Join host Matt Edmundson in a fascinating discussion with Campbell Paton, co-founder and CEO of StoreLab, as they explore the burgeoning world of AppCommerce and its transformative impact on eCommerce. In this episode, we delve into how mobile apps can revolutionise your online business, boost sales, and enhance customer engagement.

Episode Highlights:

1. 📈 The Incredible Power of Push Notifications: Discover how push notifications outperform traditional marketing channels like email and SMS, boasting a conversion rate 15 times higher than email.
2. ⚡ Speed and User Experience: Learn why mobile apps, being three times faster than mobile web, significantly boost customer experience and sales conversions.
3. 🔑 Accessing Restricted Features: Understand how mobile apps leverage features that are off-limits to web browsers, enhancing the overall user experience.
4. 🔄 Tripling Customer Retention: Insights into how exclusive app features and discounts can dramatically increase customer retention rates.
5. 💡 No-Code Solutions and Accessibility: Discussion on how advancements in technology have made it easier and more affordable for businesses to develop their own apps without the need for extensive coding.
6. 🌟 Case Studies and Success Stories: Real-world examples of businesses that have successfully implemented AppCommerce strategies and seen substantial growth in sales and customer engagement.
7. 🤔 Challenges and Considerations: Addressing common concerns and misconceptions about AppCommerce, including its suitability for different types of businesses.

Connect with Campbell Paton:

• LinkedIn: [Campbell Paton]
• Website: [StoreLab.app]

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Don't miss out on the valuable insights shared in this episode. Tune in to learn how AppCommerce could be the key to unlocking a new level of success for your eCommerce business. Ready to explore AppCommerce? Click to listen now and step into a world of enhanced eCommerce opportunities! For more engaging discussions and insights on eCommerce, follow the eCommerce Podcast on your preferred platform. Stay tuned for more episodes that bring you closer to eCommerce excellence.

#AppCommerce #BusinessGrowth #eCommercePodcast #StoreLab #CampbellPaton

Hello and welcome to the Ecommerce Podcast with

me, your host, Matt Edmundson.

It is great that you're here.

It's great that you're with us.

Let me just turn that music down a little bit.

There we go.

It's great that you're here with us here on the Ecommerce Podcast.

This is a show all about helping you deliver

Ecommerce.

Wow.

And to help us do just that, we're having a chat with Campbell Paton

all the way from somewhere just on the outskirts of sunny London.

Yes, a fellow Brit.

We're going to be getting into all things today to do with mobile commerce.

We're going to be having a great chat about apps, about mobile, about selling

things on your phone to your clients.

The list goes on.

So you're definitely going to want to grab your notebooks,

grab your pens and joiners.

I'm actually looking forward to this one and chatting this through.

So yes.

That's what we're getting into, but before we do that, let me give a quick shout

out to the wonderful Ecommerce Cohort, which enables us to bring you this show.

Yes, it does.

The Ecommerce Cohort is our monthly mastermind group that you can be a part

of if you run an Ecommerce business.

It's pretty inexpensive.

There's some great stuff in there workshops on how to run your Ecommerce

business better and also you get to watch the live recording of this show.

So if you want to know how to support this show, if you want to keep us on the air.

Come and join us in the cohort course.

If you don't just write me a letter and let me know.

That would be really awesome, . But if you do, check out e-commerce

cohort at Ecommercecohort.com.

That's Ecommercecohort.com.

And of course, if you are new to the show, a big warm welcome to

you if you haven't done so already.

Check out the website Ecommercepodcast.net.

Where incidentally, you can also sign up to the newsletter.

And every week we email you the links and the show notes and all the

good stuff from each of our guests.

They come to your inbox automatically.

So if you sign up to the newsletter, all the stuff that we're gonna be

talking about today, all the notes, all the links, all the ways to

connect with Campbell, they'd already be in your inbox, so why not check

that out at Ecommerce podcast dot.

Now, shall we meet today's guest?

I think we probably should.

Campbell Paton, who is a trailblazer in the mobile tech realm and a maestro, I

love that word, a maestro of app commerce.

As the co founder and CEO of StoreLab, he's turning the world

of mobile marketing on its head, one push notification at a time.

Oh yes, with a knack for social media wizardry.

And a history of dancing with Fortune 500 Giants, Campbell is the go to

guru for unlocking the secrets of success in today's digital bazaar.

very

What an intro!

Campbell, welcome to the show, man.

How are you doing?

Thank you.

Good.

Lovely.

That was very nice.

Yeah, Sadaf, I think has a little bit of fun with those

those intros, which is quite funny.

What was it?

The go to guru for unlocking the secrets of success in today's digital bazaar.

That's some very well written prose there but yeah, no, good

to have you on the show, man.

