Hey everyone, Scott Austin here. And this week we have a guest. Mark Gillilan is the founder and CEO of Kyoto Botanicals. Welcome, Mark.

Thanks so much for having me, Scott. Excited to be here.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about Kyoto Botanicals? What is your brand about?

Absolutely. So I launched it in 2020, actually about two weeks before COVID, which was really fun. So it is a botanical wellness brand. So started out as purely, hemp derived, THC free CBD company. So focusing on hemp wellness. I got my start in hemp a few years before that. Had never been in the category, had always been a very traditional, brand management, consumer packaged goods marketing guy and an old boss of I and pulled me over to work at, the biggest company in the category.

And I fell in love with it from day one, just making a difference in people's lives. So I knew I wanted to stay in it forever, and knew I wanted to launch my own brand eventually so that I could kind of fix all the things in the industry, or focus on all of the things I wanted to focus on.

So, yeah, launched it in 2020. Like I said, hemp derived CBD products. And now we just launched a new functional mushroom coffee as well. Earlier this year, and got a couple more new items coming out in the next few weeks. So.

Excellent. So, Craig, if I'm wrong, you started off in, let's just call it corporate experience and Kyoto is your first entrepreneurial endeavor of your own. Is that correct?

Correct. And a bunch of ideas put together, you know, everything from an app to, we worked on dog treats for a while, peanut butter for a while, but never launched anything. So, yeah, this is the first one that I actually launched.

And the fact that your first brand is still alive six years later is a major accomplishment.

Absolutely. Thank you.

I have launched many brands that are not still alive, so I think there's some stat like 95% of them die within the first five years. So you've made it past that mark means you're actually much more successful. You're in the 5%.

Fantastic. Good. Needed that, needed that encouragement today.

That's what I'm here for. Explain to me Kyoto Botanicals as the brand name.

Yes. So it came from, just as I started putting together this brand in 2019 and what I was trying to do with it, just staying as true to nature as possible, as close to the original plant as possible. And then kind of my background, either a biology background, a field biology background, and just I've been out in the woods and out of nature my whole life, and it's been always where I've been happiest and feel the most comfortable.

So I knew the brand I wanted to stand for. Nature and nature is unadulterated as possible. Somebody I originally worked with on the brand, was from Kyoto. So as we were just talking through that, it just kind of came to be one day just with the the reverence for nature in Kyoto and then the kind of bonsai tree in our logo.

Bonsai is a process. It's not an art form or it is an art form, but it's not like the finished product. Bonsai kind of refers to the process. So it all just kind of tied together to the to the process of wellness and consistency and continual improvement and just doing the best you can every day, not trying to achieve one specific goal, just trying to be a little better today than yesterday. So that's the backstory.

I love how thoughtful that was. Like, if you asked me, how did go for Jade Puma? I would give you a very technical. I was looking for a.com domain conversation and the algorithm I work through to come up with one. Right? But yours is a lot more thoughtful than that.

Oh thank you. Well, thankfully the domain was available after all of that, so that was lucky, you know.

And, you know, you said, the bonsai tree in the logo and I had to look at my, my other screen here for a second because your website doesn't show the bonsai tree in the logo, but your label does. Is that a conscious differentiation?

That's actually a decision I made probably about a year ago. I had the full label. It's a circle label. You know, when I launched this, I had a very corporate marketing background, like you said, and web development and and user experience and E-Com weren't something I was super familiar with. So the circle logo works awesome on packaging, which is something I do a ton of packaging development and brand development is something that I have about 20 years experience in, but translating that into an e-commerce site on Shopify, I did not.

And a circle logo just does not work digitally, nearly as well as a horizontal logo. So I made that switch, probably about a year ago just to kind of tighten up the website, reduce the header size, just make the website a lot cleaner and more modern, and then still use the full Bonzai logo on packaging and print materials, that sort of thing.

Are you consciously trying to. Or maybe I'm wrong in this, but it looks to me like the label on the packaging is meant to look like a rubber stamp, like old school. They stamped it on there. Is that what the intent is?

That was not. Oh yeah, I haven't heard that before. So now I'm never going to be able to unsee it.

Well, the line to me looks a little bit imperfect, right? The circle line, which reminds me of, you know, the imperfection of a rubber stamp. And then the inner circle has some breaks at the top of it. And I don't know if there's letters up there or not, but that there is also that imperfection makes me think rubber stamp, which makes me think it's old school. Right? Like they actually made this in the 40s or something kind of thing.

I'll fold it. I'll fold that into my next the next time I tell the story.

There you go. The story always, always grows. So you started your brand in 2020 and this was your first experience with Shopify also?

Yes.

So tell me what it was like and wrong. You're also a single person employee company, right? It's just you.

Correct.

So what was it like figuring all this stuff out in 2020 on on Shopify, in Shopify back then? You know, just come out with online store 2.0 stuff like today is way more complex than it was back then. But even then, it wasn't that simple. What was it like figuring this all out for yourself? How did you do it?

Yeah. So actually at the start, because I didn't even know where to start, I hired somebody to help me put it together on Shopify. From the beginning, I was not comfortable with any web design, any coding, any of that sort of thing at the time. So I actually hired somebody to put together the original store. It has changed a ton since then, and I took over pretty much after launch.

So. So after I hired the guy to build the initial launch, I took over, you know, running the store myself immediately once it went live. Which was which has been a long, long learning curve. And only recently, probably in the last 12 to 18 months, I've really gotten deep on, on the liquid side of it, on the coding side of it, really understanding the nuts and bolts of the site so I can know this brand inside and out.

All the technical side of it, all the way through the customer journey, through the product, customer relations, everything. So I really know everything about this brand in super detail, which is great, but it's been a lot of a lot of learning, a lot of mistakes. I know we're going to talk about apps. I made a train wreck of my site with apps for the first few years, and I once I started really digging in and learning the coding about 12 months ago, I started correcting a lot of those mistakes finally.

