Join host Matt Edmundson on the Ecommerce Podcast as he chats with Phil Carr from Upzelo about revolutionising ecommerce through innovative referral strategies and customer retention. Discover how Upzelo is transforming the way businesses engage with customers using cutting-edge technology.

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:27 Phil Carr's Background

3:25 Sub Summit Experience

5:08 Introduction to Upzelo

9:17 Naming Challenges and Solutions

13:31 Referrals and Retention Strategies

19:42 Improving User Experience in Referrals

25:05 Wallet Pass Technology

31:29 User Journey with Wallet Pass

39:58 Strategic Use of Wallet Pass

47:19 Behaviour and Lifestyle Loyalty

54:08 Future of Retention and Loyalty

55:12 Matt's Question for Social Media

56:14 Connecting with Phil Carr

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Key Takeaways:

1. Simplify the Referral Process: Phil highlights the importance of making the referral process seamless and frictionless. By integrating referral systems into smartphone wallet passes, businesses can enhance user experience and increase referral rates. This approach eliminates the cumbersome steps of traditional referral methods, making it easier for customers to share and for businesses to track referrals.

2. Leverage Technology for Customer Engagement: Phil discusses the potential of using wallet passes not just for referrals but as a dynamic marketing channel. By sending push notifications and updating pass details, businesses can maintain ongoing engagement with customers. This strategy allows for personalised marketing, such as exclusive offers or reminders, directly on the customer's device, enhancing customer loyalty and retention.

3. Innovative Loyalty Programs: Phil suggests moving beyond traditional points-based loyalty systems to more creative and meaningful customer engagement strategies. By rewarding customers for eco-friendly choices or lifestyle activities, businesses can align their brand with customer values and encourage positive behaviours. This approach not only strengthens customer loyalty but also enhances the brand's image and social responsibility.

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Hello and welcome to the Ecommerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. This is a show all about helping you deliver ecommerce. Wow. And to do just that, today we are chatting with the legendary Phil Carr from Upzelo. We are going to be talking about ecom, we're going to be talking about referrals, we're going to be talking about our trips up cement. We've got it all coming up, no doubt, so stay tuned for that. But before we get into the conversation, let me extend a very warm welcome to you, especially if this is your first time with us, if this is your, in fact your first time. A very, very warm welcome to you. We just talk about E Com every single week. We have a little podcast that goes out talking about ecommerce with experts like Phil, with ecommerce founders and all kinds of stuff coming up. We've got. You're just going to want to subscribe. I could do a really professional slick sales pitch, but you're just going to want to subscribe. That's all I can say now, of course, if you are regular to the show, a very warm welcome back. Thank you for being one of said subscribers. We are growing every week. It always astounds me more and more people are listening to the show, which is encouraging because the more people listen, the more subscribers get, the more likely I am to carry on and the bigger and better the guests we get as well, like Phil, who's just, you know, about as big as you can get, I think, in the known world.

Phil.

Let's talk about Phil. Phil built his first website at 15 and has been on a roll ever since. Founding, selling and investing in businesses like hampers.com and mygetaways.co.uk his fitness app, MyPT Hub flexed its way, oh yes, to the top of the world's largest, catching the attention of big private equity firm. Now he's all in on Upzelo, helping E commerce and retail businesses keep their customers coming back whilst also sharing his know how as a guest lecturer at Portsmouth University. Do we. Should we call you Professor Phil then?

Absolutely not. I'm definitely under qualified to be able to do that. But Matt, thanks so much for having me on. How are you today?

Yeah, good man, good. It's a little bit windy, so apologies if there's a little bit of wind noise. Hopefully the noise gate on the said on my posh sound desk is keeping it all out. But it's mad because two days ago, two days ago it was 26 degrees warm and very hot and today it's 15 and windy. I don't understand it. This is why I do ecommerce and not the weather. Right. I just don't understand it.

Well, I mean, you touched upon Sub Summit just then and that was when two Brits happened to meet each other for the first time over in. Over in Texas.

We had to go all the way to Texas to meet.

And I think my opening line was, I'm sure we could have done this in a more cost effective way, but fine.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Now, we did meet at subsummit and again, if you're a regular to the show, you'll know that I went to Summit last year. I'm going again next year. Are you going next year, by the way?

I have, yeah, yeah, we've literally just signed our sponsorship for 2025. So it's. Yeah, we're thoroughly looking forward to that again.

So we'll see you back in Dallas. Yes. Sub Summit is a trade show. What is it? It's a trade show, I suppose, isn't it, for those in subscription comm. And I love it. It's one of the few shows that I go to every year and I love it. And some great people over there and all become great friends and have a good time and so on and so forth. And yeah, this year we saw you guys there, you had a little Upzelo booth. Did it go well?

It did. It went really well, actually. It was, it was kind of. It was our first time attending as Upzelo as a. As a group. I know a few other people that have been over there. But touching upon your point around the subscription side of things, it's really interesting meeting people from all sorts of backgrounds in different walks of life and how subscription touches so many different verticals and so many different industries and how each of those verticals think the things are different where actually there's a lot of the problems. Some of the things that we can get into on this podcast, especially to do with referrals, et cetera, how they can overlap. But yeah, it was our first time being over there. Next year we're going bigger, which is. Which I'm thoroughly looking forward to. And you know, more of the staff members will be over there. But yeah, got, you know, got a really good feel for it and, you know, planning on going back more and more often.

