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Expand Your Offering and Channels With Carro

David Perry is the Co-founder and CEO of Carro, a leading collaborative commerce platform that assists brands, retailers, and influencers in boosting their sales. He is a Northern Irish video game developer, programmer, and entrepreneur who founded Shiny Entertainment and Gaikai, both acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment.

David was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering from Queen’s University, Belfast, and a master’s in game development from Westwood College. He is an esteemed keynote speaker who has presented at various events, including TED, E3, Hollywood and Games, Digital Hollywood, 3D Gaming Summit, and Casual Connect.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[02:36] David Perry talks about Carro and its benefits
[06:10] How influencers can thrive using Carro
[11:03] The process of working with Carro as a brand, retailer, or influencer
[13:28] David explains product pricing control at Carro
[16:10] How much do an influencer and supplier receive using Carro?
[28:17] Carro’s ideal brand profile
[31:18] What brands should expect when working with influencers
[38:28] Who owns the customer records?
[40:36] David talks about Carro’s pricing model
[43:08] Which types of brand categories does Carro work with?

In this episode…

In today’s fast-evolving technological landscape, it is essential for brands to establish an online presence to boost sales. But how can they effectively achieve this and succeed in the competitive world of online retail?

Many e-commerce platforms can help build an online store, but they may not drive enough traffic to scale in the online space. Instead, entrepreneurs can leverage available brand networks and distribute their products in various online stores and through retailers and influencers who can help direct traffic and generate orders passively. David Perry shares his journey helping connect online retailers and influencers, enabling them to extend their reach, diversify their product offerings, and craft compelling, personalized customer experiences.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Pat Yates sits down with David Perry, Co-founder and CEO of Carro, to discuss how brands can thrive online. David talks about Carro and what it does, the process of working with Carro as a brand, retailer, or influencer, the control of product pricing, and who owns the customer records.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:07

Hi folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals

Pat Yates 0:32

Hello, everyone, welcome back to the Quiet Light Podcast is Pat Yates sitting in for Joe Valley. Today I have David Perry with Get Carro and this is going to be a fascinating conversation. If you’re trying to find ways for your products to be distributed on different stores and through other people that can go out and push traffic and sell through their site and you get orders in a sort of a passive way. This is an amazing system because it helps you match up with people. So David Perry is really an amazing entrepreneur. He has been in the video game industry for over 30 years for a lot of games. He’s Atari and Sony have bought his companies which are obviously really good ones. I remember days of playing Atari, you got to be old enough to remember Atari. I’m not even aging myself on that one. Anyway, his new company has investors like PayPal building collaborative commerce, they help brands increase awareness, sales and raise investment and get acquired or go public. They have over 28,000 brands installed and they have influenced or celebrities as brands as well. This is going to be really exciting because I think that the more that you look at this, the more ideas you get of people that you could go out and be able to have them list your products on their sites and help you increase your traffic and sales. So we’re gonna get right to it here with David Perry should be a fun conversation. Hey, David, it’s great to have you on the Quiet Light Podcast today. How you doing?

David Perry 1:55

Great. Thanks for inviting me.

Pat Yates 1:57

Absolutely, man, I’m so fascinated to talk about this. It’s really interesting, because when I rewind my history, I did a license oddly with Snooki back in 2008, sort of by accident, sort of in a social situation with my company that I own. And ever since then I’ve sort of been fascinated with influencers and how you find them who are the best ones. And you sort of created a unique way to be able to look at this and take your brand and kind of take it forward. So I’m excited to talk about this today. But maybe the best thing you can do on is to tell us a little bit about Get Carro and what your business is overall, just as an overview from a 30,000-foot view.

David Perry 2:36

Yeah, well, I might say originally from the video game industry. And so to me, what the heck am I doing in e-commerce? And the answer is because we saw pretty big opportunity and video games are big, multi-billion dollars. But e-commerce is in the trillions of dollars. So we thought this would be interesting to see if we could do anything to help. And we simply looked at retail and said, well, how does it work for retail, if I make a protein bar, and I get that protein bar into Whole Foods, I’m so excited because I’m getting to enjoy the whole foods audience. If we then got it into Costco and Walmart and Target, we’d literally be hugging each other because we’ve succeeded. And so then we thought, well, who’s doing that for you online, like who’s helping you get your products into as many online stores as possible? Because that seems to be one of the core problems with e-commerce is getting attention, there’s these platforms, Shopify, Bigcommerce, WooCommerce, Salesforce, Commerce cloud, they all do the same thing, they help you build an island. And then it’s up to you to get the Internet to visit your island. And that’s actually kind of hard. And there’s a lot of people as you know, can you can actually build a store and have zero traffic, and there’s a lot of people die trying to get the attention to their store. So the thought was, is there any way we could possibly help with this? Because there’s not a single brand on planet Earth that doesn’t want more attention every day? Like, have you ever met a brand that’s like, please, no more attention. It doesn’t happen. And so I thought was what can we do to help? Can we get brands to collaborate with each other in some way? So the first brand we reached out to was a bicycle brand that didn’t sell helmets. And we said to them, like, this is kind of weird. You’re not selling helmets. And they said, We don’t make helmets, we make the bikes. And we’re like that’s not a good answer, because they’re gonna go to Amazon and buy the helmet. And if you were just include the helmets in your store, your average order value, we are certainly will increase and your lifetime value of your customers, which unlocks your marketing, which lets you bring more people to your island. And so they tried it. And of course, their AOV went up and then they came back to us saying, Do you have gloves by any chance? Do you have bike locks and do all this other stuff? So what we effectively do is we take any amounts of suppliers that you want to work with, and we wire them directly into your store. So instead of you trying to guess which colors and sizes of helmets and buying pallets of them and storing them in your warehouse. Instead, we just give you their entire inventory. It’s a bit like dating, if they say, yes, they want to work with you, then you get their entire inventory available to you. And you can just merchandise those products as you like. But that means you have all the colors and all the sizes. And you can actually work out what your audience wants versus you trying to guess what sizes you should be stocking. So hopefully..

