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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Brent Peterson (00:02.029)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Peter Karpas. He is the CEO of Bold Commerce. Peter, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day -to -day role and one of your passions in life.
Peter Karpas (00:13.501)
So I look, I am the CEO of Bold Commerce. We do checkout, right? And we revolutionize checkout. My background is more from the payment side, other than the last few years where I've been doing e-commerce, I came from PayPal and First Data before I was part of Fiserv. And I spent over a decade into it and even working with the payments division there. And so, you know, that's my background and my passions in life.
Well, right now I think we have to talk about hockey. Got to talk about hockey because we're heading into the playoffs and my Warriors lost last night. So it's a little bit harder to get excited about basketball. And so, but look, I'm the entertainment industry's dream consumer and I do sports. I play video games. I read a lot. I listen to music. And so my passion is pretty much anything that I find entertaining. And, and I try to do a lot of it.
Brent Peterson (01:12.782)
Yeah, I'm very embarrassed to admit I come from Minnesota and I don't follow hockey. I kind of gave it up in 1991 or 92 when the North Stars moved to Dallas. And now of course we have a team again and they just seem to continually do bad. It's a story of Minnesota sports. So I have my...
Peter Karpas (01:32.573)
Yes. Yeah. Unfortunately, although if we want to talk about bad, I am a San Jose sharks fan and I think they've had the second worst season since the eighties this year. And, and so we could talk about bad, but it's still fun. Right. And you just, you know, you root for the kids who are getting better and, um, but yeah.
Brent Peterson (01:43.694)
Okay.
Brent Peterson (01:47.982)
Right, yeah, it's definitely...
Yeah, and I know you're from the Bay Area and you're losing the A's, which is, I don't know if it's good or bad for you. What's your opinion on the A's?
Peter Karpas (02:00.093)
You know, I never went to an A's game because the Coliseum wasn't great and it was so far. And so, you know, I have been to a few of the Giants games. And so, but yeah, I think anytime a fan base loses a team, it's a sad thing.
Brent Peterson (02:16.302)
Yes, very sad. All right, well, we're not here to talk about sports, but we are going to talk about bold commerce and I'm excited to talk about that. But before we start, you did volunteer to be part of the free joke project. So I'm going to tell you a joke, just say, should the joke be free or paid for it? And I think you had a good way to look at it too. Like this could be a conversion rate optimization on the joke. Maybe you should just get weeded out completely. All right, so here we go.
Peter Karpas (02:29.789)
always.
Brent Peterson (02:42.958)
A man walked into a hardware store and picked up a can of fly spray. Is this good for wasps? he asked the assistant. To which she replies, no, it kills them.
Peter Karpas (02:59.101)
Okay, so should that be free or paid for? And so the before when we were talking about this, I said, well, I think a great joke that makes lots of people laugh should be free because it increases the total amount of happiness in the world. That one I think should be paid for. Right. And so, you know, I think, you know, I know I have to kind of throw one back at you. Okay, so this is,
Brent Peterson (03:14.286)
Alright, that's awesome. I love the way that you looked at that. Okay.
Brent Peterson (03:26.254)
Absolutely, I love it. Go for it.
Peter Karpas (03:28.925)
One of my favorite short jokes, which is two peanuts were walking across the street. One was assaulted.
Brent Peterson (03:36.974)
I'm gonna use that one in the future. I don't know if I can yeah there we go. That's free. Yeah, all right No, that's my That's my kind of joke. Absolutely. All right, bold commerce I know that we kind of frame this in the very beginning in the green room as as as generic checkout but tell us some background on bold commerce and How how it got to where it's at?
Peter Karpas (03:40.861)
There you go. It's terrible, but you know, again, should it be free or paid for? Probably paid for.
Peter Karpas (04:04.125)
Yeah, so Bold started as one of Shopify's top app developers and particularly in the subscriptions market. And one of the things that the company found this before my time there was that basically checkout itself, right? So if you think about subscriptions, do subscriptions right, you are changing checkout. You're changing how checkout works. You are changing all things about checkout. And so what they figured out was that
basically checkout in e-commerce for the most part is totally broken and that there is a real opportunity to go fix it. And so the company has evolved. We still have some great Shopify apps and we love our Shopify division and it does very well. But the focus of the company now is clearly on how do we help e-commerce solve the checkout problem, which let's face it, it could use a lot of help.
