Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen
[00:00:56]
Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson, and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest David Perry who is the CEO of Carro, a new e-commerce partnership network used by over 30K Shopify brands. GetCarro.com helps brands gain attention, sales, and new customers by partnering with other brands in the network. “The goal is to keep users on your store, adding all the things they need directly into your cart. Carro provides all the other products they want that you don’t currently sell.” 

Sony PlayStation acquired Perry’s previous company Gaikai to establish leadership in the future of streaming video games from the cloud. This service is called PlayStation Now. Now welcome to the podcast, David,

David
[00:01:49]
Thanks so much for inviting me.

Arlen
[00:01:51]
No problem. Excited to talk to you.

David
[00:01:53]
That guy, Kai is a strange name for a company, right?

Arlen
[00:01:56]
Yeah. Yeah. I stumbled on that a little bit.

David
[00:01:58]
So one of the things that happens sometimes is when you have co-founders they think they get attached to something. And so one of our co-founders loved Japanese words and he okay. Really wanted to call the company GA Kai and okay. I didn’t really like it. So, but it turned out, I got invited to this MTY muck branding event that was in Texas where, you know, the Coca-Colas of this world spend a fortune to train their staff and they sit around drinking glasses of wine and get trained right in marketing. And so I got invited to this thing by a friend who was speaking at it. And I, so I was sort of sitting at the back, just listening. And they were talking about something called mystique marketing. Okay. And mystique marketing is when some of your audience feels very like their insiders. And so an example would be the brand Versace. Some people will pronounce it versa. And every time they hear somebody say versa, they’re like, Hmm, they don’t know how to pronounce it.

Arlen
[00:02:56]
Right.

David
[00:02:57]
And so this is mystique marking this idea of some people being insiders and some people not knowing. And, and so I came back and I said to my co-founder, you know, let’s go ahead and call it guy, Kai. Okay. So it turned out everything that we did in the company, we put a Japanese name on. Okay. And then years later, Sony PlayStation comes along and buys our company and it’s a Japanese company and they were so blown away that everything was Japanese. Wow. And they loved it. It turned out to be the perfect culture fit, you know? So, so how weird is that that a Japanese company would end up buying it? You can imagine, as they look through the names of our servers and everything, everything was all Japanese. And

Arlen
[00:03:38]
So, wow. So that’s, that’s kinda weird.

David
[00:03:40]
The world works.

Arlen
[00:03:41]
Yeah, definitely. That’s like a match made in heaven, you know, I guess your, your, your business partner there was really kind of onto something. He was,

David
[00:03:49]
He really, he really nailed it for us.

Arlen
[00:03:50]
Yeah. That’s awesome. We thank you for sharing that. And you know, we’re excited to talk to you because today we’re gonna be talking about, you know, influencers and creators and celebrities, and really turning them from recommending products to actually becoming direct sellers of your products. And so it’s really gonna be a, a hot topic. We’ve talked, I’ve had others on that. We’ve talked about influencer marketing, I’m huge and influencer marketing. As my listeners know, as a co-founder of OSI affiliate software, we’re, we’re big advocates on getting our customers and people and our e-commerce brands that are using our technology to go after influencers to become the affiliates and the, you know, advocates for their brand. And so you’re gonna be really kind of enlightening us on a different angle for that, you know, getting them to become direct sellers. So I’m really excited to talk to you about that. But before we do get into all that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and you know, how you really got into what you’re doing today?

David
[00:04:45]
I’m actually originally from Northern Ireland and you can’t tell, you know, when you’re looking at me in a chair, but I’m six foot, eight inches tall. Wow. So everyone thinks I should have been like a professional basketball player, but basketball, wasn’t really a thing in Northern Ireland. So it’s all rugby and things like that. So I ended up learning how to make video games and that’s what I did. And as a career I got into video games, I literally left high school. I got a job while I was in high school. So I didn’t even complete high school. Okay. And I ended up getting into the video game industry and the video game industry was just at the time it felt like a fad. So my teachers thought I had lost my mind cuz it wasn’t really a thing. It was just an interesting sort of entity that was growing.

David
[00:05:32]
But boy, did I make the right choice? Yeah. I strapped myself to a rocket ship and the video game industry has become absolutely enormous. And so during that time and actually being a programmer, what you realize is in the video game industry is people tend to, that you have to innovate or you’re dead. Like if you’re not making something new and interesting, no one cares. And so I think that mentality, I kind of laugh these days cuz you know, here I am in e-commerce what the heck am I doing in e-commerce right. I should be over in the games business, but by bringing some video game people along and adding some incredible talent that we have, the net result is, you know, we have a team of people going anything’s possible. Like there’s nothing, nothing needs to be done the way it’s always been done.

