Episode #106: Why Size Matters on the Shopify Platform

Speaker A: Welcome to the Milk Bottle E Commerce show, brought to you by Milk Bottle Labs, one of the world's top rated accredited Shopify experts. The Irish based Milk Bottle Labs team upgrade, migrate, manage and advise some of the highest performing Shopify stores worldwide. Founder Keith Matthews interviews merchants, developers, fellow agency owners and Shopify folk to share as many Shopify tips and tricks as possible. If you're planning on upgrading to Shopify 2.0 or migrating over to Shopify, reach out. Milk Bottle will help. Now over to Keith.

Speaker B: Hey, folks, welcome back. I, um, am delighted to welcome Laura Lynn Drury today to the podcast. Laura Lynn is the chief operating officer at Kiwi Sizing, which is a very popular Shopify app, which our team have installed many, many times. Kiwisizing provides accurate sizing recommendations for your store, helping to reduce returns and improve conversions. With a strong background in digital and e commerce, Laura Lynn plays a key role in developing and growing a range of apps through the mothership. Stay tuned. Digital. Laura Lynn, welcome. How are you?

Speaker C: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on, Keith.

Speaker B: Great. Uh, I always enjoy interviewing people where we actually have genuinely installed the app. You're welcome. And there's other apps that we can get to. Other apps that we get to. Lauren, in what part of the world are you in?

Speaker C: I'm in sunny San Diego, so if any of this makes time to video, you'll see me dodging the sun here.

Speaker B: I knew usually from there, you know,

Speaker C: I lived in New York for many years, about 12 years up until Covid hit. And then, uh, I had just started dating a guy once Covid hit, we rented an RV and drove all the way to San Diego. And my husband and I, and we were working the whole time so nobody would let us in the campgrounds in our RV because we had New York plates. And New York, as you know, is that Cassandra? So we just had to park on public land and we were tethering with our cell phones and still working away, building our different businesses. It was wild.

Speaker B: And m. The mobile networks didn't stop the tethering during COVID or anything though.

Speaker C: No, they were great. We found this one app, Campendium, that allowed us to see cell service in all the different areas where we were parking. It was great.

Speaker B: Well, it's great to have you. And just before we pressed record, we were discussing the fact that, um, your name, there's definitely an Irish connection.

Speaker C: Oh, yeah. I mean, you can. You can look at me and see that my lineage goes way back. I think I'm probably saying it all Wrong. But I've never been to Ireland, but a whole bunch of my family's from Cork.

Speaker B: Very good. Well, Cork people call Cork the real capital of Ireland, so.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: I love that. It's the largest county in the country. So there's a lot of competition between the actual capital, which is Dublin, and the, uh, virtual capital, which is Cork.

Speaker C: So I love it. I grew up in Buffalo, New York, which also has a little bit of a chip on its shoulder, so that feels right.

Speaker B: Okay. I think. Do most places in the world have some sort of a chip on the shoulder when it comes to their.

Speaker C: I think they have to. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's a common. A common trait. Okay. Firstly, you are the chief operating officer of Stay Tuned. And part of your portfolio, or your app portfolio, inside there is Kiwi, uh, sizing. So what exactly does Kiwi sizing do?

Speaker C: Yeah, Kiwi sizing. It's pretty simple, but also really beautiful. It helps merchants. It's an app that you download in the Shopify app Store, and it helps merchants create intuitive, easy size charts that work really well with the Shopify ecosystem. So you can have. You can tag specific products with one size chart and have it be super unique. You can have set of rules to tag many. You can also even make a recommender. I think we've all experienced that, where you input a few facts as a customer about yourself, your height, your. If you prefer things to have a looser, tighter fit, and it fits out your perfect size. So it's simple, it's beautiful, it's customizable, and merchants love it. If you could just check us out in the App Store, you'll see how many great reviews we have.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I'll put a link in the. In the show notes. So we've seen. I've seen, uh, very complicated solutions in the past that require, you know, uh, effectively the management, like a CRM for this kind of thing. But yours is. It's very easy to install and it's very easy to manage, isn't it?