Brent Peterson (05:02.414)
Yeah, so I know we talked about personalization in checkout, but I do want to kind of key in on the idea that merchants are so afraid to do anything in checkout. So talk about that a little bit.
Peter Karpas (05:16.509)
Yeah, so the thing about checkout is it is really all the platforms checkout and even if you have a custom, it is rigid. It is brittle. And because it is both rigid and brittle, people are afraid of basically changing it, right? Because it is hard for them to make changes.
Peter Karpas (05:52.541)
We lost internet.
Peter Karpas (07:55.762)
Hey, Brent.
Brent Peterson (07:56.59)
Hey, back.
Peter Karpas (07:58.546)
Hey, I'm sorry, my internet completely crashed and had to restart. I've not like usually I've incredibly stable internet. So I have no idea what happened, but I was not going to diagnose it given that you were waiting. I'm sorry.
Brent Peterson (08:02.062)
Oh, jeez. OK.
Brent Peterson (08:10.03)
No, no problem. You know the tech, you're the Bay Area tech. I mean there's no tech in that area, so what does it matter, right?
Peter Karpas (08:16.05)
Yeah, right. Exactly. Right. But like, I'm like, I don't know what happened. And so like the internet and the whole house went down. So maybe 18 t had a brief outage. Who knows? So
Brent Peterson (08:24.878)
Yeah, so we were at, we were just talking, you were just gonna go, I asked you a question about the checkout and how you got there and you were just going into your monologue on it.
Peter Karpas (08:41.874)
Yeah, so you want to just start with the question again and I'll go again and try to be tighter.
Brent Peterson (08:51.182)
Yeah, I think we had just finished up with you were talking about bold and how you and your, you know, big Shopify partner and that you moved into checkout. So why don't I focus on specifically on, on the checkout process and how bold has moved into that area. Yeah.
Peter Karpas (09:06.898)
Yeah, because I was talking about how it's rigid and brittle and everybody's sort of scared. And so, um, uh, uh, yeah. So if.
Brent Peterson (09:14.862)
I'll key it up with, I think merchants are so, yeah, actually I think I asked the question, merchants are so afraid of doing anything in checkout. All right, we'll go from there.
Peter Karpas (09:22.578)
afraid of. Yeah. Yeah, okay.
Brent Peterson (09:28.046)
So Peter, I think one of the things that I've seen is merchants are so afraid to do anything in checkout. Tell us a little bit about Bold and how it is kind of bridging that gap.
Peter Karpas (09:40.37)
Yeah, so look, the big issue is most of the platform checkouts are, we call it, they're rigid and they're brittle. And they're rigid from the standpoint of you can't make that many changes. And the obvious example here is how many checkout flows do most brands have? And the answer is almost always one, maybe two, which is just crazy, right? I mean, it's crazy because they would never accept that on any other part of their site.
Every other part of their site, they are personalizing and there are tons of different variations based off of how they personalize their site. But in checkout, it's I have my one checkout flow or maybe I have two or maybe I'm really good that I have a one page that then gets CSS optimized for mobile kind of a thing. That's because the ability to configure it is low. Then of course, there's the massive worry that it just breaks.
And you and I, I'm certain like just because in our day to day shopping, it is amazing how often sort of the frustration of actually like completing checkout is because it just breaks on people. That's the brittle aspect and Bolt solves both of those problems in a very real way. But fundamentally, that's the current issue with checkout is how rigid and brittle it is across all of the different merchants using all the different platforms.
Brent Peterson (11:05.486)
I know you started on Shopify and Shopify a long time ago didn't give you much of a choice at all for checkout. Did Bold come out of that idea that now Shopify Plus, it lets you to modify the checkout finally? I mean, there couldn't have been anybody more rigid than Shopify in the very beginning, right?
