling and leaving their online stores on happy. What happens is their platform, simply ask the shopper what they like or dislike with a given product, and then gives them a product mix that they want to see exactly at that moment. They're going to use a new term called product discovery platform. But it really is for the modern Shopify brand. And for the modern, I'd call it even the social media generation just kind of used to swiping and so interesting. It's a very unique platform. I'm excited to have him on the show today to share exactly. And that's what this show is all about. It really is. Is there anything new and exciting in the marketplace right now that maybe you can get early adoption on this product. He's getting product market fit, but maybe you as the brand, you get access to this tool early on before others get it and then you can get some extra traction on it also. Michael, welcome to eCommerceFastlane. 

Thank you, Steve. I appreciate being here.

 

Absolutely. So I'd love to hear in your own words. Because I mean, I've read the website had the demo, I read a few case studies. So So I have a kind of a cursory knowledge of what the tool does. And it's very interestingly unique in the personalization world. But it really is much more different than that. So I'd love to hear in your own words about the problems that you're solving or any challenges in the marketplace today that you feel your platform is filling in these gaps.

 

Yeah, absolutely. And just to be upfront, we came about this from the shoppers point of view, this really was birthed from personal frustration that we have with econ, and primarily with the fact that, you know, while we want to buy something online, which obviously is the future, it is what it is, right? We all understand what it is. But it seems that a lot of E commerce brands sort of follow a traditional workflow, which is really not built for how people interact in real life, you know, and what I mean by that, is that you know, I got frustrated by going to a site, getting that endless infinite scroll of products to sort through, or I'm given a search box to look for something which I may not even know how to describe. Or I'm giving a set of filters that honestly, sometimes I'm like, I must be a merchandiser to understand what this is, how do I make the experience more pleasant for me the shopper and that's really what we we came from. 

What we do is that we try to establish essentially a conversation between the brand and the shopper. And we do it based on really simple interactions by you know, simply just asking, like I said before, like, you know, like asking the shopper, do you like this? Or don't you like this? And what that does, is it lets us quickly figure out what you're looking for at that moment. And so what we solve for you, which I guess is your more direct question, is really kind of helping you the brand or merchant, help the shopper in a delightful way and that they don't leave, right, because the simplest path for most folks, they get frustrated, they're gonna leave. And when they leave, it's gonna be really hard for you to get them back. So we're trying ways to improve that experience. And we're also for what it's worth trying to enhance traditional personalization systems, right. So I'm hoping that most folks on this call are using a recommender, even Shopify out of the box recommender. If not, you know, please do, because data shows that it does work. The challenge with them, though, is that a lot of times, we don't know much about the shopper, nor do we have enough data as individual sort of merge into really, you know, to get those past a certain point. So there's diminishing returns. And what we're doing at Skogafoss is finding ways to get more information from the shopper to basically enhance his recommendation systems. So the end of the day, I mean, we're just trying to improve the shopping experience in general. So

 

I love that, you know, so let's talk a little about the origin story. It's always fascinating to me, like why people I know, you said, it's out of your own personal frustration of kind of what's going on from filters and Merchandising, and that part, I agree, but I think it's got to be a lot more than just personal frustration to think, Okay, well, I'm gonna get a team together, and I'm gonna build a piece of sass. To solve that problem, it's fine to have your own challenges with it. But to make a business out of out on the other end is another interesting conversation. So I just like how did the pieces come together with the founding team, like, where did the desire and the like the technical expertise come from, to even know that there is a problem, but then you have the power and the people to actually build this thing? 

 

Well, we didn't originally start as a calm focused business, we actually started out as a data science company, in particular, we were working on data science tools for data scientists to be able to quickly deploy their AI into the business, you know, long story short, you know, for those of you that are entrepreneurs and know, this lifestyle, we were, you know, quickly figuring out that we didn't have product market fit in that space. And also, to be honest with you, we were competing against, you know, companies that have raised about $250 million. It's so long. So we were playing in a completely, you know, very interesting space, which, you know, it is what it is. Now, what happened was one of our examples was the ability for a platform to build and deploy visual AI models to apps, actually. And we built a demo app that was a camera search. So you could take a picture of someone's shoe, for example, and it would find it with the catalog. And that kind of led us down this path of well, that actually what happened was Apple started getting interested in it. And then we started talking to some retailers. 