Now, at the time of recording, of course you're the first recording of 2024.

We're recording this in January, 2024.

I don't actually know when it's going to come out and I don't know

if I've just seriously dated the episode but did you have a good break?

Did you have a good holiday?

I did I was in Sacramento in the US with with some

family with lots of kids that are not mine, but nieces and nephews.

Fairly exciting Santa and Christmas filled break.

With not a huge amount of rest, but there you go,

yeah, no, fair play.

Kids are great and especially if you can hand them back at the end of the day.

Exactly.

that's a wonderful thing.

So you're all the way back from Sacramento.

You're based just outside of sunny London.

Just tell us about StoreLab what you guys do, what sort of things

you've got involved in over there.

Sure, so yeah, StoreLab, we are essentially a software

development company at our heart.

But we make a platform for anyone to build a mobile application of their store.

We have about 35 employees that work in Farringdon.

And yeah, our software allows you to take a Shopify store at the moment.

We are just on Shopify, but we're planning to be on Wix,

Squarespace, and others this year.

And then make a mobile app of your Shopify store without any coding required.

And I'm sure we'll get into the reasons for it a bit later on, but yeah, I

personally believe that appCommerce will be bigger than Ecommerce at some point and

it is the easiest way to get new customers or not, sorry, retain your customers,

generate lots more profits out of them.

And what it really does in a nutshell is take a customer that's going to buy two or

three things a year and make that customer buy seven or eight items from you.

It's interesting, this whole mobile app thing and

I'm, this is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to it.

We've gone through different phases in our own Ecommerce journey.

For the listeners listening to the show who don't know, I run

my own Ecommerce businesses.

We have cohort, we have I do coaching, consulting, all that sort of stuff.

But fundamentally at heart, I'm an Ecommerce entrepreneur.

We have our own Ecommerce businesses.

I'm just about to launch a new one actually in hopefully

about two or three months time.

And I'm especially interested to talk to you Campbell about what's going on there.

But that aside, we have gone through very, All the various iterations

that you can think of in Ecommerce.

I've been doing it since 2002.

A little while and We went through the phase of mobile's

come out, now apps are a thing.

So we then went and got an app developed where people could buy products from our

website and manage their customer account.

And then we had the advice given to us get rid of your app and just do

like the web stuff super well and optimize that on mobile because no

one's using mobile apps anymore.

Now what you're saying is actually, no, this is now seems

to have come full circle again.

The apps are starting to become a bit more of a thing and actually apps are a

lot more and maybe this is why they're becoming a bit more of a thing, but

they seem to be a lot more accessible than when we did our very first app

because they weren't a bit like when we first did our first Ecommerce

website, man the tools that we have now compared to then a chalk and cheese.

And I think it seems to have been the same with mobile apps, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's, yeah, the rise of the self service builder and no code as a sort of

as an industry has really revolutionized,

Yeah.

barrier to entry for Ecommerce, Shopify, Wix,

Squarespace, all of the, all of those platforms and WooCommerce to

an extent makes it just, yeah, lowest barrier to entry makes it easy.

And we're trying to do the same thing with apps.

It shouldn't cost you 120, 000 to build an app or read it

well, or even more than that.

We're trying to do that, lower the barrier to entry, give apps to everyone, make

them as accessible as possible everyone can understand the benefits of them.

And see the revenue that can be generated, because that's really why we're all

here, is to see revenue and sales come in, and that's what our whole company

is based around, is driving revenue.

yeah.

Now we'll get into that, especially how apps are connected with customer

retention, which you mentioned and drawing those customers in.

I know you've got some tactics and stuff, which we can get

into about how that all works.

But if I'm someone listening to the show to full disclosure, we have thousands

of people listening all over the world, which is still staggers me, if I'm

honest with you, but it's brilliant.

And I love it.

And I love the fact that it's helping a lot of people, but we

do have a wide audience, right?

So some of them listening to the show will be thinking about starting an

Ecommerce website, but some of them will have just tinkered over the edge,

made that new year's resolution and they're starting to go, they've got

their Shopify store up and running.

And and then obviously there's a lot of people who have been around like

me since Noah and since the dawn of Ecommerce really and I've got

quite well established stores all on various different platforms, I'm sure.

But all of that said is what we're about to talk about.

for someone who is starting out in Ecommerce, as well as someone who is

established in Ecommerce, I think is a question that I'm asking, just from

an audience point of view, should I switch off or should I stay listening?

No, absolutely, anyone who uses Ecommerce at all

should be interested in this.

And I'm very happy to plug StoreLab and all the things about us, but one of

our main goals as a company is to make app commerce as well known as possible.

So no you are, you have three customers and you've just

started your Shopify store.