David
[00:06:15]
You know, where something might seem really hard in code. Like we look at our data in 3d, for example, I have spinning 3d worlds with real time. Little, I can see literally orders flying through the air. Why not? Right? That’s if you have the engineering talent, why wouldn’t you do that? And so in reality that’s been a really fun transition even though it’s the game industry is my background. This is clearly another space that is enjoys innovation and enjoys people coming in and thinking new thoughts. But from the game space where my career went was I found that working with brands was the most valuable thing. And so I would make these games and I’d make some game like a game, starring a character called Herbert and who cares. Right. Nobody cares. Then I made the teenage mutant ninja turtles and it goes straight to number one.

David
[00:07:06]
And so then you go, well, I did a Ladin for Disney, the matrix games for Warner brothers at peak matrix. Right. And so every time I got a license, my career just went crazy. Okay. And every, every time I tried to just go and make some random, crazy little silly game, then it was, it was harder. You know, I did the Terminator for James Cameron. So like those different, those different properties all really helped. And so coming into e-commerce, I’m sort of looking at the same way what’s going on in this space, you know, how does branding work within this space? And I think that’s one of the things that influencers have in an abundance is they have an enormous amount of attention. And, and when you actually really look under the covers in e-commerce, how important is attention to brands? I mean, have you ever met a brand that’s like, please no more attention.

David
[00:07:57]
I don’t want any more, you know, no more enough, we get so much traffic already for God’s sake. The last thing we want, it’s more never, they can never, ever, ever have enough. And so much though that they pay Google and Facebook for every single click or they’re doing, you know, paying agencies a lot of money to try to drive this traffic in. And what really happens when you look at it from a network component, if you look at all of these different Shopify stores, some of them are in the same categories, like they’re in makeup and they’re in fashion, they’re in sunglasses and then they’re buying the same clicks. So you get a whole cohort of stores buying the same clicks literally from, from these different services. It’s very expensive. And now I like to think about what keeps people awake at night. And one of them is that advertising efficiencies drop like 15 to 20%.

David
[00:08:47]
So where are you gonna get another 15 to 20% back? Like, right. You’re not gonna get it if you, you know, just by, unless you take action. So what is the accent? And then also supply chain has become a problem. So you start to see more out of stock, out of stock on stores. So what are you gonna do about that? What other products can you put in your store today to sort of fill those gaps? Yeah. So overall it’s a, it’s kind of an interesting time for e-commerce, but I think the, one of the first things that we set out to do was to try to help brands work out, which influencers like their products. And that’s kind of an interesting question. You’ve been trading for quite some time. You’ve hired an agency to go and sort of trouble people on Instagram to sell your products.

David
[00:09:31]
Yeah. But are you aware of what influencers actually like your brand? And so we put a lot of energy into trying to solve that and we have a lot of influencers connected to our platform. And, and what we say to the brand is, look, this is your data. These are your customers. But if you just look at it under a different light, the, these are the people in your that have been really loyal customers that are actually really big on social media. And so you should be, I talked to one brand yesterday, they have 88,000 influencers in their data. Oh wow. I mean, you can imagine they’re they nearly fall off their chair when they realize it. Now that’s, that’s remarkable. Normally it’s like 400 or correct. You know, or something like that, but that’s more influences than they’ll ever need. Yeah. It’s, it’s an army and they don’t even know how to activate them.

David
[01:10:18]
They don’t have, they’ve never had that before. They’ve never. So now it becomes a question is how do you work with these people? Yeah, exactly. And so the brands then said to us, what can you do to help here? So what we did is we created a system. So again, our platform is carro, but what we actually are doing is we’re, we’re meeting multiple needs of a brand. So one is here. You see all this latent attention that you’re just missing out on all these people love your brand and you’re doing nothing with them. So you click a button and it says to the influencer, please stop buying our products. Here’s a link. And from now on, you can shop for free and, and they’re sending these out left and right, and this is so cool cuz the influencer’s response is, oh my God, I love your brand.

David
[01:11:00]
I’ve been buying it for years. This is so much more exciting to them because this is the makeup they’re wearing. You know, these are the things they actually use. This is not some handle company coming outta nowhere on Instagram saying, please tell everyone we make the best candles. They don’t want to do that. But if it’s the makeup they wear, then they’re so happy to, to finally work directly with that company. And so what we do is we’re now built into over 8,000 homepages to welcome the influencers on arrival, cuz they’ve used a special link and it says welcome. And you can add things to your cart, but we won’t be asking you for a credit card. And so when today what happens with influencer marketing is there’s usually somebody on the team that is having to talk to the influencers and the influencers are gonna go to Coachella and they got like 48 hours and they need to choose a pair of sunglasses and they’re going back and forth and effectively they’re shopping through a human being, correct to try to choose the glasses and get them into ups.

David
[01:11:56]
And in our situation it’s like, no, just let the influencer and look at the store and let them be inspired and choose the things they want. And then what happens is the influencer makes the request. It appears in our dashboard, the brand clicks approved. Of course they have to have final approval, but if they click approve, that order is placed directly into their Shopify queue and shipped out with everything else. So there’s actually no, literally we’ve got it down to one approval click. Oh wow. That means that they can scale. So now you could actually work with a lot of influencers and effectively you can sort of test the relationships. So if the influencer does a good job and you want to make them a brand ambassador or do some kind of deal with them, that’s perfectly okay. Our platform is not, we don’t even charge for this by the way.

