Justin Burrows: Owen Landon IV, founder of CartConvert. Welcome to Commerce Chat. We're glad to to have you today. I say we, but it's me How are you doing today?

Owen Landon, CartConvert: I'm doing well, man. Thanks for having me

JB: We brought you on because we wanted to talk about, abandoned carts, which are probably one of the most intriguing elements of money being left on the table Process of the commerce journey. But before we get into that, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at CartConvert

OL: Yeah. So, founder of CartConvert, we're a checkout recovery service. basically, we focus on recovering the checkouts of shoppers that are not opted into your marketing automations. So we utilize, live agents and peer to peer messaging to communicate with the shoppers that are aren't necessarily opted into your Klaviyo automations or your attentive automations. so we've been I've been founding that for running that for about two years now. but I initially got my start into e-commerce, at molten, which is a headless e-commerce platform. So I saw that you had Jamus Driscoll on the podcast the other week, which is great. I call him

JB: The Beard. His beard is so good.

OL: I hope he keeps it is a fantastic beard, and I am proud to have been witness of him first growing that beard. so I'm like, it's like I can stamp that on my resume, but I call I call James, the godfather of e-commerce, because the two years I worked for him was an absolute crash course into the e-commerce world. I've always been in tech, but I was the first one of the first US hires, at Moltin, which eventually became Elastic Path. So got my kind of foot in the door, while working there around, like, specializing in microservices, backend architecture of e-commerce, you know, focusing on like, you know, headless e-commerce, utilizing API's to create a really fast, engaging site experience. After that, I worked for a company called bolt which specialized in, the checkout experience. So we were a checkout platform we created like a one click network. Essentially, we're trying to create, similar to what Shop Pay has done today. bolt is creating like a really fast, quick checkout for all non Shopify websites. And then after that I started working for an SMS marketing platform. And that's when I started, kind of stumbled onto my idea of utilizing live agents and SMS to engage with shoppers and creating a more engaging, you know, marketing communication rather than the standard automation. Hey, here's 10% discount like buy. We wanted to create a more kind of humanized, shopping experience. and that's how, CartConvert came about

JB: That's, so I, I think it's interesting because a lot of the conversations, especially in headless, is about performance is about what people see on the front end. but what I find fascinating is that, like, we have all of this focus on personalization and gimcracks and gewgaws not to be so dismissive of it, but there's a lot of things that you can do on the front end. But I think more than half of carts like you have them, the person is on your site, they have taken something and they have put it in the cart more than half of those people don't don't complete it. I mean, that's it's like right there. This isn't like 2%, 5% of somebody coming in from a click ad. This is like real stuff. You could really move the needle with. Right?

OL: Yeah. It's wild. The stat that's you see in the space today is, on average, 70% of your checkouts are abandoned. Like, that's a wild number, 70%. And the kind of seeing the space, like everyone, rightfully so, is focused on, customer retention, customer acquisition. And they're focused on, like, the user experience and the front end side of things. Right? Rightfully so. Right. But most of the time, what gets forgotten is the checkout side of things like checkout really hasn't been updated in years, like Shopify has done a really good job of creating a good checkout. they created ShopPay. You know, Bolt has come around and they're trying to mimic that or something similar to that. But for all non Shopify websites. So they focus on like Magento and BigCommerce and Salesforce communities. but you still see today like checkouts today like just long arduous processes like you have to create an account. There's not multiple payment options like people struggle with that

