Aidan

Welcome to episode number 83 of The Growth Booth. Thank you for tuning in today. Today I'm excited because we're talking about something which I'm pretty proud of, something that I've spent a lot of time, energy, and invested a lot of money in over the past few years. We are, of course, talking about Cartzy. 

Now, you may be a user of Cartzy, you may have heard me talking about Cartzy, or you don't even know what Cartzy is. And regardless of which one of those categories you're falling into, we're going to be able to help you out here today by giving you a really good overview of not just what Cartzy is, but a lot of the new bells and whistles that you might not be aware of and some of the different bits and pieces that we've got in the pipeline for you.

Just before I get into any of that, what we do at Cartzy is we try to give you a platform that allows you to start selling online in a matter of minutes. The reason we can do that is because we combine having a storefront, which we can give you, but we also combine the ability for you to be able to get products listed online in a matter of minutes by going into a special database that we have, clicking on a product and literally having it published in a matter of seconds after you've done that. 

Cartzy has not been something that we've just whipped together overnight. I wish that was the case, but it's taken many years of toiling away to get to where we are today. In fact, I was looking back and we started working on Cartzy around about four or five years ago and we had our first users come in in 2021. And at this point, Cartzy has helped thousands of people get started online. So if you are one of our users, I just want to say thank you right now for coming on this journey with us. 

Hopefully Cartzy is delivering the goods to you and helping you sell a lot of products online. And I know that just looking at some of the broader numbers here, cartzy has helped users sell hundreds of thousands of individual products, and some of those products sell for five or $10. Some of those products sell for hundreds of dollars. And if you do the math on that, it doesn't take much to see that Cartzy has generated millions of dollars in profits for its users. Our users have collectively listed over half a million products on their stores at this point. 

So again, if you are a Cartzy user, thank you for putting your trust in us and for using the store. We have been working incredibly hard behind the scenes and that's really what I want to talk about today. So I do have with me on the call e-commerce expert who is also the CEO of Cartzy, Mark Cheney. 

Hey, Mark, thanks for joining here. Welcome to the call. 

Mark

Hey, bud. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Aidan

So you might remember Mark, if you're a regular listener. He has come on a couple of episodes already. He was on episode 33 and episode 34 of The Growth Booth. We spoke about selling on the Facebook Marketplace. We spoke about dropshipping. And Mark has been involved with Ecommerce for probably around about a decade now. And as the CEO of Cartzy, he has his finger on the pulse of not just everything that is happening in the e-commerce landscape, but everything that we're doing at Cartzy. 

We've got a lot to discuss. There are a lot of different bells and whistles that I know we've been working on in the Cartzy labs. Where can we start here, Mark?

Mark

“In the Cartzy labs,” I like that. I like that, I'll have to use that. I mean, the first, most logical thing to start with is a few of the things that we've kind of done, enhancements that we've been able to do. Before we kind of launch into that, I'll dovetail off of what you had said about us starting in 2020 and having our first beta group in 2021. In general, Cartzy is a young player in the space. What that means for me is you should see my whiteboards. Right? I have tons of grandiose plans for Cartzy. Just because we're three years old in the marketplace, I think that's a great place to be. We have a lot of room for all of these special things that we're planning on bringing to you guys. 

Just some of the things that you and I briefly talked about, kind of touching on, right now I think the biggest goal is to make sure that Cartzy is a sound platform that people can launch a store on and do all of the things that they need to do. Our elevator pitch for Cartzy really is to give you everything you need housed in one platform for an e-commerce store. I'll say I'll say this: Shopify has all of these different apps, and they're great, but they all cost extra money. I know that's one of the biggest pain points that Shopify users have is just how expensive it can get to run a store on a monthly basis for having these things.

Aidan

We've spoken about this in the past, where some of our stores would cost upwards of $1,000 per store per month by the time we had a few of some of the more basic bells and whistles added in, which we made a point of including sort of out-of-the-box with Cartzy. Definitely one of the downsides of using not just Shopify, but any platform that doesn't have bells and whistles added in already, it makes it a lot more expensive.

