Jesse and Rich talk with Scott Stewart who ran three Ecwid stores with his wife and knew that he could do a better job than the current offerings and created HelpfulCrowd.com
What’s inside:
- How reviews provide trust
- Creating user-generated content
- SEO benefit of new content
- K&A benefits
- Handling critical reviews
- Automated review collection
Transcript
Jesse: Hey Richie, happy Friday.
Richard: Happy Friday. How’s it going?
Jesse: It’s going well. We’re back.
Richard: The sun is out again.
Jesse: Yeah. Sun is shining today. I think it’s going to be very interesting. Niin, for the people listening, listen to all the podcasts, you’ll notice that there is a post role where we’re asking for reviews and ratings for our podcast. So I think that’s going to relate to today’s show. And Rich, sinä tiedät, we asked for these reviews, why do we ask for reviews?
Richard: Hyvin, I mean, you always want to get feedback. We’re sitting here, we’re doing something that we think is valuable, but we always love to hear from the listeners because if you don’t have a listener, you don’t really have a show, oikein? We’re showing up, but we want to hear this. And reviews are valuable. We always hear about word of mouth and word of mouth’s been talked about for years, but a review is a kind of like word of mouth that lives on, oikein? Graffiti might not be the best word for it, but you know, it’s something that actually, you’ve heard a review, someone gave some sort of feedback and someone can actually see that again some other time. So we appreciate it. We love it. And please just cause we’re talking about it, feel free to.
Jesse: Yeah, that’s a little plug for a review on the Ecwid E-commerce Show. But I think the point you made there about a word of mouth or review is like word of mouth that lives on because if you tell your friend like, “Hei, check out this restaurant”. That’s great. But that doesn’t live on, they may be remembered, ehkä he eivät. But a review online lives on forever for other people to see and see that those businesses worth checking out. And also it’s good for Google to see too. Niin, sinä tiedät, Google’s out there, they need to see stuff too. With that, we’re talking reviews. Let’s bring in our guest, Scott Stewart, the founder of Helpful Crowd. Scott, how are you?
Scott: Hey guys, how you doing? Happy Friday.
Jesse: Yeah, we love Fridays.
Richard: Great to have you on, Scott.
Scott: Thanks for having me, guys.
Jesse: Ehdottomasti. Niin, Scott, you’re the founder of Helpful Crowd. You probably didn’t just start your career founding helpful crowd. How did you get there?
Scott: You’re right Jesse. Effectively my wife used to have three online businesses all on Edward. Oh, we love it for that reason. And after about 12 months operating these businesses, we thought we should actually look at reviews. And we installed the only app at the time that was on the Ecwid marketplace, a LittleBlue.one and we thought this is great and I’ve got a review one day, tried to reply to it and we couldn’t. And that’s kind of like, that’s strange. Oh, we’ve got to pay for the upgrade plan, we’re going to pay for it. Okei. So we’ve reached out and said, “Hey guys, how much is it going to cost us to reply to this review?” And they said something like $500 kuukausi. And we said, “You gotta be kidding me. Get out of here.” And that was the birth of Helpful Crowd. We thought we can do this, we can do it better and we can provide a really good affordable volume for all the Ecwid customers.
Jesse: That’s awesome. I love it when entrepreneurs build a business that basically just answers a problem that they had. And that was your problem. You needed reviews.
Scott: Ehdottomasti.
Jesse: Mahtava. So did you have a background in software development or how did you go from a problem and making Helpful Crowd?
Scott: My background is actually finance, guys. They don’t hold that against me. (laughing) Yeah. You know, it was just one of those things I was really passionate about us, from the point of view of obviously running online businesses to the point of view of obviously helping businesses. So for me, software development, we have a team of developers who do most of the backend stuff. And we mainly focus on the front end stuff and talking to the different stores.
Jesse: All right, so you get to do the fun stuff. The coding is done by other people.
Scott: But in fact usually the midnight vampires, oikein? They work all funny hours. (laughing)
Jesse: Tietysti. Yeah.
Richard: It’s sugar. And Red Bull.
Jesse: Mahtava. Niin, your wife knows firsthand, sinä tiedät, why are reviews so important for e-commerce stores?
