Catalyst Conversations, ep.2 Mario Peshev: How to design an ecommerce purchase experience that creates loyal customers?

Venture into the ever-evolving world of e-commerce with CatalystPay's new interview series. Join us as we delve deep into the entrepreneurial journeys of leading figures in the e-commerce realm in Central and Eastern Europe, uncovering insights on revenue growth, sustainable business models, and international scaling. Whether you're a budding e-commerce entrepreneur or a seasoned pro, these conversations are bound to ignite fresh perspectives and actionable wisdom.

In today’s edition, we introduce Mario Peshev: CEO of Devrix and Rush.app, a serial entrepreneur and a business advisor for $5M - $100M SMEs, profiling in eCommerce, investing, tech & data.

Check the rest of our conversations: 

Digital Transformation, The Rise Of Online Shopping, And The Power Of Starting Small with Evgeni Yordanov, CEO of NEXT BASKET 

What it takes to Scale an eCommerce Startup to €600K MRR with Ruslan Leteyski, founder of Checkout X and Vanga AI

A Deep Dive into Czech & CEE's Fintech and eCommerce Landscape with Radim Oulehla, Fintree.cz Co-founder 

Mario, you founded 2 7-figure businesses and two 6-figure ARR companies. Your eCommerce portfolio generated over $400,000,000 in GMV in 2022, according to your LinkedIn. What is the secret to this success?

Perseverance goes a long way!

“Overnight success” stories usually start with a 10-year journey of continuous grinding until it finally clicks. Sustainable businesses are about branding - and developing a strong brand is about staying long enough in the game.

Search engines favor older domains. Long-term investors observe capital gains. Entrepreneurs and consultants develop credibility and built their clout in the corresponding space after a while. 

Failing usually means giving up too soon. If the initial indication of product-market fit is in place, it’s all about incremental improvements going forward.

 

You’re now the CEO of Rush.app, a company with the goal to help merchants provide outstanding post-purchase experience. What are the main aspects of achieving this? 

At Rush.app, we bend the funnel into a flywheel. 

The so-called “post-purchase” journey doesn’t have to end at the Thank You page. Successful brands grow thanks to loyal, returning customers - and that’s what we’re aiming to achieve with our order tracking & upsells app.

Through integrating over 1,300 carries in the core Shopify experience, we help the 91% of customers keeping track of their orders during the shipment process. And with recommended widgets to relevant products, bundles, and other cross-sells, we generate ongoing revenue with repeated purchases.

This plays extremely well with our Klaviyo flows that repeatedly generate at least a 5X on the subscription cost in the first few weeks (often within 72 hours from going live.)

How about payments infrastructure for eCommerce businesses? From your experience, what are usually the biggest challenges companies face when it comes to payments?

There are multiple high-stake challenges in terms of payment integrations.

For starting businesses, it’s about revenue cut, handling accounting, navigating refund requests, and developing integrity and robustness in a payment gateway. It’s not unheard of large players such as PayPal or Stripe to block an account for good for possible “violations” of terms and conditions, high return rates, or the inability to handle fraudulent payments.

Larger businesses have to balance out ease of use and recognizable vPOS solutions with CC fees, handle international cards, and deal with localized challenges with validation (such as ZIP codes or phone numbers during the process.) Invoicing details and generating proper order information for accounting is also a key struggle for both parties.

All stores need to account for additional payment needs - from “Buy Now, Pay Later” growing in popularity in the past two years through Apple or Google Pay, to ad-hoc loans and managing subscriptions in a centralized way. 

How can the decisions for payment infrastructure influence the growth trajectory of online businesses? What are the most important aspects of choosing the right payment processing solution from an eCommerce perspective?

It’s definitely an integral part of growing a business, along with the value proposition of the store and managing logistics effectively. 

Inefficient payment providers incur hidden fees, lack proper invoicing or monthly reconciliation tools, and don’t have the right business intelligence insights that integrate with the shopping software or ERPs.

Having to integrate with multiple different services to handle several gateways is also problematic whenever you need crypto support via RocketFuel or established BNPL vendors like Klarna. 

Payment infrastructure providers able to offer as many of these as possible are on track to grow and nurture the right trust signals with store owners and consumers.

How would you describe the current e-commerce landscape in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? What unique opportunities or challenges does it present?

The CEE market is fairly segmented.

From a lingual standpoint, Europe has 24 official languages (with nearly 200 generally spoken across the borders). Targeting a handful of small countries hosting several million people each is an expensive undertaking for larger eCommerce solutions like WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce. Let alone the different nuances for each region.

On the contrary, supporting English, Spanish, French, and Portugese would allow for conquering both North America and South America almost entirely, plus the added benefit of touching the UK, Australia, Spain, Portugal, France, Switzerland, and lots of international countries with one of these being a nationally recognized language.

The same extrapolation goes for localized payment providers, ERP systems, or marketing automation tools, invoicing apps, local legislation gotchas, and different regulations from the EU. Let’s not forget about currency exchange rates and providing seamless user experience for shoppers trying to sort out both logistics and the actual final cost.

Rush.app supports 111 languages and we take care of translating order status messages for a handful of different carriers, keeping them up to date over time. Fulfillment solutions like Frisbo enable next-day delivery across Europe, despite the logistical challenges for cross-border transfers. 

We’re certainly moving in the right direction, but providing a seamless support for everyone is expensive and time-consuming, which is why selecting the right software and payment provider is so integral as a starting point.

For first-time e-commerce entrepreneurs looking to start their journey, what core piece of advice would you give them?

I would recommend them to study the market closely and carefully build the business plan for the next few years. Figure out if you’re starting nationally or regionally, or want to conquer the international landscape from the get-go.

Understand the semantics of working with different regions. What are the tax laws like? What about the buyer journey? Which are the most widely used payment gateways? What about carriers?

Whatever you pick early on, expansion or migration is always possible - but the larger you grow, the more expensive and painful that is. Making some smart choices early will mitigate these conversations later and help you scale predictably and sustainably.