September 25, 2023 • 45 mins
Have you ever stopped to ponder the power of reviews and customer loyalty in the world of e-commerce? Picture this episode as a golden ticket, unlocking the secrets of harnessing these factors, especially in a landscape where customer acquisition costs are spiralling upwards.
As our spotlight guest, Mike Barardo, CEO of Stamped.io, takes us through his journey of building the North American team and expanding their product catalogue, you'll experience firsthand the surprising benefits of negative reviews, the influence of Generative AI on customer trust, and the wealth of insights NPS campaigns can furnish.
Brace yourselves as we venture into the intriguing world of loyalty programs and VIP tiers, sifting through creative retention strategies. Imagine standing out as a brand, dazzling your customers with unique experiences, and striking that elusive balance between over-giving and just right.
With Stamped.io at the helm, enabling these customer experiences, you'll uncover how enticing loyalty programs can be a game-changer, and the role they play in convincing potential customers to take that leap of faith and make their first purchase.
Lastly, we navigate the intriguing landscape of user-generated content, unveiling its might to boost conversion rates on e-commerce sites. Feel the thrill as we share strategies for increasing review collection volume, like retouching email subject lines and copy, and employing multiple channels. Discover the potential pitfalls of merging reviews from diverse regions and how negative reviews can work in your favour, building trust. Prepare to be amazed as we reveal how data can amplify customer feedback, bolster customer loyalty, and escalate lifetime value. Join us for this enlightening journey and revolutionise your e-commerce game.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Hi, welcome to the Big Commerce Podcast.
Hello, welcome to a brand newepisode of the Big Commerce
Podcast.
I'm your co-host, luigi, and intoday's episode I'm joined by
Mike Barardo, ceo of Stampedio.
Stamped is a reviews andloyalty platform and in the
episode we learn about the suiteof products stamped off as its
customers.
The importance of reviews andloyalty is retention programs
(00:24):
due to the cost of acquiringcustomers increasing, how
negative reviews and NPScampaigns can help improve your
products and service, and theeffect Generative AI will have
on customers' trust ofe-commerce websites.
Enjoy the episode.
Hi, mike, welcome to thepodcast.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Awesome.
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
How are?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
you Doing well thanks .
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Good.
So you're from Stamped, one ofour partners based in New York.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, based in New York.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself
first and then a bit aboutStamped?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, so a little bit about me.
I've been with Stamped forabout two years.
Prior to that I spent most ofmy career in startups in the
e-commerce space, was actuallyon the D2C side of things,
previously at Travel Goods D2Cbrand called away for four years
.
It kind of got my exposure to,I would say, wave 1 or Wave 2 of
the kind of D2C trend there andthat was a big impetus for me
(01:18):
wanting to switch over to moreof the tech side of Stamped.
In terms of Stamped itself,company was started in 2016,.
Has a pretty typical foundingstory, I would say, of a
merchant who was frustrated withwhat was available to him.
He was based in Singapore andthe reviews front in particular,
I think just wasn't satisfiedwith what was out there or felt
(01:41):
it was too expensive for thefunctionality and decided to
kind of build his own.
And then in the interveningyears since that catalog has
expanded to user-generatedcontent, loyalty and we're kind
of continuing to evolve it today.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So in some respects, if you've got a problem, try and
solve it Totally, building out.
Yeah, how are you enjoying yourrole as CEO of Stamped?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, it's been great it's been, I mean.
So I mentioned there that thecompany was founded in Singapore
, and so one of the mostinteresting parts of my two
years here has been we've reallybuilt it was a kind of small
team when I first joined.
We've really built out the teamin North America in particular
Most of our teams in Canadabetween Toronto and Vancouver,
and so it's just been really funto build out a team and a
(02:25):
really exciting time for thespace, kind of coming out of the
tail end of COVID and now kindof into, I guess sort of back to
normal.
I would say so it's been a tonof fun and really excited about
kind of the product opportunityin front of us too.
So yeah, it's been a blast.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
I think timing-wise it's worked quite well as well,
because the cost of acquisitionfor new clients is going up.
So everyone's kind of talkingabout retention strategies and
how do we keep customers comingback?
And obviously your product justslots right in.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Totally.
Yeah, I hinted at this before,but one of the things that I
took from my experience on theDTC side of things out of way
was I think those early waves ofdirect consumer were like a lot
of brands whether it be away orCasper, others you'd be
familiar with, who were reallypredicated on leveraging at the
time was a somewhat new form oftargeted advertising for
(03:15):
building these DTC businessesand I think it's become clearer
over time that focusing furtherdown funnel not at the expense
of advertising, but I thinkfocusing further down funnel on
the conversion, repeat, purchase, lifetime value stages of
things is really reallyimportant and that's kind of the
key thing we're trying to do atStamps.
So to your point, I think oneof our best value props to
(03:37):
merchants is you need thesepieces to complement what you're
doing on the advertising sideto build a more sustainable,
more profitable business, andthat's really resonated at both
that conversion and that repeatstage.
I would say.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I mean there's.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Obviously, your product has kind of evolved over
time and added in someadditional functionality from
where it started.
But, like you said, it's allabout that trust and I think, as
the sector has become more oreach individual, I guess
individual sector has becomemore competitive and there's a
lot more merchants out there.
It's the merchants that investin building trust with their
(04:13):
existing customers, but also intheir image and their portrayal
of trust and looking after theirexisting and rewarding the
loyalty of their existingcustomers that really start to
stand out.
Because I see that kind of frommy perspective when I'm
shopping.
You've got so much choice.
Now how do you cut through thatnoise?
How do you stand out from thecompetition?
(04:34):
Because you've spoken aboutvalue proposition from your
perspective and it's the samewith merchants, especially when
you're selling.
D2c is slightly different, butif you look at like B2B or B2C
predominantly commoditizedproducts how do you stand out?
And with costs going up, youcan't always compete on price
and some merchants don't want tobecause it's just a race to the
(04:55):
bottom.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Totally yeah.
Actually, on the point ofcompeting on price, I think that
the real selling point of theloyalty product that we pitched
to a lot of merchants is thatobviously many people think
about that as a way to kind ofjuice the repeat part of your
business, but we actually seereally impressive results in
terms of just convincing someoneto purchase for the first time
because you have that loyaltyprogram, and in many cases I
(05:19):
think merchants even feel thatthey don't have to offer as much
on that first purchase discountIf they're able to sell someone
on all the benefits they'regoing to get as an ongoing
customer, kind of post firstpurchase from that loyalty
program.
So to your point, like it's agreat trust builder.
I think a lot of brands havecome to realize over the last
few years with the choice thatyou were referring to, that you
(05:40):
can't take for granted thatgetting someone in the door for
the first time and then hittingthem with those marketing emails
or those sale emails over thecourse of the next couple of
years is going to drive repeatwhen they have so many options
and also are just busy asconsumers, and so I think having
some proposition for them tocontinue purchasing with your
brand, whether that be rewards,whether that be something like
(06:01):
status or what we call VIP tierswithin our loyalty product.
It's extremely important and wealmost always see that in the
results, with increased repeatrates, increased repeat average
order values and all of that.
And for a lot of these brands,when they think about like the
key metric I hear most of themtalk about is MER or marketing
efficiency ratio, and whenthey're looking at just how much
(06:22):
revenue are we driving versusthe ad dollars we're putting in,
I think the thing we alwaystell them is, yeah, you can
continue to focus on making yourads or that acquisition funnel
more attractive, but the realway to drive that number in the
direction you why is to improvethe back end of that, which is,
what is your lifetime value,what is your repeat rate from
these customers.
And so I do think for us that,like I would say, in 2023, even
(06:45):
in a world where maybe theconsumer market has flattened
out from where it was in COVIDor gotten back to normal, demand
for the loyalty productscontinues to look almost like
the COVID period because ofexactly what you were saying,
which is like the acquisitionmarket has still been kind of up
and down to a degree, I wouldsay.
So it's been a reallyinteresting time to be in that
space.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
We're getting inquiries from B2C merchants
that they're kind of veryomnipresent, so they got offline
and online to be able toconsolidate that client
retention strategy.
So if someone's buying onlinethey can redeem their points
offline and vice versa, offersthat are online that they're
(07:24):
offline.
Because fundamentally thatcustomer, if you've got an
online and an offline presence,has one relationship with you.
They don't differentiatebetween online, offline, app,
whatever.
They want to just know that ifthey're dealing with that brand
they're going to get a unifiedservice or same types of service
, same types of benefits.
It's not going to inconveniencethem that they can only buy
(07:44):
online to get that offer or theycan only return online if they
bought online and so on.
And so it kind of makes sensethat if you're trying to
maintain or trying to kind ofretain that customer, that you
look at ways that, like you say,with the market efficiency,
make those marketing ads gofurther.
Because we've got merchants onerecently who did free delivery,
(08:07):
I think for four or six weeks,and basically the subsidies that
they put within the subsidisershipping came out of their
marketing budget because it wasa way of kind of retaining that
client and trying to elevate thelifetime value.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah, I think the point you made actually on
OmniChannel just to go back tothat for a second is really
really interesting To myexperience.
In a way, we had, by the time Ileft, like 12 or 13 first party
retail locations and we didn'thave a loyalty program at the
time, but we just had, like mostbrands, like a lot of
difficulty managing those on twodifferent systems and like
(08:46):
you've got your retail POS,you've got your whatever
e-commerce software you're using, it feels to the customer as a
result like a totally disjointedexperience, which is not what
the customer expects to yourpoint.
So this is, I think, one of thebiggest, I would say one of the
main areas that we've seendemand on the loyalty product.
We've started to dip our toeinto better supporting kind of
(09:06):
point of sale systems on theretail side.
But I think it's an area wewant to go a lot deeper on
because it is something that alot of these brands are
demanding and also, honestly,not even just their own channels
.
It's also like how do we retainone consistent relationship
with the customer even if theybuy our product on a non-owned
channel like Amazon or Walmartor targetcom or whatever?
(09:27):
So it's super interesting forus thinking about, like, how can
we help bridge some of thosechannels for these brands and
that's, honestly, loyalty andreviews?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
actually, you spoke about VIP kind of programs, and
that's something that I reallyadvocate because it's a way of
kind of tearing your customers,making them feel special.
It's a bit of a gated kind ofcommunity as well, because
you've got to have achieved acertain type of status.
