[Ad]: Are you sick of those fly by night fast talking performance agencies that are all talk and no action? They're promising roas you could only dream of and delivering nightmares. Look, I might be being dramatic, but I think we've all had that experience. Introducing add to Cart's performance advertising partner for 2024, Farsight. And that's Farsight with two eyes. F a R S I I G H T Farsight are in it for the long term with a genuine focus on relationships. I know, shocking right? And as the saying goes, you are the company you keep and Farsight work with some of the most genuine and high growth businesses in Australia. I'm talking Trademutt Black Milk Nobby. If you want a performance agency who actually care and can deliver on their promises, make sure you check out the Farsight team at Farsight. That's farsight with two eyes. F-A R S I I G H T.com.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous Add to Cut 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.
[Ad]: Today's checkout features Brendan Gillen, Chief e
Speaker C: Commerce Officer of Fightgear Direct. Brendan is also CEO and founder of the E Commerce Factory where he delivers advice and coaching to help store owners, e commerce businesses and founders grow, optimize and scale their e commerce businesses. His client list includes the Horse and Super Dry and he's been in the top 50 people in e commerce for the last three years running.
Nathan Bush: Brandon, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
[Ad]: We had a great chat in our
Nathan Bush: main conversation around everything from your journey from corporate retail all the way through to creating your own seven figure e commerce store. Even to the point where you've got your nine year old daughter creating shopify stores. So I don't know if that's just a tax dodge or what, but it's a great conversation. But we're here to learn a little
Brendan Gillen: bit more about you.
Nathan Bush: So I've got five quick questions. Number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Brendan Gillen: I buy popcorn salt online.
Nathan Bush: Oh great.
Brendan Gillen: So if you make popcorn at home instead of the microwavable ones, you just get the corn kernels and then you can buy, you know, cinema quality popcorn salt and you can put that on your popcorn.
Nathan Bush: Is there a particular store we should be going to for that one?
Brendan Gillen: It's the big A. It's Amazon. I just go straight on there and
Nathan Bush: get it from there. I've heard of them. Apparently they're doing good things. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Brendan Gillen: I'm crushing right now on True Classic. I think they just absolutely annihilate the e commerce world on conversion rate, on everything. Keeping it simple but understanding the customer. I think True Classic are doing a great job right now.
Nathan Bush: They us based.
Brendan Gillen: They certainly are, yeah.
Nathan Bush: All right, number three, which e commerce practice do you wish was history?
Brendan Gillen: You know when you go on those stores and you see those wheel of fortunes that spin around and you have to press a button to make them stop and get a discount, they need to go away really quickly.
Nathan Bush: Have you had clients using them and say, brendan, they actually work?
Brendan Gillen: I have, yes, but they work for the wrong type of customer. In my experience in saying that, I just don't like them. So it might not just be that. It's not. They're the great results. I just think they're annoying and they're, they're not very classy and they're distracting and they're gimmicky and yeah, that's just me.
Nathan Bush: If you want to work with me, you can't use the spinning wheel.
Brendan Gillen: No, that's exactly right. There's a clear criteria that if we're talking to each other, we've got a spinning wheel. I'm going to hang up the zoom call
Nathan Bush: on the other side of that. Is there any little tips or tricks or plugins that you go actually instead of the spinny wheel, this is what you've got to have. It's a non negotiable on your site.
Brendan Gillen: I've probably got two. One is making sure there's like a solid feed app that you have. And I learned this from the big brands I worked in. Is being able to optimize a feed in Google and Facebook is like this little game changer thing that not people realize because you can make your feed look different in all different places. So I use a really basic one from the Shopify app store called Simprosys. It's like five bucks a month. It's a great app. It means I can manipulate and optimize my feed everywhere. And that's probably been one of the secrets to me getting my PMAX and Google Ads firing.
Nathan Bush: Gotcha. Great tip.
[Ad]: Well done.
Nathan Bush: Okay, out with spinning wheels, in with product feed apps.
[Ad]: All right, number four, can you recommend
Nathan Bush: a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Brendan Gillen: Well, obviously they're listening to yours, so we don't need to talk about that. We know. But if we wanted to think about one that's not in Australia that I think is really good, one I'm loving right now is called Limited Supply podcast. So I don't know if you've listened to that, but it's two really good D2C founders outside of the US they've ran some amazing brands. I think, you know, had some great exits as well. And the, the nerdiness and the, the E commery and the. Everything in there is just so fun and I love it and I think for people who've been in our space for a little while, they relate to it and just it's a lot of fun. I really enjoy that. Plus there's some real, real good conversations that they have on there and they talk about the reality of E commerce and running big stores. So I think it's a really good podcast.
Nathan Bush: Great tip. Thank you. And last one I have for you, finish this sentence. The future of retail is growing and
Brendan Gillen: owning your own audience. That's the future of retail. Absolutely. We've got a lot of privacy laws coming in. We got lots of lacking of tracking coming through and the only way you're going to be able to sort of really have a profitable business is to own your audience.
Nathan Bush: And so are you talking predominantly email?
Brendan Gillen: Predominantly email, sms. And if you've got some sort of community that would also be pretty powerful.
Nathan Bush: Great stuff, great tips. You crammed a lot in there. In five minutes.
Brendan Gillen: Brain ticks over, mate.
Nathan Bush: Turn this into a YouTube video.
Brendan Gillen: Not a bad idea.
Nathan Bush: Brendan, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Brendan Gillen: No worries, mate.
[Ad]: To hear more from Brendon, jump back
Speaker C: into episode 398 where Brendon shares why it helps to care about the product you're selling. He tells us the importance and his non negotiable of owning your own supply chain and tells us the way that he's been using ChatGPT for data analysis.
[Ad]: Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
