Episodes > Season 3 Episode 5

Alpha Omega Agency

Headless ecommerce architecture with Alpha Omega Agency

Scott Knight, Founder & CEO @ Alpha Omega Agency

What's in this episode?

On this episode we’re chatting with Scott Knight, Founder and CEO at Alpha Omega Agency.

Today’s conversation is all about headless ecommerce architecture. Scott details what it means to truly build a headless storefront, and breaks down the various business applications so you can consider it for your own store.

Scott gives real-world examples of businesses he’s worked with at AOA and showcases various benefits for each use case. We also live brainstorm a few new ideas for how businesses can creatively leverage a headless architecture.

So let’s get started!

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn. Check out Alpha Omega Agency.

Episode transcript

Chase Alderton: On this episode, we're chatting with Scott Knight, founder and CEO at Alpha Omega Agency. Today's conversation is all about Headless e-commerce architecture. Scott details what it means to truly build a Headless storefront and breaks down the various business applications for why you may consider it for your store. Scott gives real world examples of businesses he's worked with at AOA and showcases various benefits for each use case. We also live brainstorm a few new ideas for how businesses can creatively leverage Headless architecture. So, let's get started. Scott, thank you for joining us.

Scott Knight: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Chase.

Chase Alderton: So, to start kicking off, give me a little bit of info about yourself and about Alpha Omega.

Scott Knight: Yeah. So, I'm CEO and founder of AOA. We started about seven years ago. We rebranded under AOA around three years ago. So, been around for a while, but the brand is relatively new. We specialize primarily in Shopify plus BigCommerce. Our passion is really performance. We obsess over performance and so, just organically Headless has become a big part of what we do and our engineering team, and what really separates us from a lot of other agencies I think is that obsession of our performance that leads to hiring senior engineers. On the front end side, we've got senior react developers, senior view developers, and that allows us to really leverage modern technologies and deliver really powerful experiences, which then in turn gives our design team the flexibility to really deliver on extremely beautiful designs and modern designs that you can't otherwise get with traditional development. So, [crosstalk 00:01:45].

Chase Alderton: Perfect intro. Today, we are talking through Headless if you haven't guessed already. So, Headless is obviously not a new term at this point. We've actually talked through Headless on this podcast before. We did kind of an overview episode. We're going to try to take a bit of a different route this time and talk through some unique use cases. I know you have a few examples of brains you've actually worked with. So, to kick it off, let's not go too deep into the weeds right away, but define Headless for me, just so we can set the stage before we hop into all the conversation.

Scott Knight: Yeah, no, I think that's a good starting point too, because I think there's a lot of misinformation on what Headless is and actually Headless really got its term well before it became a buzzword in e-commerce and so Headless, it's really the separation of the consumer facing side and what consumer facing is really where the term Head came from. So, it's the separation of the consumer facing side of the application from the back end, if that makes sense.

Chase Alderton: No, that's perfect. So, there's obviously in the last year or two, or even past that, but I think we've had a lot of acceleration recently, but a huge chunk of customers day to day customers for every brand are moving online. So, when we talk about this kind of like storefront idea, how does kind the evolution of the storefront happen? What does the evolution of storefront look like at 2022?

Scott Knight: The last two years have been like really crazy? You're seeing, again a huge shift to online I think in 2020. E-commerce in the United States grew 36%, 2021. I haven't gotten the latest summers, but the first three quarters went up another 17%. So, imagine another 30, 30% in 2022. And so, really what that's done is that just accelerated competition and you're actually seeing digitally native brands now going to to brick and mortar. So, it's really weird shift.

Chase Alderton: You're getting the opposite effect, whereas three years ago, from brick and mortar to online, now we're seeing the other way around.

Scott Knight: Right. And part of that is the customer acquisition cost has increased to 50% just in last year. And so, it's becoming a little bit more expensive. And so, brands are like hyper focused on providing just a really unique experience to differentiate themselves from that increase in competition, but also focus on performance because they need to offset that cost of customer acquisition through the form of increasing conversions in AOB. And there's really nothing better that can help with that than speeding up your site. So, it's a crazy time. And, then also it's becoming in addition to your storefronts, brains are starting to do differentiate themselves by providing tangential experiences as well, say like digital access memberships, developing out native apps or microsites that are progressive web apps, smart home devices. NFTs are becoming popular now.

