Thomas

#announcements - March 20, 2025 at 09:20 AM

You are bootstrapping a brand from nothing. Describe the first year and the investment for each part.

#uk - February 18, 2025 at 08:08 PM

Yep. 💯

#the-welcome-mat - January 08, 2025 at 03:21 PM

Sounds great - congrats on the first sale! Ive signed up :)

#uk - December 11, 2024 at 10:22 PM

Sorry Will - cannot make it this time.

#cx-retention - December 09, 2024 at 10:27 AM

The alternative option is to embrace it with a higher price on the Amazon equivalent. I have tested a few ways and depends on the product and the difference in price you will find there is a price elasticity that customers will accept for the convenience and returns process / customer service / delivery promise on Amazon versus own site. You may also run Amazon with Prime but with 3P fulfilment. It may be possible with your local Amazon version, but with Amazon they added a bunch of rules which make this harder to do (7-day fulfilment killed us).

#general-chat - November 25, 2024 at 12:00 PM

I rate Nuvei - happy to make an intro to my contact there. Great rates also!

#uk - November 25, 2024 at 11:55 AM

That is not great! Where is your warehouse? How extensive is the actual mould and what is the cause / where is it coming from ? If it is not extensive it is easily fixed with a spray, but if there is a lot of. condensation / moisture you should invest in a dehumidifier as well, you can rent, but we used to have one just running in winter in one of our units that was not heated.

#uk - November 25, 2024 at 11:52 AM

Hi I have been using Active Ants and LOVE them. I have been working with 3PLs in the UK for nearly 30 years and they have been my favourite people to work with from both a can do attitude and price!
Happy to intro you to my contact there - but recommend a visit. Can give you more info if you need it, just DM me.

#announcements - June 04, 2024 at 09:50 AM

@Shin Takeda Nutribullet was first called Magic Bullet Blender and was an infomercial (remember those?) it was distributed by Thane Direct for whom I was heading up UK/EU. taking US DRTV brands to the world. With all the counterfeits they rebranded and other companies also got the rights (I had left to go to Beachbody to set up their UK / EU and international by then) I still have my Mont Blanc pen engraved with 'Magic Bullet' for selling 1m units in the launch year!
The guy behind the blender (Lenny Sands) was quite ahead of his time and created a category that worked pretty much anywhere in the world, BUT the trick for International was that I edited the marketing and infomercial to suit the UK / EU as it was a nuanced pitch. This was same for Beachbody: P90X, Insanity, 21 Day Fix were all huge in the US but I had to edit the marketing massively for international (weight-loss also had regulatory stuff to re-write) for instance in the US people a lot of worked out in their basements or garage - in the UK garagres are tiny and basements are not so common, in the EU there are more apartment living. That is what I do - essentially help US brands see the marketing through a different lens (plus the operational support).
Nick and Moiz would have loved the days of DRTV - attribution was so much easier when you had 10,000 1-800 numbers! :)

#announcements - June 03, 2024 at 09:34 AM

Great episode @Shin Takeda @Nik Sharma @Moiz Ali I totally get your point on international. Taking US ecomm businesses to the UK / EU is literally what I do! Did it at Thane Direct with Magic Bullet (now Nutribullet) as a distributer and then at Beachbody and now for a variety of clients who want expertise on the ground in the UK. Happy to chat to any of your brands or contacts if they ever need to ask questions / get help on how to start. There are so many better options than shipping from the US DTC in the UK / EU that are low cost and do not have to create nexus. But, my first question is always about nexus and risk (esp for going into EU and in particular in France) you did not discuss that, but I would say that can be a big risk if not acknowledged / managed early on, unless you like double taxing on corp US profits!

#uk - April 24, 2024 at 08:27 AM

Good effort Will, I will aim to come to a future one, I have another ecomm event in Soho on 25th.

#cx-retention - April 11, 2024 at 04:22 PM

That is a nice tool!

#cx-retention - April 11, 2024 at 01:12 PM

@Robert Leonard In my testing I took the opposing colour of the background colour - example: if you were running a blue background in #39A0FF then your would have orange buttons. 🙂

#cx-retention - April 11, 2024 at 09:55 AM

When I was at Beachbody we did a tonne of testing on button colour and it DID impact CVR. We did a lot of work on colour wheel - but we obvs had a lot of traffic and so the small impact in % CVR was worth a lot more and we had a high LTV so even better impact. I still do test this, but current project is lower traffic so much harder to test, but I still live by the colour wheel.

#paid-media - April 10, 2024 at 03:26 PM

That is a pretty impressive CPA if you can get there! Assuming you are basing this on what you are running at in current markets, so you can build the allowable / target CPO from that assumption. Do you have ability to increase the allowable by using a longer LTV cycle or better upselling to get AOV up?

