In this episode, we talk to Hamish McKay, founder of OrderEditing, a Shopify app that lets customers modify their orders post-purchase without contacting support. After leading customer experience for an ecommerce group with $40 million in annual sales (including campaigns for creators like MrBeast), Hamish built a platform now serving 2k+ merchants processing millions in GMV. OrderEditing tackles the painstaking but critical challenges of order changes, cancellations, and upsells, helping brands reduce returns and boost revenue. Hamish shares his journey from identifying operational blind spots to building solutions that accelerate growth for sellers across all platforms. Read the full transcript below.
Episode 39 of The Seller’s Edge – Hamish and Jonathan talk about:
- [00:00] Introduction
- [01:05] Common Challenges with Orders
- [03:29] Inventory Strategy & Returns
- [09:04] Native Tools on Shopify
- [11:52] What Inspired Order Editing
- [14:18] Profitable Upselling Feature
- [20:34] Customer Experience Vs. Operational Efficiency
- [23:17] Automation Is Killing Loyalty
- [26:11] Trends In Product Categories
- [28:15] Trends In Seasonality
- [31:06] Seamless Integration of Order Editing
- [32:29] Overselling and Inventory Discrepancies
- [34:13] Upselling Opportunities
- [37:43] Upcoming Order Editing Features
- [40:40] Recap and Closing Remarks
Key Takeaways:
- Allow customer self-service edits for address changes, cancellations, and product swaps before fulfillment to cut returns and negative reviews.
- Quantify operational improvements as direct revenue gains when pitching tools internally or to clients. Skip vague efficiency claims.
- Audit workflows before peak events like Prime Day and Black Friday to prevent costly shipping errors and overselling during traffic spikes.
- Sync OMS/ERP systems in real-time across Amazon and DTC channels to eliminate inventory mismatches and overselling disasters.
- Offer post-purchase upsells during order processing to increase AOV with add-ons and bundles without additional acquisition costs.
Full Transcript of Episode:
HAMISH MCKAY: My career started in ecommerce. I worked for like a fashion brand that was doing a good $40 million a year. And what we suffered from most critically was that about 1 or 2% of everybody at checkout will make a mistake and they’ll reach out to customer service to make a change to it. They’ll be Shop Pay or Apple Pay and it’ll autofill their ex girlfriend’s house or their corporate office or something. And no one wants to text either of those people, outside of work hours. And that’s like fine. When you’re doing 5,000 orders a month or 6,000 orders a month and you don’t have, you can like edit it and Shopify and it updates in your warehouse and you’re all cool and cruisy. Where it started getting super painful for us was, you know, we were doing a 30,000 order drop in like seven days. And when one and a half percent of people make a mistake at checkout and you’ve got 30,000 orders going into the system at one time, it meant that people would reach out to change their address and by the time we got to their ticket, like their order had already shipped. And so it would just go to the wrong place and say, hey, you have to reach out to the carrier. We were in Australia, so hey, you have to reach out to Australia Post, to make a change to this address. I’m sorry we didn’t get to your request in time. That was a huge operational headache for us because that’s all of these customers having this poor experience. And it only gets worse and worse as you scale. It’s just like this infinitely more painful problem as your business succeeds and as we get more and more busy. And the inverse of that is like the way they solve it is you need to have this like, grace period between Shopify and the inventory system. And it creates all these other problems. It creates these other problems where you know, if you’ve got a grace period, suddenly your inventory numbers might be out of sync and Shopify is not up to date or whatever it might be. And I just generally think there are all of these consequences of growth, like needing to have an ERP or a, nice modern warehouse management software. And that makes the consequences of growth of more customers making mistakes or more people reaching out to you or more orders going through the system, just generally that makes it really hard to keep up.
JONATHAN: Yeah, for sure. It’s funny how many times I’ll be on Amazon, I’ll be looking at reviews or like Walmart anywhere. And with the fulfillment, customers will be so upset about some shipment not getting there on time and then Amazon has to intervene and be like, oh, this had nothing to do with the seller, this was our bad. And I think that that’s a really good example of how that sort of impacts the customer experience, especially the brand reputation. But I’m curious, what are some other things that you’ve seen as far as it affecting order accuracy, fulfillment speed and returns?
