DTC Guides

3 Friends of Storetasker: Canal, Okendo & Oddit

Tim

March 1, 2022

We keep a full list of our Storetasker friends here. This is a group of individuals who are pushing the boundaries of the wonderful world of eCommerce.
And every now and then, we’ll stop and take the time to highlight 3 of our friends. Who are tackling different parts of the eCommerce equation.

Today - we’ll highlight Canal, Okendo and Oddit.

Canal

Canal enables Shopify brands to create mini marketplaces of their own. In leveraging Canal, a Shopify merchant can start selling goods from another merchant - without having to stock that item themselves. It’s simple, and genius.

Here’s an example of Fellow. Fellow is famous for their sleek electric kettle. But now, instead of just selling their kettle, they also sell coffee beans to give the customer the end-to-end experience of making coffee at home. But because Fellow’s focus is completely directed towards making the best kettle in the world, they wouldn’t be able to also become the best coffee manufacturer around. So instead, they partner with the best. That’s where the Canal marketplace comes into play: Coffee brands like Coava, and Onyx now sell their coffee beans via the Fellow website. The customer can buy both the kettle and the beans at once, and Onyx receives the order for the beans and they separately ship that out to the customer, giving Fellow a little referral fee for driving the sale.

The philosophy around Canal is that marketplaces should be considered, and carefully laid out. Not just slapped on. So every brand they work with can lean on the Canal team for advice on structuring their marketplace -- like working with the best brands as well as design and dev.

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Okendo

Okendo takes reviews seriously. After all, it is a critical part of the eCommerce stack. They shine on a few different parameters, namely connectivity, review capture and design flexibility.

On the connectivity side - what I mean is that Okendo plugs into many different apps, natively. The reason why that’s important is that you capture and showcase reviews in many different ways. Sometimes you request them via email (Klaviyo), sometimes it’s prompted via SMS (Attentive, Postscript) other times you request during a customer support ticket (Gorgias) and other times you want to showcase your reviews along side a carousel of instagram posts where your products are tagged (FourSixty). Okendo has an integration for each of these, reducing the workload on you and your dev team significantly.

On the review capture front, that’s where a lot of the team’s efforts are directed. Reducing the friction to submit a review. Their November release of the “enhanced review capture form” increases review submissions by 41%. It’s a sleeker design, with less steps and all on one page.
And finally design flexibility. You can just take inspo from their list of brands (see 1-800-D2C’s list) but you’ll notice the reviews listed on a PDP or homepage can feel incredibly native to the overall experience. Just add your brand guidelines and you’re off to the races. At Storetasker we do sometimes help with even more detailed customization jobs - our devs are able to handle that really well if you need.

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Oddit

We’re big fans of Oddit. They’re CRO experts and that’s all they do. They’ve basically removed all the fluff that goes into CRO and their team of experts has a simple menu item of CRO reports to buy, from basic to advanced.

As a customer, you order a report, pay for it upfront and submit your URL. Oddit takes care of the rest, they start writing notes on how you may be able to improve your conversions (“Add this CTA here”, “remove the copy here”, “change the color there” etc). They have a trained eye to make those recommendations and it’s up to you to decide whether you action the advice or not.

If you do want help in acting on their advice, we can do that at Storetasker. We share a lot of overlap with the Oddit customer base and would be happy to connect you with one of our devs.

If you want to test drive the services, Oddit makes it incredibly easy to see the proof of their work. They regularly put out audits they’ve done for other brands, and they also publish a newsletter which covers one full report with every edit.