Aaron Conant 0:18

Everybody, Happy Wednesday, this is our second panel of the day. We've got two more after this. But I hope everybody enjoyed the first one with Michael, if anybody wants a connection to him, just shoot the team over here and email we can get you connected our brain training partner to network. In the next one that we're going to jump into here is the emergence of shopper 2.0, the next generation of eCommerce. So super interesting space here. You know, I'm talking to 30 or 40 brands a week, to network knowledge, share, see what the top areas of interest are? And a lot of questions around the shopper experience, UX UI, whatever it might be, and especially around what what does it actually look like? And what does it look like at checkout? How does it look across the board? What are the impacts what plays into it, as we've had this massive shift to digital, they're all the massive ecosystems, the Amazons, the Walmarts. You know, the targets, the Alibaba is that kind of handle it all. But also, including on that live stream, he's he's one of the places to play around. Now that we've seen a huge increase over the past 15 months as your own direct consumer site, and what does that look like? So we've got great friends, again, great partners of the network as a whole over a bolt that multiple events with them, hopefully get back to some in person ones as well. Those are super fun, those are coming up in q3. But you know, Greg, I'll kind of kick it over to you. If you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Bolt, that would be awesome. And then we can kind of jump into some of the content. In a quick reminder. We're gonna try and get as many questions as we can answered real time we try to get to all of them. But we don't always have a chance. But anytime you have a question drop in the question section. And we'll, we'll bring it into the conversation as a whole. So Greg, you know, great to hear refund shows on yourself and Bolts, and we can jump into something

Greg Greiner 2:08

that was great. So Hi, everyone. I'm Greg Greiner. I lead the product and design teams at Bolt. And bought is a checkout and identity experience platform. So we're really focusing on both optimizing the end of the funnel experience, but also how you leverage that end of the funnel experience to drive identity creation and drive and create more personalized experiences and enable things like one click Checkout, personalization throughout that funnel and other items, which which I'll be touching on a bit today. And a bit of my background before Bolt. I was at Uber, leading the Uber for Business team for a few years. And then in a past life, I started an eCommerce brand called Bob's Watches, which is still around and doing relatively well today. And so that was one of the things that attracted me to Bolt in the first place was having been a retailer myself and gone through a lot of the challenges that we're now trying to solve at scale. It was really interesting to take that perspective and try and apply some of that experience to how we can solve these issues with technology. So that's my intro, and then we can dive right in.

Aaron Conant 3:26

Let's dive in just you know how to call more people. Dial and if you have questions along the way, I just drop into the question section there you can always email me Aaron aaron@bwgConnect.com easiest way to feel them is via the Questions section there in the GoToWebinar panel. But yeah, let's let's jump into it. Awesome.

Greg Greiner 3:45

Yeah. So I think overall, we're going to be, as Aaron mentioned, talking about the emergence of shopper 2.0, and how things are changing in the next generation of eCommerce. And as everyone knows, a lot has changed over the past 12 months and is continuing to change moving forward in the eCommerce space with things like it was obviously in the pandemic and the digital transformation that happened with that and brands focusing a lot more on their their digital presences. But also things like social the emergence of social commerce and how that's been changing space, as well as some of the changes that Google and Apple and others have been going through from a privacy standpoint. And what that means for independent retailers as well. And so we wanted to kick things off by sharing a few stats that will kind of come full circle and connect us back to the the broader message around personalization, but overall, personalization and ownership of those customer relationships and seamless experiences are increasingly important both for consumers so like this stat from Accenture, about 91% of consumers being more likely to buy companies who remember them and provide relevant offers, but but also, obviously to retailers as well. Retailers, as people are moving online see online as an extension of their brand and the ownership of those online relationships is is incredibly important. And being able to recreate as much as possible that in store personalized experience becomes a much bigger priority. And a place where retailers over time can can find ways to differentiate themselves from more big box experiences that are less targeted or less specific to whatever product or service that the end customer is buying. And I think that the trends that I mentioned earlier, have made all of this even more important trade, the pandemic has made the the the online police much more important and personalization, much more important. The Privacy changes of Google and Apple have made personalization much more challenging as you can't, it's much harder to attract users across website. And similarly, with social commerce, it's provided a whole new channel, but a whole new way that retailers have to think about how they interact and represent themselves to their end customer. And so what what both has found is that really the the long term solution to solving the challenges in providing these more personalized experiences, is through identity and is through basically turning more of your guests, anonymous shoppers, into known customers who you can provide, you can gather data on you can provide those personalized experiences, you can provide those more rewarding, engaging, membership focused even experiences over time. And that's something that that can be incredibly challenging in today's landscape as shoppers are shopping across multiple brands and having to manage those identities across multiple brands. And so that's something we spend a lot of time thinking about and how to solve in a more scalable way. Yeah,

