Hamish McKay: I remember feeling that as a kid. Like, I remember feeling that if I wanted to do something, I could win at it. It's meant that we've been able to capture quite a breadth of the market, to be honest, from like your smaller stores all the way up to your $300 million brands that makes customers go crazy. We're telling a bloody epic story and it's only going to get better.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Here's your host bus. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Add to Cart. My name is Bushy. Joining you here from the land of the terrible people here in beautiful Brisbane, Australia at ADD to Cart, we invite everyone to share, learn and celebrate e commerce stories. And boy, do we have one for you today. I would especially like to welcome our indigenous and Torres Strait Islander listeners, the traditional owners and original storytellers of this land, to join us in our e commerce conversations and communities. Now imagine if your first client was the Ootie. Remember we had Davion earlier. Amazing business. Now imagine if your first investor was one of your clients. And then imagine if you upped your life and moved to the US to build your $20 million company. Now imagine you're doing this when you're 23. I'll tell you what, at 23 I had my first job selling ads in Marie Claire and that's life to small businesses scattered all over Queensland. It's very different to who you're going to hear today. Today I am thrilled to welcome Hamish Mackay, the co founder of Order Editing. Hamish is a whip smart entrepreneur who has taken the e commerce world by storm with his super fast growing app that empowers customers to make post purchase amendments and retailers to upsell post purchase. That's as soon as customers have gone through the checkout. I've got no doubt that you've heard about it. If you haven't heard about it, you've seen Hamish on LinkedIn. Made incredible traction in such a short time. Hamish learned his trade creating merchandise for creators such as Mr. Beast. And it was during this that he spotted the problem which is now built into a business that's expanded globally, helping brands like the Oodie and Sheet Society revolutionize their customer experience. Wait till you hear some of the customer stories and feedback that he's got so far. In this episode, Hamish shares how the sales opportunity for e commerce brands does not end as soon as the customer exits the checkout. There is more juice to squeeze there. As he tells us about with Order Editing, he shares why we should all be measuring CPT the that's cost per ticket as a key metric and tells us how he uses LinkedIn to share his story and create trust before securing the sale. Now, if you haven't already, I'd love to invite you to sign up for my weekly e commerce newsletter. Every Tuesday morning I share a key industry Insight along with 5 must read e commerce stories, research pieces or case studies. Whatever catches my eye from the past week. It's a great way to stay informed and to get inside my mind a little bit, which you may regret later on. You can sign up for free@addtocart.com au so let's get into it. Thanks to our partners Shopify plus and deliver in person. Here's our conversation with Hamish Mackay, Co Founder of Order Editing. Hamish, welcome to Add to cart.
Hamish McKay: Thanks for having me.
[Voiceover]: Amazing to have you here and look at you sitting there in a beautiful studio. Last time we met, we met on milk crates in the middle of Sydney. Dirty little cafe in the middle of Sydney. And here you are sitting on a podcast lounge in la. What the hell is going on?
Hamish McKay: I don't quite know. In all truth, I'm staying in an Airbnb at the moment and there's three people in the Airbnb with me and I don't think it'd be appropriate to film a podcast at 9pm there.
[Voiceover]: Start off here you are. Well, well done. Amazing how fast everything is going for you at the moment. How do you feel about it all?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, I feel very lucky. I feel stressed, I feel anxious. It's the biggest adrenaline rush that I've ever felt in my life and it's peaks and troughs. There's something amazing about doing a day where you take 10 meetings and you're literally back to back the whole day. There's also something horrifying and stressful about that. So it's all of the emotions bundled into one at the moment.
[Voiceover]: I can imagine. So what took you to la?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, we're doing a massive go to market strategy here. I remember a few months ago I was talking with one of my mentors and I was saying that the US is where we'll really grow and also where we've got the most customers in our icp. And he was like, well, why don't you just book a flight? And I said, oh, I'm waiting until I win five really big merchants in Australia. And he goes, well, why don't you book a flight, put a deadline on that happening, and then you have to win five before that date. And that's essentially what I did. I booked a flight for the end of July, and I booked a flight for the end of July, and here we are.
[Voiceover]: And did you get your five?
Hamish McKay: Close, close. I think we got three. And then there's two that are onboarding. So it's like, I'll give it to myself.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, yeah. And it's probably, you know, more than what you would have had if you didn't have that deadline, right?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, exactly.
[Voiceover]: All right, let's take people back to the start. I've had the pleasure of hearing your story and it is an incredible story so far. And I thought it was the right time to have this conversation because I think that we'll look back in five years time and it will be so, so different both for you personally and for where order editing ends up. Can you tell us how did you come up with the idea for order editing?
Hamish McKay: This started two and a half years ago now. I was working as an intern for a global merchandising company for famous YouTubers. We would design, manufacture, ship, fulfill, do the customer service for like your Mr. Beast or your Kyle Jacobs. These YouTubers that have. I mean, Mr. Beast has 300 million followers now on YouTube alone.
[Voiceover]: That's almost as many LinkedIn followers as you have.
Hamish McKay: Get out of here. He wishes. I was young. I was like 20 when I started working there. It was super exciting. It was a 2019 startup. I joined in 2021. It was doing $40 million a year of revenue. Like it was ballistic for E. Comm.
[Voiceover]: So the idea is that these great content creators on YouTube, but they might not have a merch range. And you're the business that does the merch range.