Fantastic. Well, we'll definitely see that. I spoke to Chris last week actually. We're going to do another podcast with Chris, who heads up some Summit.

So he's a great guy, very, very fountain of knowledge. I Think you'll find he's more akin to a professor I would have than myself when it comes to any of those sort of things.

I'm sure he'll be very flattered and appreciative of said comment about his professorship. So tell us a little bit about Upzelo. I mean, it's a funky name for one. Why Upzelo? What does it do? Just give us the elevator pitch, funny enough.

So zelo is actually an Italian adverb, or, you know, for part of their slang of significantly helping someone or something. And obviously the word up having positive connotations coming along with it. And it was a. Well, let's just slap the two words together. We obviously bought the domain name with two Ls, so just in case people spell it wrong, they get redirected. So we kind of thinking slightly ahead then. You see a lot of the time that people spend so much cash on, you know, trying to find the best domain name, the best side of things. But actually it's the. It's the integrity, the honesty, the product marketing, everything along those sort of things that come along with it. You can kind of make it into your own.

But.

Yeah, but the word zelo having significantly helping someone or something, I think when it comes to retention, loyalty, referrals, those sorts of things, it kind of all. It all blurs into one, really. So, yeah, that's. That's originally where it started from and it was actually on a website called Squad Help. And I put up a very, very quick post on it saying, here's a prize of $500. Send it out there and you get a load of creative copywriters that just come back with a ton of brand names and you say, okay, the.com needs to be available.co.uk needs to be there and I need you to do a basic search for trademarking in the UK and the US for it to work. Yeah. And you've got several thousand that came back and that was the one I was like, actually. Yeah, quite like that name. And we'll give it a go. So that's. That's as honest as it can be in terms of it.

It's quite a genius thing, actually, because the amount of times people sit there thinking, what the. How. What do I call this thing? Right. I want to set up a website. What do I call it? Do I need the.co.uk if I'm in the UK? Do I need the.com if I'm in the UK or anywhere else? What do I need to do? How does that work. And so we spend hours and hours and hours going round and round and round thinking about names. And where did you go to? What was the website? Because I'm remembering this one, I think.

It was called Squad Help. They might have changed. I think they changed their name to Atom now, I think. But no, it's funny, just really, just quickly touching on that. So our previous business was called MyPT Hub, and for everyone in the UK, a PT is a personal trainer, but for everyone listening on the other side of the pond, a PT is a physiotherapist. But I didn't know that when I founded that business and I just thought that everyone calls their personal trainer a pt. But as that business grew and we worked with more and more people and we were starting to branch out to work with, you know, boutique clubs and gyms and what have you. Actually, the name of PT being in the title started to become a bit of a problem.

Yeah.

And so I remember. So after that it was a case of actually, can we come up with a name which is a bit more. A bit more obscure, a bit more. Just nothing really necessarily associated with it. So if you do need to pivot or you do need to make updates or something, you're not locked in by the name. Yeah. So, yeah, it genuinely cost $6 to buy the domain name. Cost me about $500 in a fee to win it. And then the trademarking was so unbelievably cheap because it's like, what's this word, Upzelo that you're talking about?

And you go, no one's ever heard of it. Yep.

You know, and for sub $2,000, all in, you've got everything done and sorted. So, yeah, that's. That's how the name. That's how the name arrived.

It's really fascinating. Really fascinating. I'm gonna go check it out because, yeah, that, like I say, the amount of heart, blood, sweat and tears people have poured over naming things, it's a really. I like it. Ingenious in many ways.

You could use ChatGPT to do it now. It's, you know, you can, but ChatGPT.

Comes up with some very bland words it would never come up with. Zello.

Yeah. I think you need to start adding the, you know, words in, you know, think about, list me 50 adverbs for somebody when they meet someone or they connect with somebody else or when this particular thing happens. And then also make sure that the dot com is available as well at the same time. So just being very, very specific with It. But yeah, that human element of it was always good.

I love it, love it. So what you've mentioned briefly about referrals, so you've got in zelo is in referral marketing, I take it?

