Scaling Your Ecommerce Business

0:02

Welcome to today’s Webinar, everyone.

0:06

We are talking today about scaling your e-commerce business, so how to achieve sustainable growth, and how to drive four times the revenue.

0:17

Actually, I think we could probably achieve more than that if we drive sustainable growth, Right, so we’ll talk about that today, what sustainable growth means, how we drive that, and what some of our best practices are.

0:30

My name is Jason Ferrara, I’m the chief marketing officer at Searchspring, and your host for today’s webinar.

0:41

You know, ar Searchspring.

0:42

Our focus is delivering amazing shopping experiences.

0:49

Now, we’re passionate about that for two reasons.

0:52

one is, All of us are, e-commerce shoppers, too, right? So we know the experience of a shopper, that doesn’t find what they want, when that discovery process is difficult, right, those shoppers hate that experience they leave.

1:07

two, is, we understand the need for an e-commerce merchant to be in control of that experience.

1:17

And Searchspring enables e-commerce merchants to have that control through site search, product merchandising, personalization, and recommendations, and then insights that come from the data collected.

1:30

That’s where our passion lies at searchspring.

1:32

And to help talk a little bit about that today, and to help talk about scaling e-commerce business, we are going to invite some panelists, some experts, to help us unpack that and talk a little bit about scaling and sustainable growth.

1:51

So I’m going to invite Jason and Marco, and Brandon to turn on their cameras.

1:56

Jason, since you were first, I’ll ask you to introduce yourself.

2:00

You do a way better job than I will do. So take it away, and we’ll go to Marco Brand.

2:06

Fantastic. Well, thank you. Other Jason, My name is Jason Nyhus, I’m president at Shopware the company six months and thrilled to be partners with Searchspring thrilled to be on today’s call. I’d been in the e-commerce industry for 23 years.

2:24

And I’ve lived every every life from a practitioner to running other functions like sales, and marketing, and partnerships and others.

2:33

So, I bring a little bit more of the maybe an executive you to some of these topics, I’m sure that my other colleagues here, Mark own brand and can go a little deeper than I But pleasure to be here. Thank you very much Searchspring and Jason.

2:48

Thank you, Jason. All right, Marco.

2:51

Jason, thank you for having me. First of all, here, Michael, from Gorgias Partner Development Associate with the gorgeous for a year now. And, yes, we’re excited to be talking about this, this topic, and I’ll be able to share my experience or like in terms of like the topics that we have today, from our Customer Experience, Customer Support Lens.

3:11

Excellent, Thank you.

3:12

And fun fact, right, Marco, is where are you dialing in today from on the webinar, from Egypt, all the way from Egypt, all the way from Egypt, All right?

3:22

It’s like, it’s like, it’s almost like special ed and special guest day, but it is even more special when you call in from, from time zones away, away away. So, thanks for that. Appreciate it.

3:33

Yeah. Happy to be, N into sunsets. That’s why you should start all of a sudden button.

3:40

Brandon, how about you.

3:42

I am calling in from the far, far away land of Raleigh, North Carolina. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. Beautiful place. Thanks for having me. I’m Brandon Howell, how. I am with ROI Revolution.

3:57

We’re a brand growth focused digital marketing agency. And I specifically have the Director, Website Optimization. So, I lead our Search Engine Optimization teams and our conversion rate optimization teams.

4:10

And basically, been doing web stuff in some capacity or another since 1998, Viet, Marketing, or both, in House and on agency side.

4:23

Thanks so much.

4:25

Well, I appreciate the three of you being here, Looking forward to our conversation.

4:30

Before we get started, I’ve got two more pieces of housekeeping. So, one is our website producer. Anthony is behind the scenes. I want to introduce him.

4:40

Sometimes, you might hear me ask him to do something, or ask him a question. It’s not that I have an imaginary friend. Or gone crazy, it’s that Anthony’s back there, moving the slides and helping us out. So. thank you Anthony for doing that. And also, if you have questions as a listener to the webinar, feel free to ask at anytime there’s questions panel in your sidebar.

5:03

Type your questions in there, I will see them, Anthony will see them.

5:06

We’re connected via text message. We, we often are communicating with each other about questions. I’ll jump in and ask them in real time or we can save a couple for the end So don’t be shy about asking questions.

5:21

Alright, so let’s talk about our agenda today. So, we’re going to just sort of a reminder here. We’re going to talk about scaling your e-commerce business. So, we have a couple of poll questions that we’re going to run first, and the reason we do them.

5:37

Give me, the reason we run the poll questions is so that we can get a little understanding of the listening audience, right? What what drives you, what your experiences are, and helps inform our conversation a little bit. And then, we’re going to launch into our discussion. We’ve prepared some topics, we can talk about things from the polls, and then obviously, as I mentioned, we have some Q and A Don’t wait for Q&A toward the end. No need to do that. Whenever you have a question, feel free to pop it into that questions queued.

6:07

So, let’s get started with our first poll question: Over the next year, what level of growth do you think your company will experience?

6:17

This is not a super scientific poll, We want large amount of growth, some growth, or no growth.

6:24

I think that is as accurate as we can get for right now.

6:30

It’s fun watching responses, come in. I see that.

6:33

I see the panel on the poll in progress here, which is great.

6:39

And Anthony, we are about don’t, I believe. There we go, All right.

6:44

So, are our scientific answers here? Very quantitative data we’re getting, but 30% large amount of growth, 58%, some growth, and 12% no growth. So I think the most important thing around this question, And I’ll put this to our our panel.

7:05

First of all, is it surprising to you that large amount of growth is not the number one driver here?

