What We've Been Quietly Building The Last Year!

0:00OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted. You can now connect OmniSend to ChatGPT or Claude and just say, where can my email and SMS campaigns be making more money? And it actually figures it out. It reads your store data, all your campaign details, your store history, and it tells you and the insights are legit good. And even better, you can then say, okay, let's fix that or build that campaign. And it actually does it right from your chat. It's wild. Now, if you're one of our listeners, you can get 30 % off for three months on OmniSend. Just go to the show notes. There's a link there.

0:31Or you can just use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0 when you sign up. Now, if you're using another email and SMS platform and you want to switch to OmniSend, which is a great idea, they will do the migration for you. Just give them five days and then you show up with everything set, ready to go. Now, they've migrated thousands of stores from Klaviyo. And on average, they're saving 35 % on their email and SMS bills. If you're listening to this show, you clearly care about your Shopify business. If your store isn't backed up and protected, it could all be for nothing. That's why I tell every store owner I know who cares about their business, you 100 % need Rewind installed.

1:07It's a non-negotiable for me. One bad CSV import, one app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know. One bulk edit gone wrong, and now AI making changes for you. Listen, Shopify does not have an undo button. Rewind is the undo button. Go to shopify1percent.com slash rewind for 30 days free on us. Links in the show notes too. Hey everyone, welcome to a very special episode of the Shopify 1 % podcast. This week is a little bit different because I want to tell you what's been going on in my life and, well, in Bold's life specifically. Something that has been very exciting that we've been working on for a full year now and it actually just went live last week.

1:55And normally we don't do this. So this is a bit rare where I want to talk about something that we're working on. Usually I'm always talking about, well, this is ways that you can actually help your store, but usually it's all about you and other vendors and stories to help your brand. Today, I want to just take a moment and hopefully I've earned the trust and the right to do this, but I want to share a little bit about what we've been working on. Last week, we launched a new app at Bold. It's the first app we've launched in nine years. So a little bit of background. I don't know how much you know about Bold, but at one point we had 32 apps in the app store, 32.

2:28And we've got a lot more focused over the years. But since 2012, we've built a lot of apps. We did launch another app in 2020. It was version two of our subscription app. But this is the first brand new completely app. And the reason why, you might ask, why nine years is something about our DNA at Bold is every app that we've ever built has always been the first of its kind. In fact, we built the very first upsell app ever for Shopify. I don't know how many people know this or not, but in 2012. So I ran stores. I think many of our listeners know. And I put one of my first stores on Shopify in 2009.

3:06And in 2012, this app store came out and I originally wanted to build apps to help my own stores and had this idea of an upsell app. Super simple concept. didn't really realize how revolutionary it was at the time but went to a couple partners we co-founded bold built this idea where originally it was very simple you add a product to the to the cart and a pop-up of some sort would say you know you're buying a leather jacket jacket oh do you want the leather treatment kit to go along with it and so we launched it and actually Shopify wasn't crazy about it at first and I know I've talked about this before in the episode or the podcast.

3:45And so you probably heard this story, but Shopify actually wanted to shut it down because we were doing API calls on the front end of Shopify and early on, and this was only when they had around 20 or 30 ,000 stores. And for context, I think they're over 4 million now. And the, one of the first big stores using Shopify was a store called the chive and they would get a whole bunch of traffic and our upsells would fire and it would be doing API calls and would actually take down all of Shopify. This was 2012. So very different times, but they said that apps weren't supposed to live on the front end of a store which you go in the app store now and every app lives on the front end of a store so it's a very different time but we actually went back and forth to Shopify on that and we were told internally they were very split about half the company said that they don't want this type of app in the app store the app store was designed to like connect a store with services like connect with UPS or connect with MailChimp or connect with your accounting software or whatever.

4:41It wasn't designed to like live on the front end of a store to be doing this. We kind of quote unquote hacked the app store. Long story short, the reviews on it were all five star reviews. Merchants loved it. And so, of course, Shopify ended up approving it and letting it stay approved. And they introduced things like API throttle limits and different ways to make sure that, you know, the whole ecosystem wouldn't go down. and to this day now every app has API throttle limits and you can't take down all Shopify stores with your app but it was the first upsell app ever on Shopify and then we launched the first product options app, quantity breaks app, the first store locator app, those were all in 2012 and then shortly after the first subscriptions app, the first memberships app, the first VIP pricing app.