Yeah. So our ultimate aim, we actually own the trademark of retention OS as well. So we are our, if you like, our North Star is heading towards an all encompassing retention platform for ecommerce and for retail. So whilst I would love to be able to sit here and build every possible feature and part of the product is we want to be able to do that, we've got to start small and you've got to start somewhere. So under retention, if you like, the first two avenues that we looked into were customer loyalty and referrals. And the main reason for doing that was I don't know any business out there and I'd love to be corrected on this, where referrals, even at whatever size it is that you're at, isn't important. And it is a major acquisition channel for a huge amount of businesses and the best way of getting those acquisitions or those new customers in is through word of mouth and friends referring. And so a big, big part of our platform is all to do with making the experience between those first connections that two friends have or two family members seamless. And given my background in product development, user experience, design, all of those sorts of things, we spend an awful lot of time and attention really, really focusing in on, well, actually, how do people use this, what do people actually want to do when it comes to referrals? And to be brutally honest with you, the way that we'd seen it being done in E commerce has in my opinion, was outdated and the user experience was really not that great. So being in the referral side, that was where we were getting the vast majority of our customers in. Knowing that once we've got the referral piece nailed and we've got that working really well, we can start to layer on more. I'm going to use the word mature, but I don't mean mature in terms of the skills and excellence of the people running ecommerce commerce business. I mean mature in terms of the age and say the number of orders that you're processing per month, or should I say the age of the business, more of the loyalty orientated tactics and retention tactics that you can do start to become more apparent in the early days. If you're, you know, you're setting up a business, it's all about trying to acquire new customers. But then as you start to get up into the realms of the 5, 6, 7, 10,000 plus orders per month. Referrals is important, but it's what do you do as the next part of the customer life cycle in there? And I think a lot of the things that we've done previously in other subscription based businesses and then, or should I say another B2B to C businesses that we've been in before taught us an awful lot about how that product roadmap starts to unfold. So yes, referrals is a very, very big part of what it is that we're trying to do and how we're. And where we're going.

Fantastic. Well, we're going to dig into this. When I was, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, Phil. When I was at Sub Summit, I had breakfast with James Jane Myers. Keep getting his surname. Jay Myers. Do you know Jay from Bold Commerce?

I do, yeah. Yeah.

Legend of a guy, really interesting guy, spent we spent two and a half hours at breakfast one morning just chatting away. We got very carried away about stuff, hopefully going to get him on the podcast. And I said to him, I said, jay, listen, let me put you in a scenario because I'm kind of curious to see how you, you know, he's got obviously copious amounts of data with bulk commerce. And I'm like, jay, listen, if you were going to start a business today, and I think I said to him, let's imagine it's a beauty business because it's a super stupid competitive industry. How would you do it? And he said he would focus in on two things. He would focus in on user generated content as his main source of ad content, which didn't surprise me. But then he said he would double down on referrals as a way to grow his business. And he said he wouldn't do refer. Do referrals as in it would have to be more than just refer a friend. You know, you get five bucks, they get five bucks off an order. It has to be a little bit more involved in that because that doesn't seem to be working anywhere near as well as it should be. And so we spent two and a half hours talking about this in terms of how he would do it. JB&J, legend of a guy, showed me all kinds of graphs to justify his stance on the whole thing. And I was totally captivated. I really was. And I thought, this is interesting because here we are with all the data, with all the sales data. These are the two key things you've distilled success down to. There's Obviously more to it than that, but these were the two main proponents. So I'm very interested in becoming more and more interested again in the whole referral marketing aspect of it. So I'm kind of curious Phil, from your point of view, you know, coming into the ecommerce world from a subscription commerce. So you know, with my PT hub, building that, selling that with Upzelo, you're built, I mean you've, you've got to build referrals into your own business network, haven't you? In many ways. What are some of the key things you've learned then?

Well firstly, it's a brilliant question to ask and let me, let me just take a step back for a second and kind of just set the scene of, of how I can answer that question in the best way possible. So a second ago I just mentioned about being in the B2B to C world and whilst yes we ran a SaaS product and the same way as we're running a SaaS business at the moment, the way in which our previous business worked was we sold a piece of software to two personal trainers and or to gyms and to clubs and they white labeled our product and were able to send their workouts, their nutrition plans, the schedule, take payments between the client and the trainer, etc. Etc. Now obviously since starting that in 2015 and leaving that in 2020, our churn rate in that business was sub 2% and we had millions and millions of subscribers and users of our product and we were getting a new user every 30 seconds. But the way in which it is that we retained our customers is we had to focus on what the client wanted and worked backwards. So if we knew that, we made our technology habitual and we knew that a customer would want to or a client of the trainer would log in, do their workouts, do their nutri, you know, log their nutrition, tick what they needed to do from a habit tracking perspective that day, pay their trainer for another six weeks worth of online or face to face training sessions. If you get that bit right, then the personal trainer won't leave using your product because they enjoy using it because their clients enjoy using it. But not only that, but you're also making the personal trainer look good because it's making them go look, oh wow, I've managed to basically run a software business for $49 a month. This is fantastic. And then by proxy that makes our subscription work really well.

Yeah.