Scott Knight: And so, you're starting to see more of a dramatic shifts now and focus to what we call Headless that decoupled architecture, so that you can have multiple heads operating at lightning speeds, but still leverage the platforms that you appreciate and that you're on. And at the same time, luckily during all of this, the evolution of Headless has really accelerated as well. You're seeing billions of dollars of VC money going into to Headless startups. Some big ones like the Shopify, BigCommerce space that come to mind are, the sell and Shogun Frontend. But then you also have a long tail of other e-com platforms that are API first, in other words, Headless.

Scott Knight: Like Fabric, I think just raised quite a bit of money too. And so with this, it really enables merchants to go beyond just the storefronts and also just optimize speed. But before, it took a lot of time and energy and money to build these things, right? But with these apps, with the competition in that space, with the money that's getting invested in it, it's definitely lowered the barrier quite a bit. So now, you don't have to be a hundred million dollar company to afford a Headless built.

Chase Alderton: So, ton of stuff in there. Super great intro. I love kicking that off with all of everything. We're just going to dig into each one of those verticals that you hopped into. So, let's tackle a speed first. So, speed seems to be the first thing that everyone talks about when you talk Headless other than the buzzword decoupled, which is not my favorite thing because everyone always just says, "Oh, I know Headless is, it's just decoupling." So, you talked about speed first. How is speed a benefit? Obviously, we know speed is the benefit. How does going Headless create a faster speed for your site?

Scott Knight: Yeah, definitely. And, just to walk back a little bit, speed is a benefit, because this might not make sense to a lot of people is that, lag time and slow performance really is a discovery deterrent, right. And so, by increasing the speed and this doesn't just come from like agencies like ours, but also Google, Walmart, Amazon, et cetera. So, what that does is that increases conversion, that increases AOV and then ultimately bottom line. So, speed is hyper important.

Chase Alderton: It's something like three seconds, isn't it? There are a lot of studies showing that like if a page loads for more than three seconds, people are likely to drop off that page.

Scott Knight: Bounce. Yeah.

Chase Alderton: Which is like not a long amount of time to be waiting. So, it's an incredibly important thing.

Scott Knight: Yeah. For everything to load, right?

Chase Alderton: Right.

Scott Knight: And then also every 0.1 seconds translates into a 10% loss in revenue and that's something that Google, Amazon and Walmart have all like published separately. There's also a lot of studies from Deloitte now. So, you're just seeing like a lot of studies come out about performance and what that means to bottom line. So, performance on the front end, first of all, I guess one thing I should have said Headless what it is, but what is it not, it's also like, just because you have a react app, doesn't mean that's Headless. And so, that's where that misinformation is coming from. A lot of people out there developing react apps and claiming it's Headless because it's still like a monolithic architecture. It's Headless, but like it's still that monolithic architecture.

Scott Knight: So, little into the weeds there, but what Headless enables? It enables you to host that head wherever you want. And so, there's like really two strong platforms in the hosting space and that is Vercel and Netlify. They do an excellent job. And so, you're able to statically generate the pages in advance and distribute across the CEM. So, I'm just outside of Minneapolis instead of hitting a server say in Florida, waiting for the data to process, the server to render the page and then send it back to me in a massive payload. I might be sending a request to a server here in Minneapolis. And instead of waiting for that server to drum up the [inaudible 00:09:30] and send it back that data, those assets are already pre-generated. So, immediately it just gets sent back. And that's why you have that really fast, initial low time and then on top of that, you have your subsequent page request. And what happens there is, everything is really cashed.

Scott Knight: Most of the data should be cashed to your phone or to your laptop. And so, when you click on another link, you're not having to go fetch another massive payload and have that come back. Most of that's already there. So, you're just fetching the data that you need if it's not already there. So, that's why subsequent page requests are lightning fast. And you just have this like really fast performance versus what you can achieve, say in a more monolithic system, something that requires server side processing.