Aaron Conant 7:18

I mean, I think a lot of it, I think is, you know, how do brands, I mean, feel don't want to necessarily mimic the Amazon, you know, you know, feel of the website. Yeah. But the the Amazon experience from pay, they know who I am, they know my past purchases, they they have my credit card information. You know, it's an easy Checkout, they have my address. I mean, I think a big part of it is right. I don't want to be Amazon, but I don't just want to sell through Amazon, how do I own that? But then how do I mimic that trust and the feel? That's really the reason besides the one in two day delivery, which he installed for the different segments that we saw before? But, you know, what does that look? And what does that feel like? And how do I mimic it so that I get them coming back? And these are, I mean, these are encouraged, if anything, these are encouraging stats for me to see. You know, because a lot of people were thinking all with Amazon, and they dominate is that the death of the brand, you know, is there can be so many, you know, counterfeits coming in or third party sellers. You know, this says, No, it's not the death of a brand. It's actually if they do it right 91% of the time that people are going to come back and they love it. So is that kind of what you guys are seeing as well.

Greg Greiner 8:33

Yeah, totally agree. And as kind of Amazon strategy has shifted, and you seem like originally, Amazon focused a lot on price as their core differentiator. And people were coming to Amazon because they felt it was the cheapest option. But over time, as Amazon has built up these consumer experiences and this trust and this knowledge that when I go to Amazon, they'll know me, they'll have my information, I'll be able to reorder things easily, I'll be able to track my orders easily. All of the above, I even logged in to Amazon the other day and was looking for something for my card and said, Hey, this doesn't work for your car, we captured that at some point earlier in your journey with us. And that's something that that is incredibly powerful, right being to be able to provide that level of personalization based on what they know about you. And and that's the main reason shoppers are returning to Amazon now it's no longer price, right? It's that consistent experience that Amazon is able to provide.

Aaron Conant 9:30

So quick question comes in, and maybe we're going to get to it. I think it's just you know, from the previous, you know, talk around, you know, Omni channels a whole seamless omnichannel experience, you know, what do you mean by that is the question. And maybe you're going to get to it and we should just jump into some more of this.

Greg Greiner 9:47

I think we can we can speak to it. So I think it's generally the connection between online and offline. Right and especially with with more and more retailers, not just going online but investing more in online. Find that connection becomes even more important. And being able to follow the customer through their online journey to their offline journey becomes more important and being able to create experiences that can transcend both of those. So I buy something online, I want to go return it in store, or vice versa. Being able to do that in a seamless way, I buy something online, and I want to be rewarded for it with my store based loyalty program. Things like that are incredibly important in this kind of hybrid world we've we've found ourselves in. And so that's what we mean by being able to offer that like multi seamless multi channel experience, regardless of where shoppers are experiencing the brand and the products. Awesome. Love it. Love it. Cool, so we can jump to the next slide. So I think when you think about how you provide, as I mentioned that personalization, there's two key points we'll be touching on today. One is around checkout. And and how you actually take kind of what is the default today for most online retail, which is this guest Checkout, anonymous checkout guest experience, and turn those into accounts that can be reused, that that shoppers use on a regular basis to be able to have that more known customer member type experience with the brands. And then the second is around, especially as you as all these channels emerge, and all these different kind of opportunities to find customers emerge. How do you think about owning and retaining that customer data so that you can leverage it to provide those experiences specific to your brand?

Aaron Conant 11:49

Awesome, low. And just a reminder, you know, as people have questions along the way, drop them into the Questions tab, they're more than happy to get as many of those answered as possible. So don't hesitate to drop them into there.

Greg Greiner 12:02

Sure. So I think if you click next, maybe we're missing a heading here or something, but I'm just not translated through me to speak to it as well. Or you can go back to the previous slide.

