Interview with BlackCart CEO Donny Ouyang on Try Before You Buy
In this Interview Darius spoke with BlackCart CEO Donny Ouyang on the Try Before You Buy model and how it improves conversion while reducing returns.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Darius 0:02 Welcome to Retail Tech Podcast. My name is Darius Vasefi and today I am speaking with Donnie Ouyang, CEO of a company called Black cart. Black cart is in the business of b2b commerce, helping retailers use a new technology or a new process called buy. try before you buy. So I'm interested to find out what this process actually how it actually helps retailers. And Donnie is experienced in getting to this point. How are you today, Danny?
Donny 0:36 I am doing good. Thanks. How are you?
Darius 0:38 Thank you. Welcome to the podcast. So maybe a quick introduction about your background, how you came to start black court and where you are right now.
Donny 0:51 Sure, sounds good. So Blackheart is my second company. I had a startup before that started back in, in college called Raikou. This was a on demand online tutoring marketplace. So I worked on that for about four or five years. Then after that joined this seed stage VC fund here in Toronto called caravan ventures.
Sorry, they were an investor in Raikou at the time, so the guy gave me a job. And I worked there for about a year and a half, mostly working on product, helping portfolio companies with with product and growth. I always knew I was going to get back into entrepreneurship. So I came up with an idea for black part is very different at that time. But I started working on that part time. And then eventually full time. The early days of black heart, we were this b2c consumer facing app, we were a Chrome extension that we got people to install. And once they consulted, they could try before you buy from, say 50 different brands. And they'd be able to pick out items from say like Macy's or blue lemon, any any of these brands and be able to try before you buy. And the early MVP is obviously we didn't have partnerships with these brands. So I would go on eBay and other sites and buy these second market gift cards at 20% off essentially pay on behalf of the customer. So if they ended up keeping something we made 20% that was the non scalable version of trying to prove out that service. And around 2019, that's when things got really unscalable we shifted over to b2b. And that is what black card is today. But now we'll integrate into these ecommerce stores. It's a separate button on the product page. So underneath Add To Cart could be try before you buy and their visitors, their customers would be able to add items to cart get a ship to try on at home for free, and only pay for what they keep.
Darius 2:58 Okay, so that's that's pretty interesting. The just a note about the startup life is once you get the, you know, the startup bug founder, it's very difficult to get rid of it. Yeah, so
Donny 3:14 it's very accurate.
Darius 3:15 Yeah. So now so how does this this actually what's the process? So like you explained, there is actually a separate button on the PDP that says, Is there is a button always there? Or does it present after like a time period when the person doesn't make a purchase or
Donny 3:38 now it's always there? Well, I mean, sometimes it may be disabled for items that don't qualify for tribe referred by and so things like face masks or gift cards for those types of products. So just be disabled, but always be there as an option for customers who are just, they're uncertain if they that the product that they're looking at is going to fit them right or if it's it's the right look, it's kind of fit within their closet or within their lifestyle. They can choose to pre buy and not pay up front.
Darius 4:09 Okay, so what products do qualify for this because that this is it's not a cheap option, I guess for the for the ecommerce vendor.
Donny 4:20 Pretty much everything is available for it other than items that are just non returnable. So face masks is a good example. Maybe be final sale items, gift cards. Those items are typically not activated for try before you buy But otherwise, the majority of the skews on a merchant store is activated just because we still want to simulate that that holistic experience. customers might be kind of discouraged if they they see some items that are available for try before you buy but then they They really wanted to try this other thing, and it's just turned off for some some reason.
Darius 5:05 What about the product size and price? I mean, you know, like, let's say, Can you do it for you do it for jewelry? fine jewelry?
Donny 5:14 We do. Yeah. But there is a cap. We cap that currently we cap it at 2500. Anything above that we can't do today. Although eventually we will.
Darius 5:28 Okay, so what what I mean, it that sounds kind of risky to send 20 $500 Gold ring to people and expect them to be, you know, be nice.
