The Repeat Commerce Playbook: w/ Ron Shah (Obvi CEO) & Paul Chambers (SubSummit CEO)

16:55Ron Shah:Hold that thought because I think that's kind of like the point of this too. But there's this concept of the jobs to be done theory. Clayton Christensen, if you Google jobs to be done theory, it's this concept of like things do a job. But over time, like there's a job that needs to get done, but tools evolve. Like a hammer is originally what you use to put in a nail and then you use a nail gun. Still needs to get put in. Maybe eventually you don't even use a nail gun. And you use something else because there's some type of floating shelf that just hooks on or whatever. But you still need to put your book somewhere.

17:28Ron Shah:I love this analogy. And I use this a lot with actually subscriptions. People need their products. Like Ron, I would say everyone needs your products. There's very little people that don't need your products. But the tools to get them there are not the same. And a map is such a great analogy for this because it gets you from point A to point B. But it's not predictive. It doesn't adapt. It's not dynamic. If you go off course, it doesn't change. You got to look at it again. The tools, the job is the same, but the tools evolve. And when I think about subscriptions, I'm not going to go through a whole history, but I had this up on the slide at SubSummit at a talk and I got feedback on it because it was interesting because I often thought like subscriptions are this new thing.

18:15Ron Shah:In fact, they're actually been around for a long time. There was the milk delivery subscriptions in the early 1900s. each of these stages solved a problem too like milk delivery people didn't have fridges like you needed your milk delivered otherwise it would go bad book clubs people needed curation there wasn't like book talk and tiktok thread things you could hashtags you could follow to learn new books or oprah book club so book clubs solved that columbia house record clubs like if you didn't live near a place where you could easily get music you didn't have access to it dollar Shave Club they're the ones that I would say like kind of first proved that a commodity could be sold as a service and then the subscription box Gold Rush which is when Subsummit was really born too like there was a box for everything like I you name it and Paul you you had an awesome box yourself yeah and then it leaves us kind of to like where we are today Paul when you look at this What are your kind of like thoughts and the transition?

19:15Ron Shah:Because you've seen a good second half of this portion with SubSummit.

19:19Jay Myers:Yeah. I mean, and we're now entering kind of the next era of all that, of what does this look like? But you called them out perfectly. And the one thing that you look at and you mentioned along the way there, all those different elements of subscription fit a need for a customer where there was, you know, lack of of service or lack of, you know, inspiration or, you know, we'd love Columbia house back in the day. And, you know, I think that's what we're seeing is this is continuing to evolve and the subscription box industry has definitely changed over the years. And so I think you're spot on with, you know, where we're going and what's next there.

19:56Ron Shah:So this is something interesting that we've noticed, and then we're going to get into, I think it'll answer some of Anne's question specifically, but we see Ron, I'd love to know I'm sure yours is probably similar, but on average, when you go to cancel a subscription, most subscription tools have a survey where it's like, why are you canceling? I have too much. I don't need it anymore. Whatever, something else. I'm on vacation. We see that roughly less, around 20%, so less than 20 % are because a customer actually doesn't need the product anymore. Like if I canceled my protein, but I'm still buying protein, or I'm canceled my greens subscription, but I'm still buying it, but I just either somewhere else or not on subscription or some way, but it's less than 20 % is because I no longer ever want the product again.

20:47Ron Shah:Ron is your number, like, do you see a round similar to this with Obvi?

20:51Paul Chambers:Yeah, I think, I think when we see this, it's probably right around this. And I think the, I have too much piece is the biggest call out for us too it's where it's like and it comes in these weird waves it's like right around the holidays it's like right around it's like these you know these moments in time and where it's like oh man like it is leading up to memorial day weekend it makes sense you start to see these percentages kind of creep in i feel like we should be able to predict it but i think we ignore it yeah which

21:25Ron Shah:so this kind of there's hope so when i say like you know subscriptions are not dead they're not going anywhere the people still want their products the tools need to be involved and it all kind of goes to when your customers are canceling products or even when you're canceling products like like when i canceled my protein i didn't cancel the demand for it but i canceled the friction of how i was ordering it which this is kind of like a punch line here that hopefully people understand is your customers still want your products at least 80 of them do but they don't want the friction and yes someone asked about can't they just manage it in the subscription portal they for sure can it cut that what's happening in a customer's mind is they're constantly making decisions about effort and they might not consciously be thinking it but at some point their mind goes to yes i could log in i think i know my password i could go in and manage it or i could just cancel it it's pretty easy to order it when i need it and i'll just cancel it and they might not be thinking those words in their head but like that's the thought process that's going through that's what went through with my head with like the protein powder and so there's a there's a segment of customers i'd love to get your both of your thoughts on this here too but that subscriptions just don't reach they weren't built to capture for for various reasons and when you think holistically about repeat customers we always think that repeat customers are your subscribers but really it's interesting when we go in a lot of stores and look in the analytics, if you run a report, and I'm assuming a lot of people here on Shopify, it's actually a tough report to run a Shopify, you have to do a query, but you can ask Shopify sidekick to say, what is how many repeat customers do I have in the last year, or two years, whatever you want, because there actually isn't a pre canned report for it, but you sidekick just runs a query.

