#169: Sales Boosting with Creator-Driven Commerce

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Claus Lauter: Hello and welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we wanna find out how you can boost your sales with greater driven commerce approaches. So there is more than one way to sell on Shopify. And more and more, solutions are coming up that you can also sell on other platforms through Shopify.

And we wanna find out a little bit more about that and how that works. Guests on the show today, Is Rishabh Jain, he's the co-founder and CEO of fermatcommerce.com. So we will discuss how to boost your sales. Roja has been a c e o and co-founder and the network of Powering distributed e-commerce solutions that come with that has was created to enable brands to deliver commerce experience native to every piece of content.

They deploy commerce distribution at the rate of content. Prior to that, he has built three businesses at Live Ramp. The. Online digital identity graph provider for the web. He has also a PhD from m MIT and Graduated SUM from UPenn. So let's welcome pja to the show. Hi, how are you today?

Rishabh Jain: Great. Thank you. And yeah, thanks for such a kind introduction.

Claus Lauter: Welcome. I'm glad to have you on the show. You have a bit of a different approach than other solutions on the market, on how to get merchants in front of their audience. Give me a bit of an overview on how you came up with the idea and how it works.

Rishabh Jain: I was at this company called Live Ramp. As you were mentioning, that is basically a. Online digital ID provider to make it simple. What that actually means is that we were helping brands find their consumers no matter what device type they were on. So you were on a cell phone, you were on your computer, and so it was really the backbone that allowed for tracking on the open.

Then Apple made its announcement in, 2020 saying, Hey, we're no longer gonna allow you to track consumers from one site to another. And that was the moment where I knew that we needed to build a different approach that allowed people to shop native to every content experience that they are experiencing.

The core idea behind the business is, let's say you're a consumer and you're interacting with a piece of content. From either a creator or from who's, working with a brand or from the brand itself. Then the question is, how do I actually make that content experience shoppable in a native way to that content and have it be one-to-one with that content, so that way as soon as the transaction is complete, I know that that consumer came from that piece of content, and I never need to.

So tracking is totally unnecessary in this new way of doing it. A lot of the folks who are listening are Shopify merchants. And so the way that they can think about it is, imagine if every piece of content was its own sales channel, but we made it super easy to make that scalable, If I were to say that to you out loud, you're just like, man, that sounds like way too much work, like making a sales channel for every piece of content. But actually that's exactly what we do. We make it trivial for you to make a sales channel for every piece of content.

Claus Lauter: Yeah, I think it's a very good idea.

Just to give our listeners an idea, so normally you create your content, , put your content marketing out there, and then from there it's another step, maybe two steps to get the customer to where they should go through the product detail page, and obviously going through the ad and check out.

Now all of this will be saved. People will directly be on the content. And shop there huge advantage there. I see that, but how does that work in practice, in real time or in the real world? How is the implementation

Rishabh Jain: there? There are two big advantages to the system that we have created.

One is exactly like you said, there are many places where you don't even need to have that additional click. So for example, a lot of the brands who we work with, Have publishers who they work with, where they create an article that describes the advantages of their product, let's just say, , five reasons why I love this beauty brand. And when you are doing an article of that variety, actually the consumer is using that article to shop, It is serving as a proxy for the shopping behavior. And so you want to make sure that the person can actually. See the product information, browse the product images and actually complete the transaction there because that is their store.

The article is their store. We actually see this pattern a lot and we can make that article directly shoppable, using our technology. Another example of something that we do and the implementation is, A Shopify app, just like, many of your other guests on this podcast it's very simple from the brand's point of view.

You just download a Shopify app and then, we make sure that it actually embeds directly in the content. It's a very simple process. The other way that we do this is like either with influencer content as we were talking about, or with that influencer content that is promoted through page social.

You use that content, you put a link in that content. When you click it, you continue to see the content that the brand is promoting, either native or influencer driven, and then it is directly shoppable inside of that content. So imagine seeing a video where underneath the video there is a browse experience of all the products that are relevant.

And then it pulls up product description pages overlaid on the video, and you can fill your cart as you're watching the video, that's an example of the type of thing that we do to make it feel immersive native, but still giving the consumer all the information they need to actually make the transaction decision.

Claus Lauter: So just for the listeners, don't, confuse that with the buy button that you can put manually in a blog post. That's not what we're talking about. We are really talking about a native integration in these different platforms. We shorten the customer journey massively there.

, you probably not losing people along the way than the other way around from the numbers. What kind of results do you.

