Transforming eCommerce With Turnkey Solutions | AJ Asgari

Matt Edmundson

00:00:05.760 - 00:02:24.550

Well, hello and welcome to the E Commerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmondson. Oh, yes. Now, this is a show all about helping you deliver e commerce. Wow.

And to help us do just that, today I am chatting with AJ Asghori from drugstore to door about transforming E commerce with turnkey solutions. Yes, we are. This is. It's going to be an interesting one, I have no doubt.

Now, if you are subscribed already to our newsletter, all of the show notes, all the links, all that sort of good stuff from the show will be winging their way to your inbox when this all gets made live. But of course, if you haven't signed up to the newsletter, you're gonna miss out on that. So sign up to the newsletter.

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Now, this ear podcast is sponsored and brought to you by the fabulous E Commerce Coh. Yes, it is. Now, Ecom Cohort is our membership group that we run. And every month we bring you expert workshops on how to do E commerce better.

Better for you, better for the business, better for the planet, and all that sort of good stuff. It's an awesome membership group. Plus the perk.

One of the key perks is you get to watch the podcast recordings live, which means when we have guests like AJ you can come along, you can ask your questions. So come check it out@ecommerce cohort.com. be great to see you in there. Oh, yes.

And I managed to do all that before the music ended, which has got to be a first for this show. I'm not going to lie. It's all about timing, and my timing is not great on that whole side of things. Here we go. There we go. Now, let's talk about A.J.

our guest, a family guy, a serial entrepreneur, and your go to pharmacy doc, who's not just at the helm of multiple pharmacies. Oh, no, no, no. But also the mastermind behind drugstore to door. More than a CEO, he's your everyday superhero. Oh, yes. Dedicated to lifting others up.

His mantra, we only win when we win together. Oh, yes. Now, A.J. great to have you on the show, man. How are we doing today?

AJ Asgari

00:02:25.110 - 00:02:27.670

Fantastic. Glad to be here. Glad to be here.

Matt Edmundson

00:02:28.070 - 00:02:30.470

That's good. Now, whereabouts in the world are you, sir?

AJ Asgari

00:02:30.870 - 00:02:32.790

I am in Oklahoma.

Matt Edmundson

00:02:33.430 - 00:02:34.550

Ah, okay.

AJ Asgari

00:02:35.830 - 00:02:43.830

University of Oklahoma is in my backyard, so not necessarily the tech epicenter of the world, if you will. We're trying to break boundaries.

Matt Edmundson

00:02:45.990 - 00:02:53.670

That's true. It's not known for that, I suppose. And maybe it should be. Maybe it will be after today's podcast.

AJ Asgari

00:02:54.070 - 00:02:56.790

One of these days, hopefully we at least crack it a little bit.

Matt Edmundson

00:02:57.300 - 00:03:06.660

Yeah, no doubt. I think. And I hope I'm not doing a disjustice to any previous guest on the show, but I think you're our first guest from Oklahoma.

AJ Asgari

00:03:06.980 - 00:03:07.460

All right.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:08.500 - 00:03:19.300

So, yes, normally it's Florida, New York, you know, California, sometimes Kansas. Dallas is quite popular. Austin, you know, those kind of places. But Oklahoma, you're trailing a blaze there, sir. Trailing ablaze.

AJ Asgari

00:03:19.460 - 00:03:34.550

I'm telling you. I'm telling you. It's. It's rough, but it's good. It's good. It'd be easier if we're in oil, I think. I think that fits in perfect here.

But we could say the same about Texas. Texas has taken a pretty good shift into technology, so.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:34.550 - 00:03:41.870

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The way to do it. The way to do it. So you are a pharmacist by trade, is that right?

AJ Asgari

00:03:42.270 - 00:04:15.420

I am.

So I got my doctorate of pharmacy from the University of Oklahoma, practiced as a pharmacist in the beginning, for a little period of time as I was acquiring independent pharmacies.

And once I got a little bit down the road and realized I wanted to do things a little bigger, impact the space in a larger way, and I didn't want to do it through a hundred or two hundred or three hundred locations of your traditional run of pharmacy, I backed out. And now I probably shouldn't work behind the bench anymore. It's been a while, but I definitely started my run there.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:16.060 - 00:04:26.030

Fair enough. Yeah, you don't want. You don't want you serving you the drugs which you've ordered is probably what you're saying. Yeah, it's fair play.

It's fair play. Know your skills, know your talents, and know where you're at. Always a top tip.

AJ Asgari

00:04:27.390 - 00:04:32.750

I stay pretty current, but not as current as I should. So I'll stay on the sidelines, let my team do what they do.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:33.150 - 00:04:48.670

Fantastic. So the. So you started out acquiring pharmacies. I'm curious, when did that particular journey start?

AJ Was E commerce a thing when you started doing this, or was it. Was it not really a thing at this point of your life?

AJ Asgari

00:04:48.990 - 00:06:21.180

The big thing, you know, like, I'm not that old, but old enough to where, like, Facebook was coming out when I was in college, you know, so we were just starting to get a taste and flavor of all this by the time I was in pharmacy, though. You know, I worked for CVS for one year before I bought my first store. You know, it's just traditional.

You think of independent pharmacy in the US Especially as kind of your mom and pop shops. They're the independently owned pharmacies across the country. There's a lot of them, about 20,000 of them.