Hamish McKay: Yeah. The really exciting part about it was that famous influencers, singers, musicians, artists have always done merchandise. It's always been really cruddy. The people that buy it, wear it to sleep. They never wear it out on the street. And we were the first merch company. Well, not me, but the founders were the first merch company to bring out cool merchandise, like, designed by incredibly talented designers. Cut and sew clothing, high quality $120 a hoodie, and kids were running around on the streets. It was like their favorite thing in their closet. And so you can imagine, like literally what happened for that business was they launched a collection for one YouTuber in their community. It sold like 30,000 units. And to their audience and then everyone else in that YouTube's Fair said. Who did your merch like that? Merch is sick. And then that's how you do 40 million a year two years after running when you put out a product like that and everyone just came in and bound and I was riding the backseat of that. I was super young, it was exciting. I used to wake up on Sunday mornings at uni slightly hungover and I'd literally watch a 19 year old kid who played Minecraft for a Living make $9 million of revenue in 24 hours. That was my birth into high growth startups.
[Voiceover]: What was your role in that?
Hamish McKay: I was shadowing the CEO for two months and mostly what I was doing ended up being just handling customer service tickets. I was fortunate that the manager at the time was fairly absent and we had a massive CS issue. There were about 10,000 unanswered emails and I just put up my hand, I pitched, I said, hey, let me hire a team of uni students. It will cost this much, I need this many people in this many months and give me a crack. And everyone else in that company was under 25 and they said, go for it mate, you can do that. And so I put out posters and job ads, hired a team and then lo and behold, three months later I was suddenly head of cx for this $40 million company. I had 10 employees underneath me that I'd hired and trained and onboarded and it was probably four months into my professional career. All I'd done before that was catering. So it was a rocket ship. It was a real rocket ship for me.
[Voiceover]: Where does that drive come from? I'm really interested in, because I've heard that story, but I haven't heard your story before that. Where does that drive come from? Because most early 20 year olds, when they go into their first job, even when they're at university, will try and follow the bouncing ball to learn the ropes. Where you're like, actually no, just let me take it on. Like, this is what we need to do, this is where we need to go. Where did you get the confidence to take that?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, like phenomenal parents. And I felt like I was dealt a really great hand of cards. And I remember feeling that as a kid. Like I remember feeling that if I wanted to do something, I could win at it, which is a really fortunate position to be in. And that really culminated into drive because obviously I was still a kid, obviously. But it really culminated into this drive and hustle when I was rowing and I found out that I was a really talented rower and that really good rowers can go get scholarships to the US can get gold national medals. And, like, I just love the sport. I loved what I was doing, which was probably the first time I really felt like a core passion for a hobby or whatever it was. And I was really successful there. And then I remember my last season, you know, I hadn't quite achieved the results that I wanted. I wasn't really at the top of my game because I'd been doing it at, like, 90%. And I remember, you know, we'd just finished national champs in my second to last season, and I was like, well, I wonder what 100% would look like for me. And I didn't take a break. I trained all winter, rode in a single with my rowing coach, who took me out throughout that whole time in the off season, and then just, like, dominated that year because I had put so many hours in, more than anyone else on the field. I trialed for national, world, like, for the world champs as a junior, made the top boat, was the top sweep horseman in the country. And it was like this real moment where you just feel like if you work hard, you can do it. And then that just transferred through into a lot of things. It was a massive turning point in my life in terms of a life lesson. I remember taking that into university and then taking it into my career. And then that gelled quite well with what I was engaging with mentally at the time, which was this idea of financially independent. Retire early. It's like a popular community where you figure out that maybe you only need $80,000 a year to live off comfortably. And if you saved up, I think it's like $1.8 million into an investment fund, the S&P 500, you could pay yourself $80,000 a year for the rest of your life and never run out of money. And that was a massive light bulb moment for me where I was like, well, I want to do that. Because I remember thinking the coolest thing in the world would be to hit that amount of financial freedom and then stand in the shoes of someone who's not motivated to make their decisions based on money and then actually decide what really fills up my cup. And so that's been the driver for the last five years. I never stopped thinking about that.
[Voiceover]: Wow. Okay. Amazing. I want to come back to so much in that story, but I think it's really important to touch on order editing so everyone understands what you're doing and what we're going to be talking about. Then we'll come back to a little bit more and unpack that psyche and that end goal. So tell us, what is order editing and how did the idea click from the time you were in the business merchandising for content creators to what you've created today?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, so order editing is the first self service portal for post purchase amendments from customers. And where that idea clicked was while I was working for this $40 million business selling on Shopify across 22 different stores, I would wake up on that Saturday morning after drop day and we'd process 30,000, 40,000 orders and there would be 600 tickets from customers saying, can you change my address? Or it would be mothers saying, my son bought this with my card. I didn't give them permission. Can you cancel and refund it? And for us that was a massive issue. That was genuinely the whole day wiped out for two full time support agents. And looking at that, I remember thinking, well we use Loop returns for our self service returns. Why don't we have a self service portal for order edits? And I was lucky to have a friend of a friend who knew a really talented Shopify developer and he literally just told me, yeah, we can, we can build that. And we went away and we built it.
[Voiceover]: Now I know you're saying a friend of a friend, but I did see that you only recently met your co founder in this business, what was it, a couple of weeks ago after two
Hamish McKay: years, we still haven't met. No. So that's part of this trip. He's going to come to New York when I get over there in a month or two. But yeah, we've been working together for over two years now, all virtually just over discord. I would hate to know how many messages we've sent back and forth and how many hours we've spent on call.
[Voiceover]: That is amazing. And how did you get to a certain level of trust that you had this idea and you were like, no, I'm going to tie my ship to this other person who I've never met and we're going to go and do this remotely, but together.