We've seen it, obviously, withmost visibly with like airlines
(09:57):
the more times you fly, thehigher up the tiers you go.
But I think that's such a quickwin because if you've got the
ability to segment yourcustomers and say, right, you've
got to spend X amount toqualify for kind of VIP status.
How does your platform thenhelp a merchant to achieve that
without them having to jumpthrough so many hoops?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Totally yes.
This is one of the areas I'mmost excited about and I think
there's the most opportunity inour product.
The way that these tiers worktoday is pretty simple.
A brand will typically havelike the regular loyalty program
, right?
So they might have a few waysthat you can earn points in that
program.
Maybe you get one point perdollar spent when you make a
purchase.
You might get additional pointsfor following the brand on
(10:41):
Instagram or subscribing totheir newsletter or whatever it
might be, and then they'll havea set of kind of open to
everyone type redemption rules,which is, if you get 100 points,
you can redeem that for a 10%discount on your next order, or
you can redeem for a freeproduct with your next order
over $50.
We've got a ton of flexibilityin there.
What the VIP tiers do out of thebox today is they allow you to
(11:04):
offer special perks to peoplethat enter that VIP tier.
Right, so you might have a tierthat someone has to spend $500
over the course of their timewith the brand and then they
would get into, like your bronzetier, let's say, and then
you've got a silver and a goldtier Within that tier.
Stamp would enable you to offeradditional perks right.
So now, maybe because you're inthat tier, you get two points
per dollar spent instead of one,so you're earning more as you
(11:26):
go.
You get access to special perks.
You might even get access tocertain types of products for
free that are only available tothat VIP tier.
But the thing that's actuallybeen most interesting to me is
the way we're seeing brands useVIP tiers in ways that we don't
even really enable today, to behonest, and that I want us to
better enable.
So a good example would be,beyond those kind of advanced
(11:48):
earning or redemption rules, aswe would call them, we've seen
brands do things as creative aslike.
We have one brand here in NewYork that's like a loose leaf
tea brand, and one of therewards they would offer to
their top VIP tier was that youcould book a free 30 minute
tasting session with a teasommelier, which I thought was
like super cool.
So we're only really enablingthat today from the standpoint
(12:10):
of, like you know, essentiallythey know to offer that perk to
customers in that segment andthey send them an email with,
say, a booking link to set upthat session if they want, we
would like to get further intothe process of actually enabling
these experiences more out ofthe box, whether that be access
to a custom WhatsApp orcommunity WhatsApp or Slack
group or whatever it might beand so I think there's a lot of
(12:34):
opportunity there.
I think you've seen a lot ofexcitement in the DTC space
around memberships and justthese types of like status or
VIP tiers that enable reallyspecific benefits that go beyond
the core product, and I thinkwe can play a really important
role in enabling that andhelping brands stand out.
So this is one of the areas ofproduct I'm most excited about,
and we've got some cool stuffcoming in, like the next six to
(12:56):
nine months.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Do you think that DTC brands are spearheading the way
that kind of the retentionstrategies kick in?
Do you think they do somethingdifferent because obviously
they've got that directrelationship, whereas they're
not having to go throughdistributors or retail networks?
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Totally.
Yeah, I think it's.
You know, when I think aboutDTC loyalty, I actually think
it's really interesting because,on the one hand, there are some
limitations to what I thinkworks in the space.
If you compare it to like let'sjust use a membership program
like Amazon Prime or even likeyou know what some of the best
loyalty programs out there, likea Sephora, for example, is one
(13:31):
of the ones that you're quotedoften.
Those are, in Amazon's case,that's obviously the biggest
third party marketplace.
In Sephora's case, they've gotcrazy selection across.
You know tons of products andit's such an everyday purchase.
And so one of the things we docaution brands on sometimes is
like you need to think about thecontext of your own business
and whether the things that workfor those types of companies
(13:53):
with massive selection and, inAmazon's case, even the
logistics and infrastructurethey can put behind a two day
shipping promise on priming.
You need to really think aboutwhether that actually makes
sense for the use case that yourbrand plays in a customer's
mind.
So I think that's one of theconstraints, but on the flip
side, I think like you actuallyhave the ability to build much
deeper loyalty than some ofthose kind of marketplace or
(14:15):
multi brand type retailers areable to, and we see this all the
time, whether it be combiningloyalty with subscriptions for a
consumable product like coffee,for example, or any of these
things.
So I think it's an interestingtrade off and I think we've
tried to strike that middlebalance with brands, which is,
like you know, not every brandneeds the membership equivalent
(14:36):
of Amazon Prime.
It likely won't work for youwith your 10 skew product set,
but here's the things that youcan do actually that really do
build loyalty because you dohave such a niche product
offering and such kind of like adevoted following or customer
base.
So it's been interesting tokind of see that balance and
look at what the big players aredoing, but also make sure we're
helping brands understand, like, what the right offering for
(14:57):
them would be.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
If we just kind of go through the stamped suite of
products.
So you've got two main channels, You've got reviews and you've
got loyalty.
Under loyalty we've spokenabout kind of points and rewards
, We've spoken at a VIP programand I think referral programs
obviously are growing as peopletry to kind of have some passive
income or, you know, or makethe most of their influence in
(15:21):
other areas.
On the review side, becausethis is something that I don't
think gets the attention itsometimes deserves, because, you
know, e-con platforms havereview systems out of the box,
and then there's kind of there'sthe online independent review
engines, which people eitherlove or hate because they seem
to be so rigid in the way thatthey manage things.
(15:43):
But what I'm really interestedin so you offer product reviews
and ratings, UGC and then NetPromoter Score, which is
something that I think is reallyreally important and I again
think is underutilized.
Because I think, if you want, ifyou want really actionable
insights as to why yourcustomers are or are not buying
(16:06):
from you, that's probably whereit should start, because
whenever kind of I've been partof it, you know Net Promoter
Score campaigns you then get thefeedback saying I, you know why
would you?
I mean NPS for those that knowwe've all received those emails
from zero to 10, how you knowhow likely I to recommend us to
a friend.
And then obviously they'reskewed, that they're not equal.
Anyone that gives you a I thinkit's, a nine or 10 is a
(16:29):
promoter.
Zero to six I think is is adetractor and everyone else is
passive.
But it's great because it saysyou know well, your shipping
costs are expensive or you tooktoo long, or it is great that I
ordered at 10pm and I got theparcel, you know, within two
days or whatever, whateverinformation it is.
So let's talk a little bitabout kind of Net Promoter Score
and kind of the update thatyou're seeing with your
(16:50):
merchants, because I think thatis a really, really important
piece of understanding yourcustomers.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Yeah, I completely agree.
I think it's actually it'simportant in combination,
obviously, with the productreviews component, because I
think what ends up happening isobviously the feedback that
comes in on product reviews is,of course, product specific and
I think that by combining thatwith Net Promoter Score, usually
what you have from a brand'sperspective is the ability to
(17:16):
understand, first of all, tocontextualize, what they're
seeing on product reviews.
If you have an amazing NPSscore when you're sending that
out to customers and you have acertain product that's
performing pretty poorly from areviews perspective, that
actually makes that product lookeven worse in comparison
because you clearly have suchhigh brand affinity that I think
that's a big piece of it.
The other thing is that wereally and I can talk a little
(17:39):
bit about some of the specificfeatures here in a bit if it's
interesting but we do a lot totry to help brands understand,
on both the product reviews andthe NPS side, what are some of
the common themes coming out ofthat so that they can kind of
action those things as a brand.
I think that when you thinkabout from a brand's perspective
, their product is obviouslyreally important, but probably
(17:59):
as important in the consumer'smind is what is your delivery
experience like and what is yourcustomer support experience
like?
Those pieces really only comeout on the NPS side of things
when a brand is thinking abouthow do people evaluate our
support experience and reallypeople think of that honestly as
part of the product.
Nps is one of the best ways touncover that, whereas your
product feedback is going to bemuch more quality and product
(18:22):
experience focused.
I think they're two reallyimportant pieces and we're super
focused on helping brands,particularly with an internal
tool like NPS, really figure outhow to leverage that into the
decisions they make about howthey do customer support, how
they do shipping and deliveryand all those different things.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I use reviews quite a lot when I'm buying different
products, For example, whetherit's something that I don't buy,
it's not repeat purchases.
Say, if I'm buying a pair ofrunning shoes or a pair of
running socks or whatever, I'llread the reviews just to get
understanding of quality and fit.
And user-generated content iseven better because you can
(19:04):
interpret a review.
Somebody can say well, I boughtthis in a Fella Pa after it was
tight or it wasn't comfortable.
But sometimes if you've gotuser-generated content,
especially visual ones, so whereyou've got photos or videos,
you can then look at all thoseother elements that maybe
someone hasn't touched on interms of their review to
actually maybe that fits fine,or the materials nice, or I
don't like the material or itlooks a bit tight or whatever.
(19:27):
Let's talk a bit about that,because I'm seeing more interest
in the UGC requirement from amerchant.
So people are actually sayingthe reviews again.
We're talking about standingout.
The reviews just aren't enough.
Yeah, and partly maybe becausewe're becoming really impatient
and we don't want to trawlthrough 16 reviews.
Maybe if we see a widget ofphotos or videos or whatever it
(19:52):
is then, we're going to be ableto make a faster, quicker
decision.
But what do you see within UGCspace?
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, great question.
So this is actually one of myfavorite topics because I think
that it touches on and you weresaying this before, but it
touches on one of the mostconfusing things to me about the
review space and e-commerce andactually why I was even
attracted to it in the firstplace, which is I just don't see
enough discussion generallyabout conversion, and that's the
whole reason that you areleveraging reviews on site in
(20:25):
the first place.
Often in our sales cycle withcustomers, they'll come back to
us and say, hey, competitor XYZsaid that they've got a 4%
response rate on review requests.
What's your response rate?
And ours is strong and we havethat number available.
But I'm like this is the wrongquestion.
The right question should bewhen the methods that you make
available to us to deployreviews on site whether it be on
(20:46):
a landing page or a productpage or in checkout what
influence is that having onconversion on my site?
Or if you share those reviewsout to Facebook or Instagram
shops, which is a feature wesupport how is it actually
providing lift on those channels?
That's the whole reason toactually collect reviews.
So back to your question.
I think the thing that wereally focus on when it comes to
how to maximize conversion.
