Watch: Webinar – Execute Your Biggest Black Friday & Cyber Monday Ever!

Travis Mariea:

Everyone that has joined already, I appreciate you making it today. We’ve got a great webinar today with Drew from PCR and Maggie from ShipHero. We’re going to be showing you guys how to execute on your best Black Friday Cyber Monday ever, as it’s titled. Hopefully we can share some good information and from a couple different perspectives, really. I’ll go ahead and I’ll share the presentation here in a sec.

Travis Mariea:

But really from Maggie’s kicking us off with the supply chain perspective. And all that Maggie introduced herself as she got kicked off with the presentation. But as COO of ShipHero, I’m really talking about the trends they’re seeing, not only just holistically from Black Friday and Cyber Monday but also how the supply chain is repeating the issue of the strain there on the supply chain, how automation helps reduce errors, optimize routes, things like that.

Travis Mariea:

I’m going to go in from my perspective, from a Dropship software perspective and talk about how Dropship can help you expand your catalog, take full advantage of the traffic you’re going to be getting, improve your listings, roll out new channels for specific strategies, things like that. Using data from your suppliers or other data sources to improve on those strategies.

Travis Mariea:

Then we’ll get with Drew on the agency side, more the marketing web design side, talking about how to really make sure your website’s optimized and ready to go and a few of the other marketing and website design tips and tricks he’s got to wrap us up. With that, once again, appreciate it guys. Thanks for joining. I’m really excited for this to have all these different perspectives and see if we can add value for the merchants out there. Cool. So let’s jump right in. Maggie, you’re kicking us off. I’ll go ahead and I’ll be the Vanna White. Let me know as we go through different slides [inaudible 00:01:54] and take us there.

Maggie Barnett:

Excellent. Excellent. Thank you guys so much for being here. I’m Maggie Barnett, the COO of ShipHero. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about what’s going on with the supply chain, but also what you can do to actually help. Because we know it’s a mess and we can’t change a lot of the stuff that’s happening in the ports, but what you can do with your warehouses and help your customers through this journey so that you can have the best Black Friday Cyber Monday ever.

Maggie Barnett:

We’re going to go over some big ideas first, then new and expanding trends. Supply chain strain just gives you some stats around that. Warehouse automation. This is where we think we can help a lot, because we still have time even though we’re under 100 days left. Error reductions, because when you reduce errors, you don’t have to ship things a second time, which is good. And then route optimization, but a little bit about carriers and selection of carriers.

Maggie Barnett:

Let’s get right into it, Vanna. The next slide, please. Sorry, Travis. I had to do it at once. Okay. The biggest thing we’re seeing right now is people shopping early. ShipHero, we process over five billion in GMV a year, so we have a ton of data. What we’re seeing is people are already shopping. They’re nervous. Some of the reasons they’re nervous, and you’ve probably heard this from your non D to C friends, my mom’s concerned about the supply chain, my trainer is concerned about the supply chain. All of these regular consumers know that there’s empty shelves and that there’s cargo ships sitting in the port of Long Beach. The fact that they know makes them think, oh my gosh, I have to buy earlier.

Maggie Barnett:

Part of that is good because it’ll ease all of the volume from those Cyber 5 days that usually happen, because we’re seeing stuff get purchased now. So just keep that in mind that people are shopping early, you’re going to have to get inventory in as soon as possible to start to get that wallet at the beginning of this cycle. That’s the first thing that we’re seeing and it’s already starting.

Maggie Barnett:

Cyber 5, this is a new term, so just so that you’re in the know, it’s not just Black Friday Cyber Monday anymore. People are shopping throughout. We also know that when people shop, they’re not just purchasing right away. They’re really shopping. They’re perusing, they’re checking out their options. Even when we say they’re starting to shop, I think he was like 4% of people knew what they were going to buy when they started their journey.

Maggie Barnett:

You could have a good shot of getting them early, especially as new and emerging brands. You have a shot now. You have social media that really leverages that retargeting and getting out there early. The third thing that we’re seeing is buy now and pay later. This has been around for a few years, but there’s been a huge uptick in installs for Klarna, AfterPay, Affirm and Sezzle and the like, so if you’re a merchant, why not offer this?

Maggie Barnett:

Because consumers are getting very savvy with how they’re going to spend. If they’re spending early, they’re going to start to spend even smarter. They’re going to say, I don’t have to pay for this now. It’s layaway away for eCommerce. It doesn’t hurt to have it. Install one of these applications because you don’t want to have spent so much to acquire a customer and then lose them just because you didn’t give this option.

Maggie Barnett:

Those are some of the new and repeating trends that we’re seeing. On the left-hand side here, you’ll see the COVID repercussions. That’s just, we’re not going to get out of COVID strain for three to seven years probably and that’s only going to be after we add more regional carriers, add more warehousing, add more networks of 3PLs. It’s going to be a while, add more robotics. So there’s just always going to be that stress there. Then error reduction, because of all this strain, we’re going to need to reduce errors and we’re going to do that through warehouse automation and then last mile optimization. That’s again, what we’re going to be touching on.

Maggie Barnett:

Travis, the next slide we’ll dig into some stats. 33 cargo ships were stuck in the port in July, 2021. When I checked yesterday, it was 90. The problem’s not getting better, even though we’ve gone two weekends in 24 hour bringing actual unloading. They’re really trying in these ports to help merchants and supply chains to get it off the ships and into trucks. But it’s really backed up.