And so as I got in and started acquiring stores and operating these stores, I just realized, Jesus, we suck online. Like across the board, we suck and it's not getting better. No one's coming to solve the problem.

And so I started, honestly, selfishly, just how do I fix it for ourselves? And brought markers in and worked on things and tried to leverage the Shopify of the world and other pieces and just kept falling flat.

Because this industry is a very challenging one. You know, we're not selling T shirts and tennis shoes and.

And not to discount the struggle of any retail shop, but for pharmacy, there's so many caveats and regulation and all these different situations. And so finally just got to the point said effort. We got to figure out how to do it.

And if we're going to do it and spend the money and the time and the energy and the development and all this stuff, let's just attack it for the industry, you know, let's build it for scale and let's just start taking the lumps now and, you know, and see how fast we can go prematurely gray. So I'm killing it.

Matt Edmundson

00:06:22.140 - 00:07:07.350

Give me both, bud. Give me both. I'm only 20 years old, so that's kind of.

It's fascinating because you started your E Commerce journey then as E Commerce was actually becoming a sort of a growing industry. And back in the day. I say back in the day because I remember it like it was yesterday. There was no real Shopify at the time.

And you all had to, you know, it was a wild west. I mean, there's a lot of stuff you can do now which helps you, which you didn't have back then. So I can imagine you have complex.

That was for multiple pharmacies, because you would build something and six months later, it wouldn't necessarily be the right thing that you would have built. And so did you just feel like you were throwing money into a sort of bottomless pit at this point of your life?

AJ Asgari

00:07:07.350 - 00:08:41.400

Yeah, money was a vacuum. We'd start to get somewhere and you're thinking like, oh, we got it, we got it. And then come out and be like, this is a turd.

Like, what were we thinking?

Like because it's mo moving so fast, you know, and then when you're a non tech tech founder trying to innovate, it's, you know, with everything else, I always joke, and all my other businesses I can roll my sleeves up and just go, yeah, in development, I can't do that. Like, it's like you go get this switch out of the backyard and start whipping developers and they're like, that's not gonna work.

You know, that's not how this goes. So your hands are kind of locked in that.

So we really had to take a hard look at what's out there, how far can we leverage it, what starts to like constrain us? So it was exactly that. It kind of felt like this vortex in the beginning. What can we do? How can we do it?

Because we had to solve more than an E Com problem for pharmacy. I mean, you're getting drugs there, prescription drugs, you're getting services like immunizations and testing and all this other stuff.

And you've got the ability to buy products, but the products are straightforward. The prescriptions have insurance reimbursement in the US So prices can change. Co pays can change your services, your price, prices can change.

So there's no product carts out there where you can put an initial price in, modify that price without doing a refund, put a new price in the cart and change the overall, you know, so just all these complexities start to show up. And so we just decided at some point it's just full on custom development. We don't have an option. Create it from the ground up.

Matt Edmundson

00:08:41.720 - 00:09:15.930

Yeah, yeah.

So I mean, it sounds like a lot of challenges you had to overcome because like you said, I mean, I sell, I've sold all kinds of things online, from beauty supplement, beauty products to health supplements to spa products. I mean, we've probably sold most things online, but in essence, at the end of the day, I'm selling a product.

I mean, supplements, I suppose health supplements have, they have more regulation here in the UK than they do in the States, but even so, it's not a heavy regulated industry. It's not like pharmaceuticals where you, you know, you've got some real issues going on there.

So it sounds like a real big challenge to sort of overcome.

AJ Asgari

00:09:16.490 - 00:09:45.590

Yeah, in multiple ways. I mean, all the way down to processing. Right. Even just finding a processor to run prescriptions.

It's easier for me to sell AR15s online through a processor than it is to sell prescription drugs. I mean, so there's, there was challenges every single step of the way that we had to overcome to create the model for what it is we do today.

So every aspect, I can't think of one. We went, oh, that was easy. Bam. Nailed it. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:09:49.270 - 00:10:44.770

Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it?

Because I think every e commerce company I know has got their own story, they've got their own journey and they've got their own difficulties and stuff they've had to overcome.

Having done work with pharmaceutical companies myself in terms of trying to get things online, man alive, my hat's off to you if you've cracked the code because the legislation just even around what you can and can't say in any promotions or ads, it's terrifying in a lot of ways, you know. And so what, what caused you to sort of continually drive to solve this problem?

Was it, was it because you saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or because you, you think you could solve quite a few problems for a community or whatever? I'm curious, what was the drive? Because now in this industry, like I do that, man, that's a lot of tenacity, I'm not going to lie.

AJ Asgari

00:10:44.930 - 00:13:37.130

Yeah. Easier things to tackle for sure. The, the objective for us was far beyond. We've had acquisition talks and other things that we've turned out.

At this point we're pretty mission driven where we are in our current phase of growth, if you will, or I'm just an idiot and too far in. I can't let it leave that to be determined. But we're going to call it mission today. We are going to call it mission.

So we really do believe we can solve a fundamental problem. You know, if you just look at the US Right now, you've got Rite Aid, who's going Bankrupt, you've got CVS and Walgreens.

