[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy.
[Voiceover]: Today's checkout features Aaron Cowper, founder and CEO of Shop Grok, a pricing and range analytics platform for retail and consumer brands. Aaron was formerly head of price strategy and analytics at Woolworths and while he was there he had the idea to develop an alternative to sending out humans to gather data on competitors pricing and then he set up Shop Grok in 2018. Shop Grok is now working with clients such as KFC, Supercheap Auto and Oryton.
Nathan Bush: Aaron, thank you for joining us on the checkout. We had a great conversation earlier around all things pricing strategy and how you're helping retailers at Shop Grok with understanding competitor pricing, providing those insights and even doing some automated pricing. So that was really interesting. But I'm here to learn more about you. So I've got five quick questions for you. Kicking off with number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Aaron Cowper: Probably the weirdest thing is, was my car. I bought a Tesla online without having driven one or seeing one in person. I've never been a car person really at all. I had a, I had quite a bad accident on a scooter a couple of years ago and my wife said that I would never get on a scooter again. So I had to buy a car and I'm a bit of a tech nerd so I was really interested in the car, in the Tesla itself, not necessarily the car, but yeah. So I bought the car and it took about a year to get there and driven it ever since and enjoying it.
Nathan Bush: Very similar experiences there. I mean this is a bit of a, bit of a wank fest really. I love the experience.
Aaron Cowper: I had to caveat that with I'm not a, I'm not a sports car person. I don't advocate for splurging on material things. But in this case I was just interested in, in the technology and love the car, not so much. Elon. I've kind of,
Nathan Bush: I went From a Hyundai i30 to a Tesla and I just love that process of that sales process where you're not haggling over anything. And from a pricing strategy, yeah, this is fascinating too where it's an industry where you don't know pricing. You haggle on pricing all the time and you don't know if you're getting a Good deal, bad deal. Because you buy a car once every what, five years or something, so you're not staying up to date with the market. Yeah. And then you go into the Tesla room and they go, so do you like it? I'm like, yeah, kind of like. And they're like, well look, where's your credit card? We'll put down thousand dollars deposit or whatever it was at the time. And you're like, oh, that's done. Like there's no talk of price.
Aaron Cowper: Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: Fascinating.
Aaron Cowper: Yeah. Crazy how well they've done without with very little marketing.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. All right. Who is your favorite retailer at the moment?
Aaron Cowper: I think my favorite retailer is probably Country Road, which is. So they're obviously a manufacturer as well, but their own retail stores. I'm kitted out well, I must say, must admit my wife and my mother in law and my mother probably buy most of my clothes but I'm kitted out by Country Road. They have a really good range of products, both men and women. Really good price point, affordable, but slightly higher than entry level and you know, really good promotional strategy and great stores. So I think they're a great retailer.
Nathan Bush: As the pricing guy, do you still get sucked in by their spend and saves?
Aaron Cowper: Definitely, yeah. Yeah, I'm definitely sucked in by their promotional emails. Like I don't subscribe to a lot of retailer idioms, but it's one of the few that my wife and I look at.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. All right, number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Aaron Cowper: I think that they're like 50% off or the mid season sale I think is it's really detrimental to most retailers. Like it brings all the sales into this period of really low margin and really impacts your 4 forecasting and your ability to kind of actually figure out how to sell throughout the whole year. So the more that retailers can get away from the heavy, heavy discounting periods and try to have a more balanced promotional strategy, the better.
Nathan Bush: Speaking of peak sales, we've just come out of peak sales. Do you think over the coming years it's going to get better or worse? Are we going to pull away from those peak sale periods or is it we're just going to double down?
Aaron Cowper: Yeah, I think it's seeming like it's getting bigger and bigger. Black Friday is probably the one case where it's not necessarily such a bad thing because it is pulling sales back from Christmas. So it's sort of, it is spreading out the sales a little bit between November and December. So in that case it is probably actually spreading things out. That would have happened all at Christmas and maybe that is a net gain for a lot of retailers. But it's funny, you won't really know what the wash up is because Black and Friday gets bigger and bigger every year, so you don't really know how much sales you pull back from Christmas before Christmas actually happens. So it's an interesting period.
Nathan Bush: Absolutely. All right, number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into? You mentioned a couple at the start of our main chat as well. I remember. Yeah.
Aaron Cowper: So Chaos Monkeys I mentioned at the start, which is where there's a company called Ad Grock, which Shop Gro is a bit of a tip of the hat to that company. So that's a good book. It's a bit of a insider's tale of Silicon Valley, if you're interested in startups and that kind of thing. I'm just reading an interesting book called the Psychology of Money by I think it's Morgan Hounsel is his name. Yeah, it's good read at the moment. Short read, but good lessons on how to manage money and how to avoid either working too hard to try to earn a lot of money and not be happy in life and also how to be smart about saving for the future, etc.
Nathan Bush: And that's on my to read list. But it's more of a personal money approach than a business one.
Aaron Cowper: Yeah, it definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's more of it. Yeah, more of a personal finance book.
Nathan Bush: Fantastic.
[Voiceover]: All right, last one I have for you.
Nathan Bush: Aaron, finish this sentence. The future of retail is I have
Aaron Cowper: to go with data driven because it's definitely my area. And I think it's true the way things are going with AI and data analytics, it's only going to get harder and harder to compete in retail unless you're very data driven. You know your customers well, can personalize things and you have some sort of point of difference in your product range and your pricing. And that can only really be achieved through having good data.
Nathan Bush: Perfect. Aaron, thanks for joining us on the checkout.
Aaron Cowper: Thanks, Nathan. Cheers.
[Voiceover]: To hear more from Aaron, jump back into episode 374 where Aaron shares his thoughts on dynamic pricing and gives his pricing tips for anyone looking to overhaul their pricing strategy in E commerce.
Nathan Bush: Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
