The small business advantage lies in 1-to-1 conversations
We believe your store's competitive advantage lies in the personal connections you build with your customers. This relationship drives repeat orders and word-of-mouth marketing, which will lead to your ultimate success.
Our small business economy deserves one-on-one conversations between merchants and buyers. It’s the way business was done thousands of years ago, and we believe it will continue to be the way for business in the future.
Our Story
The start
We started our journey as online store owners ourselves. In 2015 we started selling products online using Shopify as first-time ecommerce entrepreneurs. As with any first-time business owners we were learning on the fly, and soon encountered our first major bottleneck in our revenue. The abandoned carts.
We tried re-targeting campaigns, auto-emails, and exit popups, and at best were only recovering 15% of our sales. While the "experts" in the industry were saying those numbers were good, it just didn't seem good to us. After all, if someone filled in their full personal and contact information, wouldn't they have serious intention to purchase? How then can recovering just 15% be considered good?
Learn - unlearn - learn
Eventually we took a page out of "The Lean Startup" and decided to simply call up our abandoned customers and get the feedback straight from the source. By asking "what caused you to abandoned your checkout?" we learned way more (way faster) about our business than we could have within our own four walls. The best part was, having the two-way conversation built trust and eventually led to us recovering more sales - 55% to be exact, far out performing any other recovery campaign we had ever run.
Fast forward 12 months and what we saw opened our eyes much wider. Eight out of our top 10 customers were originally abandoned checkouts that we had called, earning trust, and subsequently their business. It was with this data we realized that our focus on the one-on-one conversations was driving our business forward.
The breakthrough - bridging the gap
Unfortunately every marketing or sales app we found in the Shopify app store was dedicated to some form of automation. Not only this, but there was little content or education in the ecommerce ecosystem about the value of the one-to-one conversations. Every blog post we read about abandoned checkouts focused on email automations (or text automations). Growing your business became about how to spend ad dollars more effectively in order to acquire NEW customers. It was all about creating one-to-many "relationships", rather than one-to-one relationships.
This is why we took it upon ourselves to create Scout and Callback Request. Not only do small business owners like us deserve great quality tools, but our online shopping customers deserve the best experience from us as well. Our small business economy deserves one-on-one conversations between merchants and buyers. It's the way business was done thousands of years ago, and we believe it will continue to be the way for business in the future.
Our Core Values
Service
Our first value as an organization is Service. Service to our merchants, service to our team members, and service to the entrepreneurial community.
Trust
Building trust is the core value of our app product offering. Each is designed to build trust between merchants and customers. We strongly believe that one-on-one conversations are the fastest way to build trust.
Competence
In order to Serve and earn Trust, we need to build competence in our area of expertise. This means staying on top of new trends, new techniques and new opportunities.
Here is what our merchants have to say
