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Selling on Giants: Balancing Fraud Prevention & Customer Experience with Bobby MacKinnon · Selling on Giants: The eCommerce Marketplace Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to another episode of Selling on Giants.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I'm thrilled to welcome Bobby McKinnon, co-founder and CEO of Deliver Lytics.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Bobby brings a wealth of experience in tackling one of the most overlooked but critical areas of e-commerce: what happens after the sale.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: From his work at Nike solving post-purchase consumer challenges to leading a company focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to address post-purchase issues, Bobby knows firsthand how much potential is lost when brands neglect the customer experience after checkout.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're diving into the problems e-commerce sellers face with first-party fraud, post-purchase logistics, and balancing fraud prevention with a seamless customer experience.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Bobby will share how customers' intelligence can transform your business, what key metrics you need to focus on, and actionable insights to help you solve post-purchase chaos and build trust with your customers.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into it.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: In my conversation with Bobby, we uncovered several actionable insights for e-commerce sellers looking to improve post-purchase experiences and profitability.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: First, prioritize the customer experience while managing fraud.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Bobby emphasized that fraud prevention shouldn't compromise customer satisfaction.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Brands should default to trusting good customers, using data to identify risk without creating a one-size-fits-all policy that punishes everyone.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: A proactive, customer-first approach builds loyalty and encourages repeat businesses.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Next, understanding first-party fraud and its impact.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike third-party fraud, where someone impersonates a customer, first-party fraud occurs when legitimate customers misuse return or delivery systems.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: While it may only affect a small percentage of orders, the financial impact can be significant.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Tools that detect patterns like frequent claims or mismatched shipping details can help mitigate these losses.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Next, we discussed leveraging customer intelligence to drive loyalty.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Bobby highlighted the importance of moving beyond traditional customer segmentation to a more granular understanding of individual behaviors.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Using data to identify your best customers enables you to create personalized touch points like thank you notes or loyalty rewards that improve lifetime value and strengthen customer relationships.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Next, we talked about optimizing operations for profitability.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Operational efficiency plays a critical role in e-commerce success.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Bobby shares how small improvements like adjusting return policy for high-risk customers or automating workflows for late shipments can significantly impact margins.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: These back-end optimizations are often overlooked, but are crucial for sustaining growth.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And last but not least, stand out with authenticity.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: In an increasing commoditized e-commerce landscape, authenticity is a key differentiator.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Personalized experiences, such as acknowledging first-time buyers with handwritten notes or tailored discounts, help brands foster trust and loyalty.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Bobby predicts that brands who focus on creating authentic, humanized experiences will have a competitive edge in the future.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: These insights only scratch the surface of Bobby's expertise.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's dive into the full interview to explore how Deliver Lytics is transforming post-purchase experiences for e-commerce sellers and helping them thrive.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Bobby, welcome to the show.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for joining us on Selling On Giants.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm super excited to have you here.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's nice to be here, man.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome, awesome.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So before we jive into the main topic, which is balancing fraud protection and customer experience in e-commerce, I'd love to get to know you a little bit better.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you have an impressive journey so far from logistics officer in the US Army, which is crazy impressive, to working on Nike's post-purchase uh e-commerce team.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And now you're leading Deliver Lytics.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: How did these diverse experiences shape your expertise in solving post-purchase challenges for e-commerce sellers?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um, you know, starting your career in the army is I think always a good place to start for anyone in logistics because the entire thing revolves around moving people, equipment, and supplies to the right place at the right time to execute whatever operation you're gonna go do.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it sort of always puts you in that brain, like you're always thinking about how you um assemble all those things together at the right place, right, right time.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I think for me, like once you're in that mindset, right, and you take that to to wherever you're gonna go after that.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: For for for me, it was grad school and then and then to Nike.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it helps you see the problems and and the stages in which things can can fail, right?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: It helps you see those those weak points in the chain.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then you can go apply fixes to those points in the chain.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, uh I think the the army did a great job of teaching me how to think about some of these problems.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, you go to Nike or a place where everything's you know functioning pretty well, and you get the opportunity to see where where the where the chain is rusted, so to speak, and where where you can try to go fix it.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um I had never thought about post-purchase at all before working at Nike, I'd never even really considered it, to be honest with you, other than you know, kind of passively as a consumer.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um and one of the things that you uh you know run into is there there's uh there's so much effort that's placed in e-commerce in general towards the front end of things, right?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, how do you get people to come visit your website, all the ad-related stuff?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: How do you get people to how do you increase the click-through rate?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: How do you increase conversions, right?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: How do you sell more?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: How do you upsell so that the AOV goes up?