Pat Yates 5:26

Well, that kind of makes sense. It’s really interesting, because in the past, when I sort of looked at licensing, and I sort of rolled that over to influencers always tried to create things around them that they can be passionate about. But sometimes it’s about adding other products, you know, and being able to have a wider scope that might help sell too. So I’ll tell you what, let’s start from maybe the creator side. So let’s just assume that someone out there is a pseudo-influencer, maybe they’re small, they want to make a few 100 bucks a month that they can but they want to they may they have a lot of people that follow them. Tell us about your pitch if you were talking to a creator, how you can increase their, quote-unquote, brand or their ability to distribute products? And how can you add value to that creator within your company?

David Perry 6:10

Well, let’s say Pat’s, the creator, we simply say, today, it’s kind of funny. Do you have any deals right now? And they commonly go, Yeah, I’ve got this t-shirt deal. And then we go do and the customers and they’re like, no. And it turns out that very commonly, a lot of influencers today, have some kind of deals where someone else is always keeping their customers, or they have affiliate deals where they’re sending their clicks somewhere else. So they’re finding the customer, they’re convincing the customer that they want to buy this thing, and then they’re just handing them off to Amazon, for example, Amazon pays around three to 5% affiliate fee, depending on the category that you send them, and they keep the customer. So then you go a whole lot of money, is that a good idea not to own any customers, because some influencers been doing this for like 10 years now. And they still don’t own any customers. Why? Because they’re focused on followers. So what’s more valuable followers or customers, and in reality, all a really, really wealthy influencers, now have customers and are going after customers all day, every day. And they’re building their own enterprise brand. And so you have to, in a way, imagine, TikTok was to go away, for example, just imagine that happened, or Instagram disappeared, because it’s happened in the past, I remember sitting in the MySpace offices, they were the most cocky people ever, because they were killing it. And now they’re gone, right? So imagine your followers were all and potential customers were locked in the platform, it’s pretty great. If you can work out of all your followers who actually takes your advice to buy, get them in your own store, and then you can remarket to them and have a real relationship with those people. So that would be number one is it’s very important that you start to build a customer database effectively. And it’s interesting, I would say less than 1% of influencers have worked this out, I would say less than 1%. The second thing is, instead of getting this affiliate fee, what we do is when you sell a product from a brand, using Carro, for the influencer store, because they found the customer, and they convinced them to buy and they actually close the sale in their store, they get the retailer cut, they don’t get an affiliate fee anymore, they get the retailer’s cut. And then the order because of the way Carro works, the order is actually transmitted over to the supplier, this would be the helmet company, for example. And then they’ll ship out the helmet to the customer. And so in this scenario, you’re getting the retailer cut, which averages around 35%. We’re seeing it anywhere from 20% to 50%, depending on the product category. But in general, it’s about 35%. To put this really clearly in perspective. I said to my wife one day, she came to me and she was talking about she loves to rescue dogs. And she said, could you help me create an Amazon account to sell dog bowls? Because I want to give them money to rescue? And I said to her, you know, but what about using Carro? Like why would you use Amazon? I don’t understand. And she’s like, well, because that would be really easy. And I explained to her but on Amazon, you’re going to be getting like 95 cents per dog bowl on Carro, you’ll get $9.50. And so she’s like, Well, why didn’t you ever explain it like that to me before? And so that’s basically the difference is you own the customer and you get 10 times somewhere between five to 10 times what you would normally generate from a single sale. And so if you’re an influencer that can be absolutely game-changing for you. And we have really major influencers like Paris Hilton uses Carro. Ellen DeGeneres uses Carro. So we have major people using our platform, and so from a brand’s perspective, what would you rather do? Would you rather pay a very expensive influencer to do one post on Instagram for you? But would you rather have your products appear in their store, and you can enjoy their traffic for free for as long as you have that relationship?