We have a company that launched their First Sox in just early December.

And they're making loads of sales through through their own Shopify store

and through store lab as a platform.

No, in my opinion, there is no time like the present.

And what we tend to say to people is if they have purchase intent.

If someone is making sales, if people have purchase intent on their platform,

then apps will work for you, regardless if you're, been doing this for a long time.

I won't say the word dinosaur or, you're new to the game.

No, I feel, I'm allowed to say it because I think I am.

But that's okay.

I'm still here.

I'm still fighting strong.

So you're using this phrase app commerce.

A fair bit.

Let's define what that means.

Really, it's just, it's app commerce is making

purchases through that's what it is.

An app generating you revenue.

I think it's important to understand that Ecommerce is a way of doing

business, rather than generating revenue through either a website or the mobile

version of that person's website.

And there is key distinctions between the two, so that's why I use the

term app commerce rather than mobile commerce, because I think it draws

the distinction between someone just using the mobile version of a

website through to an actual app.

And so to be clear, you're not talking about web apps.

You are talking about the actual app where you go to the app, the Apple

App Store and Google Play Store.

You'll search for your Acme Store app and you will download it and it

will be installed on someone's phone.

This is not a mobile optimized website.

This is actual.

know I'm going to go to the web.

I'm going to go to the app store and download it.

Yeah, absolutely.

That

Good.

Just to clarify terms.

And again, this is where, when we did our first app, Man Alive, it was like

I say, when I say it was complicated.

So not only did we have to do all the coding, we had to go and obviously

there's, there was, I don't know if there still are, but there was a lot of

loops we had to jump through certainly where Apple was concerned because.

Getting an app on the App Store at that point in time was not straightforward.

Let's just put it that way.

I think it's probably a lot easier now.

So why should I think then?

Let's talk about some of the key reasons why as a listener, I should be thinking

about this phrase app commerce and why I should I be thinking about it in

relation to my personal Shopify business.

Sure.

Okay, so there are three key reasons in our opinion, there

are more than three, but for us, there are three key reasons why.

Any Ecommerce store should consider using Ecommerce, sorry, using AppCommerce.

The first one of those is push notifications.

Having an app on your phone gives you access to send push notifications

through Apple or the Google Play Store to someone's mobile device.

Push notifications have the highest conversion rate out of

any marketing communication.

They convert 15 times higher than email.

They convert 9 times higher than SMS or text.

They convert significantly higher than Google ads or Facebook

ads, and they are free to send.

So you don't pay cost per click.

You don't pay cost per impression on a push notification that you sent.

My personal background is in performance marketing.

I used to run a social media agency and then I was commercial director at the

largest social media agency in the UK.

We spent hundreds of millions of pounds a year off brands on Facebook ads.

And the reason I got into Ecommerce is when I found out that push notifications

convert higher and they are free to send.

That to me was a light bulb moment of this is going to be some of the future.

I feel personally and I'm sure you will have experienced it if you do Facebook

advertising or social advertising, I'm sure most of your listeners will as

well your conversion rates from social have gone down through things like the

iOS 14 update that blocked tracking.

The impressions are harder to get.

Your cost per impression has gone up.

For me, push notifications are what the Facebook ad platform

was about eight years ago.

They aren't in the same way.

And they are a much easier way of reaching your customers for a lot less money.

So bucket number one is push notifications.

That's the first reason.

Reason number two comes down to experience.

And this from two separate, two, two ways.

First way is general fact of Ecommerce life, which is the faster

websites, faster experiences convert higher mobile apps on average, are

three times faster than mobile web.

Okay.

done a few things, one of those things being image caching.

So when you open your app and you download the images for the first

time, they are cached to your phone, so they load much faster.

The second thing is the experience is down to conversion rate optimization.

We and most app producers are able to make a make their apps for the specific device.

So there are, there's a few things that that Apple and Google lock away

from the web browsers that we are able to unlock and build around the

screen and build around the device.

So that you can then yeah, access those through an app as you wouldn't be able

to on the mobile version of the website.

So from an experience side, it is small amounts of features,

but really it's speed.

But really all of those things, the push notifications make people buy more,

the speed makes people buy more, and the conversion rate optimization makes

people purchase more at the same time.

The last reason number three is retention, or retention or returning customer rates.

I use those terms interchangeably.

If you can use app exclusive products, app exclusive discounts, drops, reasons

to keep people coming back, if you couple that with the push notifications, being

able to reach people in a more easy way, we have seen customers triple their

returning customer rate in three months.

Those are the three reasons, main reasons that we talk about.

So there's a lot there, but I've got a lot of questions now.

So let's deal with the first one push notifications.

And again, just to clarify terms for those listening who might not

know what a push notification is.