Maggie Barnett:

Again, we can’t always control those things, so we’re going to walk through what we can control. Another part that you need to understand is that with all of this strain in the ports, all of a sudden all this inventory is going to come in and you’re going to need freight, and the spot pricing is out of this world right now for scene three, six, eight, x, it’s a commodity. It’s going to keep going up, make sure you’re passing on your freight charges to your consumers or if you’re the 3PL, passing it onto the right person because otherwise you’re going to have to eat it. You have to know that freight is not your friend this year. It’s going to be expensive, so just something to keep in mind.

Maggie Barnett:

Last thing that you should know, Australia. If Australia is in your market, make sure you understand what you’re charging for that shipping. Since USPS is not delivering there right now, you should probably look at DHL and make sure you can get on board with them as soon as possible. Because otherwise you’re going to do a FedEx UPS and you’re going to be paying a lot more. Again, the biggest thing that I’m trying to highlight here is understanding where your extra costs are going to be and who you can pass those to. Or are you going to increase prices? You’re going to have to do something.

Maggie Barnett:

Some of the other things that you can do to keep costs down are warehouse automation. Two pieces. Physical’s easy, so I’m going to hit that one first. Auto baggers, depending on what you ship, are you shipping in poly mailers? Are you shipping with boxes? Having conveyor belts, having auto tapers, having auto labels, all of these things take time to set up, and again, it’s tough with the supply chain because it’s hard to find conveyor belts right now.

Maggie Barnett:

It’s hard to find a lot of these products, so you really need them because you know that your shipping profile, what I mean by that is the items that you’re shipping off the most, can leverage this type of physical automation, then try to get your hands on some used equipment. There is used equipment out there. Trying to buy new ones can be really, really difficult.

Maggie Barnett:

Again, the first step I always like to take when I’m working with the customer is what are you doing the most that you can automate that without a human? If you can actually use an auto bagger, use it. That’s the first thing, is what you have the most of. The physical stuff, like I said, it’s going to be tough to get your hands on it at this point in the game, but there are certain folks that are selling them so it’s worth a shot taking a look.

Maggie Barnett:

The next piece of software automation. What I like to tell people who don’t have a WMS and they’re shipping over 1,000 orders a month or have over 50 skews, is you should probably be using a WMS. Don’t be scared by the WMS and you’re like, I don’t want to spend 1,000 bucks or 2000 bucks a month on this. I can just print labels. I just need my labels. You’re going to save money by getting a WMS in-house.

Maggie Barnett:

Some of the ways you do that with your software automation is by setting automation rules. For example, if you have one skew that is all bulk ship, you’re now able to bulk ship. We have a customer in Las Vegas, Nevada that does oral care. It’s a subscription service, very high volume. When they were just printing labels off of a station, they moved to our bulk ship feature and saved over 40% in warehouse operation costs. Huge savings. They invested $2,000 a month in our software, and ended up saving $16,000 a month. It’s worth it. I know it always sounds scary. It’s going to be a big lift. But you don’t have to use all the WMS to really get the most out of it.

Maggie Barnett:

Some of the other things you can do with software automation is routing certain types of orders to certain types of pickers. Say you have a t-shirt but you also sell a large air conditioner. That’d be an odd thing to sell both of those but let’s just pretend. And you have all these orders coming in. If I have a tote, I don’t want to have to put a big air conditioner in a small tote that’s made for a t-shirt.

Maggie Barnett:

By separating those skews with automation rules and applying that to certain orders, you’re going to save a lot of time. Because now you don’t have a warehouse team member walking around with the wrong type of cart, with the wrong type of tote. All of these little things make a big difference. And even if you can’t get your product in, these are ways to save time that you can control, and that’s what I’m trying to help with, are what you can control within your four walls. That’s software and physical.

Maggie Barnett:

The next part that we like to look at when we talk about supply chain, and again, the things that we can control are error reduction. Every time you send out the wrong product, you’re probably losing money. Being able to have the fail safes in the backup, whether it’s barcode scanning at the pic and at the PAC, or barcode scanning when you’re placing inventory on the shelves, this is huge. Because you lose money most of the time depending on your margins, when you have to reship something, because you shipped a small instead of an extra small. Having a WMS put in will alleviate a lot of that stress around miss ships.

Maggie Barnett:

Inventory management. I’ve gone into warehouses where I was also in their Shopify store trying to purchase something and I was like, “Wait, I really saw this cool. There’s this great blue sweater in the back and it’s not on your site.” And he’s like, “No, we have 50 of these.” And of course, they didn’t even know that they had the 50 sweaters, so it wasn’t pushed up to Shopify and wasn’t listed.

Maggie Barnett:

He’s purchased inventory with his money, it’s sitting on his shelf, taking up space, which costs money, and since the inventory was wrong, it wasn’t listed on the Shopify sites so he can never move it. That’s just such a waste and he’s marketing for it. Having inventory management be correct is so key. And usually, it’s only key if you have a WMS to really support that as well, so you’re pushing up the right numbers, you know what’s in your warehouse at any given time.