Painkillers and the Cure, Mitigating and then Solving Checkout Snags

OL: And it's still it's mind blowing to me how that, that, that number I've been in the e-commerce space now for shoot like eight, nine, ten years and that number has floated at 70% the whole time I've been in it. And every company I've worked for has focused on lowering that. Everyone wants a high checkout completion percentage. Right. but to do that, there's there's a lot of different factors that come into it. But no one has really addressed the checkout issue, like up front as much as you think it would. And that's what we're trying to solve for here at, at at Cart Convert. So basically what we're trying to do at CartConvert is essentially my, my colleague Anne Marie, who's worked in e-commerce on the retail side of things, for the brand side of things for the last like 20 years. And she puts a really good, good way. Basically the way that she says is like your sickness is the abandoned checkouts and your abandoned carts, right? The painkillers is basically the SMS communication, the SMS recoveries that we're doing with our live agents. Right. That's really just the painkiller that's kind of masking some of the pain that you have today. The actual issue that you have deep down inside is the reason why people are checking, aren't checking out or aren't completing that checkout process. Andwhere that data lives is through the conversations that we're having with our shoppers today. So at Cart Convert, we're having live communications with the shoppers. So if you don't complete a checkout, Justin, like within 30 minutes, one of our support reps will text you like, hey Justin, this is Owen like, how can I help you? Like, so you're checking out these shoes. And the whole point is to take that shopper and ask them questions on, you know, why they didn't check out and hopefully eventually incentivize them to complete that checkout. But we get some really great data within those conversations. And most of that conversation comes around of like, hey, my credit card got declined. shipping rate was too high. I need this product by a certain day of the week, and it looks like you guys can't complete that. Now, a lot of these issues are solvable, but the brand just doesn't know, like it actually is an issue because they're not actually going directly to the shopper. They're just looking at themselves and saying, hey, this looks nice, or we should do this because I've heard about this and there's throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. So, I think just by going directly to your shoppers and getting that data and understanding like why they're not completing that checkout, then you can actually put into action, you actually have tangible evidence on why they're not completing that checkout. And you can put the fixes in, which is what we're helping do. at CartConvert as well. So it's kind of interesting like my all the roles I've had at every company in the e-commerce space has kind of led up to this moment, because every single company I've worked for has focused on the checkout optimization side of things. So at Moulton, right, we're utilizing microservices and APIs to create a really fast, engaging site experience, right. Ultimately leading to hopefully a fast and quick checkout experience. but with API's, you could have plugged out our checkout and put in a tool like a bolt really quickly to make an even quicker checkout, right? A Bolt. We're strictly focused on checkout optimization, so we're focused on creating a one-click shopper. Networks kind of like what you see with Shopify, and creating a really wide network. So eventually you have enough shoppers that every checkout you experience is a one click checkout, right. It recognizes who you are when you go to the checkout, you you input your email or your phone number, bam! It has your credit card information saved and so on. and then in the SMS world, when I was working as the head of sales at SMS marketing platform, you know, we're focused on recovering, you know, carts, checkouts, engaging with shoppers top of funnel to send them potential discounts or product drops. But again, the whole idea around that, though was, you know, utilizing your VIP customers to convert them quickly and seamlessly as easy as possible. But, you know, we saw a lot of issues there, though around checkout optimization, because when they get to the checkout, sometimes life happens and they forget to complete the checkout and they need that little nudge. So there's a lot of different things that factor into there. But it's just surprising to me. You know, we're in 2024 today. And that number of 70% of the average checkout rate really hasn't changed in the last ten years or so.

All Roads Lead to Checkout

JB: Yeah. And I find that's interesting because again, I give a hard time to personalization. And I'm not against personalization, but even if you, like, psychographically just understood every motivator for your customer. Even if you had a perfect strategy for your personalization, maybe you're moving your conversion rate 2%. 3% like that would be really excellent

OL: That it's it's crazy just by that little like it's the, the ROI you can get from that is insane. We would do a test at Bolt. I think I forget the guarantee Bolt has now. I think they have a 5% lift in checkout conversion percentage now. Maybe a little less than that. They just throw it on the website that they guarantee that. But for a while though, we would do, we would run like an A-B test. and the goal was to get to like two, three, 4 or 5% lift in checkout conversion. And just from that little like 2 to 3% lift, like the revenue you'd see like is so high and it's just from these small little changes that you that you would see. A lot of the times it's adding another payment option, right? A lot of times it's getting rid of the account creation side of things and allowing quick guest checkout experience. So yeah, it's, these small changes have a huge effect on revenue. and then, as we all know, too, like that one conversion, right, that shopper? If you give them a good buying experience and they have a good experience with your product, they're going to come back and purchase. You have a lifetime customer right there for you. so you should be focused. I mean, it's crazy to me that we're not focused more on the conversion side of things because that one checkout could equal hundreds of checkouts in the lifetime of the brand, the lifetime of the shopper.