And then next thing, you know, we were doing one of our first POCs, or proof of concepts with a retailer around camera surge. And that kind of got us in the realm of like, well, that's really great. And we could talk about that at another time, if you want what cameras really does. But what happened was we started thinking about if humans, you know, shop with their eyes, which we do, right, we can identify images in less than 13 milliseconds, by the way, you know, how can we start to use this technology to provide a better experience for the shop. And so we ended up kind of seeing some things that actually Amazon was doing. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on the show. But, you know, Amazon sent me their active stuff that they've been working on. And with one of our customer, early customers, we decided to kind of mix this idea of interactivity with visual AI to produce one of our first products, which we called product finder, which was very much a widget that gave you a set of product images, and you would like and dislike them. And based on those interactions, we would flip products to help you find what you want it. So like that was hard to get much heavier into that. 

And right before the pandemic, we decided to pull all our efforts into the space and build this platform just based on the data we were getting back. And so that's the origin story, in a sense. So basically, we're a data science company, and we have a set of technology that we feel can really help drive the better experience.

 

Yeah, and you'll see interesting to like I've went through to a few of the sites that are lively or tuna. It's very interesting. I'm just going to try to walk people through I'm sure we'll, we'll dig deeper in a few minutes. But it's so interesting where there's a link that says see similar So if you're looking at something and I click on the See similar link from within the collection page, some magic is happening explained to us what happens for like, it looks like you have your badging, that superimposed and the kind of in the right hand corner of this particular vendor, and they're showing some jewelry right now. So let's say people are liking certain one, see similar what's happening on this page. Now once I click it, because a little green checkmark pops up, but what else is going on?

 

So you know, we've learned a lot in the past two years, and we get into the details of what actually works, what doesn't work. So what that's doing is basically, what we're trying to do is stop the scroll. And you'll see us say that a lot, right? So so what we're trying to do is solve the PLP, right, the listing page. And so the idea here, as a shopper is looking at that PLP or listing page, say there's a particular diamond ring, they sort of like right, or dress or shoe or you know, a couch, whatever it is, we're giving them the ability to tell us, hey, you know, show me more like this, right? 

See similar. And when you click that, we're basically asking our platform to give you back results that are most similar to that particular product. So then you'll kind of see the PLP, kind of rearrange itself a little bit when you do that. So that that's what's really happening there.

 

Very cool. Yeah, I love that. I'll make sure I put links to a lot of the unknown. There's a few links in your website, I guess, for different case studies and stuff. I'm going to put a lot of those in there too. But let's talk a little bit about it is a visual kind of tool. I know we're trying to stop the scroll and getting people to be more engaged with the product. And so at that point, I understand kind of devil's advocate here. But isn't scaffolds really like a kind of an another product recommender? That's kind of available out of the marketplace? Right now?

 

GUEST  11:43

That's a great question. And you know, to be frank is actually interesting to us in that like, when people ask us, what are you? Right, and I thought a lot about this, obviously, from a product messaging, you know, obviously, we have to figure out how to sell our products. So we can obviously pay the bills. And we would call themselves product discovery, which is really about helping customers find you know, what the product state they want. Right? And that, in itself does involve recommendations. Right. So to be completely frank with you, you know, we're not quite just another product recommender, I would say we actually enhance product recommendations. 

Well, we do. You know, of course, we're using algorithms underneath the covers that are very traditional recommended, which by the way, most might get shot for saying this. Most recommendation systems use a lot of the similar algorithms to VW frank with you, right. And that's great. And we use them too. And so we can basically serve up an initial sorting based on these different algorithmic sort of approaches. But what we do that's different is that we are now giving the shopper giving the merchant the ability to essentially ask the shopper and might close to what you want, right, as opposed to just guessing and hoping that I show you something that you want at that moment, we're giving the shopper the ability to interact and tell us what they want. So so at the end of the day, you know, are we your product recommender? Sure, but what we really are is a more modern way to give your customers more power, more agency essentially to discover product. And so I don't think we're just another recommender. I think we're an improved recommender.