Speaker C: It is, it is. And once you get into it, it's intuitive in the sense that we've. In my experience, the apps that work best are those that are built to work with Shopify, not against it. Um, and one way where I'll describe how that works with Kiwi is if you want to set up a series of rules. So let's say you are an apparel brand. You sell men, women's and children's apparel, and you want to have a size chart for children's shirts. You can go ahead and make this beautiful size chart with images, with a gif, with a table to show different examples of children wearing it in different sizes. And you can make sure that that only applies, for example, to any clothes that are tagged with children's, with shirts, and maybe even if it's only your brand, that the vendor is your brand. So that's just an example of how it works really well with Shopify. You can use tagging just like you can in so many other areas of like, like when you're making a collection within Shopify.

Speaker B: I haven't heard stats in a long time, but one of the, I think the most shocking stats that I've ever heard is that is some, is the return rate of some of the very, very large stores in the uk. And there's a trend over here, and I'm sure it's in the States where people will buy one or two items and provided that they can actually return it cheaply, they will buy extra items and then return them. And the cost to some of the large multiples in the UK is absolutely massive. Is it correct to assume that if kiwi sizing is set up correctly, that it actually reduces the amount of returns? I would assume that that is one of the major advantages.

Speaker C: Oh, absolutely. I think our app is a tool and, um, it's a tool for folks to build upon their return policy, give information to their customers, and reduce return rate while also increasing conversion. Um, I'm shocked at how many sites I still see with just an image of a size chart. Um, not only is that not compliant, um, with American Disabilities act here in the States, but it's also impossible to use and, um, conversion is horrible. I'm also shocked at how many sites I go on for a women's item and I see size charts for men's and children, which makes me inherently not trust the sizing. But when customers can feel confident that they're picking the right size, not only will they buy fewer bracketing sizes, I think that's what we call it here is we see a lot of customers bracket, but they'll feel a lot more confident in it. So it can absolutely reduce return rate while increasing conversion. Um, it's worth noting that merchants still need to be really thoughtful about what their return policy is. You need to think of that ahead of time and you need to make sure that kiwi is just another tool and activating upon that.

Speaker B: Your point there about the. The accessibility. Accessibility guidelines have been released in Europe and I believe the law has been enforced soon. So what you're saying is basically I see a lot of stores as well, they use an image in the actual product area as uh, it's basically the size guide, which is just a photo or just a screenshot. So in terms of accessibility, it has to be presented to the customer in a, in obviously in a readable format in the event that the customer has a disability. Is that correct?

Speaker C: Exactly, exactly. And if you also think of that, that's not optimized for mobile. The. Yeah, the image that people have on desktop is not optimized for mobile, where 70% of traffic will be. And what I see sometimes is merchants have spent so much time and money building their site, getting their product ready, ordering the product from their, their production facility and they, it's kind of like that last 10% they just sometimes can really fail to execute on because they really want to just get some sales and launch their product. So they'll take a screenshot from their producer, their production manufacturer, or just copy this tech pack and put that right on their site thinking that, oh, customers should probably understand this. Right. Um, without thinking of, for example, is it a lay flat measurement? Is it the circumference? So our tool actually guides you. We have a bunch of templates too. So if you're not sure where to start, we have a whole bunch of templates you can use from covering apparel to dog apparel, um, to shoes, hats, uh, to really help set you up for success. And we also have a whole inspiration gallery. Um, it would be great if more folks used us because when I shop I sometimes get so disappointed the lack of sizing information. I see.

Speaker B: So is it popular then within print on demand? Because one of the biggest problems with print on demand producers, it's not returnable. Exactly. Or well, if it is, it's going to go. And there is a return address for most print on demand providers. But if it's returned, the customer never really ever gets it in. So they don't because it's not going to be ever used again. So have you noticed that like is it being used with print on Demand?

