Optimizing the Post-Purchase Customer Experience With Kiril Kirilov of Rush

Kiril Kirilov is the CEO and Co-founder of Rush, a shipment tracking software designed for Shopify merchants. It automates the shipment tracking process on all fronts, so you never have to worry about losing customers again. Rush helps ecommerce sellers and agencies increase their average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and lower support costs by 90%.

Kiril began his career in the ecommerce space in 2008 as an eBay seller before transitioning to Amazon fulfillment in 2014. He has a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering and a Master of Business Administration in business and corporate communications. Kiril was a national track and field champion of the Balkans, having competed in the sport for 11 years.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:24] Kiril Kirilov’s early career in ecommerce and how he came to co-found Rush
[6:32] Kiril’s approach to running a global ecommerce business
[10:34] Three key marketing strategies for sellers and how Rush leverages them to increase revenue
[15:40] How to improve consumer repurchase rates
[19:15] What makes an ecommerce entrepreneur successful?
[23:58] Kiril and Joshua Chin open up about their biggest career regrets
[29:40] Kiril’s go-to books and resources

In this episode…

When it comes to selling in the ecommerce marketplace, it’s no secret that customer satisfaction is essential in driving revenue and business growth. But are you really leveraging the full potential of your ideal market to generate repeat buyers?

With a wealth of experience in the ecommerce space, Kiril Kirilov suggests that ecommerce sellers should take advantage of tracking and confirmation pages to optimize the post-purchase experience. If your company simplifies the post-purchase process by automating shipment tracking and supporting one-click payments, it will boost your customer retention rates and raise the chance of multiple and continued reordering. Not only would it streamline and improve the post-purchase customer experience and customer lifetime value, but it will save your company time and reduce the expense of customer service support personnel. It’s one thing you can do to simplify your life right now.

In this episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, Joshua Chin sits down with Kiril Kirilov, Co-founder and CEO of Rush, to discuss leveraging the post-purchase experience for customer lifetime value. Kiril delves into how he manages a global ecommerce business, his three pivotal marketing strategies for ecommerce sellers, and how to enhance the customer repurchase rate.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency.

If you are a direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand that wants to unlock the optimum customer lifetime value through email marketing, then look no further than Chronos Agency!

Our team of passionate email marketing experts has helped hundreds of brands generate over $70 million in return from email alone, and our clients receive an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts.

Chronos Agency has worked with a variety of brands, including Truly Beauty, Alya Skin, and many more. Our mission is to help real businesses achieve real results.

If you want to take your revenue to the next level using email marketing, be sure to email our team at sales@chronos.agency or visit chronos.agency to learn more.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top founders and experts in the ecommerce Industry and take an in depth look at the struggles and successes in growing ecommerce brands profitably.

Joshua Chin 0:21

Hey guys, Josh Chin here and the host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, where we feature top experts and entrepreneurs in the ecommerce Industry. And we go behind the scenes of the struggles and successes in growing a brand. Now this episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency if you run a direct consumer ecommerce brand that is ready to scale and to double your customer lifetime value true retention marketing, Chronos is your company. We’ve helped over 400 brands scale profits with email, SMS and mobile push while getting an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts. It’s crazy to say that and we have worked with brands like truly beauty Elias skin to Udi and many more. And the next step is to email us at sales@chronos.agency or you can go to Chronos.agency to learn more. And as usual, links will be in the show notes down below. You can go to chronos.agency/podcast for the latest show notes. Today’s guest is Kiril Kirilov. Man, I butchered the name again. Kiril is a good friend of mine. We’ve known each other for a while now. And he is currently the co founder of a Shopify shipment tracking software called Rush. It’s built for ecommerce brand owners by ecommerce brand owners. Incredibly, very few software companies can claim that its aim is primarily to improve customer experience and lower support costs by 90%. And more. ultimately helping you generate more revenue with less cost and less headache as you scale. No more endless email chains asking about statuses of your customers orders and things are relates to post purchase inquiries. So Kiril has been in the ecommerce and internet space for a long time now. When you when we say you first got started in, in the internet space, Kiril?