(21:07):
Out of some of the ways we allowreview display on site, there's
two main things that I think wesee as providing the biggest
conversion lift when peopleinteract with them.
The first one is photo andvideo.
To your point, it's typicallylike being able to see the
product.
Particularly, seeing theproduct on especially if it's
like a parallel shoes on someonewho looks like they're like a
similar size or build to you isactually really important, and
(21:32):
so it has a major conversionbenefit.
It also, by the way, isproviding potential assets to
that brand for ad and ownedmarketing channels, which is
hugely valuable, and it's one ofthe reasons that brands who
work with us on reviews andloyalty almost always
incentivize photo and videoupload through their loyalty
program.
So you get some extra benefitfor that, because there is a
little bit more friction to theconsumer to leave that.
(21:53):
But hugely valuable to theconversion experience.
And the other piece I was goingto mention, which is UGC in a
way, but less in a visual way,is that we also really encourage
brands to collect moreinformation at the point of the
review request.
So not just how did you likethe product, but I'll use like a
skincare example, alsounderstand from the customer
(22:15):
what is your skin type dry, oily, whatever what is your skin
tone?
Have you ever used a product inthis category?
And then we'll allow them touse those as kind of like
display filters when theydisplay their reviews on site.
And to the point you weremaking, say about shopping for
running shoes, the ability toquickly filter down for reviews
that are relevant to thequestion you maybe still have in
(22:35):
mind or are relevant to someonelike you, be it size or
whatever it is like.
That is where we see the biggestconversion, uplift the most
engagement.
So I think, and I also considerthat a form of UGC.
So UGC around reviews ingeneral, I think is like the
lynchpin to driving higherconversion and it's why we try
to really encourage brands,whether it be combining with
loyalty or just within thereviews product itself, to
(22:56):
really incentivize that type ofbehavior from consumers.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
One thing that's really touch on there was that
you that the merchant canleverage another part of your
product to actually incentivizefor.
So they haven't got to go andget a third party system or, you
know, configure or buildsomething custom just to get it
done.
It's out of the suite ofproducts that you offer and so
let's just stay on reviews.
So obviously, kind of havingreviews, having genuine reviews,
(23:26):
can influence potentialcustomers in terms of their
buying decision.
What tips or kind of strategieswould you recommend merchants
can undertake in order toincrease the uplift of reviews
being left on their website?
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Yeah, so a few things that the actual like in terms
of increasing kind of the volume.
There's a few things we do.
One is we enable collection viamultiple channels, so not only
email but collection via SMS,collection via like a form on
site and a few of thesedifferent pieces, even
collection through a third partyintegration with a marketing
communication tool like Klaviaor TENF.
(24:05):
So that's one of the thingsthat has really helped in terms
of kind of collection rates.
The other thing is we reallytry to share data with merchants
to inform the way that theybuild their collection flow in
our product.
So examples of that are likeyou should always be iterating
on your subject line and yourcopy in the review request email
itself, trying different things.
See what gets the best responserate.
(24:25):
You should almost always behave a multi if you're doing
email, let's say a multi emailsequence.
So don't just prod someone oncebut come back seven days later
and ask them once again to leavea review.
We usually see up to three orfour emails in that sequence.
You see a pretty consistentuplift in response rate.
I don't remember the numbersexactly, but it's something like
(24:47):
, I think, for brands that workwith us and only use one email
in that sequence, it's like a 4percent response rate.
By the time you look at brandsusing three emails in that
sequence, it's up to five and ahalf or 6 percent.
So it's pretty significant.
So those are some reallyimportant pieces, I think.
And the one other thing I'll sayat the collection stage is that
it's not just volume that wefocus on although that is
(25:07):
important but in terms of how doyou ensure that the quality and
usefulness of those reviews ishigh?
We talked about UGC andincentivizing UGC, so I'll leave
that to the side.
But one other thing we do is weactually have a feature that
it's an AI-based feature thatbasically prompts the user to
reference topics that have beenreferenced previously by other
(25:29):
reviewers.
So for my skincare example, itmight be something like other
reviewers have talked abouttexture or whatever the other
pieces might be, and it goesgreen, as you mentioned it in
your own review, and it's a coolfeature.
But what it does is itbasically encourages longer,
more useful reviews, and thoseare the ones that get more
(25:49):
engagement on site and drivemore conversion on site.
So it's both a volume andquality thing and we try to
focus on both sides of that.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
And from a merchant perspective, because those
reviews were left on the website, that's not necessarily where
they're syndicated to you plugin with other systems as well.
Totally.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Yeah, we think about the usefulness of reviews in
three channels.
One is on-site landing pages,product pages, checkout etc.
And I just talked about theconversion left there.
And then we think about twoother channels.
So the first one is what wecall owned marketing channels,
so that would be your email andwherever you're doing email and
SMS from.
So like Clavio, for example,two ways it's really useful in
(26:30):
that channel.
One is in the content itself,so you might feature a positive
review for a product in amarketing campaign.
But it's also the segmentationor the data side of things.
So we work with a supplementbrand who just launched a second
version of their initialproduct.
They're pretty early stage.
They launched a V1 and then sixmonths later they launched a V2
.
They really specificallytargeted their V2 launch
(26:51):
messaging to be different intargeting negative reviewers of
that V1 launch.
And hey, we addressed yourfeedback on X, y and Z and I
think that's really powerful asa segmentation lever.
If you think about a lot ofthese D2C brands, they don't
actually know a lot about you.
You might have purchased fromthem twice.
They know what you ordered andthey know when you ordered it.
(27:12):
They know whether you returned,but now, with our information.
They know how you felt aboutthe product, the sentiment of
that review, which we'll alsocapture in some of those pieces.
So that's really helpful inthose own channels.
And then, lastly, I think thepoint you were referencing there
is many of these brands areincreasingly going multi-channel
.
So that could be a retailerlike Walmartcom, targetcom, and
(27:35):
we'll kind of facilitatesyndication to those channels.
It could be some of the newsocial shopping opportunities,
so Facebook and Instagram shops,or we're exploring something
with TikTok shops, and so wesyndicate reviews to those
channels.
And those platforms have beenreally keen to work together
because they see the same datawe do on merchant sites, which
is that increasing review counton key products really drives
(27:57):
conversion.
So we think about those as kindof the three main ways to be
able to leverage reviews.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
And you mentioned briefly AI, so I don't think we
can have a podcast episodewithout mentioning chatGPT.
What kind of impact has AIengines like chatGPT had on
customers' perception oftrusting reviews?
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah.
So I think I wouldn't say we'veheard a ton about it yet from
brands directly, but what Iexpect will actually happen here
is that it will significantlyincrease the value of reviews,
and we like stamped and, to beclear, most of our competitors
do this too, but we willspecifically verify reviews for
(28:42):
merchants.
So basically, we're confirmingthat that review came from an
email address which alsopurchased that product from you,
so we know that it is an actualpurchaser of the product, right
, and so those reviews can beguaranteed to be authentic.
And that's already valuabletoday.
But if you think about a worldwhere the place that I expect
GPT to have the biggestimmediate impact in e-commerce
is actually a super high volumeof low value content that is
(29:06):
mostly SEO focused, so brandsare all of a sudden able to
produce five times, 10 times,more content on a blog and they
know which keywords they'resupposed to be covering for, and
I think, on a relative basis,that increases the value of
authentic user feedback versus aproliferation of lower value
content out there.
(29:27):
So I actually think it works infavor of some of these more
kind of like mechanisms wheretrust is baked in, like verified
reviews.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
I would 100% agree with you, because you do see
those kind of genuine pieces ofcontent coming through and if
you've obviously verifiedreviews, that makes sure that
you know the customer browsingthe website or purchasing knows
that it's come from somebody whohas actually experienced that
product.
Just on a kind of side note,one thing that I do find a bit
(30:00):
annoying from my perspectivewhen I'm looking at reviews,
whether they're verified or not.
I mean, obviously havingverified reviews is vital when
you're making a decision, butwhat I find doesn't always work
Well and I think this is forinternational merchants is where
you've got consolidated reviewsfrom different regions on that
(30:23):
one product.
So the example was I was buyingsome some socks yesterday from
a large website and they hadreviews that were in German and
I'm young in the UK.
I was on the UK website, butwhat they're doing is they're
consolidating all those reviewsfor that product.
Yeah, and the problem that Ithink that that sometimes can
create is that maybe theexpectation or the or the needs
and requirements of somebody ina different country, a different
(30:45):
than somebody you know, forexample, if you're selling a
winter jacket to somebody in theUK, their standards are going
to be much lower than you know.
Selling it to somebody in theNordics where they need you know
is they're going to be goingout for three, four months of
the year in minus 20 Celsiustemperatures, whereas in the UK.
(31:05):
So I think that's one of thedangers of trying to kind of
just cram in the reviews is thatdifferent markets have
different requirements, so thepeople buying those products
will have different things.
So you know, for example, itcould receive a negative review
from a customer in the Nordics,but actually for people in the
UK it might be the best productaround.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yeah, yeah, and actually so that last point you
know.
So, first of all, I completelyagree on the general point.
It's one of the reasons that,like filtering both behind the
scenes and then making filteringoptions available to the
customer, I think are a reallyimportant part of reviews
display.
But the last point you made isactually one of my favorite
things to talk about with brands, which is the importance of
(31:46):
negative reviews generally.
So, first of all, like whenyou're featuring first party
reviews on your site, meaningyou collected them from
merchants and it's not like anAmazon or a third party
marketplace where you know thatthe, the review collector is not
the product seller, right, soyou're already in a consumer's
mind they're likely looking atyour reviews with a bit more
skepticism because they knowthis is like your first party
(32:08):
channel and the bias we see froma lot of brands, which we've
really tried to discourage, islike oh, I should only show
positive stuff.
Well, first of all, if somebodycomes to your site and sees
that you have a thousand reviewson a product and a five star
rating, like a five point, oh,almost always and we've seen
this reaction in customerresearch like almost always,
they're like I don't believethis, it doesn't make any sense,
(32:30):
right?
And then the second thing and Ithink this is really important
is where negative reviews canreally help.
So I've been making this pointof like you need to find a way
to display reviews that arerelevant to the question the
person's trying to answer, thetype of person they are or where
they live.
To your point, one of the realvalues you can provide with
negative reviews is whencustomers see those.
