Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we revisit the episode with Charles Kamisasca where we discussed why you can't scale ecommerce without AI. So let's dive right into it.
Voice over [00:00:16]:
This is the e commerce coffee break, a top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host, Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome. Welcome to the hello.
Claus Lauter [00:00:42]:
Welcome to another episode of Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to dive into AI, artificial intelligence, and I have the feeling I get about 50 emails a day with new solutions. Applications are coming out every day and it's a bit of overwhelming. But obviously AI is a big part of every business, or it should be a big part of every business because obviously it saves a lot of time and helps really in achieving things. So with me on the show today, I have Charles Kamiskaska with me. He is the founder of ecomboardroom.com and he's a former management consultant who transitioned into the ecommerce realm, taking on roles such as brand owner, blogger, author, app developer within the ecommerce space. His books and blogs have garnered readership from thousands of entrepreneurs, and he has enjoyed the opportunity to conduct surveys and interviews with hundreds of fellow brand owners in recent years. His most recent endeavor, an app called Boardroom, serves as an all in one data management platform.
Claus Lauter [00:01:38]:
So we want to go in that route and talk about AI. And I would like to welcome Charlie to the show. Hi. How are you today?
Charles Camisasca [00:01:44]:
I'm doing very well, thanks, Claus. It's a joy to be with you, Charlie.
Claus Lauter [00:01:48]:
Let's dive right in. You talk to a lot of brand owners, merchants, people in the e commerce space, and obviously AI must have been a topic that came up during your talks with them. What's the feeling, the feedback? You get what people have. When it comes to artificial intelligence, you.
Charles Camisasca [00:02:04]:
Hit the nail on the head, which is that it's a little bit of overwhelm for most people, as you suggest, when you go on social media or LinkedIn, there's just constant barrage of new AI tools that's being just thrust in front of people each and every day. And oftentimes they can seem to be making contradictory claims or it's just difficult to see through the murky waters of AI right now in the world of e commerce. So when I talk to brand owners, that's sort of the sense that I get. I think people are looking for clarity and clear direction on how that they can best use it for their business.
Claus Lauter [00:02:48]:
A lot of merchants specifically, if they're in marketing like me, they have a shiny object syndrome. So they try out everything that comes out. And obviously that takes a lot of time away. And when it comes to e commerce, time is one of the most important things. You want to invest your time in a way that you get the most out of it. What do you think are the biggest advantages of using AI right now in the ecommerce space?
Charles Camisasca [00:03:12]:
Yeah, that's a great question. And I love what you said about shiny object syndrome. I think if you've been working at this e commerce game for any length of time, you've probably encountered that simply because there are just so many products, so many strategies, so many platforms to experiment with that it's easy to get pulled in different directions. And actually, that's one piece of advice that I would really give people, is try to avoid that if at all possible. You do want to make sure you're on the bleeding edge of technology and using the most effective tools, but you also want to make sure you have that clarity of focus at your business and just be about that one thing. But back to your question, what are some of the biggest benefits of using AI for e commerce? I'll speak from the perspective of our software application, primarily because that's where I'm most familiar. Now. I think there are other use cases for AI besides what I'm about to share with you guys.
Charles Camisasca [00:04:12]:
But speaking from our experience and the experience of our products, we think that there are really two great use cases for AI that are pretty simple to understand and simple to implement for e commerce businesses. The first one of those is data analysis. I know that can sound scary right off the bat, but we keep it really simple. And most people aren't aware that they could use AI for this. But these large language models, similar to chat GPT, that's the most familiar one out there. They are capable of synthesizing and accepting tons of data and information into the model, and then they can take that data, summarize it, analyze it, and even provide recommendations for practical next steps for how to move forward related to that data. That's one of the things that we built into the boardroom app is through an integration with OpenAI, a simple data analysis tool. You connect your Shopify store into boardroom.