#cx-retention - April 09, 2024 at 11:13 AM

A great guy in the uk (Liam Hooper) shared this tool to check the threshold based on previous orders which saves a bunch of time. I have used it and it works great. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/liamhooper_googlesheets-dataanalytics-shopify-activity[…]618216361985-KJk_?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

#cx-retention - April 09, 2024 at 09:58 AM

Ridgeline and Go2 both great. Happy to intro or give you our experience.

#tech-talk - March 26, 2024 at 10:24 AM

TBH if I was serious about international, I am not sure I would be using Shopify Payments, they dont support all the payment methods that are going to maximise CVR. I would use someone like Nuvei for international.

#general-chat - March 23, 2024 at 01:35 PM

We are going to test Toki which after initial discovery calls looks pretty good. Website is buildwithtoki.com

#general-chat - March 23, 2024 at 09:33 AM

I have had elements of contracts which are hourly rates. But you could make this work with caps built into the contract for work they do in an hour so it equals the same as a per pick rate. We make the 3PL do a time / motion analysis to establish what is better.

#cx-retention - March 23, 2024 at 09:17 AM

We have 2 very good parters. go2 (mostly Philippines but some South America based agents) and Ridgeline (US company but team based in South America who are excellent) happy to introduce.

#tech-talk - March 23, 2024 at 07:59 AM

Had a great meeting with Elise @Michael Mallazzo really impressed. Will keep the group informed on progress @Shin Takeda and definitely a Yotpo (and other apps) competitor to look out for.

#tech-talk - March 23, 2024 at 07:47 AM

I’ve looked at international payments and if you do enough outside your own currency you probably should not use Shopify Payments (we got amazing rates from Nuvei) but the alternative seems to be open more stores and keep the payments in local currency and transfer the money at your convenience through a broker with good rates (as you say: transfer wise etc)
I think what a lot of people outside North America don’t appreciate is that Shopify is not ‘epic’ for international, it is still a North America first focussed business.

#tech-talk - March 23, 2024 at 07:40 AM

We just switched to onetrust. It’s about $45 / m but seems much better than previous tools.

#tech-talk - March 15, 2024 at 03:04 PM

Great thanks Michael, that is helpful.

#tech-talk - March 13, 2024 at 11:13 AM

Has anyone tried or is using https://www.buildwithtoki.com/yotpo TOKI as an altrernative to Yotpo? Our team got pitched and they look good on paper. Be interested if anyone has any real life experience. Thanks

#general-chat - February 29, 2024 at 09:31 PM

Agree it’s a risk. We monitor site speed at every addition we make and play around with hierarchy.

#general-chat - February 29, 2024 at 09:03 PM

@Nik Sharma and @Moiz Ali push Clarity because it’s free.
Hotjar is good, we have used it but why pay?!

#announcements - February 29, 2024 at 09:01 PM

Great episode! Even more take-aways than the Roast call!

#general-chat - February 23, 2024 at 07:36 AM

Free Gift w/ Purchase is a big one for us. We tie it to a brand and order value mostly. We are a reseller so we have to be careful on postage thresholds being too low that they cut into margin, so anything that pushes AOV up is great for us.

#cx-retention - February 14, 2024 at 10:45 AM

Following as i was wondering same, have you spoken with replo support? I got the impression Unbounce did this better (for a lot more $!)

#limited-supply - February 14, 2024 at 08:50 AM

@Shin Takeda with the price rises from Shopify - maybe a topic for the show should be are there alternatives? Is Big Commerce or Woo Commerce an option? Are the price rises justified for these new features from the Winter edition? If you are a Shopify store outside North America there are features that just don't work properly, should we pay the same? Has the changes in Shopify support (anyone else found that not having a success manager despite paying $2K / month plus all the other fees they get in payments etc) has impacted business and support? We really feel it. Also Shopify markets: Shopify claim multi currency is worth 7% revenue lift - we saw ~1% increase which could be related to anything. Very small change in CVR. Shopify also claim one-page checkout is a gamechanger for CVR - we saw a drop in CVR and none of our peers using one-page are seeing any difference and making changes in checkout is actually harder. There must be some good anecdotes on all these from the listeners.

#general-chat - February 14, 2024 at 05:13 AM

This is literally what I worked on during my 12 years at Beachbody (I was there first employee based outside US) it can be a pain but the rules are different for personal import so if you intend to stick in U.K./ EU then it’s more strict than shipping from outside (potentially). Feel free to connect with me on DM.

#limited-supply - February 08, 2024 at 03:53 PM

Nice discussion on DRTV @Moiz Ali @Nik Sharma don’t forget the cool stuff (including long scroll landing pages) that Beachbody pretty much invented! You guys should talk to my old mentor from Beachbody Babak Azad he was the brain behind the strategy analysis at Beachbody for TV all the way to online. Also ex CMO ad GoodRx.