Maggie Barnett:

That also leads into forecasting. We integrate with a number of different applications. One of our favorites is inventory planner and they forecast what you need to buy. Because with all these supply chain delays right now, you need to start early. You need to get your products, you need to know your sales velocity based on skews. In addition, you can start to see that it’s really low… there’s like zero velocity on certain skews.

Maggie Barnett:

Your manufacturer might not even be able to give you all the inventory you need. You might just want to focus on those top 20 skews that result in 80% of your sales. And that’s what forecasting can help you with. Again, this leads back into the supply chain because you need to know what product is moving fast so you can order it ahead of time, and it’ll also create an automatic purchase order. That saves time when that inventory hits your dock.

Maggie Barnett:

The last piece around the WMS is storage optimization. Warehouse space is really tight right now. Anyone trying to sign a 55,000 to a 500,000 square foot lease in any of the prime cities, Vegas, Pennsylvania, Dallas, anywhere in the Southeast, it’s very difficult. It’s expensive to have square footage. Or if you’re just working out of your garage, you want to make the most of it if it’s a five to 10,000 square foot kind of space.

Maggie Barnett:

Having a WMS with guided put-away helps with this. Also being able to set locations within your warehouse so that you can pick potentially from a pallet location, not just pick from bins. Having that flexibility is really important. Again, it saves you time in the warehouse when you’re telling pickers where to go to make sure that they can actually pick the item. I’ve seen pickers get a pick sheet and they’re sent to a random mile where the product is actually three tiers up. They shouldn’t be sent there. That’s going to take a ton of time to take that pallet down and actually have them pick it. Again, where we can save costs, we need to save costs. That’s the WMS benefits.

Maggie Barnett:

The last thing I’m going to talk about is route optimization. Everyone on this webinar might be different in scale, so you probably have different carriers that you prefer. I work with all the carriers, whether it be UPS, FedEx, they’re the duopoly and USPS. I really encourage you all to check out regionals. Lone star Overnight, GSL. These types of companies are really coming into the forefront, the AxleHires, Grand Husky. You can email me later for where your region is. They’re getting very competitive and you can negotiate rates with them, but also get good service. It’s not just about UPS and FedEx anymore.

Maggie Barnett:

When you’re thinking through how you’re going to get packages to your customer, don’t just think about the standard ways. There’s a lot of options out there. It’s getting close to that point where you need to make that decision now in the season, but come Q1, you can always get set up for next year. Some of the things you were thinking about with route optimization is increased visibility for your consumer. Make sure that when you’re packing that item and that label goes on, that that tracking number gets to your consumer. Because otherwise they’re sitting there and they’re like, was this shipped? Was it not? Having that tracking number is so important to have that pushed up.

Maggie Barnett:

Faster delivery times. If you have a solid WMS, our WMS allows for rate quoting. You could put in the parameters, I need this there in three days and I need it for the cheapest label possible, or I only want to spend 10 bucks. And it’ll go through all your carrier options that you’ve loaded in and pick the best option for you, that’s the most cost-effective. These things, again, are going to save you money, they’re going to save you time and you’re not trying to make that decision in your head every time you’re printing a label, you need to automate all of that.

Maggie Barnett:

One of the other things you can do if you’re a larger company is we’re seeing a lot of, buy online, pickup in store. With some of our very large brands, what they do is when an order comes in, there’s a couple of options that the consumer can go pick it up in store, but if they want it shipped to them, they can then have a list of what it’s going to cost to have it for same day, next day, two day, three day. What’s cool is that after they pick that, that information goes to the brand, and from there the brand can route that order either to the nearest warehouse or nearest retail store.

Maggie Barnett:

If it’s the nearest retail store, we’ve turned that retail store into a mini warehouse. The person at the retail store can actually print out that label, put it on and ship it ground. If they’re in Manhattan at the James Perse store and I need it here in Williamsburg, instead of spending $15 to get it from either California warehouse, they can ship it directly from their Soho location. It’s going to be eight bucks and I get it the next day.

Maggie Barnett:

There’s a lot of creative things people are doing that you should start to think about, like how you can leverage a multi warehouse, how you can leverage a retail store, and really when you’re doing that, it’s all about the WMS and beyond those orders. Then that’s it. Travis, no that’s good. The last thing I was going to say is, please don’t guarantee carrier delivery times because carriers do not guarantee it for you. Peak seasons are coming. Make sure you have that drop dead down on that date for your customers.

Travis Mariea:

Thanks Maggie. It’s interesting. You brought up the regional verse, it’s no longer just UPS, FedEx. You have been seeing that a lot, people saying the same thing and echoing that. You saw what happened, just to your last point, what happened last year where a couple of those carriers were just leaving pickups at the brick and motors, they weren’t picking them up, they were not fulfilling, so having those regionals near in your back pocket seems like a good idea.

Maggie Barnett:

Got to do it. And their technology is getting a lot better. Regional has always had a bad rap that they didn’t have good technology, but I’m telling you, it’s different now. They’re able to send the proof of delivery, the PODs are in the API, and we’re finding great success with that. We have a really cool new app called ShipScore you should check out, where if you download it and attach it to your Shopify store, you can see how long it took to fulfill the order and how long it actually took to get there.

Maggie Barnett:

Because most folks who have a carrier relationship don’t get a QBR with them so they don’t even know if they’re carrier’s meeting their SLA or if there’s any issues in transit. If you download ShipScore, attach it, you’ll be able to get all the alerts if something’s going wrong with that delivery.

