For this 1st episode, Joseph welcomes Paul-Louis, Expansion & Partnerships Manager at Payplug.
As he says himself, he's been“eating e-commerce alive and well for the past 4 years”, so you might as well know that he's got a lot of interesting things to share with us 🙂
The result is 1 hour of fascinating discussion during which Paul-Louis shares his vision of e-commerce trends and his tips for creating a top-notch customer experience!
PS: We fact-checked and Citadium is indeed part of the Printemps group 😉
Listen Paul Louis, we're delighted to welcome you to the Loyoly offices today to talk e-commerce. We're going to cover a lot of different topics. It's going to be, I think, a pretty cool conversation. We're going to talk about the buying journey, e-commerce trends, advice for brands just starting out, favorites from the Shopify Store. Maybe for starters, well, now that you're an e-commerce influencer and everyone knows you on LinkedIn, most listeners are going to recognize you. But for those who don't know you yet, could you introduce yourself quickly and then tell us a little about Payplug and whether you're doing Yes or not, thank you for the invitation, it's a pleasure, we know each other a little now, it's been, what, since September something like that A little, I think you were the first to learn that I was going, that I was joining two new Payplug. So I'm Paul Louis, what do I do for a living? I do some gardening, I'm passionate about electronic music, I collect a lot of vinyl. I like to start with that because I don't really like to define myself, well I haven't presented my job as what defines me as a person. I'm in charge of partnerships with e-commerce solutions for Payplug. Payplug is a provider of payment solutions and payment services currently operating on the French market, and is a French solution. We process payments for around twenty thousand e-tailers today, well twenty thousand retailers. I'm used to saying e-tailers, but I need to get out of that habit, because we also have a solution, we have both an online payment solution, i.e. on a website, and we also have a proxy payment solution, i.e. via a payment terminal that we're going to offer to retailers in their stores, their pop-ups, and so on. At the moment, I'm planting my seedlings, so I've got some heart of beef tomatoes that are growing right now. They're the most expensive. Frankly, they're the best, the ones that cost the most. Now I'm, I'm too happy, But yeah, I started with that because I also like, I'm very, well I'm very interested in people's lives and what they do outside of work and I also like to tell a little bit about my life. And I think you do that every Friday, so you don't tell your life story, but you do talk to other e-tailers, especially every Friday. You rent it out for a little while to get to know other players in the ecosystem, as well as brands. So frankly, go ahead, it's free. In fact, it's free, and beyond that, one thing I've noticed over time is that there's a general lack of knowledge among the players in the e-commerce or retail ecosystem. In fact, I find that a lot of people are out of touch, and that's not a criticism, but it's why I'll never be an entrepreneur, because you're wearing fifteen hats at once. And I feel that for some time now, I've sensed it and it's even something that many of my interlocutors have admitted, which is in fact a blatant lack of knowledge on many subjects. So I opened Open Hours, which I call OpenHowers, and launched it in September. It's something that's working well, that we've doubled. So it's not just on Fridays anymore, it's also on Wednesdays now, and it's an hour during which you can come whether you're an e-merchant, a solution publisher or simply interested in this ecosystem. If I've got a free slot, and it's not always easy, we take an hour. We take, we take an hour, you come with your bread, you just come with questions and we try to make sure that the person comes out with intros, little actions to put in place fairly quickly. I remember not too long ago, I met a brand and we saw a lot of little things that weren't necessarily right on the site. So my job isn't to replace the agency, quite the contrary, it's more to say that on these subjects, you need to talk to an agency, if there are issues that are a little more dev to tackle, but you see types that are hyper-easily actionable. For example, you've got a header that isn't and that's basically a must-have. Let's put header in stick And yeah, it's this little momentum we've got and then this merchant with whom I did this call a fortnight ago and I actually found it really interesting because I don't feel like I'm talking in a vacuum in the sense that the next day at eight o'clock, we did this at two o'clock, the next day at eight o'clock, I go to his site out of curiosity and out of five actions we had identified, there were four that had been put in place. So yeah, it's, it's working well. Yeah, it's cool, I think, it's a really good initiative on your part and I'm really cool about it. If I were an e-businessman, I'd go straight for it. You were saying that you'd noticed a lack of knowledge on a number of subjects. What are the subjects you hear most often in your office hours? Maybe we could start by taking a look at the funnel in the order in which we arrive at the site. There you go, I don't know if you were already talking about the “not sticky” part, but are there any other things you can think of that are recurrent and that we could talk about to shed some light on this situation? Already, there are plenty of people who haven't set up a program of. No, seriously. Yes, well, the “program of” is a subject that comes up quite regularly. But after some, well, really basic stuff, I still get a lot of people I talk to who want to start an e-commerce business and who think, holy crap, I can launch a Shopify in an hour, but in fact there's a lot to do. Well, Shopify is one thing, but launching a Shopify is another, and converting on a Shopify is a full-time job. Yes. You noticed, it was not bad on that part, a little conversion on the site that had things to improve. What would be typical for reviews, for example? For me, it's a must-have these days. There are lots of studies coming out. I don't remember which study I was looking at, but I think it was one that was done everywhere. One figure I'm always referring to is that over seventy-five percent of people today, consumers who explain to you, admit that reviews and