David
[01:12:40]
So that’s free to do this, but the idea is we want to help the brands grow. And so if they do this and they end up having a great relationship, then are they wanna do some deal together? We are not an agency. So I have to be crystal clear. Taro is something you plug into your Shopify store that we do everything we can to increase attention in sales. But we are not at all an agency in any sheet form size. So if you wanna do deals or whatever, please do. But we are a very interesting way to discover that attention. Potential.

Arlen
[01:13:12]
Yeah. Good stuff. And yeah. Thank you for sharing that background in what you guys do. It sounds like some awesome stuff and it, yeah, very interesting. How you, you made that shift from the video game world to e-commerce world, but it was really interesting now cuz like you said, video games these days are, I mean they are huge. I mean bigger than ever. And I am maybe dating myself, but you know, when, when I came up, I mean video games, if I were to look at the game systems that were out in my day and then to what’s out now, I mean it’s like night and day. I mean we’re, we’re talking like I was looking at stick figures compared to

David
[01:13:45]
Like, what was your first system? What was the first one you owned?

Arlen
[01:13:48]
My first system was an Atari 5,200. There

David
[01:13:52]
You go.

Arlen
[01:13:53]
That’s thanks me. Yeah. I didn’t get the 2,600. I think I really, I wanted it, but something happened. We didn’t end up getting it. I was bothering my parents finally got the, the 5,200, which I think was their next iteration. And just when I think about those games to what’s what’s out today, it’s really amazing how far it’s come

David
[01:14:12]
Markable yes. And the game industry has an insatiable desire for new hardware and new advancements. I used to laugh because Intel would come to our office with a backpack of secret new processors that are coming out and they put ’em in, they put ’em in our computers. We would literally laugh because our game would that day push them to the limit. I don’t care what they brought in our office. It was gonna go be pushed to the limit that day. And so we could never have enough. And that was, if you think about computer today, it’s most software like Microsoft word or something like that. It it’s sitting there going please type a faster, I can handle millions of characters a second, you know? And it’s, it’s like the computers are so powerful, but we’re not really using that power. And so that’s the fun thing. That’s why I level this AI innovation cuz finally it’s starting to use the compute more. Yeah. The game industry pushes everything forward. So you’ll find people working on the latest aspects of everything. Even VR. One of my, one of my team members after we were acquired by Sony, took his money and built Oculus VR, the VR company that was bought by Facebook. And you know, now Facebook is leaning into the meta versus being the future of everything. And that’s driven by VR gaming by

Arlen
[01:15:30]
Games. Yeah. So everything like you said has really been propelled by this, these games and this whole technology. So yeah, that definitely is so true. Now, one of the things you were mentioning when you’re talking about what you guys do for, you know, Carl is with these influencers, you know, every e-commerce brand knows about influencers. Everyone wants to snag a, you know, a big fish, so to speak, whether it’s a somebody high profile or maybe not even a high profile influencer, maybe just even a micro influencer so they can leverage them. And you know, the traditional model, as I mentioned at the outset of the episode, a traditional model is just getting these influencers to, you know, just to recommend your brand in exchange for, you know, commission. So if they recommended people, go through your site, make a purchase, they get a commission now where your model and what you’re talking about is a little bit different where you’re getting these influencers to be direct sellers of the brand. Now it’s a little different model. Can you kind of enlighten us and tell us a little bit about, you know, how does that work? How does the incentive work, you know, and how do you really formulate that type of relationship?

David
[01:16:35]
Yeah. So initially there are lots and lots of ways to work with influencers that most common are some kind of link or code or whatever you want to use. Lincoln bio. It doesn’t matter. But what happened was we had this incredible focus on attention being, how can we get more people to send traffic to you? Yeah. And influencers are obviously I think the best for that. And if you work with influencers that love what you do in our case, we’ve never had to pay an influence or anything yet. So with the amount of product that’s gone out, we’ve never had to actually send cash along with it. Why? Because, because it’s an authentic relationship. If you search Carl Facebook success story, you’ll see that Facebook even wrote, sorry, it’s called meta now. But they wrote a success story on carro. Okay. Because they like the authenticity of it.

David
[01:17:25]
So that was the first piece. But then COVID hit and we’re like, you know, attention is really important to brands, but you know, what’s more important is sales. So at the end of the day, the attention is the driver of sales, but sales is the core. So what can we do as a company, if we’re gonna build lots of different components for brands, what would change the sales dynamic? And what we did is we looked at our network of brands. We had 30,000 installs at that time and we have 350 million visitors a month hitting those brands. So I started to look at it a bit like an organism. So if you can imagine all these brands together like a molecule and the whole thing is getting 350,000, a 350 million visitors every month then is there any way they can share those eyeballs between each other?

