Are Guest Checkouts Secretly Killing Your Shopify Growth?

Jay Myers: From astrophysics to PayPal to now your reimagining guest checkout, incredible journey you've had. I had a chance to chat with you about a month ago, but can you give our listeners quick background on who you are and a little bit of your story and we'll then we'll get into some other stuff, but quick background.

Rohan Mahadevan: Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for for having me. You know, it, it is been, it's a real pleasure to be here and to you know, be talking to you, especially with someone who's had such an amazing experience and kind of seen the whole e-commerce evolution happened, especially from, you know, back in the early 2000 and tens.

Yeah, just a brief background on me. You know, I guess I did my PhD in astrophysics. I did a postdoc. And then through various, you know, crazy decision making processes, you know, went and did a startup back in 99 selling warranties online actually. Of course at that time there was no Shopify, and that was a time when people questioned whether Amazon would be successful or not, right?

Buy books online. And then I, you know, I joined PayPal in 2004. And spent 15 years there and had, about 10 different jobs at the company. Fantastic experience. I ran risk analytics. I then opened up the markets of Brazil, Mexico, ended up and a few other places in Israel, including Israel.

And then and then, you know, moved to Singapore where I ran Asia Pacific business. And then ultimately running our, all our international business outta Singapore. Spent about seven years there. That was our headquarters. And, you know, through that time learn a lot about merchants and experiences, online experiences, regulations, compliance data.

And so, you know, all of that of when I left PayPal in 2019, moved back to the Bay Area and was kind of thinking about a lot of the experiences I had. And that's why I kind of came up with Node that what we're building, what we've built and, the Commerce 3.0 solution that we, would love to share with you guys.

Jay Myers: But 2004 PayPal. I just wanna touch on that. That's, that was a crazy time was when did PayPal go public? I was gonna Google it really quick,

Rohan Mahadevan: So when it went public before, so it got a, it got, it went public way before that and then it got acquired by eBay in about 2003. Around two of 2003, and then I joined in 2004

Jay Myers: Was like. Elon Musk wasn't involved

Rohan Mahadevan: No, he wasn't there. That's why everybody asked me, he

Jay Myers: The PayPal Mafia Ha was had kind of

Rohan Mahadevan: There. Some of them were still there, some of them were tearing away and yeah,

Jay Myers: Wow.

Rohan Mahadevan: I've heard a lot of the stories.

Of course. Yeah when I joined PayPal, we, that, that first year that I joined, I remember we processed PayPal processed about $17 billion in payment volume. And then when I left PayPal was processing about nearly a trillion, so about seven 50 billion or trillion. So quite an amazing ride and a fantastic company of course, but.

Jay Myers: Amazing. Well, what a, what a. Backbone to like, to have or a foundation of for the rest of your life, like, yeah, I mean, you could, we could probably do a whole show on that, but that was what set you up and that what is, what gave you some of your passion for what you later started. So what is Node, and I wanna definitely, this is what I wanna talk about today, but describe it.

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah. So no is Commerce 3.0 and what I mean by Commerce 3.0 is it's a way where it doesn't have any servers involved. And it allows consumers and merchants to directly interact, engage, communicate, and make purchases from each other without requiring any servers on the backend. So it's a true direct connection between a consumer and a merchant.

And, you know, if I were to give you an analogy the ultimate goal is, you know, if you think about going to a. To a coffee shop and buying something, right? You go and you tap your phone, right? And you're not logging into the terminal. You're, there's information that exists on your phone securely and that information is transferred to that terminal to make a transaction happen,

And so the idea was, hey, suppose you could have a copy of everything that you've done. Online in commerce, on your phone, all the emails, all the offers, all the communications, the SKUs, everything. A copy of it is on your device. Then any interaction between a consumer and a merchant should just be like doing that terminal where it's just a tap.

You get connected to the merchant directly and the transaction ends up happening on the merchant side. Right? And so the philosophy is don't worry about, logging into anything. Don't worry about signing up to anything. Just have. Everything that you've done on your device and everything can be instant, literally instant.

And because it's on your device, it's also, you have the ultimate in privacy as well.

Jay Myers: Right. So is it inherently secure because it's on your device, it's not going through, it's not being stored. Your data's not being stored on a server somewhere. It's literally

Rohan Mahadevan: yeah. So if you take an example you know, merchant today. Will typically, actually, let me go back and kind of share why we even have username and passwords in the first place. So why we have account creates, right. And if you rewind back to, you know, when the internet started everybody access the web through a library computer or internet cafe, they would go to a library.

There would be a lot of people go into libraries. A lot of people go to internet cafes. Logging into, you know, whether it's Amazon or, you know, at that time, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail or whatever. And the reality is that the service provider had to identify who the customer was, and in order to identify which one of the 500 people at that library computer was accessing it, it created a username and password that.