ratings will influence their purchasing decision. Of course they do. And I see brands that don't put reviews up, or put them up badly, because you have to put reviews up, and you have to put them up enough. In fact, it's basic to basic. Then again, I don't blame anyone. You're an entrepreneur, you're launching your brand, you've got legions of sales people coming to see you, and it's easy to get lost. But yeah, well for me, there's really, I'm dreaming one day of a, we could even take part, you know take on this subject. We get together as e-commerce players in this ecosystem and we draw up a book with the fifteen rules, you know, the fifteen commandments Very well.Vingt, trente commandements de tu lances ton site, tu l'as, tu le fais très bien enfin vous le faites très bien chez Loyoly avec le deck que vous avez lancé sur les solutions e-commerce qui sont indispensables, mais vraiment au-delà de la solution, c'est la thématique. Have you thought about your reviews Have you thought about a Loyalty program Obviously, this is when you've got your community engaged, but or when you want to engage them further, have you thought about, how shall I put it, indications concerning deliveries, delivery costs, delivery times, et cetera. Do you know that the French, for example, love point relais delivery, but they also like delivery in less than seventy-two hours. If not, you have a conversion drop. In fact, for me, it's all that, it's putting together an ebook and making sure that, in fact, anyone today can say to themselves, well, I've got a good foundation what. Yeah, but listen, it's going to go, it's going to go into production. It's our friend, our friend Florian Auffret. Exactly. Big Content big up to big up to Flof, our content manager. I know that with Payplug in particular, you've been digging pretty deep into the subject of customer experience, the important check-out stage and omnichannel. Would you have any advice to offer on this subject, to ensure a customer experience that converts and also builds loyalty, because if you have a good experience, you'll want to come back. You see, to come back to your previous question about what kind of payments you're seeing today, what subject are you tackling or other? One of the subjects is payment, but in fact it's not really tackled in the sense that payment is a bit like the last wheel in the carriage. In other words, the guys don't want to hear about it. They don't really know how much they're paying. They don't really know what they're paying for. I judge a lot of dealers who tell me, well I tell them, but you, how much do you pay back per month? I don't know, I'm at twenty, thirty percent, so you know that out of twenty, thirty percent, you get an extra girl on the refund. And in fact, you have lots of things like that where basically the payment is a huge, it's a no-brainer in the sense that they've put it aside, you know. They sweep it under the carpet, they don't think about it, it works, it doesn't work, but in this case I've got money coming in, customers paying and so on, but our role at Payplug isn't just to make payments, even though that's our core business, but also to help people understand how payment can be an absolutely fantastic growth lever. I often take the example of Fagot, one of our long-standing merchants, which is also - and I'm really saying this without the Payploc hat on - in my opinion one of the best French success stories of recent years. Fago tells you that we didn't pay him for that, but he tells you at a conference that, in fact, before I joined Payplogue, I didn't know what payment was. But not because he wasn't actually interested, but because we'd never actually shown him that there's a cover you can open, and that you can actually understand what's going on underneath. And I think I'm preaching to the choir here, but having seen quite a few payment service providers, I've seen how they work, and you know, I was a little unfaithful to Payplug for a few years, sorry guys. But here I am, I've seen how it works and I find that Payplug, and I say this with a lot of objectivity, I find that we're really one of the, if not the payment service provider that best talks to merchants about what payment can bring or at least what payment can be in a growth strategy. Yeah, it's often perceived as a commodity and a bit, it's a bit the poor relation somewhere, I feel, of commerce. And it's true that it was quite an eye-opener for me when we talked about it one of the first times you explained what plugs were. And you gave a very concrete and down-to-earth example, which is that when you have an acceptance rate, you can increase it by even two percent with a solution like Payplug. That's sales. That's sales. So in fact, it's not so much a convenience, but it's almost an acquisition channel, or a growth channel in any case. It's a growth acquisition channel, it's something to challenge. You see, I don't know, well frankly I'd give a high water figure like that, but, sorry, but you don't know, we, you know maybe ninety percent of the merchants we talk to don't know their acceptance rate. It's like if tomorrow, you ask a merchant, what's your conversion rate on site and they say I don't know. But it's a figure, well, it's a rate which, for me, is the basis of everything. After all, it's a rate that we haven't necessarily been educating merchants about for years. But now it's starting to happen, because we're no longer just talking about payment, we're talking about performance. And in fact, that's why you have merchants who don't look at it as much, because a merchant who makes a few tens of thousands of euros in sales a year will represent a few euros, a few tens of euros. But you have merchants who make five, ten, fifteen, thirty million euros in sales and who will say to me, you've just saved me several hundred thousand euros in sales because we just worked together. That's what we're trying to get across, and I think we're really good at it in terms of our work obviously, but also in terms of the way we educate people and give credibility to this payment stack. In fact, once again, I always say what I respect, you can make all the efforts in the world upstream, you can set up a CR0 strategy that is as advanced as possible of the magnificent landing pages. You can set up a loyalty program if, at the end of your check-out, your payment page, your payment provider, is not performing, you lose. All the work you've done upstream will be undone, but in