Between CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid, you got about 1500, 1600 pharmacy locations across the country that are closing. This limits access to people. You know, when we think about access to people, we think about big cities.

Your Dallas and you know, as we were talking Dallas and Austin and all these spots where, sure, there's a pharmacy on every single block.

But what happens when you get out into Idabel, Oklahoma or you know, these little small towns that have communities that don't have access to appropriate health care. This is where independent pharmacy really solves an issue.

Not only do we solve it in the metropolitan areas, we solve it in every crack of the US if you will. Right.

And so for us, it's how do we take this network of independent pharmacies and leverage what it is they can do and make them incredibly accessible to the user base. Right. To people like you and me or our families or whatever it might be.

And at some point technology will trump, you know, the, the wonderful service that small businesses provide their customers. You have to go beyond that, right.

When you go on Amazon and they drone drop a prescription in less than an hour to your front door, you better damn well have something to back up you're doing. Yeah. In a way that competes to where even if your guys on the ground in a car bringing it in 45min still comparable. Right.

As long as my path to acquisition was simple, you know, run through, being able to go online and run through. So for us, we really think not just in the U.S. but in, in every market we can really take these pharmacies into a last mile delivery stance.

And if we give them phenomenal technology and all the tools to execute, they can just extend all the things they do. We don't have to be that company.

We extend their ability to do the things that they do and then from a consumer standpoint they're going, hey, I'm not giving anything up. You know, I'm saving money, I've got great access, I can get my meds quickly. All of those things that we want as consumers. Right.

Simpler, faster, so on and so forth, cheaper, etc that helps these, these guys accomplish it. Because most small business owners are not going to go spend what I've spent at this point to create what we've created. Right.

It's not going to happen just because it's not feasible.

Matt Edmundson

00:13:37.530 - 00:14:58.780

Yeah, no, that's very true. And I think we looked at something similar in the salon space, in the, in the digital salon space.

When we had a beauty site, it's like we'd learned a lot and we had some great tech.

Could we then give that tech to smaller businesses who could leverage that for themselves where they wouldn't have, you know, they're not going to go and spend whatever it was quarter of a million or whatever we spent on that site, you know, just, it's just not, it's a million, a pointless thing to think about. But if you can give them that tech, well then that makes it interesting. Again like you say, for the small sort of independent, isn't it?

Because I imagine Walgreens, which is a large pharmaceutical chain in the States, isn't it? For those outside the states, Walgreens and CVS is both of both of which I was in the States a few months ago. I went into one Pharmacy.

And I thought, man, I think I'm going to have to sell my right kidney just to get some antihistamines. And I'm not quite understanding why. Very different in the uk, I'm not going to lie. And so I was shocked by the price of meds over in the States.

But I imagine these guys, I mean, I know the profit margins because I see what they're charging for the medication. Right. I imagine these guys are trying to create their own sort of online system to prevent the smaller guys, you know, just to lock them out.

We're just going to lock this market out.

AJ Asgari

00:14:59.180 - 00:16:09.810

Yeah, it's a jacked up industry in the U.S. i won't even get into that. We'll need a whole nother four episodes. But it's a really jacked up system.

And the bad thing for us as pharmacy owners is the margin on prescription drugs is terrible. I mean there are times we taking losses, filling prescriptions for patients and so for us we have to combat that.

And so the way I always talk with pharmacies is let's get into the sports supplements or the cosmetic lines or the other industries. There are plenty of industries that would give their left leg for the traffic flow. Yeah, pharmacy. Right.

And so for a pharmacy to not capitalize on that traffic flow and not to extend or grab more of that customer's wallet when you've already got their attention and they trust you and there's a lot of things you can sell to them is ridiculous. Right.

But the majority of pharmacy, independent pharmacy if you will, it's all wrapped up 90, 95% of their earnings is in the prescription side, which leaves this whole untapped, you know, call it opportunity in multiple areas that they're just not touching. And so we're trying to move them in that direction.

Matt Edmundson

00:16:10.130 - 00:16:18.530

Yeah, this is interesting because you're talking in some respects about a brick and mortar store, but in E commerce exactly the same thing. We just call it average order value.

AJ Asgari

00:16:18.790 - 00:16:18.950

Right.

Matt Edmundson

00:16:18.950 - 00:17:14.729

We just want to increase the average order value because we like to give things poncey names in E commerce, don't we? And so let's increase the average order value and what else can we sell, upsell, cross, sell down, sell, etc, etc.

And I imagine with pharmacy that like you say, the unique characteristic that you have is you have a high trust factor from the clientele walking through the door. Whereas if someone's walking into, I don't know, a smoothie shop or a, a clothes shop or something, it's not quite the same, is it really?

You're not going to save my life or kill me if you give me something right or wrong. And so I suppose that's quite an interesting point because you do.

You may have low margins, but you've got this high trust factor which you can then capitalize on building average order value and stuff like that. What sort of things have you seen then work for that online? I'm curious, you know what. What sort of things have you seen drive that?

AJ Asgari

00:17:14.729 - 00:18:01.850

It's funny. We see it depends. So for pharmacies that aren't versed who are not comfortable doing something even like this, Right.

You got to think your personality. Type of a pharmacist is very type A. They kind of fit that engineering line. Like, I'm the oddball in the industry. Right. I love to run my house.