It builds trust andauthenticity and oftentimes one
(32:51):
of the best roles they can playis like, let's say, you're that
exact situation you talked about.
So you're shopping for a wintercoat in the UK and you actually
see a few negative reviews frompeople in like I don't know,
like Northern Canada or like theNordics, let's say, right, and
you actually recognize, okay,they're showcasing honest
content here, but this actuallyis not my concern.
(33:12):
So I'm actually fine with thisand everyone else I'm seeing
seems to be saying it's warmenough.
I see a few reviews from youknow places that are more like
where I live and it's warmenough, and that has a lot of
value in pushing that person totrust what they're seeing and
then get them over the hump froma conversion perspective.
So this is something we reallyhighlight to brands is like you
need to think about negativereviews, as your product is not
(33:35):
going to be perfect for everycustomer.
Negative reviews very oftencome from more edge case
situations and showing that isactually really important
because it actually reinforcesthe fit or the confidence in the
product for, like your coretarget customer.
So, anyway, I just thought thatwas a great example.
We try to encourage exactlythat scenario and I probably
will use that example in amerchant conversation.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
I mean, I've had a merchant say that they don't
have, they're B2B but they don'thave reviews on their website
because they don't want to havethe negative ones displayed.
And having to educate somebodyand say people see right through
that that you're basicallycurating your reviews, I mean,
when I'm kind of filtering,whether it's for hotels or it's
(34:21):
for clothing or whatever it is,I think my benchmark is anything
below a four is probably notideal.
But if those ratings are beingskewed by people in another
country with differentexpectations, that's going to
have an impact on how approachthat product.
But at the same time, like toyour point, the merchant is, you
(34:43):
know, needs to do some work andsay right, why am I getting 72
stars or three stars and itcould be that you know the
quality isn't there or the fitisn't there.
You do see some reviews thataren't necessarily about the
product.
I mean, when I was buying theseproducts, one of the reviews
(35:03):
was a one star because theparcel arrived late.
So it wasn't actually a productreview as a service review, but
that's the channel that theyuse.
But I would agree that you knowkind of you can make a decision
.
Is the negative review an assetor a liability to my business?
I can put my head in the sandand say it's a liability, so I'm
just going to hide it.
Or actually you know, understandwhy you got the negative
(35:25):
feedback and you know I'm sureyou'd agree.
You either address it.
Or you know directly with thecustomer and say well, you know,
we're really sorry that theproducts you know not to
expectation and try and resolveit.
Or you take that feedback onboard, like the supplement brand
that you spoke about, and Ithink that's a really good
marketing case there as well,because it's kind of saying
(35:47):
right, you know, we know we fellshort here, but look, we've
solved.
You know we've addressed 60% ofthose points or whatever the
number is.
So that's a really interesting,interesting marketing case
there.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Have you got any examples where customers have
kind of been able to capitalizeon negative reviews or maybe
there's been like a positiveoutcome in the end that they've
been able to leverage, apartfrom the supplement brand, I
guess?
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yeah, yeah.
So that was one and I thinkthat was a good example of using
it in customer segmentation.
To go back to negativereviewers and we see a lot of
that actually in like a customersupport context.
Probably the best example I sawthat is less display focused.
Since we just talked about thatis we have one of our like five
biggest brands working withstandards and global apparel and
beauty brand.
(36:30):
They have described to us theway and they actually came to
one of our internal sessionswith our customer teams.
They describe the way that theyuse it in their product
development cycle and I waspretty blown away actually the
degree to which reviews weredeeply informing like a product
development process with apretty big team.
I think when I describe that'soften the brand before.
(36:52):
That's a pretty early stagebusiness.
It's one person and those arethe ones that are often very
receptive to feedback, becausethe person reading the reviews
is the same as the productdevelopment person and the
marketer and then they doeverything right but, like when
you with this brand that I'mtalking about, you know they
probably got 50 or 100 peopleand split across functions and
the way that they talked abouthow it was informing every
function by product developmentin particular, I think was
(37:13):
really was really insightful,and it's it's made me, from a
product direction perspective,it's made me want to find ways
to help more brands move in thatdirection.
I think one of the trickiestthings is for some of the
biggest brands that work withstamping.
They might be collectinghundreds, in some cases even
thousands of reviews per week,and so we've started to think
about, like how do we, ifthey're not going to have
(37:35):
someone review every single oneof those manually, what can we
do to help them better pull outsome of the negative or kind of
like constructive feedback, inparticular to replicate that
process I was just describing?
Speaker 2 (37:47):
And one of your kind of within a system.
One of the features there isthat you've got the data suite
as well, so customers can kindof leverage that to get the fee.
To understand, I guess, thefeedback that's coming in.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Yeah, totally yeah, we've said this is.
If I could just talk about thisfor a second, we have one.
I, despite maybe someskepticism I shared earlier on
some of the different use casesof AI, I am really excited about
a lot of the recent stuff, Ithink particularly in like the
language space.
So one feature we've beenworking on on the side for a few
months here is, I mentionedbefore, like, I think, the kind
(38:23):
of like topic filter feature wehave where, like, we might pick
out the 10 most common topicsbeing referenced in reviews on a
product and then make themavailable as filters on the
actual review display on thepage.
And that feature for ustraditionally has been keyword
based, so it would just pick outlike the top it filters out a
lot of like junk words, butbasically it'll pick out the top
10 keywords, let's say, andthen feature them.
(38:45):
We started running like a GPTenabled version of that feature,
which is basically look at allof the reviews and come up with
your own topic, like ask thesystem to come up with your own
topics.
That wouldn't necessarily bekeyword based and you know we've
got a long way to fullyproductize that, but I think in
the brands that we've tested itwith.
It's been awesome in terms ofboth like putting some real
(39:09):
First of all, putting languagebehind a lot of the negative
sentiments that customers have,but also on the positive side,
we've seen a lot of interest inusing this not only for
displaying on site to drivehigher engagement, but even for
informing the way brands thinkabout advertising or marketing
copy.
I have one example I referencedbefore one of our big brands in
New York.
That's this loose leaf teabrand and we read it on their
(39:30):
stuff and they had a holiday teathat this thing was spitting
out.
Instead of topics like sweet ortasty or whatever it might spit
out, it was spitting out thingslike taste, like Christmas
reminds me of childhood memories.
It was just TBD on whether thatwould drive higher engagement
on site, but A it's cool and Bthey were interested in it from
(39:51):
a marketing perspective.
I think there's a lot we can dothere to also use that to do
genuine, more valuable topicclassification, which is one of
the things I think we can do tohelp brands scale the way they
look at both parts of thatnegative feedback.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Really interesting, I think, because if you're
getting that data from thesystem saying it tastes like
Christmas or those emotiveelements are just going to be so
good from a marketingperspective.
Marketing seems like you saywould be screaming out.
Let's bring it back to howStamped can help merchants
(40:30):
selling online to increase thetrust and the relationship and
increase the lifetime value thatthey have with their customers.
What would be your advice to acustomer that's saying right, I
want to build these long-termrelationships, I want to
increase the lifetime value.
How can Stamped help them?
How should I implement it?
(40:50):
What are maybe the best waysthat I could implement to start
seeing some ROI?
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Obviously, I would tell that brand that I think we
have products across this wholesuite that can really help,
starting from that visitor showsup to the site.
How do we drive betterconversion all the way through?
I think there's our wholeproduct suite can contribute to
that.
I think the thing I would sayon the loyalty side in
particular because that's thepiece that we always highlight
as if you're not doing this,you're going to struggle to
(41:21):
stand out on bringing someoneback repeatedly to your product
I think the big thing here is wedon't give out generic advice
in that space.
This is really important because, unlike reviews and there are
some elements of the way thatyou display reviews and the way
that you leverage reviews thatcan be pretty industry specific,
say, whether you're in aparallel or a beauty and fitness
brand Loyalty is even far moredifferent in terms of the way
(41:46):
you should design a loyaltyprogram, in terms of what you
should offer customers and interms of what you can afford to
offer customers based on themargin profile of your business,
if you're a low-margin CPGbrand versus a luxury brand of
some sort.
What I would say is I thinkthere are ways that we've found
that we can benefit almost anybrand in the DTC space, but
(42:07):
particularly on the loyalty sideit's highly, highly specific to
industry.
That's why we also put a reallybig emphasis on our customer
success or account managementteam and our support team,
because I do think that thatexpertise that we have in our
team is really important tohelping people get the most out
of these tools.
I guess the way I would answerthat is we have tools that I
think can help almost any brandin the DTC space on that
(42:30):
conversion and lifetime valueside, but we don't really advise
a one-size-fits-all approachbecause that's not really where
we've seen the best results.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to
speak with me.
Like to ask all our guests whatpodcast or book podcast they're
listening to, or what bookthey're either reading or
listening to at the moment thatthey'd recommend to our
listeners.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, on the left front, I love podcasts.
I listened to a bunch of them.
The most interesting one Ilistened to recently, I think,
is this one called Land of theGiants, that catalogs like a big
tech company every season andthey just did Tesla, which I
thought was a cool one in termsof company history.
Obviously it's like a in someways kind of a lightning-wrong
company.
That one was cool On the bookside and maybe a little more
(43:16):
relevant to this conversation.
I just finished everything storeabout kind of the early days of
Amazon and I'm planning to readthe follow-up to that book and
that one was cool.
I think the coolest thing aboutit to me was that it's very
easy to look at a business likethat and be like it's so obvious
.
Everything they've done inhindsight seems obvious, whether
(43:36):
it be the original e-commercebusiness or even their cloud
business.
But to go back in a deeplyresearched book like that to
what it was like in 1995 whenyou're making this decision of
we're going to start sellingbooks on the internet, I think
it's really I don't know.
I'm fascinated by the internetin general and so to have a book
that kind of starts right atthe early stages of that with
(43:58):
one of obviously the biggestcompanies, which is really cool.
So, yeah, I'd highly recommendthat one.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
The everything store about Amazon.
We'll put a link in the shownotes.
So if people want to learn moreabout stamps, what should they
do?
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah, so our website is stampio.
We've got all of ourinformation there.
I also love talking about it.
See if I'm on Twitter orLinkedIn, or you can just reach
out to our support team orreally any of our teams.
You've got like one of the mostfriendly, passionate groups
I've ever worked with,especially about e-commerce, so
any of us are always happy tochat.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Cool.