So yeah, it's been great. It's been a long journey. It's been fun. I'm by no means a coder now, but I know enough to be dangerous. I can write some HTML and that sort of thing. So yeah, it's been good. I think a lot of people are afraid of getting into that, but once you throw yourself into it, you start to realize that there's a lot of things you could do on your own that you don't need. You know, Shopify templates for Shopify apps for. It's been great on that respect because I'm a big I'm a big proponent of after making mistakes, of putting way too many apps on my store for years now, I'm a big proponent of being very intentional in the apps I install and making sure they actually have a business case, not just, oh, that app looks cool, I'm gonna throw it on the store.

So yeah, that's kind of been the journey and it gets better every day.

But it's funny because, you know, every store owner, you know, well behaved this way. I think brands have four big buckets. Their work goes in. One is product development, two is going to be marketing customer acquisition, three is their tech stack. And let's throw the website onto that. And four is fulfillment and customer service. As a single owner brand, you can't do all of those. And you have to figure out which ones you're going to do. And it sounds like you're actually doing all them, which is quite the exception.

I'm trying.

Yeah. You know, you got to figure out which ones do you want to become expert in, or at least really versus inverse and in and capable in and which ones are you going to outsource kind of thing. So many people want to outsource the customer acquisition side of stuff. And I'm a big believer that the most important part of any brand is customer acquisition. I people think I made a great product. I'll just get someone to make me some ads like, no, no, a great product is table stakes to this game in 2026, right? The hard part is the customer acquisition.

Yes it is.

And and I'm like the first thing you should outsource. I'm not telling you you should outsource. If you've got your hands on you're doing a great. But the first thing I think people should outsource is their tech stack, right? Because is the least strategic thing that they're doing, right? The strategy is your product, your customer support, your shipping and fulfillment, and your customer acquisition. The whole customer journey. The website is just a tool. It's a means to an end. But, you know, if you're doing all four of them, that's absolutely fantastic. Now, you mentioned that you've gotten, you know, hands on with doing some HTML and some liquid. Are you literally doing the H2 on liquid, or is your good friend Claude helping you out there?

Definitely good friend Claude.

Yeah, yeah, he's really helpful about things. I assume Claude is a guy, so can you give me an example of something that you, you know, done yourself in code that you know has helped your brand and how you're using it?

Yeah. So kind of my journey through that started with just small things. So, you know, taking Shopify blocks for design on the homepage and the product page and that sort of thing, and then kind of editing those so existing Shopify blocks. So just adjusting the pixel dimensions of images or adjusting how many buttons I can have on a, on an image with text overlay type thing.

So really small stuff like that. And then I started focusing on customer experience to your point. And speed and that, that kind of left me deep down a rabbit hole of liquid and HTML and stuff. So I, I rebuilt the whole homepage just in a custom HTML block, which. So then I designed it all myself, the way I wanted to talk about the brand, the way I wanted to look, the way I wanted the customer to experience the homepage and the journey through the homepage.

So did all of that. And then back to to kind of the original point of this call right around apps. And I mentioned I downloaded a ton of apps at the beginning. I mean, I was I didn't know any better at the time. I would go in the Shopify App Store and say, oh, that app sounds cool. I'm going to download that app and see how it works.

So like across L app or an upsell app. And then I would see six other ones that had five stars. So I would literally stupidly download all of them and just test them for like an hour and see which one I liked. And then I assumed once you hit uninstall app, it uninstalled the app but didn't learn for years that that's not entirely true, at least behind a bunch of zombie code.

So that was a huge project trying to improve site speed, to go through every one of my liquid files and get rid of all code that wasn't relevant to the site anymore. So those were kind of the two big first pieces, and now I'm comfortable editing the code that I pretty much anything that pops in my head or any issue that arises on the site. I can just go in and take care of it really quickly. Like this. All morning, before I jumped on the call with you, I was working on schema stuff and so yeah, it's nice.

Yeah, I got two things I want to talk to the audience about. You know, as I listen to you say these things, the first one is we have to explain that this horrible experience you had was in 2020, right. And shop has changed a lot since then. Shopify apps now use what are called app and bits before app embeds and app was allowed to edit the code, and it would go in onto your theme liquid and it would, you know, add its own lines of text. Right. And it doesn't do that anymore. But back then when it had to do that, because that was the only way apps could add their functionality. Shopify also made the decision that an app, when you uninstall it, was not allowed to take its code out of the theme, which was a good decision at their time. Right? And I agree what they did, because you don't want the app going in and changing code where maybe it doesn't know the full context, what's going on in there.

That makes sense now that you've explained it.

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Right. But that also meant that all that code that was added was still there. And that includes JavaScript and things like that, which bog down your website. So today, store owners that are, you know, starting their store today, you if you want to add all the cross-sell apps and try them all out, it doesn't hurt your store like it did back in 2020.

We just want people to be aware that, you know, the nightmare you live was real in 2020, 2021, 2022, but now all apps reuse an app and bits. And so a lot cleaner world than it used to be. But there's still some legacy, you know, stores out there with legacy apps that still have that problem. I'm actually working on one of those with one of my clients right now.

The other thing I want to say is, it is amazing how powerful it is just to be able to do a couple little edits. Like you said, you wanted to add a second button or whatever number of buttons to, you know, an image with text overlay or something. You want. Two buttons in your theme only gave you one, and once you realize how easy it is to say, well, I want two buttons, right? And make this theme which is meant to be generic and used by everybody specific to your brand and your specific needs. It is just such an empowering experience to realize, you know, like when when you buy your car, you're stuck with your car, right? You can't change out the engine. Sure you can. You know, put on a little trim or something like that.

But that's the car you've got for the whole life of your car. But your theme, it's just the beginning. It's more like a house where you can add on a bathroom to your house if you want to. Just like you can add functionality to your theme if you want. You or you can remodel your kitchen just like you can remodel the section or change the way it works kind of thing.

And that's what I do for clients all day, every day is I give them the richest, most robust theme there is, in my opinion. And then we customize the living heck out of it because every brand is different. Like, it's the first thing I saw when I looked at your website was like, oh, this homepage is put together, it's a story and you have got some unique design elements with that vertical line going through and that kind of stuff connecting everything.