Kiril Kirilov 2:24

Yes. Such an old dude sitting here right now. I’m kidding. You gotta wait. Yeah. By the way, great intro that you put together right now, and I’m excited to be part of the part of the show in the podcast. We know each other since 2019. I believe we’ve met in Barcelona. Oh, yeah. And it’s been quite related. Listen, my end, doing econ. in different places in different situations. I started back in 2008, off of necessity of making some money. In order to support my track and field career back then, I used to do like 11 years of semi professional track and field. I was running the 100 meter and 200 meter dash. And surprisingly, I was a national champion. I was also a champion of the Balkans. It’s an area that is no container consisting like eight or nine countries, it’s really depends on the on the current state of the of the world that we live in right now. But I also participated in the European Championships in Helsinki in 2012. And I was not really lucky enough to get close to the Olympic standards in 2012 for the London Olympic Games, but I was really pushing hard towards that goal. I didn’t when I went there, it was a great journey. And just because sports, even tracking field cannot support a good living. I had to hunt down and look for some places in 2008. It was the good old forums that aggress some ideas and taken some notes in account to oversee the potential of eBay back then. And it’s like a journey that is going to open so many doors after that once you start consuming content around a specific category. You’re going to oversee more case studies, you’re going to start communicating with more people that are going to contribute to other activities down the road. And in short, I was doing Amazon FBA private label between 2014 and 2017 devoted like that. And in the beginning of 2017 I joined the group by a friend of ours called Tanner Larsen. And then I switched to direct to consumer type of ecom. Business which primarily pushed me in the position to do drop shipping from China for the most part, like 90% of the time. I And I was happy with what I was getting out of the of the opportunity because I wasn’t making enough to be be living like a king in my country because I’m living in Bulgaria. And the standard is pretty low compared to us Singapore, for example, and other Western countries. But nonetheless, I’m enjoying my ride so far. And the days of the drop shipping business that I’ve used to run, push me in the position to build a company, a software company right now, which is co founded with my partner called Stannis. Left. And that’s the nature of the business where two guys that are coming up from completely two different worlds are going to join forces, because he’s our product manager was a technical lead, and is the person who is putting up the code together in order to provide merchants with great performance and great tool that they can use and apply every single day.

Joshua Chin 5:57

It’s incredible. And Kiril, you’re based in Bulgaria. Yes. How is it like, over the years running a business and businesses that span across the globe? Pretty much selling all over all around the world, especially in the US being based in Bulgaria? How do you see the foresight from back in 2008? To know that ecommerce is going to be global? And not? How do you not decide to move out to the US having so much business out there?

Kiril Kirilov 6:32

That’s a great question. By the way, at least on my end, speaking from experience, in the early days of Phoebe, like, you have to always think about businesses in maybe two directions. Number one, what are your advantages, knowledge, skills, resources, etc. And number two, access to capital. Like, if we have to speak right now in 2022. Capital is important because the opportunity is so much more bigger than in 2008. So in order to be competitive, you have to shorten the time to build a product, put it to market and start competing with the current competitors. Regardless, if it’s EECOM, SaaS, whatever the case might be, back in 2008, I had enough capital, because you don’t need a lot of money to start a business quote, unquote, on eBay. But we had access to Turkey, which is enabled Bulgaria, which one of the biggest manufacturers of clothing and apparel to put it like that, so I can go with my cart to assemble, I can buy it will sell, like super inexpensive and cheap. And I can resell it at three 4x markup on eBay. So it was like how, how often I can go to Istanbul, Turkey stock, put it on eBay, and you’ll you didn’t need it. The back then even right now, you don’t need to acquire customers using advertising, you was going to just put the listing on eBay and make money off of it. But I’m going to your question I was thinking about kind of situating myself in the US. I even had a partner between 2014 and 2019, that we shared a mutual S Corp in Utah Salt Lake City. Because of that one advantage, which is like if you’re running a company, which is US located, you’re going to have these beautiful credit cards, which are going to provide you with room to accelerate and scale further. But the current state that I’m currently at right now, I’m so fortunate to number one, keep on getting and knowing more people who are smarter than myself, have more experienced than myself and can contribute not only with money and capital, but also with the proper advice, which current our current angel investors in the software company and also our VCs, who are having their successful, you know, the best 10 plus years. And they just want to keep on building their legacies, not at some point about the money, but it’s about what I can contribute back on a table, which is going to make some impact on the world itself. And I can’t complain right now. We closed our seed round recently, maybe like two months ago, but it’s not been officially put up as a PR is probably going to be put together in the next two weeks or something like that. We have enough fuel in the in the engine. And hopefully, we are going to continue on solving, you know more Shopify issues and problems right now post purchase, and at some point, it’s an idea of expanding to WooCommerce Bigcommerce and whatever is going to come next.