This is just simply where your phone buzzes and on my screen, I

get them all that I turned most of them off to be fair from all the

various apps that are on my phone.

10, 000 people who have downloaded my app.

If I email out 10, 000 people, let's say, on a good day, I'm getting 15

percent of those people to open that email so I'm getting 150, no, what is

it, 15, 1, 500, let's get the maths so I've got 1, 500 people who are

opening the email and then I've got a conversion rate of whatever, 1, 2, 3, 4%.

What you're saying is with push notifications.

And as best I understand it, Campbell, is if I send out 10, 000 push

notifications, so long as they've not disabled that push notification on

their phone, that's getting through.

So deliverability is going to be super high.

So all of a sudden, I'm, it's not 1, 500 people that are opening my email.

It's let's say seven and a half.

I don't know if you've got any stats on that actually.

Sure, it's a we see around about 30 to 60 percent of people will open

and engage with our push notifications.

They

Okay, so we've got massively increased open

rates with push notifications.

so push notifications have the highest open rate out of

any marketing communication as well.

Yeah.

tend to talk about conversions because most

people really just care about the purchase intent after that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm just trying to figure out why there's an increase in person.

I can understand it, I suppose if I'm a loyal customer, I'm much

more likely to download the app.

So I'm already buying from the company more than once, right?

I wouldn't, I'm just trying to think of my own behavior.

I don't think I would download the app of an unknown store onto my

phone unless there was a bloody good reason to do it, right?

That's something, a very interesting point that you

brought up once we finish this,

okay, we'll get into that we'll get into that, but if I'm just

thinking of the stores that I buy from regularly, actually, if they had mobile

apps, I'd probably download them because it just saves me going to their website.

I'm already logged into the account and I can just, a bit like Amazon, I

suppose Amazon's got an app on there.

And so I'm just thinking of, because I've got that app on my phone, I'm a loyal

customer in, at least in my own head, I'm buying from them more than once.

And i, therefore, am going to be much more likely to engage with

the push notifications on it.

Whereas on an email list, if I think about our email list, if we send

out 10, 000 emails, that's not 10, 000 amazingly hot clients, that have

put this to everybody, isn't it?

People that have signed up to the newsletter, all kinds of stuff.

And so I can see actually just by the very fact that I've taken the time to

download the mobile app onto my phone, it probably puts me in a different

yeah, but also from an aspect of message hierarchy or information

hierarchy when you're, for me to see an email, I have to log into my log into

my Gmail or log into my account to go through and read through those emails.

I am probably there for a different reason.

I'm probably there to look at something else.

Then open a an email that, that is, you go at 15 percent off this clothing store

it will, I'm not saying email marketing doesn't work but if you look at your

phone notification tray everything that exists in there alongside messages

from your family, WhatsApps text messages, phone calls, and then you have

push notifications from the company.

So it is down to the company to make sure that they're not sending

enough push notifications that, are making people disable them.

But the message hierarchy or the information hierarchy

there is equal to WhatsApp and messages from friends and family.

So the reason that is, you get the highest open rates is because

you're there in the same level.

Someone will see that message.

They will understand it.

They may not interact with it.

They don't interact with all of them.

But they will interact with some of them, which then pulls

them back onto the the brand.

And that's essentially what most Ecommerce at the moment is just, trying

to get attention from people, come back to our company to see our face.

And this is push notifications are such a great avenue of doing that.

And

That's actually a really strong word, the word attention.

You're trying to get people's attention because I've got one of those watches that

buzzes whenever I get a new notification.

I don't have that turned on for email, otherwise I'd be

constantly looking at my wrist.

And so I get how push notifications are much more likely to grab

attention, a bit like WhatsApp.

Marketing, in a lot of ways it's much closer to people because it's not yet

been screwed up by marketers, right?

So the honest answer.

unregulated aspects of it.

It's like Facebook ads were eight years ago.

In the same way that you weren't expecting, if I went when I say Facebook,

Facebook and Instagram, I wasn't expecting to just be bombarded by brands that

are getting your attention because you clicked on one thing six weeks ago.

That's how, for me, the push notification space feels.

I know at some point, down the line, they will start being

regulated by Apple and Google more so they bring your attention back.

But at the moment, it's more of an unregulated space.

And especially for companies that deal with things that are restricted.

Adult stores.

I used to work for Love Honey, it's one of my favourite

companies I've ever worked for.

But you have massive problems if you're an adult store with

advertising on Google or any social platform because of restrictions.

Push notifications are not in that same league.

If you can get someone onto the app, then they can receive notifications from you.

And it's, yeah, again, it's your job to make sure that they're not explicit.

And they're not written in a way that's going to make someone say, I don't want

people to see that, or it's bugging me, and I'm just going to turn them off.