I love to be around people. Like, people are like, you're a pharmacist, you know, but for me, it's. It's different. Right. And you don't find that.

And I didn't realize that, like, hey, I'm the weird one. They're not the weird ones.

Until I got in and was hiring pharmacists and trying to train them to upsell and do things in the pharmacy, they just got weird about, you know, they just literally got weird about.

So for us training pharmacies and trying to teach them, I try to find ways to integrate the tech into their daily flow so we're not stretching them so far out of their comfort bubble that they're going to fail.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:02.330 - 00:18:02.810

Yeah.

AJ Asgari

00:18:02.810 - 00:18:29.340

So when you ask what's working, I have guys like me who will get on social media, and they have no. They will go the whole nine yards. Right. And I. There are some who kill it on social media.

Their social media translates to sales, you know, and then their sales and their volume go crazy. They'll get on and do a butt paste video and sell $50,000 of butt paste in 24 hours. Right. And that you think it's a joke, but it's not a joke.

Like, it's the real.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:29.340 - 00:18:30.540

I'm sure it's a real example.

AJ Asgari

00:18:30.540 - 00:18:30.900

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:31.190 - 00:18:34.630

Butt paste. I've didn't realize there was such a thing, but you carry on.

AJ Asgari

00:18:35.030 - 00:19:50.050

Yeah, it's. It's. It it. And I say it for the extreme example, but it's very true. I mean, it's very true. And then you've got others who.

We just take things that they do, whether it's specialized compounding or filling scripts. So we took our technology and said, hey, let's. Let's take it a Step further.

Let's take it to the point where a customer doesn't just come in and shop the sites, but we can populate suggested carts for customers. Right? Because we are the advice givers.

We are the ones who, you know, went to school and got our doctorate degrees and understand how medicine works and what goes with what and what you're going to be depleted in and all of these things that are important for your overall health. So I could come to you and say, Matt, you're on these three medications.

I know for sure these reduce these essential vitamins and minerals in your body. I've got two here I've suggested for you with a discount code, you can utilize it at checkout or genius, you can just delete them out of the cart.

No big deal, get your prescription. But, right, and now you're going to, you're not walking into. And I don't know if you've got gncs or other supplement stores.

They've always joked with pharmacists. I'm like, you got people going in, getting bro advice from an 18 year old on what they should be supplementing to be a healthy person.

And you got a damn doctorate over here and you're scared to talk to them about what they should actually be doing. Right? So how can we leverage tech to offset that? Because we should be killing the supplement stores.

Matt Edmundson

00:19:51.530 - 00:21:13.750

No, you totally should. I mean, I sell supplements online. I know how it all works.

But yeah, what I find fascinating here, AJ what you're talking about, because often I get asked, you know, it's probably one of the most common questions we get asked. How do we compete with Amazon?

Because Amazon is just crazy at what it does and the technology and the algorithms and the scale and the infrastructure. You go, well, you can't, can you? In a lot. You, you can't compete on a like, for, like basis.

What you can do though, is you can bring a level of knowledge and expertise to your website that Amazon simply doesn't have. And what you've highlighted here is an ideal example of this.

It's like, I know if you take these three medications, you're going to be missing these vitamins and minerals. So take this supplement and we'll put that in your bag. Amazon can't do that, right?

Because they've not got pharmacists sat around going, well, if they order this, they can maybe do it with some kind of algorithm that maybe like, might, might look out.

But this is, this is, I think, where, where I do think it's genius where you're using your knowledge and your experience and your expertise to go, what else can I do to leverage this relationship I have with a client to help them but also build my average order value? You're using your knowledge and expertise to do that. And I think as e commerce entrepreneurs, that's how we compete with Amazon.

AJ Asgari

00:21:14.320 - 00:22:30.620

Absolutely. If you think about, here's how I think about it. Maybe this will help some people listening.

Your value is paid to you if you're not getting paid for a consult.

So if I'm not sitting you in a room like a doctor and saying an MD for instance, hey, I'm going to give you 20 minutes of my time, you're going to give me 300 of your dollars to listen to what comes out of my mouth. If you don't have that relationship, then you're doing it through product. So the things that come out of your mouth should be sold. Right.

And if they're not going to be sold via time, they got to be sold via product. So when I talk to pharmacists, I always tell them, get your value back out of the consults. The time spent, the energy that you're utilizing.

You paid a lot of money and spent a lot of time to be the expert in the neighborhood. For when someone comes to you and says, hey, little Jimmy's sick or I got a fever or can he take this with that? Right.

If it's a this with that, you should be selling the this with that while giving the advice on the this with that. Right? Not giving them the advice. And then the joke we always have in the US is they go to Walmart, right?

Like they leave your store, take all your advice and then they go give Walmart the dollars for the advice. That should not happen. Right. And you should make it in such a way that it, it the likelihood of it happening is incredibly low.

Matt Edmundson

00:22:31.660 - 00:23:12.830

That's really good. Yeah. Really. It just fascinates me how some of these very simple statements, you know, still apply to E comm, don't they?

It's like, you know, you don't need all the latest technology and silver bullets. It's common sense. Let's, you know, let's play to our strengths and utilize that. What sort of things? I'm kind of curious, A.J.

what sort of things have you seen work well on the sites which you've then, because obviously you, you get to see the sales data for all the pharmacies which use your system and you're creating these sort of value adds, I suppose is a good way to describe it for the customers on the websites, what sort of things have you seen work well there?

