Strategies for a Successful E-Commerce Business: A Discussion with Brendan Gillen

Ever dreamed about owning a successful e-commerce business?

Host Ryan Martin (Founder of Remarkable Digital) interviews Brendan Gillen (Founder of Million Dollar Store)

Brendan, a seasoned e-commerce veteran and our first returning guest, shares a wealth of knowledge gleaned from his 15-year journey in the industry, during which he has built up his own thriving enterprise, Fight Gear Direct. 

Despite the myriad challenges of running a digital business, Brendan sheds light on the importance of consistency, visibility, and authenticity, illustrating how his content-first strategy has helped his business grow.

Let's face it; we're living in a data-driven world that's continually evolving due to new privacy laws. 

Brendan and I examine this changing landscape, exploring innovative ways to effectively capture and utilise customer data while fostering an engaging community around our brands. 

We also guide you through the plethora of updates and enhancements recently rolled out by Shopify, detailing how features like the upgraded theme editor, bundles, Marketplace Connect, and subscriptions can significantly benefit Australian businesses.

Fasten your seatbelt as we gear up for the upcoming e-commerce season, with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas right around the corner. 

Brendan and I share insights on preparing for this pivotal period, stressing the importance of ample stock, building hype, and leveraging advanced technology and strategies to stand out from the crowd. 

Wrapping up our conversation, we glance into the future of e-commerce, reflecting on the implications of AI-powered advertising and the exciting possibilities that lie ahead. Don't miss out as Brendan and I navigate the ins and outs of the fast-paced e-commerce world in this episode!

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Transcript

Ryan Martin: 0:01

Welcome to the Ecommerce Australia Podcast. Welcome to Ecommerce Australia. I'm your host, ryan Martin, founder of Remarkable Digital. This podcast is aimed at those who have their own online business, e-commerce professionals looking to keep current on the trends, and for anyone interested in learning more about the world of Ecom. For those of you seeking direct assistance, remarkable Digital is just a call away. Our mission is to be remarkable, doing great things for great people and great businesses. I understand how much choice you have and how many podcasts are out there, so I'm truly grateful you've tuned in. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or topics you'd like covered. Let's get started.

Ryan Martin: 0:42

Welcome to another episode of Ecommerce Australia. I'm very excited. We have our very first return guest. We had huge feedback from his last episode, which is sitting comfortably in the top three most downloaded episodes of all time for this podcast. So we recorded it 18 months ago and the whole heap has changed since then. So looking forward to getting Brendan's thoughts on the latest Shopify features to come out recently. As an FYI, he also produces some awesome content. His Ecom videos are regularly getting over 300,000 views per video. Check them out. I'll put the links in the description. A quick intro if you didn't listen to the last episode. Brendan's work for brands such as TwoTimesU, Superdry, Petstock now Founder of Fight Gear Direct. He has an Ecommerce coaching business called the Million Dollar Store. He was voted one of the top 50 in Ecom in 2020, 2022 and 2023. We'll get to what happened in 2021 to make it a full peat, but a big welcome to the podcast, mate.

Brendan Gillen: 1:44

Thanks, buddy. It's really awesome to be back and I didn't realize this was in the top three. So next time we catch up, hopefully it's the top one. So if we just tell everyone that's listening to this one to go download the first one and listen to that, it should pump me back up the top because it was an awesome episode.

Ryan Martin: 1:56

Perfect mate. Yeah, 100% agree. I think what's made you top three, not the first one, is just a time, so I got you in a little bit later, so I know that gives that a little bit of time and you'll be up to number one. There were some really good takeaways the traffic trifecta I really really liked and I've used that and I had plenty of good feedback around three different kind of channels to think about acquiring your traffic. So, yeah, looking forward to this one. Obviously a bit's going on in the world of Shopify and e-commerce since we last spoke, but maybe just want to touch on your background for those that didn't listen to the last episode, just quickly, and what you're up to now, how your weeks kind of, are spent in terms of e-commerce versus coaching, versus content. Yeah, maybe start there.

Brendan Gillen: 2:43

Yeah, awesome man. So your intro is pretty good. It covered pretty much everything. I've sort of been around in the e-commerce world for about 15 years. It makes me feel really old because I know my first e-commerce website was like on Magento and it was clunky and old and stuff like that. But yeah, I've been through the ring of lots of different businesses sort of two to three years since each of them. So my sort of role of those businesses was where I came in at the starting point of their e-commerce journey and I helped them sort of build it up and scale them and sort of did that at Pacific Brands, wez Farmers, petstock, two Times you and Super Dry. So it's been a lot of fun helping grow those businesses to the size of that they are now.

Brendan Gillen: 3:18

Since then I started my own e-commerce business, or I acquired an e-commerce business called Fight Gear Direct and we've done the same there. We've scaled it up immensely and that's going exceptionally well as well. And then on the side I don't know if it's on the side or it's 50-50 now, but we run a consulting business or a coaching company where we train e-commerce entrepreneurs how to do what I do in my e-commerce businesses. So we get under the hood of my stores we have a look what I'm doing and I teach those strategies into everyone there. And then what I try and do is I try and share that in the big bad world as well, on YouTube and TikTok and Insta and everywhere else. So a lot of fun. I use it to learn as well as teach, so what I teach is what I've been learning, so you've got to constantly stay ahead of the game for it really.

Ryan Martin: 3:57

Yeah, brilliant mate. That's a great insight and one of the things that I haven't sort of put down as a question, but I'll ask it now that we're on that journey. Your content is exceptional. Can you just take us through your content journey I gather it wasn't always as it is now and how have you found that that's helped your business? More generally speaking? Obviously it's not as econ focused in terms of what we're talking about, but from an awareness point of view, leads for your e-commerce coaching business. What sort of role is that content played in over the last 12 months, as you've continued to improve on that?

Brendan Gillen: 4:32

Yeah, it's interesting. So I did start. I started producing content really when I first went down this coaching journey and it was really terrible, really bad, really low quality. But what I thought about it was about getting the content out there and not about the production. So really all my business coach said to me he goes if you're not embarrassed by the first video you put out, then you waited too long to put the video out, and I completely agree with that. And I look back on my first video and it's terrible. It's still in this studio but it was just really bad, poor quality, but I can actually I've learned a lot building out the content.

