Untapped Potential: What’s the Future of SMS Mobile Ecommerce Checkout? With Osa Gaius of Parrot

Osayame (Osa) Gaius is a software engineer with extensive experience and is the Founder and CEO of Parrot, an end-to-end payment solution that uses SMS to drive a better checkout experience. Before Parrot, he served as the Vice President of BlackRock and was a senior software engineer for both MailChimp and Luma. 

Having grown up in Nigeria, Osa went from having minimal computing exposure to being an ecommerce software development expert. He received his bachelor’s in computer science from the University of West Georgia and worked as a research intern at Texas A&M University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Do people tend not to open your emails? Would you like to implement a more effective way of deploying your ecommerce marketing strategy to engage with customers?

While emails have been the most common method of collecting information and creating accounts, it is not the only one. In fact, emails are only opened approximately 20-30% of the time compared to SMS, which hits about 90-95%. SMS messaging is a more direct and friendlier approach and has made it easier for ecommerce brands to interact with consumers to drive sales. So, what do you need to know to get started?

Guillaume Le Tual invites Osa Gaius, the Founder and CEO of Parrot, back onto the Ecommerce Wizards Podcast to dive into SMS checkout and what the future holds for SMS mobile ecommerce. They talk about the unique advantages of the model, the differences between SMS and emails, and how to leverage the strategy for increased upselling and cross-selling. They also touch on the common mistakes most ecommerce brands make along the way and how to avoid them.