Mark

And, you know, Aidan, for a company that's doing quarter million dollars a month in sales and they're really moving and have a budget and capital and blah, blah, blah, and they're making these business decisions that might be a sound decision for them, but I think most people, most entrepreneurs and most small businesses online, you have to start somewhere. Every dollar counts, especially in this crazy economy and all the things that we're faced with. You really want to make sure you're keeping an eye on those. Those pennies add up. 

I did include on the pricing page for Cartzy.com kind of a value comparison chart that we put together. So if you used every app in Cartzy and then you got those same apps in BigCommerce or Shopify, just what the monthly savings would be based on a certain monthly sales kind of volume. That’s something to kind of check out when you visit Cartzy’s pricing page. It's pretty eye-opening.

Aidan

The big thing about Shopify and some of the others like BigCommerce, they're not really at this point, designed for startup online entrepreneurs. They're designed for brick-and-mortar stores. They're designed for giant corporations, and they're set up in that way, and that's fine and they've got a good product. But for someone who's wanting to sort of get started and on a shoestring budget, it's nice not to have $1,000 per month overhead just to kind of keep your store open, especially because there's no reason it should be like that because this is just technology that we can build. It doesn't actually cost Shopify and these other companies anywhere near $1,000 to run a store. But anyway, I think we could hammer that one home all day. We've spoken about that. 

Mark

Yeah, that's my elevator pitch, so I hone that one continuously. “Why Cartzy? Why Cartzy?” I'm like, “Here. This is why.” 

Aidan

I know we've got some interesting things happening with shipping that we've been working hard on behind the scenes. Maybe we could talk a little bit about those enhancements. 

Mark

Yeah, for sure. We'll touch on several of these things like shipping enhancements. We rolled out pretty recently, maybe 30, 45 days ago or so, which really helped zero in on making some of these shipping groups. I guess is the best way to kind of talk about it is we created the ability that you could create an infinite series of groups that products could be grouped together. So you could do all sorts of things not only for the makes-sense things like just size and weight for shipping costs and things like this, but you could also create groups for specials if you wanted to run a special. “We're offering free shipping” or “Shipping for a dollar” or “Just pay for shipping,” whatever your marketing idea is, you can create these special shipping groups for that. 

Aidan

So basically, someone who might not be so familiar with the terminology, what we're talking about here is the ability to set different rates for shipping depending on different product specifications, for example, or characteristics, would be a better word for it.

Mark

So that was a good one to roll out. We got a lot of positive feedback on that. 

Aidan

And you've seen a lot of people using that for running specials, sales and so forth?

Mark

Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of seasonal stuff, I've seen some groups, people will call it, they'll do the groups throughout, like “Valentine's Day group” and this holiday, that holiday, and then they're able to kind of transfer things in and out of these groups when they want to run certain specials. 

Aidan

Right. Makes sense. Good stuff. What else have we been working there in the labs? 

Mark

Oh, man, I'll tell you one thing that we just rolled out last week actually was an auto tax sales tax feature. So when you have to charge your customers sales tax, initially we had things, the standard in the industry, same thing with Shopify and the like, is to set up manual tax rates. That's almost impossible to do on a granular level. Right. To do it, the most accurate way is to do it down ultimately to the zip code. Even within there, there's some variations and things for tax rates, but really down to the zip code level, and you just can't sit around and do that manually. 

So what we did is we literally have one button that you can click on now as of last week. You can go into the sales tax setting and click that button and it will apply an auto tax calculation to any zip code that product gets sold to in the United States. Our international version of that is coming out very soon, like a week or two.

Aidan

I’m sure. This is music to the ears of many Cartzy users because anything that makes tax less of a headache is pretty good news to entrepreneurs. I mean, we don't want to be sitting around messing around with figuring out tax rates when we can just take care of it at the push of a button. So that's obviously going to be a big time saver, but not just as a time saver, also something that can help keep you compliant because I think a lot of people who start selling online, they don't know what they're doing with regards to taxes. They just do any other thing and then they retroactively need to go back and fix that up. When it comes to doing tax filings and so forth, it's a giant pain in the butt. 

If you are someone who's not in the United States, one thing I'll say is selling in the United States is still a great way to start. If I was starting a dropshipping business or any kind of e-commerce store from scratch, that's the first place that I would start. And I don't live in the United States, so that's a feature that will help absolutely everyone. 

