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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 (00:03.179)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Linda Xu. She is the chief commercial officer at Skipify. Linda, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day -to -day role and one of your passions in life.
Linda Xu (00:15.47)
Yeah, everyone. Hi Brent. How are you? I'm Linda. I'm the Chief Commercial Officer at Skipify. And my background is kind of a typical story of going into entrepreneurship in my current role. I actually started my career in finance. I was
an investor and a banker to start off my career. And I actually loved it. I loved investing and the strategic mindset that we were able to build. But a huge part of me thought, hey, I needed to be an operator in order to be a good investor. And so I made the switch into operating entrepreneurship, small businesses, and actually started in food and bev and moved over to e -comm.
and then I had this awesome opportunity to co -found a company.
The company is called cart .com. Some of you may know it. I don't know if you do e -commerce technology and services. And we were able to grow that from about five people to 1300 people by the time I left. And I was the chief growth officer there leading BD and partnerships and also the co -founder. And now I'm at skipify as the chief commercial officer. And we'll talk a lot more about skipify and why I'm here. But in my day to day life,
role. I lead our sales, marketing, account management, and channel partnerships. And what that means is I get to evangelize the Skype by name and the product and the solution and the platform that we're building and try to bring it to as big of an audience as possible. I'm super excited about what we have here. And so I want the broader industry, the merchants and the shoppers to know about it. So that's what I do here.
Brent Peterson (02:06.667)
That's great. And passions? Passions in life?
Linda Xu (02:09.55)
yes. my gosh. Sometimes you get so in the weeds of company building that it's, you know, and it is absolutely something that I'm passionate about. But outside of the career and job side of things, I have a little toddler. She's 19 months today. So that's absolutely where my heart is.
I'm pretty excited about a lot of things, very randomly. I like going crabbing. I'm in the Bay Area, so that's a really big thing in kind of November season, Dungeness crabs. I like Pilates, hiking, all the nature things that you might expect being out here.
Brent Peterson (02:49.611)
Well, that's fun crabbing. You're my first person who's had a passion for crabbing. And I'm envisioning that you, do you have to get in the water and kind of dive down and you're bringing up crab?
Linda Xu (02:53.326)
Yeah.
Linda Xu (02:59.79)
You know, I can't say I'm super athletic in that way. So I don't want the audience to envision me going into the water and grab me a crab. All of that would be really freaking cool. No, it's actually as passive of a sport as possible. You literally, you know, grab this crate and you drop it into the water with some, you know, bait and you...
Brent Peterson (03:07.499)
Ha ha.
Linda Xu (03:23.022)
go get a coffee, walk away, and you come back and you lift it back out of the water. But I would actually really recommend it to everyone. It's so random, but it's a lot of fun.
Brent Peterson (03:35.947)
Yeah, it's a good way to get inexpensive crabs as well, right?
Linda Xu (03:42.225)
It's not, you wouldn't do it for ROI. I don't think. You do it for the fun. You do it for the fun. But yeah, you might get it for the fun.
Brent Peterson (03:43.499)
Hahaha!
All right.
Absolutely. All right. So Linda, before we get started, you have graciously volunteered to be part of the free joke project. Just going to tell you a joke. Just tell me the rating one through five at the end. And I'm hoping this is a 1980s joke, so I'm hoping that that it resonates. So here we go. I kept arguing with this guy who said he was a big pop star from the 1980s. I said he was lying.
Linda Xu (04:03.182)
Okay.
Brent Peterson (04:19.275)
But he was Adamant.
Linda Xu (04:23.022)
shoot. I, I'm a Chinese immigrant, and I moved here in late 1990s. So I'm gonna say I'm gonna get a three because I feel like I'm not the audience, you know, so I'm just gonna arm myself. I know. No, it's no problem.
Brent Peterson (04:29.547)
Ha ha ha ha!
Brent Peterson (04:34.635)
Yeah, I apologize. It was Adamant was this big pop star and I kind of screwed up the end anyway, so we'll give a pass on that one.
Linda Xu (04:42.99)
like...
Well exactly.