Travis Mariea:

Very cool. Awesome. I’ll try to follow that. That was really informative. I appreciate that Maggie and really, like I said earlier, we’re going to switch to the Flxpoint side, which is a little more focused on the Dropshipping side. We work with ShipHero today, a little bit further upstream if you were envisioning an order coming in from your sales channel, Flxpoint would typically be there in the middle of that central hub to determine, are you shipping it out via one of your ShipHero warehouses or are you going to be sending it to a Dropship partner?

Travis Mariea:

We sit a little bit further up, and we help optimize prior to it getting to a ShipHero warehouse and your ShipHero software. Really what we’ll be talking about is expanding your product catalog, how that can really help you in the Cyber 5 I just learned today, how it can help you there and really optimizing the traffic you’re going to get, which Drew’s going to talk a little bit about, and making sure that you can optimize your catalog, makes sure it’s actually as many channels as possible.

Travis Mariea:

Your listings are improved, what you have currently from a data perspective or optimized on each channel. Really talking about your order fulfillment workflows, like we mentioned. We’re in that a little bit upstream. When it comes to your ordering, if you have a more distributed fulfillment approach where you might have a third-party warehouse be a ShipHero, you might have your own warehouse and you also might work Dropship partners, how do you optimize those fulfillment workflows? Then all of those two combined, how do you make sure you’re tested thoroughly so that you’ve actually have things ready to go for when that rush does begin.

Travis Mariea:

Starting with expanding your product catalog, this is one of… We deal with a lot of retailers, resellers, reselling a branded product. From that perspective, the name of the game is really curating and getting a good catalog for your customers, but also expanding your catalog to go into other market segments, to add more to your current market segment and make sure you can increase that average order volume, things like that. That’s a big value of Dropship in general, and typically the name of the game when it comes to retail. But it means even more in the Black Friday Cyber Monday timeline.

Travis Mariea:

Really what this means is adding new suppliers and then even bringing your existing suppliers that you may not have worked with in the past or only buy a couple of skews from, leveraging a Dropship platform to bring in those products and get those into your system, and then eventually upon your website or sales channels.

Travis Mariea:

Then from there, the integration of new suppliers into your platforms. Moving along that left to right kind of flow. And then adding supplemental products to your existing product niche. Not just increasing the amount of products that you have in your camping and outdoor space, but then maybe you open up to more of the cooking, the outdoor cooking space, and adding a whole new line of cookware for outdoors, not just the tents and the fishing rods or whatever it might be that you’re currently going towards.

Travis Mariea:

The benefit of that really is people are out right now searching, they’re online, they’re looking for gifts for their family. Even now, people are searching more just from a Halloween perspective in the apparel market. People are out and online and they’re looking around, so how do you get them in your funnel? Dropship, often much lower margin than if you’re a brand with your own product or you’re buying wholesale as a retailer, but what’s it cost to acquire a customer?

Travis Mariea:

Right now they’re the most customers out that you’re going to see online, the most activity. And even if you’re breaking even, or you’re only taking 10 to 15 to 20% margin on a product, having them on your website, getting them into your funnel, have them on their email newsletter list, that’s a huge piece and a huge value add on adding a supplemental products that you might not have got that customer into your funnel prior or at all.

Travis Mariea:

That’s a good way of looking at it, and then lastly, the ability to kit and bundle products. People are looking for gifts now this time of year, so factoring and you might not buy, like I said, the cookware side of the camping. That might be something outside of your traditional approach on your website or what you sell on Amazon. But bringing that in and maybe bowling into a camping starter kit or something like that, it’s a good example of what we see from customers doing.

Travis Mariea:

Not only just from a gift perspective but just in general on Amazon, getting a new ASEN and being able to own your own ASEN. Bundling, kitting and bundling is a great way of doing that. And so it allows you to stand out right now with all the traffic on your site and Amazon site. You might get some traction there more so than you would have in the past.

Travis Mariea:

You’ve got more products, you may have added new categories because you’re taking advantage of the traffic, you’re kitting and bundling and getting more creative there. The next step is really to look at your existing products, look at your existing catalog and say, what can I do to improve my product listing? We work with a lot of people in the electronics reselling industry, so reselling HP and Dell and Logitech and companies like that, brands like that.

Travis Mariea:

Which traditionally in that industry and other industries that are similar, have really poor product data. The brands have given you, here’s how many I have in stock, feel free to drop them, and here’s the model number. Titles are maybe null number plus brand, whatever it might be. You obviously cannot list that on your website. You can’t really get that up to certain marketplace platforms that might not automate the listing and the content for you.

Travis Mariea:

Leveraging a company like, we work with a company called [inaudible 00:25:44], leveraging data providers, bring it into one central system, leveraging other suppliers that might have better product data and merging those products together is another way that you can look to augment and improve the product information. Really focusing on the product.