Hamish McKay: Yeah. It's funny, I was about to say, I guess I was fortunately naive. But yeah, I mean in some ways I got very, very lucky. At the time I didn't actually think of this as this big business pursuit that was going to happen to me in my early 20s. It was just a product that we needed. It was just a problem to solve and he came on to build it with us and I was really fortunate that he's the highest integrity guy I've ever met and he really enjoys working with me and I really enjoy working with him. So after dogfooding that product for the year, we just came together and I've got the discord message like saved in my phone, a screenshot of it. I said, hey, can we chat about the order editing app next week? Can we jumped on the phone and said I want to commercialize this. And he said me too, I think it's awesome. And from there we just kept working on him in this agreement.
[Voiceover]: Maybe you guys shouldn't meet because you might upset the the mojo.
Hamish McKay: Maybe.
[Voiceover]: Have you ever played tennis where there are two, two balls on the court at the same time? It is mayhem. That's what it felt like for the team at Elite 11 when they had separate systems running for online sales and in store sales. Inventory was out of whack, customer data was all over the shop and they just couldn't get into the flow of the game. During COVID the Elite 11 brand quickly launched into physical storefronts. The problem was that their postech was wasn't ready to scale with them. Since stopping to replatform to Shopify pos they are now acing the competition with 80% revenue growth including 240% year on year pos growth. Better still, the unified view over customer and inventory has allowed Elite 11 to set up personalized cross channel communication, enable ship to customer orders from stores and continue to grow their store network and effortlessly. Game set, match check out shopify.com auplus and get in touch with the Aussie Shopify team to see how the dynamic duo of Shopify plus and Shopify Pause can help you unify your tech stack for growth. And was order editing always the name that you had in mind? Like didn't like Brainstorm? It was just always going to be that.
Hamish McKay: It used to be called dispatch core and then I remember we were looking around for domains and it was like this name doesn't really fit and orderediting.com believe it or not was $20 and that was just a no brainer for us. Like the name is what it does, it's clean.
[Voiceover]: All right, so talk us through the customer journey here. So customer goes onto a website, orders product and then talk us through what happens if the customer goes through the checkout and then needs to make a change. How does it work?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, so we're fully embedded in checkout extensibility. So customer checks out the order processes, they land on Shopify's thank you page. Immediately our components load out, edit your order details, verify your address, add another product to your order, upgrade your shipping method, get delivery notifications, download a tax invoice, whatever the options are that the merchant allows. If they click that, it takes them to the order status page and they start editing and they're told they've got a deadline to make those changes. If they close the thank you page, we're in your order confirmation email, edit or view your order. Please double check your address. You only have X amount of time to make the change. And then what I'd say about 70% of our Australian merchants are doing because everyone's looking to increase revenue at the moment is there's this light bulb moment where you realize, well if 5% of my customers are going to go and look at your app and they can add more products to their order, I may as well send them some email marketing through Klaviyo or through our app and say there is space in your package for one more item, add anything for the next 30 minutes. These products are 20% off. And I think that's a really creative and fun way for the app to deliver a lot of value when you don't necessarily have a lot of order change tickets. That's meant that we've been able to capture quite a breadth of the market to be honest, from like your smallest stores all the way up to $300 million brands.
[Voiceover]: Well, it's gone from a admin or an operational problem solving to a sales growth channel then.
Hamish McKay: Yeah, I remember when that like feature set came out, you know, we went from having this like two pronged approach where it was deliver a better experience to your customers and save time and money on customer service and then you just add this third lever of you know, generate post purchase revenue. And the thing that I love about that is that and CX managers listening, you should know what your cost per ticket is. You know how much it costs. Every time an email comes in, it's three, four dollars. Some people it's like seven. We communicate to our customers what your revenue per edit is. And for most of these brands that work with us, every time a customer goes to our app and makes a change, we bring you back $3, we bring you back $6 and like there's a full range on that. But it's nuts. And that's why people are driving people to our app because they're like, oh it's like your roas. Every time I send a customer to my app I get $6 back. And that's really cool.
[Voiceover]: Is it actually that common that customers make mistakes in that checkout Process. Cause I feel most people like really switched on and really like, I've got to concentrate, I've got to get it done, got to get it right because there's no going back. A lot of customers making mistakes.
Hamish McKay: That's huge. That's huge. I mean, we. I spoke earlier about how our app usage. 10% of your customers will use our app. That's because of all of the features that we have sitting around it. The cold hard truth is that 1.5% of all customers make a mistake at checkout. Like fact check your help desk, check it against your total order volume. Between 1 and 2% will make a mistake. And that's majority because of shop pay and Apple pay auto filling, old details. And where we talk about that now with potential clients is they look at their order volume and they go, okay, that means we're receiving, you know, one and a half thousand support tickets a month for address changes and cancellations and whatever it might be. And I asked them what their cost per ticket is and they say, well, it's $3.50. And we say, okay, we're going to save you $6,000 this month if you turn this on. Because when you turn it on and put it on your store, you never receive a support ticket again.
[Voiceover]: Wow. You are the first person on add to cart to talk cost per ticket. It's the first time it's actually. Yeah. Tell us, is there a formula for it? How do you calculate that? $6 or whatever it is for your business cost per ticket?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, you've got to do it. You have to know that. I mean, CX manager and the ecom manager should know it and the CFO should know it, but you take all of the costs that sit within your support center. So your help desk cost per month, all of the agent wages, and then you just divide that by the number of support tickets that you receive. Your. Your monthly ticket volume for us back at the merchandising company, ours was about $2.80, which is moderately industry standard if you're doing BPOs and outsourced talent. I know that some brands, I spoke with a brand that has a cost per ticket of $6.50aud, which is just ballistic.
[Voiceover]: And a ticket is any interaction that might come from email, live chat, phone, wherever you're open.
Hamish McKay: Bingo. Bingo. Important to note that it's like the, the interaction of that ticket. There might be three or four back and forth, but that's one ticket.