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah, I mean returns is a great example. We work with the fashion brand Opali. They do a couple hundred thousand orders a month or something. Ludicrous. They’re massive. And every month, this time last year or so, 2,000 people would reach out to them and say, hey Opali customer, service. Hey Alex, hey Lauren. Can you cancel my order or can you change my size? I auto selected the smallest variant and I don’t want that color anymore. I’m not actually a size four. And those 2,000 emails are sitting amongst another 20,000 emails, another 15,000 emails. And Opal, they’re trying to compete with Amazon, they’re trying to compete with other fast fashion brands that ship out orders within a few hours. How do you cancel an order before it ships? How do you reasonably do that when you’re a team of human beings that perhaps work 9 to 5, maybe you’ve got 24, 7 support, I don’t know. And the knock on effect for returns as a consequence of that for returns is huge. And that after they started self servicing cancellations and just letting people take actions without needing to send an email or contact a chatbot, their returns went from, you know, somewhere in the 30% of all orders would get returned back to the warehouse to being 16% less. Not from 30% down to 15, but the delta of, you know, 30 to 27, like the actual delta of that is 16 or 17% as a return reduction because 10% of your returns almost 100% of the time, because the customer couldn’t cancel their order or because they couldn’t change their size. There’s no way you could say that if you’re, if you’re a brand and you do process returns, particularly fashion is the obvious example that at least one in 10 customer returns could have been avoided if the customer could have swapped their product before it shipped or canceled their order before it shipped because they don’t want it anymore, that type of thing. And returns suck. Returns are the worst. I mean Amazon, Amazon’s a great example because Amazon has a feature to let you cancel your order after you place it for like 15 minutes. I think, I reckon if every single online storefront had that, we would have 10% less returns globally.
JONATHAN: I think everybody goes to Amazon because of the fulfillment aspect of it. I mean customers and brands. Like, I think that there’s a part where like I don’t want to really deal with this, but I’m curious just because it seems like brands, you know, you’ll think about the marketing, you’ll think about your brand messaging. It seems like operationally you’re not really considering like inventory management and the ordering process and like what that funnel looks like for a customer. And I’m curious if you have any thoughts as to why that might be. Like, do you think that sellers aren’t like they haven’t been battle tested and haven’t sold before so they’re not thinking about it? I’m curious where that sort of gap comes from.
HAMISH MCKAY: I mean it’s hard to say because I never got to sit in that seat of being in control of how this works. Like someone did it for me when I worked brand side. What my immediate assumption is when I hear that, and probably from some of the teams that I work with at brands, is that at some point someone has to do that job and there’s no training for that job, there’s no school that you can go to and it’s not necessarily super intuitive or easy. I feel like there’s not a lot of readily available information online perhaps to solve those types of challenges and ultimately what you’re relying on if you’re building a brand from Day dot, like I’m going to launch a store on Shopify or Amazon and I’m going to build a team around me as my store scales, I’ll go from doing everything to doing something. I’m probably not going to focus on the relatively less sexy stuff like inventory management. Perhaps maybe I outsource it or maybe I just don’t think about it and I ignore this like blind spot. And I think what probably happens is that these ecom brands, they grow and they hire relatively junior people into their teams or they hire they kind of shape people into new roles, they hire someone who’s in ecommerce and they go, hey, can you be an all rounder and, and handle the inventory stuff too and everyone’s just learning on the fly. And perhaps my assumption is that like these more operational areas, maybe you don’t get as much love from a talent standpoint. Like if I’m entering the job market, I’d probably rather work on CRO, and revenue side of things than operational. And I think that’s probably, it’s maybe a broad assumption but I think generally it’s like more people want to work in sales and customer support. Right. When you think about tech and equally maybe it’s relatively harder to get the information to self train yourself to be quote unquote expert. Whereas if I’m an ecom manager and I go on Twitter, everyone’s telling me what I should be doing to optimize and a lot of the stuff you can actually see because it’s front of house. Like if I, if I check out from grooms who are growing really fast at the moment, I can see what they’re doing, I can see their ad library, I can see their checkout experience and I can effectively pilfer from them and go, I bet that works well for them. I’m going to use that too. You can’t really steal someone’s inventory and operational workflows. You’ve got no, you’ve got no idea what that looks like on the back end. I usually don’t know if they’re doing well or not.
JONATHAN: Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s just funny like the more and more I think about just like branding, I feel like it’s on the customer experience side. Cause I think about something like chewy or like, you know, companies that do like the fixing their operational problems on the customer experience side really well, I’m like oh, like that’s what a really strong brand feels like. Whereas other brands that seem to have really strong branding like you know, they’re operationally won’t be there and their customer experiences just not that good. But when it comes to the order fulfillment and inventory, I know that Shopify has some native tools that they offer, but I know that they’re not, you know, all that cracked up to what they should be. So I’m curious, like what are some of the, the gaps or, or shortcomings that you’ve noticed with those?