23:18Ron Shah:And then it'll say, as you say, what percentage of my, all my revenue comes from customers who order more than one time. If you sell replenishable products, you're probably going to be between 70 to 85%. And then say, okay, Sidekick, remove all customers that have a active subscription contract. And then Sidekick will take out any customer that has a subscription contract and then say, tell me what percentage of my repeat revenue comes from customers who are ordering more than once without a subscription contract. And of the 75%, about 55%, we find that on average, it's around 20. I know obviously, you guys are quite higher, you're like super healthy subscription.

24:05Ron Shah:But this is like on average, if a store sells replenishable products, and if they're doing pretty good, 20 % of their recurring customers are on a fixed subscription around 55 to 60 are just buying it over and over that's kind of like a global average it really varies a lot and this is of course excluding brands that are like one products and a subscription only but stores that have like a mix of products paul when you think about like the subscription space and running subscription show and you think about these different types of customers can you like you talk about some of like how you think subscriptions address it i there was like a moment we talked a couple months ago and you kind of jokingly were like ah we should have named it something different i thought that was so funny but what are your thoughts when you think about like the different types of people who buy over

24:56Jay Myers:and over so it's curious where you're going with your data points there because it's curious if it aligned to what it what we have and it aligned perfectly actually we have a report on the a sub summit website called the replenishment playbook and you go to subsummit.com slash reports and find it there. And it's one of our data points in there is 20 % will opt in to subscribe and save. So what that's leaving is the other 80 % as an opportunity to capture in a different form factor. And, you know, we're seeing, that's one of the biggest challenges, you know, and the way we're seeing brands work through it right now is exactly what you showed there.

25:33Jay Myers:When they go through the cancellation flow, asking the question, you know, why are you canceling? If I have too much, then are you offering to update the frequency? It's certainly an easy way through it. A lot of people do choose that option. They'll put things on hold, they'll do pause. And so I think there's some great ways to work through that as alternative methods, but there's also, you know, looking at, you know, what does the future look like here on this? And we're seeing most brands do what we just talked about there is asking the questions.

25:57Ron Shah:At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone's serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind. There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility. Your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, etc. Nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products.

26:41Ron Shah:Orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything. A bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store now. I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify1percent.com slash rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. Updating frequency.

27:20Which I think leads us to this kind of what is the shift that you're seeing?

27:30Ron Shah:this kind of shift in in how do brands address that segment that 80 percent of customers who are not subscribing but are buying yeah i mean we live in this amazing world today where

27:44Jay Myers:technology can solve this problem technology can be necessary yeah and i mean this is what

27:51Ron Shah:it's such an interesting time right now because with ai and the tools available some of this This might not have been available a few years ago, but I think there is a we're seeing a big shift going from people who want scheduled everything to to predicted and on demand on their terms. And so we're kind of calling this the shift from schedule to predicted commerce. And I think that the way we see it is they're scheduled is very important. It plays a part like there's I subscribe to a lot of things, like a ton of things. I try to subscribe to everything I can, but first, but I don't, if you think about every consumable product you personally use in your life, like everyone on the webinar right now, from your shampoo to your deodorant, to toilet paper, to coffee, to mayonnaise, to anything, anything that's replenishable, what percentage of all the products that you buy that are replenishable are on a fixed subscription?

28:48Ron Shah:It's probably very low, but there's a segment of products that are great for subscription and there's customers who love subscription predicted is a whole different segment it's additive this doesn't take away anything from a customer who wants to subscribe or for products that are great for subscription even when products are great for subscription there are customers who have like i that's it i'm never subscribing again because they had a bad experience with some brand they couldn't find the cancel button and they just said that's it i'm never subscribing again so predicted is and this answers kind of some of the questions i saw but like how do i put all the different timing options on a pdp page you wouldn't have to and that's what we're going to talk about today is what is what is predicted predicted is learning when a customer how they use a product nudging them to reorder at the right time not committing not no fixed subscription that recurs on a calendar date, but it's when they're actually using it.