7:14

And to how would you quantify some growth in your, in your experience?

7:19

Anybody want to give that a start?

7:22

Yeah, I can, I can jump in here, so You see some growth as like the main one, Considering like the economic climate that we’re in right now. A lot of people are skeptical about 23 and just like going into 23 in general and how that, like with all with all the uncertainty around it. And. So it’s actually get to see that a lot of people are still optimistic and sell and are still hoping or can still see the next 10 to 23. Or it’s going to be a year, of course, just not large amount. But some some estimates.

7:57

Jason Yeah. Oh, sorry, Go ahead, Brandon. Since you spoke up, and then Jason we’ll go to you.Uutility stack, rank those. based on what I’ve seen from, from clients and prospects, and in the econ industry, it would have been that ranking, right?

8:10

Some grouping, first, large Margaret second number, if nobody wants to have no growth rate, but, yeah, like Margaret said, there is some degree of economic uncertainty right now.

8:25

Things are just so little weird with the economy, to look a bit more conservative, when it comes to forecasting and targeting for it for the near future.

8:37

And Jason, go ahead.

8:39

Yeah, well, I’m gonna symbol, I’m gonna give a similar answer, but maybe a little different, So, you know, I’ve met with hundreds of merchants and lots of different brands over the last, say, 90 days, Things like, E At E tail and chat talk in other places.

8:54

And I’ve never seen more pressure being pull it on the people who run the store than I have right now.

9:02

And some of that pressure comes from all the things everybody already knows and feels, you know, like, The Do not Track, changing and with with Facebook, and Apple basically makes marketers jobs harder.

9:15

The cost of capital has gone up significantly.

9:19

The, the inflation challenges around inventory and product profitability are our headwinds.

9:26

So I think at this moment in time a lot of those headwinds are basically forcing businesses to be a little bit more pragmatic in their planning, and they’re planning for some growth versus the historically large amounts of growth, because the amount of money they’re asking for in the budget cycles have also reduced. So, this is this managing expectations moment that we’re all living in. It’s different than the world we’ve lived in for the last decade. So, To me, the destination is, hasn’t changed. Companies still need to grow.

9:58

E-commerce is still as important as ever, but the journey to get there, and the, the priority around execution has changed.

10:09

Not surprised to see some growth we define in our business, some growth is probably, you know, high single digits to 15, 15 to 20%. That’s some growth as I would define it.

10:22

Got it. Right, yeah. Thanks, Brandon. Yeah, go ahead. Do that as well. You know, like a 15 to 20% is what I would call some growth based on what I’ve seen and goes That’s interesting. What’s interesting about you know, more pressure being put on the people running the sites?

10:40

To me, that’s a, that’s to some degree, is a sign of some maturity and memorization, to some extent of finally realizing, like, Oh, yeah, like the site.

10:48

Like, it’s not just the inbound traffic, it’s not just all these other channels. Like, what, can we actually do all the sites to make the site so much better? Because, you know, depending on how much traffic and revenue you bring, and a very mild conversion or a change, right?

11:01

It’s a lot of very real revenue at the end of the day.

11:07

Yeah.

11:07

I think, when I think about this topic, and I think about no growth or some growth, and I think there’s, obviously, there’s opportunity to talk about large amount of growth too, but that the topics of optimizing a site and really getting into and understanding the data and analyzing the data, I think it’s an opportunity to help help our listeners to boost, boost that growth rate, if, I think my growth is going to be low.

11:31

Or, are there things we can be talking about today that can help can help build on that growth?

11:37

So I appreciate it and I echo the pressure on companies. I echo the smaller budgets. I know my, my day-to-day job, it is, is marketing, you, know, for a software company, and I definitely see and feel those impacts the economy.

11:55

That’s worth it to, it. Makes sense.

11:58

Good comments, OK, we have one more poll question. What would be your biggest concern when trying to ensure that your site can keep up with your company’s growth?

12:09

Displaying accurate inventory, Ability to handle increased traffic, experiencing platform limitations, user experience declines.

12:21

Biggest concern when trying to ensure that your site can keep up with growth.

12:28

God, responses coming in here.

12:33

Give it a minute, I’m going to give them a couple more seconds.

12:42

I think, Anthony, we are about where we’re going to be OK, displaying accurate inventory, 16% ability to handle increased traffic, 9% experiencing platform limitations, 53, and user experience declines 22.

12:59

Great!

13:00

Thank you for that. Alright. So, panelist team.

13:07

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Let’s take a lot of thoughts about this list. Who wants to, wants to get started?

13:13

This is the one that I wasn’t sure what the outcome was going to be honestly looking at the options there.

13:20

Very interesting, the platform limitations clocks in at 53. I think one thing I’ve seen is that, just about every vehicle and I’ve ever worked with has gripes about their platform. And the grass is always greener on the other side.

13:33

And I’ll be talking to clients, one of which heats, platform X, and is moving a platform why, one of which rates, but from why it’s moving a platform X So I guess, really, that shouldn’t be a surprise to me.

13:50

Anybody else? Yeah, just go ahead.

13:52

Yeah, I didn’t point of view on this one.

13:53

I, I, as well, didn’t know where this was going to kind of net out, um, but I actually love the experiencing platform limitations is the, the answer.

14:05

Um, again, based on a whole bunch of conversations I’ve had, and I’ve had similar, by the way.

14:11

But I think the calculus for owning and operating commerce platform, a search emerged platform, and affiliate plot where all these things, I think the calculus is changing.

14:25

It used to be real, high level TCO, where they evaluate people on the cost of the license, and that’s really how they decide what, what platform they want to put their business on.