Unknown Speaker 12:20

incur that next. Okay, here we go. There we go.

Greg Greiner 12:23

So I think one of the things that we're we really have seen start to pull lift proliferate, as people are trying to create that Amazon experience is a pretty fragmented experience, where shoppers have all of these different options, all of these different identities to keep track of. And in most cases, when they're presented with these options, they have multiple of them, right? They may have, they likely have an account with Amazon, they likely have an account with either Google or Apple, many people likely at PayPal, or Venmo. And so there's this huge fragmentation going on. And it creates a lot of cognitive overhead for the shopper to understand what's going to be their best experience, what is the recommended experience. And it also, in a lot of cases, remove some of the ability for the retailer to focus on the experience they want to create on their brand, where you're logging in and using your PayPal account instead of logging in and using a retailer account, and creating that kind of consistent experience from from a specific retailer perspective. And so that's one of the challenges, we see that that will kind of continue to happen as more and more of these different accounts and ways to pay, continue to proliferate, that people really need to be thoughtful about how how these things are presented, how they integrate into their broader kind of identity and personalization and shopper strategy. And how you make sure that it's easy for customers to understand which options to use and when and what's going to be best for them.

Aaron Conant 14:02

It's really, it's interesting, as you bring this point up, because I think it was like payments.com did a kind of a study, what's the number of checkout or payment options at checkout? And the average was like, eight, I think eight or nine. I don't necessarily call it but it was incredibly high, where you get the NASCAR lineup right of different payment solutions at checkout. And so if the any any thoughts that might impact as a whole? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 14:32

I mean, definitely like

Greg Greiner 14:33

the the assumption is like, hey, it's all additive, right? And I think like, hey, if someone's using it, it's it's additive. But I think that's an assumption. We're challenging and understanding here. What it what is that the result of that a B test if we offer these options versus we don't and how much of the the adoption of some of these options is actually incremental business versus not. And that's something that's worth really, really diving into an understanding better as a retailer because there are going to be especially for you, for an individual retailer different payment options accounts that are going to resonate differently for your specific use case. So just because generally XYZ payment option works works well, that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be a creative as a creative to your business. So it's definitely just something worth being thoughtful about. And looking at those adoption numbers and understanding how much of how much what is that trade off of kind of the cognitive load versus the versus the benefit that you see from from some of that adoption as well.

Aaron Conant 15:41

Awesome. So another question comes in. from a technology standpoint, you know, what technology can can retailers leverage to differentiate their brand? Right from from the competition as a whole? I think that people are, they're looking for ways to set themselves apart to be that brand to be, you know, the retailer or to be, you know, the point of sale that people gravitate towards that they, you know, find value from and they return to? You know,

Greg Greiner 16:12

yeah, I think our perspective is, is that looking for technology solutions, that, like I mentioned earlier, really convert, allow them to help convert unknown shoppers, to recognizable known shoppers is an incredibly important piece of that technology landscape. And so there are a lot of solutions out there that are working to solve those problems, whether they be of the shopping carts themselves, or other types of similar types of solutions. But it is it is a really, really big challenging problem. And I guess, specifically as it pertains to all these payment options, I think over time, there have also been a strong proliferation of aggregators, like what admin is doing, or checkout comm or some of these others from a payment method perspective, that allow you to more easily trial, these different options without investing a ton from a technology standpoint, because they own that infrastructure layer. It's also something that that Bolt does as well. And that allows you to be a little bit more thoughtful, where it feels less like I just spent six months trying to implement this installment payments provider, it's really hard to then say, well, let's a be tested and see if it's actually impactful. It feels like something that needs to be a like, what we say Bolt as a one way door decision, like you make the decision and you keep going versus a two way door. And I think some of these technologies that make those integrations easier, make it much more of a two way door where you can look at what the impact is, and make those decisions in real time and see what's best for your business.

Aaron Conant 17:56

Awesome. Love it. Love it. Yeah, just remain in keep traveling questions, we'll get a masters.