AJ Asgari

00:23:13.550 - 00:26:29.730

So one area I see work incredibly well is, let's call it reminders. But our reminders go a step further because it comes in a populated cart.

So if you're getting a medication that you should be taking every single 30 days, or you're on a supplement or a vitamin you should be on every 30 days, the more you can help that customer achieve that by automatic orders, populating the cart for them, giving them suggestions inside of that cart, people taking things away versus adding things, it's incredible how much more sticks around if it's in a done for you package. And so I see pharmacies win there.

And you got to remember we're talking about, we're not just starting out of thin air, we're walking in and saying, hey, you've got a thousand customers who use you in your brick and mortar every single day. You've got to convince them that online is the new holy grail for them, right?

And so they got to change shopping behavior from a traditional retail brick and mortar customer over to online. So we start looking for all the low hanging fruit to help them get to that point.

We see it with high end supplement lines, doctors who are really into preventative care and that type of stuff, right? They're looking at these well absorbed, just high quality tested products that are non pharmaceutical but are supplement in nature.

And if you can turn a few people onto it that become, think of it like your affiliate, if you will, that are driving people to you because you've got the expertise, you've got the products, you carry what they carry, you support their line of business. I'm always looking for those mutual relationships and synergy. So those are a couple ways. And then you've got people who just do well online.

They get online and they give a ton of value.

And then in return for that value, people will pay you whatever you're charging them because they, you've built your credibility, you know, continuing to drop value every single day. So we see it all over the place. You know, pharmacy again is different. We'll see custom compounded medications, right?

So I'm making something that's specific for you, right? You come in, you are nauseated, you can't take a pill, you've got diarrhea, you can't put something up the back end. So what are you left to do?

Right, I'm going to compound you a transdermal gel that you can rub on your wrist and I'm going to be Your lifesaver in about 20 minutes. Right. And then that person gets that grab again, that trust again.

And now everything that supports that, you have the opportunity to start to pull that in. So there's a million ways. It's just kind of the good thing for us is nobody's really starting from scratch.

But the ones who are like startup pharmacies, new pharmacies that go in, I always send them to look for the synergies.

And again, it's industry dependent, I'm sure but there are a lot of industries I can think about, the synergies where if you can go enhance somebody else's service, I. E.

The doctor by providing things really quickly that could be ordered right there in clinic, knowing that the pharmacy can just drop it at the consumer's house or the patient's house as soon as they leave the doctor's office. That's a game changer. Now you've got a little salesperson who's helping drive your econ sales. Right.

And I think this can happen times a million different ways. Once you start to build something that gets people talking.

Matt Edmundson

00:26:31.320 - 00:26:49.480

Mate, there's a lot there. Let's dig into some of that. One of the things you said right at the start, something that I call the one click cart.

So you're sending out emails that a customer can click and that takes them to a pre populated cart with their products in. Have you guys been doing that long?

AJ Asgari

00:26:50.200 - 00:27:01.490

We started testing this over the last year or so and it's been, it's been one of the most effective runs of everything, quite honestly.

Matt Edmundson

00:27:01.730 - 00:28:12.780

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting you say that because I mean we, our sites are all custom so our e commerce sites are custom websites.

Because we started out in e Commerce in 2002, you know, we, we built web development teams. We've. It's just. I'm not going to, I'm not going to change that now. You know, it's as good as shopping Shopify is.

But we have our own proprietary system which we've developed.

And one of the things I've been talking to the developers about and some of the things that we've been testing, one of which is this one click cart, right where you send out an email, you click it and everything's in your cart. You don't even have to go shopping.

We're probably going to add a few other extras into your cart like you say, which you can take out if you want to add some kind of bonus or something. Um, and my initial response to this is this is actually work Well, I don't have any.

I can't say to you that it's close conversion rate, you know, or increased conversion rate by 30% or it's reduced add to baskets by 20% or it's. I can't give you that hard data yet. I think what I can say is anecdotally, holy cow, Jeremiah. And I don't know if you've discovered this yourself.

AJ Asgari

00:28:13.630 - 00:28:52.420

Yeah. So I can give you a little bit of it from a conversion factor. Taking someone from brick and mortar to a populated cart for checkout.

We've hit 40% conversion on our outbound phone calls. Not emails, not text, but outbound phone calls with a scripted line, which is ridiculous.

I'm expecting that to fall off at some point, but those are trusted customers. So when that happened, I hit the holy shit line. Right. Like, wow.

Then the next thing we are seeing, and we'll see if this trend remains, is the upsell of the cart is almost nailing 20 of the time, which is nuts. So one in five transactions, you've got that extra 20, 30, 40 bucks that you've tossed in that cart.

Matt Edmundson

00:28:52.580 - 00:28:53.060

Yeah.

AJ Asgari

00:28:53.620 - 00:29:04.020

And so sometimes even those numbers, you'll talk to a traditional retail shop. They don't understand how ridiculous those numbers are from an online perspective. Adoption, conversion, all that kind of stuff.

Matt Edmundson

00:29:04.260 - 00:29:43.100

Yeah, yeah. Now I'm with you. A friend of mine, he, he owns a hair salon.