[Voiceover]: One ticket. Yeah, gotcha. What percentage of customers are you seeing engage with the order? Editing function?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, at best practice it's 10%. Some people breach past that, but 10% is an average if you're doing those three touch points. If you don't send out that Klaviyo email, it's probably closer to five or six. So you kind of, you double usage if you do prompt people to come in. If not, they've just made a mistake.
[Voiceover]: And I can imagine the time sensitive nature of that email or that call to action is really important in getting that next conversion. That poses a big question for retailers. How long do they keep that order open for before they start the dispatch process? What have you learned along the way around how retailers are handling keeping that order open post purchase?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, most retailers at launch had it for quite an extended period of time. There was this anxiety that, you know, we want to get rid of every single support ticket and customers may need some time to figure out they made a mistake. What we've been doing for the last three months as we've kind of been acquiring more customers is actually saying all of our earliest customers have never brought back their editing deadline. They launched at three hours, they launched at one hour and they never changed it because it works. And so now we're saying start as short as possible. Check the failing. Are you still receiving support tickets and people missing it? And if they are, extend it. It's really easy to extend a deadline when you're not capturing everyone. It's very hard to bring it back when it's working. So I'd say the majority, you know, in the last, like in the recent period are sitting at 30 minutes. But brands like, brands like an opoly or represent who really pressed on those delivery timelines and they're very competitive on that. Are launching at 15 minutes.
[Voiceover]: Wow. Okay. And from an inventory perspective, I'm assuming then that it takes the inventory off the front end, but doesn't send it through to any ERPs or warehouse management.
Hamish McKay: That's right.
[Voiceover]: Okay, Are you dealing purely with Shopify customers at the moment?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, just Shopify and that'll be consistent for the remainder of the year.
[Voiceover]: Okay, tell us about some of those customers because you've got a lot of good logos on that homepage.
Hamish McKay: Yeah, it's picking up. It's picking up. I mean, our first customer was the Oodie, which was amazing. We launched right before Black Friday. Like what a reference client. And their first month they had 4,000 customers use our app. Wow. So that kind of speaks to the volumes they're doing and the problem that we solve for Them that's like genuinely 40 hours a week of work.
[Voiceover]: What did you learn in that first month? Because I could imagine that having not tested it on a client of that magnitude before, you would have gone in saying, look, it'll do this, it'll do this, it'll do this. What happened in that first month on the Oodie that you went, oh, this is a little bit different or a little bit surprising for how we envisioned that it would play out.
Hamish McKay: Yeah, we were fortunate. We were definitely fortunate. And that they only launched with a limited set of features. So they just came in to solve a problem and that was we get a shit ton of address changes and contact information I think was all it was. They didn't do variant swaps, they didn't do product upsells, they didn't do self service cancellations at the time because they were obviously they were an early adopter of our tech. So they launched with like the very easy to service self service features. I'd say the lesson coming out of that is that now that we're working with 600 merchants, you start to realize that there was some nuance that we missed six months ago. One, for example, we were in the process of onboarding Meshke and Tian Warren was like, what happens when we have a US customer based in Washington which has zero percent state tax and they change their address to Florida? Do we bill them? And me and Kara just look at each other and we go, whoa, that's a good feature. We'll build that. And so we built that obviously. But that was a funny moment. I mean I had worked in cx, majority of our customers in the US and I never thought to bill a person for an address change. But she's right. Like you could abuse that if you, if you knew it was there. So that's a feature that we have now. It's just continually gotten more robust. And naturally the Oodi still benefited from that, but they launched with a very basic feature set.
[Voiceover]: And what do you think it was that convinced the Oodie to take a chance on you at that stage?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, I just think they had a massive problem. And that's been so consistent in that the moment that a brand that does $100 million a year, GMV hears about the product, you can't ignore it because you know, you know that you have 20 or 30 support agents and you know how much time is drained in this. And we'll jump on a call with them and they'll say, well, it's 15% of our support Demand, which is very consistent for fashion and apparel. And we go, well, will cut your costs by 15% in the support department. And that's the real beauty of it for like, and how the business just infinitely scales in terms of its value. Like, the more orders you ship out, the more tickets we solve and we become very sticky and very compelling when you do more than 30,000 orders a month. Because that's when you start to hit this inflection point of, okay, you're getting close to a full time employee being burnt, like doing these very low value, meaningless changes.
[Voiceover]: But I mean, if you take that the other way as well, you've got a brand like the Oodie who have an amazing database of customers who trust them and have a reputation in market. A brand reputation in market. That is a lot of faith, especially when you're dealing with customers who have just converted to go, I'm going to try this app on our customers that isn't proven at a large scale yet. Young founders, there must have been something that you said, some sort of relationship that got them really convinced that you were the right people for the job.
Hamish McKay: Yeah, we've been on this really funny journey where almost all of our clients heard about us through my LinkedIn profile. And part of the beauty of that is that the client gets to know me and understands how my brain works and how seriously we take this and how robust a product we're building before they commit. And I know, like I connected with all of those guys right at the very start and they'd been watching us for four months. They'd been watching the feature set roll out, they've been watching the client list grow. And I just remember I did a LinkedIn post and Marshall Jones or Jorge hit me up and he said, like, we should jump on a call and talk about this. We're about to go into peak season. And then the other nice part about this product is that we can set up a sandbox environment on their store and you can run through scenarios for days before you do any commitment. Like, they weren't subscribed and they just absolutely rinsed us for a couple weeks before live date and then we pushed it up to their site. And I didn't get any feedback from their customers specifically, but I remember when we launched Sheet Society, who are another like an amazing Australian brand, their CEO was reaching out to their customers after they used it and said, how'd you find the experience? Which is so sweet. Like, I love that. And he got amazing feedback from them being like, oh, that's a really cool Apple and sometimes we get the brand like flick through a support ticket that came in and they were like, oh, I really enjoyed the fact that I could self service my ticket after purchase, which is really special for us.