Wow.

Very good.

Ethics aside about whether or not you should run an adult company entirely.

Maybe that's a different show, but what I'm intrigued by here is there

a way then that I, as a company.

Can do push notifications without having an app or do I actually have to have

an app, a native app on their device?

There are ways that you can do that without it, but the problem

with a native push notification is it will list where it's come from on top.

When you send a native push notification from our, from one of our apps,

or from any app, you see the name of the company followed by the

message that you're trying to send.

If you use a.

A service like OneSignal, which is a way of sending push notifications without an

app, it will say OneSignal message, and then the message that you're trying to

send, so you're limiting the characters that you can send and there are, there are

desktop push notifications, but I don't know of many people that enable those,

or anyone that does, I know, turn off

desktop notifications at

Yeah.

Yeah.

They were a big thing about four years ago.

I think desktop notifications when they first came out and you can see.

But I just think it's an old tactic now, whereas, and I'm sure somebody

listening is going to email me in and go, Matt, you're wrong because I've made

gazillions from desktop notifications and all power to you I, yeah, I'm

just I think as a general rule, it seems a bit of an old technology, but.

You're right, it hasn't caught up with mobile.

So if I haven't, if I did, there are services out there, then from what I

understand you're saying, Campbell, is you can use services to do notifications.

But it's not as good or as clear as if you do it through your own app, because

you own that, it's got your name on it.

Whereas,

there are also rich push notifications.

It's sending a notification with a picture.

So someone like soft hovers over with an iPhone or clicks on it with an

Android, you see the item that you're trying to get the person to buy.

Or, another graphic that you can send.

You can't send rich push notifications with a service that's

that's not an app on your phone.

okay.

And so the service then with notifications, if I do WhatsApp

marketing, I've got to pay somebody a fraction of a pence, a fraction of

a penny every time I send a message.

I don't have to do that with push notifications.

Depends who you do your push notifications with.

Okay.

With us, you don't.

We have a deal with the company that allows us to send them for

fractions and fractions of a penny.

If you use someone like OneSignal, I believe it's something like 13 pence or

14 pence per 10, 000 messages delivered.

So it's not very expensive and there are, we are not the only people who do

the no codes app solutions but yeah it depends, really it's not it's a very

cost effective way to send messages out.

But it's, that intrigue, what you said there intrigues me,

Campbell, if I can just dig a little bit further, because you use a company to

do the push notifications with your app.

Rightly or wrongly.

I would have assumed that your app would have done the push notification, so

you, but you outsource it to a service for and on behalf of your users, just

take, just explain that a little bit.

sure.

So that's we are a startup.

We've been around for three years.

We are building our own push notification service that will send them out

automatically from our position.

However, we have a limited tech team.

So we have had to build some things into our service.

So yeah.

We swallow that cost on our client's behalf and hopefully, within some time

in the next 12 months, we will have our own push notification service.

But noted for, so we could concentrate on user experience

and making the product possible.

We decided to outsource that at the moment.

Okay.

But I imagine it's all fairly seamless and no one knows

Oh yeah, I know.

We have never had a downtime in push notifications.

So is the technology then to do the push

notifications quite complex?

depends on how deep you want to go into it.

To send a push notification to every single person on your phone, anyone that

has your app is not super challenging.

To send a personalized message that goes to an individual based

on an item that they have viewed and only they have viewed.

That is a little bit more challenging.

Oh, okay.

So you're now personalizing the notifications.

And so actually you're going from what I would call an email blast, which

is where you just email everybody.

You're going, no, let's pick out this subsection over here and let's just

notify this particular group of clientele and personalize it a little bit.

Is that, am I hearing that right?

yeah.

And especially when it comes down to the gold dust in Ecommerce, the thing that

everyone wants, the thing that generates you more revenue than anything else is

the abandoned cart push notification.

That piece of tech is usually what pulls most people when they hear, when

we talk numbers and statistics, that's what brings people back, what brings

people to the table to talk about it.

Abandoned cart push notifications can recover up to 60

percent of abandoned carts.

So that is almost unheard of in any other sort of style.

If you think of how many abandoned cart emails you send out.

The other thing about abandoned cart push notifications is

you don't have to retain data.

So this is something that we're going to talk about in a second and

how you get someone onto the app.

But say, for example, that I want, I'm using a Shopify store and I want to

send someone an abandoned cart email.

I have to capture that email first.

I have to ask that person to either sign up for account or enter

their email in a different way.

If they download the app, they have bypassed that information in inputs

requirements, you can then, and they have felt, to an extent that

they haven't given anything up.

But you are then sending someone an abandoned cart email, which

recovers huge numbers of abandoned carts and again is free to send.