any case it won't be optimized, which makes sense. And to stay on the subject of payment, what we're seeing more and more is payment, mobile payment. I don't know if you want to talk about that. Mobile payment, for me, means two things. For the first time in France, the number of transactions carried out on cell phones has exceeded the number of transactions carried out on desktop computers. That's the first time. I think it's two-thousand-twenty-one. It seems to me that Covid has also accelerated this with digitization, with the how to say the applications that are also arriving a lot well that have already been present for a long time, but we'll talk about that a little later, the applications that for me have an essential role in the rise of e-commerce today and in any case of mobile e-commerce. But you do have the mobile commerce that I find very interesting because it allows you to squeeze a lot of things Apple Pay, the rise of Apple Pay today, it's more than one payment out of two on the e-wallet. I'm sure you can see that. It's absolutely incredible. The Apple Pay shopping experience is, I think, pretty phenomenal. And then there's the other version of mobile payment that we're pushing a lot today, which is more on the in-store side: an application we released at the end of last year called Tab to pay, which we brought out in collaboration with Apple and which now makes it possible to offer payment on a terminal, but in fact on an iPhone, to turn an iPhone into a payment terminal. There are many advantages. The first is to relieve congestion in stores. The second is to meet your customers rather than having them queue up or come up to your counter. I often talk about this with Alexis Muller, co-founder of La BelleBook. We think of Laurine and Alexis. Alexis is the man behind the scenes at La BelleBook, but I think he's brilliantly imaginative. He's always coming up with ideas, and that's what we were wondering about, and today he wants to implement these solutions because he wants to bring another experience to the table. In other words, it's no longer just a case of I visit the store, I walk around, I pick up my products, I put them in my basket, I go to the checkout and then afterwards. So in fact, there are a lot of things to imagine. I find that the, we were talking about it this morning at a breakfast with a retailer where I told him the, we're seeing more and more of a new position arriving in retailer companies, that of retail experience manager. And in fact that's what retail needs today: to reinvent itself, to diversify, to explore new experiences, to offer new experiences. And I find that mobile payment really brings a tasty little feature to the table. And you see, speaking of flavors, it's interesting because I had an example in mind that's really not bad, and that's Nespresso. When you go into a Nespresso boutique, someone comes to meet you and can potentially check you out directly. So we're moving from a mode where, as a consumer, you have to adapt to a structure in order to live its experience, to a mode where it's the structure that's a bit evolutionary, that's going to try to adapt to you and your experience so that it's hyper hyper precious and that you have a great feeling, a great memory of your purchase at Nespresso, because we came to see you for the whole experience. But in fact, the le le is invented, reinvented in this way, i.e. how I offer an experience that is completely disruptive. Disruptive when possible, but in any case an experience that sets you apart from what's around the corner. It's a bit like tomorrow for me, when I'm approached by a sales rep, I buy the solution, but I also adjust the sales rep. The brand, I buy the product, but I also buy the experience that this brand offers me. For me, the most concrete example is Citadium. The Citadium experience, you go and walk around Citadium because you've got this music, you've got these salespeople who, I don't know, are a bit fancy. Yeah, yeah, that's it. And I say that, but really, there's something quite extraordinary, I think, at Citadium that you don't find at Printemps. But Printemps also has an experience that you don't find at Citadium, even though it's the same group. But I think, I think, you confirm We'll ask our management to check. We'll ask our management. No, fact checking, but no, there's something quite, I think, quite essential: the in-store experience has to invent itself, it has to reinvent itself, it has to invent itself with consumers, and think outside the box. I think that's pretty great. I have I have, I know it's a friend we have in common, it's Maxime, two dear customers. I think this guy does an absolutely incredible job of offering, accompanying merchants and designing pop-up stores, brick-and-mortar stores and so on. What he did with HUG, what he did with BMW, was incredible. Frankly, I'd like to work with guys like that, because you know that your customers really are almost everyone I see today. Sorry to his competitors, but I send him a lot of people, because my job and my desire is to make my customers as happy as possible and to pamper them as much as possible, and I know that Dune will pamper them, but he'll also take them out of their certainty and say, “We can give you a crazy experience. We can offer your summer accounts a crazy experience, so come on, let's do it together. And in fact, that's why I think that the retail experience has a very bright future ahead of it, provided that it reinvents itself, challenges itself and is as generous and inventive as possible. Yes, it's true that in concrete terms, it's a market that's more and more saturated if we're talking about e-commerce, or e-commerce in general, so it's true that you often have to redouble your creativity to be able to stand out and make a mark in a world where there's a lot of advertising. If you've had a good experience that's out of the ordinary and leaves you with a good memory, you're bound to think of that brand for your next purchase. So yeah, I think it's pretty interesting and important for brands to move in that direction. And speaking of other trends that we can see a little bit now, we released some pretty cool content together on the trends of two-thousand-and-twenty-four. So it's still the beginning of the year, so please bear with us if our Christelle ball hasn't given us all the details yet, but would you happen to have one or two of these other trends that we're seeing emerge that you'd like to talk about