[Voiceover]: And that's Andy, right? Yeah, Andy, yeah, he's been on the show before. He's a great guy. Bloody smart, smart guy as well. So he knows what he's talking about. So I can imagine brands like Sheet Society and the Ooty open up doors for you now into other retailers. Are you selective with who you bring on or are you like, if you're on Shopify, if you've got a checkout, we're there for you.
Hamish McKay: I mean we're obviously a lot more free flowing, like, yes, come on, come on, come on and meet with us and get onto the app and we'll grow in the customer base really fast. Where we're at now is that we've managed to build something that you can actually self service onboard. So the smaller clients just jump in and set it up themselves. And in terms of the larger ones, no, I wouldn't say we turn anyone away. I think that we definitely, in terms of my efforts and where I put my marketing drive and where I try to connect and network with people is almost entirely within the 50 mil plus GMV at the moment. Just because I know that those customers are obsessed with the app and we get a real kick out of looking at those dashboards and seeing that 4,000 people used it. We're on this journey at the moment to try to get 10,000 customer edits happening every day. And yeah, we're at like five and a half thousand on some peak days. So we're getting close and it's just growing far too fast to comprehend.
[Voiceover]: Tell me about the commercial model that you've got in play for order editing. Is it a subscription fee? Is it a clip of the ticket fee? How does it work?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, so we charge by Shopify plan. So your basic stores, we acknowledge that they don't have an order editing issue. And we also think that Shopify should probably just have this function like built into the platform. So we say have it for free and we'll take a 6% clip of the ticket on all of the new revenue that we make you. So you make $100, we'll charge you six. And that's really nice. It's super cheap and easy for them to get started with. And I'm seeing like we now make like we did a thousand dollars last month on usage fees. I can't do the math, but it means that we made small Shopify stores about 14 or $16,000 last month in upsell revenue.
[Voiceover]: So are you saying that if a customer uses this purely for address changes, they're not paying you a cent completely free? Is that going to be the model forever?
Hamish McKay: Probably. Like they're not our icp. They're great for reviews, they're great for pointing out bugs. They're advocates. I just think they should use it. And we'll charge you if we make you revenue and we'll take some time off the founder's hands, which is usually who's doing tickets when you're on a basic plan. Advanced stores, we charge 79 USD per month flat. Again, like relatively cheap, but not like the super strong fit. They don't have a massive order editing issue. Just use it and make some extra revenue. And then plus stores we charge 399 USD per thousand edits.
[Voiceover]: Okay, brilliant. And are you seeing any churn at all or are you seeing. Once people are on, they're on?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, it's. I was looking at it. I mean I did a post about it. It's like 0.5% revenue churn at the moment. Logo churn slightly higher because naturally like where you have fit, which is where we're charging revenue, you don't churn. I think logo churns maybe 5% or 4%. And then, I mean the thing that I'm really excited about is that we start everyone on a 30 day free trial and we're converting about 77% of those at the moment. And those numbers are muddled as well because we have sandbox stores and developer stores testing it. So it's likely higher. But trial conversion is just through the roof.
[Voiceover]: You know, when you were talking, I'm fascinated now with the growth part of it because that's where you're making your money. When retailers are upselling or trying to add more into that same basket, are you providing the recommendation engine or are they plugging in their own recommendation engines for that?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, we currently drive the recommendation engine based on Shopify search and discovery. We've also got tools to run and know what a customer looked at on site but didn't add to cart or add it to cart and removed it. Majority of our retailers though, at least in Australia, are actually tagging a certain set of items and saying we want to upsell these hardest. We'll set an incentive against those, but not necessarily the whole catalog. And then they use like compelling email copy in that there's space in your package. And they say our best sellers, 10% off or 20% off and that makes customers go crazy.
[Voiceover]: And are you finding that you don't have to be overly intelligent about it? It's not like you have to match the items that are in the cart. It's purely, it's already there. We offer an extra discount can be bestsellers. It doesn't have to be hyper personalized.
Hamish McKay: Yeah, I mean it's a feature request. Right. Like we've definitely got room to grow on the upselling part and a lot of that's because of care and I's background of being just customer lovers and where the product's birth from. We will get to that beautiful stage where you're doing different funnels and conditions and whatnot. But the majority of product investment has gone into solving this problem because that's where we see in our real ideal customer profile why they install the app. So we're really prioritizing that at the moment.
[Voiceover]: Is there any danger of training customers? Almost like abandoned cart where they add certain amount to checkout and then wait for that discount email immediately?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, that's a very good question. One that's coming up more frequently with some ecom managers. I mean it's the exact same process as your abandoned cart. One of the things that I'd like to call out is that most of these brands will offer a welcome 10 discount or whatever it might be when they come into our app. We're not double discounting. We give the customer the largest discount that's made available to them. So if you set 10% off in the app, but they've got a 10% off order amount code on their order, they get 10% off. It's not additional incentive on top of that. But yeah, you could effectively get trained around it, I'm sure. But it's like anything at the end of the day it will be making you more money. And the pros and cons and offset. I'm not sure how we can build features around that. If anyone's got an idea cold DM me about that as well.
[Voiceover]: And there's only a certain subset of customers too that will go to the effort of double transacting to get an extra 10% off an additional order. Most people will want it all at once.