Pat Yates 10:20

So let’s back up a second and make sure that people understand exactly the difference in how this process works. So let’s assume that you’re on, we’ll just use mine as an example. So buyhappyfeet.com, if I have my Shopify back in and I installed the Carro app, which I assume how it works, which I’ve seen in the past that allows you to choose those influencers. Tell us once people do that, how the process works, because I think some of the confusion for our listeners might be well, how does it get on their site? And how does it sell on my site? And how do people get paid? So maybe walk us through if I joined and put it into Shopify? How I find the people and how the products get out to them? If it’s all sold on my site? I’m sure they’d be curious to understand that flow.

David Perry 11:03

Yeah, so let’s say you add your slippers to the network. Your slippers then appear in the actual catalog for Carro. And we have lots of we’ve every possible product you can imagine. But your slippers are unique, because they’re funny and cool and interesting. So they would appear in there, someone who’s maybe running we have influencers that there’s a store called Teddy and Bear, beautiful store. And they have really nice things for kids. Maybe when they’re choosing their future products, they see your slippers, and they go I really like this one and this one and this one, then they can just click them. And with a single click this is the crazy part is it just says add to Shopify. And so let’s say you have your inventory in Shopify, every time you click one of these things, those slippers will move across into that influencer store in that case. So suddenly, you’ve got all the metadata, the photography, the description, the inventory levels, everything just moves over with one click. And now, the one thing we don’t do is we actually don’t place the product on the store. Because obviously, they want to control how their store looks. And they don’t want us just randomly slapping products everywhere. So all we do for that one click is place it in your inventory, and then in your dashboard, then you can determine where to place the products. Maybe you put them in a collection of slippers or something like that. But you can see how effortless that is. In your case, you’ve just said yes, please put my slippers in the catalog on their side, they discovered the slippers and add them to their store that simple.

Pat Yates 12:46

Really interesting. So okay, so let’s back up a second. So someone has a product and they own the brand themselves. And they put those legless shoes and slippers at an example, we set up our care account, we list those with Carro, and then anyone out there can come in and say add it to their site. So if there’s XYZ sites has just dropped shipping or selling products, or using their influence to sell them, they actually put them on their site represented exactly as it is in Shopify. Correct. I guess one of the questions they would have is how do you control pricing and things? How do you control how the sale would go down? Are there any opportunities where people vendors might see people have discounted too far anything? And maybe I’m getting too far ahead of it. But I’m sure that question would come up and in control, and then how do you approve those people? Or do they just automatically get to do it?

David Perry 13:28

Yeah, we have over 20,000 brands have installed Carro now and if I spoke to you about six weeks ago, we had about 500,000 products, by the end of the year, we’re on track to be around 15 million. So it’s growing very, very quickly. And so you can imagine we’re seeing every possible edge case on how people want to do business with each other. And we’re just adding the features as we go. But the common way to do it is if you’re the one that makes the product, we have the two names, retailer and supplier, if it’s your slippers, you’re the supplier. And so you get to determine the MSRP what discounts you’re going to allow, you might say I’ll tolerate a 10% plus or minus on the cost of the product. If they go outside of that we actually police them and automatically force it back. So they can’t just go crazy. On the other hand, you are in control of that. Secondly, you determine what split they get. Because it’s your product, it’s your decision, how much are you willing to give to retailers? Let’s say you’re really stingy and you won’t give much at all. You’re not going to get any partnerships. So it’s not even something we have to police. It’s a self-solving problem. The more generous you are, the more partners you’re going to get within the network. And so you just work out what you think is fair, and then there is the ability to work directly with the brand. So I just want to be crystal clear when we put two brands together or they discover each other In the platform, we’re not any kind of weird agency trying to stop you talking to each other, you can call each other, you can go have lunch together, you can sign contracts together, you can call market together, you can do anything you like, as far as your relationship goes. And there’s even cases we’ve had, where people have tried selling helmets, and then realize they’re selling a lot of helmets. So now they’re actually gonna go make helmets, that’s perfectly okay. The goal is to create a lot of partnerships, and a lot of commerce that just didn’t exist before. And by achieving that, this becomes an enormous company globally.

Pat Yates 15:39

It’s extremely interesting. Now, going back to what I was asking about this, so there are controls in place, you would have to approve the vendor before they could put it up, correct. It’s not allowing like anyone to come in, because there could be some places where you don’t want your product, obviously. But then second of all, you get to set up the split and talk with them. So it’d be smart, probably when you’re looking at maybe thinking about some of the influencers, you want to make it fairly aggressive for them. So they will work at harder. Is there a balance there? Is there a percentage you think people typically should attack? I mean, how do people decide what they pay?