Well, again, we'll share thoselinks.
So again, mike, thank you verymuch for your time and insight.
I've learned a lot and hope ourlisteners have as well.
It's been really fun learningkind of how stamped has evolved
over the years, that we've kindof worked with them as well, and
how you benefit merchants.
So yeah, thank you again.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me Appreciate it.
Not at all.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Thank you for listening to the BigCommerce
Podcast.
If you've enjoyed today'sepisode, please leave us a
review on your favorite podcastplatform and make sure you're
following us on social media, onInstagram and on LinkedIn.
If you've got ideas orsuggestions for future episodes,
please send us an email info atthe BigCommercePodcastcom or on
our social media platform.
Hi, welcome to the Big Commerce Podcast.
Hello, welcome to a brand newepisode of the Big Commerce
Podcast.
I'm your co-host, luigi, and intoday's episode I'm joined by
Mike Barardo, ceo of Stampedio.
Stamped is a reviews andloyalty platform and in the
episode we learn about the suiteof products stamped off as its
customers.
The importance of reviews andloyalty is retention programs
(00:24):
due to the cost of acquiringcustomers increasing, how
negative reviews and NPScampaigns can help improve your
products and service, and theeffect Generative AI will have
on customers' trust ofe-commerce websites.
Enjoy the episode.
Hi, mike, welcome to thepodcast.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Awesome.
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
How are?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
you Doing well thanks .
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Good.
So you're from Stamped, one ofour partners based in New York.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, based in New York.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself
first and then a bit aboutStamped?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, so a little bit about me.
I've been with Stamped forabout two years.
Prior to that I spent most ofmy career in startups in the
e-commerce space, was actuallyon the D2C side of things,
previously at Travel Goods D2Cbrand called away for four years
.
It kind of got my exposure to,I would say, wave 1 or Wave 2 of
the kind of D2C trend there andthat was a big impetus for me
(01:18):
wanting to switch over to moreof the tech side of Stamped.
In terms of Stamped itself,company was started in 2016,.
Has a pretty typical foundingstory, I would say, of a
merchant who was frustrated withwhat was available to him.
He was based in Singapore andthe reviews front in particular,
I think just wasn't satisfiedwith what was out there or felt
(01:41):
it was too expensive for thefunctionality and decided to
kind of build his own.
And then in the interveningyears since that catalog has
expanded to user-generatedcontent, loyalty and we're kind
of continuing to evolve it today.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So in some respects, if you've got a problem, try and
solve it Totally, building out.
Yeah, how are you enjoying yourrole as CEO of Stamped?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, it's been great it's been, I mean.
So I mentioned there that thecompany was founded in Singapore
, and so one of the mostinteresting parts of my two
years here has been we've reallybuilt it was a kind of small
team when I first joined.
We've really built out the teamin North America in particular
Most of our teams in Canadabetween Toronto and Vancouver,
and so it's just been really funto build out a team and a
(02:25):
really exciting time for thespace, kind of coming out of the
tail end of COVID and now kindof into, I guess sort of back to
normal.
I would say so it's been a tonof fun and really excited about
kind of the product opportunityin front of us too.
So yeah, it's been a blast.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
I think timing-wise it's worked quite well as well,
because the cost of acquisitionfor new clients is going up.
So everyone's kind of talkingabout retention strategies and
how do we keep customers comingback?
And obviously your product justslots right in.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Totally.
Yeah, I hinted at this before,but one of the things that I
took from my experience on theDTC side of things out of way
was I think those early waves ofdirect consumer were like a lot
of brands whether it be away orCasper, others you'd be
familiar with, who were reallypredicated on leveraging at the
time was a somewhat new form oftargeted advertising for
(03:15):
building these DTC businessesand I think it's become clearer
over time that focusing furtherdown funnel not at the expense
of advertising, but I thinkfocusing further down funnel on
the conversion, repeat, purchase, lifetime value stages of
things is really reallyimportant and that's kind of the
key thing we're trying to do atStamps.
So to your point, I think oneof our best value props to
(03:37):
merchants is you need thesepieces to complement what you're
doing on the advertising sideto build a more sustainable,
more profitable business, andthat's really resonated at both
that conversion and that repeatstage.
I would say.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I mean there's.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Obviously, your product has kind of evolved over
time and added in someadditional functionality from
where it started.
But, like you said, it's allabout that trust and I think, as
the sector has become more oreach individual, I guess
individual sector has becomemore competitive and there's a
lot more merchants out there.
It's the merchants that investin building trust with their
(04:13):
existing customers, but also intheir image and their portrayal
of trust and looking after theirexisting and rewarding the
loyalty of their existingcustomers that really start to
stand out.
Because I see that kind of frommy perspective when I'm
shopping.
You've got so much choice.
Now how do you cut through thatnoise?
How do you stand out from thecompetition?
(04:34):
Because you've spoken aboutvalue proposition from your
perspective and it's the samewith merchants, especially when
you're selling.
D2c is slightly different, butif you look at like B2B or B2C
predominantly commoditizedproducts how do you stand out?
And with costs going up, youcan't always compete on price
and some merchants don't want tobecause it's just a race to the
(04:55):
bottom.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Totally yeah.
Actually, on the point ofcompeting on price, I think that
the real selling point of theloyalty product that we pitched
to a lot of merchants is thatobviously many people think
about that as a way to kind ofjuice the repeat part of your
business, but we actually seereally impressive results in
terms of just convincing someoneto purchase for the first time
because you have that loyaltyprogram, and in many cases I
(05:19):
think merchants even feel thatthey don't have to offer as much
on that first purchase discountIf they're able to sell someone
on all the benefits they'regoing to get as an ongoing
customer, kind of post firstpurchase from that loyalty
program.
So to your point, like it's agreat trust builder.
I think a lot of brands havecome to realize over the last
few years with the choice thatyou were referring to, that you
(05:40):
can't take for granted thatgetting someone in the door for
the first time and then hittingthem with those marketing emails
or those sale emails over thecourse of the next couple of
years is going to drive repeatwhen they have so many options
and also are just busy asconsumers, and so I think having
some proposition for them tocontinue purchasing with your
brand, whether that be rewards,whether that be something like
(06:01):
status or what we call VIP tierswithin our loyalty product.
It's extremely important and wealmost always see that in the
results, with increased repeatrates, increased repeat average
order values and all of that.
And for a lot of these brands,when they think about like the
key metric I hear most of themtalk about is MER or marketing
efficiency ratio, and whenthey're looking at just how much
(06:22):
revenue are we driving versusthe ad dollars we're putting in,
I think the thing we alwaystell them is, yeah, you can
continue to focus on making yourads or that acquisition funnel
more attractive, but the realway to drive that number in the
direction you why is to improvethe back end of that, which is,
what is your lifetime value,what is your repeat rate from
these customers.
And so I do think for us that,like I would say, in 2023, even
(06:45):
in a world where maybe theconsumer market has flattened
out from where it was in COVIDor gotten back to normal, demand
for the loyalty productscontinues to look almost like
the COVID period because ofexactly what you were saying,
which is like the acquisitionmarket has still been kind of up
and down to a degree, I wouldsay.
So it's been a reallyinteresting time to be in that
space.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
We're getting inquiries from B2C merchants
that they're kind of veryomnipresent, so they got offline
and online to be able toconsolidate that client
retention strategy.
So if someone's buying onlinethey can redeem their points
offline and vice versa, offersthat are online that they're
(07:24):
offline.
Because fundamentally thatcustomer, if you've got an
online and an offline presence,has one relationship with you.
They don't differentiatebetween online, offline, app,
whatever.
They want to just know that ifthey're dealing with that brand
they're going to get a unifiedservice or same types of service
, same types of benefits.
It's not going to inconveniencethem that they can only buy
(07:44):
online to get that offer or theycan only return online if they
bought online and so on.
And so it kind of makes sensethat if you're trying to
maintain or trying to kind ofretain that customer, that you
look at ways that, like you say,with the market efficiency,
make those marketing ads gofurther.
Because we've got merchants onerecently who did free delivery,
(08:07):
I think for four or six weeks,and basically the subsidies that
they put within the subsidisershipping came out of their
marketing budget because it wasa way of kind of retaining that
client and trying to elevate thelifetime value.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah, I think the point you made actually on
OmniChannel just to go back tothat for a second is really
really interesting To myexperience.
In a way, we had, by the time Ileft, like 12 or 13 first party
retail locations and we didn'thave a loyalty program at the
time, but we just had, like mostbrands, like a lot of
difficulty managing those on twodifferent systems and like
(08:46):
you've got your retail POS,you've got your whatever
e-commerce software you're using, it feels to the customer as a
result like a totally disjointedexperience, which is not what
the customer expects to yourpoint.
So this is, I think, one of thebiggest, I would say one of the
main areas that we've seendemand on the loyalty product.
We've started to dip our toeinto better supporting kind of
(09:06):
point of sale systems on theretail side.
But I think it's an area wewant to go a lot deeper on
because it is something that alot of these brands are
demanding and also, honestly,not even just their own channels
.
It's also like how do we retainone consistent relationship
with the customer even if theybuy our product on a non-owned
channel like Amazon or Walmartor targetcom or whatever?
(09:27):
So it's super interesting forus thinking about, like, how can
we help bridge some of thosechannels for these brands and
that's, honestly, loyalty andreviews?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
actually, you spoke about VIP kind of programs, and
that's something that I reallyadvocate because it's a way of
kind of tearing your customers,making them feel special.
It's a bit of a gated kind ofcommunity as well, because
you've got to have achieved acertain type of status.
We've seen it, obviously, withmost visibly with like airlines
(09:57):
the more times you fly, thehigher up the tiers you go.
But I think that's such a quickwin because if you've got the
ability to segment yourcustomers and say, right, you've
got to spend X amount toqualify for kind of VIP status.
How does your platform thenhelp a merchant to achieve that
without them having to jumpthrough so many hoops?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Totally yes.
This is one of the areas I'mmost excited about and I think
there's the most opportunity inour product.
The way that these tiers worktoday is pretty simple.
A brand will typically havelike the regular loyalty program
, right?
So they might have a few waysthat you can earn points in that
program.
Maybe you get one point perdollar spent when you make a
purchase.