today? Or others, whatever. The one I talked about with a couple of people back home who asked me about what I was seeing a little bit. Because the idea is that half the time I'm on LinkedIn looking at all the trends, we're following everything. But for me, there's one trend that I find very interesting, and that's the application, the applications, the application revolution. We recently published an ebook with PrestaShop and OpinionWay on Genzi trends. The Genzi, you see, buys on applications. And I like to quote solutions that I find brilliant, and for me there's one solution that's really top-notch, and that's Macapi. Macapi lets you duplicate and create an application that scrapes all your data, or at least the data of your choice from your Shopify e-shop, and publishes an iOS and Google mobile application. In a fortnight, I'll take something like that. Yeah. It's like a competitor to your card. Only cheaper and better. And it's French. And the guys are really nice. Thomas, who I talk to, I talk to quite regularly, it's I I well I when I'm a bit bit bitten by an application, you know, whether it's Macapi or or Hollywood, I talk about it and for me, you need, you need in fact these applications and the richness of e-commerce, is to be able to test, You have to test. And if you see that you, it doesn't matter, you've tested, it doesn't work, which I doubt, it doesn't matter, you stop. You see, in the context we're talking about, you're pretty saturated as a consumer, there's more and more competition, you're full of stimuli all the time. As a result, acquisition costs have risen sharply. And one of the ways I find that's really amazing for creating brand awareness around your product is through mobile applications. We're seeing this with apps like, for example, the mini wait, where in fact, beyond talking about your products, talking about your brand, companies are becoming media, just like the rest of us. And so an application is ultra-practical when it comes to creating little quizzes, personalized itineraries, sharing value-added content that will interest your customers and, in fact, create a kind of habit for the end consumer - a habit of consumption. And it's even a browsing habit in the end. You look at applications, for example, I'm thinking of e-commerce nation, which releases the top hundred e-commerce sites every year. You have to see that, for example, you have the, well the, a Vinted, they have a coverage today, I think in France, of twenty-five percent. In other words, you've got twenty-five percent of the French population logging on at least once a month to the Vinted application, because Vinted is only on the application. They have the site, well the desktop platform, but in my opinion, it's not at all interesting and it's not really used. But in fact, that's the power of apps and other advantages of apps: as a brand, you get unlimited push notifications. It's cheaper than SMS. It's cheaper than SMS. It's cheaper than SMS, and another thing is that you're not dependent on a browser. So in fact, your loading time, I think Macapi, that's what they're selling, is four times faster than on your e-shop. When we talk about omnichannel, we're going to talk about it on an on an event, omnichannel today is quickly summed up as online and inshop. Yeah. No, you can be omnichannel online, you can be omnichannel in-shop, the proof is that you've got wholesale, you've got retail, you can do pop-ups and so on, you know, there are lots of things, but online too. The application can become a sales channel, the mailing is a sales channel, the e-shop, really the is a sales channel, but the application can really become a formidable growth lever. Like tajine banane, they've set up an acabit and today over twenty percent of their sales are made on the app. It's amazing, it's amazing. I'm a big believer in this trend, and you can see it among our customers, who are starting to talk to us about it more and more. And do you see any other trends that are just as important or just as interesting that you can think of, from our content or otherwise? There's a, how can I put it, it's a bit like responsible purchasing, which for me is a trend, we can see it anyway, the new generations are much more sensitive to where products come from, to product formulation, packaging, things like that. There's a solution I discovered not long ago called Blue Bird, which is pretty brilliant I must say, and which allows you, without a solution, to also Zeta what they do, what the brand does. We were talking about it with Laure not long ago, but what the brand does in terms of visibility, transparency in terms of production, in terms of the, the carbon footprint in fact of the product, is pretty brilliant. And Blueburn allows, I had seen on one of the Evamock brand's websites, it's Goodweird. BlueBird actually allows you, it's based on AI, to inject your product data, i.e. your formulation, your packaging, and give you recommendations, for example on recycling, to say what's in your product You've got a bottle, you've got a cardboard box, in the bottle, you've got a little plastic cap. So your cardboard is compostable, so you put it in your compost or throw it in the green garbage can. The bottle is recyclable. In fact, there are lots of indications like that. So it's almost a bit gamified and I find it reassuring and it also shows tomorrow's trends. In other words, we need trends, games, and the generations coming after you and me, Gen Z in particular, need to identify with responsible consumption, with products that are greens, with products that are transparent, if the product isn't super green, but how is it assumed, that it's said Yeah, yeah it's interesting for us, it's a subject we're digging into quite a lot at as you say, both on mobile applications and also on responsible purchasing. So typically, you see, we're thinking about an integration with Captain Cause to actually enable users to spend their loyalty points on different causes. And we're very committed to this in the ready-to-wear sector in particular. We're about to launch some tests and can't wait to share the results soon. But anyway, enough about us, that's not why we're here today. Another trend I see emerging a little bit, you still have that spirit where we really want to work on retention. I think this is really one of the themes of two thousand twenty-four. So, of course, we can do it through a whole range of channels, mobile applications, SMS, there's WhatsApp now too, and