Travis Mariea:

We talk about all this new traffic showing up for the first time, the first time they’re ever going to visit your retail store online or your Amazon store, a good first impression. Make sure you have multiple images, you’ve got a good title. Really focusing on the product information management and leveraging automation systems like Flxpoint or whatever it might be or other rich content providers, like [inaudible 00:26:24], getting that data in centralized, improved and optimized is a great way to make a first impression on Black Friday and then throughout the next couple of days. And that’s what we talked about there, the ad rich content from a data source. It’s not very…

Travis Mariea:

In electronics it is a need to have, a lot of people know about it. There’s others in the grocery we’ve seen. There’s providers out there that will provide more like labels and what’s organic, what’s non GMO, what’s vegan, things like that. There’s a lot of data sources out there, if you haven’t looked into it you might have enough time this year, if not for sure next year where you can really improve your product catalog, your existing one through these data sources. But you can also look to add a lot more products more quickly like we talked about in that first slide by using something like a rich content data source.

Travis Mariea:

And so Maggie kindly touched on this a little bit from an in-house, warehousing perspective or third party warehousing perspective, but just in general organizing your fulfillment area, getting that ready and prepped. I think that’s something that Maggie touched on as well. But even moving inventory between warehouses. So we talked about a lot of our customers who are retailers. You may have some of your product in a third party warehouse, like a ShipHero. You might have some of your own warehouse, you might typically look to leverage your Dropship partners for certain skews.

Travis Mariea:

I think this is where you can really look back at past sales data and say, we traditionally drop shipped this category, let’s go ahead and buy up a good deck, let’s get prepared. That’s what we talked about. Maybe splitting out and sending more into the ShipHero warehouse because they’ve got one on the West Coast and you’re mostly on the East Coast. It’s a good time to be doing that right now. Really before Halloween is the time to be doing that kind of stuff.

Travis Mariea:

Like I said, stock up on the products you’re in demand. So look at your Dropship numbers. The reason why Dropship is so great. You can forecast what you’ve been selling and there’s a lot of value in that.

Travis Mariea:

A lot of the systems today are built around forecasting what you have been selling. But if you’re never buying another category, because it makes sense to warehouse it, Dropship allows you to really put a product listing up and sell it, sell it for months, for years, whatever it might be and test out that market to determine, can I really push this? Maybe you don’t sell enough to bring in wholesale but come Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you’re probably going to see that demand obviously pick up with everything else. Then the automation we talk about, whether it’s in your own warehouse or within a distributed order management system like ours, make sure that stuff’s in place and we’ll talk about how we’re going to want to test that.

Travis Mariea:

And for those right in the, really from a brand or even a retailer perspective, multi-channel has been a strategy that is almost table stakes now. So you may be selling on Amazon, eBay, your own Shopify store, BigCommerce store, whatever it might be. Even to your own resellers, if you’re on the brand side. Having a strategy in place for each one of those, dynamic pricing. Amazon people are buying, things are going out stock a lot quicker.

Travis Mariea:

This is an opportunity here and not a lot of people talk about this specifically for the Cyber 5, but they talk about it in general is the idea of putting it up a little bit more expensive on Amazon because that’s where the market is. You got the fees. It’s a little bit easier to acquire the customer and then cheaper on your own site. Taking advantage of that while people are searching around, using that as a tool to be seen as cheaper on Amazon, especially for cheaper than Amazon, when you can do it for a certain specific, if you’re a brand or if you are a retailer that has a specific exclusive with a brand. Typically tough to do most of the time, but if you’re going to take advantage and you’re trying to position yourself you could do that during this Cyber 5 window.

Travis Mariea:

Then when it comes to pricing right now, the use of a repricer on marketplaces specifically. There are some out there that do it across your website and look at other websites. But Amazon for sure, there’s companies like Excel Co and Informed.co and things like that, where if you don’t have a repricer in place, making sure that at least for Amazon if not other channels, you’re dynamically pricing based on the market, if you’re reselling the same products as others.

Travis Mariea:

If you’re a reseller of Logitech mice or HP laptop monitors, other people are going to be selling that exact same product. Make sure that you’re staying competitive and then as they go outta stock, which they will, then be able to bump up the pricing to make a little bit more margin. So something to think about where you might not do the same on your own specific website. So having the tools in place to do that on a per channel basis.

Travis Mariea:

Then testing like anything else, before a go live, before the true stress test shows up come November, having a robust system in place to handle the major increase in orders. What can you do to test and import orders and test the system, whatever it might be, run some mock tests. Depending on your system and your setup that could be accomplished a couple of different ways. Ensure all connections. Go through these checks. Everyone gets busy with the standard day to day. Can you put someone, can you charge someone in your company to go through and really click through as a customer and push through things?

Travis Mariea:

Do you want to bulk import a ton of orders into your system and make sure that they’re handled correctly, do some actual test cases. Like we’re in software, we do this all the time where we have automation tests, we also have people manually doing tests and going through and checking things. It takes some time to plan it out and it takes some resources and people to get behind it. But this is the time to do it, to make sure that you’re going to be fine come late November. Test orders, advance things like that like we just talked about.

Travis Mariea:

But that’s the high level. Like I said, some of the strategies, one, to improve the catalog but improving the catalog you need to make sure that you’ve got good data. There’s bridge content data sources out there that you want to make that good first impression because as we’ve said, you’re going to see people coming to your site that you haven’t before. And then when they do, let’s make sure it works, make sure you test things thoroughly to make sure that first impression goes through and you get the sale. Cool. Now I’m going to kick it over to Drew with PCR.