Chase Alderton: So, clearly page feed is a huge deal. And like you just said, 10% drop off for every 0.1 seconds, that's right?

Scott Knight: 10% reduction in revenue for every 0.1 seconds.

Chase Alderton: Wow. So, if you speed this up by even fractions of a second, you start to look at a significant revenue that you're losing.

Scott Knight: Yeah. It's crazy. There's actually a really good tool, thinking with google.com. If you type in like thinking with Google test my site, it should be the first link that you see in Google. And from there, you can actually put in your URL and then it comes back with metrics on performance on mobile, on desktop. But if you dig a little deeper into the page, you can actually put in your storefront metrics, say like your average order, number of people on the site, what your current conversion rate is? And then it's acts as a calculator. By increasing your site 0.5 seconds or reducing it down to 1.2 second total page load, you'll be making initial 1.2 million dollars or something like that. So, it's pretty fun to play around with.

Chase Alderton: So, I can go play around with that. That's my sort of thing, is numbers and calculators. And how do you project out what's going on, I think that's super cool. I'll take a look at that for sure. So, speed is obviously a huge piece. Speed seems to be the piece of Headless [inaudible 00:11:43] understands the most. So, let's move on from that. So, can you talk through this idea of like NFTs, you start talking like memberships, we're talking brick and mortar. There's obviously a digital site somewhere out in the world. How do you pull all those things together? Because now you have a whole bunch of different heads, if you will, and you have to figure out how to pull all of those heads into a singular backend or multiple backends, I guess, but what are some of these trends or how does this work pulling all of those different heads into your database?

Scott Knight: Yeah, definitely. So, the source of truth for all these, for the data, can live in many different platforms. I think Netlify coined the term Jamstack. I apologize if they didn't, but I'm pretty sure they did. And so, instead of having to custom builds, say the backend, which has been the tradition for a while, and you start to see these storefronts that have an engineering team of 30, right. So that they can manage the system. Now, very similar to your e-com platforms, like a BigCommerce, like Shopify, you also now have API-first CMSs and Contentful is a really strong one. And so that data, that content model can live and say a Contentful, Shogun Frontend has their own proprietary CMS as well, that data can live there. And so, you don't have to build everything from scratch anymore. There's just a lot that is API-first.

Scott Knight: And so, now you have your decoupled front end and you have the opportunity to interact directly with these systems. And so, not to over-complicate things, but you can have essentially multiple back ends and you're kind of point to each one of those, right? So, if you were to say, "Swap out a CMS." You don't have to change your frontend code a whole lot. You still have to change the wiring a little bit, but like that frontend presentation stays the same, but you don't have to then also change out Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento or WooCommerce, right. You're just focusing on that, that content piece. So, you have a little bit more of a modular approach, which is fantastic.

Scott Knight: Nacelle does a really good job at pulling in a lot of these pieces. So, if you want to have one common endpoint, Nacelle is really good at that. So, you can have say Contentful on the CMS side, you can have Shopify, you can have maybe a custom storefront, all of that sort of goes into Nacelle as a middle layer. And then your front end just connects with that. You also have other products, I mentioned like Shogun Frontend. Content can now live in Shogun Frontend. Shopify CMS is good, but it's not very robust. So, it gives you opportunity to really enhance the storefront and any of these approaches. And again, what's great is you don't have to build everything from scratch and that's what has really changed in the last couple of years is, the opportunity to leverage these tools has really driven down the cost of development and has made things scalable, flexible, so that if you want to make a change, it doesn't take a year to scope out and sidelining your team. You can make that pretty quickly.

Chase Alderton: So, that's the next place I want to go is, scaling. So, everything you just mentioned is setting up your architecture. That's a lot of backend activity. There's a lot of stuff there that really the front end consumer doesn't usually see. So, is the idea of Headless, really just enables you to scale as much as possible. Because you can use these prebuilt systems, their best and breed on whatever side of the house they're on, but you can pull in information to everywhere you want, connect them all together essentially in layman's terms, I guess and then you have one crisp, clean backend that's pulling in data from a whole bunch of different places. And that enables you to scale because it's not a custom, you don't have to worry about how this thing's going to flow. It's everything's maintained its own.