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much effort and emphasis placed there, um, but there's very little after you click buy.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone seems to like think like, okay, like jobs done, we wrapped up.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's probably the largest source of your customer churn comes from things that happen after the fact, right?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think VHO had their annual report this year.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I believe if I'm not mistaken, it's something like 60 to 70 percent of the respondents in their survey said that they wouldn't come back to a brand after they've had a bad delivery experience.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen numbers on you know, similarly high numbers on returns.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: I have a bad returns experience and it it drives me crazy, and I never want to go back to that brand again.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so, you know, uh you you see such stark numbers like that, and then you see the sort of underinvestment or the underthinking of these sorts of functions by executives at these larger brands and companies, and you and just you see it naturally an opportunity, like, okay, well, there's probably a lot of low-hanging fruit, and I probably um can reasonably quickly get to a solution that you know addresses at least a lot of the low-hanging stuff that gets you to build business cases and and does all the sorts of stuff that allows you to um, you know, really drive like organizational level change.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: That is pretty interesting, and you make some really good points there.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And from a consumer perspective, like I recently bought a workout bar from my home gym and I had it for about three months and I really liked it and I enjoyed it.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: But when I was working out with it, it bent in half.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not a big guy, so I was like, what is going on here?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say that um I was really disappointed.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: But when I reached out to customer support after the fact, um, and that they they actually sent me a new one.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: They sent me two.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was on accident, but I was like, great.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I know that for a fact I would definitely buy from that company again.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Where and, you know, whereas if I went anywhere else and they didn't honor that or they're like, tough luck, bud, buy another one.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you for a fact I would have slandered them on social media, but I would probably never uh buy from them again, which is pretty true.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of consumers think that way.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Before we jump into the main topics, I mean the transition from army to Nike and now to your own business, does are there any skills that kind of cross over?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you mentioned like you learn logistics, you you like army, of course, like process oriented and looking for breaking points.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: But was there uh is there anything that stands out fundamentally from either a leadership perspective, good mentoring, or just uh how those businesses are run um that has helped you as a leader, as somebody who's now running your own company and and serving uh sellers and helping them with their needs?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh our the Army is like the greatest leadership school on the planet, right?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Everything's so people oriented.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, I was 22, 23 years old and immediately had 35 people reporting to me.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's a crazy amount of responsibility, like right off the rip.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so you know, I think what what it teaches you more than anything is that it's it's all about people and it's all about relationships.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think especially when you go to launch your own business and you're heavily reliant on the people you know, the people you're able to meet and connect with, your ability to talk to somebody like a normal person, have you understand the things that that that that drive them, their motivations, their pain points, like all of that is hyper essential to the success of any startup.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the confidence boost that you get from knowing like, okay, I I've I've done this in a much more stressful environment before where there was a lot higher stakes and consequences.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, it's it's uh it's something you can always like lean back on whenever you have those those inevitable moments of of self-doubt or um sort of all the stuff that every human being goes through emotionally.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome, and well said too.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've yet to see an e-commerce, any life or death situation.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm sure the stakes are a lot lower, but they're higher in other ways.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, we always want to make sure we have that the sellers have a good customer experience, whether it's with the software platforms or anything else that they're doing.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this was really great.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it was great to get to know you a little better, Bobby.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: But now I'm excited to jump into the main topic, which I actually don't know a lot about being on the Amazon side as somebody who supports sellers.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: So balancing fraud protection and the customer experience.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And for the laymans like myself, what is customer intelligence and and how does it differ from traditional approaches around understanding customers in e-commerce?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I would say the way that most people generally tend to think about understanding customers is in the aggregate, right?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: I understand that my customers are in this demographic group, they they belong to this cohort, they sort of look and function like this.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's never really a and you'll hear words like personalization.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: And typically a lot of folks that use that in the software world are really still describing kind of just a segmentation process, right?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Where you're you're sort of bucketing people into these different groups.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that that's it's helpful, uh, but it's not like the end of the road and the end of the journey, right?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um what customer intelligence is is is understanding like who is who is this customer, right?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm I'm I think the better way to explain this is really through through analogy, right?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: So we you you talked about your experience with with the barbells.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I had an experience with a brand recently.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's a famous outdoor workwear brand.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's been around for 50 years or so, right?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I I bought a pair of jeans from them recently, uh, pulled them out of the box, tried them on.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: The button on the front that like secured the pants fell off.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, well, this sucks, you know?