Brendan Gillen: 5:02

So what I do is I have to keep my finger on the pulse in the market because I want to be a leader in the industry and the only way I can do that is by learning.

Brendan Gillen: 5:09

So what I do is I just learn what I share, what I learn, and I try and learn the things that people are asking me questions about. So if I look at about whatever content I put out, let's just say I do something on Klaviyo or SEO or SMS, I'll constantly get feedback on that video and be like OK, people are interested in this space. So it's sort of testing the market to see where's the industry heading and what are people interested in. And then I'll go down that path and find content and find strategies or use strategies that I've learned and sort of deploy them in a way that people can learn from me. So that's been really interesting and continually iterating on what's happening in the e-commerce space. So I make sure I attend events and be part of masterminds myself and do my own coaching with my own business coaches. So I use that to develop, deploy content. So really every week I just try and think of OK, what's happening in the industry and how can I be the leader and be the voice of the space there?

Ryan Martin: 5:58

Yeah, and from a system approach. I don't know if you've been looking at any of my content, but I'm talking a lot about systems because it's so interesting. What's your system? So you do your film weekly. Do you have a day where you write content, research it and then film months a week? Is that sort of the general system that you run with?

Brendan Gillen: 6:17

That's the system that I have in my calendar. It doesn't always go to plan, though, so I have a system where Monday is my content writing and planning day, and then I do my filming on a sort of a Thursday. It's sort of my theory. That's how I'd like it to work, but sometimes, you know, with running up your own online stores, stuff happens. I was going to say the other word, but I'm not sure if it'll block us from YouTube. So, yeah, stuff happens in the business, and that sometimes pulls my attention away. So even though I've got a great team around me, you still get pulled away.

Brendan Gillen: 6:43

So I do try and stick to that plan of writing some content and filming on sort of the second half of the week. That's just my strategy, but really, where the gold comes from is the ideation, so I make sure that at any one point I've got something that I can write ideas down or favorite videos or do something like that, because my ideas don't come to me on that Monday. Monday has to be the day that I'm actually exploring the idea that I already have in my mind. So let's just say I thought of something around SEO strategy that I want to teach. I'll just write a little note on my phone to be like OK, do a video about this. Or if I'm going through TikTok myself, I'll favorite something. Copy the link, put in my little notes, just so that on the Monday I'll be like OK, what are my three or four videos I want to do this week, and then I'll know the content there.

Ryan Martin: 7:25

Yeah, brilliant, and we'll get on to e-commerce more specifically and talk around the current state of e-commerce, but also we're just talking about your coaching business. If people are looking for some help with that, what's the best way to get in touch and who's the ideal candidate that is successful within your program?

Brendan Gillen: 7:43

Yeah, so we work with both emerging entrepreneurs or e-commerce entrepreneurs that have got a product that they've tried to sell online. It's not doing too bad. They might be doing you know, I don't know the number of a couple of grand a week on sales and they start in our boot camp. So that's the accelerator, where we try and accelerate people to sort of 10 grand a month type thing. And then we have another program which is for our mastermind and that's people who want to get to a million dollars a year or more, and so they're the sort of two cohorts that we have. And if you want to get in touch with me, the best thing is follow me on YouTube or TikTok. But for those that are, that really want to sort of connect with me and get some of our content privately in their inbox, I just download our fast start guide. That's on million dollars, storeco, and that's the best way to just get in our world and learn exactly our processes.

Ryan Martin: 8:26

Perfect, mate. I'll put that link in the show notes as well, so everyone can find that. Let's get on to the state of e-commerce. Currently, you're obviously working with a lot of e-commerce brands as well as your own stores. How have you found the calendar year so far in 2023 and what's your take on the e-commerce industry? Obviously, there's a cost of living pressures, inflation so there's a little bit of doom and gloom about e-commerce that's come off a little bit over the last sort of 18 miles, but what would be your take on that?

Brendan Gillen: 8:57

Yeah, look, it's definitely slowed in terms of revenue. I always like to think of a business, especially e-commerce, being around for a while in the space is we do get ups and downs in any business and whether it's e-commerce, retail, hospitality, whatever it is, we always get ups and downs and we are definitely in that down slower period. But that doesn't mean that it's all doom and gloom. Stores are still growing. I am seeing stores growing. There's not growing at that exponential rate that we're used to. If you think about we've come off the back of COVID. I know it's a little while away now, but there's still some fallings off of that and people want to get back to where that thrill that we had during COVID. We're just not going to get that. But we are seeing growth month on month on stores. It just may not be double-digit growth we used to see If you think about businesses that are in e-commerce, double-digit growth was like a holy grail In e-commerce.

Brendan Gillen: 9:46

It was the standard. Now we're probably normalizing a little bit in terms of growth. In terms of businesses that are growing. We look at, say, 40 to 50 stores a month that and see their sales numbers. There are some that aren't growing. Definitely there are some that are struggling, and I won't say that it's all rosy, but the ones that are winning or at least continuing to grow or maintain and sometimes the ones that maintain is a good place to be right, because you're not going backwards what they're doing is they're being consistent.

Brendan Gillen: 10:12

That's the secret here is don't start being reactive and pulling crisis levers and doing a sort of stuff. The ones that are continually seeing some growth are the ones that are being consistent. Interestingly, when you asked me about the content earlier, we have actually taken some of the ideas of the personal brand content and applied it to e-commerce content. We're now seeing that's really working. We're on the sort of a preposist I don't know the word is of thinking that well, not thinking, but knowing that businesses need to be content first. Businesses now, because you need to be in front of everyone at all times. That's the part where people are cutting through. The guys that are in front of everyone, continually posting content, continually engaging with their community, are the ones that are continuing to grow. That's sort of our takeaway from it is stay consistent, be visible and don't pull any crisis levers. Yeah, brilliant.