Donny 5:41 yeah, that's definitely a pain. I went through that a lot as well, especially during our b2c days. So one of the value props that black artists we will take on the risk will ensure every transaction, and if there is a fraud event, we'll pay on behalf of the customer to the merchant. So the merchants always protected. The core of our technology is this broad AI that we built that came out of our b2c days, largely.
Unknown Speaker 6:11 So, okay, so then you're taking on the risk, basically. That's right, is does the customer actually have to fill out something like almost like a credit application or some kind of a form to give you more data to make a decision to do this? Or? No,
Donny 6:29 they don't have to fill out anything other than the typical checkout fields. So shipping, billing address, and phone number. It's like that, and then we'll run it through our our Friday AI to score the rest of that order, which is non trivial. It's not saying it's easy, it just, and it's very different than traditional e commerce fraud, because they're not paying up front. But we I mean, we've lost enough money and gone through enough iterations that it's pretty good now.
Unknown Speaker 6:58 Okay, so so I guess what the next question would be that, what is the fraud ratio that you're seeing right now, and is it like across the board or just for some products,
Donny 7:12 some types of products have a higher broad rate than others that exact Friday, we'll, we'll keep closer to the chest. But it's, it's, it's trivial at this point. So if the customer is determined that they're, they're high risk, or there's too much, there's too much rest to be able to process that order, then try before you buy, would it be available for that customer, they'll be asked to either pay up front or adjust their cart.
Unknown Speaker 7:43 Okay. So it sounds like a really customer friendly service. So it's good, I'm just thinking about the the fraud aspect of it, where, as you, I guess, you're working on that building the AI engine and really trying to understand the customers better.
Donny 8:01 I'd be happy to dig in a little bit deeper into that and kind of share some of the signals. Sure, it's, it's, I think a lot of the technology that's come up in the recent years have greatly improved the insights that we can glean from this. But things like, one thing that we do that knocks off a lot of it is every time you try to check out, well, two, factor your phone number. So we'll verify that you actually have your phone in front of you, you'll have to factor it as part of checkout process. And then we take that and we cross reference it with government and telco data sets, to see if your input shipping address or billing address matches with the historicals from telco and government data sets, just to make sure that it's we're actually sending it to the same person, right, there's a lot of the fraud that's going on is you'll book an Airbnb somewhere or something, we'll get product shipped there, and then you're only living there for one day. And that's, that kind of eliminates that use case to a large degree. And then we'll also do things on the behavioral side. So things like, actually, this is a good one. But if if a customer sends an excess amount of time reading fraud related articles in our help desk before they go through Checkout, that's a negative signal that we can determine that this. This is slightly more riskier than other transactions are going through our system at that moment.
Darius 9:34 Yeah, they're trying to figure out if there's any loopholes, they can get around. That's right. Yeah. Interesting. Well, yeah, it is. This is this is very interesting. So I think so in the checkout then. So there might just be like an extra step of validation or quality, scoring the transaction on the back end and you Know that the two factor or two, you know that with the mobile is actually a good idea. And it's not too intrusive, we're I think we're pretty much all used to some form of that these days.
So how are you doing now? Like how many customers you have? And what kind of transactions? whatever information you can give us to see how this is growing?
Donny 10:28 Yeah, so we're at around 50. Merchants live with cards right now. are doing hundreds of 1000s of dollars of transactions per month. And yeah, it's, uh, we've kind of our merchant base have evolved, especially after COVID, things have changed pretty significantly. We started out with just apparel merchants on Shopify, that we've kind of branched out into swimming more and more upmarket into larger and larger brands, some of them, some of the recent contracts that we signed, that have not launched yet, but they're they're household names. These are top 50, top 100 brands in the world. That is not necessarily apparel. So some of the merchants are, there's a electronics company, Louisville store, there's cookware with caraway helix sleep is a mattress company. Gallery. Yeah, there's, it's not just apparel anymore.