14:36

Now, I think the calculus is a lot more mature, and, and, and more effective, because it’s taking into the account, to stand it up. The count the, the cost to operate at the cost of the limitations.

14:51

Some platforms come with a whole bunch of.

14:53

You have to, you have to extend it to apps and more apps on top of apps on top of apps.

14:59

And when you do a real TCL, the cost to operate, it is higher than others. And the cost to add onto it is cost than the other. So, to me, this C actually connects really closely with the previous slide.

15:12

We have a world that has probably overbought technology and underutilized what they have already bought.

15:20

So, I think to me, number C is a reflection of where we are in the world. And I also think, by the way, D, which was a second place contender here, is another really good one.

15:31

If you think about how, almost virtually all e-commerce experience start to look the same, you know, we’re ready for our paradigm shift.

15:41

And so, to me, that, that is another really great signal, that the world needs to kind of figure out what comes next.

15:50

And I’m sure everyone’s going to talk about AI later and how that can really get us to the next frontier.

15:55

But that certainly has a role to play here, But we’re going to talk about it now, that you brought it up. It wasn’t on my list of notes, but it sure is now further. Marconi, any thoughts about this goal?

16:10

Yeah, just like adding on to what the other Jason just mentioned, about, like user user experience, and I think this is a pretty common content, considering that. As soon as like, a website where like in a merchant, experience some growth. They have legacy and bandwidth where like the same people who are working to see a jobs. And then there’s, just like the other, SharePoint, for example, a customer inquiries, that’s like more with the increased traffic.

16:35

They’re just like, I think, a lot more questions of our products. Social media is also like a part of this. And so and generally aren’t able to keep like the scene, for example, like response time or like resolution time, in case as as before. And that hinders, obviously, the user, the user experience overall, and, the JSON’s point of, like, using AI or, like, automation in general, This is going to be like a key factor to be able to deflect subtleties. And mundane like questions are like the common questions that customers have a like anything that can be deflected or ultimately, it should be to alleviate that pressure off of the team to be able to focus more on like, more detailed a customer experiences.

17:15

Thank you for that.

17:19

So, we absolutely should get into the AI thing.

17:22

one of the things that I saw In Bs, responses is, in my mind, they’re all related.

17:29

You can’t, You will never have a great user experience if you feel like your platform is limiting you, or you’ll never experience accurate inventory if you have a platform that can, you know, help help drive that inventory. So, to your point, Jason, there’s this ecosystem.

17:48

Right, And they eat and the ecosystem. It’s like, that, you know that, the sum is what’s, what’s most important? And the sum of those parts is what drives that user experience.

17:59

I do think that ability to handle increased traffic, what’s interesting to me is that was that was pretty low in terms of response rates.

18:11

Has that problem been solved?

18:14

Is that problem and solve for, for e-commerce businesses? I mean, is it just, you sign up with AWS and you’re on your way. I’m Brandon.

18:20

What do you, what are your thoughts there?

18:24

It’s sort of defense the, like, but it just comes a straight bandwidth, right?

18:30

You just buy more, Yeah, you’re anticipating more traffic to your site. Tree bandwidth turns, You didn’t do get into, like, the processing side of things, like, there’s, there’s So, there’s therefore influx of traffic and there’s like, Canvas site, actually, handle. And to some extent, you can buy more processing garlic to just mention these, these providers where you can just be ****. What you have and possibly anticipates. We anticipate that, right, beef up your, your, your sales to be able to handle all of that.

19:04

But you do still have like, sort of, there is a question of like, What is the platform do itself, Like inherently with the architecture of the platform?

19:13

That can be a concern, depending on what version of something you’re running, which actual platform you’re running our home-grown versus something off, the shelf, all of those considerations, they can come into play.

19:28

Yeah, it’s important you brought that up. Jason, just one second because I had a question came in.

19:33

Um, It’s really a comment, but it’s 100% appropriate for just what we started talking about now, which is.

19:41

Integrations cause and limitation, not not bandwidth, right, so, so again, the ecosystem, comment brand and your comments. So Jason go ahead. I just got any thoughts about integrations because of limitations. Or, based on Brandon’s comment.

19:55

Yeah, I actually think, Brendon’s, right in you know, the old the old day where you had a whole bunch of outages rarely happen anymore at grants.

20:04

And so, for the most part, Jason, I do think your point is right, the fact that AWS and Google and these other cloud providers have allowed you to be a utility where you dial it up, or dial it down based on your, your needs.

20:16

However, there are still some underlying things that drive people to really, potentially have a risk here.

20:23

one is a merchandiser and a marketers challenge around how do they create race conditions?

20:29

or not around basically driving huge spikes in traffic, that you may or not be ready for it.

20:37

And those scenarios you solve that, you’re really great planning with your infrastructure team to make sure that they know that they can dial things up for now.

20:44

Based on your big promotion, your select items, whatever you’re trying to do. So that one can really be solved through planning.

20:51

But there’s some more important things, are more underlying things that I think really need to be addressed. And, that is the architecture of the core product you’re buying.

21:00

If you’re buying a pure SaaS product, you are in a shared infrastructure environment.

21:04

So, figuring out, you know, how you’re going to communicate with your provider to make sure that you can handle spikes.

21:09

And then the other one is the integrations that you’re using.

21:13

Most of the times, things tip over in this value chain where you know, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.

21:18

And so, yes, integrations can potentially be a big a wire that you could trip.