Hamish McKay: Maybe they wouldn't have bought it anyways, you know.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that makes sense. And what are the top three use cases now that you've got all that data coming in? Is it still address edits? Kid, use my credit card or is it more the upsell adding more items into the cart?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, it's hard because so many clients are pushing it in different areas. Cancellations make up about 7% of all edits that happen, which I think is a really meaningful data point. A lot of merchants go oh I don't want to self service cancellations. Like what if it increases it? And we say well just turn it off. Like you don't have to run the feature. But we know that when you have the self service functionality live, your cancellations will actually drop because 7% of all your edit tickets being cancellations is not what it looks like. In a help desk, customers reach out when they forgot their discount code, when they want to change their address whenever it is and they say can you cancel my order? Because they honestly don't believe that these brands can facilitate a change for them because it's all over the policy saying we don't edit orders, you have to cancel it. So I vouch that we that we drop that number. And then by far the most common ticket we solve are address edits. We get a lot of tax invoice downloads, we get a lot of product additions. Variant swaps are also very common, but address edits is definitely the leader.
[Voiceover]: Okay, yeah. Oh, that's fascinating around the cancellations because I assume then that has a flow on effect for returns as well.
Hamish McKay: A hundred percent. What I'm doing at the moment is I'm scouring Aussie merchants, store policies and their trustpilots. And like Shopo is a great example. Shopo say in their policies you can't change your order, you can't cancel it, you have to return it. And they get blasted in trustpilot because of this. And I'm like just give them 10 minutes please. Just give them 10 minutes please. All of those customers would have such a better experience. They'll return to you. They won't go through a return process. All of these hard things that are very topical in E Comm at the moment are very avoidable if you just empower your customers for 10 minutes after checkout.
[Voiceover]: Have you got Shopo on yet?
Hamish McKay: No, we'll try.
[Voiceover]: Send them afterwards. Send it and let them know about it. How was your last E Commerce delivery experience? Did your order arrive on time and undamaged or did it fail to fulfill expectations? If you are a high value brand, just think about the low value experiences in the last mile affecting your reputation. Delivered in full on time or Dyot if you're in a hurry is a metric that matters for retailers and customers. Why? Because it shows whether deliveries are happening reliably and on time. Many Aussie retailers are settling for 70 to 80% DYOT scores and dealing with a lot of unhappy customers. However, after partnering with Deliver in person, experience driven brands like Samsonite, the Party People and Jelai see a consistent 99.6% DYEFOT score. Don't settle for less. Make your last mile experience the first thing that customers remember. Learn more@deliverinperson.com. You mentioned at the start that you're feeling all the things obviously just in la got some great clients on. Stressed, anxious, excited. What's your biggest challenge right now?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, biggest challenge is by far capacity. I'm trying to call my co founder in between meetings and like this like to speak of like the hair and now I flew to la. I got here two days ago. I didn't take any meetings that afternoon. I just like settled in. I woke up the next morning after like a jet lag sleep and I think I had six hours of meetings back to back and there's no time to like go through the tasks and the emails that I missed while I was flying for 24 hours. And then I wake up this morning and I do the exact same thing and tomorrow I've got the exact same thing again. And so I know that I'm working this weekend and I think that's a really challenging part is like I've got to manage the time really wisely and think about get a bit more brutal with the calendar in effect and also think about potential hiring and I'm starting to feel the effect of that. We've got someone running the UK market at the moment. He's been part time with us for the last few months, technically full time for about five weeks and he runs that entire market for me and it's the biggest weight off my shoulder and so I'm looking to do the same in Australia soon. So if you are excited about joining a rocketship startup like Cold DM me because I'm genuinely fielding applications at the moment for someone to run the Australian market because it's well and truly past early adopter phase. It's growing quickly and I think that would be an awesome role and it means that I can focus on the US and stay over here.
[Voiceover]: Who do you look for? Because I could imagine finding someone, don't take this the wrong way, finding someone who gives a shit about order editing as much as you do and as the founder, as the person driving it, feet on the ground will be hard like you'll have high expectations. What traits do you look for?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, 100% a weapon. The lesson that I've learned from Dave Wiltshire, our head of uk, is one of the greatest benefits of him is that he's autonomous and that absolutely comes from his senior already and his background as a founder. He founded Patchworks, which is like a $50 million iPass that works with all of the top merchants in Australia and the uk. So that was obviously a needle in a haystack that we got him. But the founder background, or the head of department kind of background, or the startup background, where you're used to running multiple functions. Massive. He is dominantly passionate about customers and I've actually seen that come through in some of these applicants that we're speaking with and people that we're networking with. There's just this inherent passion for customer experience and end user. And that's my background where this comes from. Like, I'm still a CX geek. It's all like. It's all my expertise in E commerce around customer experience. And I think that lends itself really well to. I mean, you'll never be as passionate as the founders in a project, it's just near impossible. But I think that lends it well to getting pretty darn close and being a really valuable asset for a company like this.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, br, that is very exciting. I think that's fantastic for you, but also for the business. But also what an opportunity for someone in Australia to step up and take that role. You mentioned before that you felt that auto editing should be a feature that's built into Shopify, naturally. Do you get excited by that or is that a constant threat that Shopify could add this into the off the shelf package?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, I don't expect them to. I'd be really surprised if they did. And if they did, I think it would be something like an address change, which I think would be really meaningful for our business if they did make it publicly aware that this is a very meaningful product that you should look at on the App Store. I think it would be nice if they did it for the smaller brands. I think it would be near impossible for them to do it for the larger accounts where you do have those ERPs and the different mixes. But we'll see. I'd be really surprised if they came
[Voiceover]: and offered 3.6 million. 1.8 for you, 1.8 for your co founder. Are you out today? Yeah.