David
[01:18:15]
And so that was our question, like how, I mean, we literally sat there and go, how do we get these people to share all of that attention? And the, the answer came quite simple, which was, if someone’s selling bicycles and someone else is selling helmets, can your bicycle store sell my helmets too? Because if you could put your helmets into their traffic at the bicycle store, you get that traffic for free. Now wait a minute. That’s a big deal cuz you know what? That’s even more attention. But ultimately when that helmet sells on the bicycle store, that was a sale. You were never going to get. You were never there before you weren’t gonna get that sale. And now that sale, the way we work is we actually wire the two brands together. So that, that sale from the bike store is actually instantly transmitted back to the helmet company so they can supply it.

David
[01:19:04]
Now this matters because there’s a fundamental issue that I see with wholesale today is that a lot of people are buying inventory and putting it somewhere like they’re, they’re buying inventory from over here, they’re using freight, which is expensive insurance, et cetera. And then renting warehouse space to store it somewhere else. So that, that stuff just moved, but nobody bought it. It’s just being moved around and that’s a loss of margin. So is there any way to not move anything until it’s sold? Like it’s just gonna, it’s gonna stay at the supplier until it sells. So we came up with this idea of wiring, the axle suppliers, the inventory directly into the bike store. So what actually occurred is something very interesting because today when you buy inventory for your warehouse, you want to keep the, you know, you, you wanna make sure it sells.

David
[01:19:51]
So what you end up doing is you end up buying only a few colors and only a few sizes cuz you don’t wanna be left with, with a warehouse sale to get rid of it all. Or you don’t want to have restocking fees when you send it back. So right. They end up limiting their choices that their audience is about to get. But if we can wire the actual helmet company directly into your store, you’d now get all the colors in all the sizes at no cost at all. So there’s no inventory cost to place those products in your store. And if you sell something again, what we do is we, the way our, our model works is if the retailer sells something. So the bike company just sold a bike plus a helmet that helmet, we transmit the axle wholesale cost of the helmet to the helmet company and they ship it out, you know, through their own logistics system. So the user gets a bike in a box and a helmet in a box. Gotcha. Gotcha. Those are basically partnerships. And when you do that, you realize why would you stop there? And so if you go as website, state, bicycle.com, if you go there, you’ll see that they have helmets and gloves and socks and locks and, and all kinds of stuff. 10 different categories that are powered by us.

Arlen
[02:21:00]
Yeah. We just opens up these brands to just, you know, a whole new audience and they don’t have to worry about really the logistics of, you know, getting that increased inventory and everything that goes into expanding their product offering. So it makes, makes a lot of sense. Now, as far as the influencers come into play, how do they fit into the model where they’re not recommending these stores or products and things, but they’re, they’re becoming a direct seller. And how do you, I’m a huge fan of shark tank and people that are listening. Maybe you catch the reference. How, how do, how do you get them to wet their beak, so to speak and entice them to, you know, be your advocate? What is it that you’re doing to get them to become a, a direct seller?

David
[02:21:45]
Well, what happens is there’s a conversation that happens with an influencer that’s rather uncomfortable. And that is that about 99% or more of influencers in the world, don’t actually know who they influence. And so they may have lots of followers. That’s wonderful. But what actually matters to a brand is which ones buy e-bikes because you tell, because you tell them to that’s actually what they wanna know. Yeah. So, so then you go, well, well, how many of these influencers have customers? And the answer is less than 1%. Okay. Well, of the ones that do have customers, how are they doing? They’re the biggest influencers in the world. Those are the Kim Kardashians and the, you know, Leo messes and all the biggest super superstars with hundreds of millions of followers, they all have worked this out. They all have multiple Shopify stores and brands and customers.

David
[02:22:41]
And so what happens is if you’re serious about being an influencer, there’s kind of, there’s being an influencer and saying, you know, Hey, I got a great merch deal. And then you go, please tell me, they’re letting you keep the customers. Of course they’re not, they take all their customers, right? Yeah. And you know, you’re making a few points on your, on your merch, but someone else is growing like crazy, thanks to you. And so that was really, the question is how can, how can an influencer start to actually build their own customers and start to own a brand? Yeah. And in doing so what’s kind of crazy is they become the retailer. So, okay. They’ve never even thought these thoughts like, wait, I’ll be the retailer. Well, what is a retailer? Let’s define a retailer. A retailer is someone who finds a customer and sells them something. 