Enable them to identify who that was, right. And then the second thing that ended up happening also was the only place to store information at the time was on a server that was sitting with the service provider or the business. And, the business realized, hey, if I can store all the information from that customer, then maybe the next time the customer comes, I can give them very delightful, simple and easy experiences.

Right? Didn't have to type their stuff again. I can store their card information, all of that stuff, right? And of course they said, look, I need to store it. This was even before the days of Salesforce, right? They said, I need to store it. Because only if I store it can I trust it. I'm gonna store it, I'm gonna secure it and I'm gonna trust the information.

But you fast forward and that was when, internet started when there was dial ups, right? I mean this is kind of the context of the infrastructure, but you fast forward, 25 years. You know, today nobody shares devices anymore. Whether it's your laptop, your iPad, your phone, nobody shares.

The second is the computing power, the storage power, the security power on this device is for all commercial purposes, infinite, right? I mean, when you actually go and buy a phone, they're pricing two fifty six gigs, or five 12, you're making a storage decision. You're making it, does it have fingerprint?

Does it have routine scans? You're making those decisions. And the third thing that happened was or is you have cryptography today that's very mainstream, right? And you can trust information that's not sitting on your server. So if you think about Bitcoin, you're trusting the fact that there's a value, but it's not stored on anybody's single server, right?

Jay Myers: right.

Rohan Mahadevan: So if you put those three things together. You can ask the question. Well, okay. Is there a Commerce 3.0 solution out there where you can actually store a copy of all the information of that consumer? Say, Jay's information on Jay's device, and every time Jay comes to that merchant that he is made a purchase from before, he has all the information.

He has their sku, he has their order history, he has his loyalty points, he has everything in his phone. All he needs to do is to securely transfer it to that merchant. And everything becomes an instant one click. Right? And so that's kind of what we've end up building.

Jay Myers: Okay, so just so people can visually understand this, so there's a mobile app you have installed and your information is stored there. Now you're, you are shopping on a website on your device. And you come to checkout and rather than creating an account or worrying about guest login, not guest login, you walk me through it from that point.

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I think you're bang on. So you download an app that's called Node. It's Node, it's a node commerce app. And the beautiful thing about the app is there is no signup process.

Jay Myers: Okay.

Rohan Mahadevan: I made sure that there was no, there's no point downloading an app and trying to then ask me, asking the customer for a username and password.

So there's no signup process because it's your, it's downloaded on your device and it's yours. Okay. So, then you go, let's assume you go to, you know, a merchant and you make a purchase as if, you know, as if you just made a purchase, right? You didn't have to worry about anything you. The, we have a patent where once you make a transaction on that merchant site and you come to the confirmation page, so you've finished the process, you've put five things in the cart, you've made the purchase happen, it'll ask you, the app will ask you, do you want to save what you've did on your device?

So it'll save. If you made a purchase of five things in the cart, it'll save all those five SKU numbers from that merchant on your device.

You go to your app and you'll see a copy of, Hey, this is the purchase I made. Here's the shipment. I made it to, here's the card I used everything that you want. Or, you know, if I use shop pay, you can use anything you want.

And that just sits on your device. So that immediately, whenever you wanna access it, you can just go to the this, the node commerce app and you can see everything that you. Now, if you say, the next, they'll take my example, right? I buy some aftershave and sometimes I go and say, okay, where did I buy it?

Where, what, you know, what did I, was it the nine ounce one or was it the three ounce one, or was it the 1.5? Was it the blue or was it the, i'm like, okay. I just go in there. I find out what I bought. I literally click a button because all that information is there. When I click that button, it transfers me back to the website, to the checkout page on the website.

It puts in all the SKU information, puts in my shipping, my billing, and if I used a card, puts in my card as well. And all I need to do is just click pay on the website and the payment is complete. So you're kind of getting an Amazon one click like experience for all your customers without requiring any signup in the process.

Jay Myers: And as a customer. So right away my head goes to the shop app which only would work for Shopify stores. Well, I could say pull in some stuff 'cause they sync with email and they do pull in orders As long as there's an order confirmation email. I don't think it has a, the ability to. Click and then go back to the site.

But I can see and track orders in there. But like what would be the merchants probably or a listener thinking right now, what's the difference between shop app?

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah, absolutely. So, when I, when I. Customers. For merchants, they're two buckets. There's new acquisition and then there's engagement, right? And the shop app, just like Amazon app or eBay app, or Etsy or any of those apps are really apps about discovery, right? They help consumers find a product independent of the merchant that they wanna go and buy from.

Whereas this is really this, what if you look, when you look at the app and you download it, you'll see that every merchant has their own specific storefront. All communication comes into that storefront of that merchant. So it's an engagement tool for merchants, And where it helps merchants directly engage with their customers.

And we're not about doing discovery. We're not about cross-selling. We don't do any of that at all. Right? So it's a complete engagement tool. For merchants, and that's what we, that's how we differentiate ourselves from the shop app or any, or eBay or Amazon.

Jay Myers: And by engagement tool, do you mean you can push communication offers or like what does engagement mean?