5:29Yes we were early but it was also part of our DNA. As a company we have never just looked at another app and just said, well, we should, we should copy that. That's a good idea. That's just not who we are. We try to solve new problems for merchants and, and help merchants do things that they can never do before. And this new launch, this new app that we launched really fits into that category. It's new. It's never been done before and it solves a new problem for merchants. And so that's why we decided to build it. Now I'm going to get into what we built in a second here right away. I just wanted to give that a bit of background.

6:06Now, to get into what we actually built, and thank you so much for listening. This is our story, and maybe it's even something you want to give a try to. I don't know, but I wanted to share this with our listeners. So those of you listening probably know we've done subscriptions on Shopify for a long time, since back in 2014. And now, subscriptions have always been a great way to get recurring revenue. When we launched subscriptions in 2014, if you had subscriptions on your store, it was a huge competitive advantage. Like if you had subscriptions and your competitor didn't have subscriptions, like you'd win business because who wants to buy cat food and when they could subscribe, like that was the mindset.

6:46It was novel. And I remember when Chewy came out with subscriptions, it revolutionized the pet food space. It was like, wow, you can put your dog food on auto ship. It was new and it was novel and you would just win by having subscriptions. Now, the last few years, I would say repeat customers in general have become more important than ever. So subscriptions is great for recurring revenue, but not just recurring subscribers, but repeat customers in general. I'm going to outline three reasons why I think they're important. There's probably a ton more, but three big reasons I would say they're important is one acquisition cost just keeps going up.

7:25Most brands I talk to, they say that their customer acquisition cost is double what it was four to five years ago. Like, it's crazy. And it's still going up. Every year, it's getting more and more expensive. There's more people bidding on the same ad keywords and the same audience. And so the price just goes up. It's getting more expensive to acquire a customer. So when you get one in, extra important that you keep them. Second reason is search traffic has dropped minimum 35 % for most brands. We're hearing brands well over 50%. In fact, I read a report the other day. Google said that their search searches that ended up in a click is down 61%.

8:01This means like we're down 40 % of bold, like searches through Google that people are just going to AI now. And it's think about your life. Like you're probably hardly searching something in Google, go to the website and, you know, look up something. Like if you need a store's address or a phone number, you don't go to their website. You just type their store in Google, your, their phone number comes up and, or their address comes up or their hours of operation. Like you don't need to go to the website. Search traffic is just, is just gone. So another reason when you do get someone to your website, super important.

8:31And then the third one, which kind of ties into this a little bit is agentic commerce is here. Like it's here a hundred percent. It's here. I would say it's not like broadly adopted by everyone, but it's every day it's getting more and more and more. And agentic commerce is people buying through AI. And so, like I just said, you don't go to a website to get a store's phone number or hours of operation or the address. You just type that into Google and it shows up. That's going to start happening or it is happening already for purchases. So you go to your favorite AI, you ask it for a product. It recommends one.

9:07How about this one? No. How about this one? Great. Let's buy it. It buys it. You never even go to the website. This is a reality. And I'm not going to say that websites are going to be irrelevant, but I think I can say with 100 % certainty that websites will become less and less relevant over time. And they'll still have a place, not saying that they're not going to have a place, but they'll become less relevant. There will be a percentage of your customers that buy without going to your website. That's for sure. So all these reasons, like customer acquisition costs going up, customers not finding you through search, that's becoming a thing.

9:47Agenda Commerce, it's here. customers aren't visiting your site as much as they were. So those three are big reasons why once you get a customer in, keeping them coming back is more important than ever. There's probably many more reasons, but those are just kind of just three that I wanted to highlight. And now, as I said earlier, subscriptions were always a great way to do this. Like you get them on a subscription and it's great. Life is good. And once you, once you're subscribed, they'll keep coming back. And that worked for a while. And, you know, there was a heyday for subscriptions. But starting about four or five years ago, we started to see this trend emerging.

10:24And it got worse and worse and worse every year. And that trend was the brands using our subscription platform were starting to have a harder time acquiring and keeping subscribers. Customers were getting more and more tired of subscriptions. And every year, subscription fatigue actually is increasing. The number of customers that say they are overwhelmed or frustrated by subscriptions is going up every single year. And then the number of customers every year that clean house and cancel all subscriptions is also going up every year. So all of these factors lumped together is what you call subscription fatigue.

11:02There's a lot of different indicators of subscription fatigue. It's the percentage of people that say they're overwhelmed managing subscriptions. And in fact, I have a couple of data points on this. Last year from 2024 to 2025, so we don't have the 26 data yet. But from 2024 to 2025, the average American household cut 32 % of active subscriptions. A third of subscriptions cut. That's insane. Just a couple other data points too. 60 % of customers feel overwhelmed by the number of subscriptions they have to manage. And then we're sitting on a little bit of a ticking time bomb here because another study showed that the average consumer thinks they have got the number here,$86 per month of subscriptions.