You might get additional pointsfor following the brand on
(10:41):
Instagram or subscribing totheir newsletter or whatever it
might be, and then they'll havea set of kind of open to
everyone type redemption rules,which is, if you get 100 points,
you can redeem that for a 10%discount on your next order, or
you can redeem for a freeproduct with your next order
over $50.
We've got a ton of flexibilityin there.
What the VIP tiers do out of thebox today is they allow you to
(11:04):
offer special perks to peoplethat enter that VIP tier.
Right, so you might have a tierthat someone has to spend $500
over the course of their timewith the brand and then they
would get into, like your bronzetier, let's say, and then
you've got a silver and a goldtier Within that tier.
Stamp would enable you to offeradditional perks right.
So now, maybe because you're inthat tier, you get two points
per dollar spent instead of one,so you're earning more as you
(11:26):
go.
You get access to special perks.
You might even get access tocertain types of products for
free that are only available tothat VIP tier.
But the thing that's actuallybeen most interesting to me is
the way we're seeing brands useVIP tiers in ways that we don't
even really enable today, to behonest, and that I want us to
better enable.
So a good example would be,beyond those kind of advanced
(11:48):
earning or redemption rules, aswe would call them, we've seen
brands do things as creative aslike.
We have one brand here in NewYork that's like a loose leaf
tea brand, and one of therewards they would offer to
their top VIP tier was that youcould book a free 30 minute
tasting session with a teasommelier, which I thought was
like super cool.
So we're only really enablingthat today from the standpoint
(12:10):
of, like you know, essentiallythey know to offer that perk to
customers in that segment andthey send them an email with,
say, a booking link to set upthat session if they want, we
would like to get further intothe process of actually enabling
these experiences more out ofthe box, whether that be access
to a custom WhatsApp orcommunity WhatsApp or Slack
group or whatever it might beand so I think there's a lot of
(12:34):
opportunity there.
I think you've seen a lot ofexcitement in the DTC space
around memberships and justthese types of like status or
VIP tiers that enable reallyspecific benefits that go beyond
the core product, and I thinkwe can play a really important
role in enabling that andhelping brands stand out.
So this is one of the areas ofproduct I'm most excited about,
and we've got some cool stuffcoming in, like the next six to
(12:56):
nine months.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Do you think that DTC brands are spearheading the way
that kind of the retentionstrategies kick in?
Do you think they do somethingdifferent because obviously
they've got that directrelationship, whereas they're
not having to go throughdistributors or retail networks?
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Totally.
Yeah, I think it's.
You know, when I think aboutDTC loyalty, I actually think
it's really interesting because,on the one hand, there are some
limitations to what I thinkworks in the space.
If you compare it to like let'sjust use a membership program
like Amazon Prime or even likeyou know what some of the best
loyalty programs out there, likea Sephora, for example, is one
(13:31):
of the ones that you're quotedoften.
Those are, in Amazon's case,that's obviously the biggest
third party marketplace.
In Sephora's case, they've gotcrazy selection across.
You know tons of products andit's such an everyday purchase.
And so one of the things we docaution brands on sometimes is
like you need to think about thecontext of your own business
and whether the things that workfor those types of companies
(13:53):
with massive selection and, inAmazon's case, even the
logistics and infrastructurethey can put behind a two day
shipping promise on priming.
You need to really think aboutwhether that actually makes
sense for the use case that yourbrand plays in a customer's
mind.
So I think that's one of theconstraints, but on the flip
side, I think like you actuallyhave the ability to build much
deeper loyalty than some ofthose kind of marketplace or
(14:15):
multi brand type retailers areable to, and we see this all the
time, whether it be combiningloyalty with subscriptions for a
consumable product like coffee,for example, or any of these
things.
So I think it's an interestingtrade off and I think we've
tried to strike that middlebalance with brands, which is,
like you know, not every brandneeds the membership equivalent
(14:36):
of Amazon Prime.
It likely won't work for youwith your 10 skew product set,
but here's the things that youcan do actually that really do
build loyalty because you dohave such a niche product
offering and such kind of like adevoted following or customer
base.
So it's been interesting tokind of see that balance and
look at what the big players aredoing, but also make sure we're
helping brands understand, like, what the right offering for
(14:57):
them would be.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
If we just kind of go through the stamped suite of
products.
So you've got two main channels, You've got reviews and you've
got loyalty.
Under loyalty we've spokenabout kind of points and rewards
, We've spoken at a VIP programand I think referral programs
obviously are growing as peopletry to kind of have some passive
income or, you know, or makethe most of their influence in
(15:21):
other areas.
On the review side, becausethis is something that I don't
think gets the attention itsometimes deserves, because, you
know, e-con platforms havereview systems out of the box,
and then there's kind of there'sthe online independent review
engines, which people eitherlove or hate because they seem
to be so rigid in the way thatthey manage things.
(15:43):
But what I'm really interestedin so you offer product reviews
and ratings, UGC and then NetPromoter Score, which is
something that I think is reallyreally important and I again
think is underutilized.
Because I think, if you want, ifyou want really actionable
insights as to why yourcustomers are or are not buying
(16:06):
from you, that's probably whereit should start, because
whenever kind of I've been partof it, you know Net Promoter
Score campaigns you then get thefeedback saying I, you know why
would you?
I mean NPS for those that knowwe've all received those emails
from zero to 10, how you knowhow likely I to recommend us to
a friend.
And then obviously they'reskewed, that they're not equal.
Anyone that gives you a I thinkit's, a nine or 10 is a
(16:29):
promoter.
Zero to six I think is is adetractor and everyone else is
passive.
But it's great because it saysyou know well, your shipping
costs are expensive or you tooktoo long, or it is great that I
ordered at 10pm and I got theparcel, you know, within two
days or whatever, whateverinformation it is.
So let's talk a little bitabout kind of Net Promoter Score
and kind of the update thatyou're seeing with your
(16:50):
merchants, because I think thatis a really, really important
piece of understanding yourcustomers.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Yeah, I completely agree.
I think it's actually it'simportant in combination,
obviously, with the productreviews component, because I
think what ends up happening isobviously the feedback that
comes in on product reviews is,of course, product specific and
I think that by combining thatwith Net Promoter Score, usually
what you have from a brand'sperspective is the ability to
(17:16):
understand, first of all, tocontextualize, what they're
seeing on product reviews.
If you have an amazing NPSscore when you're sending that
out to customers and you have acertain product that's
performing pretty poorly from areviews perspective, that
actually makes that product lookeven worse in comparison
because you clearly have suchhigh brand affinity that I think
that's a big piece of it.
The other thing is that wereally and I can talk a little
(17:39):
bit about some of the specificfeatures here in a bit if it's
interesting but we do a lot totry to help brands understand,
on both the product reviews andthe NPS side, what are some of
the common themes coming out ofthat so that they can kind of
action those things as a brand.
I think that when you thinkabout from a brand's perspective
, their product is obviouslyreally important, but probably
(17:59):
as important in the consumer'smind is what is your delivery
experience like and what is yourcustomer support experience
like?
Those pieces really only comeout on the NPS side of things
when a brand is thinking abouthow do people evaluate our
support experience and reallypeople think of that honestly as
part of the product.
Nps is one of the best ways touncover that, whereas your
product feedback is going to bemuch more quality and product
(18:22):
experience focused.
I think they're two reallyimportant pieces and we're super
focused on helping brands,particularly with an internal
tool like NPS, really figure outhow to leverage that into the
decisions they make about howthey do customer support, how
they do shipping and deliveryand all those different things.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I use reviews quite a lot when I'm buying different
products, For example, whetherit's something that I don't buy,
it's not repeat purchases.
Say, if I'm buying a pair ofrunning shoes or a pair of
running socks or whatever, I'llread the reviews just to get
understanding of quality and fit.
And user-generated content iseven better because you can
(19:04):
interpret a review.
Somebody can say well, I boughtthis in a Fella Pa after it was
tight or it wasn't comfortable.
But sometimes if you've gotuser-generated content,
especially visual ones, so whereyou've got photos or videos,
you can then look at all thoseother elements that maybe
someone hasn't touched on interms of their review to
actually maybe that fits fine,or the materials nice, or I
don't like the material or itlooks a bit tight or whatever.
(19:27):
Let's talk a bit about that,because I'm seeing more interest
in the UGC requirement from amerchant.
So people are actually sayingthe reviews again.
We're talking about standingout.
The reviews just aren't enough.
Yeah, and partly maybe becausewe're becoming really impatient
and we don't want to trawlthrough 16 reviews.
Maybe if we see a widget ofphotos or videos or whatever it
(19:52):
is then, we're going to be ableto make a faster, quicker
decision.
But what do you see within UGCspace?
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, great question.
So this is actually one of myfavorite topics because I think
that it touches on and you weresaying this before, but it
touches on one of the mostconfusing things to me about the
review space and e-commerce andactually why I was even
attracted to it in the firstplace, which is I just don't see
enough discussion generallyabout conversion, and that's the
whole reason that you areleveraging reviews on site in
(20:25):
the first place.
Often in our sales cycle withcustomers, they'll come back to
us and say, hey, competitor XYZsaid that they've got a 4%
response rate on review requests.
What's your response rate?
And ours is strong and we havethat number available.
But I'm like this is the wrongquestion.
The right question should bewhen the methods that you make
available to us to deployreviews on site whether it be on
(20:46):
a landing page or a productpage or in checkout what
influence is that having onconversion on my site?
Or if you share those reviewsout to Facebook or Instagram
shops, which is a feature wesupport how is it actually
providing lift on those channels?
That's the whole reason toactually collect reviews.
So back to your question.
I think the thing that wereally focus on when it comes to
how to maximize conversion.
(21:07):
Out of some of the ways we allowreview display on site, there's
two main things that I think wesee as providing the biggest
conversion lift when peopleinteract with them.
The first one is photo andvideo.
To your point, it's typicallylike being able to see the
product.
Particularly, seeing theproduct on especially if it's
like a parallel shoes on someonewho looks like they're like a
similar size or build to you isactually really important, and
(21:32):
so it has a major conversionbenefit.
It also, by the way, isproviding potential assets to
that brand for ad and ownedmarketing channels, which is
hugely valuable, and it's one ofthe reasons that brands who
work with us on reviews andloyalty almost always
incentivize photo and videoupload through their loyalty
program.
So you get some extra benefitfor that, because there is a
little bit more friction to theconsumer to leave that.