David
[02:23:29]
That’s what the influencer just did. Right? They, they actually got them from not ever hearing about this thing to actually saying here, let me buy it. So can we change that relationship between brands and influencers? So that brands treat influencers to some extent, with more respect as frontline retailers. And by doing that, the influencers start to build their own customer databases. Why does that matter? Well, if you wanna remarket, you know, as an influencer, having that versus somebody else who goes, well, I sent all my clicks off to Amazon. The typical prices you see, you know, so if you Amazon actually publishes their rates. So if you send all your traffic to Amazon, which lots of influencers do, they’re paying three to 5% for the categories that matter to influencers and they keep all the customers. So in a typical scenario, as a retailer usually get, you know, anywhere, usually around 30%, sometimes as much as 50%, it depends on the category of the product. It can be less if it’s an e-bike for example, but whatever the, the product category is, it’s profoundly more than Amazon would ever pay you. And that’s now your customer for life. And these are very loyal people to influencers. So I just see a huge opportunity to start to sort of think about ways to help influencers become businesses in a way. But, but what we have to do is not make it hard for them and today too hard. Yeah. So most

Arlen
[02:25:00]
That’s really what was just coming to mind because a lot of these influencers, you know, they’re just used to promoting brands. They don’t care what happens on the back end. They just want, of course, to get their return. They wanna get that percentage commission. So yes. How do you make it so easy for them to really open up their, their own storefront, so to speak and all of that that goes into that, is it that’s I guess what you have to make easy for them.

David
[02:25:24]
Yeah. So that’s honestly, I would love to work with Shopify on that because I think the opportunity that they have to grow yeah. Is profound, but they have not made it easy for an influencer to have a store. And what we do is we end up working with the influencers who have stores and we will spend time trying to convince other influencers to build stores, but the opportunity space here. And again, I’m from the game industry. I’m, I’m looking at this going, what is going on here? Like why is this structured the way it is, this is not optimal or even close to it. Yeah. As far as all of these people engaging with each other. And so that’s what we are doing is we’re trying to build the technology to make all of that possible. So let’s say an influencer has a store today.

David
[02:26:10]
We just did a watch on summer race sites. He has like 26 million, I think followers. Now we can bridge her store and the brand that she wants to work with without her ever touching the product at all, she has no interest, but what we’re not doing is we’re not some drop shipping company. That’s bringing things from China. What we’re actually doing is putting real brands together. And I think of influencers as brands that creates another fun conversation, which is this idea of, I think influencers need to become brands, but I also think brands need to become influencers. And I think brands don’t understand that they already are influencers. They very commonly I’ll have a conversation with a, a brand and it’ll be like, we’re in the spaghetti business. And it sounds good. But by saying that you just massively limited the potential of your company.

David
[02:27:02]
So, you know, then you say to them, well, what’s your expansion plans in the future? Well, we’re thinking of adding another flavor of spaghetti and you’re like, I get that. I understand that, but that’s not who you really are. If you look at your website, you’re showing me recipes that look fantastic with your spaghetti in them. But there’s other ingredients too. And the place settings are gorgeous and people, you can guarantee there’s people looking at that table going, where do I get that cutlery? And we see that all the time with influencers, they’ll be trying to sell a bag and, and the comments are, wow, what? Those are the coolest sunglasses. How do I get those sunglasses? They’re like, I’m not trying to sell you the sunglasses right now, but that’s the way the world works is we can’t help, but go. Those are great sunglasses.

David
[02:27:47]
I love the knife and fork. How do I get these ingredients? I want the exact ingredients to make this. I don’t want some weird version of it. And they end up going on Amazon and trying to find the components of something because they can’t buy it from. So we keep saying to the brands, do you really, really want them to buy everything else? They eat related to your product elsewhere. Like you want them every time they buy your spaghetti to open a tab and start buying everything else, like what, what’s the best pot to cook spaghetti in? Why isn’t that just create another category and put in there? The things you recommend. Yeah. They’re going to go somewhere else and do that. And so this is something that’s a maturity thing with brands. Some of them really get that and understand that there’s a, they have a bigger vision for who they are than just this one niche thing. But if you can’t think of what it is, just look at your own pictures and you know, and see what else, you know, invariably, you see that the helmet with the bike and that they don’t sell the helmet with the bike.

Arlen
[02:28:47]
What’s what, what all is in your world, in the whole ecosystem of your product line. Now, the interesting question that I have now though, is, you know, with these brands and when they’re formulating these relationships with these influencers, and let’s say, you’re going through the process and you’re getting the influencers to really kind of set up shops, so to speak, how does it work when they’re negotiating, negotiating? What are they paying? Are they, or do you approach them where they’re buying your product at bulk for a, you know, almost like a wholesale rates selling it directly? How does, how exactly does that work? Cause I know there’s a lot of ways you can come into it.

David
[02:29:26]
Well, yeah, that’s a great question, cuz I actually want to have a button for that that says, you know, I’d like to buy, oh, hold on. There’s a minimum order. Yeah. Right size. And we have to negotiate restocking fees and all of that stuff in reality, by doing it digitally, like the way we are, where we connect the supplier straight into the store, there is no contracts, there’s no negotiation. None of it is necessary. But what does happen, which is kind of interesting is we’re almost like a dating site where you have a brand, that’s the retailer with the traffic and you’ve got the supplier, who’s making the product and they wanna work together, but they have to meet. And so effectively our platform lets them discover each other. And then this one can make requests to this one or vice versa and then they can approve.