Ryan Martin: 11:03

It's good advice and that was going to be. Another question I had was just around the content that you're doing yourself. Now, again, you can do it for your own store, but typically e-commerce tends to be a little bit faceless. If you can actually put some personality or inject some of your personality into your content and do more content on a consistent basis, more top of the funnel stuff, it's really going to help. It's good to hear your thoughts on that. I feel like sometimes and maybe it was that golden age during lockdown and COVID where stores were growing at such a rapid rate because no one had any choice you could just go to that middle of the funnel and bottom of funnel conversion and retarget and do well, but now you have to basically fill that funnel up again to get that awareness back. Maybe that's just the correction that had to happen.

Brendan Gillen: 11:56

Yeah, 100% is the content piece I like to think about from a digital business. If you're a pure play online retailer, who is the face of the business? At the end of the day, people buy from people. It's important that we can put the brand or the owner or at least the face of the company in front so people know who they're buying from. They don't want to be faceless businesses the ones that have taken off the most. You know who the founder of the business is. You could probably every business that's successful right now. You pretty much know who the founder is. That's because they're proud of their business.

Brendan Gillen: 12:27

I like to recommend to our clients in our coaching program that be proud of your company. Put your face out if you can. Not everyone likes to talk to the camera, but you can do little founder stories. You can do little bits and pieces to try and put a bit of a name behind it. They're the ones that cut through because no one else can be you. That's how your brand is going to cut through. If you're in a commoditized space and there's one brand saying the same thing as you, well, what differentiated do you have? It's you. How do we put that in front to try and drive people to your brand instead.

Ryan Martin: 12:55

Yeah, exactly what's your take, just whilst we're on that, then there is going to be some friction or some people that don't want to be in front of a camera. How would you get around that? Behind the scenes footage is obviously something that's key. Would you use influencers for part of it, because it's not really you or your brand, but I guess that they're representing it? How would you try and find the balance? If someone didn't want to be in front of camera, would you advise them to be more written? There's Twitter and all sorts of different stuff you could do, I guess.

Brendan Gillen: 13:28

Yeah, it's a really good question, one that has been asked a couple of times, because it's nothing worse than getting on camera and not being comfortable, because people will also see through that and it's not authentic. You want to try and be in a medium that is good for you. I guess the compromise of middle ground we've got to try and find out is how can someone relate to your business If they can't relate in person? They might need to relate in the business itself and how it operates. If you think about things like sustainability and what your passion is and what your cause is and what your purpose is, how do you put that through in content?

Brendan Gillen: 13:57

Behind the scenes would be a great one Things that you do in the community and that doesn't necessarily need to be about you. You just want to try and connect with the audience. If you do want to put a face against it and I do like to put faces against it because then people can relate in a sense you just want to make sure that the face of the business represents who your avatar is, in some sense your business avatar. You want to make sure that, if you're selling women's clothing, that the face of the business can be male, but obviously you don't want to be someone that doesn't fit that mold properly. You want it to be someone that they can be like. Oh yeah, I can see why this person built that brand or did that credit that business.

Ryan Martin: 14:37

Yeah, yeah. I guess it just needs to be some congruency between the message as you say that, the why that they're in business, why are they in that channel, and then why people should buy from them ultimately. Yeah, mate, you spoke at the recent online retailer conference. What were the key takeaways from that conference? More wider, and then for yourself, what were some of the things that you learned throughout that expo?

Brendan Gillen: 15:03

Yeah, it was a really good expo for anyone that went. One of the key takeaways that I think I, or the theme that I picked up on from the whole conference was, I guess and this is how I opened my presentation but I sort of said, the glory days are over and we sort of talked about that a little bit earlier. But what I mean by that is, over the last five years, if not longer, we had this access readily to data. We were able to access all bits of data about our customers. You know as detailed as we want. We used to know what they had for dinner and where they had it Right.

Brendan Gillen: 15:31

Yeah, that's all going away and it's slowly getting taken away from us and it's getting a lot harder for us to use our. You know what our secret power was in e-commerce, which was, you know, highly targeted ads and you know highly targeted emails and all this sort of stuff. That's all sort of going away because that all operate on third party data and what the messaging at this conference was was that we need to find other ways because that's going to get harder and harder to get. If we think about in the future, google Chrome is going to be removing pretty much all third party data. We're not going to have any cookies in there. It's going to be a cooculus world. You know iOS has already rolled out a lot of updates to restrict any sort of data that's getting sent to any tracking mechanisms. They're even going to remove, you know, utm tags on links. Australia is going to be bringing out its own version of GDPR. So we know, in the next one to two years, the ability to target people based on their behavior using third party data is going to get a lot harder.

Brendan Gillen: 16:18

So that was sort of my takeaway from it is that the world that we knew has changed. We need to think about the new version of it, and so what I personally spoke about was how we capture customer data in our own world and utilize that to grow and market our business and basically own and create a community under your brand, because then it becomes first party data, things like, you know, cdp or like something like clavio. It's not necessarily CDP, but you can use it as a customer portal to get all the information about them and then you know, ask them questions and be able to market to them based on their behavior. So that was sort of the guts of the conference that I found that I sort of lays it in on. Obviously there's some other cool stuff. You know really cool tech. You know 3D printers, 3d scanning, all that fun stuff. Ai was definitely a topic of conversation, but yeah, that was sort of AI and privacy was sort of the two main, the main things that we talked about.

Ryan Martin: 17:11

Yeah, brilliant. So just on, let's look at that a little bit more granular. So we basically you know what you're saying and what the industry is saying is we need to know our customers better. How do we have those conversations and what do you recommend to your clients? Is it you know exit surveys? Is it you know feedback forms? How do we get to know our customers Ones that have sort of purchased from us is a little bit easier, but perhaps the ones that haven't purchased, how do we sort of reengage them or try to get some feedback as to, perhaps, why they hadn't purchased?