Like it's obvious that that is a custom developed home page, which I think, you know, customers are going to sense subconsciously. They're not looking at it going, oh, this guy, you know, it's liquid code, but they're going this brand put in the energy to tell a story that's, you know, bespoke to their brand and consistent and elegant kind of thing.

And that helps elevate your brand up. But you know, so my question is like how. Because I think it's super powerful once you realize you can do that, is that like something you do every day now or is it like once a year, once a month? No.

Most every day I'm in there. Like I said, I was in editing schema today. I mean, I yeah, I don't do big edits in code. It's probably once a week, like, you know, if you're on the homepage right now, like a couple of days ago, I added that that Trustpilot certification badge overlaid on the hero image. I added my little founder box like a week ago, so I'll make I'll make little tweaks as I look to build trust and improve the customer experience on the website.

But like a big massive code added, I won't mess around a ton. I'll mess. Like I said, I'll mess with schema. I'll do a little bit here and there, but not a ton. And then one thing, you know, going back to what you said, how powerful it is for brands to just kind of take the leap and realize that they can actually customize the cookie cutter stuff that Shopify gets.

You couldn't agree more? I don't know, I didn't know for years that you could do it. But one of us made this mistake one time, and I know you like to be instructive for people. Always copy your theme first and work in the copy, not your live thing. That's something I didn't even really know about for a while, and that removes a it removes all pressure from any edits you can you make.

You can do whatever you want. You can screw everything up and be it keeps you from screwing everything up, which I did really badly one time, a little while ago. And it took me probably like I think it was like 12, 14 hours straight, like almost all my trying to undo what I did. And so I never do that again.

Always copy your theme first and work in the copy.

Yeah, I had a client years ago now, and, they fired somebody. And on the way out, the employee deleted their theme code from their store. So there's nothing there's no themes left in the store. So. And this is for you, like the next step. Now that you know how to copy the theme, right? I have a GitHub repo for every store that I build out which has, you know, GitHub keeps code versions, right.

And you can add this to your is my point. And there's, you know, a number of different ways you can do it. Code can work, walk you through it. But the beautiful thing about GitHub is not only do you have a copy, but it shows you line by line what you changed on what days, so you can see every single, you know, line of text. It's been edited kind of thing. And it's another layer of, of security, you know. So this door that lost their their theme code, they were freaking out. And I had their theme up and running in about 25 minutes. Right. Kind of thing.

That's a great tip. Thank you.

Yeah. And you know, code will walk you through how to do that right. Yeah. You it have been too technical before you had Claude. But now with Claude, he'll, he'll he'll totally help you out getting that puppy set up.

Perfect I love that.

And on your homepage. Yeah. You said you just added your founder. Box. I gotta say, you follow my my guidance to clients, and that is. I always want to see dogs and babies in on your. Phone, Because they make you more human. And there's a picture on the homepage of Marc with his very cute dog, looking very alert and attentive. It looks like in the mountains of Colorado where you live, like, you know, you look way more real and legit there than, you know, wearing a suit and a tie and some, you know, stupid background behind you kind of thing.

Right? That's the idea. That's the whole brand, just real human wellness.

So I would think about just applying a slight gray tint to that background instead of pure white. The pure white to me just pops a little bit too much. But you're not just an opinion of one there, especially since the rest of your site is so soothing and smooth.

I love it, thank you. See, I'll be back and I'll be back and liquid today now.

And it'll probably take you three seconds to figure out how to do that.

That's just that's easy. That's just changing the background color.

Yep. Oh. What theme are you using here?

I don't even know. It's an old one. I'm kind of not committed to it at this point. Switching to a modern 2.0 theme. I this one's working for me as it is right now, and I have so much custom stuff in it that it's beyond me to upgrade to a 2.0. I've tried, and it was just going to be too big of a left.

So at this point it works it. I'm not losing anything, and I have so much custom stuff in it that I'm going to have to hire somebody to, to actually do it. It's beyond me.

That's where the GitHub thing. No, it's too late for that again. But this is just remind other people that's where that GitHub thing becomes really helpful, because I've had stores where, you know, we built out their old free online store 2.0 theme, did tons of customization for five six years, all stored in GitHub. And then we add a new theme.

We start from scratch. We don't try to upgrade themes, we just start from scratch and then we go literally git commit by git commit and say, all right, on this day we change this thing. Let's go do that. On this day we change. And instead of trying to figure out and agree to do it step by step and it helps so much.

It's funny you say that because as you were telling me about what you do with GitHub in my head, I was like, God, I wish I had. Now I'm not. A few years ago, water under.

The bridge, but now you know it.

I think if that would have made upgrading the theme so much easier.

Well, and one of the funny things, right, if you end up doing the GitHub thing, is you probably have your max of 20 theme updates, you know, in your, your store, right? Yeah. You can actually go and take your oldest one and start that is your GitHub. And then do a commit to the next oldest one and then that.

And then you'll get that history of your last 20 theme saves. You know how ever far back they go. And I've done that with stores where, you know, I've never talked to them before, but they've got, you know, 20 versions of the theme over the past six years. And I can put in a chronology of those 20 steps in six years and figure a lot of stuff out.

That's a good idea. Oh, next. That'll be my next project.

Yeah, yeah. Well, if if you have the time to do that, then your business is running really smoothly.

I do not have the time to do that.

And that's that's exactly what like I talk a lot of stuff with my clients like you. You wish you had the luxury to do the stuff we're talking about right now. You got you got bigger fish to fry. Let's do shift. Anything you talking about in apps? Because a lot of people who are just getting started in Shopify don't realize is in Shopify will even tell you this Shopify goal is to give you 80% of your e-commerce platform. And the other 20% is going to come in from other things than Shopify on the store. That means apps, right? Like Shopify has an email app, but it's kind of crap. I don't know why they even bother shipping it when when Klaviyo exists and they are stock owners of Klaviyo for whatever reason. But you know, whatever and you know they don't.

They used to have a refuse app that was an absolute joke. I think they finally took it out of the store guys. It was absolute garbage. But there's tons of apps that you're going to have to do because every store is different and like, you know, like you said, there's like 25, there's probably 50 or maybe hundreds by now across all apps.