#tech-talk - February 07, 2024 at 05:47 PM

@Anubhav Narula So I should explain the tech stack is PIM on Airtable (because as skincare we have a lot of sku's and variants (@Brendan Hastings we had to make adjustments before Shopify because of our model) We then have Inventory Planner communicating with PeopleVox in our in house distribution facility. With connections by Fusefabric.
I will be honest, I am not in love with Airtable OR Inventory Planner (especially IP!) but it is also a HUGE lift to pick those up and we need the PVX data to be stable as that is a huge part of how we run our business and so we are somewhat resigned to this solution. I find both Airtable and IP to be expensive and over engineered (in a bad way) for what we really want. I inherited these when I joined a year ago and so I am living with them. If there was a solution that worked and replaced them and was a significant cost saving, I would probably consider moving sooner.

#general-chat - February 07, 2024 at 08:41 AM

DM your email and I will intro you to the head of sales for the factory. 🙂

#general-chat - February 07, 2024 at 08:16 AM

Are you looking for manufacturers? I have one in the north of England who I have used for other product and I know they do gels too.

#tech-talk - February 07, 2024 at 08:08 AM

We use airtable for our PIM workes pretty well (this is coming from someone who hates airtable!)

#tech-talk - January 30, 2024 at 05:20 AM

Check StoreHero for Shopify.

#tech-talk - January 24, 2024 at 06:46 PM

Shopify user session extension past 24 hours. Has anyone managed to extend the shopify session past 24 hours so a customer does not have to re-log in if they go inactive. Amazon manage it but Shopify seem to log all customers out after 24 hours and the script to change this is buried / not obviously changeable from what I can see . find out.
I did see an app that did claim to do this, not tested if but have our devs looking at it. https://plugins.miniorange.com/session-management-for-shopify

#announcements - January 12, 2024 at 07:00 AM

Great episode @E:
Two notes for @Nik Sharma and @Moiz Ali :
1. UK VAT is 20% so we are totally screwed by the merchant fees on TWENTY PERCENT of our sales!
2. Amazon are ALREADY offering shipping services (like UPS) in the UK. I have had them pitch twice in the last 8 months and they are very aggressive with prices against the other carriers. They are offering almost nationwide delivery but they miss a few locations (like the islands) so a bit like not including Alaska or Hawaii in the quote. I have not gone with them as I am not wild about Amazons delivery service in general their drivers are under even more pressure than the other cheap carriers are they have a bit of a reputation for abondoning packages in weird places or leaving the packages on doorsteps 'unsafe' (to a greater extent that competitors)
Looking forward to the business idea in Ep 3!

#announcements - January 04, 2024 at 08:08 AM

Got it! LOVE it! Thanks!

#announcements - January 03, 2024 at 04:46 PM

@Shin Takeda did not get the newsletter - but want it...can i check i am registered or re-register someplace?

#announcements - December 15, 2023 at 07:51 AM

This was a great episode. Made me feel better knowing that even JonesRoad (I put them on a pedestal in clean skincare) have moments which are pretty scrappy and the senior team are still rolling sleeves up and getting stuck in.

I disagree that people don’t care about ‘clean beauty’ but he is right that they have not niched into that enough to exploit it. At Naturisimo.com we found the opposite and that our core super consumers were clean skincare advocates and did a whole category design (read: Play Bigger to understand) project around this to lean into it.

#announcements - December 08, 2023 at 08:04 PM

Should I open up shopify multi currency pricing and how important is multi language checkouts? What order would you do these?
1) multi currency for products
2) translate product pages
3) translate checkout
4) start to use Meta ads in local language
5) multi language emails

#paid-media - December 01, 2023 at 10:22 AM

Ok, reach out when you have PVX integrated or you give FuseFabric a call as they do our integration for PVX <> Inventory Planner <> Shopify (better than Patchworks)

#paid-media - December 01, 2023 at 06:30 AM

Interested to hear how easily Prediko links between Shopify and PVX (WMS)?

#paid-media - November 25, 2023 at 09:24 PM

Rebuy has limitations if you search in tech talk you will see my last post explaining one I hit on GWP.

#tech-talk - November 24, 2023 at 03:09 PM

Rebuy does not work perfectly for instance we have Rebuy on our site at Checkout already and yet we cannot use them for GWP - the issue is it can't do branded GWP correctly. If we say spend $40 on Brand X it will trigger the free gift if your cart is over $40 and 1 item in it is Brand Y. It does not appear that clever.

#tech-talk - November 13, 2023 at 09:56 AM

Also Gorgias just sent this in an email: https://www.gorgias.com/ebook/automation-power-kit may help with some macro / automation tips.