Scott: Right. So really one of the things that we didn’t learn so early, it took us like a year to think about reviews and hindsight, we recognize that from day one you’ve really got to be recollecting reviews because if you’re just starting up a business, it will take time to build momentum. But those reviews can help you build that business so much quicker. Primarily, it just builds your trust with shoppers on your store, gives really invaluable feedback to other people. And the most important thing we think really is that that feedback should be unsolicited. And so one of the biggest concerns we know when the little shop, store and all it has is obviously negative reviews. But the way that you deal with that from a shopper’s perspective is really important. And hence that commenting feature on reviews is quite important. The amount of feedback we had and the way that we’re able to improve our business from that feedback. So I think we be digesting it and then continually improving what we needed to fix or change to actually create more sales. That was the kind of biggest benefits for us.
Jesse: Ehdottomasti. And I think when you look at a product page, for the newbies out there, the product pages is when you’re scrolling through websites and you go click into the actual product, there’s usually a description there and a price. But as a store owner, you can only use so many adjectives, but if you have all these nice reviews down there where your customers are saying how much they love it, your previous customers are helping do the selling for you. So I think that’s kind of a nice benefit.
Richard: Do you have any stats, Scott? Nyt, this is going to be a wide question. Do you have any stats that show an increase in conversion with reviews? Now I know it’s going to be relative to, was it a good review, what kind of product and all that stuff. But do you have any kind of stats because I’m sure I would guess it would be better as long as it’s good reviews, but I don’t really know any stats?
Scott: Right. Yeah, that’s a really interesting question actually. Because really it’s been proven that if you have just all five-star reviews, oikein? A lot of the shoppers thinks that it’s pretty sauce and they’re all fake and fake reviews is obviously an issue in the review industry. Niin 4.3 stars are actually been proven to be the highest point of conversion for creating more sales. And it differs obviously across all the different types of stores and everything like that. But generically speaking, you should be able to see, you would hope to see you like a one and a half to two times improvement on conversions of sales when you are using reviews. And definitely, if you’ve got authentic reviews, which really reach out to the shoppers, the longer the content, that more detailed reviews, obviously the more helpful it is for the shoppers. That’s what you usually see in terms of review conversions. If you then bolt on questions and answers as well, which really is just like an automated customer service bot for your store, oikein? But there’s a lot of customers and shoppers have the same types of questions. So if you bolt on question and answers features as well, generally what you’ll see is also an 11% increase in the value of your basket from just having reviews and questions and answers together on your site.
Richard: So you’re actually seeing not only the increasing conversion but an increase in average order value as well.
Scott: Ehdottomasti. And that’s really important, oikein?
Richard: Oh, tietysti. And that’s, everyone knows that the first sale is the hardest to get and everyone’s hoping to get more sales. But the real win is if you can get that average order to go up on the first sale, you’re probably going to get more sales too.
Scott: And it’s a snowball effect, oikein? You start getting a few reviews, you get more traffic, they shoppers and see the reviews, they get more trust, credibility with you, comfortable. Especially depending on how you reply to those reviews and comment on them and then you know, that kind of helps them make that purchase decision and pushes them over the line to obviously check out.
Jesse: I think the interesting thing is, you mentioned like when a store starts out, and I think that’s probably the easiest way to determine, as a shopper, not forget about being a merchant in and being a working at Ecwid, but as a shopper, if I go to an online store and it’s a little light, products that I want, but I see zero reviews on the site. It kind of tells me this is a brand new store. Or maybe it’s a store that doesn’t get any sales. So I think it’s a quick signal to me that this store just got started, but if I see a store that has a whole bunch of reviews, okay, I might think maybe some of these are fake, but boy, they put a whole lot of time into doing fake reviews if that’s the case. But you know, it just makes…
Scott: Clicking in India. (laughing)
Jesse: Oh yeah. I’m sure there’re ways to do fake reviews, mutta, somebody probably put way more time into it. Like he just might be, I usually assume it’s just easier to get real reviews than to spend all these time writing fake reviews. There’s a lot of ways to check on that.
Scott: And it is kind of an active process, the merchants really need to get involved in or should be involved in, if they want to obviously improve the trust and credibility of that presence on the net and with their shoppers. But it’s worthwhile. It pays itself back so many times over. And it’s not that hard. With Helpful Crowd, esimerkiksi, we have an automated review system. The audit comes in, the email automatically goes out. But even if you have other people, if you just getting started, it can be difficult, but you can ask some of your friends to look at your store, give you feedback by some of your products and then genuinely asked them, what do you think of the product? And it will help your business many times over, not just from a sales perspective, but maybe you shouldn’t be stocking that product. Maybe you need to improve it. So just from an overall perspective.