Now the interesting thing about when we look at ecommerce and we're essentially doing the same thing here, we are looking at it and our customers are the merchants or the e commerce providers and the clients of the personal trainer are ecommerce commerce customers. So we took the same philosophy and the same train of thought and worked backwards and said, okay, so if a client is, or if a customer is going to refer somebody else, how are they going to do it? So instead of looking at it from a perspective of, whilst I understand the quantitative side of the metric or looking at the graphs and the data is important, but let's just look at the human element of this first and go, how is somebody actually interacting with somebody else? When do they actually do it? And looking at this through the lens in 2024, what technologies are available to be able to facilitate that connection in a more seamless and frictionless way? Because if we can make that work, then by proxy ecommerce commerce brand gets more customers and then the e commerce brand go, great, I'm going to stay with Upzelo because it's working really well for them. So it's kind of a win, win, win all round. So when I'm looking at referrals and I'm saying, well, how does that work better? One thing that we noticed was that people don't want to log in ecommerce e commerce website, go to their customer account portal, find their referral URL, copy that, go to their, go to whatever, whatever channel that they're looking to communicate with their friends with, whether that's via WhatsApp iMess, whether that's a group chat, individual, whatever, send it through to them, but not only send it through to them, but then you've also got the added factor of is that a convenient time for the person that they're referring to make the purchase or am I then going to have to hunt back through a WhatsApp message to be able to try and find where that referral link to, then go back to it. And so when we started to examine this further, you start to actually go, well, well, the user experience here is just broken, it doesn't work and it's a bit old hat. So what we did was we took that entire technology and we wrapped it up into the iOS and Google ecosystem and said, everyone's got everyone. The vast, vast majority of people have got a smartphone and in fact the vast majority of people have then got a smartwatch in some way, shape or form and they live within either the iOS or Android ecosystem. So we took that entire referral process and put it directly into wallet passes with inside people's devices. So there's no app that you need to install. If I, if you and I are a barbecue or let's just say that you are sub summit and I say to you, that cologne you're wearing is really nice or that T shirt you got is really cool or those trainers are really cool and because it's a brand that is that you like. Now I'm able to get my phone out of my pocket or open up my wallet pass on my phone and share that Wallet pass with you. And then the merchant can decide, well, how am I going to incentivize both parties here? Am I going to do this through store credit? Am I going to do this through a voucher? Am I going to do this in a, in a layering system where I. In the future I want to enable people to be able to move through different sites of tier mechanisms. Do I want them to share something on social media? How do I want that to function and to be able to work and that therefore the reward of that might be different based upon different cohorts of customers. So a customer that's been with me for five years, I want to reward and interact with them differently. To somebody who's been with me for a month and referring somebody else, you can do it in all sorts of different ways. But the really important thing here is firstly the speed of which it is that I can send something to somebody else's device. But now that you have a wallet pass installed on essentially a guest customer's phone or a customer to be's phone, I now have the ability to be able to open that up as a whole new marketing channel. I can now send push notifications directly to the Wallet Pass to remind that new customer to be, hey, come back, you've got this. We're doing this particular offer at the moment. We've got a exclusive product drop as a VIP guest referral. We'd like to exclusively invite you in and then you can use the devices hardware built in so you can drop a GPS chip. So we're working with a company here in the UK where that sponsor the, the Isle of Wight Yachting Festival, right? And so they drop a pin on the Isle of Wight and say any of our customers that has a Wallet Pass installed on the island come through to our booth and you get x percent off. We've got another example of where customers using the Wallet passes and they say, if anyone, if any of our customers happen to be within 100 meters or 100ft of one of our competitors stores, ping them another push notification and. But this is not just for existing customers, this is also for the customer that you've just referred in and you suddenly sit here and go wow, what I can do with this is so much greater. And it's just a viral effect, it's just this networking effect of this coming out. Just to add some statistics to this, there's a business based in Newcastle called E Sig 1 that use our product. Within 48 hours at about 130 wallet passes distributed within three weeks it was nearly 3,000 that they were. Suddenly there's 3,000 new devices they can communicate with that otherwise would have cost them, let's say between five to seven thousand pounds worth of acquisition cost to be able to try and find those people in. And it's now essentially at zero because you've been able to do it through this new mechanism. So. So yeah, as I say that's a slightly long winded way of trying to answer that question. But it's the context around you've got to make the user experience frictionless rather than trying to build the technology that is simply just built to be able to help the merchant rather than actually how do the customer want to use it at the end of the day.

It'S very clever Phil, it's very, very clever. And I'm curious how have you found that work with E Com sites? For example, if I going back to the gym I can see that if I'm a member of a gym I can get the Wallet pass and I can you know, go refer some friends or whatever or bring them however you know the gym want to do that because it's I'm physically going to the gym. Whereas the web ecommerce is a bit more digital, isn't it? I suppose. And so I'm kind of curious what have you noticed between like in person and online businesses using the Wallet Pass idea, which is remarkably clever and I'm just curious about that.