I even have one in the store. You can't find it. We've not posted there recently, but each one's different, right? There's not one perfect cross app. You have to look at all of them and say, here's what I'm looking for. Here's my business need. Here's the apps that come closest to it. Let me try those out and then pick the one that works best for me.

So talk to me about like the essential apps in your store and how you went about knowing you needed one and then finding the right one for you. And then of course, you know what went wrong or what went right in that whole process.

Yeah. So the easy one that is set and then forget it. I forget the app developer name. I can look it up if you want me to. It's just an index. Now out with an e-commerce store, with a blog, with with products, with bundled products and all that stuff. I kind of resisted it for a little while, and was some I tend to on the side from an SEO perspective of not submitting probably as much as I should, but but index now, for those that don't know, is what being uses to index web pages or to to tell it that there's new web pages out there that it should look at indexing being is, I don't know, people that use it. You know, Google Search Console has a pretty strict limit of how many pages you can load a day. So I started with Google, obviously, because everybody does because it's the elephant in the room and I think it's like 10 or 15 pages. You can ask Google to go index and crawl every day.

When I started working with being to and using index now, I was I kind of had that, you know, you only get a few pages to submit every day. So every little change shouldn't get submitted. But Bing doesn't have then I think Bing accepts 10,000 today or something crazy like that. So it's a set it and forget it app that any change I make on any page on my entire website, it just automatically pings index now.

And you know, stuff changes all the time. But ChatGPT relies pretty heavily as far as I understand it. On being. So I want my content to be very, very fresh with Bing all the time. So that is a nice set it and forget an app. You just click the settings that say basically, you know, pages, blogs, products, home page, all your different page buckets. Every time you make any change to want, it just pings index now and you don't have to think about it. And it's automatic and it's great. That one is a nice easy set it and forget it.

One do you have. A higher percentage of your traffic coming from being than there 1% market share or whatever their number is these days?

I do well, I shouldn't say Bing. So I kind of think about it as a bigger bucket. Like I think about it as Google and then, the search engines that, that feed off of being data, I think DuckDuckGo does. Yandex does your video all this better than AI than I do? But there's a few other, you know, smaller ones. Brave, maybe. So I kind of look at it as like a being data ecosystem versus Google. And yeah, it's, it's it's much higher than Bing's actual market share for sure.

Yeah. Anybody who puts effort in being whether it be on the organic or the paid side, you get a higher return percentage wise because it's such a small player. Most people just ignore it. Right? Yeah. It's one of those things if you go play in that garden, you'll see the results. But are those results big enough because their market share is so small.

So it's one of those trade offs. You have to figure out. And then, you know, you had mentioned, you know, the relationship between, being in ChatGPT because Microsoft and OpenAI have a tight relationship, I think. And I could be wrong on this, but I think that is shortcut. It by Shopify sends its product catalogs straight to the ChatGPT back end.

So Bing's going through your front end and scraping your website. But Shopify through GCP, its, universal commerce protocol or whatever they call that thing, right? Their product catalog, they're just sending that data straight in, which is why you want that really good, strong structured data. Shameless plug for my Data Fi app that you should all be downloading and using to get that structured data in there.

But, you know, not to say that investing in thing is not worth it, it's just not going to help you in ChatGPT, I think.

So I kind of have a unique perspective on that. I can't do causality here, but your Shopify Universal Commerce Protocol to ChatGPT I am cut out of because I'm in CBD.

Oh, that's right, you're in one of those categories. Yep.

Yeah. Which sucks. So I am cut out of that. But I still get pretty good and growing chat GPT traffic from just surfacing in actual ChatGPT conversation. So nobody can buy my products in ChatGPT, but they can still get recommended by ChatGPT. And that data does not come from the universal commerce protocol that comes from, I believe, being AI.

I can't say for sure where exactly it comes from, but something just for people to be mindful of if you are and I don't know what their restricted categories are, I'm guessing like finance, how, you know, just do your research on your own. I would say to your listeners and, and really go build all your structured data. Like you said, I have all that I have. UPC is, you know, build all that structured data really well because it is valuable. But just check and see if Shopify is even allowing your products to be fed directly to the AI search engine.

So basically, correct me if I'm wrong. You don't have shop pay. Correct?

Correct.

Yeah. So anybody ask you can't you shop Shopify Payments? You're in the same bucket. Like I have a couple clients that do knives and things like that. They're in banned categories. So if you're using stripe or whoever for your payment provider, you're not benefiting from that back end connection between Shopify.

Which is a bummer, but it does make I think I'm not an expert in this to our discussion on being an index now, it makes it even more important, for for categories like mine.

That makes that makes a lot of sense. So give me another, an app that you're a big fan of.

So you mentioned reviews and I used I don't I can't I think maybe two years, maybe three years. I think in 2023 I switched, I use Shopify as native reviews because I didn't know any better.

Piece of garbage. That is an embarrassment to the Shopify development team that they kept it alive for so long.

It was so bad. So I switched, about, I want to say three years ago to judge dot me. And I've been super happy with them, I love it. I can list off a bunch of reasons I love it. Other people may love other ones. This is the one I settled on and I have no desire to switch.

So really easy to use. Their their customer service, their tech team is really, really responsive and helpful. Like amazingly so. The integrations are great. What else do I love about it? I love that they do off platform. They host your reviews and your brand and stuff on their own site too. So you got that third party reference for for SEO and stuff.

They do Google integration, which is really great. So they do tie to your reviews to your Google Merchant Center. They feed them to, I believe they feed them to ChatGPT. Now to

you've. Got their structured data showing up on your product page, right? I'm looking at your website right now and I'm bringing up this thing called SEO markup, which will look at your your structured data. And number four on the product page I'm looking at is the schema added straight by judge me, which is really nice and neat. Their app just does that so that structured data is showing up there so that Google can read it like you're saying in ChatGPT and anybody can read it kind of thing.

Are you using any of the advanced features and judge me like their coupons and that kind of stuff?

I do. I just started like maybe a month or two ago. I don't do any of that, but I just started doing, the referral one. So after somebody purchases, you know, we give them an offer. If they refer somebody and that person buys both of them get money off. So I just started doing that. A little bit of success with it.

