Episode 4: Things I Wish Existed

While eCommerce tech has come a long way in the past decade, I still have a wish list of improvements I’d like to see across multiple platforms. So this week, I’m dedicating my newsletter to lobbying these platforms to build these features. While I’m hoping the platforms make the improvements themselves, some of these ideas might be outright independent businesses. 

If you are a product manager at any of these companies or their competitors, I am begging you to implement these updates. Steal my ideas and pass them along as your own! I don’t care - just let us make more money! 

Meta

Over the past decade, four platforms have attempted to dethrone Facebook, yet Facebook remains the king of eCommerce. I’ll dive more into this reality in my next episode, but before I do, I want to tell you how Facebook can improve their own advertising platform and strengthen their position even further. 

Pinning Top Comments 

Social proof on ads is incredibly important. Social proof is one of the reasons you may see your cost of customer acquisition decrease as an ad continues to get served. That is, the more comments from fans of your product on your facebook ad, the more credible and legitimate it seems. Social proof is also one of the reasons you may not want to edit an ad, as editing an ad removes the social proof and you start again with zero comments and zero likes. 

Facebook has created a new concept called “MOST RELEVANT COMMENTS,” which means they will pin to the top of your ad what FB believes to be the most relevant comments. For instance, let's say Sue sees your post. Instead of seeing the 5 most recent comments, she will see 5 comments that FB believes are the most relevant. The algorithm surrounding “Most Relevant” comments was written by an amoeba, because it in no way works. If I delete those 5 comments, Sue will actually see nothing. She won’t see the 5 next most relevant comments. She’ll actually see nothing. Bananas. In addition, those comments aren’t the 5 with the most likes or responses - they are five that make no sense. For instance, I’ve seen “Happy Birthday, Jennifer!” as the most relevant comment on an ad for deodorant. 

Rather than leave it up to the algorithm, I’d be happy to do it the old-fashioned way if only Meta let me - the advertiser - pin comments myself! It’s a very simple thing - I pick the most relevant comments and pin them to the top of my post. By pinning comments, I can (i) provide social proof, (ii) rebut reasons not to buy my product, and (iii) provide an FAQ right in the ad. I’m virtually certain this will increase ROAS. 

Can this be gamed? Of course it can. But you can game it now by creating fake FB profiles, commenting on your ad, and deleting the other comments that aren’t from your fake profile. By allowing me to pin what I believe are the top comments, (i) the customer will actually get the information they need, (ii) my ads will perform better, and (iii) I will spend more on Facebook. It’s a classic “win-win-win” outcome that Michael Scott supports. Or do you prefer a lose-lose strategy? 

Bulk Delete Comments

About ten years ago, marketers would actually use a third party platform called Nanigans to launch and manage their facebook ads. Simply put, Facebook’s own ad manager and power editor weren’t very powerful, and so third party platforms made up the deficiency. Over the past decade, FB evolved its Ad Manager so much that businesses like Nanigans didn’t make sense anymore. 

The same is true for comment moderation - the facebook platform simply wasn’t very powerful ten years ago. Sadly, it still isn’t very powerful today, and you’re likely to use a third party platform like Agorapulse to manage comments on your ads. If you’re spending more than $25,000 a day on facebook, you might have your own person dedicated to comment moderation. An easy way to improve this would be to allow advertisers to: 

1. Bulk delete comments. If you’re spending $1000 a day on an ad, you might get 75 new comments on that ad within one day. Currently, you have to delete comments one by one and refresh the page each time before moving on to the next. Delete, refresh. Delete, refresh. Delete, refresh. Every day on every ad. Please give me a feature where I can bulk select and delete comments all at once.

2. Canned responses. Is your deodorant aluminum free? What do the different colors represent? What's the best scent? I’ve answered these questions on my facebook ads at least ten thousand times. Why can’t I save the response so I don’t have to type it out each time? 

Video Click Through

When I started advertising on facebook ten years ago, I only did Desktop ads. Can you imagine? At some point, we all moved to mobile. And then, we moved to some video ads. And then mostly video ads. 

If video ads are the future of social media advertising, it would be enormously valuable to know exactly at which point in a video ad the viewer clicked through to see the product. View drop off is great for telling me where my video is too boring. But I need click-through to tell me at what moment my video really made people excited about my product. This would be pure gold for creative iteration.