So on the back of a Wallet Pass you have the ability to load up what's known as the pass details with anything that is that you want. So let's just say you're running a, a loyalty program and a customer is in, let's just say call it Tier 2 or Silver as an example. The details on the back of the Wallet pass can update and change based upon what the customer is doing and how they are interacting with your brand. And when I say brand, that can be both online or in store. So it can connect with your POS if you're doing retail, but it can also be used so that when I click the past details on the back of the phone, it automatically opens up your website in the background. So let's take the health and beauty as an example, right, you've got a new mascara that you've got coming out and you send a push notification to your VIP customers that says 10% off this weekend, waterproof mascara only. When I click that push notification it either takes me directly to the website loaded with the promotion as part of the metadata which is sitting inside that push notification or it flips the back of the pass round and I can see on my device, ah, this store has got this 24 hours only with a link next to it that says either redeem, stop now go. So it doesn't matter whether you're, you know, bricks and mortar retail business or either I'm online, you have the ability to do that. Yeah, but what is really cool about what e commerce brands are doing is on the front of the pass you have an image which is known as your. It's kind of like your banner at the front of it. You can change that whenever you want. So if you're running a promo on your website and you're, you know a carousel that's sitting on the front of your site and it's a promotional banner, you can take that and stick that in front of the wallet pass, send a push notification to someone and they can see the promo sitting in their phone when otherwise if I was doing that on a mobile, either have to go open up Safari or Chrome and go directly through to your site or I need to have ecommerce commerce app installed. And in this instance it doesn't make sense. There might be a new referral scheme. It is that you're running for people. Let's present that in the marketing collateral towards the front. So it's a two pronged, it's a marketing channel but it's also an ability to be able to distribute that out. So it doesn't matter whether it's physical retail or whether ecommerce commerce only it works in both of those examples, all those situations should I say that's.

Really interesting and so I mean take up rates then I assume are they good? As in if I, if I for example thought this is a bloody good idea, I'm going to do this and I email, I don't know, 100,000 customers and say this is what we're doing, how many people would you expect sort of partake.

So we're seeing around about kind of a 5 to 10% uptake within sort of like the first couple of weeks. Now, that percentage might sound low, but you've got to bear in mind that the ongoing statistics from that. So when you look at push notifications, roughly around about 28 of all push notifications get opened up on first time that they're displayed on the device. The minute that you move that into SMS or email, the percentages drop off a cliff. They go into single digits from those side of things. But from the customers that we've got at the moment, it ranges between 5 to 10% within the first week or so and then the percentage then slowly starts to increase off of the back of that, which from our perspective we think is a pretty good number to start off with because you're already 10% better than you were a week ago and you've really had to invest almost next to nothing in to be able to be able to do it.

Yeah. And I imagine it's 5 to 10% of some of your most engaged customers who are going to go, yes, this is a good idea, I like this. And they're going to install it and go for it, aren't they? And I'm just thinking, actually, if some of the. There's quite a few ecommerce sites I shop from, there are some which I would say I'm pretty. Even knowing all the tricks, I think I've become pretty brand loyal. I'm like, oh, you've done a good job there, well done. I'm bought in. And I'm kind of thinking if they emailed me and said, listen, we've got this app, it's both loyalty and it's got referrals built and you know, the messaging would have to be quite clear, I suppose. But in essence, you know, it's a loyalty program and it's a referral program and it's free to join. I think I would be like, yeah, I'm into. Because of the amount of people I say, oh, you just check it out. So how does it. Let me just. Let's run through some of the technology. Phil, if I can, you know, someone like me is a bit of an old dinosaur. I've got the wallet on my phone. Right. So the example you used was the mascara. I'm not an avid buyer of mascara, but let's say for the sake of this argument, I am right. I've got my phone and I've got my. You sent me an email saying, listen, sign up. I guess I'm going to hit something in the link which is going to install the pass on my phone fairly seamlessly. How do I then go and tell my neighbor about it? In terms of before it was just copying a link into WhatsApp. What am I doing now?

Yeah, great question. So let me just talk you through the user journey and then in a second I will hold up my phone to the screen to kind of give you an example of where we're at. So let's just say you're a new ecommerce store and you're coming to look to install this the first time. Each of those ecommerce stores will get their own sub domain. So let's just call this, I don't know, let's just call it. Mascara company is the made up brand that we're referring to here. So it would be mascaracompany.Upzelo.com would be your starting point. Now obviously if you want that to be on your own domain, that is perfectly possible to be able to do so. But I'm talking here out of the box situation. And then you can then what happens is when Upzillo is installed on your Shopify store, all of your customers are synced automatically with that. So let's just say I install appzelo, I've synced it with my Shopify store and I've created my subdomain. You can then go into the product and you create the design of what you want your wallet pass to be able to look like. Now there are certain guidelines that both Apple and Google say what you can and can't do. So when you're in the editor putting that particular piece together, there's a reason why you can't do something is because you're just not allowed to do it.

Yeah.

Then once you've then done that, the front of the pass always has a unique QR code with it for each individual customer, whether that is a guest of your store, I. E. Somebody who doesn't have a logged in Shopify account. When I come back to the Ecomm platform and customers where the unique identifier being the email address or a telephone number is recognized by that store, we probably all use the Shop app of where it logs us automatically into the check in to be able to do that.

Yeah.

So what happens is let's say you go into, you go into Klaviyo and you go, I'm going to alert all of my customers to let them know that our new referral scheme is we're using this wallet pass technology. You can go into it and in that email just put that subdomain link in that just says mascaracompany.appzello.com, put it behind a button, put a UTM tag on it, whatever it is that you want to be able to do. Now, when the customer first arrives on that page, I talk about this from a desktop perspective. Obviously everything I'm referring to here can shrink and expand based upon the device it is that you're using. On the left hand side it will say, hey, welcome, you're about to join our referral program. Please put in your email address and then hit and then hit sign up. So you put your email address in that then hunts and goes ah, I know that Matt is an existing customer of this store or no, Matt isn't an existing customer of this store. Once you've then done that, it then shows you if you're on a desktop. Here's your QR code. Install the Wallet Pass onto your phone.