It's slow. I had one setting in it that I set up wrong, so that sort of screwed me for the first month or two, I was doing it. What else do I use? Theirs? Yeah, I think that's that's mostly it for the advanced.

You're not using photos or videos.

Nobody does. Nobody I don't have like, that's more of like a fashion thing. And yeah, I haven't had anybody anybody I think the option is there. Okay. If someone goes to labor you I think they can. It's just this product is not something that people want to take a picture of. And buzz.

Yeah, it's rare that I find a brand because I use judgment for all my stories. Right? It's judge Me to me is an absolutely amazing case study right there. One of the most successful apps in the are there. Yeah. Oh by far. Yeah. And I think I might be wrong on this, but I think they're in Vietnam and they are a totally fast support team and really helpful kind of thing.

And what judge me did it's been years ago they came out. But it used to be when you added reviews, the reason that that crappy Shopify app worked for so long is the other review apps were so damn expensive. We're talking thousands of dollars a year, and it would cost you hundreds of dollars a month to, you know, reviews and a lot of them had these models where, you know, if you pay 300 bucks a month, you can send out 300 requests for reviews.

If you're selling 400, you know, orders a month, you can't get reviews from everybody. So reviews were a super expensive thing. And, you know, I don't know if it was collusion or whatever. They all had these really expensive price models and Judge Me came out and said, one flat fee, you actually were free. And you can get basic functionality for free forever.

And then if you want the more advanced features, it's one 1999 a month free regardless of your volume. And it changed the review game overnight, right? There were a lot of legacy people that were stuck on these big, expensive ones. It took them a while, but you know, now reviews are a lot more affordable. It had to come down in price, but they just came out with a great product, competed on price and destroyed everybody.

They've just kept going right, the momentum behind them. I can't imagine how much money they're making at 20 bucks a month, you know? And that's when you have 5 million stores. Yeah, we have 5 million stores. Don't try to make a thousand per customer. Try to make 20 per customer and just, you know, get the volume kind of thing. And they're absolutely, you know, knocking it out of the park doing that.

Yeah. They're they're a good team. They it seems like they're constantly coming out with new features trying to make stuff better. Getting back to the to the liquid code like I've had multiple times where, you know, I tell them I'm in my liquid and I'm trying to get the app to do X, Y, or Z, and they they just give me a snippet to add and or.

Yep, yep.

It's just there. They've been they've been great to work with and the platform is awesome. So that's that's a big one.

So yeah I, I you know early on with the structured data stuff they're they're snippets weren't perfectly, you know working. And every time I would just say go make it work in this store. And they would just do it store for storage to store like you know, you know, all is part of their $20 monthly. Fabulous. And what I love about reviews is your customers can say things about your products that you can't say, right?

You can't say this is the best thing ever, or it's going to make you sleep through the night or whatever. You know, there's certain value props you can't talk about, but your customers can, right? And that's the super powerful part about reviews is they'll say things that are that are important for customers to know, but you can't say those things.

Yeah. And this is anecdotal also. Yeah, that's an awesome point. And then I, I think I don't know if judge reviews feed it the same way, but I have a working hypothesis right now over some work I've been doing over the last couple months. Messing around with different review platforms is, I think reviews have a pretty big influence on AI.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely right.

Having your brand be recommended. I don't have a ton of data of my own to go on, but that's my hunch right now, is that I have an outsized influence in ChatGPT for a brand my size because of like, review velocity and like the people that love, love our products, like genuinely love them. And they leave super detailed reviews, not just five stars love it, which does nothing, but they're leaving like super detailed reviews of the product when they take it, why they take it, how much they love it, how it's helping them.

So there's like significant context around the product review that is then, yes, I think very valuable.

No, absolutely hundred percent agree with you. Because what you know, the world of SEO is kind of binary, right? Do you have a link or not? Right. And inbound links were how they counted the votes, right. And every vote was equal. The difference between that it's an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude. The amount of information that I is considering when it makes a decision. What is the best answer to the question that person's asking? So if someone's asking for something to help them with sleep and they live in a high altitude area, and because we're all learning and I to see more and more things right, and the more and more things we say, AI goes out and looks for the thing that matches to that.

And that's where those customer reviews, they're going to say certain things that the customer in AI is saying. Also go, we got a match here. Now let's let's go off to the races and connect those dots.

That's a good point.

I love the customer reviews. Now, have you taken your reviews and had AI analyze them and come up with how do your customers talk about you and then factor that in to how do you talk to your customers?

Yeah.

Nice. Nice.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. It's one of my favorite things to do with the brand is like, I don't think these words are the right words to be using. You're like, what do you mean? Like here's what your customers are saying. You know, you know, for example, the brand might say that, you know, our fashion is, you know, stylish and whatever. And all the customers are saying it's sensible and cozy.

So you got to, you know, use the words your customers are using because that's what they're looking for and that's what they appreciate about your brand.

I don't I don't know if I want to share the secret, but sure, why not. It's probably it's it's probably not as much of a secret as I think it is, but I've started over the last month or so, maybe, using doing that exact analysis, but but even deeper. So using aggregating all of the reviews and through, you know, our good friend Claude and getting tons and tons and tons of unique data that nobody else in the world has.

Yes. So, you know, x percent of people say this, Y percent of people use this type of products, right? That you can just add so much unique data to, to content, to product pages, everything that keeps the website relevant. For SEO. And.

You know, I always, every time you say something, it makes me want to say five things and I gotta figure out which ones the priority one to say the first one is the silver bullet is not the secret of taking that information. The silver bullet is doing the hard work that you do to execute on that tip that you gave.

Right? So by telling people that, hey, this is how I do things, you're not giving away the house because most people are too lazy to do the work, right? The successful store owner is the one that does the work. Everybody else is looking for their silver bullet, which is how do I do this without doing any work? The answer is the silver bullet is do the hard work every day, 24 hours a day.