Rohan Mahadevan: So, engagement, that's a great question. First of all engagement for me is. When the customer starts thinking about the merchant or thinking about what they want. Okay. And that really starts from whether you've sent the customer an email on an offer or an email on some loyalty conversations or a newsletter or anything.

Today, if you think about what happens, every merchant will send you. I mean, I get some merchants send me 10 emails a day, right? When they come into my Gmail, and pretty much within the first 15 minutes I'm below the, they're below the fold. Right? And that's one of the frustrations a lot of people have of not even wanting to sign up for anything.

Or everybody will say, don't send me offers or Don't send me stuff because you just know that it's just gonna create issues. Right. And so, but, and so if I wanted to go and buy, say that cologne that I was talking about, I'm never gonna go to Gmail and search for cologne because I'll get a thousand things coming up and I don't even know what you know, how to sift through it.

But with this, when the intent is, Hey, where's that thing that I bought? Or if coffee is a great example as well, where's that coffee that I bought? I can immediately go to the Node app and I will exactly see the brand I bought it from. Literally within like five seconds, you can find what you had done.

And then from intent to then finding out exactly what it is and then to completion of purchase, that entire engagement is taken care of in less than five seconds. Right. And that's the beauty of having everything instantly available. It can only be instant if it's on your device. Right?

Otherwise, you always have to log in somewhere. Right,

Jay Myers: So what are the advantages to merchants? I can kind of see it a bit to the customer 'cause it's a seeing my, having kind of all my orders in one place, whether they're on Shopify, not on Shopify. Promotions from emails go into, there's a promotions kind of section in it, right? You can

Rohan Mahadevan: There's a promotion section, there's a order section, there's a account section

Jay Myers: so that's scrapes. Like if I if a store sends out an email with a promotional offer, I can go to that store and like I can see that there versus sifting through my emails to find it right.

Rohan Mahadevan: It's always absolutely, and it's always present. So if you go into your, if I would show you my node. You can go into a merchant and you can literally see, we convert all the emails that come in, which are typically texts, right when you go to your Gmail. We convert them into basically what looks like a dm.

And so you can actually, you know, swipe right, swipe and left, and kind of see what the last five that were sent. 'cause you know, you really don't need to see the last hundred. And then you can actually act on it. So yes, we actually do provide, so it gives you persistency.

Jay Myers: Right.

Rohan Mahadevan: And one of the things I like also saying, and what I've done is, when I buy my airline tickets or when I buy, when I got an Uber ride schedule, for example, and I'm on a plane, I have instant access to it because there's no sir, everything is on my device, right?

So I have 24 7 access to it, even without wifi.

Jay Myers: right.

Rohan Mahadevan: Right. So when you, so just coming back to what you said about engagement, for me, engagement really starts when intent, when you're thinking about the merchant or thinking about the product and making sure that you can deliver the content that the customer wants when they think about it. And then so that there's no distraction and no drop off during that period of time.

Jay Myers: Okay. Now, why would a merchant wanna have this on there? I mean, okay, you can engage a bit better, but what are the other benefits for a merchant?

Rohan Mahadevan: So, what we're telling Mer, so we're focusing on merchants. So what happens today is let's, I mean, I'll take my example of buying. Coffee. Alright. I won't go and buy coffee online. I buy either buy from Life Boost or I get from ILI coffee and, you know, I'll buy three or four different bold and this grind, that grind, you know, whatever that portfolio of things that you have.

And I'll never, I won't create an account. I just don't want create I like checking out as a guest. I'm loyal to the merchant. I do like the merchant. I'm loyal to them. But I check out as.

Jay Myers: I don't create accounts, but I will buy from the same store over and over, but I'm the same

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah. And that's what I tell merchants, right? I tell merchants, I say, Hey, customers actually, I mean, they've paid you, right? I mean, so they want your product. They've paid you, they've tried you, they wanna engage they just don't want the hassle associated with signing up, remembering stuff and going through a password recovery, all that kind of other stuff they just don't want, right?

So what we are telling merchants is look. If more than 50 to 60% of your users are guest users, okay. Where they check out, but they don't create an account. Right. They don't. They don't sign up for anything. And most of them also will opt out like I do. Even with the ones that I like a lot, I will opt out for marketing.

I say don't market to me. Right? Because I just know it's gonna deluge my. My personal inbox.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Rohan Mahadevan: And so you've got a customer that's checked out, they've opted out of marketing, and so your optout file is bigger. And now when, if you're gonna, you know, you're gonna start, you know, doing your mark, if you're gonna start marketing and that customer is gonna come back looking like a new customer.