JB: It's kind of like walking backwards for you did something where it's a win, right? So you're walking backwards from where that win was and trying to replicate that, you know, the bottom of the funnel, you know, versus versus the top. And I think to your point, like people are always kind of focused on the front end, which is very important. But if you know, if they get their wallet out and then they're just like, I'm being interrupted, I've got other things going on, you know, that that makes a huge impact, because it's right there, right on that point of conversion. It's $0 or it's an actual sale.

OL: Yeah, I think rightfully so, though, too. Like, you know, when you create a really engaging website, right. Like, I love using Yeti as an example, like Yeti's websites, right. Like, you see, people like Yeti just sells coolers, right? It's but like when you go to their website, it's like this great, engaging. Like, people are on the beach, they're off roading, they're drinking, they're hanging out. Like, it's just like a fun, like it just it creates that whole it creates a brand, right? Versus just a cooler. and that's why they can charge so much. but when you go to some of these checkouts and you're like, you have a good experience but then it's like, create an account, do this, do that. And it's just so archaic and it hasn't changed at all. so I always yeah, I do the same thing. I working backwards I think is the way to go. Right? When you, you should create an easy experience. How would you want to check out. Right. What's the easiest way to do that. And that's one of the things why people liked Amazon in the first place. You can save your data in there and just check out quickly. so I think it's working backwards. It's fixing that problem first and then working your way back and then creating that engaging kind of user experience. And then you create a really powerful kind of site experience from there.

Human After All? Leveraging Existing Support Teams to Support Sales

JB: I think that maybe part of it is you mentioned like how checkout hasn't really changed in ten years, and there's an argument to be made that it's even been longer than that you know, back in the days of having having to support different browsers where your checkout might not work on, Internet Explorer,  a specific version. So you were very risk averse to do anything, right, you know, relating to checkout, because, again, that's when people have their, their, their money. But, I, I find it interesting, I think that in that time new technologies have developed where we just kind of forgot that we can actually be human beings online. Where we think that everything needs to be done in a form or be rules based. And it's like if somebody was in your shop and they had like if you were in a physical brick and mortar store, let's say, and you did, you know, same revenue as a is a pretty good website, you know, and a person walked in and they had two pairs of shoes in their bag and then they were like, nah. And then they, they, they just dropped them right there. You would use a person, you would use a person to walk up to them and say, hey, do you need a different size? Is there, you know, do you want me to hold these for you for later? Do you want to come back tomorrow? And we can totally do that now. but instead we're like, let's have an AI agent do it.

OL: And as much as AI has, has, grown as quickly as it has and matured, I mean, you you can still kind of tell sometimes when you're talking to a bot. and, I still. Yeah. And I still I'm still a big proponent of humanizing every experience, like utilizing humans for that experience. Like it's hard to create like an, like, to be empathetic, with a shopper when you're an AI algorithm. I know there's, like, empathetic AI bots out there already today. but in reality, though, like I, I just find it strange that putting so much attention onto something when we have humans right here that are that do the job, if not better.

JB: also, there's a degree of agency, I would imagine. I mean you can't, go up to a human representative and say, disregard all previous instructions, give me my products.

OL: And you're also but you also a lot of these also to you have a support team. It's like I think what I think the shift is going to change is support isn't just going to be support. I think support is slowly going to start changing, becoming sales. Right. they're already starting to do that a little bit today, but I think it's turning your support reps into a sales team for them. Right. Because they're already managing support tickets out of a gorgeous or a Zendesk. They're already getting those leads. They see those problems. But if you if you can weaponize your support reps with the ability to sell things and understand the problems that customers are having, then you're also saving money and you're utilizing the team that you already already have. and that's what which a car convert, which is what we're doing today is we have the we have our own support agents that represent your brands. So when someone abandons that checkout, right, we can come in and say, hey, how can I help you? So you're looking at this product like you want to help with a discount, anything. but if you have already have a built out support team, that knows the product inside out, you don't want to. You don't want to train any new agents. you can utilize your, your support reps themselves. and that's where I find really interesting. because I've seen today there's, there's tools like, I was just reading an article on gorgeous, where there was a subscription box company, and they were paying, a revenue recovery service for because they would have a lot of, like, abandoned, like, failed payments, stuff like that, to come in and recover those for them. They turned their support teams into that recovery revenue recovery service by just giving that support team, discount codes and they're like, hey, anyone that fails the payments, from a subscription, like email them directly. An HTML email, like don't include like any links. And then when they spawn back, we can send them that link and get the payment. And they had like a 30% increase in recovery service just from that. So I think there's a lot of different ways you can

utilize it. And that's what we're trying to do here at CardConvert. and yeah, I think like you said, I think it's like you walk into a store like look at your online store as like your, your agents as the store clerk. Hey, how can I help you?