Peter Karpas (11:20.114)
Yeah, even -
Yeah, even Shopify today is quite rigid. I mean, they are. You use our checkout flow. Maybe they allow you to add some components, right? So you can swap in a loyalty or you can swap in a thing, but it's fundamentally a single checkout flow. That checkout flow is not personalized in any way whatsoever based off of what you know about the customer. Right, and so and so even Shopify is very much a we have one checkout flow.
This is the checkout flow. It is the best checkout flow. We will tell you it is the best checkout flow, which again, no merchant on any other part of their site would accept that thinking or that rationale, right? But we do on checkout.
Brent Peterson (12:05.838)
Yeah, I mean, I like the idea of flows. We met in shop talk and you talked a little bit about the A -B testing that you can do in flows and how people don't do A -B testing at all in checkout. And you don't, so, I mean, it is sort of like unknown data that you don't know because you never do it because you're so afraid that something's going to happen, but you don't do it and you're missing out on so many opportunities. Tell us a little bit about how flows help that.
Peter Karpas (12:24.626)
Yes. Yes.
Peter Karpas (12:30.13)
Yeah, so let's just give two examples of how people should be personalizing their checkout, but aren't right. So the first example I love to use is last year at shop talk, I was talking to a brand, you know, pretty sizable, close to a hundred websites globally. They had had a technical problem with Apple pay. And so they had to actually take it down. Revenue went up.
Now think about that for a second. Revenue went up. And of course, the immediate question is, well, why? And of course, I asked that question and his answer was because average order value went up. So this was a brand who had some relatively clear cross -sells and up -sells and basically the singular focus on conversion, because everybody has been in some ways brainwashed into thinking that checkout is all about conversion. When it's not,
There's the checkout power trio and the checkout power trio is conversion, average order value and lifetime value. And those are three interconnected dials. And when you turn one, it impacts the other two, right? And so, and so basically they'd been so focused on conversion that they didn't realize that the super slickness of conversion was hurting their ability to upsell and cross sell. And that because of what they were selling, consumers actually wanted that weren't going anywhere. And so that they could worry a little bit less about conversion.
and focus more on cross -sell and up -sell. And so then, again, we continued to talk about it and they had fixed the technical problem and they were in the middle of an internal debate about do they turn it back on? Which is, of course, completely the wrong question. Because the right question, which they would have asked for every other part of their site, is who do they turn it back on for? Which they don't ask.
Right? Because this is checkout. We don't personalize checkout. And so that's one easy example. And then the other example is, you know, basically I'll just sort of continue on the cross -sell and upsell theme. Nobody wants to ship $10 of anything for the most part. Right? And so fundamentally, if somebody has $10 in the cart, you want to show them an upsell and then maybe a cross -sell and then maybe another cross -sell.
Peter Karpas (14:47.474)
and then maybe another cross sell until they have 35, 50 bucks in the cart. However, if they have a thousand dollars in the cart, you don't want to show them any of that. Right? And so the question is, like, again, how do you personalize your checkout? So based off of the dollar value they have in the cart, an average order value size, right? Or just a straight up order value size, is that average? But in order value size, right? Like you should be showing them different. That is the concept of having different checkout flows.
personalized based off of the signals that you choose. And that's what Bolt enables.
Brent Peterson (15:22.158)
And so Bold is more than just checkout now though. You do a number of different things. Tell us a little bit about Bold and how it fits in with the merchant.
Peter Karpas (15:31.73)
Yeah. So, so again, we are a composable and headless checkout. We really think of ourselves as just checkout. We don't do payment. We work well with the PayPal's and the Stripes and the AdYens and the authorizes of the world. Right. And, and so, and so what we do is we swap out the checkout component of your e-commerce stack. And so, and we do that by the way, for everybody other than Shopify, cause Shopify won't allow it, but, but for, for pretty much anybody else, we can,
You know, look, if you think through the e-commerce stack, it has a bunch of different components in it, right? You've got your order management system, you've got your content management system, you've got all these other sort of things. And with the rise of mock and really the ideas behind mock, the idea that really everything is becoming composable. That's what composable means is I can swap out my content management system. So rather than using the default content management system that the platform has, I can use a different content management system.