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I so I wrote another customer service team and I was like, hey, um, this happened, they sent pictures, all that stuff.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they want me to mail it back or they wanted me to mail it back in the box and then wait like three weeks until their inspectors could take a look at it to see if it was indeed their fault and then refund me.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, this, but I mean, but I ordered this thing, it takes like 10 days to get here.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: I put them on, I'm already super disappointed.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm gonna wait three and a half weeks for my refund.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: And we've just spent six weeks to round trip a hundred bucks.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And like it's not a big deal.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: The hundred bucks like doesn't matter to me, right?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because like whatever, like I'll carry it on a credit card, I'll get refunded, like who cares?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: But there are like a lot of customers that you're gonna run into that that hundred bucks, like if you the if they need to go use that to buy something else, then you can't just like hold it, right?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: So for a long time, like there was this big push to place um return, like so so you would refund whenever the items were scanned in.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then that led to obvious fraud instance, right?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: People put rocks in the box, a pop tart.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: I've even heard a brand told me that they they got mailed back like raw chicken one time, which was disgusting and awful, right?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and and that's horrible.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: But if like I I I've never done anything like that, so there's no reason that I should have to go through a process where like I'm round-tripping uh you know$100 over six weeks.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like customers who have uh long histories of really bad behavior, you should probably be inspecting items before you hit refund.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: For like the 99% of everybody else, it doesn't make any sense because you're driving you're you're you're you're gonna drive your customers crazy, right?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what customer intelligence is, is looking at this and saying, like, okay, well we can do this at scale and understand like you know, who's uh a bad customer to send something to, where are bad areas to send things to where there's uh high rates of porch piracy where things get stolen all the time, right?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Those packages should be diverted if they're of the appropriate like size and scale to pick up boxes and you know, Walgreens locations or like whoever you have in this network of places where you can um you know distribute that way.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's just about doing things in a more thoughtful, um, intelligent way that isn't like painting everything with this big, you know, broad brush where you're you're you're responding you know to your worst customers that are causing like a hundred percent of your problems and making everybody you know sort of collectively suffer as a result.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's really good.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: So two things A, that definitely damages the customer experience, and I'm assuming it's gonna you know stop you from making future purchases.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's like the thing I kept thinking of as you were giving that great analogy.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, what percent of customers actually do that?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because we deal with returns on Amazons for the brands that we represent.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And generally, like if it's under 5% cost of doing business, some categories are a little higher.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I think you make some really good points there.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, um, is that is what you're doing actually worth it, or is it driving more negative behavior and costing you sales in the long run?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean it's it that's the thing, right?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is like any anything that you sell, like the key to a good business is is repeatability, right?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: So if I sell you this bicycle, you're gonna come back and buy another bicycle whenever you need a bicycle, or maybe the the better example is something like sneakers, right?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like if I run in Nike's or Hokas or whatever it is, um, I'm going to, if I like the shoe, I'm gonna buy that shoe probably forever and always, right?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: And if you at any point along that think about this, like you're you're you're you're let's say you're a brand and you make these new running shoes and they're they're the greatest running shoes ever.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: People love running in them, and you deliver them really substandard customer experiences over and over again.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like at some point, they're gonna break and not buy the shoes anymore, and you're gonna have taken all this hard work you've done to create this amazing product, you found a market for it, like you have gone through the entrepreneurial fire, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then you come out the other side, and because you responded in a really poor way to your returns issue or to your fraud issue or to your theft issue, you've just torched a bunch of really, really good customer relationships with people who have really, really high and long LTVs.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I to me that's just like never made sense.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that like that was like a lot of the impetus, and we're jumping a little ahead a little bit, but why we started Deliveral Lytics and like you know, there's there's got to be a better solution than these sort of draconian one size fits all policies.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you're a marketer too, lifetime value man LTV, for those of our listeners who may not be familiar with some of the terminology, but that that's the crux that drives the that drives a lot of what we do in business, especially around advertising and marketing.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And before we dive deeper into this topic, can you explain the concept of first party fraud in simple terms and why it's a major issue for e-commerce business?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And a few other examples would be really helpful.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like some of those returns made a lot of sense, but are there other instances of how customers kind of defraud companies, uh, e-commerce brands specifically?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: So um the two kinds of frauds that you'll hear about are first party and third party fraud.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Third party is the one that everyone's probably very familiar with.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's things like stolen credit cards, right?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's I pretend to be somebody else to then defraud company X, right?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: First party fraud is when I am, I am who I say I am.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm Bobby McKinnon.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: I order the things under my credit card under my name, and then I commit some sort of fraud.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and another example of that, like returns fraud's a good example, but another example is um delivery fraud.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: So somebody drops a package off on my porch, and then I've decided for whatever reason, like I'm not paying for these Nike shoes this month.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna write in a Nike and say, uh, you know, I they weren't here.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what happened to them, right?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or uh we actually even had a customer that sells coffee.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he has a lot of like longtime subscribers, and a guy tried to send him a picture of uh women's shampoo inside of the shipping box, right?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: And he he runs his own warehouse.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like he's one of the few coffee distributors I know that runs his own warehouse and doesn't use a 3PL.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: So he knows like there is zero percent chance that they put um women's shampoo.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it's not like it was in some big warehouse with 80 other products and something you know mistakenly got boxed.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like this this person was trying to rip him off and and and and you know take 50 bucks of coffee, right?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's uh it doesn't sound like a lot, but I mean, those people like typically what you'll find is somebody who's doing that for with you, uh they do that 50 other places this month.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like it is, it is not is very rarely like somebody who just does it one time.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: It is uh almost entirely serial offenders.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: That is crazy.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: What percent of people actually like if you were a typical company, like rough numbers, like how often do you think this you would know?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: How often does this happen?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: About one percent of the time or less.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I the the way I would measure it is more like financial impact.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: It usually you'll you'll see something as so it it overall, like the first party issue when you incorporate returns fraud gets a little bit hard to put a number on because different industries are so dramatically differently impacted.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it can be as high as you know, five, six, seven percent, as low as half a percent.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: It if you're under half a percent, you're doing really, really well.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like you have done a really amazing job at vetting.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you've done a a really good job with with security and fraud controls.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you're over that, there's a lot of room to improve.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: So a couple.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm a small business e-commerce seller, a lot, a lot of brands, you know, maybe they have a DDC website, they're selling on Amazon and Walmart, you know, they're doing a couple million dollars a year, very comfortable living.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: How how do you even go about detecting this?