Greg Greiner 18:05

So I'm just starting on the first one first time checking account creation. If you go to the next slide, obviously check out his his eliminate bias bias view but incredibly important, right? It's the point of purchase is where people are really completing their transaction. And it's also a place where a lot of people drop off. So first and foremost, it's incredibly important to have an optimized checkout experience that really focuses on enabling that person to transact with the fewest number of inputs with the fastest if possible experience through that through that flow with the right payment options presented at the right times. And so that's just something that generally worth being thoughtful about. But as it pertains to the topic of converting guest users to accounts one thing that that we realize as we are starting to build our checkout platform is that everything that you need to create an account for for a shopper is entered during the checkout process, right the the address they want to say of their email or phone number, their payment details, whether that be a card or an alternate payment option that they want to save. And so instead of trying to have a separate registration experience that that's completely bifurcated from the guest checkout flow or like having that typical kind of account wall where you say hey, do you want to use guest checkout or do you want to use the the logged in experience having that be really one experience and having those two things be melded together where at during this cash checkout flow, I'm presented with the option to create an account and and don't need to add any additional information. I just need to make that one decision. Making it so easy makes it a lot easier to step for someone who maybe is on the fence, right? They're saying, My gonna be back to this retailer, am I gonna be actually able to use this account, the easier it is, the more likely someone is to pull that trigger and make that decision. And one thing that that is that makes this possible is kind of the relatively new trend towards one time password based authentication. So instead of asking someone to create a password and create an account, you can actually just use the identifying information they're giving you as part of checkout and use that as the identifier authentication mechanism where you can send a one time password to their email and phone number. And the other thing that that does is allows you to remove that attack vector of passwords from a security standpoint, right? Most security breaches are either passwords being stolen or passwords being stolen somewhere else that are then reused at different sites that people then go farm out across different areas. And, and so that whole attack vector is gone when you when you use one time passwords and kind of move towards this Password Plus way of thinking about accounts in general.

Aaron Conant 21:16

So a quick question that comes in, and there's a couple that come in, what's the balance? How does one find the right balance between offering a sufficient number of it? So this is going to be the payment options? Yeah, versus overwhelming the customer? And how does that then, you know, fit in with the checkout experience as a whole? And that goes in with another question that comes in around, you know, what impact is the speed of checkout have on overall conversion rate? Because I think people are saying, how do you balance number of options worth the speed of Checkout, where you know, I don't want them to get hung up on the shopping cart, or like I forget it, you know, I don't want to I don't want to create a new account. I just wanted the product. Yeah, I

Greg Greiner 21:59

think it's very retailer dependent. And I think you have to take a look at the audience and the products you're selling and what's going to be most relevant. But there is definitely a threshold by which you're kind of not adding more creative value by adding more options. And I think there are also ways to do this creatively where there may be a very small percentage of your customer base who is very attached to a certain method of payment. And maybe that method of payment is not front and center in the process and not a distraction, but it's accessible, right for so for those people who are extremely passionate about paying via acth, or whatever that kind of more uncommon way of paying is for a specific use case, you still make that that accessible. But it's not something that distracts the average customer who that's completely irrelevant for where they might go down a weird path and be like, oh, what's a CH like, is this something I should consider and then end up dropping because they get distracted, or it ends up kind of taking them down a wrong path. And I think speed is, is there. And there's been a bunch of studies on this. But speed is very correlated with conversion, right? The faster things load, the faster you can get through them, the more likely someone is to convert. And I think as a lot of shopping has continued to shift to mobile, that's become even more prevalent where on a desktop, you can be somewhat certain you have someone's attention right there, they maybe they can jump from thing to thing, but they're sitting somewhere looking at a desktop computer, and mobile, someone could be in line at the bank or doing something else and just shopping on the fly. And they don't finish it fast enough, they get called off to their other thing that they're doing and they're gone. Right, they don't remember that that experience. And I've found myself doing that on a relatively regular occasion, as well. And so that's where speed ends up becoming even more important. And when you think about these alternate payment options, right, you need to think about the balance of speed, in which case, sometimes they're helping, sometimes they're hurting, right, because they're adding a bunch of extra steps. We're have to authenticate and go in, depending on the user experience from a speed perspective. But there's also the trust factor, right? I think PayPal in particular has has created a really strong identity from a shopper perspective around trust. And I think what we've seen from some of our shopper research, is that a lot of shoppers choose PayPal, not because they they think it'll be a faster experience, but because they trust PayPal, and they feel that that's someone who they trust with their payment information, especially when shopping in a retailer for the first time. So I think those are all the factors you need to consider and think through like what is the intent? Why is someone using this payment method? And then what is the How is the data playing out when I when I run these experiments and see what what's going to drive the best kind of short term gains in terms of conversion and average order value in long term gains in terms of customer lifetime value. Awesome. Yeah. Love it.