Scott Knight: Totally. Yeah. Took the words right out of my mouth.

Chase Alderton: Yes. I can do the next interview then. All right, we'll do a more Headless talk. So, really is just you set up your platforms initially, obviously make sure everything's set up and there's some consistent maintenance there, but you're just now using the best platforms and that enables you to keep scaling as you go.

Scott Knight: Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yeah. It's just night and day difference, from what it was two years ago. In addition to that, you also have third party apps that have matured over the last couple years as well. And, now support Headless. Whereas before, you have to like work with our teams, get them to support it. But now, like they're also seeing Headless as being the future of eCommerce. And so they needed to adapt and so now, bringing in the third party apps that you've grown to love over time. You can still leverage those with minimal effort to incorporate, to integrate into your system. So, it's what are called like NPM packages. So, it's more of like a command to Yarn add or NPM install and boom right away you've got your integration set up.

Chase Alderton: Love it, love it. Let's talk a handful of examples. I know that you've worked with quite a few brands that obviously leverage this type of architecture as one of your specialties. Give me an example of a brand that's using this and maybe talk through how it works, how it's different than a usual eCommerce setup and we'll chat through those opportunities.

Scott Knight: Yeah, well actually, the last maybe two years, I think all of our sites have been Headless. And so, I think one really fun one that recent builds that we've been working on is Raddish Kids. And so, they have their storefronts. They're on Shopify Plus, but what they wanted to do is they wanted to extend their storefront and extend their offering by providing a digital membership that compliments their physical subscription. And so, if you're not familiar with Raddish Kids, every month they deliver a box for parents and kids to learn how to cook together and so to extend on that experience. We've built a Headless application called Raddish Plus that allows them to access, not just the recipes for that month, but also exclusive recipes on an iPad. That's a progressive web app that is then insolvable on their iPad. And so, that's one like really fun example where their customers can now interact with the store with a brand that's just outside of the storefronts in a Headless capacity, still leveraging recharge, still leveraging Shopify. It's been a really fun project to work on, for sure.

Chase Alderton: So, I think that's a really clear and really easy example of separating these heads out. I know we keep saying, split the heads. So, on the one hand, the subscription is just sending the curated box. So, there's food in there, there's vegetables and fruits and all those kind of things. And a person who already understands how to cook, may take those things and take a food network approach. Let me see, I can build with this thing, but the other piece that they're offering, which is separate from that subscription is now the ability to log in, see these recipes that they're offering and kind of link those two experiences together using one backend, which now shows you, okay, you have the food, we ship that to in a box. Now, this digital side is going to show you exactly what you need and what quantities and what the recipe is. And you can kind of integrate those and leverage those together. Is that fairly accurate?

Scott Knight: Exactly. Yeah. And like you wouldn't necessarily be able to do this if you were just using Shopify CMS. Again, not to [inaudible 00:19:45] Shopify CMS. I think it's good. It's good. But in this case, we needed to like really, really expand upon that content model. Right? You mentioned recipes, there's so much that goes into that and so in this instance, we leverage Contentful. And so, we could really map out and create the content model that we needed and that supports the product, that supports the recipes, that supports everything that is Raddish Plus or in Raddish Kids. And so, you now actually have two separate systems on the back end, you have Shopify and you have Contentful, but one uniform front end. And so, you wouldn't be able to do that if it was again, if it was just say on an e-commerce platform.

Chase Alderton: So, in this example, the Raddish Kids subscription is being managed by Shopify and Recharge. And the Raddish Plus is being managed by Contentful which is the content app that plugs into the backend. So, they can both end up working together in this Headless architecture, but they are different platforms.