Speaker C: So we're able to see, um, one of the things we look at is out of our merchants who also uses print on demand apps, and there's a really, really strong overlap between some of the leading ones. And you're right, you've hit the nail on the head there with the business like print on Demand, it's even more important, um, a lot, if you think about that, the nature of that business, a lot of it will probably be, I don't know new customers. So I see Kiwi as a great tool for attracting new customers as well. I mean, have a great size chart no matter what. But especially when people, when customers are new to your brand, they have no idea what they're doing and you really need to hold their hands. There's one brand that has used Kiwi and done really well with it. It's a women's sports brand here in the States called Together. Um, I'll, um, send a link after. And one of the things that happened to them, so they created these awesome shirts, like streetwear style shirts, and they started selling them and then customers came back and they're like, this is crazy large. I'm normally a small, I'm swimming in this. And they couldn't reprint all of them and fix the sizing because the blanks are actually meant to be bigger. So they actually use Kiwi to really clearly state that these run large. And I know that's something easy that you can put on the PDP anywhere, but we all know customers don't necessarily read and you need to have it in a couple places. And this solution reduced their return rate and their frustrated emails rate, um, to almost nothing because it was so clear. So I think not only this can also be a tool if like something happens in production and you really need to correct for it in sales.

Speaker B: Yeah. So sometimes when people talk about apps in the Shopify community, uh, I think the word app is probably. It should be a division between apps that actually save you serious amounts of money, like operationally, which is what you just said, versus apps that just add something to the pdp. I often wonder, will Shopify come up with kind of, uh, a different level of application terminology? Because Kiwi, like Kiwi sizing, is a prime example of something that you pay a monthly fee for, but it could save a business. It actually could save them. Like if that was to continue with that particular brand, it could. They could have actually put them out of business.

Speaker C: Um, absolutely. And that was their first launch of a product. They were able to actually learn really quickly. And I think, I think that's another characteristic that brands have to have is look at your data, look at your returns data, hear what your customers are saying and use tools to act on those. So they were able to do that. And for what Kiwi costs, you're going to make that money up in less than a day. It's unbelievably affordable. And that's part of the reason I absolutely love this company is we are able to provide such an Incredible service at a price that you cannot beat that can add so much value to merchants.

Speaker B: It's interesting there like there's a number of services in the Shopify ecosystem that provide a system for you to return product. In actual fact Kiwisizer fixes a problem which might actually reduce the amount of, which actually prevents it. You know.

Speaker C: So I like to think of returns as there's the avoidable returns and the unavoidable ones. Avoidable returns are uh, where you haven't as a brand done a good enough job of explaining your return policy, the sizing information, the product information, how to care for it. And that's not only done through the PDP but that's done through the checkout experience, that's done through follow up emails after and those can all be in that avoidable. There's also unavoidable if someone just doesn't like the way something looks on their body once they have it or um, no longer needs it. And I think in this, you know, 20 year of 2025, 2026, when we're getting squeezed by shipping, we're getting squeezed by our return rate, the more you can focus on what you can control there, the you're going to just save so much money.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's interesting that you mentioned as well follow up emails although I suppose it depends on your. Depends on whether an item is ordered and it's in stock, whether it's going to go to production. But a simple automated email after the, after uh, the order goes through on Klaviyo, which would give a customer a reminder of the size or the possible variations in size could also, could also reduce. I'm interested like do you find sometimes that Kiwi sizing makes a problem so simple that customers don't even have the data to go into it? I often wonder with some brands their information on the PGP is so scant and so it's not good enough. I often wonder that people sometimes even launch brands and actually not think of the fact that yes, that boring detail could actually make the money and save the money on the other end.

Speaker C: Absolutely. One and one of the. So we have about 50,000 merchants within the shop, within our um, stay tuned portfolio. And the guidance I give to merchants who are having issues and talk to us is you need to think about your PDP with this framework of 3:33. So you look at your page if a customer's there for 3 seconds or like 0.3 seconds with our ability to focus these days, do they get the information they need. Is it just like a quick once over? This is a T shirt, here's what it says and here's shipping time. You also need to cater to the person who's going to spend 30 seconds on your page reading a little bit more in depth. And then finally that kind of tail is the person who wants a ton of information. They want to click the about and read the whole founder story. They want to click through to see like what percent cotton versus viscous it's made out of and then actually click through to the how to wash. So when thinking about your PDP you need to cater to all of those, not just the three second person who's viewing and definitely not only the three minute person but absolutely.