 

And you're right, and even a comment early on this recording that you know, if you're not already using either some native things built into Shopify themes on online store 2.0 or a third party I think lime spot Think nosto Think ribeye engine, think about obvio. Think fast, Simon. And there's lots of them. We've had all these guys on the show. 

They're building some really interesting merchandising search tools. But what's yours is like decidedly different where you're letting the customer you know, vote with their thumbs, so to speak, and saying yes, I want to find things that are similar to this. And then as part of their discovery process of the brand, like if you're looking like you said, let's say you're looking at some shoes, like let's say running shoes, for example, but you want you want to see all the white leather shoes, well, if you soon as you see a pair, then click that button similar, but all of a sudden it populates based on what's in that catalog of what else is available on that collection page. And I think that's quite interesting. Instead of maybe using the LG said, if you're not a merchandiser, do you really even know how to use the left filters by brand and type and product and swatches and all these different things? Right?

 

Yeah, no, I mean, they're all valuable stuff. So I don't want to tell anyone never to do that. And all those companies, you know, products that you mentioned, are all fantastic products. I mean, we were just saying, look, let's instead of trying to always push to the customer, right, you know, we're trying to drive people down this funnel. 

It's exactly what we're always trying to do. We're just saying give the shopper agency and let them tell us, you know more about what they're actually looking for which actually in today's world, where we're starting to see pixels being decimated by Apple, and cookies eventually are going to be phased out. I mean, to be completely frank, like you're not going to know much about folks that are coming to your store in our philosophy of stuff was like, that's okay. Like, we don't really need to know very much about you. But we need for you to do is interact with our catalog. And as you're interacting with the catalog, we're starting to kind of give you more of that it almost like when you go into a store or like if you go into a store and you walk in the salesperson doesn't run up to you as sex prices, and this is what I thought you're like, you know, they actually start to ask you, you know, what, are

 

you here for qualifying questions?

 

Yeah, you know, like, like, things like that. So that's what's different about our platform. And just to be completely open with you. Yes, we have similar we have a visual sorting product, we're gonna I know, you know, we'll talk I'm sure we'll talk about this, we also start to improve recommender. 

So we actually have interactive recommend, as well, we do serve, you know, recommendation based on traditional things like, you know, you may also like or featured products, you know, all this stuff that are others Biola, all that all the famous on was called Seamus, I said famous Pinochet and all that. But we add another layer of like, you know, tell us more like this or less like this. And I can tell you some really interesting things when you start to give people agency in terms of what the data is telling us.

 

Yeah, I love the more like this, and they see what happens. And then you're right on the page says, I want more like this, or based on the recommendation engine, this is not my style. And clicking on this is not my style, instantly flips it and says, Oh, is this more like your style? Yeah, more like this, and then continues down. It's kind of discovery journey. 

So it's quite interesting how it works. So maybe let's talk about that. Like what sort of other features so we have see similar, we've got the more like this and not my style, I guess that would be more of a visual sort.

 

Yeah, digital sword, that's a newer product, visual sword is basically as you start to interact with the catalog, the products will start to kind of resort themselves, and you'll see them moving around. This is great stuff. And so we're using no just say, you know, in places like, we'll launch it from a banner, for example, like discover, you know, the perfect couch, right? So so it's trying to kind of emulate an assistant in the sense, that's a little bit of a new product that we're testing right now see similar is, you know, like you said.

I think we've explained it a couple of times, but it's really it's, you know, simple concept, like show me more of these, you know, within the thing, interactive recommenders are just what you might imagine them to be their their recommendation, you know, slots that give you the customer agency. And we're also releasing for Shopify, by the way, the next week or two featured products. So you can actually drop an interactive feature product slot on your homepage and things like that. Those are really the big solutions on our platform. You no at this point,

 

lovely, lovely. And so let's pivot over to a story, I think, I don't know, it's interesting with this show. I mean, there's, you know, 1000s, of founders and marketers that listen each week. And I think there's a lot of common themes, like I said, top of the show, they have this desire to see what's going on, and ecommerce and direct to consumer. And I think it's interesting to me that I think you're onto something very new and unique. And so I hopefully don't put on the spot here. But it'd be great if you could maybe, you know, let's just talk about a particular brand that maybe has implemented and are currently implementing the solution. 