Darius 11:38 Yeah, it's interesting how we are getting, I guess the brands and retailers are getting more comfortable with sending items like a mattress. And I mean, this is what people do anyway, for like, as a warranty a lot. You're just making it a lot more visible upfront, right? I mean, people have this, you know, I don't know, mattress is something that's what, like 90 days test period, like you can get a mattress, keep it fun threat, send it back after 90 days. So does the customer pay anything extra for using the service?
Donny 12:19 The customer never pays now.
Darius 12:21 Okay. So even for shipping back, and all of that is handled?
Donny 12:27 Well, it depends on the retailer itself. So if the merchant has a return or restocking fee, then that still applies. There's just nothing extra, there'll be part of the normal,
Darius 12:40 normal process, okay, that they have. Okay, right. Okay. And then what do what's the cost and the way that like an onboarding and getting started for retailers,
Donny 12:53 placard charges, occasionally, if they're an enterprise merchant, and there's a lot of hand holding that we may charge a setup fee. Typically we don't, for the mid market as a smaller merchants. And then for us, there is no staff fee, we charge a small percentage on items that are capped. So it's performance based, if there is a try before you buy order, and a customer keeps two out of three shirts, then we'll charge a small percentage on the two shirts that are kept.
Unknown Speaker 13:24 Okay, and now the transactions are still going through the merchant. So you're not actually handling the transaction, correct.
Unknown Speaker 13:34 Now we also handle the transaction, just because we need to be able to determine when to charge the customer, okay. Typically, the customer has five days after delivery to determine if they want to keep returning anything. If they don't make a decision after the five days, then they're charged for the full order. But if they make a decision that they only charge them for the items that they decide to keep, and we facilitate that transaction.
Unknown Speaker 14:01 Okay, so so you actually basically take over the credit card and the processing part of the site. Okay. So are you on like a Shopify marketplace as well. And
Unknown Speaker 14:20 we are not now we're a private app. So we every engagement that we do with merchants is it's it's an enterprise process. So well customize the design and look and feel for their store specifically. And then they would install a custom app specifically for their store to fit within their needs and their configurations.
Unknown Speaker 14:45 Okay. All right. So. So yeah, I think that's that was one of the questions. I said, how would this work with like a platform like Shopify, that processes the transactions as well? Probably That's right. Yeah. No Okay, have you So would it be fair to say correct to say that your customers are not Shopify customers?
Unknown Speaker 15:09 We do have Shopify customers, but more and more so as of recent, it's been Magento and custom storefront as we're swimming upstream. Thanks, Shopify. I mean, there's there's a certain handful of larger Shopify merchants. But typically, if you're doing like 50 100 billion plus per year in gmv, you're, you're not on Shopify, yet. You're on Magento, or you're using your custom storefront.
Unknown Speaker 15:38 Right, and those are probably Shopify plus customers, right? They have more,
Unknown Speaker 15:44 or Shopify, Shopify plus it's, say, maybe 10 to 30 billion Jambi per year. It's still, I mean, they're still considered enterprise, but it's not. They're not the big guys, they're not doing more than $100 million per year.
Unknown Speaker 16:04 Okay. So is that where your sweet spot is? companies that do 100 million or more.
Unknown Speaker 16:12 We're, I mean, those are the most interesting ones. Because there's so much customization we can do. We're still working with any merchant that does more than $2 billion per year GMP. So those will still consider to work with. But we've, at this point, at this point, we've kind of accumulated a little bit of a backlog of merchants and the priority ones are cards of 100 million dollar plus ones.
Unknown Speaker 16:40 Okay. So what's the process of getting started?
Unknown Speaker 16:46 Well, they have to come to our site, book a call, well, we'll have a discovery call to see if try before you buy is a good fit for your store. Because oftentimes, it's not or sometimes it's not, there's, there's a couple of qualification criterias that we go through to make sure that there's a beautiful fit. And if there is, then it's a pretty quick process or sign a contract. And there's no upfront out of pocket costs. So we'll sign a contract, we'll start the onboarding process. And within two to three weeks, we'll either have a test pilot launched on your store or the full integration launched on your store.