Aaron Conant 25:03

In the UC in May the head of the the the correlation between checkout flow checkout speed and conversion rate, is there a direct correlation there that you guys have found?

Greg Greiner 25:17

The ad there is and that's something we've we've seen pretty consistently is the faster something is the the generally speaking the higher conversion is I think there is a line need to consider though and that. And it's something that I think Amazon discovered as well. It's like it can be too fast, right? It can be so fast that it ends up in people making mistakes or purchasing these really didn't want to purchase and increasing refunds or lowering costs, like shopper lifetime value. And so you need to not be like so laser focused on just conversion and not look at the kind of secondary metrics is because then you can go down that path. And I think that the Amazon example is they released that like true one click experience a few years back where you literally just on the page, click and it ships, the ships the product to you. And they quickly rolled it back. And now it's something where you have to like enable it in your settings if you want to have that on. And that was due to that challenge, right? It was it was too fast. There was something worse that people were frequently making mistakes. And it was causing a poor, even though like conversion was way higher. It was causing a poor customer experience. And thus, like the second order impact on on people's loyalty to that brand. We're being affected.

Aaron Conant 26:37

Alright, yeah, that I think that's where it was at, right? A lot of times people just add stuff to cart to save it for later. And when that add to cart button is now one click Buy. Not the best customer experience. Awesome. Alright, we can jump back to the slide deck you

Greg Greiner 26:57

go to Yeah, if we can jump to the next slide, talking about the one click Checkout experience. So I think as you're kind of thinking about how you increase the registration rate to how many shoppers are you actually converting into into accounts and non shoppers. The second part of that is how you leverage those accounts. And specifically, I think one of the most important and first things to be thinking about is how you create that really seamless return shopper checkout experience, right? That's one of the main benefits of creating an account. And we've seen that play out in in consumer research as well is if people are looking for that that fast experience where you have my address, you have my payment, I can check out very easily. But one of the things that people often don't realize is that it's like getting someone to create an account is half the battle, right, you actually need to get them to use that account. And to get them to use that account, you need them to remember that they have an account, often like choose to sign in and kind of the traditional case. And then remember their password, right. And these can be cases where I create an account 612 months ago when I last purchased on this individual retailer. And so all of those things may be untrue. And I may just kind of default to the guest checkout experience and lose both that benefit but also lose that tie from a retailer perspective of the customer and order data back to that identity. And so how we recommend approaching this and how can a Bolt’s core checkout product works is doing things to automatically identify shoppers based on what you know about them and encourage them to go into that logged in experience. So based on their their device based on their phone number, or based on their email, we're saying hey, you're your returning shopper, we recommend you log in. And then like I mentioned previously, using a one time password based flow, so I don't need to remember my password, I can just check my phone and check my email, type in that one time password and be logged in. And then I gain that one click Checkout experience, again that my orders are all tied to my identity I can do order tracking and remember my previous orders, I gain all those benefits that come with an account without having to remember have that account or remember where the Sign In button is or remember my password. And then I think the second part of that is obviously want to create an ID to the point I made earlier and incredibly seamless experience for those those users where they can check out very quickly. But you also want to do it in a thoughtful way so that it's not surprising when people understand what's happening. They understand what the decision they're making. And you're kind of trading off that balance of speed and optimization versus the benefit of fast converting experience as well.

Aaron Conant 29:53

Awesome, love it. Just remind people can drop questions in the Questions tab or keep emailing them to me, Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com

Greg Greiner 30:05

so kind of to round this out, is if you can establish from from various surveys and things that we've done. The reality is most shoppers prefer to check out with the customer account, right? So it's not like people are like guest checkout is the default experience because it's what shoppers prefer, and they want to be anonymous and they want to be unknown. It's really these other challenges that result in guest checkout being the default, and most shoppers do do want that easier experience. And then in addition to that, like I mentioned, previously, shoppers, see the ease of checkout and that one click Checkout experience as the main reason to create an account. So this was the on the list of items, 23% of people, which was the highest saw that is the main reason for creating an account with rewards and loyalty being being close, it's close second to that. And then the last thing is, when you when when shoppers are considering the option to create an account, security and privacy actually play a much greater role than the benefits that they get from that account, right. So they don't feel that for whatever reason, the experience is trustworthy, their their information will be protected and safe. Their information won't be misused, they're much less likely to create an account versus having a bunch of discounts or loyalty or rewards associated with that account creation. So that's also something that's, that's super important to keep in mind.