And when we looked at his numbers, there was one point in my life where I thought, well, do we get involved? Do we invest in. This is when we had the beauty. I could grow a chain of hair salons and beauty salons if I wanted to.

And we were looking at it and the similar to the beauty. I mean, the beauty salon was more than the hair salon because with the beauty salon we had a lot more products.

But the hair salon had shampoo and wax. Right. That was it. Because it was for men. But the actual sales of the shampoo and wax were accounted for as much as 30% of turnover.

AJ Asgari

00:29:43.820 - 00:29:44.260

Wow.

Matt Edmundson

00:29:44.260 - 00:30:18.720

And you're like, that's fascinating that actually you can increase your turnover just by adding one or two extra things like that, which makes sense for your product or service. And so I can see why that would have such high value from a pharmacy point of view. I can. You're just circling back.

Sorry, just another line you dropped. You're using outbound calls, so you're still calling people and you're not just emailing people.

You're still using the good old fashioned telephone to help drive traffic to your website.

AJ Asgari

00:30:19.200 - 00:30:36.340

Yeah. Because I'm looking for that edge, the non Amazon edge. Right. Amazon is going to bombard my inbox with emails.

I'm going to get bombarded, I mean to the point now with text messages is it's unreal how much spam I get, you know, and so, and we all know as the noise gets louder and louder and louder, we kill it.

Matt Edmundson

00:30:36.580 - 00:30:36.940

Yeah.

AJ Asgari

00:30:36.940 - 00:31:43.060

The thing for the outbound calls is again, we're going after a trusted audience so we're not getting hung up on. And as long as we bring real value to the phone call, which is, hey, we're going to do all this stuff for you anyways.

Would life get easier if I just shot you a link to check out and then you can just come grab this thing like a Starbucks coffee and you don't have to worry about dealing with the line and the checkout and any of that kind of stuff, right? Oh yeah, sign me up for that. Right, here's the link.

So again, we're taking the audience we know, we're saying, hey, let's get more out of this audience. Right. And it's interesting what you say. We actually have looked hard at the, the beauty salon industry in the US as well.

Because when I start looking at all mid level market, we're highly focused in drugs, you know, obviously in pharmacies and that's our mission. But we've built the technology so far. At this point it's like, I can solve, you name a business, I can solve their problems.

At this point you handle all the core pillars of retail business, then it's give me the business and I can change the rules around the dashboard and we can solve their problems, you know, so I love to hear that you're, you've looked in that space.

Matt Edmundson

00:31:43.780 - 00:31:55.530

Yeah, yeah.

Well, we, we almost created a product similar to what you've created here in the UK called Salon Digital and we sold the beauty business which is why we never sort of carried on with it. Maybe I should do at some point. Maybe I should.

AJ Asgari

00:31:55.530 - 00:31:57.930

Here we go. There's a collaboration man. We'll get off this call.

Matt Edmundson

00:31:58.010 - 00:32:56.260

Yeah, we'll figure it out. It was white label what you've done. But I think it's fascinating, A.J. the fact that you're.

I don't know of any e commerce company that is doing telesales and in fact most people would have got into E commerce so they don't have to do the phone call thing. But what you've said there, which I think is so powerful, is you're trying to not.

You're trying to be different to Amazon and you're calling your high value customers, aren't you? I can almost hear the anxiety in people listening to the podcast now. And I'm sorry to induce this, but do you find that.

I guess my response to this would be if I started calling people, say, for our supplement company here in the uk I'm kind of curious to know what the response to that would be, whether it would be positive or negative.

AJ Asgari

00:32:56.900 - 00:33:03.300

I think it depends on what's coming out. Like what are you calling them for? I think that's the big question mark, right?

Matt Edmundson

00:33:03.380 - 00:33:08.740

So how would I, how would I guess, how would I deliver value then? How do you, have you, what have you guys figured out here?

AJ Asgari

00:33:09.470 - 00:34:34.770

Yeah. So for us, we're taking someone who's coming into the physical store, right? They're coming into the physical store.

They're getting their goods either via a drive through or walking into a physical location.

They're ordering their prescriptions either through a telephone phone call or an IVR punch button system, maybe an app where they go in and suggest a refill. But they're doing very manual things and our goal is to take those away from them.

So it's a quick value add phone call that we bring to these customers and then it makes it all worth it. Right? Because then we can take all of the labor pieces where you're going, hey, people are probably cringing listening to you.

We're doing it backwards at this point, right?

So it's like, how do we take all the backwards stuff and move them into the digital age so that we have less of the hands on not saying we don't want to see our patients and we don't want to talk to them and all those things.

But how can we streamline the simple stuff so that the conversations are high level or, you know, what's actually needed or solving a real problem and take care of the mundane stuff? You know, we should be able to get our prescriptions like we get our hamburger. I mean it should be that easy for the customer.

So we kind of, we made that a thing when we put drive throughs in, you know, it's like, what do you expect a customer to do when they pull up to a drive through and they've been trained to get a whole family dinner in three minutes? You know, they expect the same thing out of their medicine.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:35.240 - 00:37:16.550

Yeah, they do.

And again that, just circling back to something that you said earlier, to be frank, I, I don't know if I've ever seen a drive through pharmacy in the uk.