David
[03:30:16]
So it’s, it’s just like, it’s, you know, it’s just like a dating thing where they both have to opt in and then they get to start doing business together. It actually creates the same problems as dating, meaning that in dating some people on a dating platform are so incredibly popular that they actually want to leave the platform. Cuz it’s so annoying that they have so much work to do to manage all of the inbounds and people get upset with them. And so it’s up to the dating platform to in some clever way, keep that under control. And we do that on our platform a bit like Instagram does with the verified, you know, the blue check mark you can get on, on Instagram. We have something like that. That sort of, that puts the high quality brands together. So they can do business without having too much noise.

David
[03:31:02]
I see. But, but ultimately it’s interesting. Just this is, what’s so fun about it when you’re at the tip of the spear at something like we are definitely at the tip of the spear of this industry, but it means you’re getting up every day going, well, how would you solve that? Cuz that hasn’t been solved yet. Right? Like how do we, how do we solve these things? And then we look for inspiration and how to do it. But ultimately this idea of letting brands discover and work together is, is a core piece of what we do. But what we’ve actually found is that is a bit of a CEO network out there that they all seem to know each other. And so it’s very common that a CEO of a brand already knows the heads of some of the other brands. They really like, okay.

David
[03:31:44]
So it’s a bit of an, I don’t know whether they’re meeting each other or how they’re doing that, but we’ve seen brands install on our platform and then have 10 other brands installed shortly thereafter that they link directly to. So they they’ve invited those brands in. And cuz if you think about it, if both sides have carro installed, then they can both do business immediately. So I see if, you know, another feature we’ve just added recently is upselling is also a bit of a problem for current brands because they tend to try to upsell their own products. Imagine you’re a, a coffee brand and really all you have is coffee. And now it’s checkout time. What are you gonna do? Upsell more coffee, you know like, Hey, do you want coffee with your coffee? And so, so we’re like, well hold on. What are all the things that go with that from the network, not from your store that we can add to your cart and that you can sell and it will be your sell.

David
[03:32:38]
Then we’ve realized if we do that with data and analytics, we can actually make it a smarter guess than a brand can make by themselves. And so it might be common that someone’s selling an electric toothbrush, but they have more electric stuff like electric shavers that they could try to upsell with their electric toothbrush. But the data shows that Kendall Jenner’s toothpaste will get more add to carts than anything in their store. So as a, as a brand owner, what do you wanna do with that information? You know, do you want us to help you get more conversion or do you want to just go ahead and keep showing them your products over and over? We had another thing that’s kind of fun is if you can add any products to your store, why not create a popup store it’s Halloween’s coming or fourth of July’s coming or Valentine days coming, why not create a popup store, put a bunch of products in there that fit perfectly for that time of the year. And it won’t cost you anything because they’re all just partnerships. And when that date goes by, you can take it down. But in reality, your store feels fresh because you’re actually merchandising well, you know what I mean? Like you’re staying current, you’re relevant. Oh, it’s exciting. They have a whole bunch of stuff for Valentine’s day. Great.

Arlen
[03:33:51]
And the, the power to that is, especially if you’re, let’s say a seasonal business where you’re only typically selling one time of the year, then if you incorporate all of these other holidays into it, products from all of these other holidays that gives you kind of the full scope of the year to be able to sell products and fill in the gaps of those times where your business is slow. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And it, it really sounds like as far as the relationship forming, you know, when you’re getting these influencers to be these advocates and promote their brand or empowering them to really kind of be the retailers is it really is really just up to the brand and an influencer and whatever you, you, you negotiate, it doesn’t sound like there’s really like a boiler plate or a template. Oh, for saying, okay, you gotta offer ’em this, you’ve got to sell, ’em a bulk of outta your product at this price. So it really just, just, you’re starting with like a clean slate and you just really kind of have to figure it out. I know just really is gonna depend on what you agree on, what they’re gonna be interested in and what you’re willing to do. And you know, just kind of go from there and then try to try to work it out between, between the two.

David
[03:34:55]
Well, because you’re interested in the influencer space so much, let’s get into some of the dirty little secrets about the, the influencer space. One of them is that if you, if you force influencers to sign contracts and negotiate terms and control what they say, I mean, hold on a minute, these are content creators. Yeah. And you’re going to tell them how to create content. I can’t tell you how many brands do the vast majority of brands literally don’t trust the influencer to even what they say and right. And it’s like, okay, so are they billboards? Or are they influencers and slash content creators? And the answer is they make way better, more compelling content than the brand does. Every single time they have millions of followers and the brand doesn’t period. So the last thing you want is the, is the, the brand trying to push them around, but the brands can’t help themselves.