Never stop, right? So, you know, you never given the secret away because they're not going to do the hard work. And then, you know, the other one is, you know, we have an AI harness that we, we use. And one of the first things we did that we automated was we pull in the data feed from, judge Me for all of our clients, and we analyze it every 90 days, and we can compare it to our brand guidelines, right? All of our documentation for the branding. And we ask ourselves, do we need to update that documentation to factor certain things in? And that's been a nice automated loop for us with our clients.

That's great too.

All right. Let's, let's talk about another one of your favorite apps.

It's it's really simple and dumb. And again, another one. I just didn't know what I didn't know. I mean, I think, you know, I mentioned at the beginning I'm very intentional with that. So I don't have like 50 to choose from here. So it's it's a amp slide Carter. You know, this might have changed in newer Shopify you know setups and themes that they have really. And I'm sure I'm sure it has, but that they have really a much better cart and checkout experience than what I had before. But I added this one and it had a pretty significant result on on cart behavior and and conversion rate pretty quickly. I love it. It's got some really fun things I can do. So, you know, it's got free shipping status bar.

I have a free gift at $100 on there, too. It's got trade up options. It's got cross-sell options right there in the in the cart door where people are making that purchase decision versus, you know, pop up on the side or whatever. I can put discounts in it now, which is super nice. So like auto discounts. So, you know, if, let's say if I'm running a promotion like spend $100, get a free CBD gummy or something, I can just build the code into the cart so that when somebody cart it's $100, it automatically puts the product at the free product in with the code.

So it just basically removes a lot of barriers for for shoppers. So that one's been a really good one.

So your theme didn't come with a fly out card. It was just a page cart.

It did. It just sucked.

So you.

Wanted you.

Wanted the additional upselling, you know. So yeah, I'm looking at your cart right now and it says I'm over the $40 free shipping threshold. So it's telling me that, and it's telling me how much more I need to spend to get to the, the free shirt. And then I also see, you know, a couple recommended products, complete your routine. So, you know, there's a lot of merchandizing going on there. So that's, that's what you like about this is not the fly out cart part. It's the.

Exactly. Well, and it just looks so much better than anything. You know, I could have done this whole liquid theme thing, and I did for a while. I probably did that for six months not knowing any better. Here's the card. I have the cons out of the box from Shopify. I'm just going to go into liquid and edit it and just kind of make it look better and I could have kept doing that, but I chose to pay for this one just because it has so much functionality.

It looks really good. The auto adding the free product to cart or auto, adding the discount code when their cart hits the certain threshold and stuff. It's just it's so nice to be have a simple message for shoppers versus like, here's your code, copy it, put it in a checkout.

I'm not a. Big fan of. So I want to to see, you know, your experience with your store. I'm not a big fan of counters that say, hey, you haven't gotten this free thing yet, whether it's shipping or the t shirt, if you just spend more money, we're going to we're going to get you that right. Because there's there's two ways to look at that. One is that's going to incentivize people to spend that amount of money to cross that threshold. The other is, oh, I don't get free shipping because I haven't spent enough money. Screw you, I'm out of here. And both those are true. It's just question is which one outweighs the other one. Have you seen with your customers that it's, you know, our how do you measure success or have you been able to measure its success?

Yeah. So I move I move shipping around a lot. Most people. So my, my average order value is, is well above that $40. So it's it's not a it's not a huge issue for me. It's really first time buyers. Which obviously to your point at the very beginning of the people that are the hardest to get. So I move my shipping around a lot.

I'm just actually moved it back up to $40 versus like free shipping basically for everything recently, for a number of different reasons. Shipping is just getting so insanely expensive. It's just a margin destroyer at this point in time, where the world is right now and with shipping costs and and materials costs and that sort of thing. So I don't see a huge difference.

And I try to offset it with like make goods that are kind of more valuable than, than free shipping, but cost a similar amount, you know, like a free item or a free gift or something like that, that, that hopefully will have long term brand retention value over just a single transaction of free shipping for 599. So I don't know. Shipping is shipping is so hard.

The crazy thing is right. Everybody thinks they get free shipping at Amazon when they actually spend $130 a year for the right to get free shipping, right? So it's not free, but they all think it's free. Yeah. And that changes their perception with your shipping cost.

Yeah. Shipping is a pain in the butt.

And and you don't drop it on their front step at four in the morning the next day. So it's just.

I don't but I do ship it. I try to ship everything out same day if I can. And you know, by noon the next day is a big thing to me because it is genuinely like one of my biggest pet peeves on earth. When you buy something online and it sits and like, fulfilled or just not even this legit for days and days and days.

So I do everything I can on my end, make shipping as fast as possible. So fulfillment. I do super like I try to control all the variables I can control. I can't control USPS, I can't control UPS, but I can get the product into their hands. So when the customer goes to check their order, at least it says it's on the way and it's out of my ass, out of my hands like I did my I held up my end of the bargain.

The more competitive the world gets right. The more you have to compete. And Amazon has made shipping a differentiator big time and returns, I think, even more so than shipping. It means other stores have to rise to that chance and have to meet it, right? But they have to do better than they used to do. Like you're saying you just can't let that order sit in your queue for five days anymore.

If you can get it out the same day, you get it out the same day. Absolutely. Right here on the screen, I'm showing people for those who aren't watching the video, I have this little golf cart, Jade Puma flag. Right. And I ordered three of them custom made, or they came with a set of three. I put two in my golf cart, but the reason I'm showing it is that got printed.

So it's custom printing, right? It's my logo on the flag. It got printed in China. They shipped it out and it was on my doorstep a week and a half later, I was like, that is crazy, right? Shipping from China in a week and a half time.

That is crazy.

Yeah, yeah, on a custom printed thing. It wasn't like it was on a shelf. Like it was unreal. The world is just really competitive when it comes to fulfillment. Are you using any email apps? What? What are you doing there? Yeah.

Cool idea.

I love the way it's like, yeah, klaviyo. Of course everybody uses Klaviyo. That's a no brainer.

I mean, judge just came out with an email like that. Speaking of them, them adding stuff all the time, every column. I'm with them. They're trying to talk about their new email and I'm like, I'm not the I'm not even going to enter. You maybe do you may be doing it way better than Klaviyo, but I'm not even entertaining switching off of clay because right.

Now, well, and Klaviyo came out with reviews and you're like, I'm not looking at that. I got.