Drew Himel:

Thanks Travis. Really what I’m going to be talking about, I run an ecommerce digital agency, have done it for 14 years, worked with a lot of fun brands in the space, like MUD\WTR to Fathead, and did a lot of work with the Los Angeles Chargers NFL team. What we focus on is how to drive more revenue from your existing audience. And that’s primarily through conversion rate optimization for your site and then email marketing and SMS primarily through Klaviyo or HubSpot, so a lot of familiarity there. Today we’re going to focus mostly on the website.

Drew Himel:

Five things that we really want to stress, as you’re coming into, as Travis mentioned, a ton of traffic coming to the site that you really need to make sure that you’re optimizing that as much as possible. Prepare ahead of time. What are the things that you can be doing today, so when that traffic does spike you’re in a really good position to convert as much of that traffic into either email subscribers or customers as possible.

Drew Himel:

Going to talk a lot around, I say this all the time. You’re dealing with people online with an attention span of about a second grader so you want to remove as much friction as possible. People are inundated with ads, with kids, with all these things, especially working from home. So how do you make it as easy as possible for someone to purchase that? So some tips there.

Drew Himel:

I think we’ve talked a lot about shipping and warehouses. I’m going to talk more about communication and making sure you get ahead of that. I think sometimes brands are nervous or retailers are nervous about the delays and they hide it. That’s going to cause a really upset customer and have them not coming back. So we really want to spend some time on how you get ahead of it and over communicate, even if you don’t have exact deadlines, start giving a range in the very beginning.

Drew Himel:

Then start testing now I think while the traffic’s not quite as high seeing what messages resonate, what content resonates can be really critical. And then just an overall content strategy and a [inaudible 00:35:08] then it’s going to be, talking specifically around utilization of gift cards if you’re running into inventory issues.

Drew Himel:

Preparing to start here. If they’re not finding what they are able to see very quickly, talking about three seconds load or more, they abandon right out of the gate. There’s another state where your conversion rate decreases by 10% for every single second. It takes in addition to load. We’ve done a lot of these site speed audits for clients, but there’s a lot of easy things working with your developer if you’re on Shopify. They’ve done a lot with upgrading the themes. But images not being optimized with all tax or not really compressed where it populates. It takes too much time, big banners, big images, you really want to try and condense that as much as possible.

Drew Himel:

Lazy Load is a really easy plugin feature that you can put in. Essentially all it does is as you’re scrolling, it will start loading the images but it doesn’t do anything below the fold. It’s just a really easy way to mitigate some of the long load speeds or site speed itself. We see a ton of extra scripts running on the site. If you think about any software technology that you’ve used over the years, that you’re not currently using, a lot of times, you forget to remove that and it’s actually causing, it has to fire to populate into Facebook, to populate into Klaviyo, your SMS provider, your heat map tracking. So you want to remove those, the ones that you aren’t currently utilizing as much as possible.

Drew Himel:

Then just double check with the payment process with those increases we have had unfortunately nightmare scenarios where they’re not able to process due to payments because the processors are overwhelmed, so just trying to mitigate that as much as possible. A very easy way to check this is Google site speed analyzer. You can enter in your URL and print out a score to see where you’re at, and don’t forget mobile desktop.

Drew Himel:

A lot of people sometimes just focus on desktop but you were seeing as much as 60, 70% of traffic now coming from a mobile device. So being able to optimize that where site speed’s even more critical because they’re used to Instagram and Facebook and social media, they want to be able to see their information really quickly.

Drew Himel:

Removing friction as much as possible. We just did this as a relaunch. It’s a children’s clothing line and what I see a lot of brands, a common mistake, is they have their best sellers maybe on their homepage, but you have to individually click on every single product to then add it to your cart. Maybe you have a returning customer, maybe they’ve already heard of you from a referral or a friend. So they already know what they want. They want to go on there and be able to purchase and do it as quickly as possible. Making the add to cart as simple and easy from the homepage to be able to do, but also to one click upsells directly within the cart is another easy thing that you can turn on in your Shopify store. We see average order value increased by like 20, 30% just by adding that one feature.

Drew Himel:

And then the sticky added cart, this is especially important on mobile. And what I mean by that is you’re on a product page, you want to see more product details, you’re scrolling through, you want to read a few reviews and then you’re ready to purchase, well you got to scroll all the way back to the top. A little add to cart that follows the user along, especially on mobile, can be absolutely critical.

Drew Himel:

We see conversion rate increased by half a percent as high as a percent on that product page just by adding that one unique feature. Try and mitigate any type of extra steps, extra friction in that shopping process and go through it. There’s a lot of tools that can help you with this. The Crazy Egg or Hotjar where you can actually see the heat map tracking. You can see our user recording when they’re trying to get to something and it’s not clickable.

Drew Himel:

It’s really helpful to give you a little bit more insight or user recordings.com, they’ll actually have someone do a voiceover and give you feedback directly on their site. Again, I can speculate, I can give recommendations but we always want to have some data to be able to validate or back that up too.

Drew Himel:

We talked a lot about shipping and so you really want to let them know what’s going on, and get ahead of it as much as possible. I’m a conversion rate guy. This can negatively impact conversion but you have to look at it holistically. Business of repeat purchase rate, customer reviews lifetime value. And so even though it might make an impact but looking at every time they can have exposure with your site, how are you getting ahead of this? Because inevitably, to Maggie’s point there’s 90 carriers shipping delays are going to happen. It’s just the nature of what’s going on in the market right now.