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah, I mean there’s no native or accurate inventory forecasting or like predictability as to how much stock we should order based on our sales volume. Like that is an active area where brands are outsourcing to a third party vendor like a predico to go, hey, can you analyze all of my sales and my current stock levels and tell me how much inventory I should be buying of these different types of SKUs so I can sell better and not sell out and lose out on money? There’s no native way to get best carrier rates or carrier calculated rates. So brands also use a third party vendor like for shipping software, Shipstation perhaps or something to get the best rates available for their labels and to give the best tracking and customer experience to their customers. Like if you just ship natively out of Shopify and print your own labels, you’ll be paying twice as much as you should be at the scale that maybe you’re at. And I guess all of these little touch points are quite similar. Like your order management system, if you use Shopify as your order management system, are genuinely concerned for you unless you’re like a small store. But you know, they haven’t, they haven’t built to optimize that. And I think they actually recently acquired a company in that space to make it more in house, which is ultimately where that platform is going. Right? Kind of similar to what we were just talking about. Shopify massively optimized. I mean their backend is fantastic as well. I don’t, I don’t mean to say this disparagingly, but they massively optimized for conversion. They actively sold on the fact that this is the highest converting checkout in the world and the sites are faster and it’s very easy to set up and use and operationally it’s nice, but it’s not built to be in competition with netsuite. It’s not a financial book of record or anything like that. But perhaps over time it’ll become that. And maybe they built the most important things first or the tickets to grow first. We know that their vision for the business is make commerce better for everyone. And if you’re trying to make commerce better for everyone, the first thing you’re going to build is not going to be inventory management software or you know, any RP like that’s just not as vital to the entire broad scope of entrepreneurs who are starting stores from the mom and pops to your, billion dollar brands. And I don’t know what billion dollar brands need or they don’t have from the platform today, but there are certainly things and I’d wager a bet that that’s what they’re building for right now. And maybe that is more of those tools that currently vendors are being pulled in for. They’re probably building those in house.
JONATHAN: It’s funny because I think the running trend is like people avoiding the unsexy things and yet you decided to concentrate on the unsexy things. So I’m curious what made you want to concentrate on that piece of the business.
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah, I mean, I had a burning need, right? So that story I was telling, I was working for this massive conglomerate of fashion brands, and we were doing merchandise for Mr. Beast is like the best example. So I was a customer experience manager, managing, the experience of, Mr. Beast merchandising store. So hundreds of thousands of his fans would buy from us every year. And whenever they had a bad experience with my support team, they would literally post on Twitter and name and shame us that go, oh, relle can’t edit my address. Screw Mr. Beast. He hates his fans. And it’s a really, like, that’s a bad look. If you’re running your own brand, you know, that’s bad word of mouth. But if you’re protecting an external person’s fan base and you’re disrespecting them, then you’re not good. Like, that is not okay. And part of that was like, it’s just a consequence of ecommerce operations. It’s hard. Maybe that customer reached out six, six hours after they bought. Like, what can we do? Come on. But, it was such a, gnarly problem for us. We’d get 2,000 emails every single month. And I selfishly just built it for myself. I built a tool that would let a customer make a. Change their address or add a product or change their size without contacting us. And I just wanted to get rid of 2000 emails every month. I don’t want to do these anymore. This is stupid. It’s. It’s actually nefarious that, people have to contact us and we have to do it for them. Like, this doesn’t make any sense. It’s silly. Like, what are, we little kids, you know, communicating through walkie talkies or something? And so we built this tool and we used it for a year, and 36,000 customers used it. And I had never. I was, I was 21, right? I was a kid. I still have a kid, but I was 21 and I wasn’t thinking about starting a business. But as soon as I saw that 36, 000 people use this in a year, I actually had this realization where I thought, oh, this could be really valuable. Like, maybe we’re not the only ones that have this problem. And, suddenly I became an entrepreneur, you know, but no, we, we took it out to the market. And the funny thing about it being unsexy. So, like, we solved the unsexy problem. Because I was in cx, I geeked out on it. I wanted to build something great and wanted to get rid of this pain point. And the funny thing is we took this really unsexy product to market and we marketed it in a really unsexy way. So I went out to market and said, let your customers edit their order self service, like wipe out 20% of your support tickets, save time and operational efficiency, reduce your returns. And it was crickets. Like no one gave a shit about eliminating support tickets. And it was so upsetting to me because I cared so much about this problem. I cared so much about the unsexy. And I was like, why don’t people understand? Why don’t, why don’t you get this? Why you buying our software? And then I distinctly remember it was maybe four months after we launched on the Shopify app store, we had not made a single dollar of revenue, had signed like some tiny shops. We weren’t charging them anything, beta testers. And one day my co founder built a feature and that feature was to send an email to a customer after, they buy and go, hey Jonathan, there’s space in your package for this product. If you add it in the next 30 minutes, I’ll give you 10% off. So we started upselling in this post purchase experience through the OrderEditing app. And the moment we launched that, I posted on LinkedIn and I said, look at this cool flow that we’re doing. We’re sending customers an email, we’re letting them know there’s space in their package, we’re giving them incentive and they’re filling their boxes and immediately we signed our first three customers and suddenly we had monthly recurring revenue and I was able to quit my job. I was like, oh my God, I have an actual business now. But as soon as we changed the positioning, it changed. And ever since that day, whenever I talk about operational efficiency, saving time and money, no one cares. Still. Okay, it hasn’t changed. But every time I talk about making brands more money, the floodgates open and people book demos. It’s hilarious. It still upsets me to this day.
