Inside Commerce: Ecommerce Strategy, CX and Technology Podcast

In this podcast, James interviews Paul and his Vervaunt cofounder and performance marketing practice lead, Josh Duggan. Both recently attended Elevar's US summit on the future of analytics for ecommerce and digital marketing and in this episode we explore what's relevant to ecommerce teams.

There are rules everyone can follow to improve the PDP for shoppers and drive better conversions. In this video, James Gurd breaks down the steps to achieving nirvana (the place, not the band). Timings if you want to jump to something specific: e.g. title, pricing, images, variants etc.

Technology is redefining customer experiences as traditional retail approaches are adapted to fit with online platforms. As technology keeps transforming commerce, artificial intelligence chatbots have emerged as an essential component in boosting online CX whilst delivering operational gains for customer service teams by reducing ticket volumes. In this podcast, we chat to the cofounder of one of the leading ecommerce AI chatbots, Siena. Siena is an autonomous customer service platform designed for commerce, combining the best of human empathy and AI to transform your customer experience. Tune in to discover what's happening in AI, how ecommerce teams are using AI chatbots to improve their ecommerce operations and get advice on running proof of concepts and tracking chatbot performance.

FOLLOW US: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inside-commerce/ ABOUT THIS EPISODE: BigCommerce ran its annual summit last week in London, welcoming more than 400 agency and technology partners, 200 customers and 100 employees from across the globe. In this podcast, James & Paul digest the latest company news, assessing what the Summit reveals about their market position, go-to-market strategy and what the latest developments reveal about their product proposition and roadmap. It has been a challenging few years for BigCommerce. Shopify has accelerated its product capability but the pace of roadmap change from BigCommerce hasn’t really delighted merchants. They also had to cut the workforce as part of a global restructuring to align with their go-to-market strategy. However, BigCommerce is still landing marquee clients, really strong in enterprise B2B and has attracted a few exciting B2C brands like White Stuff and The Real Real in the US. Join Paul and James as they explore the new Catalyst composable storefront, latest news on International & B2B, and what's happening with key product capabilities like Feedonomics and the tight partnership with PayPal that now has a password free checkout in beta in the US. If you’d like to talk to use about how we can help you evaluate and select your ecommerce tech, please reach out on LinkedIn.

FOLLOW US: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inside-commerce/ ABOUT THIS EPISODE: There has been a lot of change in the ecommerce and marketing tech landscape in the last few years. Leading vendors seeking to expand market reach and increase the LTV of existing customers have broadened their feature set, resulting in trend of tech stack consolidation. For example, Yotpo now offers loyalty / referrals / SMS / UGC / subscriptions (for Shopify), Klevu has enhanced its core search & merchandising toolkit with personalisation, product recommendations and an AI chatbot for product discovery, and Nosto has bolstered its core product discovery engine with a content personalisation module. We spend a lot of time advising ecommerce businesses on replatforming and their wider tech stack selection. There are nuances to deciding which platforms to select, and the additional 3rd party tools that are required on the selected platform to deliver the required business functionality and operational gains. A common challenge is deciding whether to invest in an all-in-one vendor that can offer a pre-connected set of capabilities out-the-box, or building a best-in-class stack using leading vendors for each capability. For example, a Shopify merchant using Yotpo to do all of their loyalty / referrals / SMS / UGC / subscriptions vs. using Yotpo for loyalty & referrals, Reviews.io for reviews and Skio for subscriptions. There is no single right approach. The optimal tech stack is dependent on many factors including size of business, complexity of requirements and available resources. In this podcast, James & Paul explain how you evaluate the different approaches and sensible decision criteria to help you make the best decision for your business. If you’d like to talk to use about how we can help you evaluate and select your ecom tech, please reach out on LinkedIn.

FOLLOW US: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/inside-commerce/ ABOUT THIS EPISODE: The global email marketing market was valued at $7.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027. Email still consistently delivers one of the highest ROIs out of all digital marketing channels. But it's constantly evolving, and consumer expectations are definitely high. So, why is it so many brands still push shoppers into generic marketing flows and don't make enough use of behavioural data to segment and tailor their marketing campaigns? In this episode, we sat down with email marketing specialist Hannah Spicer to explore the latest trends in email marketing, providing practical advice to ecommerce teams wants to improve their campaign strategy and deliver better results. Tune in for the expert view. Make sure you’re following Inside Commerce on LinkedIn and have subscribed to the Inside Commerce newsletter.

Introducing our new key vendor interview mini series. Each quarter, we catch-up with the leadership teams of leading ecommerce vendors so you can hear directly from them what their strategic and product focus has been for the last quarter. For this quarter we're speaking to BigCommerce, Centra, Commerce Layer, SCAYLE and Shopify. Hear about their key product updates, go-to-market focus, major new wins and what the roadmap focus will be for the next quarter.