Rishabh Jain: I always feel like whenever I share the numbers, people don't believe me, but I will share them anyway. My number one piece of advice for listeners is, try it for yourself.

You don't need to believe me. And the numbers will speak for themselves. On average, we are currently providing a lift to our customers north of 50% on their return, on ad spend. Whatever dollars they're putting behind, amplifying any content. It is a very dramatic shift in the actual conversion rate lift and the consequent return on Aspen lift.

It is working very well , and the reason it works very well is the way you described it, consumers, they get hooked onto your product when they see that content, And you've invested as a brand, you've invested a lot into building high quality content that hooks people, that engages people, that causes them to click.

If you have put that much effort into building such high engaging content, why not use it to get them to complete the transaction? Today, you have invested in that content and then you redirect them to your website and they have all of a sudden completely lost. Affiliation with that content. Right now they're on the standard product description page and they need to continue to do what they're doing, but they've actually lost that high intentionality of actually completing the purchase.

So we just wanna maintain that, but still make sure that 100% of what happens is owned by you and is powered by your Shopify backend and. Really the key thing that we do is we make sure that it is first party. We agree with Shopify that the brand should own the consumer, and we want to make sure that your consumer experience flows natively into your Shopify o m s, just like it would if you, it was your own website.

So nothing changes in terms of how you manage the interaction with your.

Claus Lauter: Okay. How do you pick the products that you wanna, push out there? Because obviously you're only creating content for certain products. Not every product might be a fit for content marketing. How does that work?

Rishabh Jain: There are , two ways I think about this. One is just what are your best sellers? And the second one is what actually hooks people when you are actually building out your content? So when I say what hooks people, usually it's , how do I use or advantages of video content. So if you're working with a creator or an influencer as one way of actually building highly native content to social platforms, what you want them to do is talk about what their experience has been using that product.

That's very engaging usually. And then whatever are the products that they are talking about, those are the products that you wanna merchandise into that store. and we usually see that working very well. In fact, I'll share one interesting, specific, highly tactical tidbit. The product that shows up in the content, even if it is not the first product that they see in the catalog, they will look for it and actually, Go to that product and purchase that product more than all the other products on the page, no matter where you place it.

So you could place it below the scroll and they will still find it and purchase that. the reason why I think this is so interesting, first of all, it's a very useful tactic for brands listening. Make sure you pick the products that you are putting into your content as the one that you want people to purchase.

But the second most interesting thing about it, It reminds you that actually the content is the thing that is causing the purchase behavior, so please leverage that throughout your purchase funnel.

Claus Lauter: No, makes total sense. Which kind of channels or different content platforms do you support with pharma

Rishabh Jain: commerce?

Right now we operate on any blog or written style content, so any. Publisher partners where you are actually owning the article experience. We can integrate with them. We integrate with meta platforms, so Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. So those are the primary three channels on which we operate today.

Claus Lauter: From the user experience, when they decide to buy and click the auto card button, what happens next?

Rishabh Jain: This is like the best part. It triggers your entire Shopify stack because it is like an order on your website, so you don't have to do anything different. I create the order. The first thing that happens is I get the order confirmation, just like as if I placed an order on your website, I immediately integrate into whatever your email system is for the ongoing email communication.

I immediately integrate into your SMS communication, whatever platform you end up using for that Everything is natively integrated because we have built such a deep integration with Shopify, you don't have to worry about it. You can continue to operate your business out of Shopify and everything will just work.

And so the consumer has like very clear understanding of exactly how they're interacting with you as

Claus Lauter: the. Okay. In front of consumer side of things, from the customer side of things, they go through a normal Shopify checkout or where do they go?

Rishabh Jain: trigger either the Shopify checkout or if they are using Apple Pay.

Then of course, they complete the checkout with Apple Pay, right? If they're using some sort of wallet. But basically if they actually hit checkout, it just triggers the actual Shopify checkout. This might be a little bit technical, but for, our technical listeners, when you have a sales channel integration, it actually does a direct backend call to the Shopify Checkout api.

even if the front end does not look like your standard checkout page, it is actually still calling the same backend stack as your coordinator. Shopify checkout, it is still the Shopify checkout, all of the sort of core functionality of the Shopify checkout is still being. Taken advantage of, even if you don't actually do the redirect to that page.

And so that's one of the nice things about integrating as a sales channel, is that you get the fully native experience in an embedded fashion.

Claus Lauter: From your experience from at Commerce, is there a specific industries or vertical niche where it works very, very well?