David Perry 16:10

Well, again, once in a lot of cases, influencers today, the deals they get are terrible. The affiliate deals they have are just appalling. And if you talk to the influencers, managers, they will tell you how disappointed they are, when they get those royalty reports, they’ve been sending out certain codes, or certain links, and they finally get the report back. And they’re just about always frustrated, because the only way to really check is to fully audit the brand. And they really don’t want to have to go through full audits. So it’s very interesting to them this concept of hold on If the influencer owns the store, then every transaction is correct, because that’s the actual transaction, they sold the product they know every sale that happened. So it gives them perfect accounting for the first time ever. And so it’s a fundamental change that kind of has to happen. If you’re serious about being an influencer, like, this is your serious business. You need to own your customers, you need to be able to account for everything. And you need to be able to get the maximum possible each time you sell. And so it’s up to you to work out a deal. I actually think the influencers don’t understand how valuable that real estate is, let’s say you can sell e-bikes really well, to me, that becomes this hallowed ground. I want my e-bike in there. But if I’m the 50th, e-bike company that shows up, I kind of missed it at that point. So it’s going to be an early-mover advantage. Can you get your e-bikes into all the influence? I know this is gonna sound insane. But if I was an e-bike company, and then it’s an influencer, I know could really sell my stuff. I’d be like, Can I help you get a store setup? I want to have a deal with you to put my bikes into your traffic all day, every day without having to pay you have to be credited. There’s not even a concept in our network of paying the influencer to do post. We don’t do that at all. That’s not even a concept.

Pat Yates 16:25

Yeah, no, I get that. That makes sense. So let me ask this from let’s expand on that, because it’s kind of fascinating. But I think a lot of times you gave a couple of options of how it’s sold. When you said if they sell it on their site, they get a higher percentage or if it’s a referral, they maybe get a different tell us is that differentiation and how the two, if I’m right about those two segments, are those the two segments you can do and how do they differentiate?

David Perry 18:34

Well, no, there’s only technically one way to sell it. So when the influencer sells the product, they get the full retailer cut. Comparing that to their past, they would get an affiliate fee. So we’re disrupting affiliates. That whole concept is okay. We accept affiliate fee again of 3% or 1%.

Pat Yates 18:55

I was thinking of something slightly different, but said it wrong. So let me ask this. So let’s say that XYZ sites set up and they’re selling slippers, they get a transaction, how does that flow to the supplier at that point? Because sometimes people might say, I don’t want to have a lot of moving parts. I want to make it simple. So once you’ve agreed to a person, they put it up and they got a transaction. How has it worked from that point?

David Perry 19:15

Okay. I’ll explain that. First of all, one of the most interesting things is that the old paradigm of buying products, storing it at a warehouse touching it freight insurance, all the rest of it returns restocking fees, all of that goes away. So all of that margin loss that you that everyone just accepts in e-commerce is gone, because the product only moves when it actually sells. So the way that transaction occurs is let’s say Paris Hilton sells a blend jet blender. She accepts the money on her store. So the money has now been accepted. What we then do is behind the scenes, we transfer the wholesale cost from her or to the to the supplier. This would be Blendjet. So they get the wholesale cost plus the shipping immediately so that they can then send it out. And we actually, what we do is I know the transaction just occurred on Paris’s store. But the actual fulfillment order is automatically generated and blend yet store. So imagine your let’s go back to your slipper example, you wake up in the morning and you have orders in your order queue that you had absolutely nothing to do with. That’s what happens here, somebody else made that sale. And the order fell into your order queue for you to ship out.

Pat Yates 20:41

Oh, in essence, if I had one slip, or let’s say it’s a balloon light sold on one influencer side or on the other side. So I wake up in the morning, I see that order for the blue and white sitting there like it’s a normal order and the money is transferred, the wholesale thing, there’s no other moving parts, then it flows into ShipStation, or whatever it is. And it gets out to the customer. Very simple. Correct? Exactly. And it does transfer all the tracking and everything. So there’s no other maintenance needed, correct?

David Perry 21:04

Yep, it’s all unwinds, returns correctly, the returns come back to the supplier. So the STIP, the slippers would come back to you. And the whole thing gets unwound correctly.

Pat Yates 21:17

Interesting. So from a supplier standpoint, let’s say that we have people out there have vendors like, this sounds great, but who knows, the people that have on there, tell us about the people that you have, that are the influence or sites that will sell, in that program, and how maybe you vet them how do the people that are gonna come in and work with you know that these people are gonna be able to produce it? And then how do you find them?

David Perry 21:41

So what we do, we basically, first of all, we gate out everything that’s negative, so there’s no firearms or drugs or anything like that. And then what we do is we had a really interesting question is, should we filter brands based on sales, and we actually tried that for a while. But we realized that we’re killing out the people who are new to e-commerce, and are really serious about investing into it and really going for it. Because they didn’t meet a minimum threshold, we didn’t let them into Carro. We’ve changed that policy now to allow people to come in, and actually, and sort of test out the platform and show who they are. But we are very, very cautious about anybody that’s not delivering, they’re immediately ejected from the platform. And it’s much more punishing than it sounds. If you get ejected from Carro, you’re gonna lose your relationship with all these brands, forever. And that’s a terrible, terrible situation to be in. Because it can become so material to your business, there’s lots of people who’ve doubled their sales on our platform. And so to sort of lose that and all those relationships, it’s going to, I think, over time, we’re going to end up with a reputation system like Airbnb within the platform. And we’ll present that to you. We’re sort of working on it behind the scenes, but at some point, we’ll present it to you and say, here’s your rating, and here’s how you’re doing, and it will become life and death to make sure that you’re a high-quality entity shipping on time and handling everything correctly. And there’s no platform like this that could work without that kind of reputation system.