Scott Knight: They are, well, I guess, I would say they're different heads, but you know, Raddish, sorry, Raddish Plus is not just Contentful. The content that it surface is Contentful, but it's still very much integrated into Recharge, right? The access, the authentication, does this customer have an active subscription for this month? If yes, approve that access. And so, there's a very close sync with Recharge. There's a very close sync with Shopify. And so, it's hard to, you can't really necessarily say that like Shopify, sorry, Raddish Plus is just Contentful. Because it's still everything. Right. You still have product data coming in. You still have subscription data coming in. You still have Contentful data coming in, but content specifically that's coming from Contentful.

Chase Alderton: So, I'm going to put you on the spot, I'm ask you a couple questions. What could we do that would take this a step further actually, and this doesn't need to be something that Raddish Kid is actually doing, but is something like in person, like cooking event where you bring families together and you can do some platform fair where you can show people what you're doing physically in person. Could you then also run a different head and run some sort of access again where it's like, "Okay, do you have a membership to this? Check, yes. Okay, approved. You can enter. You can not come participate in this thing because you have access to the other pieces." Is that just a different head that you could add?

Scott Knight: Yeah, totally, totally. And that's concept of microsites, right? You can add any number of one, but you don't have to recreate that backend and duplicate that data. It's all coming from a single source of truth and you can have multiple heads. So, that's, that's a perfect example of how you can scale and extend with Headless.

Chase Alderton: Yeah. Awesome. And then it really opens the door for pretty much anything you want because your backend's still going to sink everywhere and you can still manage all your data in one place. So, then it's just opening the door. Like you said, there are NFT options, which I am still learning about. So, I'm not exactly sure. I'm not going to give the example how do that, but you start throwing NFTs in there. We already talked to access. There's in person options. You could open up a storefront and be able to sync all that data on the back end. And each of these are just individual heads.

Scott Knight: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And NFTs, it's something that I understand the technology and everything. I don't know if it's my age, but I just don't get it. The market, I don't get. Why someone would buy a $800 pair of digital shoes, but again that could be my age, but in terms of like the technology behind it, I get, but anyways, tangent-

Chase Alderton: I'll have to do NFT episode and I'll make sure to not have you be the speaker on that episode.

Scott Knight: Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's funny talking with merchants. We are actually working on a couple of NFT projects right now, and it's funny, you learn a whole lot about it as you developing this outs, but just putting myself in the consumer's position, I don't know if I could ever spend money on an image, I guess.

Chase Alderton: We don't [crosstalk 00:24:24] everything, but we'll laugh, as long as we're understanding it, we can see the trend that it's moving in. We'll keep track of it. We'll see if we do an NFT episode the later day.

Scott Knight: There's such a market for it right now. It's super hot. I'm certainly not saying avoid it. I think, take advantage of it, but yeah.

Chase Alderton: Interesting, interesting. Back on track here. I know you had another example or maybe two. Hop on to one more of those examples you had.

Scott Knight: Yeah. On the content side or on the Headless?

Chase Alderton: [crosstalk 00:25:01] brands that you worked with. I know you hit another brand that you've worked with to do Headless, what's on more?

Scott Knight: Yeah. I guess BlendJet is another example [inaudible 00:25:12] recently. They're another Recharge customer too. And so, with them, they have a very rich site. So, we've talked a lot about content and how almost like it's a separate experience, but it doesn't have to be a separate experience. And what I mean by that is blogs and articles, a digital experience. It can very well be accompanied with product, with product detail, and providing a little bit more of a robust experience for customers. And so, with BlendJets, you'll see just a lot of detail at the variant level with many images and videos to really provide a rich experience, not just for their core products, but also for the jet packs that you could subscribe to. And so, it compliments that and there's just a very strong, cross pollination that you can have with content and product. And so, when you think of CMS in content, don't think of those as silos, but something that can compliment one another. And so, I think that's a strong, strong example of that.

