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My nan passed away last week. Her funeral was this week. She had eight children (including two sets of twins!) and lived to the grand age of 97. I lived with her while I was at university. She had a backyard that was perfect for childhood cricket matches and was always quick with a joke.

But one of my fondest memories of her was her love of two-dollar shops. She wasn't cheap by any means, but she loved the thrill of discovering what was new and finding a new knickknack for a problem she didn't even know she had. It's a good thing she never discovered Temu.

CHEERS, BUSHY

P.S. If you missed our Shopify webinar with James and Toby yesterday, it's now live in the community. It was an awesome session with plenty of practical tips for those last-minute BFCM tweaks.

01

Oh splendid, another business portal to keep updated. This week OpenAI signalled its intentions even further towards owning the data, not just surfacing it, by launching Businesses in ChatGPT. You can claim your business today. I just registered Add To Cart.

Give it information about your business, your policies, your products and how customers contact you. It gives you analytics on how people find and talk about you in ChatGPT. If you're in the US, you can also spin up a Business Agent for customers to chat with your brand. Aussie brands can't build an agent yet but you can claim your profile now. If you're a Shopify merchant, you can activate it straight from your Shopify admin with full product integration. We've seen this playbook before with Google.

As you've probably seen on LinkedIn, it's put the fear of God into people rushing to claim theirs. But it doesn't look like a scarcity model at the moment. It's verifying that you are who you say you are. There are already problems with multiple brands using biometric identification. One more reason to claim it is that businesses can use their agent as the landing spot for ChatGPT ads (more on those in story 3).

If only I'd moved this fast in the early days of domain registration. This week we found out what Shopify paid for shop.com. Market America announced the sale back in September without a price. Shopify's financial filings now point to about US$99m. That makes it the most expensive domain sale on record, well past ai.com's $70m.

02

If you've gone down the Instinct rabbit hole, this shows you further how AI is moving into the tools we already use. Amazon just launched the ability to text Alexa for Shopping, rather than using the Amazon app or website. Some US users can now text Alexa to place an order, get an order update, add items to their cart or get recommendations on new products. It's invitation-only in the US for now.

Maybe not as technically wowing, but solving a real customer pain point: Australia Post launched App Collect this week. Customers can collect parcels at the post office by showing a QR code in the Australia Post app, rather than physical ID. Aus Post says about one in four customers forget their ID. It could be worth adding a link to the Aus Post app in your shipping confirmation emails. I'd love to be able to send my postie thoughtful text messages though. Just an idea.

03

Search Engine Land just published an analysis of ChatGPT ads since they launched in February. Keep in mind most of this is US data.

One in three advertisers who tried ChatGPT ads weren't running them in August. Average spend per advertiser fell about 85% between April and August. Software companies made up 57 of the top 100 advertisers, and retail brands accounted for less than 8% of spend. More than two-thirds of spend was bought directly through ChatGPT rather than through programmatic.

So it sounds like a test-and-learn playground for most, unless you're a software company growing on the back of AI or clinging to relevance. I still think it will be a significant channel as long as ChatGPT keeps resonating with consumers. It's just finding its feet with advertisers.

If you want to go to the next level of nerding out, Meta has just released an overview of how its organic algorithm makes recommendations. When a user adds an "Interested In" topic, it triggers four retrieval sources. Two find matching content directly, through search and related topics. One follows the content graph. One matches similar items. They talk a lot about making sure related organic content gets prioritised when someone adds an interest. In theory, that's a top-of-funnel opportunity in organic social for people new to a topic or category. But good luck optimising for Meta's organic algorithm.

04

Speaking of following playbooks, last week TikTok launched a dedicated TikTok Shop app in some regions that looked a lot like the Shopify Shop app. This week, it launched TikTok Shop Plus memberships… that sound a lot like Amazon Prime. It's US$9.99 a month after a 30-day free trial, and it's being piloted with more than 1 million US shoppers. It offers free shipping, 10% off select products, monthly coupons and instant refunds. Obviously, no streaming service included. They've already given that one away for free.

If you want to see the dangers of live shopping, check out this post from the founder of Suite 2A Outfitters (a live commerce brand on Whatnot) about when a car crashed into him mid Whatnot stream. Thankfully, everyone is okay. No word on whether it impacted his conversion rates.

05

I don't need to tell you that it's a challenging environment out there, especially if you're a standalone, independent brand. But I saw two examples this week of brands, in different ways, helping each other through.

Laura Klein, founder of Snotty Noses Co., joined me on the podcast back in EP415. This week she brought together 30 Australian brands, mostly in the baby and kids space, for a lead-generation campaign. Each brand donated a product and $50 for Meta ads, creating a $10,000 prize pack. It resulted in 6,000 leads for those brands. That's a pretty small investment from each brand, even if it took a lot of work to put together. Congratulations to everyone involved for banding together instead of getting paralysed by competitiveness.

Similarly, Carla Penn-Kahn gave a great callout to the team at Napoleon Perdis, who have been hit by the David Jones administration. Their in-store artistry services have wound down just as peak event season kicks off. If you've got a Christmas party or team celebration coming up, reach out to the Napoleon Perdis team to get everyone glammed up.

I was determined this week to leave on a positive story after a grumpy couple of weeks.

ATC PLAYBOOK #682

Your customers probably already have your next product idea.

It's in your comments, DMs, reviews and the words they type into your search bar. The hard part is that those ideas are scattered across five different tools and everyone is already busy. It's easy to lose them.

Warwick Levy started Lonely Kids Club in Sydney in 2011. Fifteen years later, there are no investors, a team of four and more than 3,000 original designs, all printed to order. His Facebook group suggests designs and his team makes them. One of those requests, Social Distancing Club, sold in the thousands during Covid.

Today, we dive into the Add To Cart archive for how to catch what your customers are asking for and turn it into products that sell.

Examples from this Playbook

👕 Warwick from Lonely Kids Club runs LKCC Presents events. The community posts ideas and the team turns out 20 or 30 designs in 24 hours. Some end up among their biggest sellers.

🧋 Pamela from Bubble Tea Club switched every order to paper straws and waterproof labels because her comments section asked for them.

🐍 Chris from Milton & King watches the searches on their site that return nothing. Snake and baseball wallpaper both came off that list.

👖 Joel from Freddy feeds customer feedback and design requests straight back to the design team in Italy.