And it is sent after a period of time that, that you can choose from someone

adding something to the basket that yeah.

Is massive and it's yeah, probably the single thing in commerce that makes

people more revenue than anything else.

Not saying the other reasons aren't important, but that one thing

is, yeah, like I say, gold dust.

I see you preempted my next question in a lot of ways.

I know when people sign up for email marketing, the law is getting

more and more complex GDPR, you've got California has got his own set

of rules because it's California.

Why would it not?

How does push notifications with the app connect with all of this?

Crazy legislation that's going on around the world at the moment.

So obviously, we can't talk about every Ecommerce provider.

Some people do it differently from us.

All of our notifications that are sent are GDPR compliant because we as

a, as we as a company do not retain data it's put onto Shopify's position.

So Shopify has to be the company that retained data not us.

So say for example that you, someone downloads the app, that

information is retained with Shopify and on the native device.

So we don't get user information, you as a company, by using us, do

not retain that information, you see a transaction when it comes through

listed in exactly the same way as it does, someone buys through the website.

But we do not get into the realms of any regulation from that perspective

because data is maintained by the customer and then by Shopify.

So if I've got say 10, 000 customers and I've managed to convince 500

of them to download the app, for example, I'm assuming with the way that you've

got it set up, and even if customers are not using what you've got set up, I'm

sure it'd be an interesting thing to do.

Is it easy to monitor which sales come from which channel?

So I know that these sales have come through the app.

So yeah, I mean that, that's one of the reasons that we

selected Shopify as our first platform to go after is we're a sales channel,

we exist as a sales channel on Shopify.

So I think on your Shopify dashboard.

Top left hand corner and your analytics, you've got revenue Shopify boss.

And next one over, it's sales by channel.

And you will see store lab listed there or any of the other app

providers will be listed right there.

And it will say, online store and store lab.

And one of the most exciting things for us is we've had customers where,

you know, within the first month we are 50 percent of their revenue.

Or higher by getting people to use the app.

And yeah yeah it's, we're a sales channel just like any other.

And that's where you'll see app commerce.

Fantastic.

So what happens if, and I'm just thinking of all the, I personally don't run my

sites on Shopify, but if I did, one of the key things I know about Shopify

and that I really like about Shopify, certainly when we've used them in the

past, is you can integrate other apps.

So let's say I've got a subscription app or a membership app or something

that's helping me grow my business.

Does what you do integrate with that or is it just a case of the app's

the app and it's a separate thing?

It depends.

We are always, when I say about having a limited tech team,

we focus on integrations too.

We partner with most of the major providers.

If you're using Royalty Lion for a reward system, then yeah, we, we do that.

Yopo many recharged, any, yeah, the many of the major Zapiet

integrations we partner with.

If you are using something completely obscure that is, not many, then the

answer is probably not at this time.

But we do have a a request service where if you want us to

build something, we will do it.

It just might take some time.

But yeah.

Okay.

A lot of useful information there.

So let's say I'm bored into the whole idea.

I like the idea of push notifications.

I like the faster experience.

I like the bigger customer retention.

Those two things we've not got into yet, but I do want to talk

a little bit about strategy.

So if I'm thinking I'm going to try this system.

I'm going to do a mobile app.

How do I convince people to join that app, especially cause I

want to come back to something that you picked me up on earlier.

About me not necessarily be willing to download an app

if I'm a first time visitor.

So let's talk about how you get first time visitors to Download the app.

So this for me was my first question.

I, we we get lots of companies use our service, especially micro

brands or really small brands.

And I know from experience with working with them, they don't want to take

budget away from campaigns to spend on just getting people to download the app.

And it really surprised me when I first learned about it.

So the primary way that you get customers onto your app is by

installing a mobile app banner.

So what this is a little widget or a banner that exists on your mobile

version of your website that gives someone a reason to download the app.

So we usually say you need to give someone an incentive that is monetary

driven, but you don't have to.

So this would be 5-10 percent off your first order, free

shipping on your first purchase.

Loyalty points with your first purchase free gift with your

first order through the app.

So you're giving someone an incentive to download the app

when they have purchase intent.

So when they're going to buy something anyway, they would go and they

would, yeah download the app instead.

The other thing that is, that I really like about the mobile app banner is

that it doesn't interrupt the purchase journey if someone doesn't want to do it.

They dismiss the banner and they complete the purchase as they would

on the mobile version of the website.

We see between 85 and 90 percent of app downloads.

Wow.

That's a really high number.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

we also see about 20 percent of people, it's about 19, 20

percent of people that download the app are first time buyers who have never

bought something from the store before.

there goes my theory then right out the window.

So you're, as long as you're using the correct incentive.

As long as you are giving someone a reason to download that, the app, then

they will do it and they will stay there.