JONATHAN: I love that. I mean that’s just like goes to show that no matter what you’re doing, whether you’re offering a service, a product, whatever, it’s like, you know, if you can solve the problem that many people have, like, that’s the, that’s the place to start. Your company offers a post purchase self service portal for Shopify merchants. I’m just curious, like could you share more about like, other than like the email? Like how does that fit into the broader, you know, order Management systems and challenges that people have.
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah, so we’re, we’re two things, right? We’re a user, interface for the customer to interact with, where they click these buttons and they update their address or they apply the discount code they forgot or they update their gift message. Full empowerment to fix mistakes that you make at checkout or keep shopping. And then we’re a integration with your backend ops stack. So we’re making sure that when the customer updates their order, it also updates in NetSuite or SAP or, any of these other systems that are managing the operational workflow. The problems that we solve critically is like the time that customer service spend editing orders. And that’s not just time sending an email. Like, it’s actually an operational complication. Because if you’re a $300 million brand and you have an ERP and for customer service to edit an order, they have to do it in Shopify and the ERP, do you want your agent that’s outsourced in the Philippines logging into netsuite? Like, is that, is that ideal for you? Is that, is that like the dream come true? And so often what happens is you have these like team managers that are local and they get all of the editing tickets. And these are your most expensive employees because they’re local and they’re senior and they have team leads and they spend their day going in a NetSuite and changing sales agreements to make sure that this customer gets the right package to the right place. And it’s just like, bonkers. It’s just like, what a waste of time. So that’s know, complexity number one. Complexity number two is if you don’t solve that customer’s problem, just the consequence of that, if a customer places an order and they forget their apartment number and the order ships before you fix it for them, before they contact you, it’s just going to get returned to your warehouse. You just wasted four days of the customer’s time. You know, the two days to send the two days to get it back. You burnt, their experience. Even though it’s their fault, they’re not going to see it that way. And it costs money. That costs money every single time. And a return to senders. The least of it, the worst of it is you buy an $800, you buy a $5,000 sofa, you reach out and say, hey, I actually need to cancel this order. I can’t afford it anymore. The sofa company goes, sorry, bud, it’s a net suite, I can’t edit it. We process our orders really fast. They obviously wouldn’t send it in email, but that’s what they’re thinking internally. Man, this order’s in our ERP. Like, no, like, what am I going to do? And then you send a $5,000 sofa, only for it to get sent back to you, and you’re just like printing the trucking company money. And they’re, they’re blessing their lucky stars that, customers don’t have self service yet, because if they did, then, you know, to be dramatically less packages going back and forth and things like that. Not that trucking companies enjoy that, but, you know, I’m just imagining a little back of office conversations that happen. It’s like we’ve talked to returns portals before and you know, they know that brands that use our software get less returns because things happen before it ships and they don’t need to come back anymore. And I sometimes imagine these returns portals in the boardroom going, man, what are we going to do about this auto editing software? Like, relatively less package. It’s kind of our whole business.
JONATHAN: t’s funny because you keep saying that you’ve solved like one problem, but I keep clocking that you’ve probably at least solved two problems, maybe three at the bare minimum. Because one of the experiences I have with orders, like I’ll order something not a $5,000 couch. Usually I’ll, I’ll be more like cognizant about doing that. But, you know, I’ll order whatever it is and then I’ll figure out, oh, I don’t want this. I want this other one, whatever it is. And then I go to cancel that one, change it. I can’t. And so now I have this initial order that I have to worry about, and then I get this other, other order, and they’re usually simultaneously side by side in my email. And so when I go to deal with like the, the order number, like, I’m not sure which order number is which. So like, I start talking to the customer service agent about the first one when it’s really the second one I want to be talking about, and then that leads to a branding problem. So I feel like there’s all of these, you know, consequences of that, and we don’t really think about it because it’s where the rubber meets the road and it is the unsexy stuff. But I’m just curious, like, I mean, as far as, like the, the benefits, I mean, other than that, like, how do you sort of, I don’t know, balance this, this? It’s like a Seesaw between enabling a customer to be able to do what they need to do, but also, like, give a brand or a seller, like, the power to do what they still need to do and not completely, you know, give away the store.