Yeah.

Or if you're on a mobile device, it recognizes you're on a mobile device. And you know that when you get with your boarding pass, when you go to an airport or something along those, all it does is it just uses the native os. The wallet pass slides in and you hit add to wallet. So it's email address adds to wallet. It's as simple as that. Once that wallet pass is then in my phone. So let me just as an example, bring this one up here. Right. So let's just say so here's that EC1 company I was just referring to, the wallet pass is now in my phone. The incentive of the referral sits underneath here. So if you were to scan that when I was with you, it now takes you through to that landing page. I was just referring to saying Phil has just recommended you scan this and you go in. If you've already been to that website before or we already know who you are because you've been on that URL before, it bypasses the entire sign up process and just goes add to wallet. Now when I'm in that particular device, if I hit this and hit pass details you can see I've got tattorefer underneath here. But if there was any other loyalty things it is I had, it would all be linked underneath here with different links that I was able to get into. So here's another example of another one that I've got past details you can see here, it says get 10% off all orders refer customer. So if I hit this to hit referral, it now takes me in to the ability to be able to refer that customer straight away. So I'm sharing the Wallet Pass with whoever it is that I'm with directly from there. At the same time as all of that wallet thing is built directly into my watch as well. So I can go straight onto here, go straight into the app I was just talking about. Hey presto. There's the ability to be able to share straight with inside that.

Tracking your watch. Yeah, that's really cool. That's really good. And then the other person to scan it on their phone. Bish, you're off. Yeah.

Then you got it. Exactly. And that's how you end up just with this viral effect taking place. You know, one person refers their next friend who's then referred five of theirs. Those five then refer another and before you know it you're back to the example that I gave at the beginning of where three odd thousand wallet passes are installed within a matter of weeks. It's.

Yeah, no, it's clever because like you say, like you said at the start, you've taken the friction out of the referral process and at the same time as taking refriction. Taking out the friction. I can't even talk. At the same time as taking out the friction, you've installed the ability to do push notifications and to. And to do a little bit of clever marketing on the wallet pass as well, opening up a different communication channel. So I, I like how you've, how you've done that. I, I just want to clarify one thing about your system though. You said Shopify, is this a Shopify only app or is this workable on or any web platform?

It works on any web platform. Although we don't have a self service model on those other platforms. We do have A number of WooCommerce and Salecommercemmerce customers that are using it. But for any of those that have had experience in WooCommerce, I think installing an app on there could have a whole magnitude of different problems. You know, people have got all, lots and lots of different apps that are all conflicting at any one time. And so our experience of doing that has been more of a We will help install it for you which is just a JavaScript snippet that sits on your site. We will help install that for you. Because we have noticed, we've just noticed quite a number of problems that people run into when they're using WooCommerce with that. So yeah, so we have that and then some of our other big retail businesses that we're operating with are actually on Salecommercemmerce. So again that works in a, in a slightly more white glove approach towards the onboarding process. Naturally, the sort of customers that Salecommercemmerce attracts are typically people that want that more kind of white glove help onboarding process. But on Shopify, the app is completely self service. You don't, you don't need to speak to us, obviously we are here to be able to speak to people. But yeah, it's a far more self service model that sits within that ecosystem.

So what are some of the strategies? So you've got this, you're taking advantage of the latest technology in some respects to take advantage of ancient marketing principles of telling stories to one another and telling your friends to go try something. What are some of the things you've seen work well with this app? You know, what are some of the strategies that you've seen work Well?

