How to Maximize Order Value with Proven Post-Purchase Strategies: Hamish McKay

Wiehan  Britz: Today I have a super special guest all the way from Australia, Hamish McKay. He is the co-founder of Order Editing and I'm going to be tapping into his knowledge today. Thank you for joining me on this call.

Hamish McKay: Thanks for having me. This is super exciting.

Wiehan Britz: Love it, man. Okay, cool. So we'll get stuck right into it. Before I let you speak any further, I reached out to him. I wanted to get him on the podcast because we serviced e commerce brand a few years ago, probably about two years ago. And of course, as even in SMS marketers, we post purchase. So the moment someone places an order, you always want to tap into an immediate upsell or cross sell just so you can increase the aov know for an e commerce business. And this particular business told us that unfortunately not possible within their business because once an order gets in the system, they can't rework or edit the the order.

Wiehan Britz: It's kind of a done deal. So we were kind of stuck with their operational constraints. So when I came across order editing, I was like, hmm, is this potentially the way to accomplish that for brands with very strict fulfillment processes? So I'm going to talk to him. He's going to tell us about the problems they are solving for ecommerce businesses and I'll just let him go straight into a demo of their tool. So off you go, man. Wow.

Hamish McKay: Yeah. I think you reached out after I put up this image that one of our clients was sending out naked sundaes where they effectively email their entire customer base. That's email marketing subscribed with beautiful image of girls selling sunscreen. They're holding empty boxes and they use this copy of this space in your package, Hamish. And that's the subject line.

Wiehan Britz: Yes.

Hamish McKay: Their customers jump in the messages. There's space in your package. We're preparing it for shipment. X, Y and Z are 20% off for the next 60 minutes. And that's what a lot of email marketers get really excited over. And I think you might have messaged after that.

Wiehan  Britz: Absolutely.

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Hamish McKay: But that taps straight into what we do. I mean, we let customers make amendments to their order after purchase. And it's a super common customer service issue where 10% of your help desk time is spent going changing customers addresses or canceling orders or applying discount codes retroactively doing all of this nitty gritty work that customers should just be able to do themselves.

In a perfect world, you should be able to check out, and if you apple page your ex girlfriend's house, you should be able to change that without getting on the phone or having to write an email and that functionality is super meaningful. But for the email marketing side of things, for the ecommerce managers, the head of digital, that are super focused on increasing revenue and driving profit, they quickly hit us up and they said, look, if a customer cannot change their address, they surely can buy more products as well. At the same time, can we send out that email? Can we say there's space in their package? Can we do an sms and actually start driving? Post purchase upsells, increasing items per car, increasing aov, all of that good, good stuff that we both love, and that's now been the real driver of our business has been this upselling piece, because no one's been able to do it before.

Wiehan Britz: And the cool thing about it is it doesn't feel as forced as just a cold upsell cross sell email that someone receives. Hey, before you process, just buy more where you're almost giving the control back to the buyer, the consumer, and they almost feel in control. And this is actually great. So it almost feels like a bit of a frictionless, friendlier approach to, you know, upselling cross selling, which I absolutely adore.

Hamish McKay: Yeah, it's really neat. And like we, I think it taps into two really key consumer behaviors. And one is that we're all very anxious shoppers right now. The data that we have in our app is that if you're sending out that post purchase email, anywhere between ten to 15% of your customers on average, will go in and make a change to their order after purchase. A lot of brand owners like, holy crap, 15% of our customers are making a change after purchase. That's concerning. But in actuality, it's just all of those customers going into their order, they're looking at it again and they're confirming it before it ships. And if you've got ten to 15% of your customers revisiting their order after purchase and are seeing complementary items or upsells, or encouraged to increase the quantity for a discount, that is just a goldmine of potential revenue.

Hamish McKay: And so when we're working with a brand, we have these two metrics of like, how can we increase frequency of use and get as many customers into our app as possible to make an edit? Like, 10% is great. We want 20, we want 30. And then how can you get the upsell conversion really high of, you know, when 20% are in there, how many are actually buying more products? And that's usually about 10%.

Wiehan Britz: Nice. And tell me, do you guys pretty much sit within the post purchase transactional order confirmation emails or what is the best way to prompt people right after they order? Or do you actually sit on the, the website back inside?

Hamish McKay: Yeah, I mean, we can run through the demo a bit later, but essentially. Or do you want to do that.

Wiehan Britz: Now or why not? Let's do it. Yeah, let's show people the magic behind it.

Hamish McKay: So the customer journey is that they check out and that's screen sharing.

Wiehan Britz: Cool.