21:25

The last thing I would add is for people who are utilizing race conditions, where they’re trying to drive a tremendous amount of traffic to your site in a small window, there are tools out there that can give you a queuing experience similar that you might see in a Ticket Master, or other kind of experiences, where they put you in a virtual waiting room, and they allow you to kinda come in when the scale is available to handle. So, to me, it’s really the big five as we talk about the ability to handle the scale.

21:56

Yeah, I’ll echo the integrations piece, right?

21:59

It’s funny, if you’ve if you’ve done web development, um, outside of e-commerce and inside of e-commerce, the amount of stuff power onto an e-commerce site from, from, from just integrations, for, for product management, for display, for merchandising, for tracking, for experimentation, for this, for that, for this other thing, regulation to Jason’s what about like that? We just link? I keep any of those can’t keep up that you’re relying on. It’s like a core part of your user experience.

22:34

That is probably where you would see the breakdown happen, right, of plugin X is struggling to keep up. And so it’s like degrading experience across the board.

22:48

So that’s a great comment, Brandon, and I think a nice, a nice segue to our set of discussion topics. Maybe, Anthony move the slide. one more forward. But, But, So, to talk about optimization, right?

23:02

The question I thought of in my head here, Brandon, as you’re saying, that, is, I’ve got to, I’ve got a tech stack.

23:09

I’ve got an ecosystem, I’ve got whatever you want to call it and, and I need to make sure that that is running optimally.

23:17

How do I do that? How do I, as a, as a, as a merchant, make sure that my, my tech stack, my technology ecosystem is running in an optimized way. What are some steps to help me?

23:32

You know, understand what I’ve got, how to how to make sure that traffic is flowing properly.

23:37

See an outcome? That would mean, Yes, I need optimization, or, yes, I’m optimized.

23:45

If you can get real, nitty gritty, if we want, whenever, when, that, you pay attention to Sorry.

23:54

So I’ll just say, let let’s, I’m happy to get, I’m happy to get really, really nitty gritty, but let’s start. Let’s start a little high level, just to make sure that we can set the stage, and then we can get in there.

24:09

So, I guess, from my perspective, my point of view, it’s very much into the nitty gritty and it goes back to what we’ve just been talking about in terms of, like, that tech stack.

24:19

Um, it’s kind of hard to pressure, tested, great.

24:24

Until it really happens, but I would suggest like having, having your Dev team clued into that concern, right, because they’re going to be the folks that can kind of help you monitor that, and helps us out if something is going wrong, or if something is, like there’s a bottleneck somewhere.

24:46

Much more so than the average show, you see the screen not loading appropriately, you know, like, ****, what’s going on?

24:52

Whereas, those folks can be like, oh, it’s XYZ script, right? And that’s causing the bottleneck.

24:59

And assuming you talked to that provider, I figured out what we should do differently there in some way. Sort of leaning on the folks that can help you pinpoint what the, what the true issues versus sort of what you’re seeing on the screen. Because what you’re seeing on the screen isn’t always necessarily what you don’t accurately reflect. What’s the actual technical issue could be a situation that makes sense. It does a JSON. Or, Marco, can I look at exit Mark Alertly asking this question. Can I look at, are there other, are there other metrics to look at? And sort of, Conversion of, of shoppers through the process. That will help me understand optimization.

25:39

To be honest, like I just want to, before entering data, I just wanna go to dependence runs. Go for that. Yeah.

25:47

Relying on, like, the folks who, like, understand it, or, like, the developers, so, I think, like, a huge part of, like, making sure that everything is working properly, And then the integration, like, as you mentioned, like, if there’s something I equal to reach out, to.

25:59

Think it’s also, like the providers are, like the apps that you’re using, to make sure that you’re with apps that offer, like a White Glove customer experience, or, like, they have a good support level. Because, like, at some point, you’re going to be facing, like, technical difficulties. And it’s up to, like, the provider that you’re working with, on solving that, or making sure to pressurize like your question. So I think it’s a huge part of it also relies on providers and their support teams.

26:26

Yeah.

26:27

Good point.

26:27

Good point.

26:31

Jason, thoughts there. Yeah.

26:33

Well, I’ll answer the question.

26:34

You had asked around KPIs and things I can’t go as deep as Marco and Brandon on that topic, but I do think the one around metrics I can No, I think it’s really important. You pay a lot of attention to page load time.

26:49

I think that often gets kind of ignored, or it’s a really hard problem to solve. So it doesn’t get talked about a lot.

26:56

But if you think about how these symptoms show up, If your inventory is not accurately updating, and it’s not real time, it could potentially be a lag on your page load time. If you’ve got images that don’t load appropriately if you’ve got integrations or connections that you signed on for, that aren’t living up to the standard in which you’ve set for page load time. All those things have an implication on your conversion rate.

27:19

Um, and ultimately, your customer satisfaction. And so, to me, the page load time probably needs to be a first class citizen, as it’s talked about.

27:27

The second one, and it’s a little bit of a different answer than I think you might expect.

27:32

But, you know, the grow at all cost era is kinda behind us, and now it’s about the era of efficiency.

27:38

And so, while we talk about conversion rates, and growth rates, I think the way that a lot of businesses are now thinking about it is optimizing for margin of profit.

27:48

And so, you gotta take a look at the products that you’re selling, the products you’re attaching and make sure that you’re selling the ones where you’ve got the better margin profile, because ultimately, that’s going to be the business’s ability to take that dry powder and re-invested in other things. So, it’s not about selling a bunch of the low margin skew. It’s about selling the right amount of time, so finding that balance, I think, is pretty crucial.

28:17

I feel like I’m doing a lot in this conversation, Both of those points, and go into the, the idea of page load time and like, site speed, Right?