Joshua Chin 9:43

Yeah. What do you see? What do you see being the future of Rush now, we talked a little bit about this before Rush being what it is today solves a very pertinent issue in the post purchase journey, a very specific one. And in shipment tracking, very common issue. Very painful for CS CX teams. Correct. So that’s a great problem to solve. And as the Shopify ecosystem grows and grows, the problem is only going to grow. So I think there’s a, there’s an acutely interesting opportunity there. But what’s what’s next, at some point, you’re probably going to tap out on this very tiny, specific niche. But how do you then grow beyond that? Like you mentioned?

Kiril Kirilov 10:34

That’s a great question, by the way, honestly, I think that’s how to call it the speed of the market that currently evolving, it’s really fascinating to myself. And I don’t believe that any company right now regardless, if you’re super matured, like CLEVEO can predict, you know, two or three years down the road on your roadmap, you can only predict six months moving forward, which is based upon the feedback that you can take from your current customers, you’re the ones who are trying to go to which is your Tam, which stands for total addressable market, right. So in a sense with Shopify, most likely, software companies are going to divide the activities and efforts either go SMBs, which is the majority of the Shopify ecosystem, or you’re going to focus, like with your agency work primarily with brands that’s currently trending, they’re matured, they have their own, you know, I don’t know, team of 20 plus people whatsoever, which is supporting a legit business. But we’re currently focused on the SMB market. And we want to, we want to completely take over the post purchase experience. And speaking about what we are currently focused on is like two or three main areas, number one is giving anybody enough tools and resources to have more returning visitors back to the to the funnel, which are premiere your customers and your buyers. Yep, which worked quite a lot. And using you know, that vehicle, we’re going to focus on a tracking page that is optimized to build satisfaction and make money, the order confirmation page, which is one of the most visited pages after the buy button, somebody’s going to place an order, they’re going to see the order confirmation page. If it’s empty, you don’t really take advantage of that asset. If you optimize on that specific asset, you likely can make more money, but also, once again, provide more input so that you can answer as many questions as humanly possible to your new customers and to the returning customers as well. Because at the end of the day, marketing is simple. It comes down to knowing three things, obstacles, the common beliefs and the pain points of whoever you’re trying to solve the problem for, even in the case of being an agency, even with the case of being a software company, if you understand the needs of the people that you’re trying to serve, you can definitely build a great product and going back to going super bullish on the order confirmation page, once again, to use it as a to to boost LV and lifetime customer value. And number three, we’re currently working on that technology to support one click payments through upsells and down cells. It’s a natural process. Yeah, once again, order is going to be received, somebody’s going to see some upsells and downsells, you’re going to make more money, then you’re going to justify it with the right information on the order confirmation page, then you’re going to notify them two days later with some more order updates on the tracking page. But in the core, and the nature of Rush is going to be the data that we’re going to get from the shipping carriers. So we’re not trying to compete for instance, with Zb fi and our for example solutions, which are doing one click upsells and down cells, but like right, providing the three main reasons to give us a shot. And we want to number one lesson as much as humanly possible, the amount of support is flying into your inbox. And number two, build your bottom line gross revenue by five to 10%, which is a great way to tackle back on the ever rising cost of acquisitions on Facebook, tick tock, you name it. Whatever you’re using to acquire customers.

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