Brent Peterson (04:48.267)
Yeah, yeah, and I should have, yeah, no, it doesn't matter. All right, well, so let's talk about Skippify. Tell us a little bit about Skippify and how, well, tell us kind of the underlying solution that it's solved or the problem that it solves.
Linda Xu (05:03.438)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Skippify is in the e -commerce technology and payments space. And my background is in e -com and I've had the opportunity to build e -commerce businesses, as well as build companies that provide e -commerce technology and services. So, you know, what Skippify does is we provide a next -gen, what we call the connected wallet.
So think of it as the next generation digital wallet that helps it easier, safer, better to transact online.
So if you think about the typical online experience today, you might be clicking a button, you might be form filling, actually 70 % of plus of people are still putting in their credit card, debit card, right? And what Skippify has enabled merchants and shoppers to do is essentially using some unique identifier, let's say an email address, right? I'm using Brent's personal email address and through Skippify's partnership with financial institutions.
We're able to bring in your
credit card and debit card information securely, quickly, right? And allow you to use those cards at checkout. And it almost, we want it to feel like magic and it certainly does, right? So even if you've never transacted with that merchant before, you are able to see your credit cards and know that it's securely provided literally in real time from the card issuers and network.
Linda Xu (06:45.968)
that you probably already have accounts with, right? American Express as an example or Visa.
Brent Peterson (06:53.003)
So is this available across all the platforms? And I can think of at least one that has really locked down their payment system. Are you able to plug into all the different platforms?
Linda Xu (07:05.326)
Yeah, we are e -commerce platform agnostic and processor agnostic. So we do work across many of them, many of the major ones, and on our way to getting into even more and more ecosystems. So it is a unique differentiator of ours that we're able to kind of flex. We just kind of want to be where the merchants are, right? And the reality is they switch e -commerce platforms too.
Right. And so for us, how can we kind of serve this like win, win, win scenario where we're always there for the merchants, for this great experience for the shoppers. And we also bring in the financial institutions that you trust, right. To be a part of this. I mean, e -commerce is it's not even the next wave. It's here now. Right. How do we bring that all seamless together? It's yeah. What we aim to do.
Brent Peterson (08:04.395)
I know that when, when everything started to go mobile, the biggest problem was again, like having to put your credit card in on your mobile phone. I said, this really solves that problem where somebody's at a restaurant and they see something they'd like to buy. And then they're just, boom, you can, you can buy it. And it's literally that easy.
Linda Xu (08:12.046)
Yeah.
Linda Xu (08:25.774)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I imagine I mean, the number of times you know, you wanted to buy something from a small local restaurant, right? And you want to support them go on their website, try to purchase and also you're left with this crazy page where you have to fill in all of your information, right? And sometimes you're just like, man, I give up.
or I don't have my credit card next to me or whatever that scenario is and you go buy somewhere else. Or in the scenario, this is a very top of mind for me. I mentioned I have a little toddler at home, but let's say I'm a new mom or a new parent and I need to buy something quite quickly online. It just would be so much easier if I didn't have to go to my wallet, which is in a completely different room.
and to be able to transact just by inputting my email address. And we also, for the most part today, send a one -time passcode to your phone, right? So to your point of shopping on your mobile device, it's an extremely seamless experience. I think you're probably familiar with it. It auto -populates, right, with the code. And so instead of...
abandoning the cart or digging in through your purse, whatever that is, you can do it just through your phone, which is the experience that, you know, we all kind of want. We want to make it as simple to shop online as it might be for when you're physically inside a store, right? We have this experience where you, you know, tap on a POS and the
device recognizes that it's you and you can securely walk away, right, in just a couple of seconds. So that's the experience we want to bring to digital.
Brent Peterson (10:17.866)
I'm imagining that this helps the merchant to convert better. Do you have some illustrations on how they're getting some benefit from it and maybe some rough statistics on what kind of uplift do you see?
Linda Xu (10:28.302)
Yeah.