And like, where were they before? What was their KPI or their business outcome challenge that they even located you and then decided to use you. And then what happened on the other end like to understand maybe some of the results that happened as it relates to how it's connected to their platform. So I think

 

That's a great question. And it's true, we are doing something new, which is good, and also really difficult. Sometimes, right?

 

This podcast is for we're here to educate the market that there is unique things out there. Yes, you need to have table stakes, and some of the basics, have your email, have your SMS, have your on page and search and all these kind of basic things. 

Fair enough. But there's also a few other things I think can really differentiate quickly. And yours very well might might be one of those solutions. So yeah,

 

Well, i Our vision is, you know, delighted shoppers everywhere. I'm not we're trying to change or improve the experience for folks online, right. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone's working really hard to drive traffic, obviously to their site, they're working on brand story, they're obviously dealing with inventory and all that kind of stuff. And you know, not, obviously you want to close the sale, but you really want to, you know, pleasant experience for someone because they want to come back, right? So, so like, what we're trying to do is like, how do we change that? How do we change, you know, from just getting your pop up? I don't mean bad things about populates but like, you know, as a shopper, like I go to the site, a pop up comes up and like, Oh my God, what's going on right now? You know, like, how do we change that into a more pleasant experience? So that's what we're trying to do. So I'll tell you about an example. Just to be completely frank, you know, a lot of our customers right now are, are those early adopters, right? They're the ones that are like, we're going to be innovative in this space. And we're going to work with Skogafoss they believe in us..

I believe in our technology, and we're working together to fine tune this dominant and I'll even give you stories about things that didn't work. We have run different types of solutions on our platform that just didn't work. But that's only one way to figure that out. It's to try it right so one of them is one of our favorite customers. In Australia. They're called bevels and they sell jewelry and They basically found us through. And we like anyone on the planet, we were outbound email marketing, which works by the way, they you know, we just happen to hit them at the right time. And at the time, they were doing some, and that's only to be very clear. So, you know, I'm not, I'm not at all dogging any of these technologies. You know, I think everything has got its rightful place. 

And in this case, they were using a quiz. And the challenge they had was that this quiz, which I think, you know, many quizzes are, they're very, were using were static, but once you set them up, you know, they're not very dynamic in nature, like, it's like a set of questions, a follow a workflow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what happened was that, you know, they were like, look, we are so busy, that it's really hard for us to keep up with keeping these quizzes up to date. In fact, they hadn't changed them in over a year. So here we come. And we're like, look, we can provide almost like a Quizlet experience with like this interaction, you don't have to do anything like the machine is going to create the workflow based on the interactions with the customer, right, so that that's what got them really excited about what we're doing. And so we ended up, you know, signing up. And just so you know, this is before we even have Shopify apps, initially enough, and we you know, we brought them on board as a as what we call the launch partner. So we ended up building the SAP fi app because of them and some others that we had coming on board. So we decided to release our first solution, I call them solutions, our platform can power many different types of interactive experiences. When we consider e xe similar visual store in our three product recruitment or future products, things like that. We consider those we call them solutions internally, just so you know what I'm saying. So we created a solution that we call the inactive product finder, which is, you know, almost like a Tinder for for product search, I guess you could say, and we tested that out on their homepage. The good news is it did drive, you know, conversion, right? Well, I would assume what does every merchant want, they want to improve conversion rates, right? 

They want to improve average order value, like they actually do revenue per visits nice. And you know, lifetime value. Those are the sort of four metrics that obviously we're trying to tune. So we released the product finder, which actually did pretty well, it ended up improving conversion rates, I think, was 104%, above what they normally do. And so you all know, like we, we don't just make this up with our own algorithms, we actually feed this into Google's analytics and let their algorithms tell us how well we're doing. So you can compare us with just about everyone folks interacting with our platform, it definitely drove conversion rates, right, which is great. It also drove RPV their revenue per visit. So we were, you know, not only close higher, but I think we were driving, I think we're driving more people to actually find something they want to purchase. 