So you're kind of reacquiring a customer that you've already bought. It has already bought from you. So what we're saying is, look, instead of reacquiring that customer, why don't you just, and by the way, my, the deployment of Node on a merchant takes less than a minute. 30 seconds. Okay. And if you just deploy this on your site, whenever the customer checks out as a guest, a copy of all that information will just be sitting on their node commerce app. And now you've in immediately when you're, when it's there, the customer actually doesn't mind getting offers because it's all organized.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Rohan Mahadevan: And everything is just one click. So you are actually giving a customer a better than an account like experience without ever signing up for anything.

Jay Myers: Okay. And I know this, so this is because there's a node specific email, right? So this is that. All email marketing and offers will go directly to Node and not to your personal email. Correct.

Rohan Mahadevan: If the customer chooses to. So there we have

Jay Myers: you turn that on, yeah.

Rohan Mahadevan: if you turn that on. What we also have in our app, and since we last talked, is you now have the ability to actually pull in your last two years worth of transactions. From your Gmail

actually see it all in one place. Or if you want an, if you don't want, you know, your Gmail to be cluttered or you know, with, or any emails that you have to be cluttered.

When you download Node, we actually give you what we call a commerce token that looks like an email that you can use anywhere and everything will come in directly into your note app. what we're saying is, look. Email was built for personal communication, right? That's what was built for back in the day.

And right now 90% of it is commercial, right? Basically. And because you've got the WhatsApps of the world, you've got, you know, Twitter, you've got different forms of communication for different things. And so email is really used on a personal basis for documentation. More than anything else when you need to remember things and we need something documented.

And so we're saying, look, just separate, create we've created a new commerce space on Node, which is your own personal private space, which is what we're calling your personal commerce assistant, where everything you do in commerce is just in one place.

And because it's commerce related we can, you know, use AI and certain other rules that.

Eliminate all spam phishing attempts that you can feel trusted, direct communication with the brand. So that's the idea behind, behind the personal commerce assistant. So you're coming back to what benefits the merchant? Right. So we're telling the merchant, Hey, if 80% of your users, or 70% or 60% of your users checkout as guest.

Right.

This is a way in which you can actually treat your guest users like members.

Jay Myers: right.

Rohan Mahadevan: And I'll just give you a concrete example Today when any merchant asks, ask somebody to create an account, they really have four value props, right? They say, and you can actually, you can Google this and say, what's the benefit of guest checkout versus account, creating account.

And this is all standard stuff. And there's pros and cons and we're saying there are no more cons of guest. Because when you give consumers merchants give consumers a reason to create an account. They say instant access to your order history. Right. Faster checkout. The next time. We can give you loyalty points and we can give you personalization. And what we're saying is, look, if you actually keep a copy of that information with the customer, you can provide all those services without requiring signup.

Jay Myers: A hundred percent. Yeah.

Rohan Mahadevan: So, so that's the benefit to the merchant is you can treat all your users like, like account holders.

Jay Myers: So. You can use as a customer node, like if I have it installed on my phone, it doesn't matter if a merchant has it, if a store supports it, I could still use it to shop there. And does it populate my, my, my checkout as I go through, or does the brand need to have a, have it installed on their end as well too so it can communicate?

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah, so to the first part you can actually use Node anywhere and it will populate infor all the information that it has on that you have on yourself, right into the merchant site. The advantage for a, what it doesn't do unless the brand actually. Has deployed us is, we can't get, is the skew information relative to that brand is, it's what's needed, right.

In order to give, in order to make sure you have a, I can pre-populate the product categories that they've purchased from the brand. 'cause that information is only available at the brand. So our deployment is really telling the brand, look, our technology does everything else, but the data that we, that the customer needs.

Is really the skew information, and that's what this deployment really does is just gets the skew information of the purchase that they made and transfers it to the customer's device. Right?

Jay Myers: Do you have any data on what yeah. Makes sense. So do you have any data on what the. Potential losses of guest checkout in terms of it, not like customers not reordering customers like not taking advantage of loyalty or customers. Like what do you know the impact of a. A customer who shops as a logged in customer.

'cause you're basically giving a logged in experience to a not logged in customer. So what is the delta there do you like, does the average logged in customer buy X more times have higher A OV have X higher LTV? What is the difference?

Rohan Mahadevan: It varies. Yeah I can give you directionally where it's at, but of course, it varies by industry and by, you know, brand and et cetera. But typically if a, if on certain industries you'll see that account holders, especially for repeat transactions, right? And you'll fee, you'll see account holders may be doing four to five transactions or six transactions, say a year.

Okay. On certain kinds of products. And the corresponding guest user may do one or two. Because the switching costs are very easy. They can go and buy anywhere else, or it's become too difficult to go back, put in five things in the cart. You know, I'm just gonna go to my target nearby and I'll just go buy it from there, for example.

Right. If it's available. And so the delta, I would say is, I mean, it's also reflected in any merchant. They just need to calculate, Hey, what's my LTV on my account holder? What's my LTV on my guest users. Right? And I think that discrepancy is about two to three, at least two to three x, right? Of a difference.

Jay Myers: Right.

Rohan Mahadevan: And of course, it varies by industry, right?