Charles Camisasca [00:05:21]:
You click a button that says analyze and thats pretty much all you have to do. The AI takes it from there. It will give you a nice summary of your business across five key metrics. We keep it real simple, the five most important metrics at your business, and then the AI will also then give you actionable tips and recommendations for how you can go about improving those key metrics in real life. So, data analysis, that's use case number one for AI that I think a lot of brands are maybe ignoring or not aware of. But I think more and more are coming to realize that it can, you know, AI can become sort of like a little accountant or assistant for your business, uh, which is very useful and a big time saver for a lot of companies. Now, the second use case, which is probably more widely known and more popular right now, is text based content creation. So you can hop into chat GPT and ask it to write a product description for a product on your e commerce website, for example.
Charles Camisasca [00:06:29]:
Now that's another use case that we have jumped on and really integrated into our software. We have built in. We've thoroughly tested rather certain AI prompts so that we can achieve a reliably, consistently good result from the AI across three primary types of content. So we have templates within our app that can help users to create product descriptions, emails and blog posts. Most importantly, that's one where we have a really differentiated product. And I'm excited to talk a little bit more about the blog post feature, if that's okay with you, Claus.
Claus Lauter [00:07:13]:
Now, I love the approach that you have there, because if you're using chat GPT, and I think a lot of people already have at least played around with it, you will quickly find out that without the right prompt, it's basically useless. Whatever you get out of it, you need to really think about what do I want to get out of it? What I understand from you is that you did the hard lifting and doing the write prompts, and that helps, obviously immersion in generating things much, much quicker. Now, let's dive a little bit into the features, for instance, for blogging. How does that work?
Charles Camisasca [00:07:45]:
Yeah, absolutely. The way that we've done it, and you're right, we've done the heavy lifting of testing out those AI prompts for you. So what we ask you to do is fill out a very simple questionnaire within the boardroom app. What's the topic of this blog post? What keyword are you trying to rank for in search engines? Roughly how many words should the blog post be? Then you click generate and that's it. And then we have this elaborate prompt in the background that's running behind the scenes to get a reliably solid blog post. Now, we don't just stop there because you could theoretically do a version of that in chat GPT, where we really add value is we then give you an editor directly in the app so there's no copying and pasting necessary. And we also analyze the text that's been returned by the AI. We have an SEO analysis that we do on that text, and we provide you with a score out of 100 for the SEO of that article.
Charles Camisasca [00:08:52]:
So for example, you might fill out that questionnaire that I mentioned. AI generates the blog post, but the SEO score is a 65 out of 100 right off the bat. Okay, then we give you 20 little tips for how you can optimize that post using our editor so that it's ready to start ranking in search engines and producing organic traffic for your website. So if you're familiar at all with a tool like Yoast, which is very popular on WordPress websites, it's a little bit like Yoast plus chat GPT but also connected with your Shopify store. So after you've optimized that post using the editor and the SEO tips, you can then just click a button that says publish and it goes directly to your website and it's live and ready for consumption by your readers.
Claus Lauter [00:09:46]:
Hey Claus, here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter dot e commercecoffeebreak.com I score and create 50 news sources so you don't have to, saving your hours of research. Grow your revenue with ecommerce news, marketing strategies, tools, podcast, interviews and more, all in a quick three minute read. So head over to newsletter dot e commercecoffeebreak.com to subscribe. I said 100% free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. That sounds like a lifesaver.
Claus Lauter [00:10:14]:
Obviously there's a massive synergy effect in there, and I like that it's integrated already on the Shopify blog platform, so you don't need to copy and paste between different applications and going back and forth. It's all out of one hand, so say what other and you're not stopping there. I see that there is more features to your app. Talk me through it.
Charles Camisasca [00:10:33]:
So maybe it would be helpful to tell you a little bit about the background of how I started the app, which will lead into some of the other features that we love to talk about. So I actually like you mentioned at the beginning, professional background is in technology consulting, but I've always been super interested in entrepreneurship and so about four or five years ago, I actually started a few little e commerce brands myself. So I'm very familiar with the e commerce business model. I started selling biodegradable plates on Amazon. That was my first brand that went pretty well and was a lot of fun. Then I pivoted into Shopify and tried drop shipping out and some other fulfillment models as well. But while I was running those online brands, I quickly became frustrated with certain aspects of the software landscape. And so one of those points of frustration was that anytime I wanted to do something like calculate my net profit or any metric that could be calculated across these different connected platforms, like Shopify, Facebook ads, Google Ads, all of these are different data sources for your ecommerce brand.