I just, I don't know if I have to be fair, but if I, if I'm honest with you, my local pharmacy is like a six minute walk from my house, which is more because again a lot of local pharmacy, there's some big chain ones, but as is a local one owned by Connie. She's lovely and you walk down, you have a little chat and you know she's great and then you walk back.

But again, the same sort of things, you walk into the shop, she's just selling the drugs, she's not selling all the other stuff really, you know, not, not really thought it through. But, but what fascinates me here is, I mean apart from the fact that I'm curious to see whether a drive through pharmacy would work in the uk.

Super tempted just to go and open one, find out. But you, you talk about the local pharmacy being that last mile.

This was something that we saw in Covid that here in the UK and I saw it, I suppose in the States. The difference between the states and the UK is size, it's land mass. So we have whatever 70, 80 million people in a very small space.

So I can walk within five minutes of my house, I can walk anywhere and get pretty much most things that I need, if I'm honest with you. Whereas in the States everything is much more spread out and land is a lot cheaper. Right. So I get that I have to go in my car and travel somewhere.

For most things in the States then it becomes about convenience. So drive throughs, they work, they make sense in my head. So you talked about the sort of the last mile with the local pharmacy.

And like I say, when Covid, one of the things that I noticed was the local shop down the road, which is five minutes from my house, was doing a delivery service.

So like if you lived within like so many meters of his shop, it was like order the stuff online because it was easy to put the website up and I'll drop it at your door by 4pm that day.

And I, I am surprised, if I'm honest with you, that I have not seen this totally take off because this is something that the big supermarkets they do, but you kind of have to book it weeks in advance to get the delivery slots.

Amazon mostly is next day delivery, some same day delivery bits, but the local corner shop which has got everything you need from beans to bread, you can get within sort of half an hour. So just speak to that a little minute because obviously you've played around this and you've worked on this with Your pharmacies?

AJ Asgari

00:37:18.070 - 00:37:39.300

Yeah. For me, it's the same thing. It's getting them the appropriate tech to actually accomplish it versus doing a small portion of it.

They can actually extend the full digital offering.

And then if you do that, then it's not, well, hey, I could get my beans and my bread and my Tylenol, but if I need my prescription, I got to still go into the pharmacy. So why in the world am I going to get these three items brought?

Matt Edmundson

00:37:39.450 - 00:37:39.770

Yeah.

AJ Asgari

00:37:40.250 - 00:38:10.920

Walk five minutes and get all of it. Right.

But if you could go on and get your beans, your bread, your Tylenol, your prescriptions, and book a flu shot to be delivered at your front door, if that's the thing that they want to do, then that's a game changer. Right. That's going to take five minutes of your day for, for that to come and come to fruition.

And so pharmacies have to build their models to support what they're going to put out there. And I think they absolutely should. You want to talk about the fear of Amazon?

I mean, they're testing drone delivery on prescriptions here in the us so get ready for a job drone to zip that thing over.

Matt Edmundson

00:38:11.160 - 00:38:11.640

Yeah.

AJ Asgari

00:38:11.640 - 00:39:05.830

And at your doorstep.

And so we have to be prepared, you know, and at some point, you see players like this in the us, like you've got Mark Cuban and others trying to disrupt spaces. They still leverage this network. And if you, I imagine if you go and.

And, you know, really take account of who's out there, big chain, who's out there, small retailer in your area. Even in that condensed area, you're going to find there's an entire individual owner who could perform at a very high level.

Like, I would take that challenge all day long and say, hey, we'll put a team together and bring what we do into the uk. I just need to come unpack what it looks like out there. I mean, we had full intention to say, how do we go far beyond.

We've explored Canada and Australia and other places, you know, and we're growing our footprint here so fast, we're just knocking this down. But world, it's gonna. It will work anywhere. It works human.

Matt Edmundson

00:39:05.830 - 00:39:07.150

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

AJ Asgari

00:39:08.030 - 00:39:08.510

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:39:08.510 - 00:40:31.740

And I, I think the takeaways here, AJ for those of you listening who aren't running a pharmacy, a local pharmacy, the takeaways here that you've talked about are quite extraordinary because they things like increase in average order value, using your experience and your knowledge to add stuff to customers at carts. Amazon can't using one click Carts.

If you have some kind of retail store utilizing that last mile, like, how can I, how can I just sort of go above and beyond with a little bit of that extra thinking, that extra delivery and just tightly transform our business as a result?

I think it's, it's stuff that we started to talk about with COVID for most businesses and then Covid kind of went and so everyone's sort of starting to go back to their default before COVID And you think, I don't know.

I just think someone needs to, you can keep pushing and innovating in this space and I think there's a lot that we can learn from what you guys are doing. Like for me in the health supplement space and for others in whatever space they're doing, you know, selling couches or whatever.

I think it's, I think you, there's a lot of conversations to have around some of the things that you've said. So I appreciate, you know, some of the stuff that you shared with us. It's been, it's been eye opening.

AJ Asgari

00:40:32.300 - 00:41:10.070

Absolutely.

Covid was like a window is saying, hey, I'm give you a snapshot of what the future looks like and then we're going to retract it and it's up to you to determine what you're going to do with it. But when you think about where AI is going, you think about what Apple's about to release.