HAMISH MCKAY: We just give optionality, right? I mean, the biggest question where this comes up is if we let customers cancel their orders without contacting us, what about buyer’s remorse and people doing that more freely because it’s more easy to. And they start losing the conversions and we just say to them, turn it off. Like, don’t, don’t let them do that. You know, restrict that specific functionality if you’re worried about that. And we have a bunch of brands that do that. You know, they have. They set up a no refunds policy in our app, and that’s completely fine. And as they scale and grow bigger and probably become more necessary, because that’s when cancellation numbers get painful and you’re just like, I just don’t want to do this manually anymore or risk it. But, from their standpoint, I mean, they just adore it. Like, they don’t. As a person who worked in customer service, there are certain types of emails that you look forward to, and there are certain types of emails that you hate or certain bits of work that you hate doing. And it’s very similar to a salesperson’s day or a marketer’s day or whatever it is. And it’s like your admin and then your actual meaningful work. And in customer service, it looks like this. Your admin is editing orders. No one thanks you. No one’s grateful. No one’s appreciative when you change their address for them. It’s an expectation you met, an expectation you can’t go above and beyond. You can just click a few buttons and say, hey, I did this for you. And they won’t even reply to the email. They won’t say thank you. No hard emojis, no smiley faces. And that’s what we live off, man. Like, that’s my. That’s my fuel. The fun tickets are things like returns or, you know, damaged products or things we can actually deliver, like a surprise and delight experience because you went above and beyond to keep them within your brand. Weirdly enough, like, the most gnarly tickets, the biggest, I guess risks of losing your LTV on that person, your new end consumer, are the most fun tickets to work on because that’s where you actually make a difference. But if you reach out working customer service, and Danny writes me, cancel my order, please, and I Send him a cancel notification. Like, that’s literally the interaction. And I never hear from Danny again. He doesn’t post on Twitter about me. There’s no Reddit threads. There’s no five stars, on the Better Business Bureau or Trust Pilot. And so I guess from their perspective, they’re always looking to empower. And then sometimes, sometimes management will come in and they say, I don’t want to enable, like, all of these features. I don’t want to let people do certain things because of the potential risks associated with that, like losing revenue on a cancellation, for example.
JONATHAN: The more we keep talking about this, the more I realize just, like, additional problems that you’re solving. Because I think that customer experience has become largely automated these days with chatbots and stuff. And, like, the amount of times that, like, I want to change my order. So now I need to figure out how to get in touch with customer service. And so no one publishes phone numbers. So now that I’m dealing with a chatbot that doesn’t want to do. It wants to do anything but answer the question that I have. So now I’m going through, like, the fury of being just frustrated by this chatbot, and then I have to break the chat bot and eventually I’ll get to an agent, and then by that time I’m just, like, so infuriated that there’s really nothing the agent can do to salvage it. So I think the more and more, the time goes on and how we’re automating this thing, automating the customer experience, the more and more something like OrderEditing is needed.
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah. And it’s just like, it’s not a famous quote, but I’ll say it’s a famous quote, which is, why are we building AI chatbots to solve things that we could just do ourselves? Like, don’t build a chatbot to edit my address for me after I write you an email. Just let me edit my address myself. It’s just not. It’s nonsensical. And that’s the position that we take. We’ve had brands reach out and they go, oh, you’re thinking about building an AI chatbot software to do the OrderEditing? And I go, why would we? No one emails anymore. They just do it themselves. No one’s going to use this. Maybe five Karens are going to use it every single month. I don’t know. Because they don’t like touching things or they don’t know how to use it. But the majority, the majority of your customers are not on that demographic. They’re quite happy just like playing around with settings on their phone to go. I want to change these things.
JONATHAN: I hear more and more just like people walking away from brands that they’ve been loyal to for years. And I’ve done this myself. Like I don’t, like you’re gonna. As soon as you sabotage your reputation with me with like a terrible customer experience, I never want to talk to you again. Like I will go work with a small mom and pop where I can actually talk to a human being rather than work with some conglomerate that has built my loyalty over the years. But now they’re too big for their britches.
