“It solves a real customer pain point for us.”
What was actually going wrong
"We've all been there, right? We're trying to check out and then we realise we've made a mistake. Maybe we've got the billing and the shipping address the wrong way round, or we put the wrong phone number in, or we forgot to add something."
Sous Chef is a relatively small team without 24-hour customer service. That turned a small percentage of orders into a disproportionate problem, because mistakes don't wait for business hours.
"It was particularly tricky for us if people are shopping in the evenings or at the weekends and they wanted to make that fix. They reached out to us and actually we couldn't help them, because we weren't around at that time."
Even during the week there was a second wall behind the first one. Nick's customer service team had been raising it with him long before he found the app.
"A customer needs to change their order but it's out of hours, or they've got in touch, they've tried to make a change, we've sent it to the warehouse but it's too late. The order's too far down the processing step. Even if it hasn't actually been dispatched, it's just kind of too far into the system for us to change it. And it was really frustrating for us that we couldn't action those customer requests. Now we can."
Solving the problem with Order Editing
Sous Chef gives every customer a thirty-minute window after checkout to fix their own order.
- Customer completes checkout on Shopify
- Order Editing · 30-minute self-serve window before the order releases
- Customers add items, remove items, fix the shipping address, pay any price difference, or download an invoice
- Changes sync to Shopify; the finalised order continues to fulfilment
"They can go back to the website, make the changes to the order that they want, reconfirm if there's a difference in price, and make the payment there and then. They can add items, they can remove items, they can fix the shipping address."
Results the team is tracking
The two ROI figures are calculated separately and against the same cost. Upsell revenue alone returns 30.7x. The support hours Sous Chef no longer spends on manual order changes return 5.7x on their own.
"Each of those is saving us a support ticket and delivering a better customer experience, because the customer can do it themselves probably even faster than we could do it for them."
The 3PL question
Nick's answer to why this worked is the one an operator will recognise, and it isn't about features.
"It does it without having to touch the integration with our 3PL. It's all within Shopify itself, and it's all controlled and owned by us."
Sous Chef ships through a third-party logistics partner running its own warehouse management software. Any change that reaches into that system stops being a Shopify project.
"Once we're sort of outside the Shopify ecosystem, then integration becomes a lot more challenging. Particularly when you're dealing with a much larger partner and you're having to schedule work with their IT team and build API integrations from scratch. It adds a lot of time and complexity and cost to an IT process."
"Because Order Editing keeps all of the logic on the Shopify side, it doesn't have to touch the downstream. Which is a real benefit both for getting it live, also for being able to get it live at all, and then finally for actually being able to make changes to it and continuing to iterate."
That last part is the one that keeps paying. Because the edit window sits inside Shopify, the ecommerce team changes it without booking warehouse IT time.
"We're in control of it. We can make changes, we can optimise the upsells, we can optimise the placement, we can get reporting."
The upsell side
Sous Chef didn't install an upsell app. The edit window became one.
"Another benefit that we found is that because customers can edit their order after they've placed it, it gives us another opportunity for upselling. So we can put special offers or products there that we particularly want to move. Even if they've gone all the way through the checkout process, they still have the opportunity to add that product to their order."
"We're actually seeing five to six percent of customers taking advantage of those offers. Which is good news financially and for the customers too."
For a food and ingredients retailer, that placement does something a checkout upsell can't. A customer who has just bought two jars and a bag of flour is looking at their own order, thinking about what they're actually going to cook, which is exactly the moment a missing ingredient becomes obvious.
The Slack channel
"Your team have been great. We have a direct Slack channel to you guys."
Nick didn't expect it to hold up.
"It was the first time I encountered that, a direct Slack channel to the founders and the developers of the app. And I was a bit sceptical. I'm like, are these guys really just going to drop everything and reply to us on the Slack channel? Actually their responsiveness has been fantastic."
"You don't have to go on hold for a long time, or send a ticket and wait for ages. They're always on hand to give us further advice on how we can get more out of the app. It's come on a lot in the time that we've been using it. There's a whole load of features that I'm not sure we're even making the most of yet that I'm excited to learn about."
What customer service thinks
"They absolutely do. I think it's one of the best things we've added from the customer service perspective."
Would you recommend it?
"I'd absolutely recommend it without hesitation. It solved a real problem for us, and it's a problem for any ecommerce business, right? Customers place the order and then they need to make a change. This is a really good solution."