Charles Camisasca [00:11:49]:
So anytime I wanted to do some sort of synthesis across platforms, I was downloading spreadsheets and combining them into a Google sheet and writing painful formulas. I'm sure many of the business owners that are listening know this exercise that I'm talking about. So I got frustrated with that. And using my background in software implementation, I decided, hey, why don't I just, you know, try to start a, you know, ecommerce software platform that can help to solve this problem? And so that was the sort of original intent of boardroom, and we still do solve that problem pretty well. And many of our customers love using boardroom for its business intelligence capabilities. So with boardroom, you can integrate very easily just by clicking a few buttons, the data from your Shopify store, your Facebook ads account and your Google Ads account into one dashboard. Now, as I say this, we are working on an Amazon integration as well. So if you happen to sell on both Amazon and Shopify soon, you'll be able to monitor your sales from both of those platforms in boardroom, which is pretty exciting.
Charles Camisasca [00:13:00]:
We calculate then tons of KPI's and metrics based on that synthesis of your data, giving people clear visibility into exactly how their business is doing and also just doing common sense things to make your life easier. If you're familiar with Shopify, you know, it's a great platform, but there are certain aspects of it that are maybe a little bit deficient. One of those for me, for example, is the customer data that's in shopify. There's not really a built in CRM in Shopify that's very easy to use, but the data is all there. So in boardroom, we decided to just build a quick little CRM that people can use. So you have a centralized database with each customer's contact information, financial details, where they're located, in the country. And you can sort and filter and report and create segments as well that you can then target with maybe an email marketing campaign or a remarketing campaign through advertising or something like that. So our CRM is one of our more popular analytics features.
Charles Camisasca [00:14:15]:
So I like to mention that the last thing about the CRM that I always love to throw in there is that we have a customer heat map, which is a fun, lit up map of the world, showing you a visual representation of where your customers are located. I always just think it's a very fun page to look at and get a good sense for where my customers are.
Claus Lauter [00:14:36]:
Yeah, I saw that on your website and I love that feature. As I said, it's a fun way to see where people are. Now, what I love, and I think I can at least relate to it, is the story of what happened to a lot of merchants. They start, they come from drop shipping, business grows, things become more complex, and they are sort of looking for tools to make it work to get through the hurdles. From what I understand, with the tight integration that you have into Shopify, you just offering on top of Shopify, a lot of features like the CRM, like the analytics, like the AI tools. Now, how does the onboarding or the integration work? What kind of steps do I need to go through to get it up and running?
Charles Camisasca [00:15:19]:
There's actually two ways you can sign up for boardroom. Number one is you can sign up through our website, and then we have very simple onboarding instructions from there that we help you out with. Way number two, which a lot of people maybe prefer, it's because it's a familiar process, is that boardroom is available in the Shopify App Store, so you can simply install the app like you do any other app. And, and again, we'll kind of take over from there with some. Some more simple onboarding instructions for how you can then sync your advertising accounts. We have a great customer support model as well that we really prioritize. You know, we. We kind of are trying to go against the grain when it comes to customer service at boardroom.
Charles Camisasca [00:16:05]:
I think in today's world, everything is so impersonal, right? You know, you sign up for an app and you're kind of left to experiment with it and try it out yourself. And some people like that, but some people want a little more hands on help. So with boardroom, when you sign up, you get a dedicated customer support rep who is a real person, not an automated email that reaches out to you and just makes sure that everything looks good. In your account and is there to hop on a call and screen share if you're, you know, going through any issues. So that's something we really prioritize. We think onboarding is important and we just want to make sure that, you know, everybody gets up to speed easily with the app.