Hamish McKay: No dice. No dice. Have you.
[Voiceover]: You don't have to give me the number, but have you got A number in your head of where you want this to get to.
Hamish McKay: Yeah, I would love we wrote down at the start of this journey like we are building a attractive $20 million acquisition target. Cause that was my personal fire target. My co founder was very happy about that as well as anyone would be. I think what will come down to the end of the day is when you're more excited to do the next thing and I know that I have an idea of what the next thing would be and where like I will be most fulfilled and where my cup will be forever overflowing and we'll just see when that's feasible and where the business is at and make a really great decision that will make me personally happy and my co founder as well.
[Voiceover]: I love that you've got personal happiness at the end of all of this. Coming back to your the conversation at the start, to get to that 20 million valuation, do you see that you've got to expand features significantly from here or do you just think that you've got to hit scale, hence the US expansion?
Hamish McKay: I think why not both. We're investing a lot into product at the moment, like tens of thousands of dollars a month into product development, which is probably a drop in the ocean compared to Klaviyo. But we're bootstrapped. Or we're not bootstrap anymore, but we're a small business. Like, come on, it's a lot of money and we've got some really grand ideas and a lot of people say, you know, how complex is the product? Or like, how'd you find this wizard co founder? And like Kara is a true wizard. He's been building Shopify apps for the last six years, since they first kind of started. And I'm very excited about what's in the product pipeline, but I'm also very excited about what we're doing from a BD front and how quickly we're picking up the biggest logos in the world.
[Voiceover]: Going to give us any hints in what's in that pipeline?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, I mean, I think the product upselling is a big area and there's a lot of creative ways that are happening on storefronts at the moment outside of like recommendation and search and things like that. So we'll be leaning into that. And I think there's still more tickets that we can self service.
[Voiceover]: Brilliant. You mentioned there that you were bootstrapped. No longer bootstrapped. I love the story of your first investment. Tell me how that came about.
Hamish McKay: Yeah, we won Nike. They were our second customer after the Audi Actually, yeah, Nike the Hammocks, right? Nike the Hammocks, Yeah. Dean and Jared Libran. You've probably seen their ads. They crush it. And they're also, like, the greatest Aussies I've ever met. I love them. I remember I did a LinkedIn post and that's how Dean messaged me. He reached out back last year and he said, like, this is sick. I want to do this upsell. Get it on my store right now. And he ended up ringing my personal mobile. And we were just talking on the phone and he just, like, kept saying, this is bloody. A sick product. Like, he was just absolutely frothing over. And he said, where do I invest? Where do I invest? And I said, oh, like, we're not taking funding at the moment. We're not taking funding at the moment. I was still working full time. This was a side hustle. And I remember him saying, like, quit your job. Quit your job. And we hit that kind of revenue threshold where I could quit and go full time on this and be comfortable. We kept working with him, and then he emailed me in Feb being like, run me through the analytics. And I was like, okay, let's go through the analytics. And he had made about 12 grand in upsell revenue last month, and he'd self serviced, I think, 1500 support tickets. And he was like, holy crap, where do I invest, Hamish? And he goes, I think I could distribute this to 50 or 100 brands. I'm in all these communities and whatnot. And I go, well, how do I make that happen? And then the conversation started, and we just brought them onto the cap table a few weeks ago, and now they're a part of our business and they're guiding product development and they're talking to their friends about it and they're advocating and like, he. They just ring me up every week and go, how's it going? And we're just so excited to be working together and be building this kind of, like, family. Wrapped around the Shopify app. It feels very special.
[Voiceover]: Was it difficult setting up that investment structure that quickly?
Hamish McKay: It wasn't. And that's actually a good tip for young founders that are looking at this. One, like, investment from clients is a massive win. It just demonstrates a lot of product maturity advocacy. They're great referral networks, which you just kind of see a return on that investment outside of the capital that they put in. But two, if you're bootstrapped or you don't want to spend a fortune on legal fees and contracts, look up a post money Safe agreement. Why Combinator has a standard template and you can bring someone onto your cap table like in days and with no cost. And it's a very standardized contract where the challenging part around bringing someone on the cap table happens post liquidity event. So look at post money safes. If you are considering raising money and
[Voiceover]: are you looking for more investors?
Hamish McKay: 100%.
[Voiceover]: Who's the ideal investor?
Hamish McKay: I mean, the model with Dean and Jared works so well and it was something that we wrote in our strategy book last year, like potential investment. Because we obviously thought about it, we weren't dedicated to being bootstrappers and brand investment was top of the list. Where we're at now is that I'd like to bring anywhere between 10 to 15 more of those people onto the cap table in different areas of the world. The dream is the founders of large brands that are well connected, like the founder of Hexclad, the founder of Catch, the founder of Ridge Wallet. Those types of people, potentially the founder of RepresentClo, who we just closed. Those types where you do the post on LinkedIn and everyone's like, how the hell did you win that advocacy? And we go, well, it's a sick product. It's literally the coolest thing to happen in the app space in a very long time. I would say bias, but, you know,
[Voiceover]: slightly biased, but you're allowed to say that.
Hamish McKay: I am.
[Voiceover]: So you mentioned landing in la and you've got a big mission ahead of you. Tell me what, what does your next week look like? Because now that you've given us context on where you're at with order editing, that big $20 million goal, and I can imagine there's a relatively short time frame for you to get there. Tell us what next week looks like.
Hamish McKay: Yeah, next week I've got lunch with hexclad, we've got opoly intending to go live. So those are two, like $200 million brands we're talking about running through testing with High Smile, which is like a billion dollar company. I've got lunch with TalentPop, which is like a 500 person BPO that work with all of the world's largest brands. We're doing a partnership and demo session because there's really strong alignment with them and there's probably, I think maybe 25 or 30 hours of other meetings sitting around that.