Brendan Gillen: 17:44

Yeah, so people realize how valuable data is now. So we need to make sure that's a fair exchange and if you're asking them for something, you need to give them something in return, and the more you ask, the more you need to give it. So it has to be that fair value exchange. So people are willing to give away an email address now, but they won't give it just to give you to get subscribed to a newsletter. That's there's not enough value in your newsletter for them, because your newsletter to them is basically you just trying to sell to them. Okay, so the first one, whichever one does, is, you know, just give a dollar discount away or a gift away or something like that. But the first one is just to give a dollar discount away or a gift away or something like that, but that is just going to be for an email address and that's not enough these days. So what we want to try and do is enrich people, enrich people's data. So we don't need it necessarily to get the email just on their website. We can use competitions. You know, via Meta ads we can launch competitions with partners and you know, we can give away our products and get more data in there. Now, if you're giving away something of high value and someone's going to win something, we can obviously ask for more data, right? So we can ask for first name, last name, email, maybe what the interest that in, maybe where they live. Maybe you can ask for more data. Right, we can ask for first name, last name, email, maybe what the interest that in, maybe where they live, maybe their birthday? Okay, because we're giving them away something more and we're doing it offsite, which means they don't even need to get to your site. So that's sort of one real way to get started before they purchase.

Brendan Gillen: 18:52

And then, once they do purchase, then we can do some sort of enrichment program and we roll out a program in our million dollars store coaching, one which we call the customer upgrade, and what that means is, when customer purchase with us, we then put in a flow into claveo that tries to ask them a little bit more information. That upgrades them to a like a VIP. So the more information they give us, the higher they will go in the ranks of VIP. So then at the end of the day ideally, if I think about how we do this for fight gear we not only know what they purchased, we'll also know what sport they're interested in, what their age is, what their agenda is. You know whether they're advanced or beginner in the sport.

Brendan Gillen: 19:29

So we can then curate all our messaging, whether it's SMS, whether it's email, whether it's phone, to be able to really put good messaging in front of them. And it doesn't necessarily be marketing, it could be educational content, could be new products, could be anything. It's a long program that you run. You know how do we get them in before they know you. How do we get them if they just learned about you? And then what do we get from them once they are in your world?

Ryan Martin: 19:51

Yeah, that's a really good insight. What I love there was was that fair value exchange, because it makes sense, but sometimes as business owners, we're trying to just. You know you could be guilty. I know I am at times of like taking like you know what can I get.

Brendan Gillen: 20:06

How do?

Ryan Martin: 20:07

we get their details? How do we get it? But if you actually put that hat on as you mentioned, we're on fair value exchange then all of a sudden it almost gives you a little bit of accountability back because you go well, I need to actually give that fair value exchange in whatever way it is whether information, education, product reviews or whatever that is. So that's a really good takeaway, that's a good nugget there we can use going forward, I think, and just a bit of a mindset shift as well.

Brendan Gillen: 20:34

One of the things I said in my presentation was capturing someone's email address is a conversion. A lot of people measure conversions just based on the purchase conversion. But actually getting an email address is valuable to you, right? So you need to treat that like a conversion. So it's almost just as important as the sale, because if you can nurture that email address, then it's going to become a sale, not once, but it will be twice, three times, four times, and you need to sort of think about that as almost your middle top of funnel type conversion, as opposed to sort of the more traditional way of the bottom of funnel.

Ryan Martin: 21:03

Yeah, interesting, and I always think sometimes, you know, I have both a mixture in my agency of e-com clients and also professional services trade businesses and I always feel like e-commerce leads the way in a lot of areas, but probably a way that it can work back. The other way is that you know from professional services, we're always looking for lead generation. Do you feel like e-commerce businesses have a good opportunity to become more lead lead focused than revenue focused for a period of time to acquire that first party data?

Brendan Gillen: 21:34

Yeah, I think it's a good way of thinking for e-com businesses for sure, generating leads, and then how do we convert them into sales as opposed to just going straight for the sale. I think there's definitely a huge opportunity there and I think we do it inadvertently. We just don't think in that methodology of like a B2B business where I've got to get customers in and then work them through, so you're sort of doing it right by cap, throwing them into a clave or somewhere like that. I guess we just don't think of it as leads.

Ryan Martin: 21:58

Yeah, yeah, but leads, as you say, it's easier to get an email address or it's easier to get details rather than someone's money, especially the first or second time they come to your website. And then if you have your flow set up in such a way that you can nurture that, give them that fair value exchange, then that leads probably, or that conversion is going to become cheaper through cost per acquisition than trying to retarget them three or four times and get them back on your website for the sixth time for a conversion. Yeah, absolutely yeah. It's interesting. And with all your Ecom clients or your coaching clients, is there a common like how many of them would work on lead generation before they started with you, or is that something that you really speak to them and try and get them to implement as quickly as they can?

Brendan Gillen: 22:45

Yeah, so when we assess where someone's at when they join our program, it depends on, you know, they might already have a massive database or they might have a big community somewhere. So we've got one client and her community is massive on Facebook. Right, she's got a huge private Facebook group and that's where she does her marketing to. So it's the same theory, but in a different database, whereas others have a huge Clavio group or something like that. But list growth we call it the list growth method. So we have the strategy I just sort of talked to about. Then we have a framework on how to roll it out. They would go in and implement that framework. So they're getting leads externally, they're getting leads on their site. They're getting leads, you know, through people that purchase and then we're nurturing them into a sale.

Brendan Gillen: 23:23

So we definitely put that high on the list because your database, or your owned customers a bit like the traffic trifecta, that's one of them right, having your own traffic is the most valuable part of your business, because no one can take that away from you, right? Yeah, all the other stuff can get taken away from you. Seo can get killed because someone else takes your lunch. Your meta ads can die because your account gets hacked or they just don't work as much anymore. You have to spend more, whereas your own database no one can take away from you unless the cloud platform goes away. Let's just never hope that happens. Yeah, you know what I mean. That's yours, is why we call it your own marketing.

Ryan Martin: 23:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly Now, that's a good thought, Mate. We've got a couple more questions which would probably take up a little bit of time, but the Shopify released and I think it was, over 100 updates. You've done a lot of content on that. What are the top sort of two or three that Australian businesses can use to enhance their results?