Jesse: It makes perfect sense. You do need to stock the way you’re a store with reviews and it’s part of the process. And I think that a lot of times people are getting started out and everybody, you want to get to that first sale, you want to get traffic, you want to get advertising going of course. But as you grow, part of the part of the process here is building these reviews on each of your product pages. And I think one of the important things there too is also for SEO value. So with Helpful Crowd, is Google able to read the reviews on the product pages?
Scott: Yeah, they can. With every plan at Helpful Crowd, we have rich snippets, Google calls and many different things, many different times. We still call them rich snippets. Effectively what this does is it enables Google to easily read the information about the total number of reviews you’ve got for that product, what the average rating is. And then also we provide detailed reviews as well. Päivän päätteeksi, and I think this is a really important point for our merchants to understand is Google, at the end of the day decide what they show and what they don’t show, depending on what they think the searcher is really looking for. We have no control over that and no review app has any control over that. Which is one of the reasons why we have in our plans is standard. It’s not a paid feature, because we can’t guarantee any results with that. But what we do do is we make sure that we give Google a and all the other search engines the best chance of being able to find that product and display those little rating stars on the search page when someone’s looking for.
Jesse: Got it. That means that yes, you’re putting these reviews or helping people get these reviews on their site, on their product page. Eikä vain se, you’re giving it in the format that Google needs and just, I’ll give it that, oikein. The short answer for people that don’t know about rich snippets, like Google can see all these things, but if you don’t give it to them in the right format, they don’t know that it’s a review and then they can’t display these stars on the search engine results page. So that’s great. Great to know that you have that. And I think for, we’ve done several podcasts where we talk about SEO and writing content and nobody likes writing content, but this is kind of a free and automated way to build content on that page because there’s a very good chance that your product that people are going to use the words naturally that you want them to use. Like if you’re selling a carabiner, a key chain, there’s a good chance they use the word “key chain” in their review. And you’re basically getting free content writing from your customers.
Scott: I mean your customers are your best marketers really. And they’re free. That didn’t cost you anything. And Google and all search engines love new content all the time. As you said, there are keywords, Jesse, they obviously are very important to obviously optimize your site for those search keywords. And it’s effectively a free source of free content writing.
Richard: What I’d imagined to not only do they use the words that matter in the keywords you want, but they probably also sometimes at least, write a review that describes your product in a way that would seem a little strange for you to like, “O, it was great when I opened the package. It was packed perfect in my kid. Loved it.” You’re not going to write that, but it can put you in a light that kind of raises your status and I don’t know the exact vernacular that Google would use, but you can use the word a bunch of times and you could use the keywords, but there are phrasings and there are things that I’m sure the AI is like, “Oh, this is, they’re talking about this product in use”, or they’re talking about the love of this product or how it was packaged. And again, you probably won’t be writing that stuff down.
Jesse: And I think also people are going to misspell and they’re going to use synonyms that you wouldn’t think of because as a merchant you’re not gonna misspell your product name. That’d be dumb. You don’t look like an expert, but if one of your customers does well, that’s what they wrote.
Richard: That’s actually a great point, I’ve never thought of that.
Scott: And the residents as well, obviously with the shoppers being in use and implement that, that’s pretty strong as well.
Jesse: Ehdottomasti. And you get the emotion there as well. If you have a boring product, nobody’s going to give you a nice, there’s not gonna be an emotional, I love this, I’ve seen it personally that there are people, if they’re emotional about the product, they will say that. And that’s something that the store owner can’t really say themselves. It just comes across wrong or cheesy.
Richard: You were mentioning something earlier that you were talking about stacking on the Q&A or the FAQs with it. We haven’t actually attached this to one of our test stores and use it ourselves. Is there the way that you do that or how does that work?
