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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 (00:01.364)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Hamish McKay. He is the founder of Order Editing. Hamish, go ahead, tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (00:11.864)
Amazing Brent. I am Hamish McKay. I'm the 24 year old CEO and co-founder of a software startup called orderediting.com. We're about 18 months old and we're letting customers make changes to their orders without contacting customer service. I've got a lovely team of seven that are based globally. I'm living in Mexico city, but I'm originally a Kiwi. And my greatest passion in life is teaching. My dream is that one day we can hopefully get this business acquired like all business owners want.
And then I can go lecture at a reputable university and inspire the next generation of kids to hopefully achieve a lot more than what I'm going to achieve. That would be a dream.
Brent (00:46.518)
That's awesome. Hamish, before we dive into order editing and it's something I'm familiar with and I'm excited to talk about, I am going to tell you a joke and all you have to do is give me a rating on the joke, eight through 13. So here we go. I applied for a job hanging mirrors. It's something I can see myself doing.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (01:13.486)
I'll give it a 10.5.
Brent (01:15.51)
Thank you. Yeah, I didn't say they were going to be funny. I just said it was going to be a joke. All right. So yeah, that's good. That's the point, right? All right. So tell us, let's just tell us a little bit about your background. 24 years old, in Mexico City and starting your own business. Wow. Just tell us how you got where you're at.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (01:20.174)
It got me to laugh.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (01:38.966)
Yeah, I mean, my, my professional career started in my final year of college or university, as we call it in New Zealand. And I started as an intern for this merchandising studio and we were designing and manufacturing clothing and setting up storefronts on Shopify for famous YouTubers. And MrBeast was one of our clients, for example, it was really successful business. And I started as an intern to shadow the CEO and there is not.
like a clear role there, it wasn't super structured. And so I ended up lunging into customer service and doing support tickets and then ended up becoming a manager of that department. And during that process, you know, looking over and controlling this help desk and understanding why Mr. Beast fans reaching out to us about their orders. I pretty much just think of it as complete no brainer that
We would get about 2000 emails every single month from consumers saying, Hey Hamish, can you change my address for me? I forgot to apply my discount code. Can you give me a refund? can you cancel my order? I bought the wrong size. put on weight, whatever it might be. And I just had this moment where I thought, Holy shit, like this is my opportunity to start a business and looked out in the market. There was no software for this. So we built the first software on the Shopify app store to let a customer make a change to their order without customer service.
And that was way back in like mid 2022. I was 21. I was completely naive and that I was not ready to go start a company. So me and my co-founder at the time, we just kept kind of building the software and improving it in the backend and making it ready for launch on an app store. But quite casually, it was kind of like a side hustle, very standard business journey.
And I kept working. I got a job in sales at another startup. And then at the end of that year, we put it out on the app store. And this was in December, 2023. And at that point I quit my job. didn't, wasn't making enough money to earn to pay my rent, but luckily I'd saved a bunch. And, you know, from January, 2024, was just like, shit. Like, how can we get this off the ground? How can we, how can we realize what we knew this was going to be a massive opportunity? Like this is a very good, sexy product that CX people want.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (03:49.484)
but no one knows about us. I've got no connections. I'm a kid. Like I've never worked in the econ before. and just slowly and steadily, started growing and growing. And I remember by about June, so halfway through our first year, we got to like doing about $15,000 a month. And that's crazy cash for a kid in New Zealand, with no prospects outside of this business and his brain. And I remember us working with a mentor at the time.
And this mentor said, Hamish, like all of your customers are in Australia. The majority of e-commerce happens in the US. When are you going to go to the US and go to market? And I said, well, I'm not ready yet. And my mentor, Adam, said, when are you going to be ready? Like, what's the deciding factor that would get you to go? And I said, I need to have three big logos in Australia before I feel like the market's good here and I could leave and go somewhere else. And he said, well, how about you book a flight for July 21st?
And you make damn sure you've got three logos before that plane takes off. And I followed his advice. And I think when I left, I I jumped on that flight. think we had two really big logos in Australia. And then I flew to the U S and that just completely changed up this just astronomically very slowly. And then all at once to the point where, you know, a few months later, we're at three times the size.
Like it was just gnarly. And suddenly we had American clients and we had British clients. And then I found myself in Copenhagen of all places in October, selling our software to merchants in Denmark and Germany and Amsterdam. Like it was just, it was this amazing thing. then, know, naturally we had growing pains and you start hiring people and the rest of the business unfolds from there. But that's a brief backstory on how we got started.
Brent (05:37.332)
Yeah, it's an amazing journey and I can hear that energy that you're getting from all that growth. Are you having now flattening out? Are you still growing like crazy and having a fun time doing it?
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (05:53.196)
Yeah, still growing like crazy. There have been like mile market fluctuations earlier this year, but now that we're heading into Black Friday, it's it's stupid dizzy. Cause this is very much a Black Friday software. Like the more orders you receive, the more tickets you get for changes. And if you're getting slammed with audits, it's very hard to make changes to them before they ship out. So we have this really big incline before BFCM.