28:28

That’s site to site speed. And if you’re not paying attention to the site speed, what are you doing in 20 23 right? Go back to 19 90 when it didn’t matter.

28:39

In addition to, like, your actual page load time, looking at metrics like bounce rate or an engineer for the flipped on its head and their client engagement right now, which is the inverse of battery.

28:52

Exit pages where people are leaving the sites while we are trying to suss out why they’re leaving the site.

29:01

Breaks down metrics by page type, I find a lot of times. You know, with e-commerce, it’s a templated site, right?

29:08

You’ve got your homepage, you got your, maybe your CLP, you gotta pay OK, you got a PDP.

29:14

You got card search results.

29:16

Steps are your checkout.

29:19

If you’re not looking at our data in aggregate and appropriately tagging as such in your analytics platform. So that you can say, Oh yeah, our user journey is homepage, search, PDP.

29:32

PLP search PDP checkout. And being able to look at data in that way. Versus just seeing, like, oh, your product for the URL for Product X and Y and Z like that data is kind of useless.

29:43

But as you see folks sort of going down grouped, they can kind of lead you astray.

29:50

just tag everything, frankly.

29:52

All right, especially with GA for it’s treating events the same way.

29:57

It’s treating a page view, which is really for all of our various complaints about you for that, that actually makes sense, right? Because there are very critical events that happen within a user experience and paying attention to those events, see which events pre seed.

30:14

Failures are successes within your user journey, just capturing that information to paint the complete picture.

30:21

Now, I feel like I feel like complaints about Georgia four are more rooted in change than they are actually about, about GA for. Like, it’s not, it’s not the worst thing. You look at the worst thing in the world, it’s just that, we’ve structured our whole life to not be that, so now changing is a big thing, Right. This is true, but it’s created a lot of work for all of us To sort of get back some of the things that we have, if we want to keep them. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Brandon, you oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Just going to also echo the Optimizing for murdering Profit piece, right. Like Jason was talking about your actual products and merchandising appropriately to maximize your return based on which products heavier, the best profit margins, right? The flip side of that is on the order level, right? Maximizing the order level, I’m doing everything you can From, from a conversion rate standpoint, to suggest these additional products that you may also likes, but even going beyond, you may also, like, and factoring it.

31:21

Like, oh, he’s like, uh, a quick example of A, complete the look. Right? Oh you’re getting, that’s like either you really should get these other things. This completes your ensemble and, boom, you know, higher order values, not just more conversions, on top.

31:41

So you mentioned a couple of things Branden, that I think might be worth talking about.

31:46

So you talked about an Analytics platform like it.

31:51

Was something that every single business had so I’m guessing that there may be some people in our audience, who are like yes, Yes Analytics platform and then are going to you know, leave this session and be like, oh, What is that? How do I get it? Why do I need and what do I do now? So, so maybe we could start with you, or Jason, we can start with you. Like or even Marco, like, let’s.

32:17

what?

32:18

What should I be expecting in terms of analytics platforms? if I don’t have that today, where do I, where do I start?

32:26

Because I think a lot of the these four bullets right here, to me, resolved into, you got to understand your data.

32:34

So, let me tibor and all those platforms to growth for a second.

32:41

That can actually be a bottleneck in growth and getting good data, is not having an appropriate level of service when it comes to your analytics platform.

32:52

To be able to get the full data, or get it quickly, or get it without your sampling, as you historically see, and Google Analytics.

33:01

So, you know, calling out for 360 versus the free solution in that case.

33:10

Another thing to consider with, with growth, right, MIT, and having good data, and being able to scale appropriately. But I think of analytics platforms in two types, there’s sort of your classic like.

33:23

Uh.

33:26

There’s like a classic analytics platform.

33:28

It’s just solely, like, data, and movement through the site, right, Like Google Analytics, or an Adobe Analytics, right?

33:37

… in the industry, will continue to be the payments industry, for probably the rest of our careers.

33:42

So, having that, and there’s degrees to which you can set those up, to get more and more data, better data, and then you’ve got that done.

33:53

This sort of second layer of user experience analytics.

33:59

That gets a little deeper, when you get into like, silica, content square sort of thing, where it’s, it’s layering on a lot of the visual analytics, the heat mapping, the quick mapping, Being able to tie that with your overall analytics platform, or, tailor them, with your experience platform, or, your experimentation platform, and, getting that extra, qualitative information, on top of the quantitative information, to some extent.

34:28

I find that most folks have the first They have the GA or the Adobe, but they don’t have that second layer there to get that extra MIDI type of insights that you might want to get.

34:41

Sure. Yeah, OK, very good.

34:43

And, and, and this, this kind of data and using this type of platform, Marco, let’s talk a little bit about Product Inventory and the data that exist there. Like, how are those power, those items related?

34:58

So, I would say, like, I’m not sure about your question, but I like in terms of like how they’re related to like the analytics that Brandon just just mentioned.

35:07

So, I think, like, inventory in general, like inventory, like to have, like, real-time data on your inventory is important to have that tied into your e-commerce platform that you’re working with, Your customer support platform that you’re working with, and all other platforms, that, because, like, anything that changes in, that, it needs to reflect on all of these other platforms to be able to support the customer better. If you don’t have, like, these data, like, at your fingertips, you’re gonna find yourself either like, under stalking, stalking, or, like, there’s going to be, like, a lot of issues related to that, that you, that you can easily like deflect if you have to, like the real-time data on your fingertips.

35:48

And that, and that real-time data, inventory data, product data, that sort of thing.

35:55

Aye.