Pat Yates 23:25

Right? So walk me through, let’s say that I assume that your normal percentage is let’s assume you’re talking about 50% that as an influencer, whoever is putting out there store, what’s the average percentage, you think if it’s wholesale that the seller keeps versus the supplier?

David Perry 23:42

The seller usually gets around 35%.

Pat Yates 23:45

Because the 35%, let’s face it on a $30 transaction that’s $9 plus 1050. So typically, you get the 1950, wholesale, plus the shipping put into your system. And people have to figure their margins based on something like that. But they’re not paying an upfront fee, to that person that’s putting it out nor any kind of implementation fees or any kind of maintenance. So they said, as simple as it gets right there.

David Perry 24:06

That’s as simple as it gets him.

Pat Yates 24:08

It’s really amazing. So let me ask you this. I’m sure that you’ve had some people in for a while that it worked in the system, or you have some of your clients that you think it really optimizes how many I envision a few maybe 10 1250 people that you work with? Is it a small number that people typically work with? Or do they end up working with hundreds because the recommendation system does it is it as easy to work with 100 Witnesses 10 or 15?

David Perry 24:33

Well, I’ll give you a good example, go to gear.com. If you go to gear.com and click on brands, and then you click on all brands, you see an incredible selection of partnerships that this company has. And they can have their you know, you can do wholesale you can make your own products and then you can just form partnerships with Carro. So to be clear, it’s completely flexible. It’s not you only allowed to do it one way, you can do it any way that works best for your company. But what this means is a company like gear.com can try products and learn about products and see what works and very carefully curate the partnerships that they want. They can try a new product category if they wanted to try kayaks for example. Do you really want to be buying pallets of kayaks to see if you can sell them? Or do you just want to add them and see what happens? And now you get no risk at all, there’s no capital outlay. If you start selling kayaks, do you want to try foldable kayaks because we have those two, and you can try those in your store. And you can see how you can intelligently build a very, very strong marketplace by working out what your audience really wants. And again, at no capital cost. The second thing that we see a lot in e-commerce is it’s a bit like reruns on TV, it gets boring over time, and people build an e-commerce store and they don’t keep it updated. They don’t keep it fresh, like you go back six months later, it’s the same as it was six months ago. So that’s something else you can do with Carro, let’s say it’s Valentine’s Day or the Fourth of July or Halloween, and you want to add products that sort of are fun or Yoga Day and you want to add products for that you can do that with zero cost, you literally just add the products, do a marketing thing, do press releases, whatever you want to do, enjoy the extra sales. And then and then just remove that stuff, because it didn’t cost you anything. So just remove it, it’s like it’s not the Fourth of July anymore, move on. And so pop-up stores, pop-up relationships stores, partnerships with the influencers will be a good example like today is whatever day with a certain influencer that you like, you can add their stuff to the store instantly. And so that flexibility to make the merchandising stay alive in your store, I think is really important. I’ll give you one really cool tip, if you’ve played Have you played with chatGPT yet, you know the whole, everyone’s going crazy. So just go onto chatGPT and type in I own an online bike store, what are all the products I should sell to get the maximum possible revenue, simple as that chatGPT will immediately give you the shopping list of things that you should be selling to get the maximum possible revenue out of an online bike store. And it’s fascinating. And so you should try it as well for years, and see what it comes up with. Because the AI has got a very, very clear sort of view on these are all the kinds of things you should think about. And you can steer it a little bit, but ultimately, or you can tell it what you currently sell. Here are the items that I currently have in my online store and just give a list of all the items you sell. What other items, complimentary items could I sell, that would increase my sales, and it will just give you a to-do list then you come over to Carro and just add those products to your store.

Pat Yates 27:57

That’s absolutely amazing. So what kind of reach do you think some of the people that would come in into the store has been? Is it some people that don’t have any reach? Do they need to have a certain amount to be successful? Is there sort of a wheelhouse size of a following that someone needs or a scope? Or is it just if you want to start an e-commerce store, and you feel like you’re gonna push it? Here it is.