Speaker B: But uh, Laurelin, it's very, very hard to get all of that information on what is more than likely an iPhone or a Samsung mobile device. You know like probably 95 plus percent of traffic to most E commerce stores is now on mobile. So would you advise users to bring the sizing of information up to the top?

Speaker C: Oh absolutely.

Speaker B: Bring it, bring it front and center. Or would you advise that it sits down below? I would be thinking that it's probably the most important information other than the material and the price it's made out of.

Speaker C: I. From a conversion rate optimization perspective, I think it makes sense to have it right near the size selector which is that should be right near the add to cart button. Um, and you can always have, if it's on mobile you can have, you can expand a section into that. So if you have the kiwi size chart that pops up or if you even want to highlight all the reviews that talk about sizing, you should definitely substantiate that quick size chart with more information other places on your pdp but put it right as close to your size selector and add to cart as you can.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100% you mentioned together there. Um, do you work with any particular brands that you've been really impressed with or just doing really really well that you mentioned?

Speaker C: So apparel, we kind of follow the whole Shopify angle of we have so many apparel merchants, so many wonderful ones. Um, I really like. Let's see right now, even this morning I was looking at a brand, one of my favorite brands, Rolly Nation. I'll share a link. They are an apparel, excuse me, a shoe, shoe wear provider and they use our recommender to help recommend what size is right for you, which I love. I always have so much more confidence when I actually answer a recommender like that. We have A lot of lingerie brands that do it, which is the sizing. It's so important there. I'll link to, um, to a few of my favorites. Um, one of my absolute favorites though is a dog dog apparel dog accessories company called Wild One. Not only do I love the brand, but I love how they have used our um, recommender. They have used so many of the features we have from inputting the different sizes of your dog's neck. They're, they don't really have a waist, their torso to try to figure out what harness is the right size. And they use a whole bunch of images to help highlight because dog sizing is also really hard. So they've used a ton of our features to make that really fun. So I'll link to that as well.

Speaker B: It's funny because we've just spent 12 or 13 minutes talking about kiwi sizing and we are talking about humans. Of course you have pets. So is that, yeah, that's. Is that a big business actually buying the right things for your, for your pet?

Speaker C: We have a lot of animal accessory brands, we have a lot of lingerie brands, shoe wear, just regular apparel. It's really fun to see the whole cross section if you think about it, anywhere we need size and guidance, which is the majority of, um, Shopify businesses. If we look at, you know, the information Shopify puts out, the vast majority of their businesses are apparel of some kind of head. Accessories is up there near the, near the top too.

Speaker B: It's funny, at the start of the, um, intro I mentioned Stay Tuned Digital. So you are not just looking after. You're not just COO of Kiwi sizing. You are also, um, COO of Stay Tuned Digital. So I know what you guys do and I know the nature of your business. But just for the listeners who are a lot of Shopify, uh, app developers, Shopify agencies, listen to this. So your role there is very relevant. So what does Stay Tuned Digital do?

Speaker C: Yeah, Stay Tuned. We own and operate a handful of different Shopify apps. The way we got into this business is a few of us got together and we've all had experience with Shopify from different angles. And we saw that there was a great need to work in the app ecosystem and bring an incredible obsession with great technology and even better customer service. I think from my experience as a merchant, I felt that you could interact with different app providers and have a range of experiences from will they ever even open or answer my email to. Wow, these people are the best partners I've ever worked with and I'm going to be friends for life with them. And it was really hit or miss. And as a merchant it gave you a lot of anxiety of um, like my business is in their hands. So we wanted to come into this ecosystem. We all love Shopify and really try to contribute to, to how we can better define apps as being like incredible partners, great customer service and really solid technology. So one of we have a handful of other apps and solutions that play really nicely with Kiwi. We uh, are. Our partner company right now is zendrop a drop shipping company. Zendrop is incredible for any folks that are really passionate about dropshipping or want to learn more. They actually have a whole education platform. You can actually, you can go to their site, I'll link it too. I'll give it to you, Keith. And use their tool, which is a store builder, to build a store for you and start dropshipping. Zendrop provides a catalog of options for you to select and add to your seamlessly add to your Shopify product catalog, um, through a variety of partners and start drop shipping immediately. So it's all about curation, content management. It's a really great tool. Um, another one of our apps just to help show our range is um, called EV Events.