Drew Himel:

We’re not all Amazon that can deliver something on the same day. So the more that you over communicate that, I think the better the user experience and at least you’re getting ahead versus expecting one thing they purchase and then you’re not communicating and then it’s two weeks, three weeks, four weeks out before they actually receive this. And then you get the negative reviews, then you impact repeat purchase rate and everything else too.

Drew Himel:

Really trying to over communicate that through your site-wide banner, through your product detail pages, even when they’re in the cart just to harp on that as much as possible. And then if you’re able to, it’s a little bit more logistics involved. But dynamic shipping incentivizes that checkout based on when they’re going to be able to receive it if they order today versus delay, especially as this gets further and further along in the holiday season. If you’re not going to be able to ship it to them, I think just letting them know is going to be critical.

Drew Himel:

Start testing. Test, test, test as much as possible. We do a ton of these experiments on the site, on the product pages, within email, see what messages are most resonating and even you can test it in specific holiday messaging as well and seeing what as people are buying sooner and sooner this season because of worries around if they’re going to get their purchases in time for the holidays. So we tested different offers from percentage discount, from a dollar amount incentivizing by free shipping. Like different tiered offers that they’d be able to do. Do we add on additional gifts with that purchase?

Drew Himel:

Knowing what is going to incentivize the customer, what’s really going to lead them to that conversion. If you are doing that right now and setting up these small experiments, highly recommend the easiest most cost effective way to do that is through a Google optimization. You can go into Optimizely or A/B Test it, but there’s a software cost associated with that. Or we do a lot of testing within Klaviyo for popups. Seeing that $20 off versus 10% off, which one actually converts is one level. But then you want to look maybe a little bit deeper, how many products did they purchase, what was the average order value?

Drew Himel:

Think as broad as you can when you’re running these tests and then get very specific with what broad strategy, very specific with the experiments that you’re actually going through and running. But do that now so that you’re not guessing to see which message is going to resonate when you have all this traffic coming in. Decreasing the conversion rate by half a percent or a percent can have a huge, huge impact on your business. Really thinking about that and doing it sooner rather than later.

Drew Himel:

And then the last I’d say two parts is, what’s the holiday centric strategy? Don’t think of just about merchandising and product but what are the blogs to the imagery, to the emails that are all going to correspond. We’re already building out and we started building out those campaigns a few weeks ago in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Drew Himel:

I think you can’t get ahead of it too much. And the more that you put thought into the content of the different areas from paid media, how you’re originally going to reach them to your site itself and what are the banners going to be, what is the design, the imagery the blogs that might help support that of like editorial and voice all the way to products and merchandising, to post purchase flow.

Drew Himel:

Think about the entire user journey. The more that you can coordinate your efforts and streamline that the more effective all your campaigns are going to be, the more effective your website, your paid media, your social channels your blog, kind of things like that. I think there’s opportunities to even introduce landing pages and things like that are part of these holistic campaigns. And you can build those really, really fast on a ShowGun or Unbounce or even the cell on the headless commerce side. Build that, that allows you to have a little bit more control with the test as we talked about earlier, along with centralizing some of the content.

Drew Himel:

One thing that we’ve had a lot of success with is actually through gift cards. You have all this traffic, whether it’s paid or organic that’s coming, maybe your product’s out of stock or you’re just not going to be able to meet shipping deadlines, but you still want to capture their attention and develop a relationship. Gift cards are really, really effective. It’s a huge industry obviously for a lot of the major brands.

Drew Himel:

But now with platforms like Rise and things like that, you can create your own gift cards pretty easily and get that on your site so that even if you, maybe it’s a last minute shopper and you’re not going to be able to get the product to them in time, you can still develop a relationship with them and be able to sell the gift cards as purchases for friends and family or for themselves so that they could apply later on.

Drew Himel:

Then I think too, this builds up a lot of a really strong, Q1 strategy of their wish list, the out of stock, the gift cards. If you have a significant amount of people in your database that have purchased those, you can leverage gift ideas. If they purchase 50 to 100 to $250, the products that are going to best correspond with that, to make it a little bit more contextual, a little more personal, a little bit more segmented too.

Drew Himel:

Don’t sleep on gift cards, it’s a great way. I think to still capitalize on the traffic if you’re scared that you’re already out of inventory, you’re not going to need shipping, it’s just a really easy way to drive some revenue for your business and finish out at the end of the quarter really strong. That’s everything from my side. If you have questions, or like I said, you want to look at the site speed, feel free to shoot me an email. Happy to come and take a look. But Travis, I really appreciate you having me on.

Travis Mariea:

Certainly no, I really like the gift card part because it’s one of those things where you might not think about it if you’ve only been selling for a year, two years, you might not have got to the gift card side of things, maybe whatever it might be. But just the idea that it helps with conversion. People don’t really like gift cards, I’m not really a gift card type brand. Maybe that’s an argument or at some point but like just really the idea of there’s not enough time.

Travis Mariea:

You’re shipping at a seven day window and they need it in three or four days wherever, helping someone convert like that, building a relationship and then, just really or they can’t find anything. And it is purely a gift and they can’t find anything, they can’t make a decision. That’s the whole thing about conversion is allowing them to make that decision. Then really focusing on it this time of year, maybe putting it in a banner or putting it more prominent makes a lot of sense so I like that.