Unknown Speaker 17:31 Okay, so two to three weeks is really what the actual integration typically takes.
Unknown Speaker 17:37 That's right.
Unknown Speaker 17:38 Yeah. Okay. So it's not like massive integration and coding and things like that. That's good.
Unknown Speaker 17:45 No, there's no, there's no engineering investment from the merchant side. It's, it's more so kind of backlogged on our end right now.
Unknown Speaker 17:54 So it is. So you have an API correct? Or how do you how does the implementation actually can we dive a little deeper into that?
Unknown Speaker 18:04 We do have an API. Our API is used for custom storefronts. If it's Shopify, or Magento, or WooCommerce, or any of these set storefronts, then we'll plug into their existing API's. And all we need connection to is the order endpoint, the customer endpoints, the inventory endpoint. And actually, yeah, that's it, just those three endpoints, we would then be able to create orders, update orders, and then pass along updating information, like when this transaction happened, when this customer decided to keep something or return something else.
Unknown Speaker 18:45 Okay. What can you share as far as some performance numbers like, you know, increasing, you know, sales or average order values or things like that.
Unknown Speaker 19:00 We've seen those evolve, especially after COVID. Or, I mean, not immediately after COVID, but say, maybe three or four months after, after COVID hit and March, things started to evolve. So the the numbers today as we increase conversions, this is from visit to checkout. So the full funnel of conversions on site by around 24%, and we increase net ARV, so this is average order value after returns by on average 51%. So if you if you envision the customer going through the try before you buy low, they they have less risk upfront in order to make that try decision or checkout decision up front. So more customers are checking out and the customers that are checking out they're trying more and ultimately keeping more.
Unknown Speaker 19:57 Okay, that's great. Those are great. Numbers, especially at scale, you know, larger companies. So
Unknown Speaker 20:06 it makes a difference. I mean, large companies and smaller businesses, especially with everything that's going on. It's so important piece of their stack.
Unknown Speaker 20:16 Right? Are you live? So I guess, does the location of the merchant and the customer, does that make a difference for this offer?
Unknown Speaker 20:30 There are some limitations. So we we do cover all the English speaking world today. Um, so we have merchants in Australia, UK, obviously, us. But the limitation is as long as the customer or your main group of customer lives in the same country as the store, the store availability, so shipping internationally is still a challenge for us. Just because the lag time between when they checkouts and when the customer ultimately receives the product is too long, and then returns the costs is too high. So as long as you're not you have a warehouse in Australia, where you're shipping out too and receiving returns, then you're okay. But if you're shipping from Australia to the US, then we wouldn't be able to support that.
Unknown Speaker 21:22 Okay. Yeah, that's interesting to international cross border shipping. I just had an interview with the CEO of a company called sky postal. And their specialty have you know them?
Unknown Speaker 21:35 I've heard of them. I'm not familiar. I've
Unknown Speaker 21:37 heard Yeah. So they, they specialize in shipping to Latin America, from the US. So if you'd like I can, I'd be happy to put you in touch with the CEO.
Unknown Speaker 21:50 That'd be awesome. Yeah, sure. That's really interesting.
Unknown Speaker 21:54 Yeah, it is. I mean, depending on the size of the, you know, the, the market in these countries, like Latin America is really not that much developed for us. And you know, North America vendors, and shipping is one of the main reasons. So that could be another potential. Okay, cool. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna invite Jeff to come up. Jeff is one of our you know, he's he's a retail tech and retail analyst. Jeff, if you want to you happy to have you on up and ask some questions from Donnie, give us some pointers. Yeah, good morning. Good
Unknown Speaker 22:36 afternoon, everyone. How
Unknown Speaker 22:36 we all doing today? Hey, Jeff. Doing great.