Exactly right. So yeah, I claim yeah, it's literally been on my site since day one. It's set it and forget it. People try to get me to switch all the time and I'm like, I'm good, I'm solid. It's fine.

You say set it and forget it. So that to me sounds like you're using lots of flows and not campaigns. Is that true?

I do both, okay, I do both, but I don't even like I don't think it has everything I need. It's got decades of experience. It's not crazy expensive for a store. My volume, you know, once you get an enterprise share, then it gets nutso. It's fine for my size store. It does everything I need. They, you know, keep adding functionality.

I've literally never. I'm trying to think since the day I launched the shop with Klaviyo in February of 2020, I don't think maybe once or twice, maybe a couple times I've, like, gone in to look at my integration with Shopify. Like it seems to be very seamless, which is really all that you can ask for with an app integration with Shopify.

Like, is my data from Shopify ending up in Klaviyo? Can I build my segments correctly? Everything seems to be pretty flawless every single day, so I'm good with the idea.

Do you have judge Me connected to Klaviyo? So you see the review events and all that?

I don't because there was a think maybe I looked into it, I don't know, I think because I just, I use judge to collect reviews. So judge means email emails, people to collect reviews. And I've just made, you know, I've done all of the HTML email editing, some of my klaviyo emails and my dummy emails look the same. They can't tell them apart design wise. It's just comes from a different domain and I want it. I kind of wanted judge dot me and their domain reputation as a sender to to take care of the the review request emails because I want them I want them to be hitting the inbox as much as possible.

You're not using your domain to send the judge emails.

I don't believe so. Now you've got me wanting to go in and check. Now I have to go check.

Well, and then the other thing to think about, right? With the connection between judge me and Klaviyo, the only purpose is not to have klaviyo send the emails like we have judge we doing that what we do most of the time, but what it is is klaviyo knows everything about your customers as possible, right? It knows all the data from Shopify. It knows all the data from Klaviyo, it knows all the data from judge me if you connect it and it knows all the data from whatever other systems you connect it to, so then you can use that information to do things. For example, you may want to say, oh, you left a one star review, I'm taking you off my email list not as revenge, but like, I'm just respecting you're not liking me kind of thing, right? Or you could say, you know, show me people. You know, use that as a piece of data when you make segments and things like that. Now I see you don't have subscription. If I am I wrong in that?

No, I used to I made the decision to get rid of it a couple of years ago. I'm not a big subscription guy. It kind of grosses me out in this category. It's what every brand like. Just hammers and hammers and hammers and then raises price to be able to offer the lower price on subscriptions and then traps people in subscriptions and it ends it.

You know, Colorado even came out with a law this year. You basically have to have one click cancellation for subscriptions. They just there's just something about them. They're a they're a pain in the butt to manage on my end. Because when people do want to cancel, like I'm big in the customer service, I want to take care of them for them immediately and make 100% sure it's done.

So I, I did all cancellations manually personally, as a consumer so immensely fed up with subscriptions that I just I just have made the decision not to contribute to that nonsense.

Your customers, how often are they, you know, what is your average, you know, number of orders that a customer does? Are they repeat customers all the time? They come back every few months.

Yeah. So lifetime value is really high. Purchase cycle is about like 63 days retention really I so they're coming back because once you start, once you find a product that actually helps you and gives you the benefits you're looking for, it's, you know, it's something you don't want to go without. So, you know, keep coming up with great products that help people that they love. And and they'll keep coming back to.

You know, one of the ways to think about that, you know, you can do whatever you want, of course. And it sounds like good, you know, thinking what you're doing there. But one of the services you could provide is making their lives easier by just renewing it for them and allowing them to do subscriptions. They don't have to keep coming back if that's what they choose to do. Right. You get to decide if you're a jerk in your merchandizing, in your policies, or if you respect the customers in that. Right.

Yeah, that's a valid point.

You know, I have a couple clients who, you know, have consumables are completely different than yours. And we put in recharge and recharge is my favorite subscription app. And you just look at the number of subscriptions and it goes up every single month for. And that's a sign that people like it. And you see there's a healthy unsubscribe rate.

So people opt in. They opt out and all that kind of stuff. But that subscription just keeps growing. And it's, you know, people that don't forget you're providing a service to them. You know, if you're subscriptions not growing, then that's a sign you're doing things wrong or not providing the value to the customers that you should be. And, you know, in both those cases, their subscription floor of revenue they're going to make that month is now substantial.

Yeah. No, that's that's a huge part of it. And it's great. And you know another issue not having Shopify payments.

Oh that's right. Yeah I forgot about that part.

So I have to go through subscriptions just through the payment processor. And it's not it's not super native into Shopify. And it's very manual and it's just really not ideal.

No I had totally forgotten that technical challenge you have.

Yeah. I'm guessing recharge subscriptions require Shopify payments because most of them do. They don't work through third party payment processors.

Well, they're old platform. You know, before Shopify supported subscriptions, which wasn't that long ago that they started supporting a few years ago, all subscriptions went through the subscription app's checkout process right. This month, recharge is actually forcing all those people on that legacy platform to upgrade to go through Shopify. So I don't even know. I don't even know if they're supporting their own check out anymore.

So disregard everything I just said about,

you. Know, I'll keep looking into it because that, you know, that's a good point you make about, you know, if your subscriptions are growing, you know, you're doing something right and you're providing a service that's actually valuable to people. So it's a valid point. So I'll look into it again.

One thing I see here, well are there any more apps that you're using that are big favorite years that you would recommend.

No, those are the big ones that generate revenue. I just added literally, I think a week or two ago, Microsoft Clarity, which has been really cool, really fun. So getting back to being in ChatGPT stuff that we talked about earlier.

Do you find yourself screaming at your customers when you watch the videos?

I, I actually haven't watched the video yet because I think that I would,

Would you have to learn how to do so? Those, I don't know, clarity is is recording your customers browsing session so you can see exactly what they're doing right and what you have to learn over time, as you watch 100 of these videos is whenever you want to scream at the customer, you should scream it yourself because you've done something wrong. The customer is confused because you've done something wrong. So scream at yourself every time you want to scream at your customer and fix. And the hard part, and the fun part is like trying to figure out why are they doing what they're doing. What did I do with this website that made them do that thing that they should not be doing?