Linda Xu (10:37.998)
Yeah, yeah, of course. It's certainly a question that's top of mind. I'm not going to sure coat it and say, you know, e -commerce is easy, right? Retail is easy. It's not. And rightfully so, merchants, right, are scrupulous around, right, the stats that they get from their vendors. So it is absolutely something, an uplifting conversion is something that a lot of our
customers and prospects ask about. So in a couple of ways, I would say we contribute to this conversion uplift. One is through just start.
infrastructure, right? So what does this idea that we connect automatically to the financial institutions and partners bring in that data in real time, right? The credit card information, the billing address, some shopper details, right? How, what does that unique infrastructure enable in terms of results?
And what we've been able to see is an increase in authorization rates. So basically when you submit a payment online, are they saying yes or no to whether that payment gets accepted? And a lot of times that payment might get rejected. You've probably had this experience yourself of your billing address is incorrect, or maybe you fat fingered a credit card number.
I do that all the time, right? All these common decline reasons and some of the forms might not even tell you what went wrong, it just tells you that it didn't go through, right? Because we're getting that information automatically from our partners and in real time, right? You're always getting the card that is gonna work and go through.
Linda Xu (12:32.174)
And so we've seen that authorization rate, which is typically marketly lower for card not present situations, right? So shopping online versus shopping in person, there's a huge gap in what that authorization rate is. And we've been able to close that gap pretty significantly. So within our merchant base, we're seeing that go up by around like four, five, 6%.
which is extremely meaningful in contributing to your ultimate conversion uplift. The other piece of it is, we're also very proud of it, just the user experience in itself.
We've done a lot of A -B testing around UX to ensure that, okay, this is an experience that the shopper wants to go through as they check out. Some of our customers onboard us just because they like the streamlined, easy, innovative type of UI that we've put in place. And so...
Our conversion that we tout right now is around 9%. Of course, that impact could be lower or higher depending on the merchant itself. It's around 9%. And yeah, it's a mix of our infrastructure underlying what the product's able to do. That increases authorization rates as well as the user experience component.
Brent Peterson (14:34.641)
Okay, we're back Yeah, Riverside's been really good and every once in a while they give us a little hiccup. Alright, so
Linda Xu (14:36.59)
Hi, there you are.
Linda Xu (14:42.83)
Well, I wasn't sure if you were just, you know, really intent and serious and observing what I was saying by being really still, you know, so.
Brent Peterson (14:50.065)
Yeah. Well, good news is that you were talking. So we'll capture that part. All right. So I'm just going to restate my question. So I think a lot of times merchants think more about just their conversion. They don't think about authorization rates. Tell us a little bit about how important that is and why merchants should be asking about that authorization rate.
Linda Xu (14:58.638)
Right.
Linda Xu (15:10.51)
Yes.
Linda Xu (15:18.606)
Yeah, yeah. And you're right, ultimately a fold into conversion, though, right. So I think when merchants are thinking about conversion, it's a broader term, right, that they can use for all pieces of the website experience. So that is a number that they ultimately fall back to.
But we're seeing that more people care about the authorization rates as well, right? Specifically, usually certain departments care more than others, but certainly when you explain it, right? And you talk about, hey, common decline codes, right? And our ability to get rid of them, that means something really different for different verticals as an example.
right? And then they can do the math themselves of, okay, what is actually going to be the net impact because they, for the most part, know, right, what their common decline reasons are.
depends on kind of the space that they play. But it is really important, right? If you think about it, an authorization rate is a customer that is trying, attempting to make a transaction and with a card of some sort and ultimately was not able to because they maybe manually screwed up somewhere, right? And I should probably also say, for us on the...
on the shopper consumer side, right? And this is a part I get very excited about where, you know, even in some of the legacy players in the space, a lot of the work is still on the role of the shopper, right? I have to either manually input my
Linda Xu (17:11.118)
all my information on a guest checkout or whatever form that is, which is still for the most part, or I have to create an account with one of the one of the current, you know, kind of more traditional wallets. And then I have to maintain that account, right? If I sign up for a new credit card, I have to go and then add it.
or if my card expires, I have to go and update it, right? Imagine all the card on files that you have with various wallets or merchants. I wanna take the work away from the shoppers, right? Like, why do I have to do that? And so, you know, we are able to do that because of the banks. But anyway, so I do think, you know,
people should be asking, hey, for the customers that want to buy my product, it took so much effort, right? For that merchant to get that shopper there. So much effort. We all know this, right? Optimizing merchandising, optimizing the website, landing page, so on and so forth. And so to be able to capture that customer who's literally at the point of purchase, so pivotal, so pivotal. And yeah.
who people think about it and ask those questions. And, you know, we try to direct that narrative as well.