Jay Myers: Yeah, I was, I just looking it up as we speak. Logged in users on average have a 30 to 40% higher a OV average order value than guest shoppers. Reason. This is from a Salesforce study. Store preferences make personalized upsells, personalized offers. They logged in, users convert two to three times higher than guest shoppers.

That was from a Bay Mart study. All the data. Lower higher cart lower abandon cards. So higher abandoned cart recoveries. Yeah. So I mean, so the benefit here is do you know what the industry what percentage of checkouts are guest versus logged in?

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah. So if you, well, again, it varies by industry and by merchant. Some merchants force, some merchants will say, Hey, I've got a hundred percent you know, account holders. But the question is, okay, what's the conversion? What's the overall website conversion? Right. And that's really a question over there.

In a lot of the merchants we've been talking to, it's about, you know, some people say it's 90% our guest. They just want to, 'cause they're coming in either through a social, through their social media advertising. Nobody wants to, everybody wants speed. Everybody wants speed, right? Customers want speed, they want safety and they want convenience.

Right? That's kind of it. And especially in this day and age where everything is instant. So the ability to go and create something new and sign up for something is, and even, and I, you know, one of the things I get you know, I see a lot of is the minute you go to any website, they say 20% off, gimme your email.

Right? And customers have created multiple junk emails to kind of make sure that they value that and it doesn't really go anywhere with it. So, it is pretty significant and. I, yeah, it's

Jay Myers: Shopify, I just would there's se 70% of all orders are from guest checkouts on Shopify. Globally, the average is closer to 80%. But so, I mean, it's a huge, so that's a huge portion of customers that guests out check out as guest. And they have, well, I just went over all the. Data on how that affects their buying behavior.

So we, like you're solving a large problem here. This is not in inconsequential.

Rohan Mahadevan: We, I think so. And,

Jay Myers: Yeah I guess that's why you're doing it right.

Rohan Mahadevan: I definitely think so. And you know, one of the things, you know, you're looking online and if you even do a Google search and say, Hey, what are the benefits and the pitfalls of guest checkout? You'll see, they'll see pros, faster, checkout, no speed, higher conversion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Challenges, engagement low, can't give, offer loyalty, et cetera, et cetera. What we're saying is those cons don't exist anymore with Commerce 3.0. Those cons don't exist. You only get benefits. Right.

Jay Myers: Yeah. You.

Rohan Mahadevan: I remember the time when, you know, when this was, when PayPal was part of eBay. EBay had a philosophy at the time, was it would, we're gonna, everybody requires logged in transactions, right?

For various reasons

Et cetera. And then of course, you know, they opened up guest as a way to allow customers and they immediately saw a huge increase in in new sales, right? Because it's guest is great, it's fast, but then they saw challenge with engagement, right? On that group of users.

And so what we're saying is there doesn't need to be a challenge in engagement anymore

'Cause the tech is different.

Jay Myers: So you say node claims to deliver all the benefits of a logged in experience, such as loyalty, reorders, personalized offers. Without signing up, is there any, is there anything it doesn't do like it does there, is there like a, is there like, okay, we can do almost all of this, but not this one thing.

Rohan Mahadevan: I'll answer. I'll I'll answer that question. Well, the short answer is I think anything that a merchant wants to do with the customer, they can do directly with the customer using this technology. Right. And the reason is is because the fundamental infrastructure that we're building in this Commerce 3.0, which is serverless AI commerce.

Is serverless, right? So we are not, we don't own any customer data. Okay? I think that's a really important point. We don't own any customer data. The merchant still owns whatever data they have. I'm not taking anything away from the merchant. They still own the data, the transaction, the customer. All of that is, all the merchant's doing is, Hey, I'm just gonna keep a copy of it on the customer's device so it becomes easier for them to interact with me. Right. And so there is really no downside on how they email on the backend, what the backend processes are, what we actually increase their opt-in file. And so, you know, it may sound too good to be true, but that's because the infrastructure has changed. Right. And if you don't mind me going down a little bit of a parable based on my astrophysics background

Jay Myers: was hoping you would.

Rohan Mahadevan: I can give you my, the analogy I like to use when I talk to investors and other people as well. Look I view this change, this technology shift that we are going, we've all, you know, we're going through and we're seeing it right now, and we can talk about agent commerce and the impact of that on guests as well.

In a second. But if you think about. All risk manage, I mean, all the things that e-commerce providers, the e-commerce industry has today, right? You have risk management that makes sure people don't hack into your servers. You put caps in front to make sure it's not a bot.

You, you know, you go through password recovery flows, you do OTPs. There's a lot of stuff that's going on and every merchant is provi needs to think about this. Right? And that's all because they're storing data on everybody's individual server. So there's a lot of different solutions to try to solve a common problem.

Right. And the analogy I like to use based on my astrophysics background is. Is these were the same kinds of different solutions that we tried to explain planetary orbits when we all believed that everything revolved around the earth. Okay? When we did that, we could explain, the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn or one of them, and then we'd come to another planet and be like, Hey, it doesn't work.