we're also hearing a lot about WhatsApp - we can talk about it, I'm interested to hear your point of view on that - and also about subscriptions. I'll pass on if you have any feedback from merchants and discuss apps like Recharge, the whole logic of creating recurring income for brands. I'm not going to say that I'm skeptical about subscriptions, but for me, it's not all black and white. In other words, you can't say to yourself, I'm going to do a subscription and suddenly it's going to be incredible. The problem with subscriptions is that if you don't have a mailing strategy and a strategy behind it, your customer will never come back to the site. And in fact, what's interesting is also to increase your A0V. It's important to know that, generally speaking, when you do a subscription, you offer about fifteen percent off the 1-shot price, and maybe you'll offer the shipping costs because it's a recurring thing and you want the person to subscribe. If you don't have a strategy that also brings your customer back into or into your summer account on your site, your A0A won't increase. So that's a bit of a problem too. It's that today, you've got, well the subscription is to be considered as part of a whole, as part of a whole of retention. I'm not going to name the brand, but it's a brand I'd worked with for a long time that has now set up a subscription program, but it started from a position where the bias was to say, I don't do subscriptions, because in fact I want people to come back to the site. So what I do is I do one month, two months or three months and then I bundle. So you get a discount on the most interesting bundle, a slightly smaller discount on the middle bundle and no discount on the solo product. So it's quite interesting because the person is going to receive, so you've increased your A0V, you've got a little gamification that says here, take three months right now. And on top of that, most of the time on a cure, for example, you're told that the effects of a cure really start to show after three months, so for me, for example, when I do a cure, I have to take three months, otherwise I find it's absolutely useless. So there's also the question of whether your product is designed for subscription, and how you're going to challenge that. Do I make subscription compulsory, i.e. do I really stop whenever I want, or do I decide to test? For example, on some products, I suggest a subscription, on others, I suggest a bundle, and I see what works best. Yeah, you really need to take an iterative approach and test a little extra. But that's the richness of e-commerce: you can test things that are quite complex in the way they're built, but actually quite easy in the way you interpret the results. As Sébastien tortue from Boost Conversion often tells you, you've got three months of testing, but three months already gives you a lot of information on how these directions are perceived, the directions you've taken. What's the feeling? What's the reception of your summer accounts, of your prospects and so on, and then you see, do I continue Do I not apply Do I modify Do I test things Yes, that's clear. It's true that today we have quite a few tools, as you said, at our disposal to be able to do this. And that brings me to my point, but I'd like to reiterate that, for me, it should also be, it should be offered. We've released an excellent plugin with Cyclic on PrestaShop, because subscription was the poor relation of PrestaShop for a long time. What we've come up with with Cyclic is a plug and play subscription module on an open source environment that lets you set up subscription rules in just a few hours. I'll talk about this in the next episode of my newsletter, but really, it's huge. And for me, as a service provider, it's also about offering these solutions. On Shopify, it's a little more complicated because we have more control. But on PrestaShop, we've released this plugin. It's a little, little bomb, little nugget. Yeah, little nugget really. Check out what cyclique is up to, and Paul Louis' newsletter, where he shares a little. Ann Hacking. Ann Hacking. So we'll share all the links with you. Very quickly, I need to have you as a guest. Come on, invite me when you, I'm here, so. So cool. So cool. I can't wait to see how it all turns out over the next few months. But I hope we're not wrong. I hope we're not wrong. Otherwise, it's your fault at worst. But then, e-commerce trends move really fast, or retail trends in general. I was talking about it last week with Nicolas Devillers at our place, who said, yeah, I'd like to see your twelve-month action plan. I come back and I say, Nico, even at three months, my action plan can completely change the creativity of today, the possibilities that are given, well look at you in terms of technical stages, I have the impression that you release an integration every week. In fact, things are moving too fast and the, for me the right mix, is to have certainties while challenging them and always being ready to listen. And, in fact, from that, you can both take a direction on what seems to be a trend that you need to follow, on which you need to position yourself, and at the same time stay a little tuned in, because in fact the market is moving too fast. Yes, there's one of those, you see, it's a trend that's totally in that vein, that has really taken off. It's WhatsApp. So, finally, a big kiss to Tiphaine from Simeo. And what's your take on WhatsApp? It seems to be quite a game changer. There are a lot of questions, but I think the first use cases are pretty convincing. So, I'm curious to hear your opinion. The best person to talk about it is Tiphaine. We'll invite her. Now my opinion on the question. When you look at the figures, I don't understand brands that say no to WhatsApp, I'm not interested. Direct mail today has a twenty percent open rate. WhatsApp is ninety-four. The figure alone should make you say okay, I'll test it. In fact, I, why I haven't, why I haven't, well, why I won't go as a brand. After all, the, well, the WhatsApp message, the SMS, it's special because you're still addressing, well, you I find that you pass an intimacy barrier with your with your prospect, your smoking account which is quite fateful, either it passes or it breaks. Yeah, that's true. And you have to be really careful about that. Why not in a strategy say I start with mailing and once the person has become a customer of the brand, why not I direct on WhatsApp you see Where I simply