We did have one challenge, though, which we're very open. This is why everyone should work with us, we're a partner for real is that we were like seeing a OVS drop, which is really interesting. And we're trying to, you know, figure out like what was going on there. And I think what was going on is that we were driving people to product fast or the normal, therefore they were making a purchase. And maybe that's what dropped the EOB. So we've been working on that with so either way, it was a success. And then they're like, Well, this is great. We're going to move off this quiz company. And we want to add you in other places. And that's how we started getting into see similar, and that improve their conversion rates within the first week was crazy, like how people interact with it. And then we added interactive recommender. And I believe we have frequently bought together right now on their PDP. And they're really excited about that. 

They're just a great partner. And we're seeing a lot of really great success with them.

 

So that's apples.com.au. I'll put that link in the show notes with well throw them some love for those in our Australian and New Zealand market. Yeah, they're awesome. Yeah, it's a good, it's good to see like a live Shopify store implementing it. And I've gone through it, just as you were speaking, I just looped over there and had a peek. And so yeah, it's pretty neat kind of what they're doing. 

I tried the mobile experience, too. And it's also really, really cool, too. So I'm really enjoying that. So I'm trying to think of anything else that I think is kind of interesting about your tool, because I think, you know, like, here we are today, you're early ish in the Shopify world. But you've been running maybe on other CMS for a little bit longer than Shopify, because your app is fairly new. And that's kind of why I have it on the show today is because you're new, you know, there's 2 million some merchants now on the Shopify platform. 

But I think you've had Magento brands and big commerce and other CMS is WooCommerce, and stuff that are implementing this solution. So let's just talk a bit about the current, I guess, range of services that are built into the tool today are able to talk a bit about maybe what the Northstar is for the remainder of 22. It's always just feels warm and fuzzy just to hear okay, here's what here's what we're building right now. And we're really good at it right now. But you know, is there a public roadmap? Is there a merchant frustrations tool, like how are people giving public feedback about what's next to build? I just want to throw it back to you, but you know, what the future is looking like?

 

And that's a great question. And it's actually it's a probably a hard question for any product company, right? Like, what do you Working on, I think, you know, at Scotland's we spent the past year and a half, building this platform really like really building it. Right. So I think, you know, for us and 2022, I forget what year I'm in, by the way, because it'll get all COVID. Anyway, in 2018, I'm like, what you're in Florida in 2022, you know, we're focused on now is how do we refine our offering to help our customer succeed? 

Right, so we are spending a lot more time focused on improving metrics, right? So what are those, again, it's conversion rates, right, we want to be able to have a positive effect for our customers, you know, top line and bottom line, I mean, what why also we there, you know, we want to improve ao V, which we have techniques to do RPV, and of course, a lifetime value. So we're probably less building now as more to refining and improving to make that happen, we're also doing more things around connecting the data and insights that we have to different parts of the business. And so you know, one example is we're working with a unfortunately, not a Shopify customer, they're actually on WooCommerce. 

We're working with them to start to take the data and the insights that we're actually unlocking, which we're gonna talk about in a second, and pushing those into other parts of the business. So for example, we're going to push how people are interacting based on their you know, so just so you know, I'm gonna back up a little bit like we, we are gathering a set of information that was never possible before. So we're not only do we see what people are clicking on, for example, we're also getting feedback if they like it or don't like it. And by the way, fun fact, when someone says no to something, I have a blog post on this, the conversion rate triples, it's crazy. So when you give people the power to say, I don't want to see these right now, like it seems to give them we have a theory on this, and I'll send you the article, but like, like it actually drives conversion much higher than the other way, which is pretty wild. 

That said, you know, what we're doing now is we're taking this information like these interactions that we've created, essentially a sentiment score, or product sentiment score, almost like what you'd find with brands with NPS, you know, we we actually can apply that to products. And what you're doing with that, is we're able to kind of overlay that over things like, you know, how many times have you shown this product, and if you see products with higher sentiment, you're not showing them a lot, we can start to boost those up in the stream for customers, right. So we're starting to see a lot of our current, you know, partners or partners for us or our customers, by the way, you know, customers are starting to use this information and things like their inventory, filament planning and things like that. So that's one example of how we want to start providing more value to the customer. And we're also hopefully this year starting to kind of push into the marketing. Alright, so being able to kind of take some of the information, use it for remarketing, obviously, things like that, those are the big push for us, it's like improve the product in that we're hitting criteria for our partners, and then figure out how we can use our data and insights to improve the business even more.