Speaker B: I was going to ask you about that for the simple reason that I will never forget meeting a, ah, young app developer at a Shopify event in London about seven or eight years ago and he had created a ticketing app which turned the Shopify order process into a ticket number and it presented the customer with like.

Speaker C: I'm guessing that Jason.

Speaker B: I don't know if it's the same guy. Is he from the uk? No, no, it may very well be. But explain what EV Events was.

Speaker C: Maybe he had a great accent that sounded like this. Yeah. So EV Events, um, is an we purchased a few years ago and have been working with and building on since then. It's an app that again seamlessly works within the Shopify ecosystem to turn products into tickets, event tickets. So our merchants range from national parks, yoga studio to sports teams who use Shopify to sell events tickets typically in addition to some kind of merchandise. And the reason people come to us from Eventbrite, sometimes they don't even need to have a physical product on Shopify, but people are flocking to this app because it allows the merchant to control the customer. So instead of Eventbrite which they're the one who own all that information, um, they can own everything and have it on Shopify. Fun Plug for those of you that are going to uh, the Shopify dev conference that was tickets were recently released. Enjoy that experience of buying your tickets. That is all powered by Eevee.

Speaker B: So it was powered by Eevee on a Shopify store?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, we worked closely with them to set that up. This is the second year in a row that they've used our app. Um, so hopefully I'll get to see you. Maybe Keith in Toronto at the end of May or a couple of your listeners there would love to hear if anyone has any thoughts on the uh, experience of buying tickets.

Speaker B: So what that does then is cuts out the famous Ticketmasters and all of the other providers that they're kind of in one way like TikTok and Amazon where they take the data and then that's their data. So they're farming it which is, I mean there's a whole like Harley and Shopify has been talking openly over the last five years about, you know, kind of arming the rebels to get away from this big data and um, people encouraging people to move to Shopify independent business so that they own the data. So that your, your event ticketing app is probably a bit of a game changer. Is it for it's allowing small businesses to actually enter the space that is owned by large corporations effectively, isn't it?

Speaker C: It is. And you know, it makes me so happy to talk to these merchants who find us and this is a solution that is allowing these small businesses to save so much meaningful money and get paid out quicker because we pay out just like we do. Um, it's just Shopify, right? So it's your typical payout schedule. But Ticketmaster Eventbrite, they take forever to pay out after an event. Um, so the bigger Shopify gets, we'll get to ride that waves. The more merchants are coming to us every day from different platforms to see if Evie could work for them to change their business. I had a conversation just the other day with someone who runs a whole bunch of venues for comedians and music venues. And finding this allowed him to quit his full time job to be able to keep focusing on building his network of comedians and musicians because of how much money he was able to save using EV versus traditional ticketing platforms.

Speaker B: That's a great story.

Speaker C: I know.

Speaker B: That's a great, great story. What's your of all of the apps that you look after in Stay tuned. What's your favorite app?

Speaker C: It's a toss up between. Evie is very niche and it works very, very well for folks who understand Shopify well, um, and have a very niche use Case and I think it's so beautiful for that. But Kiwi, I like to think about it like a little. Like, um, oh, there's a famous restaurateur in the states of Danny Meyer. So he owned this. He owns Shake Shack, or owned. And then he had this super fancy restaurant, um, called, I don't know. I'm going to make it up. This isn't right. My. I think it was. I'll have to correct this name. One is really fancy. They have like two seatings a night. And then Shake Shack is just whipping out burgers left and right. So that's kind of how I look at Evie and Kiwi. Kiwi is just serving the masses and can be used for so many different people, feed so many different folks and is really democratize. Anyone on Shopify basically can use it. Eevee is very focused. Yeah. Um, so. So I think those are my two favorites of all the ones that we have. And they're, they're really fun. Um, and different growth patterns, different customer usage. They're just very intellectually stimulating in different ways.