29:48Ron Shah:And it's adaptive by customer. We believe that there's three things that will define the future of repeat revenue. It'll be predicted, which you just kind of talked about. Adaptive, meaning it'll change. And this kind of makes me think about that GPS analogy. It changes as with usage. It changes by season. It changes by preference we see that even like flavor preferences change and usage patterns change like ron said like over the holidays like he sees spikes in cancellations that's probably because people get gifts or something else and then maybe it piles up and different things and i think the third one is this one is a hard one for me to actually swallow as a subscription company is optional because I part of me hates that word because as a brand you want to say I want to get everyone on a subscription but the truth of the matter is when something is optional you actually if you have good tools to keep them coming back and if they're optional you actually stay around longer the irony is because you're not committed you actually have a you stay around longer and the analogy I use is like relationship.

31:04Ron Shah:I don't know if I use this analogy or told you my analogy Paul or Ron before, but you know, if you think about a relationship, when you're in a committed relationship, you have, there has to be a hard breakup and like you can't just not see someone you're in a committed relationship to for six months. You have, there has to be like some point of breakup, but you know, Ron and Paul and I are friends, but if we don't talk for a few months, If six months go by and me and Paul don't talk, I'm not going to get a message from Paul saying, hey, are we broken up? Should we officially end this? Or like there's no hard breakup.

31:39Ron Shah:It's just because it's optional and it's the same thing with brands. So with a predicted reorder, there is no such thing as a cancellation or a breakup. And because of that, it actually ironically lasts longer. So I'll jump into a little bit about what we're actually doing with repeat. So some of you may have, can't remember if this was in the name in the webinar description or not, but we're trying to solve this. And we, as I mentioned, we've been doing subscriptions since 2014 at Bold. We still are. And subscriptions always serve a space. But a couple of years ago, we started to notice that more and more customers were hitting subscription fatigue.

32:17Ron Shah:And we saw a lot of our brands kind of struggling with cancellations going up and up. And kind of the sentiment being that, you know, just customers aren't subscribing as much as they used to. And they still are, but it's not as easy as it used to be. And so we thought, what if we could predict when customers need a refill using AI algorithms, a whole bunch of data points, and for each different customer, nudge them to reorder at the right time for that customer for a one-click reorder. So the whole concept of repeat is it learns each customer's timing. And that's based off of usage. It's based off of how you interact with it.

32:57Ron Shah:If you say, remind me in a week or no, yes. And then learns how they interact with it and then adapts. It reaches, it nudges them to reorder, but adapts each time. And then when they do reorder, it's an effortless reorder. So it has to be completely frictionless for, to answer some of the questions about like, why don't they just manage? It has to be, it had to be even easier than managing it. It had to just be like, hey, Paul, time for more protein. Yes. Great. This address. Yes. done, not even a checkout. And so the, it's not an email and SMS tool. It does do email and SMS. That's a huge part of it.

33:36Ron Shah:It's really more of the intelligence layer behind it. So whether that's push notifications, browser push, onsite push, email, smart devices, and actually two that we're releasing very soon. And my marketing team didn't even know that I slid these into the slides, but that's okay they're right they're being worked on as we speak so this will be out very soon i'm super excited about these is dynamic retargeting for customers who are due for a reorder making meta audiences populated based off of if there's a scheduled reorder so if paul is due for more protein he starts seeing ads to reorder protein on on instagram or met all the meta property as soon as he reorders the ads stop showing same thing and then dynamic email blocks so imagine being able to drop a block in any of your email marketing tools, Klaviyo, OmniSend, whichever one you use.

34:30Ron Shah:And if there's a predicted reorder, it reminds you. So if you ordered protein powder yesterday and then, or Obvi, let's say if you ordered your collagen yesterday and they send out a marketing email, that customer is not going to get reminded to reorder. But if someone hadn't ordered for 32 days or something and they are due for a reorder, then it dynamically populates in there based off of that. And then there's a lot more to the channels are really endless, like WhatsApp, direct mail. This would only maybe make sense for maybe a little bit higher ticket items. But you know what? If you have a customer who's reordered 10 times and maybe they missed one, maybe it's worth sending a dollar 50 postcard, live agent, SMS, phone reminders, and many more.