Aaron Conant 31:35

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. I mean, if you look at the 65% of shoppers, temporary checkout with customer account, I mean, going back to the original site, people value, they're thinking, Hey, I'm going to get a better experience. Overall, I'm willing to set up this account so that I can keep coming back here over and over again. The question that comes in is around the 23% of sobre. Su si ease of checkout is the main reason to create an account does Bolt take the place of creating an account in account?

Greg Greiner 32:04

Yeah, so and we'll talk about this a little bit later in the in the deck as well. But Bolt provides a, an identity or an account that is global and lives across our retailer network. But in addition to that, that global identity is with a product that we've actually just released, called SSO commerce, linked into the underlying identity of the retailer. So I'm creating a Bolt identity, I'm also creating an identity on the shopping cart platform or within the retailer system. And when I sign into my Bolt identity, I'm signing into that retailers underlying system as well. So you kind of get the benefit of both worlds, right? You get the ability to have one identity and one login system instead of many from a shopper perspective, while also getting the benefits of those very retailer specific logged in experiences, whether it be specific pricing, rewards, or loyalty, etc, that that retailers are optimizing around from unknown returning customer perspective. Awesome. Love it. And so yeah, kind of rounding this out how both accounts and I've kind of spoke to this a little bit based on the question fit into this story. It's something where we we've kind of created what we feel is the ideal account experience for shoppers where it's really easy to register, they don't have a password, they don't have a username, they can easily save all their information and reuse it. And the results are pretty strong, right? So we see a much higher 64% higher conversion rate for people who are using the one one click Login experience versus the typical guest Checkout, we see over half of shoppers actually choose to create an account at checkout, which is a lot higher than than the standard. and choosing that to create that account gives you that one click experience not just on one individual retailer, but across the whole network. And this is all powered by one time password based authentication. And the ability for Bolt to to tokenize that shoppers payment information and reused across the network regardless of what the underlying retailer is using for payments, right. So it's not like shop pay, for instance, which only works on Shopify payments. It's something that can work regardless of how you choose to operate as a retailer regardless of what the underlying payment processor or payment vendor is.

Aaron Conant 34:33

processing is both us and international.

Greg Greiner 34:37

Were us focus but we do support international as well. Awesome blood. So now jumping to that second second topic is of kind of retaining customer data, and being able to reuse that customer data as kind of some of these aggregated trends Like shop pay, for instance, or like social commerce with with Facebook and Instagram I've been doing, it becomes even more important to think about how you're able to identify your customers, how you're able to, to kind of connect all of those different transactions together those different pieces of activity together to create a customer profile, to be able to provide those personalized experiences. And some of these trends are making it more challenging. And that was a problem that we saw with Bolt when when originally, our Bolt accounts system was separate and kind of a layer on top, it wasn't at all connected to the retailer's underlying account system. And so we weren't necessary, other than the one click Checkout experience, we weren't supporting retailers in their journey in their desire to create more engaging, personalized experiences, we were still adding value, but it wasn't connected to that initiative. And so that's where the the concept of both SSL commerce came from. So if you can hop to the next slide. Really the the problem that that we saw as we were talking to retailers, is that it's really hard to register shoppers through accounts. And the typical account network shop, a pay pal, etc. Don't actually connect into retailers accounts. And then from a shopper standpoint, right, I look at the stat 20% of shoppers have seven or more retail accounts, right? managing all those accounts is incredibly challenging, right, I need to write passwords across all the, like I mentioned, you need to remember have them. And those experiences can all be very diverse and confusing. And not a consistent. And so this is kind of the lifecycle that we were trying to solve is both for shoppers, how we can how can we make that a lot easier, a lot more seamless from a technology standpoint? And then for retailers? How can we leverage our shopper accounts network to actually create more engaging experiences, allow them to create store accounts, etc? versus having those two concepts be completely separate?