David Perry 28:17

Yeah, I mean, the truth in an e-commerce is, is that a lot of people don’t know how to get attention. And it’s, it calls the herd very quickly. So a lot of people start a store, they put all their effort in, they set it all up, and then they just don’t know how to get people to come to it. So that’s why we thought this was important as a concept is to help you get your products into other people’s traffic. And get awareness that way, the more people that see your products, the better, I’d highly recommend being very generous with retailers and get as many eyeballs looking at your stuff, there’s no risk to you, they just are going to basically buy the product, and the order comes back to you. So it’s a win. And ultimately, that’s the hard part is really getting these online brands going and you see a lot of people get killed because they just never work it out. They find that it’s costing them $100 to sell a $30 item and they just can’t make it work. And they’re not all experts in SEO and I’m buying traffic and partnerships. That’s the one thing I say to brands is how much does it cost for us to put our products together like put the bike on the helmet buy each other at sunset on the beach or whatever, how much does that cost to take that picture and get it into our social media. It’s really next to nothing and showing that you’re working with other cool brands just gives you things to post. A good example I think is a company called Blendjet. They make these portable blenders and they didn’t sell what went in the blender because of all the perishable goods that would entail that, do they want to sell frozen items? Not really They’re an electronics company. But by working with Carro, they can have an unlimited amount of products, they have a marketplace now. And if you go look through the marketplace, they have some great brands like Oatly, working with them. And that’s powered by Carro. And they’re able to now sell subscriptions to the things that go in their blenders, which is super cool use of this concept.

Pat Yates 28:25

It’s really incredible. Now, I think, unfortunately, for a lot of entrepreneurs, let’s say that they’re out there, and they built a brand, and they’re ready to take care of one ticket wide. Or let’s just say they made that decision, they want to list their products with you. A lot of times I think even for me, as an entrepreneur, I go to what’s the worst case? How am I gonna get screwed on this? How am I going to look bad? What is the downside to this, because every wants to protect that because your brand and the reputation are so important. So tell me how people have dealt with because obviously, there’s some customer service issues that they are going to have to deal with. So they may not know the answers you want? Or if they don’t treat the customer, right, it could reflect on your brand originally. Are there anything that you’ve seen that people need to be concerned about when they’re working with these marketplaces are influencers, as we would call it? Are there concerns there from a standpoint of customer service and pricing and how they represent the brand? Or is that something that usually don’t need to worry about because the people are controlled and come in and apply in your business?

David Perry 30:22

No, it’s up to you to determine again, the relationship, I think it makes sense to talk to the people you’re going to partner with I would. So if it was my brand, I would call the company and talk to the CEO and have a chat and say we’re going to work together, let’s do this thing. And this should be a really healthy relationship. So I think having communication with the brands is probably a good move. On the other hand, if somebody isn’t performing like six months from now, you’re not happy with someone, you can literally just hit a button and eject them. So the relationships over I’m done with it, we’re breaking up, that’s okay, too. So you have your own expectations, I would have your team learn about the product. So if you’re selling, so imagine you’re the seller, then you should at least your team should at least be taking the time to learn about the products that you’re selling. It’s easy to add them with Carro, it’s maybe too easy to add them with Carro. So at some point, you actually want to make sure they’re aware of it, because then they’re when they’re doing events or anything, they should always be thinking about what they can do with the partner products as well, because that’s all extra sales. And honestly, as you get a higher ARV that determines how much you can spend to buy customers. And so everything that can get you a higher AOV is super interesting. And you got to make sure your whole team is on that page. Like we all understand why we’re doing this right. And this is the objective is to increase the AOV. And when you increase the AOV that increases the lifetime value as well, which ultimately is how much you can spend to find a customer.

Pat Yates 32:58

Now clearly there are everything’s not a success story. But sometimes I think, you know, people want to understand how can I best use my resources. If I come into work, Carro. So let me give you an example. Like with the silver thing, we keep going back to that, a couple of years ago, we made some very targeted designs that were like for teaching profession and medical profession around that for doctors, and nurses and things like that, is it better to have products that are really targeted to a demographic because then you’re getting way closer to what that person is selling? Because I envisioned this huge eBay store, someone would sell dice and maybe books and all kinds of stuff and how to products get lost? Is it better to have things that are parented to that brand, that kind of site? Does that make it more successful?

David Perry 33:43

Yeah, yeah, you still want to curate very carefully. Everything that would make sense or in this case, let’s say it’s your slippers store, you really want to curate that store carefully to make sure it really still is a cohesive brand, unless you decide to go big. And if you go big, then you become a marketplace. And so your slippers are just one piece of your overall shoes, and now you’re starting to cover every possible kind of shoes. And then you start going well do we had the socks. So why wouldn’t you that increases your AOV? Of course you should. And so you start becoming a full marketplace? So that’s a maturity thing. Do you decide that you are that funny slipper brand, which I think is actually a great opportunity, because there’s a lot of my goodness, gifting companies we do santa.com. We power santa.com I wish we had have had your slippers and Santa.com and q4 that would have been phenomenal. So you can see how there’s just so much opportunity that didn’t exist because the technology didn’t exist to make this easy for everybody. But that’s something we’re building in earnest on a day-by-day basis. And whenever we hear from the brands, what is necessary, we add those features immediately.

Pat Yates 34:55

It’s really amazing. I mean, I agree with you too. It’s something that obviously I want to look into more. And I think it’s sort of a way. You know, I talked to some people that we look at all kinds of different marketing with influencers, whether it’s paid or like your business where you sort of invest in them having a store. I really liked this idea. But does it really matter? Who’s doing it? Because I started talking about this. Let me give you another hypothetical. We had a teacher-driven slipper. I mean, do teachers? Are they good people to throw up a little Shopify store that they can raise money for their classroom and be able to buy things and say it’s a targeted teacher thing? Is this an opportunity for people to gain revenue that even if they’re doing some other job by utilizing their capture group, say, their classroom who has to buy gifts or buy something, and they encourage them to buy there, and it helps them do that? Is that a process that people look at if they’re looking at a marketplace?