35:56

Is that a first step making sure it’s right, or, Or is it, is it like a journey, or is it, you know, get, get my product data in there, begin to analyze it, and then begin to clean it up, like, what, what is the what is the process?

36:09

You know, infrequently do we just start from zero?

36:13

You know, we’re usually, we’re starting with something.

36:16

I feel like just like having everything in one case, and just like making sure that it’s like connected after that, this is really important. Just like making, there’s one source of truth and that she’d be like your inventory management platform, your ERP, whatever the case may be. Just to have that, like, as a source of truth, and that everything, like all the data on their SKU.

36:35

And from that point you like, integrated with your other platforms, make sure that this data is like accessible to everyone.

36:44

So Jason mentioned a key performance indicator earlier, which is paid page Load Time, and we talked about Brandon, you talked about Speed.

36:52

What other, like, key performance indicators are there? If I’m thinking about optimizing my site, like, what are what are some, other than the load time, right? We got that? What other key performance indicators are there that I should be looking into?

37:09

I think, like, a key, like, performance indicator, and that’s, I wouldn’t say that’s, like, directly related to your website. But, in general, is like your response time, because, as businesses grow, it’s really challenging for them to keep the same response and resolution time for, like, across all their lives.

37:28

It gets to whether that’s e-mail, chat, SMS, or whatever the case may be. And, I think like, this is like almost like a lagging metric that people like to look at in terms of, like, let’s like focus, as you mentioned, like, on the website. Let’s focus, Everything is going well on their When. There’s also other metrics that shows you that, OK, like, you’re at the point of view, or scaling your business now, and you need, it looks like, more resources like this segment of your business, or this section for something like, your customer support, OK.

37:53

Like, how, how can I make sure that these metrics stayed there, like the Amazon here, as we say, like the golden standard, on a quick response and quick resolution time as you’re scaling your business?

38:07

Jason kept, Go ahead.

38:09

Yeah, I actually love that. You brought up customer, customer, service, customer experience.

38:16

I was inspired, I don’t know, a decade or two ago at this point by someone talking about and vitamin Amazon Ash.

38:22

They’re talking about viewing customer service contact as a defect.

38:28

And you think about it in the, in the context of how, if someone has to call you something, likely broke or didn’t go exactly as they wanted, or they couldn’t find the information they needed.

38:39

And so, what, I think, if you take that mindset, what it leads you to induce into an action plan, saying, how can we figure out how to eliminate these calls?

38:51

And to make sure that we’ve got the capacity set aside to really delight the ones who have to call us, but at the same time figuring out how to eliminate that need.

39:01

And I’m sure there are things that, you know, chatbots and better product documentation and better information around fulfillment.

39:09

You know, all the things wrong, that if you, if you take a look and say, This customer called us, something went wrong, What was it, and you do it at scale, You’ll really improve the customer experience.

39:20

Yeah, absolutely. I definitely agree with you there, Jason. I think it’s important to empower your customers, to find their own answers.

39:27

And, before, like, as, as, as he mentioned, instead of like, having customer support, and, dealing with all of these, like, regular inquiries are like repetitive ones. For example, like, where’s my order, you can empower the customers to do that through, like, your, your, your chat, your chatbot to have, like, a tracking page on your website. And also, like, very like, like, also, like detailed information into the product, like sizing, there’s this like key. Like, key information that shouldn’t be accessible and easily accessible to your customers in order to defects these tickets and not have a customer support agents to pay attention to these when you can easily.

40:07

Interesting.

40:09

Sort of tie in with the idea of, like, deflecting customer, inquiries, slash issues, right?

40:15

The idea of a carrot juice or marker negative, like, riaa to answer that before they even have the question, Right?

40:26

I think and empower them to find the answers to their questions, or even like using some of that analytics data or just good, common sense. Like where could we better communicate some of these things along the user journey?

40:39

So, we don’t have an influx of questions coming in and overloading customer service, right? Like, could our FAQs be clearer?

40:50

Could we just have a little nod towards a particular topic?

40:54

Like, I was looking at a site the other day and they were sort of getting hammered and third party reviews about their return costs.

41:05

No one ever likes to pay to return something, but if you knew, it wasn’t a factor in your purchase ahead of time.

41:13

You would expect to see less negative reviews.

41:16

Some, but less because you effectively communicated ahead of time, Factor this into your, your, your purchase.

41:24

Someone, somewhere is going to argue, that might be detrimental to conversion rate, because you’re giving them a negative website. You’re welcome imbalance the cost to your business.

41:34

What’s, what’s the cost to her to have the customer service team double staffed Versus possibly losing some orders? No one likes to say no one wants to talk about that sort of stuff, but suggests is what earlier as far as, like, total costs, right? Like, taking, taking that into account.

41:54

Can benefit the organization as a whole for it.

41:58

And I just wanted to add on on one point that Brandon just mentioned about, like, FAQs and I think like, it comes to like most of us as yet, obviously, we’re gonna have like, FAQs There, but actually. like, just like checking on like, which ones that are like you should have on there and how detailed they should be. Because this would alleviate a lot of the pressure that you get from increased traffic from growth. And just be just updating your FAQs frequently, and just like having all the information needed on there.

42:27

Use your analytics platform, to see which ones are being viewed the most, and which ones have the longest dwell time, and appropriately address those concerns throughout the user journey around them, and making them look for it.

42:39

We just had a comment in the in the queue. That was, I, you know, definitely think that.

42:44

That FAQ pages are are a stepchild of me of e-commerce sites. Right.