So as I said, the thing I said right at the start, what an app really

does is it takes someone who's going to buy two or three things

and it makes them buy six or seven.

First time buyers are retained on the app.

And this is not a foolproof solution.

People will download the app for the incentive and then leave.

People will download the app and they will turn off push notifications.

But the vast majority don't, and that is why yeah, that's how you get people

onto the app which is a much easier solution than most people expect.

That's really interesting.

Such a high number.

A first time clients who you've obviously worked with a lot of, you

are working with obviously a lot of people, 35 staff, you've got a

significant number of people on board.

If you don't, if you don't mind sharing this one or two maybe companies that

are top of mind that are doing this well, that are killing it, that we,

I'm really tempted just to go to their website, have a look and download

the app if I'm honest with you.

Oh, of course, so I'll tell you my favourite case study.

I'll let you know my favourite case study of all of this.

A lady called Carol.

From a company called Rock Those Curves.

She,

Curves, is that what,

Rock Those

Curves, yeah.

They are yeah, we spoke to her in September of 2022.

She was doing her company as a side hustle.

It was, I wouldn't say, a distraction, but she was not doing

I think what she aspires to with it.

She was making a few thousand pounds in sales a month.

Most of that was through Etsy or other platforms and not necessarily

through her own Shopify store.

We helped her with some mobile app, with some Facebook strategy.

To help her just basically from my old experience and

installed the app on her service.

She has made 390, 000 in sales in the year and a couple of

months that she's worked with us.

It's now her full time job she works, 15-90 an hour days that she's not super

pleased with, but she's still doing that.

So they're someone I love talking about and when she first came to us, she

said, my target market are 55 plus.

They will not use apps.

We've categorically disproved that.

Yeah, and I don't believe app commerce works for my audience, I

don't think Facebook will work for my audience, all of those things.

We've just, we've made almost half a million pounds at this point.

Other companies I talk about that I'm not saying that this is the right

thing to do but they do it really well.

This is a company called Arabell Apparel.

I always get, I always struggle saying the name, it's Liberia Backwoods Arabell

Apparel they are a fashion brand that exists out of New Jersey a lady, very

impressive lady sells around about 1.

9 to 2 million dollars worth of fashion gear a year out of her bedroom in New

Jersey we were 52 percent of her revenue from month one that we worked with them.

wow,

cause she managed to convince all of her

customers with a great incentive.

I think it was really 10% off your first purchase to use the

app, and then she's retained them.

So yeah, that, those are two.

There's another company, Mike's Dive Store . They are largest provider

of diving equipment to Europe.

This isn't just fashion apparel that works across the board.

We sold 15,000 pounds worth of gear in their first week.

Other companies are similar in the sports equipment side.

We have a few butchers use it really well.

So it is industry agnostic.

The only thing I would say for that is, the analogy of someone who's

going to buy two or three things.

It's difficult to get someone who's going to buy zero to one.

So yeah, a mattress provider people don't tend to buy three mattresses in a year.

Apps are difficult for them to get used well.

So yeah, multiple purchases, if, repeatable purchases,

that's where we really shine.

But yeah, in the diving equipment analogy though, of Mike's Dive Store.

Someone may buy one BCD or a jacket a year or even longer.

That's, a few, a thousand pounds purchase, but then they'll come back for the mask.

They'll come back for fins, they'll come back for accessories, and

that's where you can pick them up to.

that's really interesting.

Super powerful.

I, and that you, again, you've preempted one of my questions

is who does this not work for?

And so if it's single purchase items, it tends to not work well.

And the other thing, it's worth explaining what apps don't

do and they don't drive traffic.

So you need to have traffic coming through to your website.

You need to have it coming to your online store.

This is not going to revolutionize your company if you're not

driving traffic in some way.

So it pairs really nicely with Google and Facebook ads.

And you do take a, if you want to go down the route of discounts on your incentive,

you will take a hit on the first purchase, but you will have that person coming back.

And again but yeah, they don't drive traffic and they don't work for

companies where someone's only going to buy one thing in, in three years.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

I can't imagine actually, even if you optimize your app, no one's going to

the Apple app store to search for your widget or your product, are they really?

I get that they don't drive traffic.

But if you've already got traffic come in and you've already got a plan

to create traffic, do you run ads?

I dunno how this would work, but can you run ads direct to your app store or do

you run ads that take them to the web store and then there's the mobile banner?

Yeah, so we wouldn't run ads for the to the App Store

because Unless the person has a real knowledge about the brand,

Nike and Adidas will do that.

But most of the people that we work with aren't well known enough

for that to really work that well.

Or you're, you're using a personal, personalized list that you've taken

for, and uploaded to Google or Facebook, that your cost per click

or cost per impression is going to be so high, it's just not worth it.