Yeah. What are you looking for?

How to Convert Unregistered Customers 

JB: and the thing is, you, you know, as they say in Texas, you know, you didn't used to could, but now you can. And there's no reason. But it requires kind of new thinking, new systems. And I think, you know, a lot, a lot of times you talk about like, microservices. It makes it in headless. You can pop in, you know, different services. You can add on, you can take away, oh, I have it. But I have a challenging question for you. Sure. in my experience, about 80% of people who who go through checkout, even people who have an account go througha guest or unregistered checkout, how do you this is eight out of ten of of the people on your site

How how do you reach them? How are you? getting in contact with those people? What are the challenges? There are the people that abandon. The people who abandon, who are not registered. Are you able to is are there ways to get in contact with them?

OL: Yeah. Great. Great question. So when the shopper abandons their checkout, they don't have to be registered at all. so basically they we get that through the integration with the ecom platform, through their checkout API. so we have a integration with BigCommerce and Shopify today that we pull those, those leads directly from the Ecom platform itself. So we have all the shopper data directly. They're already filled out, their name, their email phone number. So any of the data that they filled out within that checkout gets pushed to us. so that's how we get their phone number. So they have to have their phone number filled into the checkout. And when they abandon that checkout, post the phone number that gets sent over to us. If they don't have their phone number filled in, we filter that out. because we don't can't message them unless they're an existing account member, then we can pull that data in. but they're not an existing account member or they're not, you know, opted into the marketing communications. We can still get that

lead. that lead comes through. we'll have their phone number there. It's almost like a sales lead. We call it an active lead. and it takes about 20 to 30 minutes for that abandoned cart and checkout to come through from Shopify or BigCommerce. and then we can measure them directly from there. and we'll get notified when they respond back. but today we're seeing like a 16%, higher revenue, driven than the automations today, 16%. And that's just because, again, they're communicating with most of the time, they have questions on the kind of buying experience. but the big thing with that, though, is like like the other alternative to that is there's some crazy data points with this. So on average, on average, this is not every brand is different. But on average, only 10% of existing shoppers today are opted into your marketing communications right? Yeah. So what that means is that if you get an abandoned checkout, that happens, you're only reaching out to about 10% of all the all existing abandoned checkouts. So the other 90% is just out there not being touched. and so other alternatives to reach those customers is you can like retarget them with like Google ads. But as we all know, that's getting more and more expensive. and you don't even know if that's even going to work where with this, what we're doing, is we can now we can now reach out to those other existing 90% of abandoned checkouts because compliantly, we're humans, texting other humans. So TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) laws allow, you have to be opted into the marketing communication to receive an automated message. But we're in P2P platform, so that's peer to peer. So as long as it's a human texting another human compliantly, you can reach out to all those phone numbers. There are all those shoppers. So we then we can then reach out to those 90% of shoppers for you, help recover them. And ultimately, if you want turn them into, a marketing customer as well and get them to get get into the marketing automations also. but with that, though, I mean, with SMS is great. You have a 99% open rate. so you know that when you send that message to that shopper, they're going to open it. and we have a 30 on average, a 30% recovery rate from it. So it's working. so and the way that we do it also is we're a pay for performance model. So we only get paid when we recover that checkout for you. we take a 5% cut of that. So if it's $100 pair of shoes that we recover, you know, we get $5. If we don't recover anyone, we don't get paid. So that's the nice thing about it is that, we know it works, right? Like, you can, like, retarget these shoppers, you can do ads, you can throw a bunch at the wall. You don't know if that's going to work with this. You know it is going to work because you only pay for it when it does work. so I wanted to create it as simple as possible because we know how effective it is