 

Lovely, lovely, that's great. So I just want to pivot a bit over into I'm going to call them like interesting vantage points, because I think each, it almost seems like every SAS founder, they have a unique position, because they're directly communicating with merchants, like on a day to day basis, that's what's kind of, you know, upgrading your tool, and you really are building for your customers helping them with all these inequalities winning KPIs that you were just mentioning, with good strategy and aligning your numbers. And, you know, just keep improving these sorts of things, right. 

But I'm just curious if you have any advice that you could give, it could be a strategy or tactic could be, you know, using your tool or not, but it just, the brands are really eager that listen to the show, they really want to move the needle, they want to grow their ecommerce businesses and just curious to see adding your tools, certainly a good starting point to differentiate because you know, you can get that sort of thing, but I'm curious, like what you're seeing on your end, maybe from shoppers perspective, maybe what's unique, or maybe from a merchant perspective, maybe

 

I am very open, like, we're not a tool for everyone. You know, I think just just to close that off a little bit, like, obviously, I don't want everyone to use us. But you know, we weren't much better with products that people make judgments based on visual, right, so like clothing, apparel, jewelry, you know, Home Goods, things like that. So well I you know, I'm like everybody use us this be real, that we're not 100% For everyone your question or what I'm saying or what I perspective, I think, you know, coming at it from a merchant point of view, I wouldn't say that I would be thinking about it. Maybe these are table stakes, and you could tell me site speed, right, super important. You know, I come from the digital world. I come from mobile actually. And you know, if you take a certain amount of time for something to happen, people are gonna leave if you're gonna go to the path of least resistance which may not be your store. 

So site speed, hugely important. We touched on this earlier in his conversations, and I'm gonna tell you that recommenders do move the needle like we have data on that. And so at the very least, you know you Shopify guys, you know capability to do it or use us, or use Aveo or live spot or wherever, just just make sure you're doing that. I also feel there's so many tools now to run tests like really quickly and cheaply, like, you know, you can do with Google Analytics and Google optimized and you could run a set of tests to see, you know, what's working, what's not working, I wouldn't be thinking about that. And very more tactical point of view, I think that social shopping is extremely effective. And it's going to grow. So thinking about those channels and how you leverage, you know, social shopping, I think I found this a merchant, I'd be thinking about that. So there's a sort of my virtue perspective, I mean, from a shopper, very simply, just don't make it too hard on me, you know, try to think about the fact that I'm coming to your site, I don't want a lot of stuff in my way. So

 

Yeah, no, absolutely. I totally agree with you on the social selling part. And hence the reasons why Shopify has led the market with Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok and Pinterest and, you know, directly align themselves and you know, buy from within video now on YouTube.

All thanks to our connections with the social networks, shop pay is is, you know, partnered up is that their business partner is stripe, and so the gateways there, and so everything just works. And I think that's something that you know, for those that have not thought about, or have not turned on that channel, in your admin, for social selling, like, you know, there are direct sales channels available from within your admin, you can start building your business and selling directly through the social networks. I mean, it is a little bit of rented land. Fair enough. But that there's a lots of there's lots of people in these different audience, and we're all trying to drive traffic towards our sites. But it's also by getting out there and influencer, sharing things and you sharing things and maybe some small ads and things around these different networks, you'd be really surprised what people can discover and buy from within App. So interesting.

 

I think that's a discovery, right? I mean, I've bought so many things off of like Instagram ads, it's crazy. Like, just you know, and this is anecdotally speaking out, I'm sure the data backs us up. But you know, even my neighbors, and I joke around of all that stuff that we've discovered and bought based on these, like shoppable ads, so to speak, or within the social environment, I think if you're not taking advantage of that you're missing a, I wouldn't even say it's that hard of an opportunity. You're just missing it, and you need to go where people are. And that's what they are.

