Hello? Can I Speak To a Human Please? (Why The Biggest Opportunity on Shopify Right Now Isn't AI)

How do I recover abandoned carts on Shopify? Ask anyone at a trade show and they'll tell you the answer is AI. My guest built a company doing the exact opposite. Steve Lequerica is the COO of LiveRecover, where real humans text the customers who bail at your checkout. Baymard says just over 70% of carts get abandoned. Steve's agents convert 21% of the conversations they start, roughly triple what a good automated Shopify SMS flow pulls on its best day. One brand recovered $147,000 in a single week. Real people, apparently, still work. So if you're asking yourself "Do abandoned cart text messages actually work on Shopify?" or "Should I use AI or real humans to recover abandoned carts on Shopify?", this episode is for you! KEY TAKE-AWAYS: The legal distinction almost no Shopify merchant knows about: why a real person can text someone who abandoned checkout without opting in, but your automated flow legally cannot For every 1 customer who redeems a discount code, 3.7 buy without one. So why is everyone still leading with 10% off? What happened when a shopper asked a competitor's AI agent "are you really a human?" The answer is why this episode is called what it is The abandoned cart is almost never about price. So what is it actually about? The brand that rebuilt its entire shipping program into three tiers using nothing but text message transcripts Why 21% recovery beats the 6% you get from automation, and what's actually happening inside those conversations The post-purchase play: turning one-time buyers into subscribers with a text from an actual person What the best brands do differently in their first 30 days (it takes about 10 minutes and a Slack channel) The black box between TikTok Shop and Shopify that's swallowing your customer phone numbers 🛠️ RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: * LiveRecover: https://www.liverecover.com/ * LiveRecover on the Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/liverecover * LiveRecover pricing: https://www.liverecover.com/pricing * Steve Lequerica on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-lequerica-589b207a/ * Human vs AI SMS, LiveRecover's data breakdown: https://www.liverecover.com/knowledge/human-vs-ai-sms-cart-recovery * Your Customers Hate Chatbots: https://www.liverecover.com/knowledge/your-customers-hate-chatbots-heres-the-proof * Baymard Institute cart abandonment research: https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate * Klaviyo: https://www.klaviyo.com/ * Postscript: https://postscript.io/ * Attentive: https://www.attentive.com/ * SubSummit: https://subsummit.com/ * Bold Commerce: https://boldcommerce.com/ 🎁 SPECIAL OFFER FOR LISTENERS: Steve is giving Shopify1Percent listeners what he's calling "Free Summer." Sign up through this show and you get LiveRecover free through the end of the summer. No charge, no catch. Mention you heard about it here, or reach out to Steve directly. Support our amazing sponsors that make this show possible 👇 ⭐️ SATHI ⭐️ This episode is brought to you by SATHI, the best affiliate platform built for Shopify brands.  70% of influencer-driven revenue isn't showing up in your dashboard. Codes are leaking. Affiliates are ghosting. And you're paying commissions on sales that never should've counted. SATHI fixes all of it. Built by the incredible team behind SARAL (200+ top brands, $59M in revenue with influencers). 🎁 Our listeners get early access at MySATHI.io and use code JAY for 20% off ⭐️ OMNISEND ⭐️ I personally use Omnisend for email and SMS on every Shopify store I manage, and for this show too! I've tried them all, and it's hands down the best way to run every email and SMS automation and campaign you need, segment to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion. But here's what has me genuinely excited lately: you can now connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and just ask “where can my email and SMS be making more money?” It reads your actual store data and tells you, then builds the campaign for you right from the chat. It even writes in your brand's voice. Fifteen years doing this and it's the closest I've felt to having a full-time marketer sitting beside me. (Plus most merchants report paying about half the price of Klaviyo.) 🚨 Listeners (YOU) get an exclusive 30% OFF 3 MONTHS: http://shopify1percent.com/omnisend