35:11Ron Shah:The channels are endless and growing, but wherever they go through the experiences, is they get the nudge they land on a confirmation screen and confirm the address the product and then it's and then it's done we actually don't even have to go through checkout you can go through checkout you can set it up either way but we can just have it one click confirmation reorder on the way and so the whole goal was originally was just can we get more customers to reorder people who buy one time can we get more people to reorder then it was can we get people who reorder to reorder more often can we get more cycles so the way humans think is you run out of something and then you reorder we don't like estimate very well like oh i'm gonna run out of my coffee in seven days i bet reorder now or just a human nature as we run out and then we go a couple days without it and then reorder so with better timing you can get more cycles per year And then our third goal was, okay, when people are reordering, all the data always says that customers who buy more from you or order more times from you spend more when you give them offers.

36:22Ron Shah:So it was, can we get people to spend more when they actually do? So we introduced Repeat Smart Cart. This is actually what it looks like on Obvi's site. They, so when I, wherever the nudge is a customer, whether it's by email, SMS, however, they get the nudge and then they're shown relevant additional items that can be added on. And we have found, so we also have an upsell app that just does generic upsells. And I think the average global conversion rate on it is between six and 7%, like roughly. That's when it's on the front end of a store and a customer shopping and they click add to cart and a pop up comes up that recommends another product.

37:05Ron Shah:And it's, you know, a little bit intrusive because you're it's in the buying journey. But we're seeing over 30 % conversion on these. And I think the reason why is it's a customer who's already bought from you and they know you. They're already committed to placing the order. They just kind of shook their head. Yep, I do need more. And then there's a relevant add on. And so we're seeing extremely good conversion on these offers and then kind of one step before. Ron, before I jump, go forward, I spoke for about like, I think, eight slides in a row there. I know when we spoke a couple months ago, I kind of told you the idea about repeat.

37:40Ron Shah:And I said, hey, do you want to try this with Obvi? And you kind of were shaking your head. Yep. Okay. Yep. This makes sense. Yep. I see it. what were your what was the thought process that you went through as we were talking about that and when you kind of saw the concept yeah you know here's the thing and i will say and i'll

37:59Paul Chambers:kind of speak on we have some brands right it's like we get especially in the last like six months you're now you not only is there a lot of sass tools or a lot of different ways you can you know, potentially try new features from different people, you can now also build stuff. You can also use AI. You can also, you know, create your own agents and whatnot. And I think we've probably reached a point where as brand founders or operators maybe get a little bit more of like, oh, is this another one? Oh, is this just something that's going to create really small incremental, you know, upside, but not going to be worth the time put in.

38:38Paul Chambers:And I think initially I've defaulted to think like that. But I think like, where you kind of hit it for me was, when you started to talk about how we never really consider when somebody is finishing their product, we just assume that we know and that's when we go and ask them to take an action. And I think that it's just so true. It's like, I'm, whenever it's convenient for me to think the customer's done, I'm going to go ask them to buy more or, you know, get another shipment or whatnot. But I don't actually flip it and say, is it convenient for you yet? You know, are you ready? And that part, sometimes I guess felt almost like hard to do because it's like, I'm not going to personally reach out to everybody.

39:23Paul Chambers:And so I think it became really cool to start to say like, all right, I understand the moat around what you're trying to do. Now, how does it really work? And And I think what sold me, you were like, hey, like if it doesn't do anything, you're not paying anything. And I think that was like really powerful because it's like, otherwise, you know, we're all spending a lot of money on a lot of different things. We need everything to work. And I really love that approach.

39:45Ron Shah:Which coincidentally was actually the next slide here. Yeah. I think this is not just repeat. I think this is also the future of software, the way software has to be priced. This is my personal opinion. you know sass has gotten away for years charging 99 a month whether you use it or not whether it makes you money or not i think with ai now like i already feel that software needs to do something for me i'm sure ron you're big in ai and paul you're beginning you probably like everything's credit based if it doesn't do something don't pay like it's you know and so we knew that we wanted it to be that if it worked like if it actually drove a reorder there was there's a fee And if it doesn't, there's nothing.

40:28Ron Shah:And so the way we decided to price it was there's no fees for SMS and SMS is expensive. There's fees for push. There's fees for everything. So we, there's zero fees for anything unless it actually makes a sale. And as a merchant, I thought, you know, if I logged in like Ron, you'd probably feel the same way. If you logged in tomorrow morning and saw that repeat sent 10 ,000 SMS and you had a $700 bill and it didn't make you a single sale, but you're not controlling the messages. you'd be a little bit upset, right? Like you, but if you create a campaign in, let's say Klaviyo, and if you send out 10 ,000 SMS and you don't make a single sale, you're not mad at Klaviyo because you wrote the campaign and you did it.