Claus Lauter [00:16:46]:
I love the approach. So it's not all artificial nowadays. There's still a human factor in there. Where would you draw the line between using AI in your store because there's so many facets, so many areas where you potentially can use it, and where you should still be offering a contact to a human being?
Charles Camisasca [00:17:04]:
I think that it depends on your size and your approach. There are certain brands out there who I'm sure would love to have a personal one on one approach to customer support, but maybe they're getting millions of visitors each month on their website. It's just not realistic. I totally get that. If that's your situation, then you're probably not too concerned about it because things are probably going pretty well. But if you're a smaller brand and you're looking to stand out and really differentiate yourself, then I would recommend that wherever possible, within the reasonable cost constraints that you might have, add a little personal flavor, add a little personal human touch. I think it goes a long way. And like I said, in today's world, people are so used to this impersonal person to machine relationship that I think you can stand out in people's minds if you have a person to person contact.
Claus Lauter [00:18:02]:
Now you have got your finger on the pulls of ecommerce and artificial intelligence. What kind of trends do you see coming up in the next couple of months when it comes to optimizing that and using AI?
Charles Camisasca [00:18:13]:
As I mentioned, people are maybe a little bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of AI tools that are out there. So I hope that. And this is kind of what we're betting on with ordering, right? I hope that people are moving towards consolidation. A complaint that I hear from Shopify brands all the time is that they're sick and tired of having 25 apps that they have to add to their store in order to get it running properly. What we've done at boardroom is we've taken basically the top ten most commonly used add ons in Shopify and we tried to consolidate them while adding some additional functionality on top of it, just to make the most bang for your buck, the most useful application possible, so that you can have one subscription that you're paying for instead of ten. I think that's the direction we're moving because I think people are faced with almost decision fatigue when it comes to e commerce and AI right now. So we're trying to make people's lives easier, help people to make better, more data driven decisions in the world of e commerce. That's, I think, the direction that we're heading.
Claus Lauter [00:19:25]:
Talking about that. What's the pricing structure? How does that work?
Charles Camisasca [00:19:27]:
We bill based on the total monthly orders of your connected store. So something I haven't mentioned yet is that order also allows you to integrate multiple Shopify stores into the same dashboard. So it's something that actually, a lot of our customers, it's a trend, I would say, is that a lot of Shopify merchants are starting to open multiple stores in different industries or different practices, and so you can merge them all into boardroom and monitor everything from one dashboard. Now, our pricing structure then is the cumulative orders across all of your connected stores per month. So if you only have one store, it's just what's your total orders for the last 30 days that determines your bill for this month and our pricing, we start at $14 a month. It's pretty reasonable as far as bi and AI tools go, I think. And part of that is just we have a heart for small businesses. Me coming from the background of starting my own little shopify brands in the last five years, I know how daunting it can be to be faced with all these decisions about, well, should I pay for this app? Should I pay for that one? So we tried to make it inexpensive for new businesses, and then the pricing, our goal is basically grow with boardroom.
Charles Camisasca [00:20:43]:
So I think once you get over 100 monthly orders, that's when we increase the price from $14 a month just to $29 a month, and then you're at that $29 a month range until you get to 500 monthly orders. So something that I love to see as a customer who started in that lower tier, uses boardroom to help grow their business and moves up to the next tier. And they don't mind paying $29 a month for boardroom instead of 14 because boardroom's helped them grow their business. That's a really gratifying story for me, and I hope that we'll continue to see more of that.
Claus Lauter [00:21:22]:
Charlie, thanks so much for giving us an overview today on AI and e commerce. I think a lot of things are moving there, and I think your application there is a great help to merchants to make things just much easier in their already busy life. Thanks so much for your time today.
Charles Camisasca [00:21:37]:
Thanks very much for having me, Claus, much appreciated.
Claus Lauter [00:21:41]:
Hey Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast, simply like comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast, and even better if you could leave a rating. Thanks again and I catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.
