Alt & Dot says Rewind benefits entire Shopify ecosystem
Emily Moss had two goals after founding Alt & Dot. The first was to work with clients every step of the way. Helping them grow an idea into a fully actualized online business. Agencies are often boxed into becoming simply a designer or developer. Alt & Dot pride themselves on being problem solvers, growth coaches, and cheerleaders. “We really see ourselves as an extension of our client’s team,” says Emily, “We help in terms of design development, but mostly spend time on strategies, to help our clients grow.”
The second goal was quality over quantity. Emily carefully vets her clients, their products, and her partners. They are drawn to merchants who are championing diversity and inclusiveness. A recent client Kate McLeod, which sells moisturizing body stones, has become a personal favourite. “It’s a very sustainable product. It’s a female founded team. They’re really passionate about what they’re doing and their core values align with ours.”
Emily says this sharing of values has been a critical factor in their success. It’s a business philosophy which has been carried over to who their agency partners with.
Building & maintaining clients’ trust
Having such a deep connection to her clients, Emily says they apply the same due diligence when evaluating software solutions within the Shopify marketplace. Alt & Dot ensure they have a full understanding of the product, assess whether the teams behind these solutions have a high level of trustworthiness and determine if the product will truly help their clients.
If we were to recommend somebody, and then they have a bad experience with an app partner, then that reflects poorly on us.
When we join a partner program you are not going to see a ton of leads come from us, but the leads that come over from us are carefully vetted. And we really want it to be a good fit.
– Emily.
Rewind passes the test
On average, one in four ecommerce businesses are frequently losing or accidentally deleting critical data in their stores. Shopify, like many ecommerce platforms, doesn’t save all the data that stores need to be up and running. Their reason: they follow something called the Shared Responsibility Model of data storage.
This means Shopify will take every initiative to ensure their product is always working. However, individual stores are on the hook for saving images, product descriptions, pages, customer lists, themes, menu navigation, and much more.
According to a recent survey conducted by Rewind, one in four ecommerce merchants have had data or content go missing from their store. Merchants may spend up to several days trying to restore everything, resulting in lost sales, a damaged SEO ranking, and a tarnished brand reputation.
Many agencies see this scenario play out time and time again. Alt & Dot are no different. “One client inadvertently deleted all of their product photos with a CSV import gone wrong,” says Emily, “We also had a client who had an app installed, that was making changes to product templates behind the scenes. And we couldn’t figure out why this template kept changing. It wasn’t a human that was doing it.”
Having such a close relationship with clients, Alt & Dot were compelled to find a solution which would protect everyone’s data. Their search led them to Rewind. Now Emily says they recommend Rewind to the majority of clients they work with.
“We pitch Rewind if a merchant has a lot of people in the back end or a lot of people touching things. This provides security and peace of mind that they can restore data if something goes wrong.”
It saves us having to go in and manually correct something. So it’s a better solution for the merchant long term and less work for us.
A perfect partnership
For an agency which is laser focused on customer satisfaction, Emily Moss says joining the Rewind Agency Partner Program took very little convincing. She says the fact that Rewind shared similar philosophies made the decision very easy. “We value a trusted relationship so that we can hand off a client to the app team and be sure that they’re supported,” says Emily, “So knowing that we have a direct line of contact within Rewind, with our clients being nurtured through the sales process, as well as post-implementation, has been really important to us.”
Emily says they are now at the stage where they are very hands-off when referring clients, due to the level of trust which has been built between her agency and Rewind.
A true ecosystem
Emily Moss is a true believer that a community is needed to build and scale a business. She says joining the Rewind Agency Partner Program has cemented that belief. “I think within the Shopify ecosystem, our business has been successfully built with key relationships and true partners. And I think that this relationship with Rewind has continued to hammer home that point, that we are all stronger together; like a rising tide lifting all boats. So when we’re working together as true partners, that’s benefiting the entire ecosystem.”
She adds any agency who is looking to build long-lasting relationships with their clients, would do well to consider joining the Rewind Agency Partner Program. “It helps the merchants, but it also helps the agencies who are trying to support the merchants.”