41:10Ron Shah:But repeat does it all for you. It's all AI based. You give it the tone and guidance and everything else. But that was our thoughts. So it was really interesting to hear your feedback on that. So, I mean, we can kind of talk a little bit about obvious, which is awesome that we have Ron on here. Why don't you speak to this, Ron? And I was going to say some of the conversations we had, but like, I feel like you can speak to this better than me.

41:31Paul Chambers:Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, I think there's a few things where one, we were in consideration versus like actually understanding what's happening. It's been a really cool journey, right? You know, we have a strong subscription program, but I think a lot of our reorders were actually, were not coming from like subscribers. It was just because like we're able to like launch a lot of new products and skews and get people back in the funnel. But they weren't necessarily from subscribers. It was from people who were maybe one time purchase or different buckets. And I think like when we look at the like the one time and lapse buyers, they were kind of starting to really slip away.

42:12Paul Chambers:I think what we see a lot is a lot of behavior shift in when somebody comes in as a subscriber. subscriber, I think that our job needs to be very different in how we treat them, which is like, hey, you're here, you've committed. Now let me make sure that I can make you feel comfortable, right? If you need some time, you need some patience, you need to, you know, you got to push off some stuff, no problem. And I don't think we were talking to people like that in that cohort. And then you have the one-time people or people who have lapsed. I think you're trying to be as aggressive and like, hey, where are you?

42:49Paul Chambers:What's going on? Why haven't you come back? Like, what do you need? Here's this, here's that. Come back for this, come back for this. And you're kind of chasing.

42:55Ron Shah:At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Claude ChatGPT straight to your OmniSend account. Your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything.

43:34Ron Shah:My favorite part though is AI segments. I used to build these by hand clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. And anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up.

44:09Ron Shah:J-A-Y-3-0. If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend, like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo.

44:26Paul Chambers:And I think we were kind of using a little bit of a global strategy instead of like a cohort strategy. And it affected both parties differently because we weren't being as aggressive as we needed to be on the one time and lapsed because like subscribers are in that pool too and then we were probably being too aggressive for the people who are subscribed we were like hey i'm not going anywhere like just give me some time and i think so that being able to have this predicted reorders i think that is the part that is probably the missing layer that we i don't think we knew we were missing it that's the that's probably the problem with a lot of brands a lot of operators is you don't know what you don't know and so being able to go and say like, Hey, I think I know with high confidence that you're ready to buy.

45:11Paul Chambers:I don't think that's something we even thought about getting to on an IQ level for our brand. So I think that's one of the big reasons why we leaned in.

45:20Ron Shah:And it's been, I'll give a little bit of a snapshot what kind of it looks like. So for from Ron, this is actually not Ron's dashboard. This is a demo, but all of the metrics are broken out like obvi has repeat customers already and then so when you log in you actually see two dashboards this is one of them there's a whole separate dashboard so one is just what your store's repeat metrics are one are then what repeat pete's metrics are and it's broken out probably a little bit tough to see on the screen here but by which ones are crosshells which are assists which are direct so a direct is when someone orders within 24 hours of a nudge and then there's the cysts and then cross cells.

46:01Ron Shah:The I won't go into this isn't a demo of the product, but I just want I think I just have two slides to the screen so people have an idea how it works. But one big thing is there is no concept of a template. There's this preview where you can see what it would potentially look like. So this is a screenshot on the left here. You can see a custom prompt. You can select from preset defaults like friendly professional or you You can give it any kind of guidance you want to sound however you want. And then you can click generate to see what it would like. But it adapts for every single customer. Different customers react differently to different messaging.

46:39Ron Shah:I didn't message or say this earlier, but the timing, the messaging and the channel are all different by customer. So timing is the obvious one. Different customers need different time. The messaging also adapts by customer and channel. So if customers only engage on email, it might stop sending browser push or on site or whatever. So all three are adaptive. But you set the tone and then repeat just is off and running. That's it. It's like a little salesperson for your orders. You can at any time see what schedules there are for any product. And there's nothing to do, but it's more just so you can feel comfortable.

47:17Ron Shah:I can see a product and I can see, okay, this product has 370 predicted reorders. I can click on and I can see that I can see every single customer, what their prediction is. Nothing you have to do, but more just, I don't know, it'd be weird not to see it, to know it, but it's all in there. And we ran this. So quick little background. We went live with this March 4th. Prior to that, we ran it with 50 stores for a private beta testing it. It's AI. so you want to make sure it works well and doesn't go rogue and do different things so after six months we things were looking really good and we went live march 4th of the actually not of just of the beta period but of after i was saying this just before the before we went live on the web in here it's actually mind-blowing 100 of brands have seen an increase in reorders.