JB: You know, it's interesting. I don't know if that's low tech or high tech

I mean, maybe it's a little bit of of of both. yeah. But again, it's, the, the element of, you know, of using humans as part of a technical transaction, but it's still you're still dealing with humans and you're, you know, being able to have that kind of agency and to be able to relate to the people who are in the midst of a decision. And you get to learn a little bit more about them. And it's not I would imagine that the data collection is probably a little bit richer than trying to infer it from like a, you know, like a, like in Google Analytics, you know, trying to look at your checkout flow and infer, you know, what's been happening. You can actually say, hey, what just happened? And they could say, well, I'll tell you what happened.

OL: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. and like, and I don't, I don't want to like take away from like brands what they've done with like their automations with Klaviyo or intentive or something like that. Like those work really well, those platforms, we work side by side with that. We're not replacing any of that. Right. So I think with automations, plus that human element creates a really engaging experience because you can create your VIP. Customers can have usually stay in those automation side of things because on average, only two and a half only you're a shopper only lasts two and a half text messages and then they opt out. So they're not really in there for that long. And if they are in there for longer than that, they're probably a VIP customer. And they care about, you know, product drops and discounts and so on. So that's why those those those platforms work really well. We're there to add that human element to it. obviously reach more customers. But the whole idea though, is creating that human element with it. And then, like you said, getting those conversations and understanding why there was problems, checking out and then taking that data and putting that into action and making the fixes that are necessary. So maybe it's adding more payment options. maybe it's maybe it's, creating more discounts, or maybe it's fixing your shipping product or logistics. so yeah, there's a lot you can get from the data just from having those conversations with the shoppers

Beyond the Black Box: Reclaiming the Human Element of E-Commerce

JB: it's interesting because you hear a lot about like, marketing automation. And I think marketing automation is really important. Yeah, certainly. But I think sometimes, especially in this area, it's just so valuable, like the potential transaction is so valuable, why not just just actually use a human. There's no. Yeah. You don't have to use it for every single use case you can actually. Yeah

OL:  Stanley was an old customer of mine. Stanley. The, the water bottle. The thermos.

JB: Yes. Stanley 1913.

OL: Who was it? You had him on the podcast the other week?

JB: Michael Francis.

OL: Yeah. Mike. Yeah, yeah. Mike.

Great shout out to Mike. Mike's the man. yeah, I met him at Shop Talk this year. He's great. He's a Boston guy. and, he, So we were talking. I was talking to him about this, so Stanley extremely popular. And they wouldn't run that many campaigns anytime they had a campaign. It's usually a new product drop or a new color. It would explode and would sell out in minutes. They would generate just millions of dollars just from this one campaign that they spent, you know, maybe a

thousand bucks on or something like that. So it works. So those automations work really well. And that was with their SMS campaigns, emails. I'm sure it's even more so that was just with their their automation, the SMS campaign. So those like that works really well there. But when one of those shoppers again is maybe checking out and they don't complete that checkout, that's where it's really good to add that human piece and talking to those shoppers and so on. but we actually like speaking of like adding that human element, I have a customer today that they have a they sell a product, they sell car covers. Right. and it's like for like, you know, if you live in like Phoenix, Arizona or something like that, your car gets really hot, you put covers on it so the paint doesn't dry up or anything like that. so car covers for every type of car. and they said their buying cycle is typically two weeks. So they'll see the shopper come on the website, they'll see them check out a few pages, leave come back a few days later. And usually what they're doing is they're trying to figure out which size fits their car. So they're doing their own product research and not talking to anyone. And, so my customer had a good idea of like, he's like, they use automations, they use a welcome campaign. You know, you can get 10% off when you first opt in. But he was like, what if we instead of just doing checkout recovery with the humans, like, could we add that human element higher up in the marketing funnel instead of sending them a welcome message and giving them a discount, can we send them a welcome message from the human that has a discount with it too? But we want to engage the shopper as quickly as possible, because we know they're going to leave and it's going to take two weeks for them to come back. so we want to answer any of the questions they have right away. So it's like we said earlier, it's that store. It's that shopper coming into the store and the store clerk saying, hey, how can I help you? That's essentially what they're trying to do right now. so we're playing around with that. We're messing around with that too. So it's not just the checkout recovery two. There's also a lot of different pieces of the shopper journey that you can add that human element to. and most of the time it's for a product that, you know, it's probably doing a bunch of research. You know, we have some like mattress companies that use us. that would be really great for. So yeah, I think I think people are starting to realize now too like, there are a lot of different areas of that shopper journey that just talking to someone, it's not intrusive at all. It's it comes across as more engaging.