Scott: Yeah, it comes standard with Helpful Crowd. We have reviews, and Q&A, it’s a standard as a feature set. If you don’t want to have Q&A, you can turn that off. Some stores have a separate chatbot or different ways to address customers’ questions. So that’s fine. And it really is sitting there on your product page as a tab beside the product reviews. And if a customer has a question, they can simply ask a question that goes directly to the merchant. And the merchant at the end of the day is I would say probably the most knowledgeable person to be able to answer the question about the product. They then reply to that question. An email goes back to the question person who asked the question, I should say, to tell them that it’s been answered and the answer is displayed on their website. So it’s quite common for a lot of shoppers to have the same types of questions. The more that you can encourage questions being asked by shoppers and it just helps other shoppers and again helps them over with that potential purchase hurdle. If they don’t have enough information or they want to have some more information or that day, they may be conservative about asking that information, they can see it on the product page.
Jesse: I love that. The questions are not generated by the merchant, they’re not like fake questions, there are customers that, and this is more in a presale process, so they’re looking at the product page, they have a question and then you can easily ask the question on the product page that then populates this section.
Scott: Jep. Ehdottomasti. And then the answer replies, also an email to the person and the shopper that asked the question as well as onto the product page so everybody can see. And you can also search that as well. Very similar to what you’ve seen on other sites. You can search that if you’re looking for a particular term or a question and it will fix the short list and show those positive results.
Richard: Do you preprogram some of those answers and if it’s in there notified then how does it notify the merchant of that question?
Scott: That’s a good question. The merchant receives an email to say, hey look, you’ve got a new question from a shopper and it also appears in the app dashboard. There are unanswered questions there in the moderation panel.
Jesse: Got It. Okei. Ei, that’s interesting. Particularly if you are, if anyone out there is monitoring live chat, you’d get this same question over and over and you’re probably like, oh my gosh. Uudelleen, with this question, boy, wouldn’t it be nice to have that Q&A feature? You could even point to that or maybe that question never comes because people see this little Q&A tab and look at that. I’ll love it. Itse asiassa, K&A seems like an obvious thing here.
Scott: Definitely. You can check it out. It’s definitely one of the key things for us when we were looking for a reviewer and back in the days.
Jesse: Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes perfect sense to be part of a review app. And also what I was thinking about when you mentioned like, okay, there are these reviews and there’s also a Q&A section. And to me, I’m picturing this big company in the e-commerce world that seems to have mastered things and Amazon is known for their reviews and they’re known for their Q&A section. Pohjimmiltaan, you’re taking a little bit of the Amazon playbook and giving it to smaller merchants out there that can now have access to basically the power of Amazon.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Richard: So what do you do when… We talked about the 4.3 stars and I love that you’re talking about that transparency because it does seem strange sometimes when you see all five stars, oikein? Everyone knows that someone’s going to have a problem. So that was a very interesting stat you were saying three, excuse me, 4.3. What do you do though, when you get negative reviews, what’s the best way to handle that?
Scott: I think negative reviews definitely has to be a merchant’s biggest fear, oikein? Because once it’s out there, it’s out there. But it also presents the greatest opportunity for the business owner to demonstrate what other shoppers and everybody else visiting their site, how they run their business, and how they deal with, we couldn’t call them critical reviews as opposed to negative, but how they deal with critical reviews. And so the most important things, obviously not to get personal, to stay calm, obviously look at it and say, actually I probably need to find out some more information about this. And so with Helpful Crowd you’ve got a one-click email assistant, you can click on the email address on the review and it will open an email for you prepopulated with all the information about the review. And then you can ask that reviewer and say, “Hei, listen, we received this review. We obviously are very serious about our business. We take all feedback seriously, we’d like to hear more about this and we’d like to see how we can fix it.” And the best way is to really try to resolve the issue offline and then provide a comment to the review and highlight that you’d obviously taken that forward. You resolve the issue and obviously look forward to the customer coming back and shopping with you again.
Jesse: Got It. Niin, in this case, let’s say it’s a one-star review, they say, “I never received my product, blah, blah, watch out for this company.” You get a chance to respond to that before that review goes live. Miten tuo toimii?
Scott: Yeah, that’s a good question. So we’ve got a toggle switch. We’ve got an auto-publish feature, which means that every review will automatically get published to the storefront. And that’s really good. You don’t have a lot of time, you want to do things, that you might consider more important. And you can just let all the reviews published to the website and comment on them later. We also have a toggle switch where you can moderate all the reviews and review them before you publish to the website. It really depends on how you want to run your review system. You have both options. And also with sometimes one-star reviews or even four-star, three-star reviews. There may be reviews which are not considered to be appropriate, oikein? Whether it be language, whether it be talking about a competitor’s product, whether it just be off topic about the product altogether. And so we also have an inappropriate flag which can be used in the moderation panel, which removes that review from the public domain.