we are doing just the exact same thing for checkout rather than using the default checkout for the platform. All right. Or a custom build. If you have a sort of a custom build, we swap that out with bold checkout. And, um, and so, and that's our focus. And then we enable as many flows as you want. We enable the integration of shipping and taxes and, and that actually sort of leads to why we're not brittle. And we can get into that later if you'd like, and if they'd be interesting to the, to the audience, but.
because it gets sort of technical around how do you do this without being brittle, right? And that is sort of due to the unique architecture we have, but fundamentally that's what we do.
Brent Peterson (17:12.782)
I know one thing you had mentioned at Shop Talk, and this is where I was going with my previous question, is that you are really a checkout platform, and you're unique in that space. There's not a lot of other vendors that are just doing checkout as a service, right?
Peter Karpas (17:23.41)
Yes.
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Like, you know, people always ask who are our competitors. And, and, you know, when I was at Intuit, one of the great things was people would be like, who competes with TurboTax and QuickBooks? And aside from like the other obvious big ones like a block, really the answer when I was there, which was in the 2000s was paper and pencil. We were competing against paper and it's awesome to compete against paper and pencil because paper and pencil does not have a marketing arm or a lobby. Right. And,
And for us, it's very similar. We don't have any real, we are, as far as we can tell, the only composable checkout that is not part of a platform. Right? And so our competitors are the equivalent of paper and pencil, which is the default checkout parts of the platform. Right? And we sort of swap them out. And because we only focus on checkout, we can make a better one.
Right. And, and sort of enable. And so that's, that's how I think about sort of, but yes, we are creating a category because there aren't many other composable checkouts, right? There are like the payment checkout and everybody sort of like talks about payment checkout, but, but we're a platform level checkout, right? Which means that we do everything that a platform checkout is expected to do, which is all of the integrations upsell and cross sell. Right. And, and so.
You know, it's funny, I said I said earlier, I'm a long time payments person.
Peter Karpas (18:56.946)
The word checkout is a problem now in the same way that POS is a problem for payments people. So, so in the payments world, when you talk about POS, you have to say, well, am I talking about the physical terminal in the store? Like the thing that actually allows people to tap a card or swipe a card, right? That's a POS. Or are you talking about the software that runs the whole restaurant? That's also POS. And so the word POS has little meaning or at least a very broad meaning now. Checkout is the same way.
Lots of people use checkout in very broad ways. Whenever I talk to payments people, I'm like, we integrate with payment checkout. Like payment checkout integrates into platform checkout. We are a platform level checkout and we do everything that you would expect a platform level checkout does, of which the easiest example is upsell and cross -sell.
Brent Peterson (19:43.118)
Yeah, I want to present an argument that I would hear from a merchant when I used to run an agency. And there are, and every merchant is so afraid of checkout, but they aren't afraid of their payment gateway. And if you think about the relationship of checkout and payment gateway, if your payment gateway is down, you're down, right? So talked about, I mean, I talk about, is that a valid, valid argument or not a valid argument? I'm being.
Peter Karpas (20:04.306)
Yes.
Brent Peterson (20:12.75)
But talk about that juxtaposition between the two and how merchants overlook the fact that all the processes of that checkout are outbound APIs to fulfill the order, even the outbound fulfillment to an ERP. But they don't work on the actual part of checkout that's the most important. Nobody cares if you're authorized .net or PayPal or Braintree or whatever.
They care about is the experience they have in checkout.
Peter Karpas (20:45.17)
Yes. Right. And so, and so that's the thing. So, so whenever, again, whenever I talk to payment people, I'm like, what does your checkout plug into? And if you think of it that way, right, what it plugs into is the checkout module of the merchant's platform. Right. And so it starts there and, and, and you won't ever hear me say, wow, that checkout isn't important. It is a very important part of the process, right? Like does the credit card get approved? How does that work? Like, like how slick is it? And, and the rise of like the one click checkouts and the
pre -filling of forms and sort of all that. That's great. But there's all ton of stuff that happens outside of just the payment part of checkout, which again is the platform level of checkout. Upsell, cross -sell, I've mentioned a bunch of times already in sort of in this. But if you think through shipping integrations and tax integrations and injection into the order management system, right, you've got sort of like all these aspects of it, a large part of which is what is the flow? When do you ask somebody to log in? Do you ask somebody to log in?