Hamish McKay: They check out, they land on Shopify's thank you page, and there's a button there that says, edit your order. Because this is all done through checkout extensibility. If they click that, it takes them through to Shopify's order status. So effectively, your customer accounts literally where the customer goes for all of their information, and then they see a set of components like shipping address, buying additional products, being able to increase your quantities, changing product options, upgrading shipping methods, all of the types of edits that a customer might want to make.

Wiehan Britz: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, no, I like the idea of having it right there in the, in the interface, you know, on the confirmation page. I'm wondering. Yeah, you'll probably also touch on this. The order, does it get, is there any chances of that order not processing? Because if you're kind of halting that order from processing and allowing people to almost, I don't know, do people cancel? Is there any chance of people canceling the order before it processes? Because I know I've seen brands that are quite worried, like, why are you guys then. Prolonging the processing of the order is not potentially bad for us.

Hamish McKay: Yeah. And that's the whole post purchase upsell challenge, is once an order goes down to your WMS or your three PL, it's generally locked up. What we build is functionality to stop that automatic pull from happening and actually incorporates some form of delay that you can set, like, to the second or the minute of what you want that to be. Most do 15 or 30 minutes where the orders of shopify customers have a grace period to make the pick of their order accurate and make sure it goes to the right place and then it gets sent downstream if there's a risk of overselling. When you have a type of order delay like that, we can also cancel and recreate orders and use a manual payment gateway so you don't pay shopify a whole bunch of processing fees that you don't need to. But in a perfect world, you delay orders going down for an editing period. And that's when you pick up all of these problems.

Wiehan Britz: That's when you. If I don't make any action if I don't make any changes, my order will auto process in the backend 30 minutes after I purchase, correct?

Hamish McKay: That's right.

Wiehan Britz: Okay.

Hamish McKay: That's right. And if you have like, a shipping SlA of, you know, if you place that before 02:00 p.m. your order ships same day, your order ships next day. What we do is we just set conditional blocks and we say orders placed between 01:45 p.m. and 02:00 p.m. they go straight down so that we don't actually impact your processes at all.

Wiehan Britz: Got it? Got it. Nice. Smart.

Hamish McKay: It works, it works, it works. It's just this astounding thing where you wake up the next day and you don't have any more support tickets and you never have any more support tickets after that. And like, you know, we work with, like, I think the best example is represent Clo, who are about to go live in a few weeks. They've just finished up onboarding, and they spend 40 hours a week changing addresses after purchase.

Wiehan Britz: Unbelievable.

Hamish McKay: Like, you know, we work, we work with a sunglass brand that used to spend, like, smaller, smaller order volumes. You know what, not one of the biggest brands in the world, but smaller order volumes. And they used to spend 8 hours every week changing orders, or 40 hours per month. And now they've self serviced all of that. But they also make ten grand of us upsell revenue every single 30 days, which, you know.

Wiehan Britz: That's, that's amazing. And tell me the, for the email, SMS marketers and just marketers in general, how would you debug something like this? Like this problems, root cause? Would you just essentially ask questions around how frequently are people changing their addresses? And is your customer support team kind of blocked out doing that? How would you kind of support, because some ecommerce brands out there might not be aware of a solution here. So it's obviously our marketers role to kind of inform them about some of their problems and how we can solve it. Like, what is your recommendation on how someone can debug this for, for their teams or even their clients?

Hamish McKay: Yeah, and I mean, it depends on who you speak to. If you speak to a customer service agent or manager, they will immediately tell you that that's about 20% of their day or 10%. If you speak to an e commerce manager or a marketing manager or head of digital CTO, there's a chance that they'll have less awareness of it because I find departments end up being quite siloed.

And the conversation there is usually this is a conversation that I have is, do you do any post purchase upsells? Would you like to? And then you show them an email like this and say, you know, would you be pretty happy if 1% of all your customers took up the software after purchase? Just send this out through Klaviyo with our integration customers click that button and then it takes them to a page like this. And this should load my order details.

This time, customers can access their order status page from the order confirmation email, right from the thank you page. And then in any Klaviyo Upsell email, or, you know, this space in your package email, you just direct customers here. And then they land in and they see all of the editing components and what a typical customer journey is, is they click in, they want to edit their shipping address.

Hamish McKay: We use Google maps APIs to verify it. Here it's pulling up that my postcode is wrong for this Australian address. It calls out things like missing phone numbers, and it's super clear when you save, it drops the component up address saved, and that's been saved against my order. And then naturally, what we're trying to do, as these changes happen is trying customers to upsell and they see that it's 20% off everything. They see. One click upsells down the bottom, they can view those, they can see it, they can add that to their order, and then they effectively just get, they get sent an invoice to their email, which is just showing up on my phone. They can also check out straight through the app. Oh God, I've gone past the cutoff point.