I think when it comes to from a strategic perspective, it's that referrals is the starting point and the great thing that Wallet Passes enables businesses to do is to dynamically update them based upon what the customer is doing with the brand. So let's go back to the example of where a customer has been with you for a month versus a customer that has been with you for three years. You mentioned it already that there are some brands that you go back to and you classify yourself as, you know, more of a loyal to that particular brand. Yeah, it's interesting the definition of the word loyal there because it's in your mind the word loyal is repeat business. Other brands may see it in a slightly different manner in terms of being loyal with them. Now the strategies that work well is the ability to be able to consistently remind the customer that whatever it is that they're doing is beneficial to them. So we talk about, we'll go back to the tiering system, right? And typically the entry points into tiers have been you have spent X, therefore you now are in bronze tier, you've spent more, you are now with inside the silver tier. One of the things it is that we're trying to encourage brands to do is to think a little bit broader than this. So we can touch on the next point here which is the notion of lifestyle loyalty, social responsibility and environmental. Some of the really important things that from a, not just from the planet, but from corporate responsibility through to what customers are conscious about, what it is that they're ordering. So I'll give you an example which is if a customer wants to select a more eco friendly way of receiving their product so they want to have it in recycled card and they also are happy for it to take an extra three or four days to be able to do it. Why is a brand not leaning into that more and rewarding customers to be able to do that. So this is where we move from a referral based system into actually how do you want to build your loyalty program? When we speak to businesses, when they're talking about from a strategic perspective, they are coming to us less from the point of view of we want to build a points based system that people move into tiers and actually we want to start to encourage better behavior with our customers because that makes us as a brand look like we're doing, you know, makes us look better. It enables us in some instances like with hampers.com to obtain its B Corp status because it's, it is tapping into that particular part of the consumer buying side of things. I mentioned about the environmental side of things. Another big area that we are now pushing the wallet based technology to move into and utilizing mobile even further is we're working on the lifestyle side of things. So let me give you an example when with fitness, because this is, this is an easy one for me to refer to. If you're going for a run and you're going for a run three times a week, then why would a fitness brand not want to encourage you to continue doing that or reward you for doing that with their brand? So if I'm going to go for a run and I want to go for say 3 5k runs a week because I enjoy going for a run, if I know there's a fitness brand or a supplement company or whoever, if I'm going for a run and that for therefore means I'm getting rewarded with this particular brand when it comes to that decision making, I'm more likely to go with the brand that's rewarding me for the things it is that I'm doing in my lifestyle rather than because they happen to be running a promotion at one time. This is back to the point that you mentioned around when you guys were having breakfast around the user generated content. It's tapping into that kind of similar sort of psychology of where we're saying, well what is the user actually doing throughout their lifestyle? Where I can reward somebody to be able to do that. So somebody using the mascara and they're posting it online, you can tap into that fat and then you can communicate with them on the wallet pass to be able to say, hey, great, thanks for doing a video for us on TikTok. It did this. We've loaded your wallet up with another $5 worth of store credit. So it's thinking about where our customers, what are they doing? How are they interacting with your brand and can I incentivize them for our brand to be front and center all the time? So instead of them going trying a new chocolate whey protein with another brand, no, come back and buy it from me again. And I've got the part inside my phone that enables me to be able to make that transactional element. Well I'm already on the person's device and the ability to be able to communicate with them but now that I'm, now that I have access to that particular device I can load up other applications on the side to be able to say connect your Strava, connect your Apple Health, connect your fitness data into it and start pulling it through. Especially as we're moving into more of a first data and third party data world and moving away from cookie, sorry moving to more of a cookie less environment. It's these sorts of things that brands should be thinking about moving forward rather than relying on a promotional offer to try and incentivize somebody to be able to come back. It's thinking a little bit more long term.

I love that. It's definitely thinking outside the box, isn't it? And it's definitely not thinking the default I'll give you a fiver if you refer a friend kind of a thing. I'm intrigued by this because actually you're talking about behavior, you're talking about lifestyle which ties into what you said right at the start that actually your business was built because you created habits in the end consumer. So I'm thinking the protein company you mentioned, if they can they use the technology to help develop habits. For example, I don't know, 8:30 in the morning I'm going to remind you to take your chocolate protein shake because it's the best time of the day to take it or whatever it is and if you take it you, I don't know, you kind of gamify it in some way I suppose or you, it even gets to the point I suppose where if you know They've taken it 30 consecutive days they're going to be running out of product surely so you don't even need to order it. I could just automatically send you something, that kind of thing. I think it changes E commerce quite a lot, doesn't it when you start to think down those roads.

Yeah and I think going back to Sub Summit that's where a lot of the conversations went. Because when you're talking about subscription and you're talking about subscription ecommerce, what you're actually talking about there are products that are consumable products where there is a start and there's an end. But when you start to lean into things like apparel and you start to lean into, I don't know, say audio, visual equipment and some of the other businesses that we work with that sell products where the average order value is like $800 for something, the strategy around it suddenly starts to change quite some. Because now if I'm turning around and saying, oh, we want to incentivize you based upon the number of steps that you're doing, but we know that the average order value is $1,000. Suddenly you don't incentivize customers in the same way as you would do if it was somebody taking their vitamin tablets every morning. It's a very different type of model. So in those instances, instead of building the technology out to say, well, let's build an all encompassing app that can take into consideration those different types of buying behaviors or those different types of, or the different average order values of those econ brands. Instead Upzelo is taking the attitude which is, well, what integrations and what third parties can we work with that would incentivize that? So looking at the higher average order value, some of the integrations that we're looking at, there are more say down the charity route, which is somebody has placed an order for $1,000, they don't care. I'm generalizing here, but I don't care about your 5% off, your discount voucher for it because I'm not going to buy another product from you for another six months. Yeah, and that's fine because the brand knows that. But what happens if that individual says no? Actually that 5% off has a maximum value of $50. I would like to put that towards more of a charitable event. I'd like to donate that to somebody in some way, shape or form. So we're looking at it from the perspective of who can we integrate with to make, to open up opportunities for the brand to decide who do. Who do we necessarily want to be able to integrate with and to be able to provide a wider breadth of brand exposure.

That's really good, really powerful. And I guess thinking that through then and also thinking about third parties, could you have it where going back to the protein company? So I, you know, I subscribe to philchocolateprotein.com if that domain is not gone, by the way, we should totally register that. But Phil Chocolate, I know, I know.