11:49Yet the actual average is$219 a month. So when you, when they find out, they're not going to be happy. And this, this happens, the customer gets upset. They start going to their credit card and they look at all their subscriptions and they just cancel all of them. We call it rage canceling. I feel like every year we've said subscriptions fatigue is at an all-time high and it seems to just keep going up every single year. In fact, I hear sometimes people say, I just heard someone say this the other week, they said, oh yeah, I don't subscribe to anything anymore. I canceled all my subscriptions, which is interesting because like that's not something you would have heard someone say 2015 to 2018.

12:27Like we weren't frustrated with subscriptions yet, but now I hear people say that quite a bit. Like, oh yeah, no, I don't, I don't subscribe to anything anymore. Almost everyone has had a bad experience with a subscription. Maybe they couldn't log in to cancel it. They got too much or too little. They got frustrated. Maybe the cancellation process was really hard or overwhelming. They forgot their password. There's just a lot of things that can go wrong, but pretty much everyone has had a bad experience. Maybe not many, but a bad. Some people have had multiple bad experiences. Everyone has their tipping point.

13:00Sometimes it takes one bad experience and then that's it. I'm not subscribing anymore. Sometimes it takes more, sometimes 10 experiences, but at some point there's a switch that flips and something in your head says, that's it. I'm never subscribing anymore, you are subscription fatigued and you will never subscribe again. Now, here's what we know though, because we looked at the data and I'm going to pull up some stats here. So 24 % of people that cancel a subscription do come back and buy the exact same product at least one time from the same brand, at least once, sometimes not a second or a third time, but at least once.

13:39So what does this tell you? This tells you that the customer still wants the product. They just don't want the subscription. Okay. So this is actually really good news, but the sad news of this is 76 % of the customers, they want the product. They still need protein. They still need coffee. They still need their shampoo. They still need the dog food, whatever they're subscribed to. They just buy it somewhere else. They buy it locally. They buy it from a competitor. Maybe they just forgot about you and went and Google or chat GPT and searched for typed for what's the best dog food and bought there.

14:11So you've lost those customers for life. You know, the 24 % that buy from you at least one more time, they may not continue buying from you forever, but they do buy from you at least one more time. So it's not that they don't want your product. They just don't want a subscription. Okay. And so this, there was another data point that while we're seeing all these trends of subscriptions starting to go down and people canceling and people getting frustrated with subscription. There's another data point that demand for one-time purchases as an alternative is actually increasing by 6 % every year. So we've got this weird dichotomy of convenience where subscriptions were supposed to be so convenient, started to cancel.

14:55People are canceling more and more and people who are just wanting to buy one time is slowly going up. So we started to see this and this is why we launched our most recent app that which I'm going to tell you about. We started seeing this a couple years ago and about a year ago we said well what if we could build the world's first AI reorder agent that could predict when you need a refill politely nudge you to reorder and make it as easy as a click to reorder. The way I think about it, there's often a job to be done. Like customers still want replenishment. At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind.

15:42There 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, et cetera, 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. Orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action.

16:21Luckily 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. Shopify1 %.com slash Rewind. you'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. It's more about what they don't want. They don't want a fixed subscription. They still want the product.

17:02And here's how I think about it. Like maps versus GPS. Okay. Who uses a map anymore? No one. I was going to tell my kids the other day, one time we're going to go on a road trip and I'm going to pull out a map. Cause I remember as a kid, putting it on the hood of the car, trying to figure out if we passed this exit or not. Then we'd have to drive a little bit to see what the next exit is. And oh yeah, that's where we are on the map. Feels archaic now, but at one time that was what we did. Now you just tell your GPS where you want to go and it guides you there. And sometimes if you're just going a couple blocks in the city, you still turn on your GPS.

17:33You still need to get somewhere. You still need directions. You just don't use a map anymore. It doesn't mean you don't need to get anywhere. There's a ton of examples for this. You probably don't rent DVDs anymore, but you still watch movies. You still need to wake up when you go to a hotel, but you don't call the front desk for a wake-up call. You just put an alarm on your iPhone. You still need, when you need to get somewhere, you book an Uber. You don't pick up the phone and call the taxi phone number to schedule a taxi. There's a ton of examples like this. You still need to phone people. You don't have a landline phone, but you still need to talk to people.

18:07The moral of the story is customers still need their products replenished. they just don't often want a subscription and that's really what i want you to pick up on here if you're doing something in the subscription space people still need their stuff replenished they still need it over and that's that's not a trend that's going away it's physics you drink your coffee you use your dog food you take your supplements you need eventually you run out and you need your products replenished. That's a part of, that's a part of life. This is not a trend. The question is not whether this repeat demand exists.