What else have you been working on there, Mark? 

Mark

Listen, what I have absolutely learned in running a software product is you're making some forward momentum and then bam, there's an API that goes down or somebody changes their credentials. So we're always in the middle of not only looking forward, but looking to the side at the same time to make sure that any fixes that need to be deployed happen when things change.

One of the things that we integrate with is Printify so that we can do print-on-demand shipping business, drop shipping, etc. They made some changes which changed the way photographs about variants. So like if I had a if I sold a T shirt and I had a red T shirt, a blue T shirt, a black T shirt, and a white T shirt that the image would come in. Well, it wasn't coming in correctly, the right image wasn't being placed. So we made that improvement, which could, across 100 products, could take you a long time to go in and fix. So a couple of people needed to do that, but luckily it all happened quick and we were able to stay on top of it fast enough that this fix really helped anything moving forward. 

We knew that there were users that would have kind of backward compatibility issues, so we created a bulk edit tool to allow people to if you did have to go in and make any of those changes, even from anything in the past you had published in the last few weeks and certainly anything moving forward that you could bulk edit these things, which again, like you said with the tax thing, right, it's all about speed and making our life easier. I spent enough time running my business as an entrepreneur in an online e-commerce thing. It's very valuable time that I want to go to the park with my kid and play soccer. I don't want to spend that time, avoid missing that time to check boxes and edit stuff. So really important stuff. 

Aidan

So this is another great example of one of the powerful integrations that we've got. Now, there are obviously multiple ways that you can make money through an ecommerce store, but one of them is print-on-demand. If you want to start selling through print on demand, then it's important that your e-commerce store natively integrates with a good print on demand solution, and Printify is the very best for that, in my opinion. There's hundreds, thousands of different products that you can completely customize and have available for sale on your store. 

And then if someone actually decides to buy one of those things, you get paid, and then everything else automatically happens behind the scenes to make sure that that product that someone purchased was sent out to the person that purchased it. It's a really great model and some people are using print on demand very effectively with what we're doing at Cartzy. 

And that actually leads on quite nicely to the next point, which is something that we've been talking about and getting pretty excited about for quite a while, which is the Office Hours. The Office Hours is something where we can get on live and showcase some of these things to our members. Do you want to talk a little bit, Mark, about the plan there for Office Hours and the types of things that we can cover in our office hour sessions? 

Mark

Well, so I've been leading the office hour for, I don't know, a couple of months now. I had a colleague of mine helping me with it and he took a little ill, so I took over and I've actually found it very, quite fun to get in live action and teach people things and answer questions. Once every two weeks for our Platinum members, we'll get on at 11:00 AM Eastern and just kind of go over something.

Sometimes I'll ask some questions, “What are topics you guys want to hear?” and I'll try to put something together for the next session. This last one, for the last two or three sessions now, I've been trying to build a series of, it's that cliche, “Start with a niche, but start from zero and let's make smart choices and run through this efficiently and blah, blah, blah.” So I've gotten a lot of really good feedback and it's been quite fun. I got a couple more sessions in me for that series. I'm looking at a four- or five-part series. Everything is recorded too, by the way. So we have like a members area. You can go back, watch everything that we've done to this point. 

Aidan

Yeah. So just to reiterate there, so we do have a couple of different tiers over at Cartzy that you can sign up for. We've got the most basic plan, which I believe is $29 a month. Is that accurate there, Mark? That gives you a lot to get going with. But then if you want to have a more complete plan, which has got even more advanced tools and access to more unique tools as well as the Office Hours, then you've got the Platinum Plan there as well. And if you want to find out more, you can always head over to Cartzy.com.

Now, there are a handful of some of the different things that we've been working on in the background, along with all the other everyday things like keeping the ship afloat, so to speak, and making sure that it's really providing the bread and butter service that you would expect from a good shopping platform. We've been doing a lot of brainstorming as well and sort of planning some of the months ahead and some of the rollouts to new tools and functionality that we're going to be working in. By the way, when we roll out this functionality, it's just natively built into what you have access to. It's never like there's a new cost associated with it or anything like that. Maybe you could share a few of the different bits and pieces that we're working on at the moment. 