Jesse: Got It. Okei. And Google also has some review rules around review companies and such. Does that follow the Google standards for that?
Scott: We have our own standards and I think it’s fair to say they’re pretty straight forward common sense. Mutta yleisesti, it’s about racism. Ilmeisesti, it’s about language. It’s about appropriateness, competitor mentioning competitive products, jne. I think what we’d like to do is I suppose to give the shopper and the customer their voice and also the merchant, their voice. And that’s why we also believe that the commenting feature on reviews is very important. Because if it was just one way with just a customer leaving a review and not that ability, then it’s not really giving a full context. And it also gives that merchant or the business owner a really good opportunity to show how they run their business, what their morals and values are.
Jesse: Yeah, I liked that. I’ve have used other reviews, apps in the past and sometimes that’s not available. You can either have this, there’s this may be a critical review. It’s two, three stars and you do take the opportunity to fix the situation with the customer. But if you can’t leave like an addendum to that or can’t comment on that review, it just looks like a bad review and you didn’t take care of it. That’s a negative, but sometimes a bad review that you then leave a note said, “Hei, thanks for pointing this out Mr. Customer, I’m happy to ship you another package, thank you for your feedback.” Right? That might actually look good to other people rather than being just a negative negative review.
Scott: Ehdottomasti. And we have another kind of interesting feature in Helpful Crowd, which we really love. It’s called thank you emails. We consider a positive review being effectively a four and five-star rating review and a critical review being one to three. You can set this up so that when you, if you receive a review, which is a one to three, then the customer will automatically get an email and say, “Hei, we’re really sorry you didn’t have a great experience. We really want to fix this up. We want you to give us another try. Here’s a coupon, come back and give us another chance and we’ll be in touch with you to talk to you further about this issue.” Uudelleen, that’s all automated if you set it up and in fact, we provide you that opportunity to create and continue the conversation with the customer after they’ve sent the review, both for positive and critical reviews, which we think obviously is really important for building loyalty and trust.
Jesse: Love that. And then did you have a similar thing for people who left the four or five-star review?
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. We have two separate email templates, one that goes up for four and five, one that goes up for one and three. And what we usually encourage merchants and business owners to do is effectively, probably for the critical ones, we always recommend whatever you give to, if we’re going to give a coupon or an incentive, whatever you give to the positive reviewers, you should give more to the critical reviews because actually, they’re worth their weight in gold much more in some ways in terms of getting feedback and understanding what you can do to improve.
Richard: I don’t have hard stats on this, but I in my experience have actually some times felt better having something happen with the business that potentially went wrong or they didn’t go up to what I thought the standards and then they fixed it. I actually have more belief in them than if nothing bad had ever happened in the first place. Doesn’t mean I want that to happen every time, but if something happens and they fix it, I actually in some strange way tend to have more belief in that business than if everything was just perfect every time.
Scott: Right. And if you’re like most people as well, I think you’ll go and talk to other people about it as well. Right? We all love to whinge a little bit. I had a really bad experience with this store, but hey, you should have seen how they help me and fixed it up. And that again just increases your reputation brand and rich.
Jesse: Makes perfect sense. I don’t think that means you should send out mistakes on purpose to fix that later, but don’t take that tip. (laughing) The tip is to fix mistakes when they happen. But that’s great. So how does it work? I sign up as a merchant and say click some boxes for yeah, I want to get reviews. Does it, do the reviews get sent out when the product is ordered or when the tracking number shows that receive, how does that work?
Scott: Helpful Crowd and Ecwid are fully integrated, very easy install process. One click button, we install the display widgets on your site and everything like that. And then I think that you have a couple of options. You can import reviews from other review platforms if you have them or from other sources. And you can also go back up to six months. And you can import, if you’re an established business, you’re going to put all your previous online orders for up to six months and then those review request will go out straight away. So effectively what you’re doing is you’re seeding your reviews on day one with previous purchasers and customers, which is a great thing to obviously build momentum and get up and running. And then after that, you can set up the email templates. The first one that goes out, we have two in total. So the first email template can be set up to send out based on three or four different triggers. One is when the order is placed, one is when it’s paid, the third one is when it’s shipped and the last one being delivered. So you can then set up the number of days after you want that trigger to send the email. What we used to do is we used to send an email, a review request, five days after delivery, which gives the customer a little bit of time to be able to try the product. They don’t feel like they’re being rushed to provide a review and then they can provide a more informed review and feedback and insight for you on that. This is all automated. If the customer doesn’t reply to the first review, then you can also set up a second email to send X number of days after the first email is sent. So you might set up that to seven to ten days after the first email. This really increases your opportunity to collect reviews. And unlike a lot of other review apps, Helpful Crowd actually allows the customer to write multiple reviews for a single order. If you’ve got one order and there are 10 products on there, the customer can write a review for all of those 10 products if they feel inclined to do so.