Brendan Gillen: 24:21

Yeah, good one, yeah, so I think I put a video out on YouTube a couple of a week and a half ago on that and on TikTok, and there are over 100. It depends on what stage of the business you're at. So if you're on a plus store, there's some really good updates for plus, but I'll just go through sort of, I guess, the ones that apply to everyone, just so that you've got a wide audience and we hit them. But one thing I like, which I think is really cool, and what I love that's where Shopify came from is that they built their platform to try and empower entrepreneurs Right. So they want to put the tools in their hands and you can see that with every iteration of these Shopify additions that come out. The latest one that came out was just really simple They've upgraded the theme editor. It's just so much better and you're going to be able to drag and drop things around and squash things in and out. You were just never able to do that. It was very rigid and it's just an update that just makes our lives a lot easier. Now, that was one that I really like, because I think that was a big. We always needed to use developers to help us just move things around. Eventually. I can see in the future we're not going to have that. It's just going to do it for you and you're going to just drag it around. It's going to be a lot better. That was one that I really liked.

Brendan Gillen: 25:22

The other one, which is bundles, which is these are all small little things but again, just make our worlds a little bit better. Shopify now natively does bundles on products. They never used to do that. We used to use a third-party app. I must say the bundles are pretty basic, but if you just want to do a basic bundle, it's there now built into the platform. If you want to do anything more sophisticated, you do need probably another app. Yep, the other one they did was Marketplace Connect. Now, that one is basically what they did is they used an app called Cadisto and they bought it out and they named it their own app. But what that allows Shopify stores to do and this is one of the ways that we scale our coaching clients is, rather than just sell off your Shopify store, we sell in other places. So sell on eBay, sell on Amazon, walmart, all those different places, and Marketplace Connect makes that easier for you to do From an Australian perspective. It doesn't have all the Australian marketplaces, so it doesn't have like CAPT, I don't think, and a few other ones on there, so it's not going to fill everything, but it does make like eBay and things like that a lot easier, yep.

Brendan Gillen: 26:18

The other one which is really cool actually, is if you run a business where you can offer subscriptions. Subscriptions are now going to be built in to Shopify. It's not released yet, but it will be very soon, and it means that you know, if you want a coffee business or something like that, that someone could subscribe to coffee. You know, once every four weeks, three weeks, two weeks or whatever. Usually that was a third party app that was pretty expensive as an app, actually, and now that's going to be built into Shopify, so that is a big win. I feel sorry for the apps, though, because a lot of those apps are going to lose a bit of market share because Shopify is sort of doing what Amazon did, and you know all the good things they take and own themselves. So we'll see how that goes. And then the biggest thing that I feel is going to really help us all is the integration of all the AI that's coming in. So there's two big parts of AI that I think are going to be really cool.

Brendan Gillen: 27:02

The first one is when you're creating content now in Shopify. So you know, writing like your collection descriptions or something on your sections or things like that. It has like a little chat GPT. It's not chat GPT, but it's similar to it. You press the button and you type what you want to write about and it will create a paragraph for you. Super simple, super easy, but all it does. It just makes you speed your time up and it just means that you don't have to go and write something and then bring it back. It just helps ideate with you and I think that's really neat and that's sort of sprinkled throughout the whole platform. It's not just on one section, anywhere that you can write text. You're going to see this little purple, starry thing which is Shopify magic and you can go in and it helps you write the content Beautiful.

Brendan Gillen: 27:38

And then the final one, which I think is going to be really awesome, is Shopify Sidekick. I don't know if you've seen this one out there, but well, it sounds like it's going to be awesome the proofs in the pudding. They have released things like this in the past, but that was pre chat GPT LLM era, so it might be different. But the idea of this is quite cool is that this Sidekick is going to know everything about your store and all the millions of stores around you and all you need to do is ask it questions about what you want from it and what you want to do, so you might be able to. You might type in there and say why am I sales slow today? And it might say something like well, the majority of your sales come from Australia and it's hot in Australia today and you're selling umbrellas. So you know, you know the weather's it's not raining, so you're not going to sell many umbrellas. So it's going to be things like that.

Brendan Gillen: 28:21

But then the other part is, if you don't know how to do something, it'll do it for you. So you could say, update my theme, put it on sale at 20% and change the banner to this, and it will do that for you. So I think the first version is going to be pretty basic and probably not very useful, but over time it'll just get better and better. But yeah, so just think of it like chat GPT built into Shopify that knows everything about you and your store in the world and I think that's that's going to be really interesting. I think it actually might put like people like me, maybe out of a job because it's going to be telling them exactly like what I do. So we'll see what happens.

Ryan Martin: 28:54

Yeah, yeah, I think you'll be safe, babe, for a while. You know I always like a question I get asked and I'm sure you do a lot is you know AI and how is that going to all integrate? And you know where to where to all our jobs sit? Is it going to take over? And the best example I always sort of say to my clients is well, you know, canva come along and all the designers thought that'd be out of a job, but you know they're still in demand.

Ryan Martin: 29:19

I try, you know I try and design stuff on Canva. I'm absolutely horrible. It's not the platform, it's just the, the input. So I think, whilst it can, you know, while sidekick will, I am assuming, be able to do all these sorts of things and speed up your time, there's still going to be a quite a a premium on expertise, you know, and real and understanding the data, and you still need to get people to your store. You still need to understand why they're not converting. You know, and you still need to continue to get better. So I think it's just going to make the sharper minds even sharper.

Brendan Gillen: 29:52

Yeah, I think you're right. It's like I've talked into chat GPT and I'm sure everyone has how do I get more sales my e-commerce store right and what it will do is it'll give you the normal things, but it doesn't actually tell you how to do it. So I think I think you're right there.

Ryan Martin: 30:03

Well, let's hope so.

Brendan Gillen: 30:09

I'm crossing my fingers for those listening at listening, yeah 100% Mate.

Ryan Martin: 30:14

Last question, before we get into a couple of couple of questions that we've had off the live stream how do we've obviously come into a really key part of the e-com calendar with Black Friday, cyber Monday, christmas period, boxing Day sales? How do we set ourselves up for success? What are, you know, potentially a couple of takeaway tips? Obviously it's hard because people are at different stages of their e-com journey, but what are some things that you really suggest everyone listening needs to have in place before that sales period really starts to kick off and you know it's only another month or two away really?