Hot on the heels of Shopify’s smart PR on their platform TCO cost model and value proposition ‘research’, we’re pulling apart why vendor-led cost model analysis needs to be taken with a generous pinch of salt. The issue: no two TCO models ever show exactly the same cost model structure or calculations, so you’re not getting a true like-for-like comparison and evaluation. This can distort perceptions of value and create false flags, either under or overstating real costs. There are lots of “research shows platform X has the lowest TCO / fastest ROI” studies, and from our experience this is smoke & mirrors. Which platform ecosystem delivers the most affordable cost model and highest value is dependent upon the size of business, complexity of build, operational setup and a brand’s red lines. It also depends upon how value is defined, and whether or not attempts are made to put a monetary value to things like opportunity cost and operational efficiency. When a cost model assessment is based on the business type that is best suited to a particular platforms, inevitably the research will demonstrate it hits the value goal. In this podcast, we break down why you need to be sceptical when vendors publish cost models showing they deliver the most value / quickest ROI. It’s great marketing but we explain why no platform can ever state it consistently delivers the lowest cost for any business. Let’s pick apart cost models!

Patchworks is a leading SaaS integration platform for ecommerce businesses, providing low/no code tools and flow builders to connect data sources and simplify integrations. They work with a wide range of businesses, so have their finger on the pulse of what tech stacks are trending and in most demand. In this podcast, we caught up with Dave Wileman, VP Sales & Partnerships, and Conor Barr, CTO, to explore the trends Patchwork is seeing around omnichannel commerce and ecommerce data flows during 2023 and into 2024 We explore variance across territories, which markets are most active right now and the business challenges / resistance their customers are facing when migrating from legacy retail systems to modern SaaS tooling like Lightspeed POS. Tune in for the strategic market view and practical industry insights.

LISTEN: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/re-platform-replatforming-podcast/id1488091548 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25sR2mHAFdsVmrZoHMibzZ Amazon: https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/6b90a9bb-1554-4d79-849f-066f6139346b/re-platform---ecommerce-cx-and-technology-podcast FOLLOW US: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/re-platform-podcast/ EPISODE SUMMARY: All businesses face this challenge: what resources do you need to run an ecommerce store, and how does this change over time to deliver against growth targets? It's a challenge knowing what blend of skills do you need, what should be in-house vs outsourced and how do you structure and manage the team to ensure it delivers against growth targets and performance metrics. In this podcast we’re talking to an experienced ecommerce leader to find out how she approaches these decisions, and what she’s learned from running ecommerce for brands including Waitrose, This Works, Laura Mercier and Bare Minerals. Any questions, please let us know via LinkedIn or using the form on our website https://replatform.fm

The latest from our monthly ecommerce mini-series, where experienced ecommerce consultants James Gurd and Paul Rogers step back to summarise what’s been happening in ecommerce in the last month. Ecommerce is a fast-paced industry, with constant change, new market entrants and incumbents updating their products with new features and fixes. James & Paul spend a lot of time looking at ecommerce strategy and technology, talking to agencies and technology vendors, so this series is a digest of what they’ve found interesting, what ecommerce teams should be thinking about, as well as highlighting interesting stories and cool tools they come across in their day-to-day work. Any questions, please let us know via LinkedIn or using the form on our website replatform.fm

Not another chat about headless! Don't worry, this podcast is packed with practical advice to help you better understand Shopify's headless solution and its relevance to ecommerce merchants. We’ve heard from some ecommerce teams that it’s not crystal clear what the role of Hydrogen currently is, with frequent improvements to OS and Liquid making them question why a headless approach is needed. We see a long-term future of the Hydrogen / Oxygen stack and, alongside this, theming becoming more low code to help businesses who don’t have custom front-end needs to self-serve more effectively. Although we’ve spoken quite a bit about headless commerce, we’ve never had a practical discussion around using Shopify’s Hydrogen to explore the genuine pros and cons. Given the surge in popularity of Shopify, it’s the right time to focus on this. To give you the best advice we’re talking to Michal Klim, CTO and Co-Founder at CommerceUI, who has worked with a wide range of customers implementing Shopify solutions. Any questions, please let us know via LinkedIn or using the form on our website https://replatform.fm

We recently talked about fixing ISNO issues for ecommerce sites using smarter automation with the team at Sweft. In this episode we’re diving deeper into product data and looking at how ecommerce teams can enrich base data to improve ecommerce trading and operations. It’s an area that doesn’t always get enough attention during site migrations, and has platform specific considerations as well. We explore why source product data is not always fit for ecommerce needs, the impact partial data has, tools you can use to plug data gaps and ways to add richer data to product records, and the operational benefits this has. Any questions, please let us know via LinkedIn or using the form on our website https://replatform.fm