ask I do the do you want us now we talk by WhatsApp But WhatsApp well actually I the first, I I no longer check my SMS, I've deactivated my notifications and above all I have I have more notifications on my phone because it was hell and instead the first application that I'm going to see for myself, is WhatsApp. I open all my WhatsApp messages, to have in my WhatsApp message backlog, I see, I've got two unread conversations, it's freaking me out. I think what's going on And yeah, actually, again, it's not all black and white, but WhatsApp can really be part of, well be part of a much more global strategy. But the figures speak for themselves, I mean, ninety-four percent open rate, it's even SMS, it's not that. And I think, I'm not going to be stupid, but I think it's eighty percent of WhatsApp messages that are read within five minutes. Yeah, that's impressive in terms of the open rate. I think it's very difficult to do it better or it costs a lot more because SMS isn't cheap either, that's one of the big advantages. It's not cheap and there's also another argument for WhatsApp, which is that you're international. In fact, WhatsApp today is based on your, well, your Internet connection. So you don't need, you don't have to adapt to any particular environment because you're going to Germany rather than France. WhatsApp opens the doors to a global world, a world of sales. And when you look at it, as you know, I was in India for a good month and it's crazy because they're light years ahead on that. So I don't have the names in my head, but they have solutions that are already like ultra advanced on the subject. If you look at the shop fronts here of any kind of shop, it could be a gym, it could be anything you want. In fact, here you have the phone number and over there you have the same thing but with the little Whatsapp logo, and in fact everyone is on Whatsapp, you can pay on Whatsapp. They also have a system where you can pay with your five-thousand-euro phone. And they're really five years ahead of us on that because, of course, for cost reasons, it's much simpler to have a phone number on your WhatsApp and you can reach out, everything's like that, they do everything on WhatsApp in fact. So I think for those who are also interested in WhatsApp, it's interesting to dig a little deeper into what's being done on the other side, I was going to say the other side of the Atlantic, but no, on the other side of Europe, in Asia in particular, where they're really very far ahead on these subjects. It reminds me of a little anecdote, Thomas from e-mail club, whom we know well, and whom we salute. And who we salute. And Thomas is the Klaviyo mailing expert. Really, he's a brute. And when he gives me an intro, he doesn't give me an intro by e-mail, he gives me an intro by WhatsApp. He always tells me to stop sending emails. He never answers every email. No, that's really, well for me, once again, the cobbler is always the worst shod. But that's the thing about WhatsApp: I think it's got a considerable strength that hasn't yet been exploited in e-commerce. The Germans are a bit ahead on that. I'm like I said at the very beginning, I'm a music fan, I'm passionate about electronic music in general, I collect vinyl and there's a store I've been buying from for a while, I've been buying from them for four or five years now, which is a store in German, in Germany though, called dj point d e and they actually have all their customer support on WhatsApp. You don't get any mailings, it's all on WhatsApp and the response time is considerably faster. I had a problem with an order, I couldn't find it, I wanted to know where it was, I didn't have the info, I don't know what happened, you know. And the customer experience on WhatsApp, moreover, I say that, it was a few years ago. I thought it was great. Yeah, frankly, big topic to dig into, same, can't wait to see what happens. Typhoon. So, too cool, and yeah, talking a bit about all these solutions that are emerging, we know that the marketplace is bursting with innovation, with new things too. And you spend quite a bit of time on it too, too: too fifty, three and a half and a half on LinkedIn and then the other on the Shopify marketplace. What would be a little you precisely apps apart from Yoli of course that you could recommend, that are available on the Shopify store. That's the problem. I have a little problem with Shopify, with the Shopify marketplace, which is that I can't save my apps. I can't say, for example, I'm going to put a little heart on an app and say here, I'm going to put it on a list, you know a wishlist. It's a bit problematic. Which also forces you to remember all the time and go looking, et cetera. But it's a bit problematic because, in fact, sometimes I look for the same app fifteen times in two months. Yeah, what's this app called, what's its name and all that. Anyway, there's an app that I like, that I'm really recommending right now, it's Atlas, Atlas pick up Point which is an app that's only available for Shopify plus merchants and allows you to combine your shipping into a single interface. And for the summer account, what this gives in terms of customer experience is, for example, I work as a merchant with GLS, DPD, DHL, Mondial Relay. In fact, I'm going to offer the same interface with a map that will open up all my relay points with all these partners. And that's pretty interesting, because it means you've got one, you've got one point, and tomorrow you'll be able to say, I've got three relay points near me, but I've got one that's a parcel relay, I've got one that's DHL and I've got one that's colissimo. I can see all three on the same map, and I also have a listing. And on top of that, it also tackles a problem for Shopify plus merchants, which is having Mondial Relay before selecting the relay point before paying. This is a real headache, and I know that Mondial Relay had a problem, or at least there's always the same problem, which is that even Shopify plus merchants have to wait until the customer, the summer account, has paid before selecting a relay point. I find this rather distressing in terms of the consumer experience. Yes, I agree. Okay, interesting. So instead, I recommend it. Then in application, you have so many today, you see, I find that for example a hosto, it's a great solution for cross-selling Oioli on Oioli well after, I'm not saying this because we're at your microphone, but I send customers to you, they're delighted, they show a ROI