David Perry 35:42

Well, I’m super biased. But I think it’s the best possible way, because you’re working with real brands, you’re not working, you’re not drop shipping from China, right? This is a real brands and you can build, we’ve actually we had a company that was adding food. And they were selling cookies and things like that, but they ended up getting acquired. And it’s just interesting to see because they become a bigger entity than they were before because now they have a full marketplace and their sales are going crazy. So there is an opportunity, but there’s an opportunity to build something quite exciting. There’s a brand Consumer House that was built by a girl or lady called Claire Spackman. And she ended up adding 150 different partnerships and 800 products into a marketplace. And she said they ended up writing about her on Forbes. And so the ability for one individual, can you imagine trying to do 150 partnerships the old way, and then having 800 products showing up at your warehouse with your hard hat on when the granola pellets are arriving. She didn’t have to do any of that. They just chose the products she wanted. And she took her store live. And then she started to work with influencers to drive traffic to her store. So absolutely any teacher could do it. An example we had recently is a pickleball is becoming quite a big thing. And there’s a group called The Kitchen, which is 350,000 pickleball players, it’s the largest community, they wanted a marketplace. So what do you do? Do you get a warehouse and start buying multi $1,000 nets and paddles that are going to be old a month from now? Or do you just build the whole thing on Carro and then you can add all the products, all the paddles all the nets, all the stuff, have a great big marketplace and take it live immediately. And that’s why we think this is important. Because there’s so many communities in the world, there’s so many groups of people, Facebook groups, the right teachers, people trying to save or rescue pets, whatever it is you can build a marketplace on Carro.

Pat Yates 37:49

It is really incredible when you know obviously Quiet Light, we’re an M&A company, but we try to be very actionable and e-comm and teach people, I think we probably do more of that than we do about anything. But when you talk about an M&A purpose, when you’re looking to exit your business, having that larger scope of people out there really can help it. No, it changes the margin some. So there are some things that obviously people have to be concerned about. One other question I have who owns the customer record? That’s kind of an interesting thought here, because you have a couple of systems are working in, and both will have that information that’s redacted from the actual supplier versus the marketplace person who means owning that and can go back to that client?

David Perry 38:28

That’s a great question. So it was interesting, because we assumed that it would be the retailer would own the customer. And that’s the way we created the system. So it’s the retailer made the sale. So it’s their customer, right period. But what we found is that in our in when you when you look at the page, it’ll say fulfilled by our friends at and then the name of the brand, so fulfilled by our friends at Blendjet, for example. And that we found that very commonly, the two companies that we’ve put together have absolutely no competitive bones. And thereby they’re not even close, like one is making milk and the other is making electronics. So are they willing to share information? And that’s actually something they can turn on. So why would you ever do that? Well, the answer is because the value to the supplier is incredibly high if they can grow a customer too. So if you’re the slipper company and an influencer sells the shoe, but you’re not competing with the influencer and they go ahead and let us share the customer. You just increase the customer so you got up this morning to an order in your order queue and the customer how much the customer normally cost you like 30 bucks or 20 bucks or something. That’s a really exciting thing in relationships to get. So what that does is that makes you want to be more generous with your retailers. So if you get a PC how that matters, right if you get the customer then you know what I’m going to be more today. Nora’s with this retailer. So I want to be clear, there is no set rule here. This is up to them to work this out that we had expected, it would just be the retailer only. But we do have cases in the network where they feel a true partnership. They’re not competing at all. And they’re perfectly okay. With sharing customers.

Pat Yates 40:18

It makes total sense. I think the relationship has to be great between the two, because he’s basically representing your product. And you want to make sure that that happens as well. So tell us a little bit about Carro and how they make money on this. I mean, is it contained in the transaction? How do you work with your clients from a financial standpoint?

David Perry 40:36

Well, first of all, it’s free to put your products into the network. So we will help you get sales for your products just by joining Carro. But what we did is we created subscriptions, which are for the retailers, and the subscriptions are based on two things is, how much help do you want, because if you want, we’ll actually get on the phone with you and really brainstorm. We have merchandising experts who will brainstorm with you, to help you. So you can do it yourself. So it is self-service. But if you choose, you can pay more and actually, and get help. But it’s low, like the bottom tiers, like $35 a month 75. And then I think we’re up at like 250 or something like that. It’s not crazy. And then the second feature is the more partnerships you have sort of forces you up the tiers. So we don’t want you coming in and spamming everyone in our network and trying to get 500 different deals and then paying us $35 for it. So what we do want to do, like imagine you build your whole marketplace on us for $35, that wouldn’t be good. So just to be clear that the more partnerships that we push you up the tiers, and that just makes sense, then as far as transactions go, we charge 5% for the actual transactions, and that effectively comes off the top, which means and just to how we pitch, this is very simple, which is this is a whole new revenue stream for you this is keep doing everything you’re doing today, but we’re gonna get you more sales, and those additional sales are going to cost 5%. And you’re splitting that between you and the supplier. So ultimately, you can argue you’re really just paying two and a half percent, or an entirely new revenue line never existed before. And that’s a pretty easy pitch.