Release what Magic Leap and all these others have been working on with an augmented reality and meta and all of this. Like if you think about bringing the world to your living room, bringing the world to your space, it comes to you versus you go to it.

You are doing yourself a huge disjustice if you are not preparing for that future because it's going to be here so fast.

Matt Edmundson

00:41:10.230 - 00:41:10.630

Yeah.

AJ Asgari

00:41:10.630 - 00:41:36.030

And I'm excited, quite frankly. I'm excited.

Like I would love to be sitting in my house and have wearables giving me, you know, keeping data feed on me and am I healthy and am I two hours from a heart attack and can I order my stuff on demand? And I love all that. Like I'm, I'm ready or we're all going to kill ourselves because we don't know how to control this monster.

Either way it's going to be exciting. Yeah. Either way it will be exciting. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:41:36.030 - 00:41:40.830

Is it Terminator or is it not? We just don't know yet. Cyberdyne Systems. You know.

AJ Asgari

00:41:43.720 - 00:41:46.440

It'S a tad terrifying, but also super exciting.

Matt Edmundson

00:41:46.440 - 00:42:16.130

Yeah, it is and I think very wise words. I think it's this industry. E commerce changes at a rapid pace and you don't have to keep it with everything, but you have to keep up in a smart way.

I think that keeps you differentiated from your competitors, whether that's Amazon or whether that's somebody else down the road keeping customers coming back to your site to buy your products. You can't just assume that what you did last year is going to work this year.

AJ Asgari

00:42:16.770 - 00:42:21.730

You probably should stop that assumption. Period. It's a rapid change. Like, period.

Matt Edmundson

00:42:23.090 - 00:42:28.610

Yeah, absolutely. There's that great book, isn't it? Was it Marshall Goldsmith wrote it? What got you here won't get you there.

AJ Asgari

00:42:29.090 - 00:42:35.860

That's in my. I just gave a presentation in Orlando last week and that was was one of my slides. That exact quote. Yep.

Matt Edmundson

00:42:35.860 - 00:42:52.660

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great quote. Really great quote, A.J. listen, I feel like we're just touching the tip of this iceberg, but I'm aware of time.

But if people want to reach you, if they want to connect with you, find out more about what you're doing, especially in the States, if they're a local pharmacy, what's the best way to do that?

AJ Asgari

00:42:52.980 - 00:43:25.060

Yeah, honestly, you can find me via my name, aj Asgary, ads, all that stuff. I don't go crazy on social. I don't build. You know, it's not my avenue, at least not yet. I probably need to pony up and do it.

But you can find me through those channels. You can DM me through those channels. I even have a random landing page, which is my name.com ajazgary.com you can find me there. Spelled A S G A R I.

I just try to make myself accessible. So if we can help someone go, let's help them go. Or if you can bring me value, I'll take it all day long, baby.

Matt Edmundson

00:43:25.060 - 00:43:40.220

Bring it all the way to Oklahoma, definitely. And why not? And why not? What is the just in closing there, AJ Then what does the future look like for you?

What's the next sort of year or two's development? What are some of the things you really excited about?

AJ Asgari

00:43:41.340 - 00:44:18.290

You know, we've closed the loop here. So for us, really, it's the land mass grab over the next 24 months.

I really want to have a big chunk of the independent pharmacy market in the US And I'd really like to see us expand out of the US in these two years. And then we want to open the door from a national standpoint to where not only are we solving a problem.

Boots on the ground for these pharmacies, but we can actually start to drive value back to them. And I think with the collective network that we're building, we're really going to be able to do that, which is a whole nother podcast.

But exciting stuff, exciting stuff coming.

Matt Edmundson

00:44:18.850 - 00:44:39.670

Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, listen man, appreciate you coming on the show, appreciate you taking the time to share with us what's working for you.

I've really enjoyed it actually, talking to someone who's doing E commerce and running the businesses and picking your brains a little bit. So genuinely appreciate you coming on and the best of British with what you're doing over at Drugstore to Door.

AJ Asgari

00:44:39.830 - 00:44:41.270

I appreciate you having me.

Matt Edmundson

00:44:41.910 - 00:46:09.900

It's been great.

Now of course we will link to all of AJ's links in the show notes which you can get along for free with the the [email protected] or they will be coming direct to your inbox. If you have done the thing which I suggested at the start, which was sign up to the newsletter. If you haven't, go and do it because it will help you.

Yes, it will. So great conversation. Huge thanks again to AJ for joining me today. Also, a big shout out to today's show sponsor, the E Commerce Cohort.

Remember, do check them out if you're in E commerce. Go have a look, join the membership. Be great to see you in there, E Commerce Cohort.

Now be sure to follow the E Commerce podcast wherever you get your podcasts from because we've got yet more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them. And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes, you are created awesome. It's just a burden you have to bear.

AJ's got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now the E Commerce Podcast is produced by Oria Media.

You can find our entire archive of episode on your favorite podcast app. The team that makes this show possible is Sadaf Banon and Tanya Hertzelak.

Theme song was written by Josh Edmondson and as I mentioned, the transcript and show notes, they're all on the [email protected] so that's it from me. That's it from AJ. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.

AJ Asgari

00:46:11.910 - 00:46:27.430

Sam.