Aaron Conant 37:15

Yeah, no, I think everybody relates to this, right here, which is, you know, every single one I log into, and I don't remember the last time I updated the password, because I only shot there once every six months. You know, there's a security barrier, I got to go in, update my password. If I'm at that stage, if I'm not sitting in a desktop, I'm probably not, you know, hitting the Reset Password now and going through a mobile device. How do you tie all of this together? I mean, these are interesting problems that people didn't concern that, you know, they were concerned with, you know, 15 to 18 months ago. But now, the shift to digital and there's such a larger portion of the pie to go after in the digital space versus brick and mortar. Now, I think it's more relevant for a lot of brands. Awesome.

Greg Greiner 38:02

Yeah. And I think like we talked about at the beginning, when you think about what makes experiences like Amazon unique, it's really that that identity and account space experience and that membership based experience. And you can only really do that if you're able to identify customers at scale. There you go, I really do that if if you're shifting from the majority of your transactions being a guest experience, the majority of them being a logged in known shopper experience. And I think that in the past that challenges caused retailers to focus a lot on user acquisition and rewarding first time shoppers, and doing that at the cost of not spending as much time on, on thinking about how you reward and personalize for your attorney shoppers, because it's been so hard to to turn those returning shoppers into people that you actually can reward and then have an identity around because of the challenges we've been talking about. And so kind of to speak to what what SSO is, like I mentioned, it's our path at saying, Hey, we have this experience where you can make it a lot easier to register for an account. You have a global identity where you don't need to remember passwords and accounts across multiple experiences. But how do we actually connect that into a retailer's existing tech stack surrounding accounts and enable it such that like I mentioned, when I register and checkout, I'm not just registering for that global Bolt identity, but I'm also registering for the underlying retailers account system. And when I log into my Bolt account, I'm not just logging into my Bolt account for one click Checkout when I'm also logging into that underlying retailers account system. And so we've created that such that those authentication mechanisms are tied, and we serve as kind of a single sign on type experience that lives on top of the the retailer's account system where You can use your Bolt account to authenticate into your underlying retailer account. And one of the big benefits here is, is in a lot of cases, right, someone may have a Bolt account that lands on the store has never been to this retailer before. And with one click, they can then have an identity and create an account on that retailer using the information already on their bullets account without having to go through an arduous signup process. And so this is kind of towards towards the end goal of creating a more unified shopper identity. That is retailer first, right is thinking about how we do this from a perspective that's really not focused on the accounts network itself, but focused on how you leverage that account network to to empower individual retailers to create these more engaging experiences. And it's something that that, like we've talked about is just becoming increasingly important, as some of these trends continue to push forward like Google and Apple's privacy changes that that removes some of the ability to track shoppers cross site anonymously, like things like social commerce that are potentially removing some of those connections back to the to the retailer and having the retailer have access to that shopper data. So this is something that we feel is going to be a continuing trend and something that, especially with the move to online, people, we're spending a lot more time thinking about how to shift to these more kind of logged in and shopper experiences.

Aaron Conant 41:37

I love it. I mean, it's it has to be addressed at this point in time, right? It's nearly table stakes. I jumped to the last slide here. And then we've got a few more questions that came in that I want to make sure that we get addressed. And so let's, let's, I'm gonna, I'm going to go through some of these questions that came in and we can jump to these key takeaway. Sounds good. Sounds good. So the first one is, he says, Yeah, your survey is unclear. an earlier question. Is the survey data in responses? Is it for international customers or local customers referring to the percentages shown on the previous slide? So was it more of a US

Greg Greiner 42:17

phone, it was a US us focused survey. So there definitely is a snapshot at one particular segment. And those those, obviously International, especially with the proliferation of some of the more prevalent international alternate payment methods of payment, is a bit of a unique and different story. And with the kind of privacy laws and GDPR, and things like that, that are happening there, there are different ways of slicing the same, same concept.

Aaron Conant 42:48

Awesome, love it. The next one is we just talked a lot about retailers as a whole does boat work with product, you know, brand direct consumer websites, or just retailers.