Mark

Yeah. So it's fun talking about the past stuff, but talking about the future stuff is even more exciting, right? I think one of our ideas is you really want to be able to have a tool that can do natively, like Aidan said, natively everything for you as much as possible. It eliminates any of that kind of cross application communication, errors or things, and certainly the cost. So we're looking at fully integrating kind of another company called SendPad as an autoresponder into the mix. 

That's going to be really exciting. Day one is just get that sucker connected and working. Day two then is to start to add in some e-commerce-rich type of features into it that will provide a better experience for us as business owners and for our customers. So that'll be an exciting one. That one is something we're working on today, so it should be released very soon. 

Aidan

It's not far away and some of the listeners will know about SendPad already. It's another company that I co-founded, another software tool, email autoresponder, that allows you to send out emails to your audience. This is the kind of tool that just makes sense for you to integrate and use with the likes of Cartzy. It's not just SendPad that we're integrating. We're integrating a number of the most popular, different, not just autoresponders, but autoresponders and other SaaS tools as well. 

So to Mark's point, they're natively integrated out of the box. You come into Cartzy and you've got all of that functionality at your fingertips and it's a really great way actually to expand the functionality that you've got because it opens up all of these new things that you can do. It really adds a lot of multiple different layers of sophistication onto the tool. 

What about AI? I know that you've been busy planning out a lot with AI and I think this is going to be a game changer for people who are using Cartzy. So what have we got in the works there? 

Mark

Yeah, so I think ultimately what we're trying to do is build a robot that we can ship out to everybody's home and just run their whole business for them. Wouldn't that be sweet? Does the dishes, whatever. I saw a movie about that once. Didn't end well for the humans, but we're working on things. But some of the lighter stuff, aside from a robot to your house, that we're working on are the ability to help you. I think one of the biggest benefits to AI obviously comes in the form of time savings, but it comes in the form of creativity. 

It's like if I sit down, if I have to write an essay, or if I have to draw a sketch, or if I have to do something and I'm looking at a blank screen, what do they call it? There's a writer's block or there's something, there's psychological terms for this, and it's the hardest thing to do. Once you get over that initial hump, things begin to be a lot easier. 

I think from this standpoint, this is how we kind of approach this AI piece. Writing your titles and product descriptions, SEO data and things like this, these AI tools get you, in my opinion, 90% of the way there. You're really just kind of going in and cleaning up some things that you know are unique to you in your business or your spin or your situation to make it your own. It happens in a matter of seconds. So that's going to be a huge one that is going to be a game changer because in the e-commerce world, it's just like Google strikes you down for having duplicative content on the internet, right? So this is going to be able to give you a unique spin for every single thing on your site and avoid things and do it in a matter of just moments.

Aidan

Especially with Cartzy, one of the things that we can do is suck products in that are not unique to you. I mean, it's like you could be selling the same remote control for a video camera that is sold in 100 other stores online. There's nothing wrong with that, but it'd be nice if you could make the description and the title of that remote control a little bit more unique to you. That's exactly what we're doing. 

I've been fortunate to be able to play around with some of the technology that we are right now building into Cartzy, and I can tell you it is absolutely amazing. Through using the likes of drop down menus, by inserting just one or two words, and also other things like choosing a tone of voice, we can get an output for a description, for a product title, in a matter of seconds using this technology. By the way, we've already got similar technology built into SendPad, so for those of you that use SendPad for your email marketing, we've got that technology built in there already and Something similar but more focused on e-commerce, e-commerce stores coming to Cartzy. 

I think this is going to be absolutely huge. Just like I mentioned a moment ago, this is not something that we build in and then we start charging you more for. It's built in to the core package that you have access to. So that's pretty cool. 

I know that we've been doing some not just with written AI, but visual AI technology as well. What's the story there? 

Mark

Yeah, so the text-based AI will come. That's something that we're also working on currently. So that's something that is in the very near term roadmap. The graphical one is just a skosh further down the road, but it's just as impressive. It's one of the things that I advocate for. If you have a drop shipping business, when you start to identify a winner, my advice is always to buy one of those, get one of those units, flower box or an aquarium, whatever it is, and get it in your own hands and take your own unique pictures of it instead of stock imagery. It's the same thing you were saying with the titles and the description. If it's the same text, you don't want to use the same image either.