48:10Ron Shah:Not a single store didn't. Some of the top performers are over 20 % of new repeat revenue coming through repeat and in less than 60 days to 6.6 is the average across the board. And then the 16 % reorder conversion rate. You know, I, we didn't know what to expect when we launched it. We thought, what if we could increase it like 5 % or 3%, but 16 % of this is actually a little bit outdated. I think this is actually from about a month ago, but it goes up every month too. But of all the customers that repeat engages with, that's how many are reordering versus like, you know, average email conversion on a purchase, that's purchase conversion is like three to maybe 5 % if you're really good.

48:56Ron Shah:So the results have been amazing. We've had, this is one of the ones that's seen over 20%. Actually, the one I really want to highlight is Built Bar. They are such an interesting story. They went live the day we went live with it. And he actually, Paul, he messaged you. You talked to him on the phone. And he said that he is now

49:23Jay Myers:four X-ing subscriptions. Or can you speak to that conversation? I actually think it's higher than that. I think it's almost like 10X on it right now. like it's they've done phenomenal with it i talked with jeff over there and he's it's worked really well and it works really well for them too especially because what they saw is people on subscriptions there's so many different new flavors they're rolling out people wouldn't necessarily to subscribe all the time to they might have a certain flavor they like and they'll subscribe to that this is augmenting people who also want to try different flavors at different times and repeat with suggesting like hey we just came out with the cookies and cream or the sour passion fruit or whatever it is.

50:01Jay Myers:And so they've got a lot later on top of that. Right. And so they're doing phenomenal with it.

50:06Ron Shah:It was so interesting because, because you mentioned that number to me, the 4X number, and then I emailed him and I said, Hey, are you okay if we use this as a quote at SubSummit? And he emailed back and he said, yes, absolutely. You can use it as a quote. And he said, I'll tell you another interesting data point that you might want to use and I didn't include it here, but we have a full case study on them. It's on our site, but they're, so this is all public. That's why I'm sharing it, but he's the average and I'm going to not get the exact cent right, but it was like his average order value through the site was something like$46 and 20 cents.

50:41Ron Shah:An average subscriber was like$53 and 50 cents. An average people buying through repeat was like$68. So he was seeing higher average order volume AOV from repeat customers than all other customers. And I asked him why, and he said the exact same sentiment too. He thinks that there is a real potential of customers getting flavor fatigue. And he said the customers that don't subscribe, but just reorder and try different flavors are actually his most valuable customers because they, they keep coming back, but they try different flavors and so they stay around longer versus like getting tired of whatever flavor it is after

51:19Paul Chambers:four months there was also been amazing but i think just like the most important thing to note

51:24Ron Shah:here and i said this months earlier but not a single subscription is cannibalized in any of this so like you know obvi's subscriber base is exactly what it is this is only net new customers who are ordering one time and gone or if they're ordering one time and ordering again getting them to come back more often. It doesn't touch a subscription at all. There actually is a really neat flow where when someone cancels a subscription, we can turn them into a one-click reorder. And then after a certain period of time, turn them back into a subscription. Like if they reorder five times in a row, you start to know that they've like, oh, it looks like you're needing your protein powder every 42 days.

52:02Ron Shah:Why don't we turn that back? Do you want to turn that back into a subscription and save 5 %? So it actually complements subscriptions perfectly. It's not competitive at all. I won't show on this in slide two, but some of these, some of the, you guys might recognize a couple of these faces. It's been very well received by a lot of people in the industry. We'll kind of go on here because I don't want to run out of time and I want to try to get to a couple of questions. But lastly, the, you know, to add it, it's Ron, I think we spent maybe 20 minutes on a call.

52:31Paul Chambers:Not even.

52:35Ron Shah:We got to almost all of it. There was one last thing I had to do. And then that was it. It's really it was I think we yeah, we talked for about half of the call and then we actually started the setup halfway through. It's it is truly, you know, it's AI. It asks you a bunch of questions. You tell it, do you want to give it discounts? If a customer reorders four or five times, you want to give them a bigger discount. And then it analyzes your store. It takes usually 24 hours. It has taken as long as four to five days if a store has like 12 years of history and has a ton of orders. But it's usually around 24 hours.