But no, we're still growing like 12 or 15 % every single month. It's been phenomenal. And the challenges for me really are just growing pains and generally like having this amount of energy every single day. There have been times early in the year where I've been like...
cripplingly exhausted. was seriously burnt out last year and I wasn't performing at the same level. I'm blessed at the moment to be feeling good and on top of my game, but it's definitely not always like that as founder and CEO, especially as a first time founder. I have no idea what I'm 70 % of the time, let's say, we're figuring this out as we go and thank God I have mentors like Adam and thank God I have a co-founder who's a lot more intelligent than me and thank God I have friends and family to lean on.
It's been pretty astronomical with no word of a lie. And I think honestly, what we get most excited about now is just the type of brand that we get a partner with. We were growing really fast at the start and our income was growing and that's really cool. And the team was growing, but we didn't have these massive, massive clients. And now we're working with like.
a serious percentage point of Shopify's biggest stores. I think we have 30 brands that do more than $100 million a year of revenue. Big household names. There's only 200 of those on Shopify. And we feel very privileged and fortunate to have this eye into the biggest e-commerce brands in the world on Shopify. It's just fun. It's a sense of pride.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (07:57.55)
We built something that's used by companies that are like a hundred times larger than us. What the hell? How did that happen?
Brent (08:05.782)
So explain, I understand the problem. I was in the Magento space a long time and we had an extension that helped edit orders after the order closed. Explain the problem to people who don't understand what the problem is and maybe they'll give them a better understanding of why your solution is so popular.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (08:24.726)
Yeah. So it's fantastic market timing. The core of the problem is about one and a half percent of customers on an online checkout will make a mistake. They'll auto fill the wrong address or they'll buy the wrong product and things like that. And those one and a half percent of people historically, unless you buy on Amazon, which lets you do this, they have to contact your customer service team to get that fixed. And for a small store, you know, that's not a major, right?
maybe 10 orders a month or something that need changing. And your customer service team are fine to do that. If you're a merchant like O'Polly, who are one of our longest standing clients, we've worked with them for a year. In June last year, they had 2000 customers reach out to them in that month to make a change to their order. In June this year, they had 14. Because the other 1900 customers or 2000 customers, because their business has grown.
are doing it entirely contactless, are doing it immediately, and are having, like one, it's a better experience, two, it saves the team time and the customer time, and three, one of the biggest pain points about audit editing is often you can't make a change to an order. Like picture this, I placed my order on Saturday night, customer service works night of five, Monday to Friday, warehouse team gets into the warehouse at 7 a.m. on Monday morning and start shipping out orders.
Who's gonna cancel my order before it ships? Who's changing the address? Who's changing the product? And so a lot of the particularly fashion brands that we work with, like these fast fashion brands, they both see the ticket reduction. They also find that their returned auto volume drops by about 10 or 15%. And me and my co-founder, we did this strategy offsite early in the year where we drove around New Zealand in a camper van.
swimming and drew on whiteboards and generally had a good time and drank wine and ate cheese. And one of the conversations that we had while we driving through Queenstown was like, hey, buddy, if every single online checkout on the world had the software, how much do you think online returns would drop? Like what percentage point would make a difference on global e-commerce returns in any category, any Amazon, whatever it might be. And he said, honestly, I reckon there'd be 5 % less returns worldwide if every store had this.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (10:44.726)
And I honestly think he's underestimating. I completely believe that too. And so, you know, that was like a new source of pride for us. Now we feel like we're these green thumbs that are making an impact beyond just the customer service. it's like actually maybe 10,000 packages aren't returned every year because of us. And that's really exciting too.
Brent (11:06.688)
How are you controlling the time in which they can edit it, and the time that it gets to the ERP and gets into the fulfillment system where really the edit is too late?
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (11:18.764)
Hmm. So we, we like our product is two things. It's a grace period between Shopify and the warehouse or the ERP. And we control that. Like we'll put 15 minutes between Shopify and NetSuite or SAP or BC. And the brand chooses what that time is. Most of our clients, interestingly enough, just do 15 or 30 minutes. A lot of people started out with doing an hour or two hours because they're like, customers need that much time.
And then like O'Polly, the case study that I mentioned, they completely disrupted that thinking. They started at 15 minutes and the results were a mirror image of everyone else's. And so we actually learned like urgency works. Customers don't need an hour. They know immediately. And then we're surfacing these components in the right places. You don't need that long. And so now it's not on the website or anything, but whenever I do a speech at a conference, I always say,
This one thing of just 15 minutes of grace is all it takes. You just need 15 minutes of grace to open up the store to this new world where people don't contact you, your customers are happy, your orders don't get returned, you make post budgets up, sell revenue, et cetera.
Brent (12:28.214)
Yeah, you mentioned post-order additions earlier. And I know one of the features that we had built for Magento was the ability. It was for a supplements company and they had you place the order and then they'd come back to you and give you a little timer box and say, Hey, would you like to add this bottle of supplements for some unbelievably low price? You have 10 minutes to do it or whatever. And there'd be a countdown. Is that another?