David
[03:35:48]
They just can’t. And so they end up trying to force the influencer to do stupid things that say things that they wouldn’t say, and they restrict them. You’re not allowed to do this. You’re not allowed to do this. Literally. You wouldn’t even believe what, what goes on behind the scenes. And, and so, you know, what happens is the minute the influencer is allowed to legally delete that post, they will delete it from their feed because they never wanted it there in the first place. Wow. So just to be clear, they take the money, they’ll do the post, they hate it and they’ll delete the post. The minute they can. Is that the relationship you want to have with your influencers? I can’t understand why so many brands choose that relationship. It’s ridiculous. And so the second thing that happens is quite commonly brands. Don’t take time to test influencers and work with them and get to know them to understand why people follow them. And, and it’s stunning. How many just go, oh, he’s pretty, I’ll just have her sell my bikinis. And it’s like that. Do you know why her followers are following her? They’re mostly male and they don’t buy bikinis.

David
[03:36:55]
Right? And, and yet you see it all the time. They’re so disappointed. The sales didn’t come through the sales didn’t come through because you didn’t take your time to understand who follows this influencer. Right? And the influencer will work with you if they really like your brand. And that’s what we’ve trying to do. Another piece that’s not obvious is that the social networks, I’m not going to say they do this on purpose, but let’s just say, when you actually look behind the scenes at the data, the vast majority of their followers don’t see your post. So, so what’s actually occurring and it’s shocking. Like the percentages are ridiculous. What actually happens is if you want to be successful with influencers, you actually have to boost their posts. Why? Because, you know, you can imagine if you were building the platforms, why they would do that.

David
[03:37:45]
And so this is a good thing by the way, because what you can do is you can actually test the posts and see is it working and then, and then add some, some boost behind it. And if you do that, it’s called whitelisting, but you can create relationships directly with the influencer and then boost their posts. They’ll, you’ll see a huge uptick in the amount of people that start transacting because of it. And so, you know, but see how you have to be careful. You have to engage the influence of the correct way. Don’t treat them like a billboard, understand their audience, test them, and then boost them that a lot of people just aren’t doing that. And that’s why your influencer, program’s not killing it. Yeah,

Arlen
[03:38:23]
For sure. For sure. And thank you for sharing that, cuz that’s a big thing. It is a lot of it is people get wowed by the follower counts and they’re thinking, okay, wow, I’ve got all these followers. They’re gonna expose my brand to. But if you do a little more digging, like you said, in the example of the bikini majority of that particular influencers followers could be males. And so, you know, males are not buying bikinis typically. And so, you know, and unless you do that due diligence, you’re never gonna know and you’re gonna be burning, you know, a lot of cash, you know, as we get ready to, to wrap things up. One of the last things I wanted to ask you is as far as where is all of this headed as where do you think this is headed? Cuz you’ve been around for a long time and you, we’re kind of on the cusp of this whole influencer marketing, it’s really reached kind of a peak. And as you mentioned, we’re kind of shifting now into this whole metaverse virtual world. Do you feel that the power of influencers really is going to get, I guess you could say kind of a renewed strength in this world or how do you kind of see it when we kind of enter this whole metaverse so, you know, virtual world to speak.

David
[03:39:30]
I think authenticity is actually the answer. If they turn into walking adverts slash walking billboards, I think it’s actually, people are gonna lose confidence in them. When you, when you do surveys, you find that the trust is very important between the influencer and the follower. And so in the future, I think if, if they can do that, then it becomes actually a question of there’s something, a concept that I think about a lot is moving people on the internet is a terrible idea. So every time you say I’m just gonna get these people over here to go over here on the internet, that’s a terrible idea. That’s a very, very painful and expensive process. Yeah. And so I think what you have to do is always bring the transaction to where the people, you know, that’s saying fish where the fish are, is the same is, is that concept.

David
[04:40:19]
If people are shopping in social media, then bring the, bring the content to, to social media and let, let the actual transaction close there. Some brands can’t get just can’t think that way. They’re just like, no, no, you have to leave social media and come to my store. And then we’ll transact with you. And it’s like, that’s not the best way to transact with someone on social media. The metaverse is gonna be even worse. You think I’m gonna leave the metaverse to go to your store? Is that ever going to happen? The answer is never. So right. The transactions have to happen where they are and the innovation, the people who are gonna win and the people who think of ways to get transaction to happen easier and easier and easier and easier. So, you know, you start asking yourself how effortless it can. It actually become, my last company was all about streaming video games from the cloud, because then you wouldn’t need consoles anymore.

David
[04:41:14]
And the fact that Sony bought our company is a bit of a signal. Is that part of the future or not? And so in reality, how easy could that make it? If you were watching a video on YouTube about a video game, you could just jump in and play that video game in YouTube, right? You said, never leave YouTube. I, this game looks great. Can I play it? Oh yes, I can. That’s the future for streaming gaming, that kind of unbelievable accessibility to be able to teleport into places with your friends. And so why would e-commerce any different? Like why wouldn’t, e-commerce just be, there’s a, there’s a quote actually from, I think of bill gates or someone from the past business at the speed of thought business at the speed of thought is a really exciting concept for me, because that means you’re actually starting with zero clicks and working backwards.