Brendan Gillen: 30:52

Yeah, it's definitely a good question to ask right now, because you should be thinking about it now and really I want everyone that's on this call or whoever's listening you should have a plan in place on what you're going to, what your offer is going to look like during that period and what your you know what your planning and campaign might look like. Because if you need to, if you want, if you've got a big target, you need to make sure you've got the stock that's going to meet hitting that target. Okay, that's the first thing. There's so many stores that go to market and they don't have enough stock to hit their targets, or they they fizzle out too quickly and they can't hit those sales. That's sort of. The first one is plan, plan for success first. Okay, the second part is making sure you build hype. So and that's not just so hype early on, but about building your database and making sure you're building an audience ready for it. It's a little bit like what we talked about today how do we get people into your world now so that they know about you, so that when you do pull that lever that they're ready to buy and they're they're warmed up right. We don't want to be getting cold customers on the day of Black Friday or a couple of days you know out, because you don't want them to have to make a decision on it's, whether you or them. They want to know that. Okay, if this person, if this brand, goes on sale, I'm ready and willing to put my credit card in play. So that's pretty standard stuff, that what we're doing in a normal Black Friday playbook is build your audience early, start prepping them and hyping them and priming them so that when you pull the lever, they're ready to go. Yep, but really the other thing that I think is really important is that's a normal playbook that everyone does, so we need to stick to that to get our baseline right. But if we want to stand out from the crowd, we need to start playing with new technology and doing something that's a little bit different to whatever on does all the time.

Brendan Gillen: 32:21

One of the things that we're a little bullish on for this year is using things like live selling on TikTok and Instagram, using live. So overseas, this has been huge running, you know like. You know people. It's literally like TV shopping on social media. So they're holding up you know these pair of headphones and they're going. These headphones are amazing. You know, we've only got 30 of these left and we're going to be selling for 50% off, so click the link right now and you can buy it. And then they can almost say, okay, we've sold 10, we've sold 13, we've sold 15, we've only got 10 to go. We can't. You know, it's a bit like that sort of selling. That's what's going to be really big. I think this Black Friday, having these key sales like live events and you know, I think brands that do that well and build that hype is going to really cut through the noise of Black Friday, because it's super noisy and we want to make sure we get through that noise.

Ryan Martin: 33:06

Yeah, brilliant. I always thought like live shopping has been coming for so long, but it's not quite there yet in Australia, but it has to be a matter of time. You've got all that attention. You go live Any time. You go live everyone on your database. I think it's a notification saying that you're now live. It's a great way to you know. Maybe even that's that's when you you put more of a face to the, to the brand, or you can use some influences in your strategy. But, yeah, it's a really good point around. You know, being live and selling with some scarcity, that's that's worked for 200 years probably. So I'm imagining that's going to work going forward as well. Absolutely.

Brendan Gillen: 33:46

Yeah, I think it'll be really. Oh look, the thing is when they're saying it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, well, it's actually here, just no one's using it. That's the difference, right? So I think brands that actually use it during this period or have the ability to like not everyone can do it, but if you have the ability to do it, then I urge people to give it a try at least. What's going to happen? Like it doesn't work? Well, that's okay. It's something new that you tried what is? And if it does work well, even better. But the brands that I know have done it recently and they're just small brands and they've told the audience they're going live at this date. They've done really well out of it because it builds a bit of something a little bit different. People are really enjoying it. So I highly recommend brands try it.

Ryan Martin: 34:21

Yeah, and I think to your point earlier on again, if you have the lens of fair value exchange, it's going to be a. It's going to be a word I use all the time now. I like it. But if you, if you think about that, you're not just going live and sitting in a room and saying, hey, we're selling. There's obviously got to be some sort of fair value exchange, that, giving you their time, you know how do you make that live, educational and worthy of their attention for a certain period of time, and then you know what's the end goal with that as well.

Brendan Gillen: 34:51

Yeah Well, I think a little bit like you doing this podcast now live right. It gets attention of people and people enjoying how to interact with the video, and you know it's. We don't want it to be a one way anymore. You know, I could be holding up these headphones, which is another one of our brands, and they could be saying to us you know what's, you know what phones do they work with and we can answer questions live on that. So these are, you know, works with all phones that have a Bluetooth device. You know how long the battery lasts last for 24 hours. You know. These are sort of things that we can do on the call and interact live with them. So it's really powerful like that, you know, you're like you're a salesperson in a store, but you can just do it on the live call. That's where I think it's going to be really, really powerful.

Ryan Martin: 35:32

Yeah, brilliant. So there's a bit of sales creep generally what we've been noticing over the last few years. And to address this question, how early should they go with a discount or how early should they start their black Friday, cyber Monday campaign in terms of like, going live? This is the discount, this is the offer. We've seen brands they want to make the most of. You know everyone's probably got a fine item out that they're going to spend over this period and it looks like the earlier they go, the more of that spend they're going to get. Do you have a thought around when to press go or how to best execute it so you don't miss out on that sort of weekend?

Brendan Gillen: 36:13

spend? Yeah, it's a really good question, so thank you to have asked that. It is well if you think about November, right? So the reason black Friday was started was that November is typically a really quiet period in the retail calendar Super quiet period and in the US you know that was Thanksgiving and no one was shopping. So black Friday started by getting people into the stores after a long public holiday to get sales back up and running. In Australia, november is really low because people wait till December to go to the shops to get all the Christmas deals. November has now become the biggest month of the year for sales because of all this stuff that's happened.

Brendan Gillen: 36:47

Now in November we have a couple of key events, especially in Australia. We have at the start of November we have 1111, which is singles day, which is that's coming from China, but it's becoming getting a lot more traction here in Australia, so it's sort of our first one. Then we have click frenzy, which sort of kicks off a couple of days after 1111, and then we have the sort of sales weekend, which is black Friday. So one of the things I like to think about is let's use the first two events as a bit of a test run and see what's happening and see what's moving and the type of offers that people are liking, and then we basically go helpful either on those in the in the sort of the last sort of that that weekend In terms of how early should you go. A lot of brands do go really early and they raise their hands early with that, with that offer.