HAMISH MCKAY: So there’s nothing worse than someone abundantly wealthier than you not giving you the refund or treatment that you deserve. I remember I bought, I bought some jewelry and it never showed up to my house and my like my address was correct. Like most packages come but it just got lost in transit and they were like, sorry, there’s nothing we can do about that. It’s the carrier’s fault. And like you’re a 500 million dollar year business and I spent a hundred dollars at your store and you can’t give me like a hundred dollar store credit. What is wrong with you? You’re so rich. And obviously it’s not the agent’s fault. It’s their status of their SOPs. And I get, maybe it blows out at scale, but it’s a rarely I’ve never bought from again. I never will. I’ll go somewhere else.
JONATHAN: Yeah. And I mean I think it’s just going to keep being proliferated and then the new chatbot, it’s amazing that like people have like have cutting edge technology and yet the chatbots are stupider than they used to be. So I don’t know, I’m curious when it comes to something when like a product category or specific product or a type of brand, is there one that you think like benefits, more from OrderEditing than others.
HAMISH MCKAY: We love fashion. We love, love, love fashion. Fashion have the highest pressure to ship fast and the like a lot of the mistakes on fashion will relate to things that would cause a return like buying the wrong size or color or wanting to change products. And so that’s where we have the biggest environmental impact or just like those knock on consequences. You know, if we work with a, if we work with a, I don’t know, a kid store or a toy store and they take a couple of days to ship their orders, the problem that we solve is time, time spent manually editing and Customer experience. We work with a fashion store that gets orders two hours after they’re placed. We’re solving time, we’re solving returns, we’re solving, like, a really bad experience when that goes poorly. And we’re literally changing the game for them. If you look up Princess Polly, edit my order, Alo Yoga, edit my order, skims, edit my order. Their FAQs will save Sari. Due to our warehouse processing times, we can’t make changes to orders after they’re placed. Like, all purchases are final. Return them to our warehouse if you wanted to cancel. And my life’s mission, my life’s mission is to flip those FAQs into. You have 15 minutes of grace to make a change to your auto post purchase. That’s, like, all I do. I look up, I go, I look up stores, I go, what’s your faq? And then I screenshot it and I send it to them and go, hey, your FAQ could look like this. And I show them, you know, I don’t know Hexclad’s faq. And it says if you go to your order confirmation email, you’ll have 15 minutes to edit your address or add a product and things like that. So hopefully, you know, in, like, what is it, 2025 by 2020, by 2030, no one on the whole world, will have that FAQ policy. Everyone will say, 15 minutes of grace, 30 minutes of grace, and my job will be done. I can officially retire, perhaps pass away.
JONATHAN: I love this. You’re like Don Quixote. But, like, I hope you don’t pass. And I feel like we need you around to solve other problems.
HAMISH MCKAY: Me too.
JONATHAN: I’m also curious. I mean, that was from, like, a brand and category perspective. How about seasonality? Because I was trying to think about this when it comes to Q4, because I imagine, you know, Q4 when people are coming to order, like, modify orders for when buying presents. I know that I’m one of the guiltiest perpetrators of this, that, you know, I want to add something or change something. And I’m just curious if you’ve. If that trend carries through or if I’m the only person doing that.
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah, we just, we just had, like, three brands reach out after Father’s Day, Mother’s Day. I’m not in the US So I don’t know when you celebrate your days, but one of those days was recently. And these brands said, oh, you know how shop. Like, on the demo, they’re like, oh, you know how shop pay will auto fill the Last address that you purchase from? Well, we had all of these customers buy gifts for their father or mother and they send it to themselves. Like they send it straight back to themselves. And it was meant to be a gift. It was because of Shop Pay or Apple Pay, which is super common on Shopify, you just autofill your old address. And so we do get a little bit of seasonality. Christmas time, people are buying presents and they’re not sending them to the correct house or Valentine’s Day, things like that. I mean, you’d hate to buy chocolates from Dandelion Chocolate on Valentine’s Day and send them to your ex apart rather than your new girlfriend because you know you’re switching partners quickly and that was the last address you use. I don’t know. Like, that would just be a nightmare. And so we’re actively trying to help brands with those challenging communication situations. The other time is Black Friday, right? Any, any peak sales period, you just go nuts because you have hundreds of thousands of customers, maybe millions of customers stream to the site during that week. And some of them will convert, and they’ll convert in a very rushed manner because they’re worried that things will sell out. Like, sellout culture is, a real problem for OrderEditing. And then they all email the customer service team and they get really frustrated when you don’t reply immediately because they’re so anxious that their discounted item that they’ve been waiting to purchase until it went on sale is gonna not be correct or it’s gonna go to the wrong house. They’re like, man, I spent a month saving up for this dress. Another two weeks waiting for the Black Friday sale to start. I was on the site at 12pm when the sale opened so that I could make sure that I buy it. It’s going to my dad’s house and he lives in Milwaukee, you know, like now I’m going to have to ask him to ship it to me and I won’t be able to wear it for the formal this weekend. Like, that’s, that’s the problem that we solve, right?