times three times five times ten. So good, go you see. Beyond just giving you what's interesting about the Shopify App Store is that when you get lost in it, that's when you start to get a bit lost and that's when you start to think Shopify. That's when it gets interesting. Side has released Visual Merchandiser, which lets you do daily merchandising on your site. What else do you have? You've got high day, high day, the nugget. Four dollars a month allows you to completely customize your checkout. And really, this is the app. We talk a lot. I talk a lot with Andrea, the founder of the lab that set this up, Next Tools, they're in Eastern Europe, they're geniuses, I mean, it really speaks to me, what do they do? Basically, they're a lab, an app lab, so they develop apps on Shopify, so they've developed High Pay, which lets you customize your tone, well, the display of your payment methods according to a whole range of criteria, whether it's currency, whether it's, I don't know, volume, basket size, things like that. They've also developed HighShip, which for me is also a little gem, because it tackles a subject that's particularly relevant to shipping methods. So let's take a very simple example: I sell products, I'm in the tableware sector, I sell both cutlery that's not too fragile and I sell an ultra fragile lamp, I can very easily say that if the lamp product is in the basket, Mondial Relay will disappear. Do I want to be sure and certain that it's hand-delivered to the customer, et cetera? In fact, you've got lots of little tricks like that that I've discovered by pure chance or because I type in a keyword and I find this and I think, well, I'll give it a try, I find it interesting. But yeah, you've got a lot of, well actually, the absence of Shopify, you've got to be curious. Yeah, that's right, you've got to have the time. You've got to want to dig into things, but yeah. You have to want to dig. But for me, you've got a Pain, go to the App Store. Yeah. And on the, we talk about apps in the newsletter.but no, it's really about being curious and having a bit of time, and you can find really cool stuff. There's Regulo which has just come out too, which is an application that's been live on Shopify's absence for a week now, which is an application - and I'd like to give a big kiss to the founders - that allows you to automate e-commerce invoicing for all your orders, and also to prepare your accounts for direct injection into your accounting software. Ah, that's like. It's a bomb, it's a bomb. And on the App Store, it's available on the App Store, guys. Just go for it. Come on, I broke it right off. Okay, too cool. It's not bad. We've got a lot of real ideas for markets. It's spinning, spinning, spinning. It's good, we've got material, so no, it's great for We can be in times one point five in post production and there's fun. So, yeah, it's really cool to have a lot of ideas, trends and subjects to explore. And just to finish, for brands that are sometimes a little lost in all this world, all these apps, all these solutions, what would be the four or five tips you could give a brand that's just starting out to avoid getting lost and still keep this approach where you can test things, set things up quickly and then learn quickly? so, it's already to get informed. Today, there's an enormous amount of content on e-commerce. Some is very good, some is more evasive, but some is really very good. I find, for example, that DNG's newsletter, called le regard de DNG, is a really interesting newsletter, it comes from the bunkers to a sector of activity, the one in particular that was done on, I think it was home and house and interior sector, something like that, very interesting in particular on the evolution of Ikea and the, how can I say, trends that IKEA is going to put forward over the last fifty years. So it's about getting informed, it's obviously about sorting through information, otherwise you need a second life on the side, but listening to podcasts, the Laurent Crest basket podcast for example, by Laurent Crest pardon is a very good podcast, I find very interesting.I'm telling you this again, I'm a bad student because for example I don't read any books on business, I hate it. But if there's one podcast today that I'd rate on e-commerce, it's really to start with and also to learn from others, because that's Laurent's role with his podcast, to interview brands about a success story and share it with others. And when you're an up-and-coming brand, or one that's in the process of evolving or even just breaking new ground, Laurent's podcast is really interesting. So yeah, DNG's view in terms of newsletters, it's Laurent's podcast, so really getting informed in a general way, surrounding yourself with people, for me one piece of advice I always give is to surround yourself with people who have nothing to do with your business. You've created your brand, it's your baby, it's your product, you know it by heart. The problem is, when you get too attached to your brand and know it too well, you're full of certainties. Yeah, your tunnel, in fact. You're in your tunnel, and the day someone comes along to clear your head or give you an outside perspective, you're going to freeze up. You'll say, “He's judging my work, he's judging my baby”, but it's just that your baby, your brand, you don't sell it to yourself. You don't sell it to replicas of yourself as a salesman. You sell it to the common man, you sell it to people who have absolutely nothing to do with you in terms of social origin, who have absolutely nothing to do with you in terms of age, quite simply. So, in fact, it's also about that, it's about how you surround yourself with people who have absolutely nothing to do with your business, who will challenge you, obviously always with a great deal of benevolence, and who will explain to you, in fact, that they'll give you an outside view and take you out of your certainties. I think that's really important today, not to have certainties, to have convictions, that's important, but not to have certainties. It's to try to play devil's advocate on your own and say, ok, yeah, I'm convinced of that. Come on, let's check that what I'm thinking is that's that's that's being all alone in your corner. Yeah, no, it's clear. It's complicated. Really, it's complicated. And you see it anyway, the people who are really solo, who do, I say it with a lot of first degrees, but who do as they please, who do as they please, in fact, after a