(21:53):
But hugely valuable to theconversion experience.
And the other piece I was goingto mention, which is UGC in a
way, but less in a visual way,is that we also really encourage
brands to collect moreinformation at the point of the
review request.
So not just how did you likethe product, but I'll use like a
skincare example, alsounderstand from the customer
(22:15):
what is your skin type dry, oily, whatever what is your skin
tone?
Have you ever used a product inthis category?
And then we'll allow them touse those as kind of like
display filters when theydisplay their reviews on site.
And to the point you weremaking, say about shopping for
running shoes, the ability toquickly filter down for reviews
that are relevant to thequestion you maybe still have in
(22:35):
mind or are relevant to someonelike you, be it size or
whatever it is like.
That is where we see the biggestconversion, uplift the most
engagement.
So I think, and I also considerthat a form of UGC.
So UGC around reviews ingeneral, I think is like the
lynchpin to driving higherconversion and it's why we try
to really encourage brands,whether it be combining with
loyalty or just within thereviews product itself, to
(22:56):
really incentivize that type ofbehavior from consumers.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
One thing that's really touch on there was that
you that the merchant canleverage another part of your
product to actually incentivizefor.
So they haven't got to go andget a third party system or, you
know, configure or buildsomething custom just to get it
done.
It's out of the suite ofproducts that you offer and so
let's just stay on reviews.
So obviously, kind of havingreviews, having genuine reviews,
(23:26):
can influence potentialcustomers in terms of their
buying decision.
What tips or kind of strategieswould you recommend merchants
can undertake in order toincrease the uplift of reviews
being left on their website?
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Yeah, so a few things that the actual like in terms
of increasing kind of the volume.
There's a few things we do.
One is we enable collection viamultiple channels, so not only
email but collection via SMS,collection via like a form on
site and a few of thesedifferent pieces, even
collection through a third partyintegration with a marketing
communication tool like Klaviaor TENF.
(24:05):
So that's one of the thingsthat has really helped in terms
of kind of collection rates.
The other thing is we reallytry to share data with merchants
to inform the way that theybuild their collection flow in
our product.
So examples of that are likeyou should always be iterating
on your subject line and yourcopy in the review request email
itself, trying different things.
See what gets the best responserate.
(24:25):
You should almost always behave a multi if you're doing
email, let's say a multi emailsequence.
So don't just prod someone oncebut come back seven days later
and ask them once again to leavea review.
We usually see up to three orfour emails in that sequence.
You see a pretty consistentuplift in response rate.
I don't remember the numbersexactly, but it's something like
(24:47):
, I think, for brands that workwith us and only use one email
in that sequence, it's like a 4percent response rate.
By the time you look at brandsusing three emails in that
sequence, it's up to five and ahalf or 6 percent.
So it's pretty significant.
So those are some reallyimportant pieces, I think.
And the one other thing I'll sayat the collection stage is that
it's not just volume that wefocus on although that is
(25:07):
important but in terms of how doyou ensure that the quality and
usefulness of those reviews ishigh?
We talked about UGC andincentivizing UGC, so I'll leave
that to the side.
But one other thing we do is weactually have a feature that
it's an AI-based feature thatbasically prompts the user to
reference topics that have beenreferenced previously by other
(25:29):
reviewers.
So for my skincare example, itmight be something like other
reviewers have talked abouttexture or whatever the other
pieces might be, and it goesgreen, as you mentioned it in
your own review, and it's a coolfeature.
But what it does is itbasically encourages longer,
more useful reviews, and thoseare the ones that get more
(25:49):
engagement on site and drivemore conversion on site.
So it's both a volume andquality thing and we try to
focus on both sides of that.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
And from a merchant perspective, because those
reviews were left on the website, that's not necessarily where
they're syndicated to you plugin with other systems as well.
Totally.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Yeah, we think about the usefulness of reviews in
three channels.
One is on-site landing pages,product pages, checkout etc.
And I just talked about theconversion left there.
And then we think about twoother channels.
So the first one is what wecall owned marketing channels,
so that would be your email andwherever you're doing email and
SMS from.
So like Clavio, for example,two ways it's really useful in
(26:30):
that channel.
One is in the content itself,so you might feature a positive
review for a product in amarketing campaign.
But it's also the segmentationor the data side of things.
So we work with a supplementbrand who just launched a second
version of their initialproduct.
They're pretty early stage.
They launched a V1 and then sixmonths later they launched a V2
.
They really specificallytargeted their V2 launch
(26:51):
messaging to be different intargeting negative reviewers of
that V1 launch.
And hey, we addressed yourfeedback on X, y and Z and I
think that's really powerful asa segmentation lever.
If you think about a lot ofthese D2C brands, they don't
actually know a lot about you.
You might have purchased fromthem twice.
They know what you ordered andthey know when you ordered it.
(27:12):
They know whether you returned,but now, with our information.
They know how you felt aboutthe product, the sentiment of
that review, which we'll alsocapture in some of those pieces.
So that's really helpful inthose own channels.
And then, lastly, I think thepoint you were referencing there
is many of these brands areincreasingly going multi-channel
.
So that could be a retailerlike Walmartcom, targetcom, and
(27:35):
we'll kind of facilitatesyndication to those channels.
It could be some of the newsocial shopping opportunities,
so Facebook and Instagram shops,or we're exploring something
with TikTok shops, and so wesyndicate reviews to those
channels.
And those platforms have beenreally keen to work together
because they see the same datawe do on merchant sites, which
is that increasing review counton key products really drives
(27:57):
conversion.
So we think about those as kindof the three main ways to be
able to leverage reviews.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
And you mentioned briefly AI, so I don't think we
can have a podcast episodewithout mentioning chatGPT.
What kind of impact has AIengines like chatGPT had on
customers' perception oftrusting reviews?
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah.
So I think I wouldn't say we'veheard a ton about it yet from
brands directly, but what Iexpect will actually happen here
is that it will significantlyincrease the value of reviews,
and we like stamped and, to beclear, most of our competitors
do this too, but we willspecifically verify reviews for
(28:42):
merchants.
So basically, we're confirmingthat that review came from an
email address which alsopurchased that product from you,
so we know that it is an actualpurchaser of the product, right
, and so those reviews can beguaranteed to be authentic.
And that's already valuabletoday.
But if you think about a worldwhere the place that I expect
GPT to have the biggestimmediate impact in e-commerce
is actually a super high volumeof low value content that is
(29:06):
mostly SEO focused, so brandsare all of a sudden able to
produce five times, 10 times,more content on a blog and they
know which keywords they'resupposed to be covering for, and
I think, on a relative basis,that increases the value of
authentic user feedback versus aproliferation of lower value
content out there.
(29:27):
So I actually think it works infavor of some of these more
kind of like mechanisms wheretrust is baked in, like verified
reviews.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
I would 100% agree with you, because you do see
those kind of genuine pieces ofcontent coming through and if
you've obviously verifiedreviews, that makes sure that
you know the customer browsingthe website or purchasing knows
that it's come from somebody whohas actually experienced that
product.
Just on a kind of side note,one thing that I do find a bit
(30:00):
annoying from my perspectivewhen I'm looking at reviews,
whether they're verified or not.
I mean, obviously havingverified reviews is vital when
you're making a decision, butwhat I find doesn't always work
Well and I think this is forinternational merchants is where
you've got consolidated reviewsfrom different regions on that
(30:23):
one product.
So the example was I was buyingsome some socks yesterday from
a large website and they hadreviews that were in German and
I'm young in the UK.
I was on the UK website, butwhat they're doing is they're
consolidating all those reviewsfor that product.
Yeah, and the problem that Ithink that that sometimes can
create is that maybe theexpectation or the or the needs
and requirements of somebody ina different country, a different
(30:45):
than somebody you know, forexample, if you're selling a
winter jacket to somebody in theUK, their standards are going
to be much lower than you know.
Selling it to somebody in theNordics where they need you know
is they're going to be goingout for three, four months of
the year in minus 20 Celsiustemperatures, whereas in the UK.
(31:05):
So I think that's one of thedangers of trying to kind of
just cram in the reviews is thatdifferent markets have
different requirements, so thepeople buying those products
will have different things.
So you know, for example, itcould receive a negative review
from a customer in the Nordics,but actually for people in the
UK it might be the best productaround.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yeah, yeah, and actually so that last point you
know.
So, first of all, I completelyagree on the general point.
It's one of the reasons that,like filtering both behind the
scenes and then making filteringoptions available to the
customer, I think are a reallyimportant part of reviews
display.
But the last point you made isactually one of my favorite
things to talk about with brands, which is the importance of
(31:46):
negative reviews generally.
So, first of all, like whenyou're featuring first party
reviews on your site, meaningyou collected them from
merchants and it's not like anAmazon or a third party
marketplace where you know thatthe, the review collector is not
the product seller, right, soyou're already in a consumer's
mind they're likely looking atyour reviews with a bit more
skepticism because they knowthis is like your first party
(32:08):
channel and the bias we see froma lot of brands, which we've
really tried to discourage, islike oh, I should only show
positive stuff.
Well, first of all, if somebodycomes to your site and sees
that you have a thousand reviewson a product and a five star
rating, like a five point, oh,almost always and we've seen
this reaction in customerresearch like almost always,
they're like I don't believethis, it doesn't make any sense,
(32:30):
right?
And then the second thing and Ithink this is really important
is where negative reviews canreally help.
So I've been making this pointof like you need to find a way
to display reviews that arerelevant to the question the
person's trying to answer, thetype of person they are or where
they live.
To your point, one of the realvalues you can provide with
negative reviews is whencustomers see those.
It builds trust andauthenticity and oftentimes one
(32:51):
of the best roles they can playis like, let's say, you're that
exact situation you talked about.
So you're shopping for a wintercoat in the UK and you actually
see a few negative reviews frompeople in like I don't know,
like Northern Canada or like theNordics, let's say, right, and
you actually recognize, okay,they're showcasing honest
content here, but this actuallyis not my concern.
(33:12):
So I'm actually fine with thisand everyone else I'm seeing
seems to be saying it's warmenough.
I see a few reviews from youknow places that are more like
where I live and it's warmenough, and that has a lot of
value in pushing that person totrust what they're seeing and
then get them over the hump froma conversion perspective.