 

Absolutely. So let's talk about where people can go now that they understand that, you know, there's this tool available, it's new to the market, there's a Shopify app available, I guess, what's the call to action today, we've heard this, we see the what you're kind of doing, it's very unique. So it's leading edge for those that are very keen to try something new, I'd probably worth a test in zoom, you can let us know where you want to send people today,

 

definitely worth a test. And I think for your listeners only, you know, what I'd like to do is, you know, our website, Scotland's dot AI, so you can go there, we're going to create a page with you as well, which is gonna be awesome. If you're coming to us from this podcast, you know, just mentioned, you know, Steve, or whatever. And what we'll do is like, you know, we'll get on the phone with you personally, just go through your site and just run an audit to kind of see if we make sense or not for you, you know, we're happy to do that. We don't do that with everyone, just for what it's worth, actually, we don't do it. But for I think that'd be a great way for us to start because you know, I'm gonna be the first person to tell you that we're not going to work, or we're going to work on your site. But the very least we can discuss, you know, more in depth about how to do that. I think that'd be a great way to get started. Absolutely.

 

What we'll do is all I'll make a landing page, it'll be E commerce fastlane.com forward slash scaffolds that will redirect to your landing page, and there will have I guess, there's gonna be two offers want to know, we just chatted in the greenroom before recording, understanding, want to talk about a little bit of a side topic, but the NFT kind of opportunity.

 

Yeah, yeah. So So you know, that's another way to get more stuff from us. So we, you know, like everyone on the planet, we were fascinated by crypto, and NF T's and all that stuff. And so we, we were having a little fun, you know, we wanted to one showcase some of the more futuristic uses of our platform, so to speak, right? You know, because like, we can't ask merchants to change their entire sites, we decided to kind of test some different ideas. And so we built a site called shop, sh O P NF T. Dot SCAF was that AI, which is really a way to kind of run through these 10,000 NF T's that we created that we call pandemic panda in celebration of coming out of the pandemic, right. So you go there, you can start to interact with the catalog. And then you claim your your NFT will basically give you an NFT for free. And if you have that NFT you get an upgraded support from us as you use our products, but either way, it's just it's just a fun way to kind of explore how we were

 

it's fun actually, I'm going to do it right now. And yeah, looking at Yeah, it's it's, it's cool. And if you don't know much about the blockchain, Shopify is working really hard. Also right now with minting and dropping product. I have quite a few brands now that are in NFT market right now that are doing extremely well and we're even able to block a lot of the bots Since stuff too, so it allows people to actually the real customers actually buy instead of maybe getting bots to be buying some of the more important ones, I guess. But it's interesting. Yeah. So that'll be shop NF t.scaffolders.ai. All these links will be in the show notes for sure. I'll have all this lined up for you. 

Thank you so much for getting on the show today. It always makes me feel good when I know you already have product market fit and traction other CMS has. But whenever you're new in the Shopify world, it's always interesting to start having these conversations like hey, wait a second, others and other CMS are seeing value over the years and what you're building. And now it's time for the Shopify world to understand that, hey, it's worth a test. That's what we're going to do with the shownotes I'll have a link to that landing page, at least quick audit procedures, if there's fit for your product collection. If you're extreme, I've looked and so it's phenomenal what you're building. I think people get in early, they also get kind of grandfathered in and like so it's one of those things. So I think it's great. But once again, thank you for sharing your knowledge and your vision and kind of giving back now to the Shopify ecosystem.

 

You know, we love Shopify and you know, we're just trying to learn how to be good partners. So love to talk to anyone.

 

absolutely me included. Yeah, that's cool me you include especially well Have yourself a great day, Michael. Alright, have a good day. All right, take care.

 

Today's episode is brought to you by recharge the leading subscriptions payment solution for Shopify brands. 1000s of merchants use subscriptions powered by recharge, to grow their business and their communities by increasing average order value, reducing churn and providing predictable recurring revenue, turn transactions into relationships, and experience a seamless subscription commerce with recharge. You can check them out today at recharge payments.com forward slash Fastlane. Well, that's it. For today's episode, I'd like to thank you a loyal listener of ecommerce Fastlane. It's my hope that this podcast is offering you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my personal goal to help you build, launch, grow and scale with Shopify. 

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