42:48

So, they’re not, They’re not totally use the way the way they should be, which, which, that, that high level concepts that I’ve written down and I love these two, because they’re not, there are about running a business period that, they’re not about not, about necessarily earning in e-commerce businesses. The ability to communicate among your teams, no matter how big or how small.

43:10

So, if you have a, a person or group that’s responsible for answering the phone when someone calls with a problem, that person or group needs to communicate with the people or person who’s working on the backend data. Who’s working branded in your example on, how do we express our return policy? Who’s working with Margo and your? Who’s writing the FAQs?

43:34

Who’s looking at the page load time, Like, all those people need to communicate, because you learn in each one of those different spots. And without that learning, you never will optimize your site, Right?

43:45

Because you can’t, as someone who talks to a customer, you can’t keep that locked away in a head or at a database. You’ve gotta get that out to circulate among the team.

43:57

So we were talking of brand, and you also brought up user journey.

44:02

So I’d like to talk about that a little bit too.

44:06

I think first, let’s define our user journey and let’s define our shopper journey, what that means, what that is, and then break down into that.

44:14

So, Brandon, you want to define what you meant by user journey first, and then we can jump off from there.

44:22

Yeah, there’s sort of a there are two types of user journeys them online. There’s there’s a user journey that’s locked into the website experience right there on the site.

44:30

And I am trying to optimize their experience from start to finish on the website.

44:39

Folks can sometimes get a little like blinders on when it comes to them and not think about all the stuff that happened before They got them to the website and all this stuff and frankly what happened after they go to the website.

44:52

So, you know, like a true user journey takes into account person’s experience with your branch rate and how they’re finding out about your site, what they know about your site, before they give their, what they don’t know. As well as your post purchase experience and how you’re following up in your drip campaigns and your total lifetime value and all that sort of stuff. So, user journey. I sort of, I use it interchangeably, depending on which context I’m talking about, but that’s what I usually when I’m talking to users so that the specific site experience or like the broader brand customer experience, and specifically how that ties into beside, Right? Like, how much do I need to communicate?

45:32

If I’m known brands, don’t have to sell you as hard on who I am, but if you’re trying to break into a market or say or resale or something like that. I know who you are, who communicates to make sure you’ve got a great website, but like, part of my user experience, and the user journey, is actually getting comfortable with your brand. So, don’t forget about that piece, too.

45:55

Yep, Jason, go ahead.

45:58

Yeah, actually, Brennan’s words kinda sparked something in my mind, which I think is relevant to this topic.

46:05

You know, a lot of brands who operate their own, I guess, context around e-commerce experience.

46:12

Whether it’s selling through retailers, selling B2B, B2C.

46:17

All these different cutting user flows that they have to kind of manage.

46:22

one of the things, that I’ve, I think a lot about, is really valuable, it’s figuring out what aspects of your business are you going to rely on third party experts to go help you, And, shameless plug for ROI Revolution on call, but it’s really important that you seek third parties who’ve got content, who have other experience in your industry, with what you’re trying to do.

46:49

So they can, they can tell you what is good or bad, they can help benchmark, and no agencies, uh, love them or hate them. I guess it doesn’t matter.

47:01

one of the best things they can provide is context, whether your performance is good, bad, or ugly.

47:08

And so to me, all this talk about optimization.

47:13

Really, you have to have something to parents. What is good, What is bad? What is great? How do we continue to get more towards great?

47:20

I don’t know if that’s something you want to comment on, Brandon. But to me that, that seems like a huge value prop.

47:26

It is a huge value problem.

47:27

also, In some contexts, we try to steer our clients away from thinking about that too much because every site is different and every market is a little bit different, right?

47:37

But yes, to your point, we can just give a general sort of, gut check, right?

47:42

Of, like, what we’ve seen in our experience, both, like, in the moment of, like, what’s happening now, but then also too late, OK.

47:50

Our agency has been doing e-comm Digital Parking for 20 years. There’s, there’s like a depth of knowledge there.

47:58

Yes, that sort of plug.

48:00

But, we also sometimes, like, do you want you to, like, focus on, like, making your site better, making your experience better, right? Making those incremental improvements to, to try to get to that better spot certain, regardless of what everybody else is doing.

48:17

And in some cases, like, from my experience on the experimentation side, um, doing what everybody else is doing isn’t always the best thing, Right? A lot of things get introduced into an E com, roll it like the latest and the greatest do, add this, whatever.

48:34

And you may actually be too early to the market on it, right?

48:39

Folks haven’t figured out that that’s even more useful. It might be detrimental or it might be the greatest thing since sliced bread. But like you should, you should set our, this is my quick as a conversion rate guy, test, test, test, test, test, test at all. Like, it’s your own data and make your own decisions, prove it out.

48:58

Yeah. Marco comments on that on the buyer journey testing, that sort of thing?

49:05

Yes, I actually wanted to comment about like what Brandon said earlier about the user journey, and how crucial it is to throw out, like, the person or the customer is interacting with the brand, and the brand needs to know who the customer is, as well as, like, the customer can start a conversation in one channel, and ended in another, And they would expect the brand to know who the customer is their their history with the brand. So throughout the user journey, the customer, that the merchant will always need, like, have the information about the customer, and the art to the brand, as well, just to be able to provide that extra step of personalization or that extra step of customer experience to have the customer engaged at all times.

49:45

Yeah, understanding that. And that engagement is so and so important. So thank you for that.

49:51

That comment, Ari, we we added in AI as a late entrant into the bullet points here. But certainly, we should probably touch on AI as a, as a technology to help optimize or scale businesses. And I think this topic will probably bring us to the top of the hour. So, let’s, let’s start with, you.