53:09Ron Shah:And then it's off and running. You don't have to do a thing. You get an email that says you've got money. We kind of copied the PayPal subject line. But it's you've got to reorder. And, you know, it's really important to note. And we actually had this up at SubSummit at the talk there. But like subscriptions, you know, I hope it doesn't come across at all in this webinar that subscriptions are not important in any way. Subscriptions are super important. Continue investing in subscriptions. But, you know, there's a whole other segment of customers that are not being supported the way they should be.

53:46Ron Shah:And repeat is a tool that can help address all of those. And together, you know, it's I always say you should look at your whole repeat business as one, not just, oh, these are my subscribers. I got to treat them extra good. I got to give them member benefits. I got to give them exclusive access. I got to give them VIP pricing because they're my subscribers. But meanwhile, you might have another customer over here who's reordered 12 times and they keep coming back and they're the most loyal person in the world. They just don't want a subscription. And I've bought the same coffee for probably five years.

54:17Ron Shah:I just don't I don't subscribe to it. I should be treated good as well. And that's what we're trying to say with repeat. So I think we have a couple questions or I don't know. Susie looks like I can.

54:31Jay Myers:She's been answering a whole bunch. There is one I think you'll want to address. It says, oh, shoot. More questions drop. Does it send nudges to also first time buyers or only repeat buyers?

54:43Ron Shah:Only repeat buyers. So it doesn't touch a first. Once someone buys, it'll have a default predicted time for a product unless we know that customer from another, from somewhere else. Like there is actually a concept of, it's interesting, there's heavy users and there's light users in the world. Like there's people who squeeze toothpaste hard and there's people who squeeze toothpaste light. And if, yeah, my wife, like she could last a year on one toothpaste. I'm like, I'm done in a week. and if I am a heavy user on one store repeat gets to know that I use toothpaste 23 % faster than something else now if I'm getting nudged to order toilet paper somewhere else or something else there is a ratio applied so if it comes up with the predicted schedule and it goes oh we know that this person is a heavy user so let's increase it by x percent and then go from there and then watch how they reorder and adjust.

55:42Ron Shah:So, but the, but it doesn't nudge the, on the first order only after the first one. Yeah. You're on your own still to get them the first time. Repeat is for everything after the first order. I'm going to just throw this up there in case anyone wants to scan this while we're asking questions. So I did mention that it's free unless it makes a sale. We are giving away$10 ,000 in repeat revenue for anyone who wants to give it a try. So it doesn't cost anything. So your first$10 ,000 in reorders won't even cost a penny. So not even SMS fees or anything. You can scan that QR code or go to repeat.me slash obvi.

56:17Ron Shah:But I'll keep answering any questions here in the meantime. We only have a couple more minutes, but I wanted to put this up just in case so people could scan it.

56:22Jay Myers:Yeah. AJ, one thing you should talk to, there's a question there. How's it charged up the first order? You built a really neat piece of functionality in there about kind of the one click purchase process. Do you want to talk to that a little bit?

56:33Ron Shah:Yeah, so there's two ways you can have it set up. You can do one click or you can go through checkout. And so the way it works is if you want to turn on one click, the order goes, it's a regular Shopify order. Customer, let's say I go to Obvi and I order my collagen. Then I get nudged to reorder collagen like a month later or whatever product I'm buying from them. And then I order it. There's a little tiny checkbox. If they turn on one click reordering that says, say, do you want to make reorders faster in the future? turn on one click reorders. So a customer does, you're not secretly doing it to them.

57:06Ron Shah:They choose to turn it on. And then on the third, on the second reorder, which would be their third order in total, it's one click from there on. So then the experience is they get nudged. They say, yes, there's one confirmation that shows their address that we actually can do it without even taking them to the website. But we actually, we found conversion went down, like customers want to see the address it's going to because most people have a bunch of addresses saved in their shop pay accounts so we show the address confirm the product they click yes little spin and then done no checkout that's optional so you can do either or you can have it go through your shopify checkout because maybe you have you're selling insurance and other upsells at checkout or whatever but you can do it either way yeah i thought that was important because i think

57:54Jay Myers:you're reducing friction further that way and it's a cool feature if people want to do it and i don't there's one more i wanted to point out to you if you get i think we have one more minute here do you want to take one more it was the poop dog subscription they're asking about if somebody orders like 120 bags will they get an email sooner than 360 bags and i think you kind of addressed it in the last one but i don't know if there's more to talk to there does it take into things account immediately does it look at products as a whole if they order multiple things how is it accounting for those types of things yeah it looks at every it looks at quantity

58:24Ron Shah:as well too so if you this is a question that comes up a lot it's like if i order coffee and then again but then i order four coffees on my next order does it know that i ordered quantity of four in that one or a bigger size or and the answer is yes so it it does know the order details and so it adjusts if if an order is larger there is there's a lot that goes into like we've got about six people on the data AI algorithm team. Like that's the core of the product. There actually isn't like a ton of UI stuff. It's the algorithm is, and the data is really where the value is. And there's a lot more that I, that go into that as well too.