You might as well drive to the website.

And then use the IncentiveFace banner to get them there.

We encourage people to do social posting about their app and include it as a banner

on the bottom of their email campaigns.

On the desktop, they might have a QR code to scan.

But yeah, no, we don't see the need to drive people to the app store.

As well as what we're really trying to do is drive revenue and we want

someone to have purchase intent when they will download the app

because it makes them less likely to then turn off the notifications.

so I, my final question here, Campbell, before we

start to wrap up, 'cause I'm aware of time, but have you come across

any stores that have gone the mobile.

All the app commerce, as you call it, is working so well that I'm going

to switch the website off and just run all my commerce through the app.

And that wouldn't work because of the way that the journey works.

One, one day.

Okay, so there is a thing that Apple and Google brought out a few years

ago, and it is years now that hasn't really taken off, and it's called

an App Clip or a Google Instant App.

They tried to bring this out for app streaming rather than app downloading.

So if I went to Google and I looked for the Nike app, then

I would open an App Clip.

of that store rather than downloading the app.

The the icon goes onto the homepage for 24 hours.

And yeah, it's app streaming rather than downloading.

I don't fully understand why that never really took off as it was supposed to.

But the way that you want someone to download the app is,

again, with purchase intent.

So they want them to be looking through your store.

You want them to be looking through the clothing or the pictures of the

products in whatever they are to then say, I want, I'm going to buy that.

I want the incentive.

And that gets them onto the app and then the retention through

there makes them convert better.

If you just remove that experience entirely, then you're trying to sell

someone on an Ecommerce experience based on the Shopify app store, I'm

sorry the Apple, the Google Play store, which is not a good experience

for someone to check out products.

Very good.

I have one, one more question if you have time.

I'm aware of time.

I know.

As long as I'm not causing you to be late for something else.

The thing that you mentioned there about payments, so I go

onto the app, buy a hundred bucks worth of product through the app.

Am I paying 30 percent commission to Apple or Google for that purchase?

No not at all.

You don't pay the because the, you are not using their payment service as this

is where the lines get a little muddled.

You can use Apple Pay and you can use Google.

But you're not using the Apple Pay through our Apple developer system, and you're

not using Google Play Pay, sorry, through the Play system developer Play system,

you do not pay them the percentage fees.

You retain everything.

And our competitors are different, we're not all the same but we do not

charge percentage of sales either.

The, you pay as you would normally and you retain as much of that

as you're taking normally.

Fantastic.

Fantastic.

Campbell, listen, I appreciate the insight here into app commerce.

It's very fascinating.

And offline, I think we need to have a conversation about

a new store that we're doing.

I'm really curious to see what your thoughts about that are.

But if people want to reach out to you, if they want to connect with you, if

they want to find out more about what you do at StoreLabs, what's the best way?

To do just that.

Fantastic.

I'm on LinkedIn, so please come speak to me on LinkedIn it's, my

name's Campbell Paton, you can find me there or come to our website, which is

storelab.app, where you can connect with me or any of our team to talk about apps.

We're very happy to talk to you about it.

And yeah, we do store audits all the time to make sure someone's ready.

So yeah, please come check us out.

Fantastic.

We will of course, link to Campbell's information in the show notes which

you'll get along for free along with a transcript at ecommercepodcast.net.

Or they come into your inbox if you signed up to the email newsletter

and if you're not, sign up to it.

'cause why would you not?

Campbell, listen, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Great to meet you.

Great to hear what you guys are doing.

Really intrigued by the whole thing.

Genuinely, really intrigued and I'm always intrigued.

It always fascinates me how these things come full circle again.

So great to have you on.

Thanks for your candid information and all the best with the venture, good sir.

No worries.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you very much for having me.

It's been

No, great.

Loved it.

And I hope you loved it as well.

Also, a big shout out to today's show sponsor, the Ecommerce Cohort.

Remember to check them out, ecommercecohort.

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And be sure to follow the Ecommerce podcast, wherever you get your

podcasts from, because we've got yet more great conversations lined up.

I don't want you to miss any of them.

And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first.

You are awesome.

Yes, you are.

Credit awesome.

It's just a burden you have to bear.

Campbell's got to bear it.

I've got to bear it.

You've got to bear it as well.

Now, the eCommerce Podcast is produced by Aurion Media.

You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.

The team that makes this show possible is the astounding and just simply

amazing Sadaf Beynon and Tanya Hutsuliak.

Our theme music was written by Josh Edmundson.

And as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript or show notes, head

over to the website ecommercepodcast.

net.

So that's it from me.

That's it from Campbell.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world.

I'll see you next time.

Bye for now.