JONATHAN: Yeah, I love that. I recently had an experience because I house sat and I had groceries delivered while I was house sitting. And then I went home and like a few weeks later I was doing grocery delivery and it was, it went back to the previous, like the last address that it was being shipped to. So my groceries went to somebody else, which was a whole other ordeal. So I really feel like you’re just working miracles here. From a technical standpoint how easily does OrderEditing integrate with Shopify or third party vendors as far as like, not to disrupt, you know, fulfillment and any of that?
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah, I mean, we’re like an app on your phone. Right, but an app on your phone that maybe gets a little bit more complicated once you install it. So you just install it on the app store and then suddenly it’s fully integrated with your Shopify store. And then, yeah, you have these external layers behind it. We just need a grace period. Like we’re that UI and we’re a grace period between Shopify and all of your other softwares. And we can either do that for you. We have a bunch of these integrations out of the box where you just put on a workflow and then NetSuite won’t know your order exists until the order ending period’s finished. And that’s like the best way that the software works. We’re still doing that on calls at the moment. We’re usually like onboarding the client and walking them through it because it is an operational change. You know, it’d be pretty rare for, an ecommerce manager to install our app, set it up and then go, I’m, going to put a 30 minute delay between Shopify and Netsuite without talking to anybody at this app. And so we usually do like, they reach out, they go, hey, you know, how does this integration work? Is it all going to be okay? What are the knock on effects that I need to think about? And we say hello in our lovely Kiwi accents and guide them to a sweet, sweet launch. But yeah, it’s like 30 minutes to get it live. If you meet with us, which is what typically happens, that’s great.
JONATHAN: And then I know a lot of sellers worry about overselling or inventory discrepancies. Is there anything that you guys do address that?
HAMISH MCKAY: That’s the number one knock on effect. Right. Inventory numbers getting out of sync. Netsuite’s coming over saying this is the correct inventory, but they don’t have the last 15 minutes of sales. So they’re wrong. We do. I mean, you do. You can have a shorter editing period. Right. If you have relatively large numbers of stock, 15 minute delay isn’t going to be decremental. And that’s where 95% of brands fit in the 5% of brands that do present a risk of oversell. We have inventory risk assessments. And so we’ll say, look, if any order gets created and it has one of the products on that order has less than 15 available units of inventory, then we’re not going to delay it. It can’t edit like, that has to go straight to the warehouse because we might sell a unit a minute for the next 15 minutes and then it would oversell. So we have those assessments and then actions you can take based on available inventory in our app. And then the other way that customers do it, which is probably most common during like a Black Friday, is you just don’t do your stock syncs. So if you use Shopify, like, you do a sync before the sale goes live and Shopify has correct data and then you run those numbers for the day, you don’t override it with any information from a third party. Use Shopify as your source of truth.
JONATHAN: Yeah.
HAMISH MCKAY: And then at like 2am you do a sync and get it back to perfection in case there are, discrepancies in Shopify. And then you do the same thing again. And that’s just automated system. And that works really well because Shopify inventory is pretty good. But you do need to feed those orders down. You do need to just like cross check everything because maybe something got damaged or an item got returned or whatever it might be. And you want to get that back up to date.
JONATHAN: Yeah, that’s great. Beyond editing orders, like, I know you mentioned, presenting opportunities to upsell before. Like, are there other additional kind of things that you want to call out there?