A website that you could try and find out Whether the brand name is still available or not. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't trust it.

I wouldn't either. So I, in effect, I'm a regular user of the protein, right? And I'm like. And you do this thing where it's like, listen, every time you do 10,000 steps a day. Because we integrate with the health app on your phone, every time you do 10,000 steps a day, it unlocks something, it does something, right? Which makes sense because you're a health company. Can you then do it whereby if I go into a gym chain which you have connected with and show my wallet pass that I can then get, I don't know, a free day, I can get something just for turning up, like a free entry or something like that. Or are we starting to take technology beyond the realms of where it's capable right now?

No, it's a very good point. I'm actually based upon the black book of individuals that I have both here in the UK and over in the us there's some big gym chains. I would be lying if I said that conversation hasn't come up in some way, shape or form. And the advantage of having this on a device is that you are essentially doing what you would do with Shopify pos, right? But you're just opening up the integration with a different point of sale and you're scanning the QR code to be able to gain access to that and to be able to say, hey, as a customer of this whey protein chocolate company or whatever you want to label it, we've partnered with X gym chain. Don't forget to use your free pass. And this is exactly what we did in our previous product. It's almost. We created a marketplace where we utilized our ability to negotiate good deals. In fact, we even had Apple on our previous marketplace. Like, you know, and that was a tough gig trying to be able to distribute Apple products with inside our own ecosystem, to be able to do that. We had everything from technology providers through to education that was sitting inside there. We had sports supplement companies, hardware providers, you name it. And we created a marketplace that enabled the club or the PT to say, I want to work with that brand, that brand and that brand that then unlocked it with inside their platform for their clients to be able to see. This is exactly the same thing over here of where we're sitting and saying, well, it can work this way, but only can it work that way. But there might be two merchants that are using Upzelo that actually complement one another. So you might have a company over here that sells shoes that's never going to sell clothing, but you have a company over here that sells clothing that is never going to sell shoes. Well, why can't our customers benefit from one another? We're using the same technology to be able to do it. One of them's got ecommerce and retail, the other one is just purely ecommerce. And suddenly you're able to connect the dots up behind the scenes for that to be able to happen. Now, I'm not sitting here for one second and saying that all of these particular feature sets work, but as I said at the beginning, with the trademark around retention os, you can kind of see where this stuff is going.

Yeah, you can.

And I'm definitely not sitting here and saying that we will be the only provider that will do this in the future. I wouldn't be at all surprised. There are other businesses and other people that are way smarter than me that will come up with concepts that do this as well. But there's plenty of e common retail companies out there to go around. So I think if we can move in the direction that makes the experience for the customer great and it makes it work really well, then everybody benefits from it.

Yeah. Phil, listen. What a great conversation. Thoroughly enjoying your technology. But alas, we have come to that point in the show where I ask you for a question. For me, this is where, dear listener, if you don't know, for the last few weeks I've been asking my guests for questions. I take the question snippet and we create like a little social media video. So if you follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn, you'll hear my answer to the question, which is.

You asked, you asked somebody what are the two things it is that they would do when they're setting up a brand today? If you couldn't use, if you had to extend those from two things and added another two on top of it, what would be the two things that you would add to the list as well?

Ah, very good question. So what were the, what are the two things that I would add to Jay Myers? Okay, yeah, no problem. If you want to hear me answer that question, come follow me on social media, which is Instagram or LinkedIn, basically, and you will hear my answer to that question. But Phil, listen, man, thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. We were going to record this in person, but alas, it never worked out. Maybe next time, but it's been cool anyhow, man, how do people reach you? How do they connect with you? If they want to do that, yes.

So the easiest way to do it is with connect with me on LinkedIn. So just search for Upsello or search for my name, Phil Carr on LinkedIn. Feel free to drop me a message on there or connect with me directly and then we can go from there.

Fantastic. And of course, car is spelled C A R R because why would you dispel it with one R?

Right. It wouldn't be the first time.

Absolutely. We will of course link to Phil's LinkedIn information and to Upzelo in the show notes, which you can get along with the transcript and all that good stuff on our website, ecommercepodcast.net it will be in your inbox if you are subscribed to the newsletter that I mentioned earlier. And of course, if you're like me, all of that doesn't really matter because I just scroll down in the podcast app. The notes are there anyway and I just click the link. So either any of those three methods work, but if you know, please come join our email list. It would be great. But yes, that's it from me. That's it from Phil. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, by the way, I've not done it. This is what happens when you go off script. Big shout out to the team at Podjunction that make this show possible. Of course. And if no one's told you yet today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes. You are created awesome. It's just a burden you have to bear. Phil's got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now, be sure to follow the Ecommerce Podcast wherever you get your podcast from because we've got yet more great conversations coming up and I don't want you to miss any of them. And that genuinely is it. Now I remembered my final bits. Phil, thanks for coming on, man. Really, really appreciate it. It's been a great, great conversation.

Matt, thanks very much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Fantastic. Well, that's it from me. That's it from Phil. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I will see you next time. Bye for now. Take.