Avenue that you see as a potential uplift for your product to offer other products even after checkout and give people even in their thank you email that says, Hey, and actually I, know what? I can just say that I did get one of those emails from, I can't remember who the vendor was, but I did recently just get an email. athletic brewing. They gave me a said, Hey, would you like to add that you have 15 minutes to add this extra six pack of non-alcoholic beer into your cart before you, before it.
you know, expires or whatever and they gave me some low price for adding it. that, is that another thing that you see a lot of advantage for, for merchants?
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (13:34.766)
Yeah, so we're doing that at the moment. It's like the launch of those campaigns. had a client, we didn't come, like we had no idea that this was possible. And then we worked with this brand called Nakey in Australia and the founders said, hey, we want to send out an email and an SMS that says, hey, Brent, there's space in your package for another product. Get 15 % off for the next 20 minutes if you add it into your order. And me and my co-founders minds just blew.
That's that's a big idea. And so we built that into the app where customers are now sending out, our merchants are sending out emails or SMSes and effectively taking their own spin on whatever that language is. Some people say, Hey, Bram, there's a fire sale site wide. Get 10 % off for the next five minutes only. And the customer clicks our button and they go to the app and they start browsing again and adding to the order. And the discounts are applied automatically. the space in the package one I particularly love. Cause that, that to me is like.
It almost gives you permission to send that email. I'm not just emailing you to upsell you. I'm emailing you because there's literally room in your box. There's not actually room in the box. send it to everyone, but it's literally room in your box. And here's some incentive to fill that up because we don't want to waste empty space because who wants that? We want you to save on your shipping. And that's been crazy. Like that brand Nike, for example, they make about a thousand dollars a day by sending that email and an extra top line. It's like another
60 or 70 cents for their AOV, it crushes for them. And now these brands are saving time and making money, which naturally the CFO loves.
Brent (15:16.976)
You had said that you have new thoughts and features that you want to add. What's on your roadmap?
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (15:22.978)
We want to do like world-class address validation. We currently offer that in our app, it's really good in the US because USPS APIs are free, but it's pretty poor in Europe and in the UK and Australia and New Zealand are quite hard as well. And so we're looking to build that into the app and extend ourselves into pre-checkout. We just launched Checkout Upsells as well. We built this really cool thing where...
If the customer's not at free shipping, we embed and upsell directly into the cost of shipping box. And it say, you you're $11 away from free shipping, add this to your order and we'll upsell like the best selling item that would get them over the threshold within a margin. And that's been crushing too. And then we want to start getting into the domain or avenue of letting customers add products to the order directly from an email. So without having to click the email add to order, go to our app.
add to order, we want them to just click the button and the email add to order and go straight to a checkout session to pay for that amount. Or in a public world, perhaps on subscription orders, we'll be able to vault their card and just automatically charge them if they click that button and one click checkout, which for our subscription customers could be, I have no idea what that will do to our results. But for context, we did a design change. This is a really fun thing about e-commerce, especially when you have a lot of traffic.
We had these like tiny upsell cards in our app. And then three weeks ago, we made the upsell cards slightly bigger. And we made them have these like discount banners in the top right corner of the product image. And we made the button slightly nicer and just took out some of the options, reduce the friction and the conversion rate doubled. And I was like, oh, why didn't we do this six months ago? But it's so exciting to think about all the little things you can do to reduce friction and what that might mean for your merchants.
Cause I feel like a lot of software vendors, like e-commerce teams have conversion rate optimization analysts and agencies and they have their email team optimizing every little detail. And it's hard to do that with software because you can go down and search a black box and you're trying to service everybody, right? You don't want to, can't get too specific, but there are still, there should still be time in the roadmap to go, Hey, how can we make this twice as fast? How can we make this, UX twice as better looking? How can we design this better? How can we make it more compelling?
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (17:43.167)
So we're playing around with those ideas at the moment and email is one of them.
Brent (17:50.122)
That's awesome. Hamish, we have a few minutes left. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (18:02.604)
I mean, I'd like to, I'd like to plug myself, not, not my business, but my, personal brand, the way that my company has grown, the way that I've developed as a young person has been by sharing content on the internet and posting online and effectively being a modern day blogger. and I do all of that on LinkedIn. And if you, if you'd like to watch a 24 year old figure out how to scale his business and hire people and do this all for the first time.
and build a novel product and create a category in the Shopify app store. I would love for you to connect with me on LinkedIn and say that you listen to the podcast that we can connect. And it's just under my name. It's under Hamish McKay. I'm sure it'll be in the show notes or somewhere. And yeah, that would be awesome. That's all I ask for.
Brent (18:49.718)
That's great. Hamish McKay, thank you so much for being here today. It's been such a great conversation.
Hamish McKay, Order Editing (18:54.946)
Thanks, Graham.