while, there's a wall. There's a wall because the world, it's vast, it's very heterogeneous and the people you're talking to, who you don't necessarily think you're talking to, have lots of different expectations. Ok so yeah, in summary, surround yourself with the best, take our sons hours with Paul Louis, it's already going, I'm going to block a lot of things. I don't know about, x not magic it anethm sweat. Grégory for example from Okara, you're doing an Okara by the way, it's Okara, I talked about it only last week has a very good newsletter on e-commerce monitoring that I also find really good. The s'obstacle format is really ideal because it falls into your inbox, you save it for later, you feel like reading it, you read it, you don't feel like reading it, you don't read it. So that's interesting. And then LinkedIn, LinkedIn is your best friend. Yeah, that's clear. That's where you learn from the founders, who share their success stories, and maybe sometimes a little too much success. You see, for example, I think that at Amazona, who also talked a lot about her failures, I find that interesting. Léa Léa Legendre from cuisseau who also talks a lot about her failures, who sometimes says on a TikTok video, j'ai la flemme. Today I'm lazy. Tonight I'm stopping at four because I don't feel like working anymore. Yeah. But great. Go ahead. More content like that, please. Oh yeah, it feels great. And then, and then it also shows what Entrepreneurs are human. I mean, it's clear. So you've got some, you're thinking, it's still some, you can ask yourself the question, because it's not a machine, but no, well, it is. Yeah, it is, yeah. You mentioned Cuissoh, you mentioned Amazona, you mentioned others too. I can't make any friends right now, but I'm going to name three brands. Come on, don't be jealous. So, I'm obliged to start with this brand. We talked about it briefly earlier, but over time, they've become buddies. It's la belle boucle, the brand founded by Laurin, whom we salute. We salute. It's a brand that, by the end of its fourth or fifth year, has achieved organic sales of eight and a half million euros. I repeat organically, it's just unbelievable who calls me and says I don't understand and I've got an agency asking me to spend five thousand euros on ads. She's created a war machine and I find her and Alexis, this couple, extraordinary. I really enjoy working with her and him. And on top of that, it's an incredible success story. I mean, it's a brand that's decided to put the customer experience at the heart of everything, whether it's online or in the studios, because there are three studios today. I'm thinking of Bonsoir, for me, because I love Bonsoir sheets. Bonsoir were the only ones who managed to get me to buy a set of sheets. I put them on, I spent the night, I said okay, I'll buy another set because they're so good and because I don't want to wait for, how should I say, to put one between the two, you know. Anyway, I find the whole experience absolutely incredible. It's a brilliant French success story, and the teams are lovely, and they've also worked with some superb agencies for the online part, so it's a very, very. No, I was talking about the digital part. I think they worked with Unlight Lea on the dev side and who did they work with on the design side. You're not with Moon Moon or. No. No. No no. I don't know, but either it's online client, I don't know, I'll have to tell you again. But as for the online part, it's been a big job and I'm a big fan of the brand. And then the third brand, ah it's complicated, third brand. I don't know who you're thinking of, Joker. Listen, one brand I really like is Epicure. So it's a market that's actually quite big. There are a lot of people out there, but I think they do things very well in terms of the customer experience, in terms of involving their customers at every stage in the construction of their products, and in terms of communication, which is very much driven by the founder, Paul Etienne in particular, one of the founders, who we also salute. We've greeted a lot of people here today. It's a round table. But yeah, no, no, frankly, I think it's cool, they're doing a really great job. In terms of business too, they've talked to him quite a lot and it's all very straightforward too, so frankly, hats off to them, I think it's a great story. It's true that Piqûre, I wasn't thinking about it, but what's more, it's a brand that's helped me in my transition to vegetarianism. I don't know if we're listening. Yeah, okay. Because they have a little food supplement that's really good specially made for vegans and vegetarians. Too good. And yeah, thanks, kids. We'll check that out. All right. And listen, man, it was a great conversation. There's Maxime who died behind the last one, our sound engineer, poor guy. So yes, listen, Paul, it was a great, great conversation. We were able to talk about all kinds of subjects. Personally, I learned a lot of stuff too, so it was really cool and I think our listeners will really appreciate it. So, just to finish up, where can we find all your tips and follow you a little bit? On LinkedIn, I post a lot, maybe even a little too much sometimes.On LinkedIn, yeah quite a lot, you can follow me. The idea is also that if people have questions, they can ping me directly by message. The open hours again, I insist, but on, it's really time that's allocated to people who need to challenge themselves, who have a loaf of bread, who simply feel like having a virtual coffee or not, if I'm in Paris at the time with great pleasure. But I really want people to be able to say to themselves, here, I can benefit from a thirty-minute, one-hour meeting with someone who has a completely outside view. I say this with a great deal of objectivity and modesty, but it's also, well, I've been eating e-commerce up and down for four years now, so it's also about giving you tips, sharing what I see on a daily basis, and of course the anakin newsletter is starting to take off, so Ann Hacking, in homage to the greatest pop culture hero of all, Darth Vader, but yeah, anakin is really a newsletter that I share every last Tuesday of the month, in which we talk about lots of things. It's ten minutes of reading for ten hours of work behind it. So read on. But really, we're better off as long as it's useful to someone. There's the French y. Frankly, it's a gold mine, a gold mine.too good. With Joseph as the next guest on an episode. Allez là, c'est parti. C'est parti.