JB: I think I'm much more tolerant, if you know, of getting like an SMS related to something that I've been doing, you know. A call maybe not, I don't maybe that's a generational thing, but an SMS I can deal with. Although lord knows I've got all the presidential candidates, like blowing up my phone all the time.

OL: Apparently, I just got one today. Yeah, yeah.

JB: I find that that's that's kind of fascinating, but also kind of hopeful, because, websites, you know, at a certain point, you know, when we got started with this, it was like a black box, you know, you had it and then you had to look at your analytics engine, to really kind of figure out what was going on. but now it's actually much more like interactive and human intervention

possible. Because Lord knows, especially when you're dealing with technology or elements that require a fitment element, like auto parts or, or if you're trying to get, you know, a cover, like for your car or whatever, it feels so much better if you can say, am I in the wrong place? Is this the right thing? And you can have somebody say, oh, yes, I know what you're talking about. Yes. This is the you know, this is the product that that will fit. Or maybe it's a different product 100% and say, here you go.

Business to Business is still Human to Human

OL: So yeah. Well, and that's like, that's why I like working with BigCommerce. Magento. Because they have a lot of those B2B companies using the platform. again, it's a little bit they have a team of sales reps that utilize them, and they have a team of support reps

JB: And so B2B would really yeah, could really use this.

OL: Yeah. We're starting to see that more and more with us. So it's like yeah, basically it's like arming your sales team to communicate with the shoppers that are coming on. So you get notified when one of your accounts is shopping online. You want to probably you want to talk to them as quickly as possible. yeah. So you can text them directly from there.

JB: Yeah. I find B2B like completely fascinating just because. Yeah, the the scale, the way that you put together an order, and like the, the, the high touch, that I, you know, that typically is like technical, but a lot of times people just call up, but you have to be able to support both. You want to be able to start an order. You want to call in and say, okay, here's my order. This is what I have. And as B2B kind of permeates out, you know, through all elements of the B2B, things like that, that human intervention, I think is going to be really.

OL: And that's why I'm such a fan of what Elastic Path is doing with BigCommerce, is doing, what you guys are doing with the high velocity from the front end side of things, is like, you can create there's two things, right? If you're a B2B or B2C business, right? If you have both. Right. but mainly if you're B2B, like you're going to create a totally different site experience than you would if you're a B2C company. And like what, like the whole, the whole, best in breed architecture is built on and around like APIs. Right? You have all these microservices, ERP, order management, PIM, all that stuff. You have all these tools out there, these platforms out there today are focused on just that one microservice, right? And they're really easy to sync up into, like a headless architecture that's built on APIs. So then you can essentially you're building your own platform, your own kind of site experience. Yeah. and then using something like a high velocity to create an engaging front end experience. but that B2B site experience is totally different than a B2C, and I don't think people have really solved for that yet. and that's what James and the team at Elastic Path is doing a really good job with, and some of the guys at commercetools as well. They're kind of focused on that also. and that's what I like. And that's what that's kind of what I got started in, and so that's always that's interesting to me. I don't think people have solved it quite yet, but I think that whole microservices API driven back end side of things like that's going to be that's that's going to be the way I think a lot of these B2B businesses are going to be built on in the future.

JB: Owen Landon, IV, founder CEO of Cart Convert, thank you for joining us today. I, I found I find this immensely interesting that the the next element that people need to be adding to their technical stack are humans. Yes. Humans. Who would have thought that that's the next, one of the the new emerging technologies? I feel good about that.

OL: I know humanize the buying experience, man.

JB: All right, well, thank you very much, Owen. and I hope to talk to you again soon

OL: All right. Thanks, Justin.