This allows you to basically avoid that step, and we're able to take that image and change it up to make it unique to you and your store, and it looks very good. We've done some preliminary testing with it and the results are pretty astounding. That'll be on the roadmap as well. Have unique images in your store. That's crazy. 

Aidan

If you could sort of snap your fingers, to your point, if you could just snap your fingers and avoid having to buy a product, get it sent out to you, get a camera or get a cameraman, someone who knows what they're doing, a photographer to take good photos of, if you could just snap your fingers and make all of that happen in a matter of seconds using technology, that'd be pretty cool. That's I think what we're building towards there.

The next thing that I wanted to mention to folks is something that I would put in the category of a monetization method or maybe even like a business model method. So we spoke about print on demand a few moments ago and a lot of our users sell on different platforms already, like for example the Facebook Marketplace, like Walmart, and there's a big one out there that we're working on building some pretty interesting functionality around and that is Amazon. 

So opening up a new potential income stream opportunity by leveraging specifically, it could be selling your own products on Amazon under your own brand, or it could be other people's products, other people's branded products on Amazon and having sort of a mechanism that makes all of that possible has been a bit of a headache and I would say a handbrake or a roadblock for people in the past. 

We're quite a long way along developing a way that you're going to be able to do this right from within Cartzy, so for those of you that are looking to find new monetization methods and sort of add new income streams to what you may already have, then I think that's going to be an interesting one. It's also probably only a few months away until where you're going to have the functionality to be able to do that. That's a big one. 

Mark

Just a little marketplace called Amazon, right? Yeah.

Aidan

Just a little one. Yeah, just a little one to go with that little old Walmart and Facebook. It always amazes me. You just need a teeny tiny slither of market share. I mean, it's minute, and that could give you a million-dollar business on these marketplaces. It's kind of mind blowing.

Mark

And the commitment to list on multiple marketplaces is almost nothing. You got your AI writing your listing, you got your images and all this stuff. You already have it set up, so put it on as many as you can, that type of mentality.

Aidan

Squeeze all that juice out of the orange and leverage that syndication. Yeah. Eat everything. Eat the pips as well. If you've got the ability to syndicate content and products, you've done the work one time, you may as well leverage that. That's always served us pretty well. 

I know we've been talking about product funnel integration and that is there anything you can share with us at this stage about the idea there? 

Mark

Yeah, of all the things we're working on, probably one of my favorite things, everybody talks about funnels, funnels, funnels, is to actually integrate a full-fledged funnel builder with an e-commerce slant, obviously, right into Cartzy, kind of baked right in. Again, just like SendPad, by using a company called Float Funnels. We're working on merging some back end technology again, so it's all native and seamless, but I think that not only from an entry point, from a marketing standpoint into a product kind of flow or journey, but as an exit point as well for upsells and things like this. They're all proven to do very well in the world of ecommerce. 

We have some upsell capabilities and things like that through Cartzy already in our upsell app, which works very well, but I think adding a full blown, full fledged funnel in there is going to be a game changer as well, and one that includes like one-click upsells and things. So the roadblock there for somebody adding another item that is relative to it in the cart, it's just the click of a button and you're moving on down the stream and it increases your average order value, and that makes everyone happy. 

Aidan

And I think, again, it's one of those cases where if you asked a marketer what they would wish for if they could just snap their fingers and make it happen, you'd have these fully built out product funnels with one page, one-click upsells and so on and so forth, and that's really what we're working towards. None of these things are things that happen overnight, I can guarantee you of that. But when they are rolled out, they are really things that can add a huge amount to a business. 

Because when you've got a funnel, it allows you to typically get much better conversions. And if you're using any kind of paid advertising, not just paid, but it could be free traffic as well, conversions is one of the few levers that we have that we can pull or push to make an impact to the bottom line. I think that'll be a popular one. 

I was going to mention something else that a lot of people have asked us for over the years, and we've sort of reluctantly or deliberately, I should say, sort of pushed back on it, for additional themes. The reason we've pushed back is because we've wanted to make sure that we're giving you what we know works every single time and not just make something cosmetically beautiful for the sake of making it cosmetically beautiful. You've seen this with car companies when they have started out. The Ford was famous for the Model T and had like one version and that was it. Tesla went down a similar path. They had one version and that was it. 