Jesse: Mahtava. And I think what I saw there, pro tip for people listening, if you don’t have reviews right now, you could install Helpful Crowd and then because you can take the last six months of orders and send out those emails, you can immediately see your store with a bunch of reviews, Toivon mukaan, positive. Mahtava. Now you mentioned other review apps. How does Helpful Crowd standout from others?
Scott: That’s a good question. I suppose we do things a little bit different, differently. Obviously coming from the world of being a store owner, we’d like to think that we understand what some of those challenges are. And we’ve touched on some of those things already, but we provide premium features as standard as I mentioned. We feel that it’s really important. A store shouldn’t have to pay a lot more money to access those premium features that they really need on day one to grow their business. That’s our mentality we want to give the store on is the best opportunity to grow their business from day one with access to all the premium features, from branding their templates, customizing their templates, setting up all those different trigger dates, to social sharing. You can share your reviews on Twitter and Facebook. We’ve got six different widgets. You’ve got carousels, sidebars, or different ways to show and display your reviews anywhere on your site, wherever the customer is. And this is just a short list of features. We also differ, we collect our reviews very differently to a lot of the other review apps out there. We follow very much closely to what the biggest and the best leaders in the industry, kuten Amazon, TripAdvisor do. And we have a hybrid approach. So we ask the customer a really simple question when they open the email, which is how many stars would you give this product? And they click on that and then we automatically redirect them to another page, which actually enables them to fill in their content. We call this the FHRX experience or the friction honest review experience. And because of that process, effectively we’re reducing the refraction rather than asking the customer five or six different things. As soon as they opened the email, we’re just asking them to make a very binary decision, which is to click on the number of stars. And we’ve actually seen significant increases in review collection rate. It’s nothing unusual for our stores to have 20 to 30% reviews collected. I suppose the conversion rate for the orders centel.
Jesse: That’s great. I mean sometimes you’re happy to get that many people to open an email, so that’s all right.
Scott: Yeah, I think for the pro users out there and just everybody actually, there are some really interesting things about review collection rates that may be a lot of people don’t know and because a lot goes into it, there’s quite a lot of science around it. So the first thing is you’ve got to get the email into the user’s inbox, oikein? And I’m not sure if there’s a lot of people are aware, but up to 85% of all emails sent every single day on the planet are actually spam. So that challenge of getting the email into the customer’s inboxes is a real challenge. When you’ve got Gmail spam engines out there, spam bots or the other spambots, I’m trying to protect the customer’s inbox from spam. So we really rate ourselves in terms of inbox delivery for getting those review request to the customer’s inbox straight away. And then really it’s up to the merchant, the business to make sure they then position themselves and set themselves up for success for getting those reviews are applied to. And that starts with whether the customer is even received the product. So getting that timing right is really critical. Nothing worse for a customer. They get this request asking for a review and I haven’t even received the product yet. It’s also about the subject line making a really compelling subject line, but obviously making sure it’s not spammy, making sure that it stays on point. And then obviously a time of day, the best time to send out emails to any customers. It’s been proven over many studies to be around 10 o’clock on a Tuesday, Tuesday if possible. Mutta 10 o’clock is a really good time. Yleensä, after people have gotten to the office, had a coffee, settled down before they get into their work and they check out their inbox. So timing is also very important for increasing those review collection rates.
Jesse: Got It. So there’s the number of days after it’s been delivered and then your software says, well we could deliver it on Sunday, but why don’t we just hold this over till Monday or Tuesday at the ideal time? Is that the idea there?
Scott: That’s a feature that’s coming. It’s in the pipeline. We have the timing today. So effectively if you’re in a certain time zone, then you can say, “I want this review to be sent out at 10 o’clock.”