Brent Peterson (18:37.105)
You talked a little bit about personalization and I think nowadays every merchant or every customer, every client is expecting some sort of personalized journey or yeah, I think everybody's expecting it now. And even as creepy as it comes, we're getting more used to them knowing more, the merchant knowing more about us as a, as a consumer. How does this help the merchant in that personalization journey?
Linda Xu (19:00.654)
Yeah.
Linda Xu (19:06.542)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think where we love for payments to be able to go is, hey, what are the payment methods that Brett and Linda wants to use with this particular retailer? Right? Cause we're all, we're all different. We all have different preferences and how can we help surface what you actually want to use, right? Take the work away from the shopper, take
make it easier to convert on that merchant and increase that conversion and increase our increases shoppers is right basket size with with that merchant. So ultimately, I mean, I think it's it plays a huge role personalization in improving the experience on that merchant, right. And I would say, you know, merchants that are full worth thinking, right, that are
innovative trying to stay ahead of the trends is thinking about, okay, well, how do I incorporate specific, let's say merchant offers, right? Credit card offers that are specific and personalized to an individual and line that up and show that right at the point of checkout. So we're having a lot of those conversations as well.
Brent Peterson (20:50.869)
Geez, I'm really sorry. I've never had Riverside die twice. Yeah, sorry about that. No, it said that my browser is doing something. I don't know what it would be. So I'm going to close all my other windows. And we'll keep going. So you just finished off on personalization. So I'm going to stop.
Linda Xu (20:51.813)
No, it's no problem like there goes
Linda Xu (20:59.022)
Might be my side note, probably is.
Brent Peterson (21:19.125)
start with the next question. And I'm gonna ask you about the security part. So here we go. Linda, one of the things that maybe consumers don't think about, or they think about more because of hacking attempts, is the security part. And I'm older, I can think back when we stored credit cards in Magento in open text without even encrypting.
Linda Xu (21:29.038)
Yeah.
Brent Peterson (21:46.645)
Then we went to tokenization and now that's pretty common. Tell us a little bit about the security side of the Skipify solution and how that protects the consumer from some of the things that happened 10, 15 years ago.
Linda Xu (21:50.286)
Yes.
Linda Xu (22:02.446)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, absolutely a huge point of conversation, as you can imagine, as a startup working in payments, where our biggest partners are literally banks and card issuers and card networks, right? It's a huge point of conversation, right? It's
Right. We work with the security teams, compliance teams, at the largest organizations. Right. So that aside, that itself has a ton of rigor. But from a consumer kind of merchant standpoint, I'll kind of share it anecdotally. Right. What our platform does is we are recognizing your personal email address with our
partners, right? Our partner network and within our own network. We're using something like your email address, right? And when there is a hit with our network, then we are sending a verification code to your phone number, right? So in order for someone to make a purchase that's not yourself, it's pretty complicated.
Right. You have to have access to that email address. You have to then also have access to that phone. Right. So there's, there's multiple tiers of security built in into the flow while at the same time. And this is kind of where, you know, I think legacy, solutions have also, you know, used to, to offset, is the actual flow.
Right? man, we have to make it secure by introducing all this nuance and all these various gates, right, that you have to pass. And all of a sudden that user experience becomes pretty complicated, right? And not what this kind of forward looking experience that the user expects. So we take into consideration, hey, we need to have this be secure, right? Which is what our
Linda Xu (24:22.318)
bank partners expect, the merchants absolutely expect, and our shoppers expect, but at the same time, do that in a way that allows me, the shopper, to have a really good experience checking out. So yeah, absolutely a conversation topic that we have all the time.
Brent Peterson (24:41.653)
What, so I know that you mentioned earlier you are a co -founder at Cart .com. What sort of things have you brought from the actual shopping cart world into the payment world that you can talk about?