18:45The question is whether your store has the right tools to capture it in a way customers actually like. And we often get the goal confused with the tool. For example, you shouldn't say you work at an automotive factory, you work in the transportation industry. And what that means is people maybe won't be using cars 10, 20 years. I don't know, probably will be. But the point is they will always need to get from point A to point B transportation, whatever that evolves into. Like if you worked in the horse and buggy industry and that's all you did a horse and buggy, you never made the move into automobiles or trains or planes or whatever it is.

19:24And so for the last decade, the tool for repeat growth has been fixed subscriptions. But today subscriptions are showing its age. Customers are tired of subscriptions. They're hitting subscription fatigue and they don't want these fixed subscriptions and they don't want contracts. They want the product when they need it. And all these fixed subscriptions, it's leading to rage cancels and the tool has actually become the friction, which if you think about that for a second that really really sucks you have a product that maybe your customer loves but you might lose that customer not because of the product but because of the mechanism you're using to get it to them because if you they if you've got protein and and it just the customer is getting too much or too little and their shelves build up and then their spouse says how come we got four jugs of protein in here i can't we're running out of space and they get upset But what do they do?

20:22They cancel their subscription and then they might forget to turn their subscription back on. And then they just buy protein somewhere else because you know what? At the end of the day, protein mostly is protein. I mean, if they are a diehard protein fan of your brand, they will come back and reorder it, but they might likely just pick it up at Costco the next time they go to Costco. And so it sucks to lose that customer, not because they had any complaint about your product, not because they thought, oh, this product is horrible. I never want it again. It's just they didn't want the subscription.

20:55And because of the tool and the friction, you've now lost that customer for life. Like, think about that for a second. That sucks. So this is exactly why we built Repeat, as I mentioned earlier. Now, it's Repeat, P-E-T-E. We thought about naming him RePhil, P-H-I-L, because Repeat is a character. He's an AI agent. And as I mentioned, Repeat is the world's first AI reorder agent. Smart, friendly, and built for this exact moment right now, where people are more frustrated with subscriptions than ever. Repeat gets to know each of your customers individually, their unique buying patterns, how they shop, how they consume.

21:37Some people are heavy consumers. Some people are light consumers. gets to know their exact timing preferences and sends a friendly reorder reminder at the exact right time when they can just with a single click trigger their next shipment the way it should be not scheduled predicted no subscription fatigue now we realize that the future of commerce is predicted not schedules and while schedules will have a place for the like ultra consistent products, I say, the pill bottles that have 30 pills in it that you need every 30 days. There is a place for subscription. And we are still doing subscriptions.

22:15Bold subscriptions still exists. There is just a large segment of customers that will never subscribe, but they want your product. 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 cloud chat GPT 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?

22:52And 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. 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.

23:29I 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, 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. Replenished, but they won't subscribe. And this is for them. And it's actually the largest segment of your customers who want your product, but don't subscribe.

24:03We see the data. Most brands that sell replenishable products, say you're a pet food company or coffee, any company where you have health and wellness, beauties, anything. You need your products over and over. But the percentage of people that are on a subscription is usually 15, 20 % is good. But if you look at a store, say you sell wellness supplements, customers should keep buying those forever. But most brands will have around 15 % subscription. The other 65 to 70 % of their repeat customers is actually from one-time customers. And they might just buy a couple times. Maybe they don't keep buying forever, but that's the bulk of the repeat business.

24:44It's not coming through subscriptions. Subscriptions, they solve repeat revenue for people who like commitment. Repeat solves repeat revenue for everyone else. That's how I like to say it. And so what exactly does repeat do? Well, in a nutshell, It's actually really fun to install. You install it. Repeat asks you a couple of questions, asks if it can offer your customers discounts for reordering. Is there any products that should be excluded? What type of tone do you like to talk to your customers? You can set the tone because it's an AI and it's conversational. So you can give it guidelines on tone and voice and language settings.

25:20You don't have to write any templates, nothing. You just give it the guidance and then that's it. And then you turn it on and it takes about 24 to 48 hours, depending on how much data is in your store. It literally goes through and it goes through every single order. It builds predictions for every single customer. Some customers will, of course, have no predictions, but it goes through and it checks every single customer and it builds a prediction and it has a confidence level on that prediction. If it's a low confidence level, it won't nudge a customer to reorder. But if it's high enough, it also then blends in AI to check because it's algorithmic based and AI based and it builds a prediction.