The Dow Jones for Facebook Ads

Okay, I know this one is a much bigger ask. But every Meta Ads user understands the visceral gut punch of seeing your Ads performance drop off a cliff for no apparent reason. Where do you turn to? Twitter. Everytime this happens, Twitter lights up with panicked founders and performance marketing managers asking each other if they’re seeing the same thing. 

Or, you might ask your agency (if you have one) what’s going on with the other brands they support. Of course they’ll tell you that everyone else is experiencing the same thing - but is that the truth, or are they just covering their own underperforming ass? 

What if Facebook themselves published a “Dow Jones” of sorts, an averaged index of ad performance across all accounts? That real-time info on whether it’s a Meta-wide issue or a just-you issue would be incredible.

I’m not sure they’ll ever do it themselves - it might just reveal too much about their business and earnings for their quarter. But, this is where a savvy agency with enough brands opted in might be able to produce a facsimile that they could sell on its own or packaged in as a benefit to their clients. Narrative Ads already does something like this and I love it. But something from Facebook that looked at more brands and even specific categories would be better. 

Postscript / Klaviyo

SMS Voice Notes

I’m not sure if this is technically possible, but how cool would it be if you could send voice notes via SMS at scale? I’d love to see how brands could get super creative with this. Imagine, for example, if SKIMS could send their first-time customers a voice note from Kim K. thanking them for their purchase. With new AI voice generators, you could even dynamically insert Kim addressing the customer by name for a super personalized experience. It’s not just a quality customer touchpoint, it’s a potentially viral idea.

Klaviyo

Conversion-based A/B Tests

At this point, nearly everyone has a sign-up pop-up module installed on their website. Sign up for email and/or SMS, and get some sort of welcome offer like 20% off your first purchase or a free travel size deodorant. It’s proven to be effective at pushing that prospect over the edge into purchasing. Even if the prospect doesn’t purchase, you’ve still got that email address so you can keep contacting that person.

Klaviyo allows you to A/B test offers and creative based on opt-in rate - i.e., what % of people who view the pop-up actually enter their email address and opt into receiving the offer? That’s great, but what I really care about are the purchase metrics: conversion, AOV, and total net revenue. Because it’s pretty obvious that increasing the offer from 20% off to 30% off is going to benefit my opt-in rate. But, does it actually pay off for me in total net revenue? I need to see that moving from 20% off to 30% off increases conversion and/or AOV to a point where that extra 10% discount pays for itself. 

Klaviyo already has all the tracking in place to be able to do this. They know my customers, their opt-in status, and everything about their subsequent orders. So, why isn’t this data available in a format where I can actually use it?

BTW, Postscript just launched this insane on-site opt in on their mobile sign-up forms. This feature makes it so that a new subscriber does not need to leave the website at all to opt into SMS marketing messages. This is better for sign up rates, better for conversions, etc. After Jones Road Beauty implemented this, JRB got an 82% increase in conversions for mobile opt-ins. This is a feature I didn’t know we wanted, but definitely needed. Disclosure: I’m an investor in Postscript, but this isn’t sponsored by them. 

Stripe

Yelp for People

Last but not least, this is probably the one I would be most excited about. It’s harsh but true: some customers are just bad customers that you don’t want to deal with - or at least, it would be great to know up-front that you should handle them with extreme care. They’re not fraudulent, per se, so typical fraud detection won’t catch them. But they do things like chargebacks at the drop of a hat.

Stripe already knows which customers do this. Of course they don’t handle all eComm payments, but they sure as hell handle a significant portion of them and it’s only growing every day. I’d love it for Stripe to create a feature that says: “Hey! This customer has contested 5 charges in the last 12 months” and I can decide as a business what I want to do with that information. Maybe I block them from purchasing altogether. Or, maybe I just upgrade tracking on that order and require a signature at delivery so I have a paper trail in case they contest their charge. Or maybe stripe blocks them from purchasing until they become a better actor. At Neiman Marcus, 2% of customers deliver 40% of sales! Is that true with chargebacks? 

Did I miss anything? Let me know if there are other eCommerce product features you’d like to see launched! You can respond here, or tweet at me (@moizali).