Unknown Speaker 22:40 So what are you? How would you describe your business? Are you SAS? Are you physically facilitating the returns? It sounds like you've got your hands in a couple different places. We're How would you self describe?
Unknown Speaker 22:54 We're not technically SAS and that we don't charge a monthly fee. We were purely transaction based. So we're performance based business model. But we also don't touch logistics. I mean, back in b2c days, I did. Everything was shipped to my house I was driving to from people's houses. And that was not scalable, or not okay. It was not fun. But we were just the software layer. Now. We're, although not technically SAS.
Unknown Speaker 23:22 So when you say manager return, you're just overseeing the return, what probably facilitating the paperwork, but those are going through other other providers.
Unknown Speaker 23:30 But it still goes through the same rails as the traditional returns for that merchant. So we'll generate the returns port returns label for that customer. But the return is still getting dropped off at the post office. It's still getting sent back to the same warehouse where they facilitate their their other orders. There's no changes on the merchant side.
Unknown Speaker 23:52 Right, but you aren't touching any of that physical process.
Unknown Speaker 23:56 No, no, not anymore. Yeah. Interesting. So,
Unknown Speaker 24:05 so again, what
Unknown Speaker 24:05 space Do you sit in, then?
Unknown Speaker 24:07 It's not it's not payment processing?
Unknown Speaker 24:09 How does the animals world describe what you do?
Unknown Speaker 24:13 I mean, we wouldn't be ecommerce enablement.
Unknown Speaker 24:19 Yeah, that's a big category that's too big of a category to egg. Everything I don't want to meet.
Unknown Speaker 24:24 You can probably read that Jeff is an analyst.
Unknown Speaker 24:28 So or maybe not even technically post purchase?
Unknown Speaker 24:33 Like, is it a
Unknown Speaker 24:35 certain aspect of fraud prevention?
Unknown Speaker 24:38 Yeah, there's that piece, I mean, from a technical perspective, but maybe marketing is we've the main value prop here is well increase your sales. actually really haven't to be honest. I haven't really kind of pigeonholed into into this specific category yet for Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 25:06 well the standard standard advice I was getting when I'm working with a startup is a use the use the dreaded pigeonhole work for but I'll tell you what you do want to be pigeonholed at least you want some analyst that cares about you at least cares about the space. So then that's you know how you can get drive some some contacts and you know, some position on various theories analyst, you know, graphics, whether it's a hype cycle or, you know, Magic Quadrant or garden array with what sports are called the wave things along those lines. It's hard to it's hard if we don't know how to pigeonhole, quote unquote pigeonhole you with where to put your
Unknown Speaker 25:43 I see. Yeah, it's interesting. I haven't really spent any time thinking about that.
Unknown Speaker 25:49 Yeah, that's, you know, it's, it's,
Unknown Speaker 25:52 it's down the road, usually typically what what I would see, but at some point, somebody's going to say, hey, what analysts are covering you. Say? And then then you go through this exercise? So, you know, it's, it's in your future? I guarantee of that, for sure. I see. Interesting, so
Unknown Speaker 26:11 great.
Unknown Speaker 26:15 What did you learn from all this process? I mean, you're you're seeing fraud, I guess? or hopefully you're not seeing fraud. But But you're definitely in that space? What are you learning about? The consumer? are we are we an honest people are being honest, are there? Are there characteristics or something that you're seeing?
