Having to carry an inventory of accessories for the bikes you sell is a lot of overhead. What if you simply partnered with other great Shopify brands that already carry gloves, locks, and helmets? You’d keep people who buy your bike on your site, bundling together various complementary products, giving you a cut and simplifying their experience.
David Perry discussed this on last week’s podcast. He wonders why more brands aren’t tapping into this huge network to increase sales and only depending on more ads.
We chatted to David about his past career as a game designer and how photographing influencers brought him out of retirement. By bringing brands together with each other, along with content creators who genuinely care about their products, David sees a very fruitful future for eCommerce brands.
The three big topics we touched on were:
- How partnerships are beneficial to all brands involved
- Experiential sales through bundling
- The ways that partnerships can help influencers turn followers into customers
You can find the teaser below and the summary of the main points if you’re short on time. But if you have 30 minutes to spare, this episode is definitely worth a listen in full!
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Who are David and Adam?
David Perry is the Co-Founder and CEO of Carro, a new app used by over 30K Shopify brands that enables brands to sell each other’s products by creating a bridge. GetCarro.com helps brands gain attention, sales, and new customers by partnering with other brands in the network.
Before starting Carro, David was in the video game development space. There he created a video game streaming service that was eventually acquired by Sony. It’s called Playstation Now.
Adam Vaira is Optily’s Client Strategy Consultant who has guided many store owners on the best strategies and solutions for growing their business. He is also a Shopify store owner himself
Benefits of Brand Partnerships
Rather than solely relying on ads to drive traffic to your Shopify store, David would like to see more stores collaborate and share the traffic they have amongst themselves.
Rather than investing in more inventory with all the overhead that goes into that, partnerships enable you to sell complementary items, keep people on site, and make the experience simpler for everyone involved. This is especially powerful for starter kits, David pointed out.
For example, if you sell dog food, you might want to have a new puppy pack with all the things a new dog owner might need. You sell the food, but maybe you don’t carry bowls, leashes, or collars. Simply partner with other shops that do carry these and create a bundle that can be purchased from all the stores.
The logistics happen in the background, but the customer doesn’t need to be involved in any of that. All of the businesses profit from the sale without having any of the other products on hand.
Experiential Sales through Bundling
Building upon the idea of bundling, David introduced the idea of not only physical eCommerce, but also experiential. Continuing with the new puppy pack concept, what if you also included a voucher for a video chat with a veterinary clinic? This peace of mind and emergency backup could be a valuable addition to the pack, but not necessarily one with very much overhead at all.
Partnerships across many brands and sectors can really open doors to all sorts of possibilities. With this new lens on eCommerce, David thinks this will really have a significant impact on how we buy and sell in the future.
Rethinking the Influencer Brand Relationship
Affiliate marketing is not very effective and oftentimes influencers have strained relationships with brands. If they aren’t passionate about your products, it’s going to show. Also, they will sometimes take down the post they made as soon as they’re allowed. Rather than a pay for post approach, David would like to see influencers curating their own Shopify store with products from brands they truly care about. Their content and sales happen on one site and they get a much bigger cut of the sales than affiliate links, while keeping the traffic.