Which payment buttons do I even show? Right? I mean, right now we're heading towards a button war and even beyond the button war, now the next war that we're gonna have is who owns the guest email field. So between ShopPay and PayPal Fastlane and Stripe Link and MasterCards, Click2Pay and I could keep going, right? All of them wanna own that guest.
Email field and be the first one you call. And so how do you know which is the first one? How do you know which one is more effective? Like that happens before you ever get to the payment level checkout. Right. And, and so, um, and so questions like that are things. And the reason why people don't test that is because typically today you do basically you have to, you integrate with all of these, right? You integrate with your payments, you integrate with your shipping, you integrate with your taxes, you integrate with sort of all this.
Then if you want to create a second checkout flow or a third checkout flow, you have to reintegrate all of those things. And that's why it's brittle. That's why people are afraid of, because every time they create a new checkout flow, if they have to reintegrate, all of a sudden that is error prone. And when they make a change, they now have to make a change twice, right? For each checkout flow, if they're only doing checkout flows, or if they have three checkout flows, they have to make that change three times.
Peter Karpas (23:12.274)
Right? This is, I said, the unique architecture for bold, right? The unique architecture for bold is you plug in everything once. And then the way we're architected is you can create as many checkout flows as you want. Once you're then sort of like using, you can reuse those integrations. And it's just a fundamental architectural, like, you know, when you really get into it, it's deep technology, which nobody wants to hear about in a podcast. But the result of it is I'm only going to have one checkout flow because I don't want to reintegrate everything.
Right. And, and that holds merchants back from making real money. And, and that was, you know, the thing is that was true a few years ago, but now with composable commerce, it no longer has to be true and people have to get over the learned helplessness because it's learned helplessness.
Brent Peterson (24:01.294)
I want to walk through a scenario and I'll try to do this as quickly as possible, but I consulted with a client who wanted to allow their customers to redo reorder. So they had their account section turned off. They only allowed guest checkout, which meant that nobody could reorder anything, which meant they just had the account section turned off, you know, all the things down the line. And I said, why don't you give some incentives?
for people to actually create an account. But they were so afraid of that abandoned cart, that lost person at the end, that they were so reluctant to do that. But some of the things that are forcing them, if they wanted to do a program or loyalty, all these other things that you need to, talk a little bit about how you would help in that situation in terms of how to get customers through the process quicker and...
Peter Karpas (24:48.146)
Yes.
Brent Peterson (24:56.846)
And is there a reason to be afraid of making them put their real address in as a real customer for reordering?
Peter Karpas (24:57.17)
Yeah.
Peter Karpas (25:04.018)
Well, look. Like in every other part of the site for every other part of their site that would have said, let's just A B test this.
Right? Let's just, you know, like, because, because you don't know the answer there, right? Am I going to make more money if I encourage people to log in and sort of sign in or am I going to? And this comes back to why it cannot just be about conversion. Right? Conversion is myopic, right? It is the power trio. It is the checkout power trio, conversion, average order value, lifetime value. And so, and so given that it's those three things, the question there was, well, do I give up conversion because I'm going to gain in lifetime value or my average order value?
And the only way to really know that is to test it. And in order to test it, I have to be able to build multiple checkout flows. All right, and I have to have a plugin like the actual testing, like they all have testing engines today, right? This is how they personalize the rest of their site. Right. But again, nobody does this in checkout because the capability of doing it for the most part is limited until companies like bold, right? You know, sort of enable.
enable the sort of full A -B testing. And so like for that, it's gotta be, it isn't go do this and then because it's risky, right? It's go test this so that you can learn which is going to maximize your business. Right? And that's how I would talk to them about it, which is you have to build the capability to A -B test checkout just like you A -B test everything else.