Unknown Speaker 26:32 definitely seen a lot, especially, I mean, during the early days, I was doing this all on my own, every every order would be brought checked by myself, manually. And there's some interesting characteristics, some regions in the US that are higher in price than others, some product categories. But now, I mean, in general, if you're, it really depends. Like, it's not. It's not as bad as back in the old days, thank just a couple of these. specifically around fraud, maybe I'll give some context. During the early days, we hired this professional social engineer scammer, so his entire day job is to accept Bitcoin, and then get you free stuff from Trump cloud from Stitch Fix. It's like that, that's his job. And there's a community of them out there. So we picked the best one. And we interviewed them. And we hired him as a consultant. And I mean, for people like that there's specific attributes that they're looking at when they're assessing a target, when they're looking into a new store, if they think they can put that on their list of services. And I mean, if you knock down the top three of the at that list, then you cut out, let's say, 80%, of the fraud attempts in general. So it's not just fraud prevention, it's fraud deterrence, on the first onset. Some examples of what they look for is like, look at the ability to use a drop, drop address. If there's verifications for address, so this tutorial, how to factor phone number thing and verifying with telco data sets to verify your address that kind of cuts up that step of their verification. As a lot of people, you know, they'll they'll hire, stay at home moms book at Airbnb and stay at home, mom would just facilitate packages and four packages. And that's how they conduct their quote unquote, art. Wow, wow.
Unknown Speaker 28:46 This is interesting. I'm going to be looking at people's profiles now see if they have professional scammer as a part of their expertise. That's a new category of jobs. Hey, we have Daniel Also joining us. Daniel, did you have any questions for Donnie?
Unknown Speaker 29:06 Yeah, I just jumped in. And I would just I just had a question regarding the title. When you say, try before you buy you mean as compared to your prior where you're virtually try on glasses or giving the service where you can get the product shipped to your home, try it for a few days and send it back.
Unknown Speaker 29:27 Now it's tried to keep So right now, any items for example, a pair of chains that you you're just not sure if you're a skinny or straight size, or you're 32 or 33, you can still check out with it. Not pay anything upfront, get it shipped to your house, and then once it's delivered, you get five days to try. If you keep it after the five days, then you're charged for those pair of pants. If not you just send it back and your credit card is never touched. That's essentially the job. All right, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 30:01 yeah, that okay. I get it done. Yeah, we do. I work with 3d and augmented reality for the next generation of e commerce. And we have this other solution, which is also try before you buy, but it's a try before you buy different ways. If you go to roadmap, for example, they have integrated this software, you have pressed virtual try on, it automatically opens up your camera, and you can try on glasses, and it's super good now. I mean, the technology is awesome. So that's, that's another type of try before you buy, but Okay,
Unknown Speaker 30:37 that's a good point.
Unknown Speaker 30:38 I mean, that's a big problem, right? Now, this whole fit or just envisioning yourself with that product, when it's all just completely online, and you get three, maybe four pictures to look at to make a purchase decision. It's it's the, the jump is too high for most consumers. And it's, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 30:59 yeah, absolutely. Everywhere they create, the crazy thing is that, you know, what? 3d and AR is, is coming so fast right now for e commerce and the data has coming from the last year now how much more it increases conversion rates. And, you know, it's, it's amazing, it's three to 400% increase in conversion rates and return rates dropped, because you actually know how our product looks on yourself before buying it. So it's all about you know, getting the positive effects of physical shopping and try to put them in into different digital formats. And these were to try on this is one of those aspects.
Unknown Speaker 31:42 Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So actually, Donnie, I was while you were talking, and I hope we're going a little bit over time. Are you okay with that?
Unknown Speaker 31:53 Yeah. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 31:58 So, do you get this this case where people actually order like two different sizes of jeans, like a 32? On a 34?
Unknown Speaker 32:10 We do. Yeah, that's about the outside 20% of the cases, it's either customers who are ordering, like three different products that are all completely different. So like a sweater, pair of shoes, and then jeans, or, though they're just not sure about either the style or the size. So the Pick tool, two of the same products, just different variants.
Unknown Speaker 32:35 Okay, so yeah, that's, that's the other thing is that, you know, one of them is going to be returned. For sure, in that case. All right. So we are taking audience questions. So if anybody has a question for Donnie, raise your hand, and, you know, we'll add a, you know, stay on for a couple more minutes. One of the other things that I wanted to ask you, Donnie, was that, what do you see based on everything that you've experienced so far, and building this company on your other experience? Like what do you feel are going to be like the really the growth, optimization areas of e commerce in the next few years?