Travis Mariea:

Really a lot of the things you talked about were just good practices that hopefully Black Friday, Saturday, Monday can put you in gear to actually do. And then there’s a lot of those you can keep for going forward and they’re going to help you convert.

Drew Himel:

Absolutely.

Travis Mariea:

Awesome stuff. No, I really appreciate it. We do have a couple questions that came through. One of the first ones was, it looks like Maggie, you mentioned a bulk ship feature and I think we just want to hear, explain that a little bit more on what that bulk ship… You mentioned an oral care company that reduced something about 40%, there was a question about what the bulk ship feature did?

Maggie Barnett:

What bulk ship does is, so say you have 1,000 orders for the day that you have to get out. And 600 of those orders contain skew a and skew b. We’ll actually pull all, if you go to the bulk ship page, it’ll pull all those orders for you. Instead of having a pick or go and pick each of those individually, like skew a, skew b, skew a, skew b, and putting them on carts and going throughout their regular walking process, you have one pick or go over and pull 600 skew a and 600 skew b, bring them to a packing station with a bulk ship team and we’ll print out all the labels and all the invoices and then you can pick and pack in one long assembly line.

Maggie Barnett:

It saves a ton of time. It’s super easy and at the same time it’s going rate shopping for each one of those based on the address and the location and the SLA. If it’s overnight, it doesn’t matter. Your whole assembly line is stacked. Say it costs you $1.75 to usually pick and pack that order, it’s going to cost you like 80 cents by using this bulk ship.

Maggie Barnett:

The key to it, Travis, and I’m not sure who asked the question, a lot of people can do this but it’s just one skew, but us having the ability to show if there’s multi skews that have that bulk ship, maybe it’s just 60 of them are 30 or 80. You don’t want them going through the same process of just a picker and packer, a picker to totes. It aggregates all those for you.

Travis Mariea:

Got it.

Maggie Barnett:

I hope that answers the question?

Travis Mariea:

No, I think it does. And super helpful. I think it just sounds like warehouse workers, you roll that out. That they’re probably loving that first day when they-

Maggie Barnett:

And on the hero board, which shows how much has been packed, you’re just jamming through things and it works really well and you still keep a very good rate because you’re scanning it before you actually… You don’t scan each one into the poly mailer or into the box, but you scan it at the beginning to have a quality assurance check. So we’ve built that in as well.

Travis Mariea:

Cool. All right. Second, we’ve got here is how would I get started finding and adding more products? I guess I’ll take that one, obviously that we harped on that first slide, the Flxpoint side. Right now, depending on what your product mix is, one you can start with going to your existing suppliers and just understanding what you might not be buying, asking for one, if they drop ship, if they don’t, updating catalog, things like that. That’s one option. Two, you can look for new suppliers. You can go around, start Googling obviously is the first step but just in general, there’s other marketplaces out there.

Travis Mariea:

Tundra is a wholesale marketplace. You can find new suppliers there, determine which one’s Dropship, if that’s a requirement for you or not, or just buy new wholesale or low minimums. Faire, F-A-I-R-E also can allow you to filter down the minimums on certain wholesale suppliers and the products that they have. The inventory source directory, if you’re really looking for Dropship, going to inventorysource.com and looking for Dropship specific suppliers that might already be integrated through the Inventory Source software.

Travis Mariea:

There’s also wholesale suppliers in there too to browse. Handshake is now owned by Shopify. It’s been owned by Shopify for a year or so, or maybe two. That’s another one. Tundra, Faire, Inventory Source, Handshake, marketplaces like that are great to just expand and look for new suppliers. But working with your original suppliers, the ones that you buy now from is always a good first step.

Travis Mariea:

I’ve got one question, Drew. I’d just be curious, for you. You mentioned a bunch of really good, and I know you’ve got a lot of experience with a lot of large brands, conversion rates. You mentioned probably half a dozen, almost a dozen different tactics. You could pick one that you’d implement. Not site speed, not site speed, anything else. What’s one of your favorite ones to implement for a company?

Drew Himel:

I’m going to go to a search bar. Even with limited skews, usually the percentage of traffic we see is as high as 30 to 40% of total traffic utilizing the search bar, and you get three to five x higher conversions off of the search bar. We’ve done this for Vibe Organic, the low ness. They only had six products. They’re like it’s pretty easy, but the search you could search by ginger turmeric and then the products come up.

Drew Himel:

Especially if you’re doing a lot with the digital market, they might see an ad and then they land on that product page. But they don’t know the full assortment of products. It’s really, really, really effective to be able to drive higher conversion. Even if you think you don’t have enough skews to warrant it, I would 100% get that installed as quickly as possible. You’ll see a big spiking conversion there.

Travis Mariea:

Cool. On the spot. Just hit it out of the park. Awesome. Everyone, I appreciate you guys joining. You can see we’ve all got our personal emails down there. Love to hear from our customers, future customers, questions you’ve got, obviously on this topic. It doesn’t have to be about our companies or our products, whatever, always love talking shop, so feel free to drop us a note. Happy to talk, and thanks again for attending the webinar. Maggie, Drew, awesome stuff guys. I really appreciate it.