Need to have another solution to try to, you know, explain those, those perturbations, blah, blah, blah. And then when Galileo came in and said, Hey, maybe our baseline is wrong. Maybe actually the sun is the center, right? And if the sun is the center, then everything is elliptical and it simplifies everything,

Here's what we're coming in and saying is, Hey look, it's actually, if you actually let the customer store their data with them and they have access to all their data. Then when they come to any merchant site, they can actually share whatever they want to, and you don't have to. And it's uniquely determined because it's their device.

And so you don't have to worry about, you know, all these other complications, about two fas, about logins, about, you know, going through what my order history was. All of that is just there. Right. So when you ask the question, is it anything it doesn't do, I just think that the, when you change the. on what everything is built on, then because at the end of the day, if the customer is the king, the customer is the king, right?

Jay Myers: right,

Rohan Mahadevan: Or.

Jay Myers: Do is there any I imagine it's as secure as your wallet pay, right? Is it, there's a, it even if someone took my phone, it's still gonna use my facial identification or something else to, yeah. Okay. So it's as secure as having my credit card in my wallet, paying my

Rohan Mahadevan: Your wallet. Yep. And that's the beautiful thing about, and one thing to think about, also to mention Jay, is it's like the security is on the phones. If you look at, or any device, right? Even a laptop fingerprinting on every single laptop today, which didn't exist 10 years ago, five years ago.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Rohan Mahadevan: I mean, the speed.

The security and everything on devices are only gonna get bigger because of Murphy's laws. Right. They're only gonna get better. So this is, yeah, this is completely, you know, protected by, you know, face id, this, that, et cetera. If you want to turn it on, if you don't want to turn it on, you don't have to. It's not like I'm storing your, bank information right in it.

But yeah, it's as safe as anything else that's on your device right now.

Jay Myers: So what about, other email flows that merchants will sometimes have, like automations. You buy something, there's welcome series, there's educational content. It could be Klaviyo flows, Shopify flows, different things that normally happen when someone purchases something. So if they buy with Node, how does Node integrate with those other tools or loyalty programs?

All of that.

Rohan Mahadevan: So let's do the email first and I can talk about loyalty program and I wanna be very clear what we are and what we are not. Okay. And it's super important to, to to do that. But on the email flows, look, what we end up doing is our system. Think of it as, whether you're using AI or using, a really nice piece of code.

Where we're telling merchants, Hey, when a customer buys from you and they want to use their node, you know, their node connects token if they want to, or they can use Gmail. We are, do, we can automatically add that just like an admin, right? We can automatically add that into your file as a line item of an next to your customer.

They'll have two emails now. One will be, you know, rohan@nodeconnect.com and one will be my Gmail, and you just now do whatever you usually do. And every time it, any new message or new onboarding flow takes place that you usually do with your mer, with your customers. It just comes into my Node app and we, you as a customer can say, Hey, notify me every time I get an offer, or every time I get an account update or every time I get a newsletter.

So we have notification preferences as well,

And so, but the beautiful thing is you can, you what I, what we're telling. Merchants and consumers is when you send me something today, and if I'm not ready to consume it, it's going down below the fold. Right? Whereas with this, I'm like, you know what did I get from Ilia Beauty, right?

Or what did I get from Lime lush? And okay, I'm gonna go and check it out on my time, and I can have access to everything that they sent me when I'm ready.

Jay Myers: Right.

Rohan Mahadevan: I was just bought something from Bright Land and got some great olive oil from them. And I mean, we wanna do a repeat purchase, right?

It's really helping the customer engage with you on their terms, on their timeline, when they're ready, when they have the intent,

Jay Myers: Right.

Rohan Mahadevan: doesn't change. So coming to your loyalty I, I wanna, so this is kind of where I wanna say what we are and what we're not. We are basically an information company, okay?

I don't provide my, I don't provide loyalty programs at all, right? So what we do is we would go to companies who have a loyalty program and say, look, if you want to, you can offer that loyalty program, whether you have to the, to your guest users.

Because all we're doing is just like we store card information on the customer's phone.

We are storing your loyalty points or your loyalty program, and every time the customer comes back to your site, we'll just pass that information so that you can automatically log them in and you go through their existing flows. So we're an information company that stores everything to do with commerce on the customer's devices.

Jay Myers: Gotcha. I know it's early and you just like launched this recently, but any case studies of big wins or examples of success that some merchants have seen with it.

Rohan Mahadevan: So we, you're right, we are early. We are talking. We still haven't gone live with some of the merchants that we're having discussions with right now.

Jay Myers: Okay. Okay, so

Rohan Mahadevan: But you know, this is one of the reasons I'm excited to be on this because I'd like merchants to also come in. There is really no downside.