Linda Xu (24:52.43)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think ultimately, and the part that excites me to the most is that we're really talking to the same audience, right? You're talking to the e -commerce merchants. And I think what I've really loved about the startup world is getting to a point of your startup journey where you can listen to the pain points.
of the merchants, your customers, and actually be able to solve it. Right. And hopefully that's relatively early on, on, on, and, you know, in your startup's journey, but that's been such a cool thing where, you know, I really adjoined to Skipify because I think it solves for a lot of pain points that I heard right in the cart days. and when we reached that point at cart, I was super excited about it. And I think we've certainly reached that point with Skipify. So now it's about.
you know, sharing our vision in a broader way. So that piece is really exciting for me. I'm talking to the same merchants with evolving pain points from what they had previously and now solving it in a different way, but also just a lot of the, you know, nuts and bolts of building a startup, right?
It's okay, how do you use your resources? How do you think about people management? How do you solve prioritization? All of these different things that does come from experience, right? A lot of startup is trail and error and you keep going, right? And so to be able to pull from...
the mistakes that we made previously as well as the areas of success allows you to jump through those hoops faster and more accurately and more thoughtfully.
Brent Peterson (26:53.909)
in the, if we look at the e -commerce space, where do you think it's going? Not just platforms, but, into the future for how consumers work with platforms and then maybe how merchants use platforms are, are we looking at more SaaS based or do you think there's still a place for platforms where they self -install or, you know, like Magento or something like that.
Does it matter? I guess I'm asking rhetorical here, but it doesn't really matter for skipify. You're going to integrate into that platform no matter where it sits, but I'm more curious about where you think some of these e -commerce platforms are going.
Linda Xu (27:37.262)
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I'm trying to think about how to balance how I answer it. You know, I think the e -commerce platforms have different strategies, right? And each of them, you know, going after something that they think will do great for them. And I think that's the right thing to do. I think for us and where bar investors get excited, you know, I get excited from a
total addressable market perspective and longevity of our customer base perspective is that we are agnostic. And we will build partnerships with certain players in the space that are the best fit for us, but we want to be able to work across platforms. And I think consumers and how they will interact
they'll go to the brands that they love, right? And a lot of the times it's not consumer facing. Some choose to be more behind the scenes, but I think, you actually in the beginning asked me what I'm passionate about. I love brands that evoke a feeling for shoppers, right? Whatever category that might be in. But I think consumers will continue to have loyalty towards...
brands, right, and retailers. And so how do you as the merchant stay on top of technology and innovations, right, and figure out what's the best case scenario for you? That's how I think about it, but it's it's ever evolving.
Brent Peterson (29:26.741)
Are you able to extract data that is agnostic of the users or not user specific but more general data that helps other merchants understand how they could be doing better in conversions?
Linda Xu (29:46.993)
We certainly have learnings, you know, that we can that. So, I mean, we're very careful with data. I think that is, you know, a first piece of it and that comes with the security part of it. But if, you know, if there's anecdotal insights, we might share that. But actually,
I would say, you know, we're very careful with data. We're very specific on what becomes anonymized. We do have case studies that share some of those, you know, syndicated high level data, which gets approval from each of the merchants. But that's kind of the level that we are sharing today from a, hey, are we going to...
create, are we going to take the aggregate of our merchants and create some type of marketplace where you can go in and search a database? We're staying away from that. It's not something that we want to do ultimately.
Brent Peterson (31:05.003)
All right, well hopefully this is the last time. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Well, it does keep everything in the cloud as we're recording. So we'll see how it all melts together at the end. Good news is that I can always hear you talking. So it's definitely on my end. Yeah, so I apologize. This has never happened like this before.
Linda Xu (31:08.793)
Three times a charm.
Linda Xu (31:15.566)
Yeah.
Linda Xu (31:23.438)
good. good.
Linda Xu (31:30.734)
You never have to apologize for technology, right?
Brent Peterson (31:34.731)
Yeah, they need them. Yeah, anyways. Okay, so you were you were just talking about
I'm just trying to think of where we should pick up. Let's see, how about what would be a good kind of segue into kind of closing out the podcast? What would you kind of like to, what would be a good thing to lean into as we're going into this next quarter?