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how would you know uh as somebody who's like running their business and dealing with marketing and advertising and logistics and all that other stuff?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what are some of the red flags that if I'm an owner and I'm seeing these returns or my customer service reps are communicating with me and I'm like, oh, that's like what are some indicators that may be yellow and red flags?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: So in in the Amazon and and and Walmart world on the marketplace side, those marketplaces tend to do a better job of policing this kind of stuff because they're they're aggregating all the customer data, right?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: So like not just from you know what they buy from you, but they see what they buy from every other merchant on the site, right?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And they sort of develop these profiles exactly like what I'm describing.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: If you're out in the D2C world, you don't have that.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it doesn't exist for you, right?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so like the first place you should you should start uh let's just take Shopify as an example.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Shopify does a really good job on the credit fraud piece.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, whenever customers go through Shop Pay, there's a lot that you're protected from as a brand owner.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: So like a lot of our customers will will will, you know, onboard Shop Pay, they'll encourage its use uh among their customer base, they'll you know, sometimes they'll offer those extra, you know, percentage multipliers on the shop cash that you earn as as a spender to try to get you to move through that channel.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um this kind of leads into what we do at Deliveral Lytics, but one of the categories that if you look at the terms of service on Shop Pay that they explicitly don't cover is what's called INR fraud, or it's that first party fraud I described, or somebody lies about not receiving their stuff or receiving it damaged.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you know, like if you're if you're uh experiencing those kinds of problems, that's where we can help you.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: But generally speaking, like they're very, very good at identifying uh a lot of different types of fraud.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so setting up using the the Shopify flow app to set up automations around how you deal with the high and the medium risk customers is always something that we see a lot of our successful customers using.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's sort of part of what you get is your is your Shopify subscription.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Are there um Are there specific uh are there specific categories that are more vulnerable to this type of behavior or is it kind of across the board?
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the one that everyone's gonna think of immediately is consumer electronics, and that's definitely like uh I mean we see a lot of our of of of problems in consumer electronics.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: The other one is um baby stuff, like strollers and like really durable, yeah.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um actually a fair amount of our customers are are folks that sell strollers, um, you know, carriers, like those you know, Bjorn things that you wear your baby on your chest, um backpacks, these things are multiple hundreds of dollars.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're expensive.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, everybody poor and rich has kids.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you know, it's like it, I mean, so there's there's a massive the the way I it's funny, I sometimes I'll get asked like what is your ICP if I'm talking like a partner or an investor or something.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And and like the way I jokingly describe it is if you've seen your product on eBay or Facebook Marketplace, ICP, right?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because like that, there the reason why this stuff happens is there is some sort of secondary market demand for the stuff that you're selling.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: So if if you happen to know that your stuff is all over secondary markets, then you're definitely you're you're you're in our ICP.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's so funny.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when things used to fall off the back of the truck, I guess that truck has completely new context because we're dropping it off at their front door.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's so funny.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, absolutely.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: So you also mentioned so there's uh there's a low risk profile, a high risk profile, whether Studio Deliver Deliver Linux or is through Shopify, like how are these profiles created?