Greg Greiner 42:59

So we definitely work with with brands as well in a variety of contexts, both in terms of supporting their direct to consumer efforts and eCommerce efforts. But also, as we we have started to make our own technology a bit more extensible and platform eyes, we've been starting to work with some brands on their experiences of selling products, that that originate from their own site, but the actual checkout is elsewhere. So this is kind of a new concept we've been developing called remote checkout where I can say hey, I'm on a direct to consumer on Wrigley's looking at gum, but really the only place I can purchase it is Target. How can you actually make that make that purchase experience on Wrigley's.com and not make the person jump over to target but still have the fulfillment process happen through Target. That's something we've been, in part working on in partnership with some of these direct to consumer brands who don't have as much of an eCommerce present yet presence yet.

Aaron Conant 44:02

Awesome. Loving it, anybody wants a connection 100% with a follow up conversation with a team at ball, they're great friends, partners, the network come highly recommended from you know, tons of brands in the network across the board. impactful, you know, in total, you know, conversion, UX, UI, customer satisfaction, all that fun stuff, just hear fantastic things. So what I encourage everybody have a follow up conversation for sure. You know, bring sorry, if I just pull up your calendar that people you know, reach out afterwards. Next question that comes in and then we're going to kind of probably jump to key takeaways, you know, advantages of Bolt versus fast versus PayPal versus, you know, you know, go on and on list them. Yeah,

Greg Greiner 44:46

so I think there's probably two different categories, I think advantages versus Bolt versus Pay Pal and these other alternative payment methods, but that's where one Bolt is focusing on being really integrated into the core checkout experience, right? So instead of being an alternative where I have to choose to use it, I have to go through this separate flow and pop up experience and then come back and finish my checkout process. Both the registration of accounts and the use of accounts is very fundamentally integrated into that experience. And like with things like SSL commerce, we're focused on doing all that in a way that's very merchant first and thinking about the merchants tech stack and how we integrate deeply into that. So that we're not just kind of adding on this experience. But actually supplementing and creating a combined experience, it's much better. And then for for fast, I think they're looking and trying to solve a lot of the same problems. They're a little bit more focused on SMB today and moving up market. And so we're constantly looking at some of the work that they're doing. But they've also at least at the onset, taken more of an alternative payment approach. Right. So instead of being the checkout experience, that it's an option. And so that that's somewhat fundamentally different from from how Bolt is approaching things, which is more focused onintegrating or being in that core checkout experience. Awesome. Well,

Aaron Conant 46:22

yeah. So let's jump over to kind of key takeaways, if you want to walk us through this, and then we can kind of wrap up right on time and stay on course.

Greg Greiner 46:30

Awesome. So yeah, I think main things right customers want more personalized experiences. That's how some of the big box, online retailers like Amazon have been able to differentiate, and it's becoming more and more of the consumer expectation. And at the same time, retailers, and merchants and brands want ownership of those customer relationships directly. And they want to be able to provide those experiences directly. And with that, retailers really want to be focusing on how to create those seamless omni channel experiences, where online, offline, social, everything is well connected. And it's not enough disparate experiences, depending on where you're looking at products. And then as you think about how to solve these from a checkout standpoint, right, focusing on converting guest checkouts to accounts focusing on converting those anonymous users to known users, thinking about how in those models and when you're using these alternate options for payment, how you're earning and retaining customer data, and then leveraging those identities in that customer data to create personalized experiences for those returning shoppers.

Aaron Conant 47:40

Awesome. Well, Greg, you know, thanks so much for your time today. Always a great big thank you to you and the whole team for being such great friends, partners, supporters of so many brands in the network as a whole. Really appreciate you know, your time today, all the insights and again, you know, anybody on the line today, if you want to follow up conversation more than happy to connect you with Greg and the team over there. They're all around, you know, digital experts have a great feel on on checkout flow. And I'm sure more than happy to jump on the phone with you and kind of walk through best practices, do analysis on your site as a whole though it's worth worth the time spent for sure. Um, and with that, we're gonna wrap this up 151 you know, thanks again, Greg. We're gonna take a brief break here. We'll be back at 2pm Eastern Time. Coming up next, we're going to have navigating successful end to end customer journeys for global commerce and retail. So with Adobe Bonnie's team from Coca Cola is going to be an awesome all around panel for sure. That we're going to kind of wrap it up here. Alright, thanks again, Greg or anything.