50:14

Know, I don’t know, who wants to raise their hand first here to talk about, about AI.

50:18

Jason, go, go ahead and tell us a little bit about what your thoughts on scaling and optimizing sites using AI? Well, what does it mean? What’s the expectation, and where can we go?

50:30

Yeah, first off, I don’t think I’m an expert on AI. And I think anybody who probably claims they are with a background like mine is also probably a Facebook expert on other things as well.

50:39

But I will say, to me, this is a little bit of the industrial revolution, needs E commerce.

50:47

I think this is, I think, the expectations that have been set in e-commerce.

50:52

For next day, shipping, four, no.

50:56

Basically the margin profile, an e-commerce business is not really good at this moment in time, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. This whole AI revolution.

51:05

So my advice to brands are, well, actually let me say a little bit different.

51:09

So in Silicon Valley there’s this concept called the 10X development and it’s the the Facebooks, the Googles, The Apples have been competing for those 10 X developers for years. And the concept is if you’re able to acquire the type of talent, you can get 10 X more productivity.

51:26

Because the quality and speed at which the work is better, 10 X better than just about anybody else you can get, OK?

51:33

Number one, I think AI makes all developers tennant developers, So that’s zero point one zero point two, is it actually has the ability to make marketers, are merchandisers for analyst, 10 X, and their respective roles as well. And so, my piece of advice is find a way to experiment with it.

51:54

Um, tryin instituted into your process.

51:57

This is going to be the thing that makes e-commerce wildly profitable and return us back to your first question around hyper growth, hyper efficiency, It’s just gonna take a little bit of time. So, my advice brands is, make sure you’re buying from technology vendors, who have AI very clearly on the product roadmap. And number to experiment with all sorts of tools and tack to make you a 10 X, whatever your role is. So, that’s, that’s my kinda soapbox moment. But, again, I’m no expert in AI. I play with it.

52:31

Oh, great. Thank you, Jason.

52:33

Marco, how about you add thoughts about thoughts about AI and optimization scaling?

52:39

I definitely, just like as Jason mentioned, and invest in companies that work with companies. Or the apps that have AI, and their, and their old now, because this is definitely the future. I’m also not an expert on on AI, but, like so far, with that, with a gorgeous, we’re definitely seeing a lot of traction using, for example, like automation AI to automate a lot of tasks. So, whether that’s like, as I mentioned before, just like, deflecting tickets, are also, for example, like intent and sentiment detection. To just, like, understand what the customer is saying without having to go through, like, manually, every single ticket.

53:14

To just, like, understand in general, what the sentiment of the ticket is to be able to categorize it correctly. And that ties back to that, having this data, to know what your customers are, communicating to you, and use that to, again, develop, like, support your growth faster, and provide the customer experience that you should provide for, for your customers. So, in a nutshell, the AI is definitely there to help you grow and to help you become more efficient and use, automate a lot of tasks as much as you can be to focus on other aspects of your business that needs your attention.

53:50

Great. Thank you. And Brandon, how about you?

53:54

Also, not an AI expert, but aye.

54:01

Yeah, we’re on reserve. We’re on a precipice here and I don’t think anybody’s 100% sure where it’s going.

54:07

But we all know it’s going to be different, right?

54:11

So to Jason’s points you should be playing with these tools. You should be integrating these tools into what you’re doing.

54:22

Because it is, it is where we are moving, right, an AI can consume and parse information way faster than any of your employees are going to be able to. They’re also not humans. They don’t make the most compelling arguments sometimes, when you ask them to write. So, there are ways in which they could and should be used when we’re experimenting with them in our agency work. Right.

54:50

So, yes, start figuring it out. Some of the platforms are already like introducing AI aspects to their platforms themselves, as far as the platforms are concerned. I’m very curious to see where those go out if they work.

55:06

Once you’re average person can use AI at scale, I think it changes a lot of things. You know, like, right now, you may need a developer to use AI at scale. But, if, if anybody can get in and really use AI at scale, what does that mean for product descriptions across an e-commerce site that has 100,000 SKUs?

55:26

What could you do with that, right?

55:29

I was recently at my last thought I was recently at the Search Law Conference, and I’m totally stealing someone’s talk, and I cannot remember who the speaker was, but, The, the thought was, AI isn’t going to take your job.

55:47

People using AI, are going to take your jobs, E-comm brands using AI are going to take your customers.

55:56

So, it’s, it’s going to become table stakes and you need to make sure you get it on the ground floor when it, when it’s table stakes and then that gets sort of caught fire.

56:05

Very good. Yeah.

56:06

Thank you for that, and I think it goes into big that goes into scale, and growth, and optimization, and all the good things we’ve been talking about here. So, really appreciate your insights on that, all of you, and your insights, throughout the whole conversation. I think we’ve had a great conversation about some of the key points in our data and our customer journey, and with AI, and with our analytics platform, and with understanding the data that goes in there, and how we arrange and communicate around the company.

56:35

Those are all all important pieces.

56:38

Building an e-commerce environment that can scale, optimizing an e-commerce environment, so thank you for your insight there.

56:46

Marco, Branden, Jason, I really appreciate it.

56:49

I know that it’s not easy to field random questions about, about all sorts of topics. But you did a great job. Thank you so much. And everybody in the audience, thank you for being a part of it.

57:00

And we look forward to seeing you at our next webinar next month about replatforming, e-commerce sites. So I know that’s that’s a hot topic, so we’ll be talking about that next month.

57:12

Thanks. Thanks, Jen, for being here, and thank everybody for being on the call.

57:16

Take care of us.