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it tied to my credit card?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Is it like, do I create an account with every brand that they're able to identify me as somebody who's high or low risk?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I so I I I don't want to be like the expert on how Shopify does it, but Shopify provides you with like all these flags in there that says like we flagged it for X risk because of Y reason.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like one you'll commonly see is billing and zip code, billing and zips uh or excuse me, billing and shipping addresses not matching is like one flag, which could be you just sending a gift to somebody, right?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe if there's like one flag like that, okay.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: But if there's that plus the IP address is coming from somewhere sketchy or they're using a VPN and and so you start to like assemble these different building blocks of things, and that's how you get to that's how Shopify sort of gets to its its riskiness.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: For us, we're looking at factors like you know, how many claims have been made in this area in the last month, year, two years.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're looking at seasonality trends.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Do claims for, you know, um, we like we have a customer that's sort of he's a competitor to like Yeti coolers, right?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: So for him, we're his his risk profile dramatic or dratic dramatic that dramatically increases in you know late April, early May, early June, because now it's summer, a lot more people are gonna be so right.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like his high buying season is also his high risk season.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, we incorporate seasonality into our models, we incorporate um, you know, product type, like I said, you know, depends on what the product is, it faces different levels of risk.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, even things like brand can get into like levels of riskiness or brand adjacency.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I actually literally had a I have a toddler daughter and she had a pair of shoes delivered today from Nike and the box was opened on our porch.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like somebody, like the driver, I don't know, somebody had tried to open it to see just check it out.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Is it my size?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Let me see.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: So like there's just different, there's different risks, you know, that are um inherent to the places you are, the product that it is, um, the type of customer you are.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's a lot that you have to tease and pull out in this to get to a place where you feel comfortable saying, like, yes, this is a risky shipment.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's not.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: If it is a risky shipment, what do you want to do about it?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, do you want to make that item a signature required delivery?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm I've seen this.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's an article flat floating around right now about ATT phones.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was written by the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, one of those two, uh, wrote about ATT phones going missing all over the place.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: And what I don't really quite understand about that is it's an extremely expensive item that should be fairly high margin.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know why they're not requiring more signature uh requirements or like lockbox or drop-off requirements, because to me, that seems like the item is worth enough and you know that there's a huge target on those types of things.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like I I just would probably, you know, uh place a little bit more emphasis on the security of those things than I would like a pair of socks or something, right?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like and that's all the stuff that we try to do to help our merchants understand like, okay, what is your risk profile?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: What are the the the right steps for you?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, um those those sorts of decisions.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty interesting.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we started this conversation, you and I both had experiences where you had a negative experience with a big brand, I had a good experience with uh the brand that I had, the the the negative experience with the actual product.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how do you balance that as a merchant or how do you recommend your your brands that you represent in this ecosystem balance like a good customer experience versus like uh no one went to crack down based on those uh those risk profiles?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything you can share with our listeners so that they're not, you know, it's not all doom and gloom, but there is a fair balance so that the brand experience can can kind of shine through for those customers who occasionally get bad products.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the effective products are inevitable in e-commerce, things get damaged, uh they go missing.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've had packages that were delivered and they just were literally not there.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, so I I would say default to providing a good customer experience.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like your default answer should be that I believe you, right?
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: The issue is if you have no um you have no data, you have no intelligence, you have nothing to go off of, it's hard to take that position.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's very uncomfortable to sit in that seat, right?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um to say, yeah, like we're gonna send you another barbell.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry about that.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really, really difficult thing to swallow as a brand owner or or CX operator or whatever your role is, right?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and but it should be the one that you're you're operating under.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so the way that you gain that level of comfort is through data, through insights, through understanding who these customers are, so that you know, like, okay, yeah, Will's a great customer.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: He has a extremely strong history of being a really good customer, not just with us, other people.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so like there's and we should be trying to satisfy him, right?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because to your point, like you are now likely to go back to that brand.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now they don't have to spend whatever their CAC is to reacquire you or or go reacquire somebody else, right?
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like that that that makes scaling your brand incredibly difficult to do profitably.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so defaulting to that really good customer experience so that you can scale the brand profitably is is like I mean, that's what we tell our customers to do, right?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then you trust us to do a lot of the heavy lifting on figuring out um where are the instances where you shouldn't be.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's well said.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: I love that too.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And customer experience is everything.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: And for our listeners, CAC cost per acquisition uh or cost for a new customer, essentially, for those who aren't aware of all the acronyms, and that's really important because uh you tied in lifetime value as well.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: So it may cost me$30 to acquire a customer, but I know the average customer lifetime value is for purchases at 200 bucks, and then it's worth it.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of these marketing terminologies I'm just gonna be defining for our listeners who may not be marketing savvy, but maybe in the logistics world.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and really good points, Bobby.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: I I um liking how this conversation's going.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, from your perspective, how does first-party fraud impact profitability?