[Voiceover]: Wow, a big week. What do you do? What do you do to relax? Do you get to relax? Because, you know, I was interested when you were talking about the rowing, how you, as soon as you put your Mind to something. You go, I can go all in on this and I know I'll be successful and how that set the tone for what you've done. Do you go in waves? As in, I'll be really, really active and really foot to the pedal to achieve a goal and then I'll take some time off for myself to rest and recharge. Or are you foot down all the time?
Hamish McKay: Yeah. It's funny, if you asked me three months ago, I would have said I'm really good at it. Like, I'm good at unwinding and reading and doing all the things I love. The reality was we were half as busy. It has been extremely hard the last couple months just because it's been 7am to midnight, like Monday to Friday, and that's got a huge set of challenges around it. I love reading. I love decompressing. I'm fortunate that I am extroverted. So I get a lot of energy out of my work, but I kind of get enough of energy out of my work that when it gets to the weekend, the downtime, I actually take the downtime. I don't keep charging full steam ahead and burning out. But the biggest things for me at the moment are finding those peaceful times where I can dive into a book or just listen to some music or
[Voiceover]: go for a walk.
Hamish McKay: And also the crazy thing about running a business, and you would know this, is that you just never stop thinking about it. It's really hard to switch off. And that's the drain, mentally, is that you're hanging out with someone and you're thinking about work and you're tempted to check your phone and whatever it is. And that sucks. And I've found that as this has started scaling and getting really intense, is that there's certain people in my life that when I hang out with them, it's impossible to think about work because I just love their company so much. And I really try and latch onto those people and spend as much time with them as possible, which is hard now that I'm on the other side of the globe. But hopefully I find some people like that here.
[Voiceover]: I love that, mate. That is awesome. It's still the work hard culture, but it's definitely not hustle culture in terms of you've always got to be on. I think that's a really important message for longevity and success.
Hamish McKay: Yeah.
[Voiceover]: So you are very active across LinkedIn and I would recommend anyone who wants to follow your journey do that, because you are definitely building in public to follow you on LinkedIn. But what's the best way if people want to get in touch? Whether it is brands wanting to come onto the audit editing platform, whether it's. Whether it is potential new Australian GMS or investors for audit order editing, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Hamish McKay: Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn's amazing. I reply to everyone on there. Otherwise my email is hamishderediting.com Very simple. But, yeah, like, I would love to see people watching the journey because we're both building the business in public and sharing all of the learnings that come with that. But you're literally also watching a 23 year old figure out the world. Um, and I'm very open about that. I think the most interesting conversations you have aren't necessarily fact based. Like we're doing X, Y, Z. It's actually how that makes me feel and that's why I share. It's like how I feel right now and how I feel about what's coming up and how I feel about this challenge and that challenge. And I feel like I'm building a really meaningful relationship with the people that engage with the content on there and are following along and we're telling a bloody epic story and it's only going to get better.
[Voiceover]: You are doing LinkedIn, right? I would say yours is some of the most refreshing content because every time I see it, I, I go, there's actually something real here, as demonstrated with how you got the Ooty on board, that they felt they knew you before even meeting you. So there's a lot of bullshit on LinkedIn and I feel like you do a great job of being authentic and taking people on a journey. So thank you for taking the time out to share your story so far with us today. Hamish, I really appreciate it, knowing that you've probably got another 64 meetings today, but thank you for taking time, timeout. Loved hearing your story and let's check in again soon.
Hamish McKay: Thanks so much.
[Voiceover]: What an awesome story. And he's only 23. What I wouldn't give to be as focused and logical at 41 as what Hamish is at 23. I have a feeling that this is just a tiny, tiny fraction of what the Hamish Mackay story will be. Here are the three takeaways I took away from this conversation. Number one, empower customers with self service. Hamish highlighted the importance of allowing customers to make post purchase changes themselves, reducing the workload on customer service teams and improving the overall shopping experience. To start with, you need to know what your cost per ticket is and then identify how many of those tickets could be fixed by the customers themselves. This will highlight the size of the self service prize for you. Number two Turn Service into Sales Most people think of service lines as ways to fix problems, but by strategically using post purchase interactions to offer upsells and promotions, businesses can turn customer service touch points into growth opportunities, increasing both revenue and customer satisfaction. But this does require a bit of different thinking. Deals need to be compelling enough that they mean instant action, but not so good that they train customers to wait for that post purchase offer. Number three Authenticity Leads to Trust I think I found someone who uses LinkedIn more than I do, but Hamish exemplifies the power of being authentic on that network and using personal branding to accelerate sales. He uses LinkedIn not just for networking but to openly share his professional journey, challenges and like he says, building in public. By doing this he builds genuine connections with his audience and establishes himself as a leader and someone that people can trust. I know LinkedIn gives a lot of people the X, but if you are on the fence about doubling down more into LinkedIn as a platform to help build sales and trust, I think Hamish is a pretty good playbook to follow. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode. Be sure to check out Order Editing's solutions on their website, maybe play around with a few of their customers, place an order, see how it works for yourself and connect with Hamish on LinkedIn to follow his journey in the US. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend or a colleague that really helps. Or leave us a review on Spotify or Apple. And please support our sponsors who support us Shopify and Deliver in person. They make all of this possible for free. Before you go, we'd love to invite you to join our free e commerce learning platform Add to Cart Campus, meet other professionals and learn from e commerce experts to take your business and your e commerce career to the next level. Register to join campus@addtocart.com now. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague. Or even better, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple. It really makes a difference.