Rishabh Jain: That's a great question.

So I would say that for us, the customers. we see the most value that we can add. Generally speaking, they're doing a few million dollars of GM v a year, at least they are spending on meta platforms or on TikTok as a way to drive customer acquisition. they're in three verticals. So we work very well with food and beverage, beauty and apparel and those three verticals, I would categorize them as like lifestyle brands where highly engaging content with people like you and I can be created and used as a way to drive intent for the purchase.

Claus Lauter: with the integration, you said it's a Shopify app that should be very straightforward. Is there any other kind of homework that the merchant has to do before they and get. I would say

Rishabh Jain: that the main thing is do you actually have a content strategy today? , we're not a service provider for that content strategy.

We're here to make your content as directly shoppable and as engaging as possible. But If you're a Shopify brand, the technical integration is easy. The real question is like, Hey, do you have a content strategy that we can plug into and turbocharge that for you? So those are the two things that I would say.

Claus Lauter: Okay. You touch briefly on, the topic of your own content. If you have your content strategy having your content on other platforms. How far can you put integration into that?

Rishabh Jain: The areas where we integrate is , some third party publishers where, , the brand actually is doing sponsored posts, like we can actually integrate into that third party publisher.

And then, the social platforms, wherever you're running ads, we can definitely integrate into that. We have tried to make it really easy to. Have the power to deploy the store experiences wherever they actually own that media. Even if it's living on a third party platform.

Claus Lauter: So with firmat com me, what's the pricing structure? What can I expect as a merchant to pay for it?

Rishabh Jain: The core element of our pricing is really like a very small percentage of the GMV that flows through our pipes. the way we think about our pricing is we will only take a percentage of the G M V if we are providing you that lift that we were talking about earlier on your sales.

So let's just say today your return on ad spend is a hundred dollars. You work with. And it's 150, we give you that standard 50% lift, then, we are gonna take roughly 5% of that. But , you are ROI positive on the first interaction with us, we only want to win when you win.

our pricing will roughly follow that for most of our customer.

Claus Lauter: In regards of features, one question comes to mind. Content marketing sometimes is a bit difficult to measure the results. people buying directly on the content there might be a way to do so. Do we have any kind of reporting tool where I can find out where the Ches came from?

Rishabh Jain: this is again, one of the benefits of being a Shopify app. I have to admit, as much as I like to talk about firm, I have to admit that, Shopify has built really nice ecosystem to make it easy to do some of these things. , it's actually like very easy to see where a purchase came from.

Because every store you create is for each content. You can break out byproduct by content, by channel, whatever is the cut you want, you can easily tell exactly what drove that purchase. And then in your Shopify o m s, you can see all the purchases that are coming through the firm at sales channel.

So Shopify on their backend has a sales channel tag and you can just sort through format and you can easily tell here's how much is coming directly from my content strategies overall. And so there's no ambiguity. You don't need to worry about like, Hey, is this pixel recording? It's very obvious that the person made the transaction there.

Claus Lauter: I really like the idea to bring the product to the customer and not the customer to the store. So I think that's the huge advantage that you have there. , cuz otherwise you are in the normal conversion rate optimization and getting them to the store and whatsoever, which we know works. Why not bringing the product to the customer?

, how does , the onboarding.

Rishabh Jain: The technical onboarding is just downloading the Shopify app and then connecting us to your paid media platform. , Facebook or TikTok, whatever you're running your paid media on. And then the most important part of onboarding for us is, We will spend time with your team understanding your current media and content strategy, and making sure that we are actually building the content native stores in the right way to get the most leverage.

So usually that is like a couple of meetings, and then you launch within two weeks, and then you will see value within two weeks after launch. So you'll start to see the lift on your campaigns. Let's just say as a brand, you meet us today. By the end of a four week period, you will already see that r o ROI impact on your campaigns.

Claus Lauter: With the numbers that you shared earlier, should be a huge, problem to create profit on that side. So I think, that speaks for itself. Cool. Where can people find out more about you?

Rishabh Jain: The easiest way is just our website, firm commerce.com, and

I'm very accessible on LinkedIn and on Twitter. It's just my name, Risha MJ on both LinkedIn and Twitter.

Claus Lauter: I will put in some show notes and you just won't click away. Risa, thanks so much for giving us an overview. It's a very good angle, as said, , I would like to see a lot of merchants trying it out and come back and, report the results.

Thanks so much.

Rishabh Jain: thank you for having me. a good day. Bye.