Chase Alderton: BlendJet site is gorgeous. So, BlendJet sells like mini blenders, essentially like single serve, single use blenders, not single use, but like single size blenders. And they come a whole bunch of different colors and patterns. And the website's absolutely gorgeous. Every time you click on a new color on product page, it brings up different examples and there's different kind of fruits that match the color, and it shows it blending. And it's a really, really cool site, but it's one of those things that you would look at maybe five or six years ago and think like this site is massive. How is this site pulling in all of these data and images and videos and all this stuff, it's got to be such a slow site, but that's just something you can host on a different, you can host on Contentful, or you can host on a different platform or different head, I guess, and pull that in. And that's kind of another speed benefit, right?

Scott Knight: Yeah. So, the products, product information is all coming from Shopify. Contents is all coming from Contentful. Again, there's some overlap there and then everything is statically generated in advance. So, when you actually come to the site, when a customer, or comes to the site, they're not pinging in the server and the server's coming back with a payload, all of that set up be generated. And so, that right away speeds things up quite a bit, but then also there's some best practices with lazy loading. And so, I think you have like 16 plus videos on the page. We're not hitting those on initial page load. And so, you can really optimize performance and really deliver some really unique experiences. And so, definitely not possible if it was not a progressive web app, if it was built more traditionally.

Chase Alderton: Talk a little bit about this idea of being able to still roam around a page, even if you lose internet access in a Headless.

Scott Knight: Oh yeah. Yeah. So, we've talked about Headless, right? And that is that separation. And, one area of focus is really the head and that head can be, what's called a progressive web app of PWA. And so, really what you can do with the progressive web app, the browser itself has really come a long way. In fact, it's something that Steve Jobs a long time ago had envisioned like the future of apps, right? Not to go on another tangent here, but being suppressed a little bit in that Apple has some ties to the app store because of that 30% tax that they have. But you are seeing like explosive growth in other countries, with progressive web apps and Google and Microsoft are really making a push for it here too.

Scott Knight: And I think Apple slowly come around, but I can relate to them, if it makes me billions of dollars, I wouldn't want to give that up either. But so anyways, with a progressive web app, what you can do is you can actually install the sites locally on your machine, on your phone. And so, it actually looks like a native app when you're on your phone and you're looking through your apps and you can select it. And what's cool is that, you go to the site and let's say, you're going under a tunnel, or like you just lose internet connection, right. We talked about performance and how subsequent page requests are almost instant. It's almost instant because everything is then pretty much cashed and installed on your phone.

Scott Knight: And so, if you put your phone actually in airplane mode and loose connection to your wifi and everything, you can actually still experience the site. You can click around, you can discover products because it doesn't have to make that request to a server. And so, it's super fast. And when you gain that connection back, the only thing that it prevents you from doing is actually making that checkout because that does require a server call, but it is something where the customer can still explore the site, can add things to the cart, can get to that checkout. And then when they have a checkout or when they have signal, it can take you to the checkout page and process the order. So, yeah, making it insolvable is pretty cool.

Chase Alderton: AWS feels like one of those things that in a few years, we're going to look back on this and think like, why was this unique and new? Like, everybody should be doing this.

Scott Knight: Yeah, yeah. It really is. It's a progressive web app. And so you, you think app, so it really does provide that native app like experience, but with the reach of web. And so, you don't have to put your app in a storefront, which used to be valuable, right. Because there's a way to discover apps, but not a whole lot of people shop in the app store. And also, it's just so diluted at this point with so many different apps that you lose that benefit of discovery in the app store. And you still have push notifications with a progressive web app. You might lose out on things if you're skateboarding and you want to know, what sort of flip you did, progressive web app doesn't really have that native app integration, but what storefront does that? So, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty powerful, pretty fast.

Chase Alderton: All right, Scott, a couple closing questions. I want to get some advice from you for growing brands. I have a feeling, I know what the topic is going to be about, but give me a piece of advice for a brand who's a subscription brand who's just launching.

Scott Knight: I promise, I won't say anything about Headless. We've talked about Headless. I've beaten that in. So, perhaps, maybe something fresh, something new. I think the way that you phrase the question is probably the advice I'd give and that is, always be testing. I don't think you're going to hit the nail in the head squarely on the first go. What I mean by that is just do it, take a lean approach and then always just be optimizing. You know, there's ways to optimize on retention strategy, on acquisition. And, don't set it and forget it because more than likely you're leaving money on the table. And so, just always, there's so much that goes into subscription, so just always be testing.