Speaker B: That's good, that's good. And I think some of your apps there, they, they're complex apps that solves in some cases complex problems and in some cases simple problems. But, yeah, there is a danger in the space that we all work in that Shopify doesn't ultimately end up launching its own features. And, you know, the platform is becoming feature, uh, rich. So when I look at your set of apps, you know, it's very clear that you're very focused on solving complex problems where that's a risk.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: You know, it's a risk for everybody. And I was at Shopify Unite, maybe back, I think it was 2018. And, um, I'll never forget sitting beside a group of app developers from the UK and, um, Shopify just launched a feature which they had spent six or nine months working on, you know, so, so there's no doubt that what you're working on is. It's complex. So I hope you're protected.

Speaker C: I suppose, you know, it is, you know, it's worth. I mean, the advice I'd give anyone listening to is follow what Shopify is doing, try to read through the tea leaves of, of what they're doing to figure out what's coming next, you know, for us. Um, built for Shopify. I'd make a prediction that that's going to be a requirement in a year or two. Um, it's worth thinking through not only those requirements because I'm sure the majority of Your listeners as well are app owners are overwhelmed by the amount of updates they have to keep. They have to push to their app to keep it compliant. So that's just another angle. Um, but there's always that risk that Shopify is going to launch something. However, it's not always a massive, it's not always, um, a game ender. If we look at something like Shopify reviews, Shopify email, they, they're not holding a candle to the other apps that are out there and nor do I think they intend to. They're just trying to provide a service to folks who want something free. Um, so it's not always, not always going to completely ruin your business, but it's worth staying smart.

Speaker B: You know, I suppose it's a risk in every business. It's not just a risk with the Shopify platform and in fairness to Shopify

Speaker C: because we are playing by their rules and we are characters in their game. Um, so that's why we have a portfolio of apps. We're hedged as well.

Speaker B: Exactly. That's the way to put it. That is the hedged is the way to put it. Do you have any, before we go, do you have any exciting news for the future or any releases or anything you can share with us?

Speaker C: We will maybe by the time this airs. So I can give you some follow up notes. But we're really investing in the apparel space. We do have another app called Pre Order now which allows merchants to easily do pre orders. I've used this many times even before I joined the company. It's an incredible simple. Another one of those simple apps that we're going to be relaunching in the spring, which is really exciting. I think this is another one. It's a tool for when merchants are strapped with inventory, orders are coming in late and you have to hit that marketing deadline. Being able to have tools to successfully manage and navigate pre orders is incredible. So we're going to be relaunching that. I'll also share a link for that.

Speaker B: We'll keep an eye on that. I am, um, I'm fascinated by a couple of things in Shopify. One of them is the logistics and the connections. And it's just, it's, it's phenomenal how you can order something in another country and just get a DHL from Germany within, you know, two or three days and just. And Shopify does that really, really well. But the Pre Order now feature the ability for Shopify store owners to sell product and take payment from their customers before it is ever produced.

Speaker C: It's so broken.

Speaker B: You know, it's so broken. So it's, uh, so broken.

Speaker C: And we can only fix it as much as we are able to within the confines of being a pre order in Shopify. Um, but that's something I think about a lot of. How could we change? There's no concept of a pre order in Shopify. There's an order. And so we can't introduce a new concept. But what we can do is try to work with that well, to make good user experience both on the merchant and the customer side, and set expectations.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I hear you. Well, Lauralyn, it has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I await your list of links there because you shared a lot of links, so we'll put everything in the show notes. Um, great. But thank you very, very much. Been absolute, absolute pleasure. Nice to talk to you.

Speaker C: Yeah, you too. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. All of our episodes are available on Apple, Spotify, itunes and Google Podcast. If you're an E commerce professional with an exciting story to tell, reach out to the team on, um, hellokbottle, uh, labs.com until the next time. Take care.