Jesse: Got It. Yeah, it makes sense.
Richard: And there’ll be 10 o’clock in whatever the customer’s time zone is or 10 o’clock?
Scott: Yeah. Right. In the app again, we have a time zone for the app. And the customer can, I should say the merchant can change that to align with their time zone. But usually, we get that straight from Ecwid anyway.
Jesse: Okei. Got It. This sounds great so far now. How many hundreds of here are we going to pay here? How do you price this?
Scott: We priced it very competitively and we feel very affordable. So entry level is what we call the Scoopful plan. It starts at $3.99 kuukausi. We have a 30-day trial. You get to use all of the features you can get up close and personal with it, see how it’s working out with you. And after the 30 päivää, and we have paid plans starting at $3.99 and it’s based on orders. It’s based on a number of online orders that you get a month. And we also have what we call In plan and Out of plan. Pähkinänkuoressa, provides maximum flexibility. If you have a store that usually has let’s say 60 orders a month, then you might want to have a look at the Handful plan that includes 75 tilauksia. And then if you need any more orders, say if it’s around Christmas or it’s a really peak busy time, then it will automatically apply a bundle of 50 orders to your Helpful Crowd account. You can continue to collect reviews and obviously, you continue to create that trust and credibility with your shoppers.
Jesse: Got It. So like a rollover plan for your phone bill basically?
Scott: Yeah, I suppose like a phone plan, oikein, where you have X amount of minutes or something for a month and then if you have more minutes then you can access those minutes. The difference to a phone plan though is that our out of bundle orders are actually cheaper than the base one. Whereas usually buying plans.
Jesse: Yeah. The phone companies are not out there to be friendly and help you out there all that much. (laughing) That’s awesome. It’s really not that about that much money here. If you’re at the hundred orders a month, it’s starting to become a real successful business and spending 10 bucks a month on all this, all these features we talked about the Q&A, the reviews really not that much at all.
Scott: Right. We are kind of like coffees, oikein? The script book plan is like one great cup of coffee a month. Which is nothing. And then if you’re up to the hundred orders and yo maybe talking about two or three cups of coffee a month, which for what it does and for the content SEO reputation, it’s really the cheapest marketing tool you could probably have.
Jesse: Makes sense to me. Are there any customers stories like something that our customers, our listeners could look at?
Scott: Yeah, definitely. So there’s an Ecwid store called Soundwave Art. And interestingly, the CEO there, a guy called Michael LaTour, he actually wrote an Ecwid blog article probably about a year ago and he outlined, so that’s on the Ecwid blog. He outlines…
Jesse: We’ll provide a link there for listeners on the blog.
Scott: And he brought it up some background in terms of his experience of trying to find review apps and then obviously when he found us and also why he uses the review app. So I think that’s really relevant. And the biggest takeaway from Mike really was that the review collection rate with Helpful Crowd was significantly higher than any other review app he’d used before, including some of the tier one guys out there. That really gave us a lot of confidence that we’re onto really good feature there with the way we do that. And interesting that Soundwave Art is a really nice store. Check it out effectively. They, they create customer on many different types of materials. And they’re also involved with a guy called Kevin Harrington who was actually one of the original sharks from Shark Tank. Just a small bit of information. And I think he was the guy that actually started As seen on TV.
Jesse: Oh yeah, I remember.
Richard: He was even in on the original Ginsu knife, if I’m not mistaken, dating myself there.
Jesse: Using a review to help sell a review app. I love it.
Scott: That’s great.
Richard: That is a good store.
Jesse: So Scott, now if people listening there, how can they find out more about you or how can they sign up for your app?
Scott: Yeah, we’re listed on the Ecwid app marketplace so they can search for us there. They can also go to HelpfulCrowd.com that’s our marketing site and they can read up more there. But there’s a fair bit of information on the Ecwid app market page already.
Jesse: Mahtava. Rich, any last questions here?
Richard: Ei, this was great. I’ll give you a positive review. This was a great interview. It’s very helpful. I mean, anything we can do to help the merchants, especially when you can get your customers to help the merchant too. It’s a win, voittaa, voittaa. I love it. Thanks for your time.
Jesse: Yeah. Mahtava. Scott, I really appreciate you being on the show today and for everybody listening, get out there, make it happen.
Scott: Thanks for that guys. Really appreciate it.
Jesse: Ehdottomasti. Kiitos.