59:07Ron Shah:So just because someone orders four of something doesn't necessarily mean they're good for four more cycles. They might've been buying some for a gift. So they, there is some weight given to extending the next nudge, but it's not four times longer. It's a little bit sooner because you, they might still, some of it might be given away. We also do a lot to try to catch the customer before, because if you are one day late on a nudge, you miss them. Like if someone buys a product from Obvi and we predict that they need a refill in 33 days, but they actually needed it in 32 days and they go and they buy a product from Costco or something, then it's lost.

59:52Ron Shah:Even though you, even though you're close, you're by one day, if you're one day late, it's too late. Right. So we've started building out intermediary steps where repeat introduces himself after like, it's like a halfway point and says, I'm your reorder agent just to let you know you all reorders are 10 % off if when you're ready for a reorder you can use this link and just to like okay top of mind before I go buy from Costco I have this offer from Obvi to get 10 % off I'm like I'll come back to the to my SMS message there I'll save this or you know and or if you're ready for reorder now just and a lot of times people will reorder early and then so we get an early indicator that okay this person needs it early because the goal is to never miss late, right?

1:00:36Ron Shah:But over time, it gets smarter. What we've noticed is that for the first six months the brand uses it, the reorder rate gets better consistently for six months and then it kind of flatlines. Like that's like, there's an optimal state. Like we'll never get 100%, but it kind of goes up and up for about six months and then it's like fully optimized.

1:00:58Paul Chambers:I would say a few things here, guys. like Paul, Jay, like you hit them up on Twitter, LinkedIn, email, like within minutes, you're getting a response. Make sure you reach out to them. I think number two on the repeat end, like I think at the very least, as many skeptics as there may be and just trying new things, especially in a time where everything feels like there's a lot. Trust me, just go try it. It's a pretty incredible tool. But more importantly, I think we all owe it to ourselves. We all spent a lot of money acquiring these customers. We've spent a lot of money, all of us. So no matter what pool, whether you're a five-figure brand, six-figure, seven, eight, nine, doesn't matter.

1:01:33Paul Chambers:You've spent a lot of money, relatively speaking. And you owe it to yourself to make sure you get the most out of each customer. And then lastly, I think when you guys get the recording and some material as follow-up, if you have any questions, just feel free to respond. We'll route you to Jay and Paul. If you guys need an intro, feel free to respond. And I think Jay and Paul, if you guys just want to drop your information too in the chat, I mean, 50 of you guys stick around until the very end. And we're over time. It's pretty incredible. Just love all the questions and shows the amount of intent people came here with.

1:02:03Ron Shah:I'm happy to help and talk through any questions with anyone. This is my passion. I've been selling online since 98. It's been so fun seeing the results like that this is doing for customers. I think the thing I want to end on is I know, Ron, you kind of said it. It's hard acquiring a customer. It's even harder just building an e-commerce business. And like you put your blood, sweat and tears into it. and you hope that at the end of the day, you have something that's valuable. And I talk to a lot of investors who acquire and invest in e-commerce brands. And I always ask them like, what's the number one thing you look for?

1:02:37Ron Shah:And every single time they say, I go straight to the dashboard and I look to see how healthy their business is. I look at their repeat revenue rate, whether that's subscriptions or customers coming back. And if you have a brand that is doing, like if 100 % of your revenue is recurring, you are going to be the value of your business will be a multiple of your top line revenue. So if you're doing a million dollars in sales a year and 100 % of it is recurring, you probably are worth three to five times like you're probably worth three to five million. If it's all one time orders, you're a multiple of EBITDA, which is going to be 30 to 40 % of EBITDA, which you have a business worth roughly two or three hundred thousand.

1:03:20Ron Shah:And that's it. Same business, same revenue, same sales. But the difference is one is a highly recurring repeat revenue and one is one time. And, you know, I sleep good at night when I know that brands are increasing the value of their company. And I know that this is a tool that helps with that. And so that excites me. And for all the hard work that everyone is putting in, I think that's the win we're hoping for. So I'll end on that and happy to help anyone with any questions. Thanks for everyone for joining us.

1:03:50Paul Chambers:Thank you, everybody. Take care. Bye, guys.