David
[04:42:04]
So for you to have to put a click, there should be a whole argument over why there has to be a click. Right. And, and it’s just a very different way of thinking of just moving people around. It’s like, no, no, I’ll literally, I mean, what made Amazon so successful? I think initially was this idea of one click shopping. Yeah. They, you know, it was such that patent turned out to be incredibly valuable for them. The idea that you could just click and we’re done the product’s on the way. Exactly. Right. How important was that Barry? And so I think that’s the way, as long as the brands are saying to themselves, are we making this easier or are we making this harder? It’s a very important discussion to have.

Arlen
[04:42:44]
Yeah, for sure. Definitely. That’s really what it all has to come down to the ease for that in the customer and then, you know, bringing what you are offering to them and not the not vice versa cuz that’s, that’s just not the way to go. Well, yeah, this has been awesome. David, I’ve learned a lot and I appreciate you coming on the podcast, a lot of golden nuggets, and I’m really excited about the future. As we see this whole metaverse is really gonna be interesting where, where e-commerce is gonna kinda meld into that. So I’m excited about that, but lastly, you know, before we let you go, I always like to switch gears here. My last final question, just so our audience can get to know you a little bit better. If you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think our listeners would be interested to know.

David
[04:43:26]
Well, for me personally, I believe in the concept of learning a little bit about everything, meaning it’s actually something that I’ve found incredibly valuable in my life. And what it means is if there’s something, you know, like let’s say you choose photography or I don’t know, woodworking or whatever you’re into. There are so many different subjects and everyone is interested in something. So have you ever played tennis? Have you ever gone water skiing? Have you ever snowboarded, have you ever parachute jumped? Have you ever scoop dive? You need to, and why do you need to, is because someday you’re gonna be sitting in a meeting with, with somebody who’s really into that thing and you will have immediate rapport with that individual wherever they are. I once was sitting on an airplane flight to New York and there’s a guy sitting next to me and I’m like, I wonder what his thing is.

David
[04:44:13]
And I start talking to him and he’s in the iron or business. And I’m like, oh, well that’s it. This guy’s got me. I have nothing. I don’t have a single thing. I don’t know nothing about the industry. And so, you know, that was one of the first that ever really stumped me. And I noticed he was playing a little handheld game console and he is playing tennis and, and I go, oh, I, I see you’re playing this game. And I know the people that made that game and he goes, I invested in this game.

David
[04:44:40]
Oh wow. So I invested in the team that made this game. And so boom, we’re off we go and we’re having a conversation. And then he said, look, I’m gonna go and see you two tonight at Madison square garden. Would you like to join me? Turns out to be one of the most wealthy people ever. He had a whole row to himself at Madison square garden. It’s just the two of us sitting in our row. And we got to like right over the stage watching you two. And I’m sitting there watching you two thinking to myself, if I hadn’t have turned to him, I would not be here right now. And so how many opportunities are out there for people when you actually as long, but you have to have the ammo with you. So this, if he said I’m into water skiing, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll have stuff to talk about.

David
[04:45:24]
I’ve stories to tell. And so that I think is there’s a quote, which is something like learn a little, everything about something, about everything and everything about something. And that basically means in my case, that would be the video game industry. And maybe someday I’ll hopefully grasp the eCommerce space, but learning a little bit about everything else, you’ll find that people will actually respect you more when you care about what they do. So if you’re working with an animator, but you actually care, you’re not just like go do that animation, which is the way they, they normally get treated. Right. But you’re kind of fascinated and you actually care. Then you’ll hear them saying, this guy really cares about this stuff that we’re doing and it creates a relationship. So that would be, that would be my thing in a very long-winded way. But basically that makes sense.

Arlen
[04:46:15]
Definitely. Then thank you for sharing that. It makes total sense. You know, the more and more I interact with people, I see it. You, you have to really diversify what you’re into things you’re exposed to because other, if you don’t, you know, you’re gonna encounter people and you know, there may be into something, you have no idea what that is. And then there’s just really kind of no commonality. And so if you, if you’re able to diversify and, and take a, you know, a genuine interest in a lot of different things that really can, can, can open doors for you. So yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I really, really appreciate that. And David, before we let you go, if any of our listeners wanna reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about e-commerce e-commerce marketing or anything under the sun, what’s the best way for them to reach you.

David
[04:46:58]
LinkedIn I’m D Perry. So if you search for D P E R R Y as one of the, the LinkedIn people, I’m there to get our app. If you go to get carro, G E T C a R R o.com. If you mention this podcast, so email, hello, get carro.com and tell them that you listen to this podcast, they will take really good care of you. You will get V I P concierge support. So right. Please do that. And yeah, if you have a Shopify store, please check this out and tell us what you think.

Arlen
[04:47:26]
All right. That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I definitely recommend all of our listeners to check that out and, you know, thank you again, David, for joining us today on the e-commerce marketing podcast. Great. Thanks so much.

speaker 1
[04:47:39]
Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast. 

Podcast Guest Info

David Perry
CEO of Carro