Brent Peterson (26:30.99)
Yeah, and I'll add one more part to that because a lot of customers may use something like VWO to do the A -B testing where they can inject some code to make it look different. They find something that works, but they don't know that it might not work for somebody else, right? So you A -B tested, now you've done, well, B works better, but A is never available and C and D are not even on the cards. They could be in the future, but once you've figured out that...
the newbie works, right? Then you've switched and there's no capability in that checkout to give somebody a different path to go down knowing that they work this way, right? So I mean, I think that from the guest checkout, there should be a different version of checkout for guests as there is, than there would be for registered. And maybe you wanna make it like even less friction for somebody that's registered, right?
Peter Karpas (27:18.962)
Absolutely.
Peter Karpas (27:24.114)
Yeah, well, you know, or the interesting thing is actually more friction because you know that they're a customer and they're not going anywhere. So why aren't you throwing in an upsell? Right. Or a cross sell. Why aren't you trying to get them to sign up for your loyalty points, you know, sort of program or some other program, right? Like, you know, one of my favorite examples of this is have you ever gotten a business card printed? It's like Vista print. Right.
Brent Peterson (27:48.654)
Yeah.
Peter Karpas (27:50.226)
So, in Vistaprint, Vistaprint does an amazing thing, right? Which is their checkout is like 30 minutes long, right? Because, right? You've already put in the time to design your business card. They know you're not going anywhere. And so they do a series, like they are not solving for conversion at that point. They are trying to sell you the poster. They're trying to sell you the signs. They're trying to sell you every other design that they can. Higher quality business cards, quantities of business cards.
Right? Like, do you want to, you know, put something on the back of the business card? Like, like they know their business, right? And, and, and so that's an extreme example because I think they literally do something like five to 10 upsells and cross sells maybe even more, right? Because they know you're not going anywhere. And so in the case of it's a returning customer, you know, they like you, they're likely not going anywhere. So why wouldn't you actually,
potentially lower the conversion dial a little bit in order to maximize the average order value and lifetime value, but the only way to know it is to test it.
Brent Peterson (28:55.342)
Yeah, I mean, that's such a good point. And I mean, that's that really drills down to what marketing is about. And marketing is about not just trying different things, but actually testing to see which one works the best. Right.
Peter Karpas (29:06.258)
Right, right, for who? Right, it's again, it comes back to for who and going all the way back to that story about Apple Pay. I'm certain that there are some customers they should be showing Apple Pay to. And I'm also certain that there are other customers that they shouldn't based off of that story, right? And then now the challenge is just let's figure out who's who.
And that's how I'm going to maximize their business. And this is real money to the merchants. Like it is likely, because we run the math, right? It is likely bigger than trying to maximize their ad, you know, sort of return on ad spend, right? Like the investment here is so clear and easy because they're already in checkout, right? But again, for the most part, it's learned helplessness and people are afraid of the rigid and brittle when they don't have to be anymore.
Brent Peterson (30:00.11)
All right, so we have a few minutes still to go here. I was part of a PayPal program in the late 2000s that helped to streamline mobile checkouts, or just mobile conversion optimization, they called it. And it wasn't, they didn't do flows, but they did experiments that would help merchants determine what worked better than other. And you gave the example of the Apple Pay.
Do you have any other examples like that that seemed counterintuitive to what would happen in checkout?
Peter Karpas (30:35.282)
Oh, well, there are tons, right? And it all comes around to, you know, know, shipping options is another one, right? What shipping options do you show? What don't you show? Right? It can be sort of fascinating. And a lot of that is, you know, or even personalizing it. If you have a physical stores in addition to e e-commerce, Like a lot of people will just, hey, they're on e e-commerce, gonna show shipping results.