Brendan Gillen: 37:28

I've got two trains of thoughts. This, the first one, is if you've built your built sort of your brand and people have nurtured your customers and they're nice and warm, you know they'll buy from you during that period. If they're not so warm, they're going to wait to see if there's better offers before that, right, so you've raised your hand first, but they know that on black Friday all everyone's going to bring their offers out, okay, and they might wait until then. So you might raise your hand early and you might just you'll get an increase in sales, definitely, but it just might not be these big spikes that we used to sing. So usually the longer the offer, the more spread out your sales are going to be in. The shorter the offer, the more sort of intense the sales are going to be. It's just whether or not you can hold on earlier to do that. So it really comes down to the brand on, I think, how warm your audience is and whether that as soon as you put an offer out they're going to buy, because there's some brands that you know don't go on sale very often. So as soon as you put an offer out, then we're going to see an explosion.

Brendan Gillen: 38:19

So I didn't really answer that clearly, but you know, I think that if you think about it, that the longer your offer is, the more spread out your sales are going to be. Will you get more or not? That's hard to say. And the shorter they are, then the higher the spikes going to be. I like to think if the shorter they are, the bigger the discount you can do, whereas the longer they are, the lower the discount you should do, because you don't want to be eating a margin for two weeks with on discount when you could just do a big discount over a short period of time, build the hype, blow it up, close the offer down.

Brendan Gillen: 38:46

The other thing with that strategy which I like is that if it doesn't really go so well, you could extend it, whereas if you have a really long offer and then it goes up and doesn't work and extend it out, then it just becomes dead offer. It's boring. So it's definitely strategy that you want to play out in your world on what works for your customers. But cold audiences you could do with a short offer. Warm audiences you know they're going to buy from you as soon as you go on sale. It's probably a nice way to break it up. Then after that we've got Christmas gifting period, which is sort of after Black Friday up until Christmas Eve. Some people might go their boxing day sale before Christmas Eve now and then boxing days that are the new spike that you do to the end of the year. So if you really think about it, you got almost two months worth of sales. So the earlier you go, the longer that offer is going to be there for and the more fatigue it's going to get. Yeah, interesting.

Ryan Martin: 39:33

I think that's a great answer and there's some great insights for people listening to consider for their. Obviously, you have to adapt whatever we say to your own business, but there's some great thought starters there. The other thing I would advise as well is just around email. So if you do want to go a little bit earlier perhaps, perhaps treat your warm audience or your loyal loyal customers with a discount ahead of time. That way you keep it off socials, you're not seen to be going too early, but you're giving your loyal following perhaps a discount, and I guess it doesn't have to be a discount as well, right?

Ryan Martin: 40:09

So do you think there'll be a there's always a tipping point of sort of mass, of mass right, of everyone going to do the same strategy and then there's another thought around going the other way. So do you think we'll see brands opt out of all of these sort of Black Friday, cyber Mondays or have a different take on it, because it's so the norm and expected now that some of those luxury brands go, you know what. We're going to go the other way, or maybe they just have a different take on it? I'm not sure.

Brendan Gillen: 40:39

Yeah, I think we did say a little bit about a little bit of that last year as well. A lot of brands not a lot, but some brands opted out. The challenge is and when you're in a large retailer, so you know, definitely the big end of town drives this more than the small end of town. So the big retailers that was our yearly forecast and I'll often do the forecast based on prior yeah. Okay, and some of the brands I worked for is they might have made 50 percent of the revenue in these two months period. Okay, so, if not more, right, which means they're highly reliant on that to get the revenue in to hit their forecast for their board. So there's an element there that if they don't do it, how are they going to hit their forecast? Okay, so there's that, and sometimes it's just a top line forecast, not even a profit forecast. They just want to hit their revenue numbers. So those brands will still play the game. The brands that don't play the game are going to have pretty big Gahunas to be like. Well, we might miss out on sales because people have their wallets open and they're going to go and spend money with people that are on discount rather than us. We're not on discount. So that's where brand advocacy and having a really tight community and audience and owning a customer is really going to help. But if your lever is discounting to get sales, it's going to be really hard. Think of Apple. Apple doesn't go on discount. You don't ever see them on Black Friday. But if they were doing it you know what month, years ago and people are expecting and they don't they might have to weigh it like, stretch that wave out for a couple of years when people then start to realize, okay, these guys are never going on sale again.

Brendan Gillen: 41:59

Yeah, yeah, true, I think the thing is, though, if you aren't on sale, then you can't necessarily just stay quiet. I think you need to scream that you're not on sale. And who did I see do this recently Not recently, but I know it wasn't. I don't think it was during Black Friday. But Culture Kings did a similar thing where they're like they're not on sale, sale. I think it was Culture Kings, but like, so they screamed from the riptops saying we're not on sale.

Brendan Gillen: 42:19

And I have seen a couple of brands do stuff like that over in the US. Where it's the not on sale, sale, you know everything is full price. Yeah, it's really interesting because that cuts. Because the goal here is you want to get through the noise in the market. You don't necessarily want people to be like oh, I'm going to browse your site, oh you're not on sale, okay, but at least if you cut through the market saying we're not on sale at full price. That's the other one. And then the other event that I've seen happening in Australia was Green Friday, I think it was called, which was I did see that.

Brendan Gillen: 42:44

Yeah, which I think wasn't necessarily a sale or it was something. I didn't look enough into it to give enough info but that's people shifting out of the Black Friday fast fashion you know, high consumer disposable goods market and being a bit more sustainable and thoughtful about the sale. So I think we will see a bit of a mix up this year on that sort of thing.

Ryan Martin: 43:03

Yeah, nice, it's interesting, but no doubt a lot of Ecom brands are really and a lot of Ecommerce managers they're probably when I might need to send them out a bit of a care package. I think that's a point because there's probably a lot of pressure coming into that that last quarter. Yeah, all right Now. So I got two questions to finish off. Mate one is from Gabriella and she said Brandon, you mentioned at the conference that they spoke about the future of AI. What were the key takeaways of that?