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: And what are some strategies that sellers could could implement to mitigate some of these losses?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um, you know, like like I mentioned earlier, you have this really small percentage of your customer base that commits most of these offenses, but they commit them in like very outsized percentages.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: So typically what we'll find is let's say you have a customer there on boards, half a percent of their population is committing these types of frauds.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're usually responsible for more than half a percent of uh the revenue losses.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's usually something closer to one, one and a half percent of revenue, um, which is an insane amount, right?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean, obviously, like the first thing that you can do is cut down on that and it will dramatically help improve your profitability.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um the other thing is, you know, there's uh really, really good strategies, especially in the returns world around um uh inspecting items uh before you issue um the uh you know the payment back to the individual.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think those need to be strategically placed.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like I said, you know, you you can't if you if you carte blanche that it's a bad experience for really, really good customers and you're gonna lose people.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: So shouldn't carte blanche it.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, the like the really simple first step, if you're not gonna be willing to pay for some sort of software product to help you decide where to you know pick your battles, then like a good general rule of thumb is like you know, a first-time customer, you probably wait to refund until uh you've inspected somebody who's purchased maybe three, four, five times from you and hasn't had any issues.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know why you would make that per I don't know why you want to inspect the item.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's much more likely that you know it just didn't fit them this time.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, maybe the stitching was busted.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like it is things happen to your point, right?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, like I said, it you should always default to the to providing the best customer experience unless you've got a really good reason not to.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: So before I jump in, I want to talk about deliveral lytics and how you guys do business.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you've given us some really good advice for people who may not be considering software, but but things to be aware of, especially for sellers just starting out on Shopify on their own D2C journey.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, is there anything I didn't ask or anything else you'd like to share that um a seller or merchant should be aware of as they're maybe analyzing some of their returns and some of their customer records to understand that experience and to figure out am I being defrauded?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is is how much money is this costing me?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: So uh what one of the things that we bumped into, I'd be honest, I did not expect this, is that most people don't know how much this stuff is costing them.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we we actually ended up making a uh a dashboard that will populate all your losses into and then categorize them and then tag all of like basically your entirety of your customer data set in the first week that you onboard with us.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we we cover that in the free trial period.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: So if you don't have any issues, you just uninstall, go your separate ways, like no harm, no foul.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and we we we we had to do that because most people just they had no idea.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then we'd onboard somebody who, you know, they weren't really sure if they had a problem, and then we find out it's like, dude, you're losing two percent of revenue to this issue.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's insane.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how you missed that before, but um, you know, we'll we'll definitely help you um, you know, wrangle it back under control.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think, you know, probably working with your CX teams, like they they'll they'll know a lot of this stuff.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: They may not bring it up in a lot of meetings, or they may not be flagging it or putting it in a dashboard anywhere for you, but they definitely are the ones who are close to the problems and sort of understand what's happening.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think starting there is like a really good place to to start your analysis.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty solid.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: And one more, another acronym CX Customer Experience, or your customer service team for those who uh may not be aware of all the acronyms for sorry, former, former, former military officer.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: I can't I can't stop using acronyms.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a it's all good.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: I live in the Amazon world, all we do is acronym stuff.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is uh this is awesome.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing I want to highlight that you're you're making clear, Bobby, is like on the front end advertising and stuff, like it's pretty clear your cost per acquisition and all that other fun stuff.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: But what's typically neglected and what I find is operational efficiency, a percent here, a half a percent there, all these add up and contribute to profitability.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: So software like deliveralytics, uh being aware of customer fraud and the customer journey, these are all small pieces that when put together can add up to a sizable portion of your profitability, which is why we're having this conversation today.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to highlight the importance of being aware of this and understanding where operational efficiency comes in.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Advertising's fun, marketing's fun, we spend money, but at the end of the day, like operational efficiency is where it can make and break a business for sure.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, especially if you're a bootstrapper, right?
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like you just don't have necessarily the cushion to absorb bad blows like that.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: So now let's talk about deliverytics.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: I love that you have a free trial.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that is amazing.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: I recommend to all our listeners hop on, sign up.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you may, you may be surprised about what you discover.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: But what makes deliveralytics unique in the e-commerce space and how does it address the often overlooked challenges of the post-purchase customer experience and and some of these fraud elements?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I guess what makes this unique.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm I maybe just be ignorant, but I'm I'm I'm I'm literally not aware of another competitor to what we're trying to do.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I know some folks who are doing adjacent things, um, but not anyone who's trying to do the same thing that we're trying to do.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't want to make it sound all negative either.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like we started out with this fraud prevention goal and strategy, but the other thing that we're finding with our customers is we can also help you identify really, really good customers.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is a sort of a classic example I would go back to is uh you know, there if you go to like Washington, DC, right?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's all these restaurants where you go in and all over the walls there's like pictures of you know foreign leaders and like senators, secretaries of state, generals and stuff who have come in and like eat the you know uh chicken or picking duck or whatever it is, right?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: That you're serving at the restaurant.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, and so if you're in one of those parties, you walk into that place, like the owner recognizes you, they sort of immediately come up, right?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like you have this like great and awesome experience.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, same thing if you were like Justin Bieber and you walked into like my little retail store in Los Angeles, right?
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like I would I would immediately be trying to do whatever I can to make sure that you had a really great experience, and you know, hopefully you'd post about it or something, and and that helps me out a lot.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's all these really, really good strong customers that exist out there that you should be trying to attract into your business.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like they're the people that you want, they're the people that have they don't return a lot of stuff.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're very like pretty consistently loyal.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's all over marketing teams all over will develop customer profiles and they'll say this person is a you know is a will.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: And what does a will do?
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: A will buys like a a sweater, and if if if will likes a sweater, he'll buy it in every color and his size that we sell it in, right?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he'll wear it from Monday to Friday.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so you know, I we can through the same types of tools help you identify who those people are.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so if they come to you, like they're not a they're not a new customer, they're just new to you.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: They've bought stuff before, like they like they so you know, if you know if you're a brand that relies on selling to wills and a will shows up, you need to know that that's like a will, right?