It takes less than two minutes to deploy. And you know, we'd love to kind of work with merchants that are, you know, watching this show and with

Jay Myers: and it doesn't interfere with Shop App. Actually now I think like orders will still flow into, if someone's using Shop app, they're still in there. It's just, if someone prefers a more secure way, faster way. Guest checkout. Like the two don't conflict, right?

Rohan Mahadevan: Absolutely they don't, they absolutely do not conflict. And it doesn't conflict with Shop App, it doesn't conflict with Shop pay with PayPal. It doesn't conflict with anything. And I'll just give you an example. So I use Shop App as well, right? 'Cause it gives me my tracking and instantly and it tells me a bunch of things on that.

But I've gone into Shop App, into Shop Pay, or even into PayPal, and I've updated my contact information to my Node Connects token. Now everything comes into Shop App because that's how Shop identifies me or PayPal. And, but I also get a copy of everything in my note so I can actually, all of these things can really coexist with each other.

I'm not trying to pull anybody away from anything. Thing is just a much easier way to engage directly between consumer and merchant.

Jay Myers: What do you think? Where's this all heading? Like what do you think the commerce looks like in three to five years?

Rohan Mahadevan: It was interesting. I was speaking to somebody and they asked the question, Hey, where do you think AI is heading in 18 months? And the guy's like, I can't tell you anything over six months,

Jay Myers: Yeah. Or not three months. Yeah.

Rohan Mahadevan: months. So, look I think the one thing that we're starting to see right now is there's a lot of agentic commerce coming in and people, you know, the whole perplexity, PayPal deal, you know, you mentioned Amazon doing some stuff and Google and

Jay Myers: Shopify and ChatGPT just have a partnership now and

Rohan Mahadevan: yeah.

So everybody is doing this and I think it's great, right? Because it simplifies. Consumer cognitive load, right? They can just do things, say, Hey, I wanna buy that thing again. Just go find it for me and buy it, and they go, right. It's a great, as I mentioned before, it's a great discovery for the consumer so that they can go and execute on their purchases, but I find it's going to have a lot of harm on the engagement between a consumer and a merchant.

Because if you thought that, you mentioned guest checkout on some of these on Shopify is 70, 80% and sometimes even more, and the LTVs are much lower, this is only going to exacerbate that,

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Rohan Mahadevan: Because the switching costs are gonna go, are gonna become so low. So unless you can actually figure out a way to engage.

With your customer on their terms. I don't think anybody's gonna be creating accounts signing up for anything anymore. Right? You have to figure out a way in which you can engage your customer directly when they are want to. Otherwise the everything is gonna go to higher customer acquisition costs, right?

As a first time user. And so I think some, you know, commerce 3.0 is gonna be. Even more important. Right. And we're gonna be, you know, may in, in the near future we can what I'm telling merchants as well is not only is this a storefront for you to engage your customers on their terms, but it's also you can have personalized AI that's running on the customer's device.

That just engages with you, like tells you, Hey, when is your next, we talked a little bit about this with respect to bold on subscriptions. A lot of people, I mean, I don't I always buy from my merchant again and again, but I don't subscribe because I never finished my stuff before the next usually comes, so I wanna just do it on my terms, right?

And so setting that up locally and making sure, you know, you can do it on your terms I think is gonna be really important to have this capability. As a additive solution for engagement. Right. It's additive. The key word here is additive,

Jay Myers: Yep.

Rohan Mahadevan: right?

Jay Myers: So if a merchant wants to, if it doesn't conflict with Shop app, there's no real downside. It's only potential upside. What does a merchant have to do to turn this on their Shopify store?

Rohan Mahadevan: So, so we have a plugin for example, on Shopify store, we have a plugin and they literally, you know, download that plugin. And, you know, it's, I have a video that we're just pretty up a little bit, but it takes about a minute, 30 seconds, and they're just enabling the access of skew information.

From their confirmation page to the customer's note directly. Right? And as long as that gets transferred, they're done and they're ready to roll. We the system automatically will take, the brand images that the merchants use on Shopify, and we'll put it onto their device so that we make it look as much as.

As the merchant's brand as we can. Because it's an engagement tool, right? It's and we wanna make sure that there's continuous trust and the merchant doesn't have to worry about being below, above the fold. They're always above. I like to say they're always above the fold, right? Because when a customer thinks of you, you're there.

Jay Myers: And there's no actual change to the website. It's just a backend process that connects it. Right. That doesn't change the checkout or the cart page. Or like, I essentially if you weren't using Node, you wouldn't even know it's running.

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah, I think that's a great point. And what we say three things to merchants. We say it doesn't change anything of your buying flow,

Jay Myers: Yeah. Okay.

Rohan Mahadevan: So we're not trying to distract you or trying to get you to download node before you make the purchase. That doesn't work at all. It doesn't change your buying flow, it doesn't change your email backend processes, and it doesn't change your data ownership.