They integrated with with AI overviews now, too. So there's a lot there's a lot of good data just built right into your Shopify dashboard on it, which is really nice. I did watch one actually, because it caught my eye. It was like a it was like a 17 minute session and the I don't know what the purpose. They must have had like 75 tabs open because like, the mouse would move for a second on a page and then it would go to her for like six minutes.

I'm like, what is, what is this what it looks like when I'm on my computer all day working?

I had one client. They sold cold therapy machines. Right. So if you have a knee surgery of this, you know, ice bucket that wraps around your knee that, you know, gives you cold therapy for your recovery process, and they sold like 6 or 8 of different of these machines. And there's very little differences between them. But there are differences. Right. So what this brand had done a fabulous job in SEO and they were winning in this space in SEO for it for years because they brought all these articles that said, you know, the best ice buckets for knee surgery, the best one for your ankle, the best for tennis, the best for this, all these different things. And I'm watching the videos and you can just see the customer doesn't want to read the article.

They just want to be told what is the best one. You could just see it, right? And after five I watched five hours of videos and it was so obvious. They just want to be told what to buy. I got a knee problem. Which one do I buy? You know, after doing that, you know, we looked at the data of all the machines that they sold, which one sold the most knee pads, which one sold was ankle pads. Which one? You know. So the most back pads. And like you were saying how you come up with data for your product page. We actually said this is number one for knees on our website. Right. This one's number three. And ankles, you know if you've got this thing going on. So we actually said we recommend this. We recommend this.

But we only did that by watching these customer surveys. Right. Or these customer videos and realizing what they wanted that we weren't giving them. And it actually made a difference in their conversion rate, a substantial difference. So I love the apps that you talked about on fans. I the couple I hadn't heard of before, like the indexing one.

That's really cool. I have to check that out. You know, my favorites of Clearview and Judge me right on top of those. One thing I'm looking at, you know, you talked about your cross-selling across merchandizing app and your cart. One thing I don't see you doing, or maybe you're doing it. I don't see it right now. I'm on a page of your website.

It's the broad spectrum peppermint CBD oil bundle. Does this product come unbundled also?

Yes.

Why don't you put those on the same page?

They are. You're probably on the Wellness Bundles collection page.

Perhaps I'm in the all products collection.

So it'll be all the products will have all of the all of the SKUs. So they will both be on there. And then I have a bundle collection page that'll just be those those bundled products like bundle and say it's stuff and then.

Oh you're doing that for inventory management aren't you.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay. So you're using Shopify for inventory management.

Yes.

Yeah. Because what's really nice and you can't do it because of that technical limitation. Because one of Shopify has weaknesses. It has two big ones. I think there's a lot of them. But the two biggest ones, just if an e-commerce platform, it sucks that inventory management and it sucks it's shipping. Even though it's getting better at shipping. It's not getting better inventory management. Right. So if you had a third party inventory management system, you could actually put all those, you know, you could have three different SKUs on one page by one, by two, by three. And those be SKUs. Right. But you can't do that in shoppers. You could use the bundle app, which is nicer bundle app manages that inventory problem for you, but then you have to put it on a separate product page.

Yeah, they're bundle up. I know we've given Shopify a lot of grief for some horrible apps, and the bundle one is actually very basic, actually functional.

It works perfectly for simple needs. And we add it to most stores. Yeah, absolutely.

What the bundling really gives you is actually so I could do it, but I could probably figure out a way to do it with variants. But I wanted to actually, you know, increase the number of product pages. So that was kind of kind of a nice bonus if.

That's that's an SEO goal, right? Yeah. I always say you want to optimize your store for the customer experience and then do SEO things. Second.

Yeah. So it was first year customer experience without having a subscription. It's it's basically the same thing, right. So you know save they're typically like 10 or 15% if you buy three of the same products. So it gets at the same end kind of of a subscription. It's not recurring forever, but you still get that customer now and you've got product in their hands that will hopefully last in three months. And then once they develop that, they've got a routine and they're going to be coming back more and more so that was the original goal.

One of the things I'd encourage you to think about, right. So I did a podcast episode earlier this year, episode 186 review of The Breeze landing page. Right. And breeze is a UK company that sells polo shirts. And if I remember correctly, like if you buy one polo shirt, they're like 58 bucks apiece, but if you buy five, they're $23 apiece.

So the reason I did a podcast on it is I actually bought five. They sold me on buying five, because who wouldn't buy five at 23 bucks apiece?

Right.

But you don't get that mindset shift if you're on separate pages.

Yeah.

If you had a page. And one of my favorite things that I learned from Amazon is the price per read, this price per bottle, price per ounce, whatever. The example I always give is K-Cups because I always look on Amazon. I'm not. I don't have a good palette. Right. Coffee's coffee to me. So I look for the cheapest per K-Cup coffee on Amazon and that might be 100 pack. It might be a ten pack. Doesn't matter. So if you could show on yours, you know, buy one, two, three, five, whatever. And you show the cost per bottle and you drop that cost per bottle significantly and you show a savings, you're going to incentivize people to make that decision there on that page.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm just taking notes. That's why I'm looking down right now.

Yeah. No worries, no worries. I assume it would work in your space because, you know, everybody likes the value. The problem is, you know, we show the 10%, 10%. You know what I always try to get brands to think about is like, what bundle size do you need to give a significant price cut? Because people think, oh, I'm going to give them 10% off. Like, that's not enough. If they're buying five bottles, you got to cut it in half or 40% like and you know, do the math, figure out what works for you to package it up one time, one shipping cost and all that kind of. So what sort of savings does that give you that you can pass on to them and really incentivize them to buy the thing in bulk?

I love it. I, love talk to me about this stuff. You know, in overall, I'm looking at your site and talk to me like you got this stuff really buttoned up for a one person Shopify brand.

Well, the idea, I appreciate it.

You're welcome. Thanks for your time today, Mark.

Thanks so much.

Thank you. Soon.