HAMISH MCKAY: Jonathan wants to get sexy with me. We do, we do a few things. So we, we actually just released a whole bunch of new features. We now do upsells and checkout. So if you go to like, you should do this after call. If you go to Data Protein and you buy one carton of peanut butter protein bars, you won’t have free shipping yet. And you’ll see there’ll be a cost of shipping box. And we’ll say $10 for shipping. We’re loading in a product upsell into that cost of shipping box. And we’ll go right underneath the $10, it’ll say, do you want to add another carton of peanut butter chocolate cookie dough for $39? And we’ll give you free shipping. And the bottom says, yes, I want free shipping. You click it, you get free shipping. And that’s converting like nuts, like they’re making an extra like one or $2,000 a day, through that upsell and checkout, just getting people up to their free shipping threshold. So we’re doing checkout upsells. It’s like the start of our buying experience. Purchase Converts. And then the first thing they see on the confirmation page are like those post purchase offers and all of the editing options. So we’ll have these big beautiful upsell cards. It’ll know, you know, if you bought a red dress, I’m going to recommend you the red scarf. Or like gloves to go with it. And it’s only $25 because we know that lower price items are going to upsell better. So we have that recommendation logic and we just continue selling. And then there’s all the editing too. I still think the coolest thing that we do, the most unique thing that we do on the sexy side, is that email. And one brand absolutely crushes it. And there’s a YouTube video on my YouTube channel that shows like their case study. They make 30 grand a month doing this. After, you buy from form, they send you an email. And the email like literally says, hey, Hamish, there’s a fire sale on our website. If you go back in the next 15 minutes, you get 15% off site wide to add to your existing order. And so you go back to the website, you keep shopping, and it just adds it to the order that you just placed and you just start bulking out your existing purchase. Like direct email. Direct email marketing, post purchase. It kind of feels like a transactional email. So they’re very high open rates and they’re getting like a 2% take rate on that email. So 2% of people who receive the email are buying more items, which is pretty crazy conversion considering they’ve already spent $100-200 at your store. And they’re adding more, obviously.
JONATHAN: That sounds really sexy. I love that it does. The personalized, if somebody orders like the red dress, you offer them the red scarf. I like that a lot. I mean, for any, listeners who want to get in touch with you to get on board with OrderEditing, what’s the best way to reach out to you or your team?
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah, so you can book a direct demo through our website, orderediting.com. we got the dot com. We’re good like that. Or you can go direct to my LinkedIn if you want to have a chat. Personally, I still like meet almost every single one of our clients. We’re running a very lean bootstrapped operation here, and my LinkedIn is just Hamish Makai McKay. And you’re absolutely sure? I mean, we’ve got about, we work with about $5 billion worth of Shopify’s gross merchandising value. We have about 30, 30 brands that do more than $100 million a year. Like it’s a bloody great business. And yeah, the problems we solve are unsexy. The money we make you is very sexy and together it’s all quite sexy.
JONATHAN: Nice. As far as the future and the roadmap, are there any sort of features or things coming up that you want to talk about?
HAMISH MCKAY: Yeah, so we do checkout, upsells, address validation, OrderEditing and post purchase upsells we are looking to get into. And it’s funny because I disregarded this earlier, but our customers want it. A voice agent or helpline support for OrderEditing. There’s also a bunch of, there are a bunch of chatbots out there that are doing OrderEditing self service and we need to build a way for them to call our API. Because we’re a master of knowledge. We’re a brainchild on if you add this product to an order, does the customer then get a gift with purchase and things like that? We understand how the store works, but honestly we’re, because of what we’ve learned, we’re so dead focused on just making brands more money at this point. Like we’ve done a phenomenal job of solving the OrderEditing issue. And there are a whole bunch of companies in the post purchase space and their strategy, their tech strategy and their roadmap is I’m gonna build everything so the brand gets one vendor. I’m gonna consolidate all of this tech into a little cozy family and you can save on subscription costs. And the reason why I think that’s a really ugly and lame strategy is like 20 people are doing it and it completely disregards the advice of doing things and doing them extremely well. And I think what’s actually more compelling is that you guys can all build an auto editing software and returns and a fraud and a tracking and an email software all in one platform. But your OrderEditing software is going to make a brand a thousand dollars a month and we’re going to make them a hundred thousand. And no one’s going to use your auditing tech because we just make brands so much money. So we’re thinking a lot about how we can make the upsell service better, how we can create better merchandising strategies, how we can extend this experience even to the, to the website. Because imagine Amos is shopping and I’m looking at a product page and it’s like the product pages below it saying this goes with this. And what if you know that I clicked on that product page and didn’t buy it? So I’ve already looked at another product and said, I don’t want that. There’s probably no point showing that product to me ever again. Like, I’ve effectively rejected an offer. And so if we have data on the customer’s, you know, buying strategy, what they look at, what they don’t want to buy, what they haven’t added to their cart, we can get really intelligent about what products we recommend and effectively not repeat offers, which is, like, a huge burden on conversion rate, because there’s no point saying the same shit twice. Like, sell me something new at every step of the way. So we just need to own more surface area and be a little bit smarter.
JONATHAN: I love that. Hamish, this has been amazing. I really loved learning more about OrderEditing. You’re really, funny and charismatic, so I appreciate. I always worry about, guests, you know, like, not making. Taking an unsexy thing and not making it sexy. But you. You have definitely found a way to. To take the unsexy and make it sexy, and that I truly appreciate. So thank you for doing that.
HAMISH MCKAY: Why, thank you. I’m flattered. I’m flattered. Thanks for having me on. It’s been a lot of fun.