Pat Yates 42:28

So if you’re given the supplier 35, you’re have another two and a half, if you have a transaction from their side, is that correct? Is that what you’re saying? 37 and a half is what it ends up if you…

David Perry 42:38

35 is a monthly subscription in dollars. So it’s just $35.

Pat Yates 42:43

Okay, got you. Now, let me ask this. So hacks, licensing help or hurt us, let’s say that someone has a college license or a Disney license? Are there people out there? Does that make it easier to target people that can be successful as well as sites that may want to add that? Or is it just it really doesn’t matter? Your products are going to be your product? So there are people out there looking for those specific types of licenses?

David Perry 43:08

Yeah, there’s a very interesting, we have, we have three categories of products. And I think we’re finding a fourth. So one is core products. So the core stuff that you would expect to be on our network. The second is impulse buy, we actually power television shows like The Today Show on NBC. Also, Univision does live selling on television, we power that as well. And so the idea of those guys is they want stuff that will convert instantly when someone sees it, they have to buy it, and it has to be high margin. So it’s a really, they can give a big discount. So here’s this thing that I see and I want and it’s a really big discount, that’s an impulse buy product, we can never have enough of those. The third category, so we have core we have impulse buy the third is super high-end brands. So we have Balenciaga, all the all the sort of Adidas and Nike and canon and all of these companies, that’s our high-end piece of the puzzle. And we’re ingesting millions of those products, actually. Right, the second. So that’s a very exciting, other piece. But that last then sort of fourth piece of the puzzle, is what I’m considering to be white label. And what it really means is, you were like, for example, so you wanted to partner with the people who did stranger things and you want to make stranger things, shoes or slippers, then are you willing to do that? Or if you’re like we Super 73 is an incredible e-bike company in our network. Is there some partnership that you can do together where you’re going to get a lot of sales for them, but you’re going to end up doing a different vinyls on the bike that will actually increase the sales so it’s some kind of licensing Deal. And we see enormous opportunity for that, which is customizing things. We have people doing it today like Barstool Sports does that with us. So if you buy a mug, it’s actually being sent from a partner who puts Barstool Sports on it and sends it. And so the idea of that category of people that want customized stuff, but at zero effort for them, like just, I want this, but will you please add our logo or our art to it? I think there’s an incredible amount of opportunity there as well.

Pat Yates 45:41

It’s really amazing, because you’re right about if people may, like I have a custom printer that we can do stuff on as well. So T-shirts, things like that, ASR products, things like that, if you could really push it, there are a lot of opportunities there. It’s really interesting, because the more you talk about it, the more the scope gets bigger. So I think that’s what’s really exciting about your business. And how can help entrepreneurs? I guess I wanted to sort of wrap it up. Are there things that we haven’t covered? You’d want the listeners to know about Get Carro? OR we pretty much talked about everything, and they just have to come in and see the excitement of it?

David Perry 46:16

Yeah, I think the thing is that you should definitely take the time to at least consider this. I just bought my wife and e-bike on the weekend, we went into a local store. And I was standing in the store looking and the guy had 1000 helmets on the wall. And I was like, oh 1000s part of our network. And as I looked around at the things he was selling, we asked him, Can we buy one of these? And he’s like, I don’t have any of those in stock? And then can we buy one of those? Do you have this in that color? No, I don’t have that. And I just was like, this is crazy. I’m standing in a retail store, he has a Shopify store, but he hasn’t used Carro. So therefore he can have every helmet and every color and every size and every other bike component always available. And he can just say like, I don’t have this here. But if you go on our website, we have it right now. And I can have that delivered to you. It’s fundamentally changes those kinds of things. So I think now that you understand what we’re doing, I think you’ll have all kinds of ideas on what you could do with that. And we’re welcome. We’d love to have those conversations. So please do feel free to reach out to us the email address is [email protected]. Our website is getcarro.com. And please mention this podcast, because they will give you VIP treatment. If you mentioned this podcast.

Pat Yates 47:37

David, it has been amazing having you in today. I think I like you know teasing them letting people reach out, I know you can get this in the Shopify app store, people should really take a look at this because it’s very progressive. And it’s interesting how, small TikTok influencers and other people out there having real success getting engagement. And some people this may be an easy way to find people that can really hit some stores. I actually am thinking of some people that have a chance to do some really good stuff with this. So I love to follow up with you sometime and we can do a demo and then maybe follow it up and I appreciate you being in here today, David.

David Perry 48:07

Sounds great. Thanks so much.

Outro 48:10

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast, subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.