But actually they should be showing a try box, which is pick up in store today or delivery or shipping. And the impact of something like that, as simple as that, can be far bigger than you expect because again, you don't really want to be shipping if they're willing to pick up in store. And if they're willing to go to a store, what else are they going to buy when they're in the store? And, and, and, you know, so the surprise there was not, oh, well yeah, that makes sense. The surprise there was the size of the increase.
and how much more money you can make if you can get somebody to pick up in store. But of course, if somebody isn't within 20 miles of one of your stores, you probably don't want to show them pick up in store, right? Because that now hurts your conversion, right? And so, again, it's all these details like that. The amount of, I think the other big, really surprising thing is the amount of upsells and cross -sells people are willing to accept.
I think people are worried, let me do one cross -sell and then get out kind of a thing. And I think what we are seeing is that is just simply not true. Right? By the way, you want to know what the number one cross -sell item is? The second of the thing they've already bought.
Brent Peterson (32:12.718)
What?
Brent Peterson (32:17.102)
Oh, sure. Yeah, that makes sense.
Peter Karpas (32:20.914)
Right? I was surprised when I heard that. I was like, really? But no, no. Like you should literally do a cross cell of the thing that's in their cart. That surprised me. Right? But you know, when you start experimenting and check out, there's all sorts of things you can learn.
Brent Peterson (32:27.63)
Right.
Brent Peterson (32:35.182)
That worked, I have two Model Ys. I'm joking. So, let's just kind of close close out. What are some predict, do you have have predictions for 2024 on what we should be looking for in terms of e -commerce e-commerce
Peter Karpas (32:53.106)
Yeah, I think the big thing and I think we both I'd be shocked if you didn't feel us at shop talk like I did was the rise of composable even outside of sort of like just it's just everybody seems to be talking about mock. And and for those who are listening might know what mock is M A C H. It is the is a movement and it is also sort of a group of companies who enable best in breed solutions.
And really the end result of mock can be very interesting around, you know, how do platforms play? How do agencies play in terms of stitching together these best of breed solutions? Right? Like, can you just now create your own platform really easy that is specific to you using best of breed? And that's all coming, you know, kind of a thing. And when people talk about like AI and really that's the code generation, the code generation AI tools.
really accelerate that work in a very interesting way. And there's some agencies who are doing some very interesting experiments with AI cogeneration tools to do the stitching together kind of thing. But I think there's little question that 2024, the fact that the Mach 3 conference is in the US is I think indicative of just, it's amazing how many companies are doing Composable, moving to Composable if you're a retailer or merchant.
And it just everybody's talking about composable. And so that's a prediction. It's a pretty easy prediction to make. But it's just like the wave. You can see the wave and it's kind of fun to be part of it, to be honest.
Brent Peterson (34:34.19)
Yeah, and I think some people are a little afraid of the composable part of it because they think it maybe it adds some complication. But I think that bold will easily swap in with most shopping carts or right. It's not a big heavy lift and there's no redeployment and there may be one deployment if you're on Magento, but there's not a continually redeploy redeploy redeploy multiple different systems. Yeah.
Peter Karpas (34:49.01)
Yes.
Peter Karpas (34:57.554)
Yeah. Now from a gentle, it's an extension you install, right? Like, you know, and, and, and, and so, but, but yeah, but even outside of both, right? Because, you know, whenever anybody asked me a question like that, I try not to make it specific to both. It's just in every other category. Again, when you look at the e-commerce platform stack, right? Content management, search, order management, like it's all going composable, right? And these best of breed solutions are doing really amazing things.
Right. And, and so you just, you can see that movement and it's fascinating.
Brent Peterson (35:30.222)
Peter that's as we close out the podcast I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they like what would you like to plug today?
Peter Karpas (35:40.05)
Look, the shameless plug is go to boldcommerce .com or reach out to me. I'm not that hard to find. Sort of where my team, every merchant of any size at this point should be personalizing their checkout. It is the easiest investment decision they could be making. And they just need to know that here's the plug, right? Don't have learned helplessness. You need to know that it is possible. It is doable. It is doable in weeks and months, not quarters and years.
Right. And it, and basically the changes you make go straight to the bottom line. And, and so that's my shameless plug.
Brent Peterson (36:16.878)
That's awesome. Peter Karpas is the CEO of Bold Commerce. Thank you so much for being here today.
Peter Karpas (36:22.93)
Thank you.