Chase Alderton: So, then let's fast forward, let's assume a brand launched. They are testing. They found what works. They're starting to scale. What's a piece of advice now, a little bit down the road that you would give to a subscription brand who's trying to break through this like 10,000, 100,000 subscriber mark?

Scott Knight: Yeah. I would say it's amazing to me how you have some merchants, even like large merchants that want that, but they still don't have subscriptions as the main focus of messaging, and there's a lot of ways to do it. I guess I would say have that top priority, make your products default to subscription, instead of defaulting to one time buy and subscription, default that to subscription because, and just as like a customer behavior, this sounds really ridiculous. And, how simple I am as a customer, but if it's already pre-selected for me, I almost think, "It's already selected. Do I want to uncheck this? Let's do it, let's subscribe." Versus if it wasn't, it's like, "Do I need to subscribe to this?

Chase Alderton: It's an active choice to get to that point.

Scott Knight: Yeah. Yeah. And it's not like a pre-selected checkbox of like, "Oh, subscribe to our newsletter, that's different, right. And I would also focus on and I think this is probably one of the biggest things that I see is the lack of attention to retention. A lot of focus is really how do we get subscribers? And then, that customer journey after they become a subscriber, which bakes into the retention [inaudible 00:35:23]. What is that experience like for the customer? Is it something where they subscribe and then you're done with them, and then you're just crossing your fingers that hopefully they stay, hopefully they like the product, or are you focusing in on that experience and so they continue to stay with you and then building a loyalty program into that, so that, you're acquiring more customers.

Scott Knight: Again, kind of going back to the rising customer acquisition costs, increasing 50%, like retention is all the more important. And by the way, a lot of this stuff is like low hanging [inaudible 00:36:04] to do with recharge. You know, all of this is out of the box stuff. And so, it's not a complicated, big developer ask.

Chase Alderton: I wasn't going bring that up. I wasn't going to product plug it, but I appreciate you.

Scott Knight: Sorry. I have to, I have to because it's, you see it, well, we can do it.

Chase Alderton: No, I think that's spot on. Retention is such an overlooked piece usually because traditionally commerce, you just look for acquisition because there isn't that built in subscription piece where you're going to purchase again. But, it's been shown time and time again, it's two to three times more expensive to reacquire a customer than it is just to retain them. So, there needs to be that second piece, which is all retention. What do the customers see after they've purchased the first time? Does that change after it gets to a second, third, fourth, fifth purchase? Are there extra gifts? What's the unboxing experience like? All of those things play into retention. And if you're singularly focusing on top of funnel, it's just going to leak out the bottom of funnel. You're going to have to try to find a way to get them right back into the top. So, I think that's a perfect piece of advice.

Scott Knight: Hundred percent. Yep.

Chase Alderton: Final closing question for you. What physical subscription products do you subscribe to?

Scott Knight: Coffee?

Chase Alderton: Lots of coffee. It's an agency [crosstalk 00:37:19].

Scott Knight: Lot of coffee. As you can tell, I've been sipping all through this. Coffee and then I have to give a shout out to Adam [inaudible 00:37:29] Brock over at [inaudible 00:37:31] client of ours, not just me, but I think all the males and males in my family and friends. I think are all a subscriber of at least one product of theirs. And so, coffee and ball wash.

Chase Alderton: I love it. I love it. Opposite ends of the spectrum, but we'll go with it. It seems to make sense. Scott, thank you so much for joining. Really appreciate your time.

Scott Knight: [inaudible 00:37:58] Yeah, likewise. Cheers.

Chase Alderton: We want to thank Scott once again for joining us. If you're interested in Alpha Omega, you can head over to alphaomega.agency. If you're looking for more of our episodes, check us out at rechargepayments.com/hitsubscribe, and to get the latest episodes, remember to hit subscribe on whatever platform you're listening from.

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