Unknown Speaker 33:19 Well, there's so much and that's, that's something that I've come to realize it's like, ecommerce has been just so bad at innovation for the past two decades. I mean, there, there may be number two behind banking, as an industry in terms of just technology, innovation, just looking at returns, returns has still hasn't been figured out fully. There's no set protocol or industry standard for exchanges, store credit returns, and all that just seems like e commerce in general has been lacking substantially up until COVID. Hit and now everyone is I mean, we've seen this massive shift from both smaller merchants, as well as the large big players, the household names of the worlds are they're thinking five years ahead, and they're investing very open to, to taking on new new approaches of doing things. So anything in e commerce, I mean, I think that's the reason why we were able to raise so quickly, one after the other is kind of VCs are realizing this, and they're realizing that there's all this opportunity for quote unquote, e commerce enablement, companies that come in and help improve the way both consumers shop online and retail or sell online.
Unknown Speaker 34:35 Okay, yeah, that's interesting. So you want to talk a little bit about the raises?
Unknown Speaker 34:43 I'm sure we, we did a $2 million seed back in believe, April 2020. And then we just did $8.8 million Thursday in January of this year.
Unknown Speaker 34:59 That is pretty clear. Yeah. Yeah. So the numbers are definitely impressive enough that retailers know. This is going in the right direction. That's great. So
Unknown Speaker 35:14 there's a lot of activity. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 35:16 yeah. So what what, what are your, I guess challenges biggest challenges in growing the company over the next, you know, the rest of this year.
Unknown Speaker 35:26 I mean, right now, we have a pretty severe problem with merchant onboarding. We've, as they're moving more and more market, these larger enterprise brands, they have other feature requests, other expectations for what a what a onboarding process looks like, and what they, how it fits within their existing workflow. We, we've kind of accumulated a little bit of a backlog that I would really like to clear office as soon as possible. So we're working towards a self serve option for the mid market and smaller brands as well as kind of optimizing our onboarding process, hiring engineers, hiring product people to help alleviate some of this bandwidth constraints that we have.
Unknown Speaker 36:15 Okay, yeah, that's, that's, that's normal in growing companies right now. It's just so difficult to find people, the right people that can actually hit the ground running and get to work.
Unknown Speaker 36:28 Yeah, well worth anything.
Unknown Speaker 36:31 Is your company distributed? Or is it these are the jobs are remote or?
Unknown Speaker 36:36 Were remote? Yep. Although the most of the team is still in Toronto.
Unknown Speaker 36:41 Here.
Unknown Speaker 36:42 We have a couple of employees and an Arizona and Seattle as well.
Unknown Speaker 36:50 Okay. And the customers are probably mostly in the US. Is that correct?
Unknown Speaker 36:56 They're mostly in the US? Yes.
Unknown Speaker 36:58 Okay. Okay, cool. Well, I'm going to wrap it up. Jeff, do you have any final questions or thoughts?
Unknown Speaker 37:07 Well, just that
Unknown Speaker 37:08 this whole return space and and Donnie, I know, I don't think you want to be pigeonholed there. But it's just such a huge black hole that we're all trying to get our hands around it. It's every retailers nightmare. And, you know, haven't seen a huge amount of tech really thrown out yet. So be interesting to to follow you along and see. See how you how you how you managed this whole mess and
Unknown Speaker 37:33 good luck. Yeah. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 37:37 All right. Thank you, Donnie. And Jeff. great meeting you. Very interesting concept. I definitely look forward to keeping in touch and seeing how things grow, grow up and I'll make that connection with with AJ from Skype or still for you.
Unknown Speaker 37:54 Nice and good. We
Unknown Speaker 37:56 can do something. Thank you so much for this conversation. Talk to you later. Bye bye bye.
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