We sort of adopted that line of thinking for the layout and the theme of Cartzy. We wanted to make sure that for the first, however many thousand users and the first thousands of web pages or stores that were set up, they were set up with something that we thought was the very best in the industry. We designed the theme that way. 

But now we're at a point where I think we've ticked off a lot of the entry level boxes and we can add some additional themes for people that provide different styles for cosmetics, if you like, without needing to go in and tweak things yourself. You've always had the ability, if you wanted to or if you wanted to hire someone to go and tweak colors and different bits and pieces, but a complete new theme out of the box that you can click a button to switch to is something that's going to be pretty powerful. So it's coming finally. We feel like we're there.

Mark

To your point, Aidan, about the one theme that we've had, and we've gotten a lot of questions about it because it always seems to be the thing that people want to focus on first. People that are starting an e-commerce business or starting a website in general. And I can't tell you how many people I've talked to, they want the perfect color beige or they want the right tone of it, when I'm like, it doesn't matter what you think. It really doesn't matter what you think. Sometimes we've seen the ugliest websites convert the best, sell the best, do the best, and I'll say this and we can move on. You would rather us spend hundreds of thousands of dollars testing theme elements and getting everything right and then saying, “Here, this is what works based on a half a million dollars worth of testing,” than you doing it and spending a half a million dollars or a half a $1,000 in testing. So trust us, this thing works, and it's why it's the only theme we've had for a long time. I will make sure…

Aidan

A good example I think to hammer this home. Can you imagine going to Elon Musk at Tesla and sort of say, “The car looks really nice, but I want to have sort of like monster truck wheels on it.” “Oh yeah, sure. Because that's going to make it really agile on the road,” kind of a thing. It's similar with ecommerce where people sometimes say, “Oh, I want to have this menu up here and a video over here,” but from actually millions of dollars of testing, we've seen that menus in the wrong places, videos in the wrong places, actually reduce sales. So I think we've hammered the heck out of this one. People get it. 

Mark

I will still make sure that it is the default theme that gets loaded when you start your Cartzy trial. 

Aidan

Yeah, absolutely. There's lots of bits and pieces happening and we're going to keep our members on the pulse of what's happening, obviously. If you're someone who's looking to perhaps start an e-commerce business, then I think Cartzy is really the go-to tool or one of the go-to tools that you're going to need and you can take it for a test drive and see if what we say is really fact, in that we can get you up and running with the store online in a matter of minutes. We'd love for you to be able to do that and you can find out more by going to Cartzy.com. 

We are going to wrap up this episode here right now. Thank you Mark, for taking some time out away from the lab and sharing some of these different bits and pieces with the audience here. I know that a lot of Cartzy users who are listening to this will get a good kick out of this and a bit of enjoyment out of it to know what happens behind the scenes. For people who are perhaps using an inferior product like Shopify and BigCommerce…

Mark

And by the way, we have a Shopify importer app. If you're unhappy with your current Shopify, you can just click a button and pull everything over to your Cartzy store. 

Aidan

So if you're using something inferior, then now's the time to come over to where all the action is happening and get a really good product that's going to cost you a fraction of what Shopify will charge and get some fun bells and whistles in there as well just for good measure.

Mark

If you don't think that Shopify is inferior, and it's probably not, but it's certainly more costly, right? That's the point that you can't argue. 

Aidan

Depends what you're doing, doesn't it? I mean, if you're a corporate giant, then, yeah, Shopify is probably better, but if you're a startup entrepreneur, then I think you'd be hard-pressed to make the case that it's better to spend $1,000 a month than $29 a month for a bunch of bells and whistles and get money coming in.

Anyway, we've bagged Shopify and the competitors plenty here today, and for good reason, I think, anyway, but I'm certainly a little bit biased there, so thanks for listening, thanks for tuning in. Always good to have you here on The Growth Booth. Remember that you can see show notes so you'll have a written version of us bagging the competition over at TheGrowthBooth.com. Head to episode number 83 and of course you can catch us on YouTube as well or wherever you like to listen or watch these podcasts. So with that said, we're going to wrap this one up and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now.