So those are the three basic things that we're saying that does, so yeah, it it's, you know, at the, in the, on the thank you page, you, if you want customers to download note and engage with them, they can do it. Information is transferred directly and it's a very nice, seamless interaction. And then the customer has, you know, their links on their phone and they're literally in one click.

They're at your website on your checkout page,

Jay Myers: Amazing.

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah.

Jay Myers: And are you live now? Can someone

Rohan Mahadevan: Absolutely, we're absolutely live. You can download it as a consumer you can deploy it as a merchant and please, give me a

Jay Myers: Where can people go to to learn more or to try it? Does it have a free trial? Is it, what's the cost? As a merchant?

Rohan Mahadevan: yeah, so the, you can go to node connect.com, CONN.

Jay Myers: link is in the show notes as well.

Rohan Mahadevan: So it connects.com. There's a merchant site telling you all the benefits of, you know, using it as a merchant. We obviously have a merchant calculator there as well, which says, Hey, if this is your volume, if this is your, you know, guest checkout amount, here's what you could expect, an increase in revenue in terms of increase in engagement, right?

There's a calculator there in the merchant calculator side, and of course there's a consumer section telling consumers, you know, it's this, the nice thing I like about it is it's really speaking the same language to both people because it's changing that. And and you know, the pricing model right now is, you know, it's free for merchants.

When if a customer makes a purchase. Initiates a purchase from their node, then we basically ask for an affiliate marketing fee from

Jay Myers: Oh, okay. That's super reasonable. So only if Node generates it

Rohan Mahadevan: only if it's coming from the node. Do we ask for a affiliate marketing fee in that? And yeah, and that's kind of, I mean, if some merchants do want a subscription, a monthly, fees and we can always talk about that. But that's, and it's completely free for the consumer.

Jay Myers: Amazing. Amazing.

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah. I mean, one thing I'd like to say, if you don't mind, also wanted to just point out this is again, a little bit of philosophy is, you know, the technology is fantastic, right? In general, all technologies and when the internet started, everything was great. Everybody's buying stuff online, everything was going on.

But I feel that there's, over the last 15 years, there's been technology that we're using that was built during dial ups.

Jay Myers: Yes.

Rohan Mahadevan: Created a tension, right? Like, I don't wanna give you my data, I don't wanna do this, I don't wanna do this. And there's a tension between, hey, private, you look at anybody's privacy policy, it's like, I'm gonna share your data with all my partners, right?

Because I wanna give you better services. And so there's this tension, and I don't think there needs to be tension using technology.

And what, and the, that's the reason I said, if you look at our website on node connects.com. You'll see that the merchant and consumer pages are saying the same thing.

It's not saying something to the consumer and something to the merchant because there doesn't need to be tension. You can actually have commerce happen and delight both parties and not take anything away from them.

Jay Myers: Amazing. Yeah. No, if you people never read those privacy policies. Policies, but if you did, it would. It

Rohan Mahadevan: I know.

Jay Myers: would

Rohan Mahadevan: And the cookie policies

Jay Myers: Yes, I know. We just, we have, we just accept everything now. It used to be that we were scared, but now we just

Rohan Mahadevan: Yeah, exactly.

Jay Myers: we're numb. We're numb as

Rohan Mahadevan: You just accept everything

Jay Myers: yeah. Well, this is, this has been very eye-opening.

Is there anything you would like to leave our listeners with? Any last thought, advice or anything you'd like to end on?

Rohan Mahadevan: I, first of all, thank you again. Jay, I think this has been fantastic to share what we're doing at Node and. You know, this is Commerce 3.0. It's a, it is a, it is gonna be the new way people are gonna interact with people,

Especially merchants and consumers. And, you know, for people who are innovative and, you know, have thought leadership, I'd love to kind of work with them to implement this and and, you know, show them that it'll drive, it will make your guest users, I think, even more engaged than account holders.

Okay. Because you don't have any of the friction. So.

Jay Myers: I like it. Rohan. If someone wants to follow you personally where are you active? What social platforms

Rohan Mahadevan: I'm on LinkedIn. Me there I'm mainly on.

Jay Myers: I'll make sure I add that in the show notes as well too. So this has been a ton of fun. I learned a lot, and I will make sure there's links in the show notes for all of this.

I, I, you know what I always say in e-commerce there's always times to take advantage of things before they become table stakes. Like I, I remember buying. AdWords for less than 5 cents a click. back in around 2006, 2007 I remember when you could put words on a page in the same color as the background for SEO optimization. It was like different things like that. And so there's always different things at different times that you can take advantage of and. Get a bit ahead and this feels like one of those things. So I think if it, it's not, there's no risk in trying it. So I think to me, that's the, that's, that says it all right there, there's only potential upside.

Rohan Mahadevan: Thank you. Thank you. Very well said and very well summarized, Jay. And please download it as well and use it. And let me, and if there's any feedback, you know, we're always innovating and changing things and feedback is always is the core,

Jay Myers: Thank you so much, Rohan.

Rohan Mahadevan: Thank you so much, Jay.