Linda Xu (31:47.438)
Yeah.
Linda Xu (32:07.182)
I, you know, from a skipify perspective, just visualizing what it means to have your cards available with just your email address or, or just your biometrics, right? And be able to shop online or digitally in a way that's as smooth of an experience as online.
And I think what I've observed in the market is, you know, even a year plus ago when I joined Skipify, we weren't talking about this, the idea of an accelerated checkout, right? Nearly as much as we are now. I would say even in the last three months, it's accelerated from the standpoint of the merchant, right? So you're a merchant or you're a partner in the ecosystem
system thinking about, hey, what should we be exploring? Is this worth my time? What I'm observing from the market is that the momentum is coming and maybe is already here in a really big way.
And certainly there are merchants and partners that are leading the way. But if you haven't yet, it is a great time to explore this. Imagine.
you know, as a shopper, right, forget about the merchant experience of increased conversion, increased authorization, rate security. Imagine as a shopper that experience, right. And for me, I joined because the idea of having my credit card surfaced, having my debit card service, various payment instruments automatically felt like a no brainer.
Linda Xu (33:59.278)
Right. And when we have conversations with prospects for the first time now that that's the exact phrase that I hear back over and over again. And so just implore you to explore this. This space maybe is is is my ask.
Brent Peterson (34:16.715)
Yeah, that's good. And PayPal is one of your investors. And I've been in PayPal programs in my previous role at the agency that we owned, where they really emphasize the payment, the customer journey, especially on mobile. And we did a lot of mobile optimization things in the late 20s, late 20 teens. And I would imagine that PayPal offers a lot of
offers a lot of incentive to help push that, push the envelope for better customer experience.
Linda Xu (34:51.758)
Yes, yes. I mean, I should also probably make a plug for, you know, we have an incredible investor base, right, of strategic investors, financial investors that are just so plugged in in the ecosystem, right. And so to have their vouch and support for what we're building more
right, who have seen all the trends over the last, you know, decades, right. And people being one of them, it's, it's, it's very solidifying of, right, of what we're trying to build. And also maybe I'm making maybe a takeaway, you know, certainly for for your audience is like, building a startup is hard, right? Having conviction is hard, but it is
So satisfying of a journey when you're putting out something that you believe in. Right. And then you start getting your customers' feedback and they get their customers' feedback. Right. And then you see it in the wild. I mean, every step of the way is so hard, but so rewarding. Right. And what I've loved here is like, I'm doing it with people that are just awesome.
that are so hardworking but are just like human, right? And it's so wonderful to be able to push the envelope, push the envelope together.
Brent Peterson (36:27.275)
That's awesome. Linda, as we close out the podcast, I gave everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Linda Xu (36:36.046)
Yeah, you know, I'd say if any of this is interesting, I, you know, I certainly am passionate about this space. I suppose I have to be given the role that I'm in. If you know if you're if you're thinking about accelerated checkout, if you're
don't know what it is you're interested in skippify certainly. But if you're, you know, broadly just like, Hey, why, what's, what's the intrigue in this space? Why is it heating up in such a big way? I'm certainly available to talk about it. I think you'll, you'll pose some of our ways to, to reach out to me or, you know, anyone on the skippify team. Or if you're thinking about, you know, the startup journey, right? I'm, I love being able to engage with the community.
and all the components of it, right? Partners certainly make a huge part of our success. So I would say that.
Brent Peterson (37:31.243)
That's awesome. I'll make sure I put your contact details on the show notes. And I'm assuming on the Skipify website there's some demos so people can see how the merchants especially can see how well the process works.
Linda Xu (37:45.358)
Absolutely. And our website is ever evolving. But yes, the team has done a great job revamping the website lately. So you can visit there.
Brent Peterson (37:56.331)
Linda Sue, it's been such a pleasure to speak to you today. Linda Sue is the chief commercial officer with Skipify. Thank you so much.
Linda Xu (38:04.658)
Wonderful. Thank you, Brent.