We recently talked about fixing ISNO issues for ecommerce sites using smarter automation with the team at Sweft. In this episode we’re diving deeper into product data and looking at how ecommerce teams can enrich base data to improve ecommerce trading and operations. It’s an area that doesn’t always get enough attention during site migrations, and has platform specific considerations as well. We explore why source product data is not always fit for ecommerce needs, the impact partial data has, tools you can use to plug data gaps and ways to add richer data to product records, and the operational benefits this has. Any questions, please let us know via LinkedIn or using the form on our website https://replatform.fm

This podcast is inspired by an article from our guest Liam Quinn, Technical Director at Vervaunt, which featured advice from notable luminaries from Yottaa, Render Better and previous podcast guest and respected consultant Erwin Hoffman on optimising for page speed. We all know that the less you put on a webopage, the faster it will be. But we’re not just trying to make pages fast, for brands the customer and brand experience are equally, often more, important. And measured speed is different to perceived speed. There is a lot of data around the impact of speed improvements, with many big business case studie. For example a Deloitte report states that Tui saw a 31% decrease in bounce rates and a 78% reduction in load times through better tech optimisation, eBay found that 0.1 second improvement in load time resulted in a 0.5% increase in Add to Cart count (by reducing the pay load, critical path optimisation for above the fold content & prefetching assets). In this episode we discuss sensible ways to improve page performance, exploring the tools to use and how to use them.

In this episode, Paul & James review what Shopify's latest product roadmap release, Editions Winter 2024, reveals about their strategic focus and how they're positioning the product to tackle known challenges and feature gaps that previously required more work arounds. Shopify's concerted push into the enterprise space is well known, and the latest drop contains some interesting feature growth for international, omnichannel and order management. What's interesting to see is the ticking off of some edge case features that will appeal to a certain size and complexity of business. Tune in for insights into what the latest release means for ecommerce teams and how Shopify is evolving its market focus.

How confident are you that your website is fit to serve all users, regardless of how they access and read your content? An estimated 1.3 billion people experience significant disability. They represents 16% of the world's population, or 1 in 6 of us. And...they have serious buying power. So, if you've not taken accessibility seriously before, and your approach is to ensure you're not breaking the law but nothing more, then think again. Accessibility is about more than compliance. It's about respecting your customers and ensuring they are able to access and meaningfully use your website. It's also about providing a website that gives you the best chance to turn visitors into shoppers, and hopefully loyal customers. In this podcast we discuss accessibility strategy with Irina Enevska, Manager Accessibility Services at Crownpeak. Irina's team work with ecommerce merchants to audit their websites, then identify and prioritise improvements based on business and customer impact. We explore Crownpeak’s approach to educating customers and helping people get started, because accessibility isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, and the levels of compliance and legal frameworks vary depending on which country you trade in.

The latest from our monthly ecommerce mini-series, where experienced ecommerce consultants James Gurd and Paul Rogers step back to summarise what’s been happening with ecommerce technology in January. Ecommerce is a fast-paced industry, with constant change, new market entrants and incumbents updating their products with new features and fixes. James & Paul spend a lot of time looking at technology, talking to agencies and technology vendors, so this series is a digest of what they’ve found interesting, what is worth ecommerce teams thinking about, as well as highlighting interesting stories and cool tools they come across in their day-to-day work.

Grab your chance to learn from Michael Robinson, the ecommerce retail leader who launched and grew Anthropologie.com into a $200m+ online retailer, and James Brooke, ex-founder and CEO of Amplience, who scaled them into a market leading global DXP. In this episode we cover a hugely important topic, one that affects pretty much all retailers: maximising inventory availability online. Getting stock online is harder than it seems! For many businesses, siloed processes and technology result in inefficiency and slow down the speed to market for new products and range launches. Not to mention the sheer number of spreadsheets and manual effort involved to move products from one stage to the next. The longer a product remains offline, the greater the margin loss because the window of full price opportunity shrinks. In this episode, we share the combined experience of two ecommerce leaders who are helping ecommerce retailers improve automation and join the dots to speed-up product launches and minimises the number of products that are in stock but not available to buy on the website.

We’re expecting the tough trading conditions from 2023 to continue into H1 2024, perhaps longer in some markets. Retailers are under margin pressure, as discounting bites and CPAs have increased in many digital marketing channels e.g. Google Shopping. At the same time, customer support expectations are increasing, so a focus on delivering the best possible customer experience with the resources available is important. In this ecommerce podcast, experienced ecommerce consultants and strategists James Gurd & Paul Rogers give advice on how ecommerce retailers can measure and report on CX, and take steps to improve the online customer experience using proven techniques. Any questions, please let us know via LinkedIn or using the form on our website https://replatform.fm