So this is something we reallyhighlight to brands is like you
need to think about negativereviews, as your product is not
(33:35):
going to be perfect for everycustomer.
Negative reviews very oftencome from more edge case
situations and showing that isactually really important
because it actually reinforcesthe fit or the confidence in the
product for, like your coretarget customer.
So, anyway, I just thought thatwas a great example.
We try to encourage exactlythat scenario and I probably
will use that example in amerchant conversation.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
I mean, I've had a merchant say that they don't
have, they're B2B but they don'thave reviews on their website
because they don't want to havethe negative ones displayed.
And having to educate somebodyand say people see right through
that that you're basicallycurating your reviews, I mean,
when I'm kind of filtering,whether it's for hotels or it's
(34:21):
for clothing or whatever it is,I think my benchmark is anything
below a four is probably notideal.
But if those ratings are beingskewed by people in another
country with differentexpectations, that's going to
have an impact on how approachthat product.
But at the same time, like toyour point, the merchant is, you
(34:43):
know, needs to do some work andsay right, why am I getting 72
stars or three stars and itcould be that you know the
quality isn't there or the fitisn't there.
You do see some reviews thataren't necessarily about the
product.
I mean, when I was buying theseproducts, one of the reviews
(35:03):
was a one star because theparcel arrived late.
So it wasn't actually a productreview as a service review, but
that's the channel that theyuse.
But I would agree that you knowkind of you can make a decision
.
Is the negative review an assetor a liability to my business?
I can put my head in the sandand say it's a liability, so I'm
just going to hide it.
Or actually you know, understandwhy you got the negative
(35:25):
feedback and you know I'm sureyou'd agree.
You either address it.
Or you know directly with thecustomer and say well, you know,
we're really sorry that theproducts you know not to
expectation and try and resolveit.
Or you take that feedback onboard, like the supplement brand
that you spoke about, and Ithink that's a really good
marketing case there as well,because it's kind of saying
(35:47):
right, you know, we know we fellshort here, but look, we've
solved.
You know we've addressed 60% ofthose points or whatever the
number is.
So that's a really interesting,interesting marketing case
there.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Have you got any examples where customers have
kind of been able to capitalizeon negative reviews or maybe
there's been like a positiveoutcome in the end that they've
been able to leverage, apartfrom the supplement brand, I
guess?
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yeah, yeah.
So that was one and I thinkthat was a good example of using
it in customer segmentation.
To go back to negativereviewers and we see a lot of
that actually in like a customersupport context.
Probably the best example I sawthat is less display focused.
Since we just talked about thatis we have one of our like five
biggest brands working withstandards and global apparel and
beauty brand.
(36:30):
They have described to us theway and they actually came to
one of our internal sessionswith our customer teams.
They describe the way that theyuse it in their product
development cycle and I waspretty blown away actually the
degree to which reviews weredeeply informing like a product
development process with apretty big team.
I think when I describe that'soften the brand before.
(36:52):
That's a pretty early stagebusiness.
It's one person and those arethe ones that are often very
receptive to feedback, becausethe person reading the reviews
is the same as the productdevelopment person and the
marketer and then they doeverything right but, like when
you with this brand that I'mtalking about, you know they
probably got 50 or 100 peopleand split across functions and
the way that they talked abouthow it was informing every
function by product developmentin particular, I think was
(37:13):
really was really insightful,and it's it's made me, from a
product direction perspective,it's made me want to find ways
to help more brands move in thatdirection.
I think one of the trickiestthings is for some of the
biggest brands that work withstamping.
They might be collectinghundreds, in some cases even
thousands of reviews per week,and so we've started to think
about, like how do we, ifthey're not going to have
(37:35):
someone review every single oneof those manually, what can we
do to help them better pull outsome of the negative or kind of
like constructive feedback, inparticular to replicate that
process I was just describing?
Speaker 2 (37:47):
And one of your kind of within a system.
One of the features there isthat you've got the data suite
as well, so customers can kindof leverage that to get the fee.
To understand, I guess, thefeedback that's coming in.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Yeah, totally yeah, we've said this is.
If I could just talk about thisfor a second, we have one.
I, despite maybe someskepticism I shared earlier on
some of the different use casesof AI, I am really excited about
a lot of the recent stuff, Ithink particularly in like the
language space.
So one feature we've beenworking on on the side for a few
months here is, I mentionedbefore, like, I think, the kind
(38:23):
of like topic filter feature wehave where, like, we might pick
out the 10 most common topicsbeing referenced in reviews on a
product and then make themavailable as filters on the
actual review display on thepage.
And that feature for ustraditionally has been keyword
based, so it would just pick outlike the top it filters out a
lot of like junk words, butbasically it'll pick out the top
10 keywords, let's say, andthen feature them.
(38:45):
We started running like a GPTenabled version of that feature,
which is basically look at allof the reviews and come up with
your own topic, like ask thesystem to come up with your own
topics.
That wouldn't necessarily bekeyword based and you know we've
got a long way to fullyproductize that, but I think in
the brands that we've tested itwith.
It's been awesome in terms ofboth like putting some real
(39:09):
First of all, putting languagebehind a lot of the negative
sentiments that customers have,but also on the positive side,
we've seen a lot of interest inusing this not only for
displaying on site to drivehigher engagement, but even for
informing the way brands thinkabout advertising or marketing
copy.
I have one example I referencedbefore one of our big brands in
New York.
That's this loose leaf teabrand and we read it on their
(39:30):
stuff and they had a holiday teathat this thing was spitting
out.
Instead of topics like sweet ortasty or whatever it might spit
out, it was spitting out thingslike taste, like Christmas
reminds me of childhood memories.
It was just TBD on whether thatwould drive higher engagement
on site, but A it's cool and Bthey were interested in it from
(39:51):
a marketing perspective.
I think there's a lot we can dothere to also use that to do
genuine, more valuable topicclassification, which is one of
the things I think we can do tohelp brands scale the way they
look at both parts of thatnegative feedback.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Really interesting, I think, because if you're
getting that data from thesystem saying it tastes like
Christmas or those emotiveelements are just going to be so
good from a marketingperspective.
Marketing seems like you saywould be screaming out.
Let's bring it back to howStamped can help merchants
(40:30):
selling online to increase thetrust and the relationship and
increase the lifetime value thatthey have with their customers.
What would be your advice to acustomer that's saying right, I
want to build these long-termrelationships, I want to
increase the lifetime value.
How can Stamped help them?
How should I implement it?
(40:50):
What are maybe the best waysthat I could implement to start
seeing some ROI?
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Obviously, I would tell that brand that I think we
have products across this wholesuite that can really help,
starting from that visitor showsup to the site.
How do we drive betterconversion all the way through?
I think there's our wholeproduct suite can contribute to
that.
I think the thing I would sayon the loyalty side in
particular because that's thepiece that we always highlight
as if you're not doing this,you're going to struggle to
(41:21):
stand out on bringing someoneback repeatedly to your product
I think the big thing here is wedon't give out generic advice
in that space.
This is really important because, unlike reviews and there are
some elements of the way thatyou display reviews and the way
that you leverage reviews thatcan be pretty industry specific,
say, whether you're in aparallel or a beauty and fitness
brand Loyalty is even far moredifferent in terms of the way
(41:46):
you should design a loyaltyprogram, in terms of what you
should offer customers and interms of what you can afford to
offer customers based on themargin profile of your business,
if you're a low-margin CPGbrand versus a luxury brand of
some sort.
What I would say is I thinkthere are ways that we've found
that we can benefit almost anybrand in the DTC space, but
(42:07):
particularly on the loyalty sideit's highly, highly specific to
industry.
That's why we also put a reallybig emphasis on our customer
success or account managementteam and our support team,
because I do think that thatexpertise that we have in our
team is really important tohelping people get the most out
of these tools.
I guess the way I would answerthat is we have tools that I
think can help almost any brandin the DTC space on that
(42:30):
conversion and lifetime valueside, but we don't really advise
a one-size-fits-all approachbecause that's not really where
we've seen the best results.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to
speak with me.
Like to ask all our guests whatpodcast or book podcast they're
listening to, or what bookthey're either reading or
listening to at the moment thatthey'd recommend to our
listeners.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, on the left front, I love podcasts.
I listened to a bunch of them.
The most interesting one Ilistened to recently, I think,
is this one called Land of theGiants, that catalogs like a big
tech company every season andthey just did Tesla, which I
thought was a cool one in termsof company history.
Obviously it's like a in someways kind of a lightning-wrong
company.
That one was cool On the bookside and maybe a little more
(43:16):
relevant to this conversation.
I just finished everything storeabout kind of the early days of
Amazon and I'm planning to readthe follow-up to that book and
that one was cool.
I think the coolest thing aboutit to me was that it's very
easy to look at a business likethat and be like it's so obvious
.
Everything they've done inhindsight seems obvious, whether
(43:36):
it be the original e-commercebusiness or even their cloud
business.
But to go back in a deeplyresearched book like that to
what it was like in 1995 whenyou're making this decision of
we're going to start sellingbooks on the internet, I think
it's really I don't know.
I'm fascinated by the internetin general and so to have a book
that kind of starts right atthe early stages of that with
(43:58):
one of obviously the biggestcompanies, which is really cool.
So, yeah, I'd highly recommendthat one.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
The everything store about Amazon.
We'll put a link in the shownotes.
So if people want to learn moreabout stamps, what should they
do?
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah, so our website is stampio.
We've got all of ourinformation there.
I also love talking about it.
See if I'm on Twitter orLinkedIn, or you can just reach
out to our support team orreally any of our teams.
You've got like one of the mostfriendly, passionate groups
I've ever worked with,especially about e-commerce, so
any of us are always happy tochat.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Cool.
Well, again, we'll share thoselinks.
So again, mike, thank you verymuch for your time and insight.
I've learned a lot and hope ourlisteners have as well.
It's been really fun learningkind of how stamped has evolved
over the years, that we've kindof worked with them as well, and
how you benefit merchants.
So yeah, thank you again.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me Appreciate it.
Not at all.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Thank you for listening to the BigCommerce
Podcast.
If you've enjoyed today'sepisode, please leave us a
review on your favorite podcastplatform and make sure you're
following us on social media, onInstagram and on LinkedIn.
If you've got ideas orsuggestions for future episodes,
please send us an email info atthe BigCommercePodcastcom or on
our social media platform.
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com