Brendan Gillen: 43:33

Yeah, so I think the biggest one I took away was that it has I think it's replacing some not jobs, but probably roles in a sense, and one of the big ones was how AI is helping media buying. So it definitely has been helping copywriting to an extent gets you 80% of the way there and you just polish off the 20%, Right. So a lot of people are using it for copy now. So I don't really need to talk through that. If you're not using it for copy, start using it for writing copy. Just don't get chat GPT to write the copy and then paste into your website. That's bad. Make sure you just, you know, rewrite it in your own words. It does the frame for you, Right. But where it is really powerful, we're seeing places like Meta and Google bringing out these ad tools. So you know Google's got performance max. Facebook or Meta has, you know, Advantage plus.

Brendan Gillen: 44:16

What that basically means is that, rather than being an interest and data led bidding platform, which is in the old days we used to say, I want people that interested in boxing and martial arts and that's what we would have done in our world in fight gear we're now basically saying you know, I want you to find all these people. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you content that they're going to like and engage with, Okay, and I want you to use your smarts to find these people. So it's a content led strategy, not an interest in data led strategy. So think about this If I put up a picture of someone you know with some boxing gloves and and you know all martial arts equipment, if that picture comes up in front of someone that's interested in that, they're going to engage with it. But if it doesn't, if they put in front of someone that doesn't engage, then Facebook knows that that profile is not interested.

Brendan Gillen: 45:01

So go and try and form, find more of the people that are, and so that does has nothing to do with people saying I'm interested in martial arts. They're showing an interest in that type of content and that's where we're really finding a crushing. By being content led, the AI is finding it. All we're doing is feeding them the creative stuff. Right, it's really cool and it's blowing up, you know, and we do that in both meta now and and in faith performance max. So that's really where I think AI has changed. The game is that now we just have to take the human element, which has been creative, and putting that in front of people. Letting the AI do all the grant work.

Ryan Martin: 45:33

Yeah, so you're seeing a lot less wasteage of ad spend.

Brendan Gillen: 45:37

Yep, because what happens is, if the creative is terrible, it just doesn't doesn't be, it's just not spent. So we'll be doing, like you know, dynamic creative testing in Facebook, which is a way of doing it, and we might throw three creatives in there and one of them spends crazily, but the other two don't, because it won't if no one's engaging with it. It can't find an audience that likes it, so we just kill that, put new creative in, try the next creative, and that tends to be working pretty well.

Ryan Martin: 46:01

Brilliant. That's a great, a great takeaway. One last question I've got is from Rachel, and she wanted to know the difference between a Facebook group and a page. So you spoke a little bit about well, not the difference, but we spoke in a little bit about, in terms of a marketing point of view, building a community. And then we're talking about, you know, running ads on Facebook. Obviously, if you're building a community in a Facebook group, you can't market to them, you can't run ads to them, but they perhaps are a more, a more engaged, versus a, you know, a page where you can actually run ads against. So it looks like the question is sort of more around from an advertising point of view, would you recommend someone start a Facebook group for community or still have a traditional Facebook page and run ads? You'd have both right.

Brendan Gillen: 46:51

So, exactly as you said, your Facebook page is like the window of your business. The group is like inside your store, right, and it's your customers browsing your store or talking to the owner or you know, basically involving themselves in the community. It's like an organic version. It's like basically having your email list that you can talk to via chat and you create content and share with them and show that you're part of their community. It's a really, really powerful way. So, facebook group you use it to get people in there and can talk to them and have conversations. The other cool thing you can do is you can ask them feedback on your products or new ideas or things like that. So great for direct customer feedback.

Brendan Gillen: 47:28

And then, as you said, ryan, the page is just like a, it's the billboard that you can run ads using that page. You can run ads directly in to get people into your Facebook group if you want. So yeah, but one of the strategies that our clients use is they will, you know, get them into, get them with an ad, get them to buy the product and then invite them into the Facebook group and that seems to build this nice little circular momentum that gets them in there. And then, unless we're on ads now, because now the Facebook group so popular, there's a lot of word of mouth going on.

Ryan Martin: 47:54

Yeah, yeah, which is great. Okay. The only danger with that is there is to say Facebook shuts you down, you lose your group. So there you know. I guess even more reliability goes back to first party data, Absolutely.

Brendan Gillen: 48:08

Which is why the secret is get their email address first and then invite them into the group.

Ryan Martin: 48:12

Yeah, yeah, so you would have a. So they can't join the group without being invited.

Brendan Gillen: 48:19

Oh, they could probably find it, and you know you'd let them in right.

Brendan Gillen: 48:22

But I mean, yeah, you ideally want to get the email address. In fact, when you, if you do have a Facebook group, you can ask two or three questions at the start. And here's a little hack for you which is this is more my personal brand hack which we sort of do is if you join our Facebook group, we're going to ask you your name oh sorry, we know your name we're going to ask you whether you have an online store, and then we're going to ask you for your email address when you join the Facebook group, and then that email address then goes to CLAVO and then you're in our world. So we're sort of doing the best to work worlds, yeah.

Ryan Martin: 48:49

Yeah, beautiful, fantastic, mate. We'll look all. I'll leave it there. There's some really great takeaways again. No doubt this will be the number one download podcast in 12 months time. But as always, mate, you're very generous with your time. I really appreciate that and some absolute nuggets. But for me, the you know, the reliance on you, know first party data and also that fair value exchange. If you can look at all your campaigns through a lens of actually being providing value back to the user, then you're not going to have any trouble generating leads and revenues. So that's it. That was a really good takeaway from what I've learned today. I'll probably go back and listen to it again and learn a lot more when I can relax and not try and be the host. But yeah, I appreciate your time, mate.

Brendan Gillen: 49:34

Always a pleasure, mate. It's lots of fun. I'm glad you got through it in live and got some real questions in. That's a bit of fun. So, yeah, I like this format. I'm all in on it. Let's go for it. Perfect mate.

Ryan Martin: 49:43

Well, good luck with the year ahead and no doubt we'll jump on another podcast again soon.

Brendan Gillen: 49:48

So easy, mate. Thanks so much, cheers.