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that you can um, like we said, like build really, really high and long LTVs and and make your uh you know make your cat go a lot further.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um so what are all the functions of deliveralytics?
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously you're doing this customer farm prevention.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was unaware, you guys are also doing uh customer profiling, and you guys are gathering some of this information for the merchants who use your software.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, everything up and down it it's a uh you know it's it's a data intelligence software.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: So anything that we can help you with, we'll help you with.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're we're also a startup, like we're in the same boat.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: We we understand, right?
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think, yeah, I so it when when when you onboard into us, um, you know, the the first thing that we do is go through that data profile and then uh you know come back to you with what what we find.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, if it makes sense to move forward from there, then we move forward and we work on setting up workflows, which you know, we provide a rules engine for that helps you adjudicate different, you know, when an order happens that has this tag associated, XYZ thing happens next um and set up processes for that, right?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, to go back to our classic like returns fraud example, you know, maybe you should change, you know, terms of service for somebody who's had five different merchants say that they've committed returns fraud.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe thinks that person should be final sale.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like maybe you shouldn't let them return things because that's you're so much more highly likely to get defrauded.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, those types of things are are the things that you can like the workflows that you can expect people to execute within within our platform.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty awesome.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so I actually had an experience with a brand where my first purchase with them, I had a nice handwritten note and they acknowledged that it was the first purchase, and then I purchased more, I had a really good experience.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: And like I didn't get the notes of stuff, I still had a good experience.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the type of workflows that could be set up using Deliveralytics?
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, totally.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it's it's we we really start and focus a lot of our effort on that um, you know, identification and segmentation, right?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: So so that you can do things like that.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's I mean, that's a great example.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: I always love when brands do stuff like that.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: And and you you can't, you're obviously not going to do that for every purchase every time, right?
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: But a first-time customer, that's a great way to get them to come back.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: I like I love that strategy.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and particularly if you were a will and they were selling the will, right?
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like maybe you should toss in a pair of gloves or something with the sweater, right?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like there, there's all sorts of stuff that you can do.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that I think it just is the the the ability for you to unlock different creative ways to get people to come back a second time, a third time, and and really hook them as customers for life on a product is is incredibly interesting to me and and uh like a very good application of you know um you know data intelligence.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: That is a really interesting way of using data.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if I understand it correctly, not only are you helping with operational efficiency by identifying bad players, but you're also contributing to lifetime value through through customer intelligence, through through the data that we're able to acquire when we get enough purchases.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: What are some other use cases that maybe I'm not considering that you could share with our audience who may be on the fence about using a software like Deliver Lytics?
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we actually had a customer that we we built um we built this custom for them, but they they were having this issue where they would have folks place orders and then sometimes for whatever reason, like it gets delayed.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Ups misses it in the system.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: It happens like a very like maybe like yeah, like a small percentage number of times, right?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Where like the shipment they they they said, hey, we want to, you know, it's gonna be three to five days, it comes in on day six or seven, right?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: And typically when that happens, you'll see like lifetime values drop um because they don't come back and buy again because they they don't believe that you're able to fulfill on that expectation, right?
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: So we set up a workflow for them, it's a little bit outside of what we normally do, but um, to plug into their email sending service, um, I think it was Clavio, and uh punch out like a discount coupon saying, like, hey, our bad, like this isn't what you should expect from us moving forward as a brand.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, here's a discount code, it expires in you know 30 days or whatever.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you can come back and uh use it again when you need to re-eppose is for an energy drink company.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and that like has helped them a ton reclaim these people that ordinarily they would have just churned off.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so there's all sorts of stuff that you're able to do, but you like you have to have that intel, you have to have that data intelligence and identification before you can move through things like that because otherwise you're gonna get huge discount coupon abuse and people are gaming the system, right?
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the why did 30 minutes or it's free go away in the pizza world because every, you know, should I had 16-year-old figured out that they could order from a place that was 32 minutes away and get free pizza all the time.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, it's it's like stuff like that that um makes those challenging.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, in this day and age, it's it's all very achievable and very doable.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's really interesting too.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And before we jump on to like the next topic, although so it sounds like there's a lot of personalization going on, and that's that's really big in the marketing world with the AI and everything else.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it sounds like if I'm understanding it, like you're sort of like, well, it's not personally to Will, but Will is a first-time customer or Will who got a late or damaged shipment, like you're able to create these personal, personalized touch points with the merchants that kind of use uh Deliver Linux, understanding what the data is and like what a good experience is.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: When you work with these brands, do you kind of do you come up with a few of these use cases?
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Are there like three or four that's typical across the board?