Hamish McKay: So funny. And then you can view your invoice, you pay for the updated total, less what's already been paid. So here it's 885 for that new product. And then we're updating the original order in July. So you can see the changes have already synced through here, but it's on hold. But it's not a fully paid order, it's tagged changes that shipping address, product data, sitting with an invoice, and we update it in the older timeline too. Zip code, updated. Customer added this product.

Hamish McKay: Here's their checkout link. We're holding fulfillment because it's awaiting payment and hangs with an invoice. And until that's paid, this won't get sent down to your warehouse, to your three plus, and it won't ship out. But once it is, it'll get set down automatically and it's a quick run through.

Wiehan Britz: That's pretty damn cool. And tell me quickly, you obviously integrate directly with Klaviyo so the triggers that gets pushed into Klaviyo, you can get timing, post purchase flow and transactional flows.

Hamish McKay: That's right. Klaviyo. Gorgeous. It's all very accessible from here.

Wiehan  Britz: I love it, love it. I love giving power back to email and SMS marketers, especially because we drive a lot of, you know, post purchase, transactional type of emails. So having technology like this, you know, play well into our space and we can make people more money is just beautiful. So it's something that I think all brands should sign up for. So, yeah, thanks for the demo. Appreciate it, man.

Hamish McKay: No worries. Yeah, but those are the types of conversations that you need to have. Like whenever I speak to someone and they're asking about the ROI of this type of thing, there's really three points to work through. One is how many tickets do you receive relating to address changes? I forgot my discount code. Can I cancel my order? Can I change product, switch size, all of those types of things, and multiply whatever that number is by. By two or $3, because that's the average cost per ticket for every single e commerce brand, regardless of what you sell. And then, cost savings aside, consider how many orders do you ship out per month? If you do 10,000, then we know that you'll probably have at least 100 upsells through our app because 1% of all customers will buy more products. Multiply that by the average value of your items and you can get a pretty good forecast of what types of revenue this would generate for you.

Wiehan Britz: That's great.

Hamish McKay: And then the last really interesting piece, and you spoke to it earlier of brands that wanted to ship out orders really quickly. You don't want to do delays. Almost half the clients that we work with now went from this process of acknowledging that they sometimes ship orders to the wrong address or with the wrong products and end up doing a return or refunding them because the help desk can't work through the tickets before they ship it out. And I literally, before I meet with a brand, I'll order something, I'll email them and say, hey, can I cancel my order? Or hey, can I change my address? And I'll see if they reply before. I'll see before. If they reply before it ships out. 20, 30% of the time they don't get back to me and my order goes to the wrong address. But it's mine.

Wiehan Britz: Super interesting. And I've seen that within shopify, like, returns, refunds. Of course, there's many reasons why there's a refund or return, but my goodness. We used to serve as one brand. They had probably at least three to products that gets returned to them. And exactly like you say, if we can reduce 20% of that, that is big money, especially if they handling the shipping costs and they don't, you know, put that shipping expenditure on the consumer sending it back. I mean, that's loads of money and. Very cool, man.

Wiehan  Britz: Very cool. And tell me, is it only Shopify native for now. Do you guys support other platforms?

Hamish McKay: Yeah. So it's just Shopify and likely will be for at least the next three or four months. We'll see if it makes sense to build for other platforms at that stage. But I mean, where this all started out from was like two years ago we were running a Shopify store for MRBeast and a bunch more of the world's biggest youtubers where we'd have like one and a half million customers go onto our site within 48 hours to buy merchandise from them because there's a big following and I'd wake up to 1000 emails and that was on Shopify. So we solved it for Shopify and then after using the product ourselves, dog fooding it for a year, it was time to kind of go to market and we'd already built the infrastructure for it.

Wiehan Britz: Huge slice of the pie to grab so, you know, grab the pie of the shopify ecosystem and it's amazing, but. Okay, cool. I'm happy for you to, what we'll do is we can just attach a stitch, a live demo or demo recording to this piece and I'll basically edit this video. Do you quickly just want to wrap up? How can people are slotted into this little space between the two? Do you, how can people get in touch? Is there a demo that you guys offer? Can they reach out to you, connect to you via social media? How can people get to get in touch with you guys?

Hamish McKay: Yeah, if you want to get in touch with me, LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. Just search up Hamish Mackay on there and send me a DM. Otherwise my email is just hamishautoediting.com and feel free to get in touch with me there. Otherwise you can book a demo through our website. Again, orderediting.com dot.

Wiehan Britz: Love it. Easy enough. Do it, people. I think there's a great product. Yeah. And why would you not get involved in this? If we can save you money and make you money, that's the two levers we want to pull. But yeah, thanks for your time today. Appreciate it.

Wiehan Britz: And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing, seeing how you guys grow in the ecosystem. And amazing hats off to you for what you guys are busy accomplishing.

Hamish McKay: Appreciate it, Wiehan.

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