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then as you get deeper into the data, you kind of build up on, I guess.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: What is what does that look like if we're working together?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm a supplement brand and I'm like, let's rock and roll.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: I heard I heard selling on giants, I'm ready to dance.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like what uh what's typical and and what do you guys do?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And how long does it take?
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like I said, we we start with the data identification piece usually takes a week.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then we move from there into what it is that you need.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a rules engine that's populated with basically every rule that you our customers have thought up so far.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes people come in and we haven't thought up the rule yet.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: So you know if there's enough popular support for that, we'll put it into the to the application and then enable that for for everybody to be able to execute the same kinds of workflows.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: Try to come up with case studies that reflect how someone's been able to use the data, how someone's been able to change a workflow, create a personalized touch point, do XYZ thing, and then you know share that with the rest of our our our merchants and say, hey, this is like an interesting use case.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's some of you and you know we can look at the data and and figure out who who that was would probably be applicable to, right?
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like we can look at we go back to that uh you know discount code example.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like I can look and see okay who's got uh issues fulfilling packages on time by their estimated delivery date that they were kicking out in in the in the you know we just shipped your order email.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: Then we can go through and figure, okay, like you're probably a really good strong use case for this and um work with them to to implement those kinds of workflows.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not just like you onboard.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean there's a component of it where you onboard you sort of set some rules up you forget about it.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: But then as you move through the and and you continue to grow and scale your business there's other needs that are going to pop up that you know we're able to help craft solutions around and we're very open to doing so.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty awesome.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: What's the customer experience like uh on your end so if I'm a merchant do I have a chat feature do I work with a rep does it how how do you engage your customers post purchase?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of Slack channels uh created with us um I'm in every one of them respond to everybody I talk to all of our customers I think there's one customer I've never talked to um uh you know our engineering team is hyper responsive and and um is very very good at taking and implementing product feedback we don't have a lot of or really any sales reps I'm like the only if you would consider me one that doing that kind of role um everything for us is more about you know uh like I said creating a really really good customer experience because that's ultimately what we want to help you do as a brand um and then you know growing organically through through that kind of word of mouth function.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well Bobby sounds like you're running a heck of a business for all of our listeners who are tuning in all the links are going to be in the show notes.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: So wherever you're tuning in if you want to check out Deliveral Lytics I love that he has a component where you can test it out.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I recommend everyone who's listening jump on, test it out, see where there's opportunity and give Bobby some work.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: He might need some more stuff to do when he doesn't have enough running the business and doing sales.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I implore everybody to check it out.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh before we wrap up we have a tradition here the future of e-commerce and technology and I'm gonna ask you to pull out your crystal ball and predict the future uh so how do you envision the balance between automation and human touch evolving in e-commerce to improve customer trust and loyalty I think that um I think that there's been a kind of a commodification of everything um there is like a working thesis I have not just on e-commerce but in general like a lot of things have gotten commoditized and I think brands that are going to win over the next 10 years are going to be those that figure out how to personalize well and how to create authentic experiences.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think you see a lot of evidence of that in sort of the creator space right people don't watch as many TV shows as they used to they watch a lot of YouTube they watch a lot of I mean it's like vlog I mean the concept of a vlog 30 years ago would have been nuts.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like absolutely nobody would have invested in that idea right but as as everything becomes sort of fake uh the the authenticity becomes a huge component of creating successful brands I think the same thing is definitely going to be true of commerce as we move towards this like hyper scaled commodification.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Your your point about the handwritten note like things like that little touch points that cost you very little to nothing but are very reflective of uh a personalized human touch um you know this sweater was sewn by Maria in whatever city like those kinds of things I think are going to be the things that um define successful brands.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty awesome.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well if it happened you heard it here first.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then no thank you Bobby for sharing your valuable insights and expertise with us today.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure having you on the show.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: Before we wrap up could you let our listeners know where they can find you and if you have anything else going on that you'd like to share.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah you can go to deliveralytics.com to find us.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm on LinkedIn Bobby McKinnon.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm also on Twitter uh Bobby McKinnon if you want to see some of the more unhinged uh thoughts over there on D2C and e-commerce.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful well hey Bobby thanks for being on the show and once again our listeners uh all these links are gonna be in the show notes don't worry about typing especially if you're driving and thanks so much for joining us on the show today been a pleasure that wraps up another impactful episode of Selling on Giants.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: A huge thank you to Bobby for breaking down the intricacies of customer intelligence and how you can revolutionize the post-purchase experience for e-commerce sellers whether it's tackling first party fraud optimizing post party post-purchase logistics or building a balanced approach to fraud prevention Bobby's insights highlight just how crucial it is to invest in the moments after a customer clicks by if you want if you want to learn more about Bobby's work you can visit deliverlytics.com or connect with him on LinkedIn links are in the show notes below as always if you found this episode valuable please like follow and subscribe wherever you're tuning in and don't forget to share with other sellers looking to level up their customer service experience thanks for joining us on selling on giants and we will see you next time