Talk Commerce: Recent Episodes
Brent W. Peterson
Talk Commerce is your destination for the latest developments in the ever-changing world of commerce. Brent W. Peterson is an expert and enthusiast who is passionate about eCommerce platforms, payment gateways, shopping carts, and everything else you need to create a thriving online store.
If two witches watched two watches, which witch would watch which watch? Each witch would watch which watch belonged to which witch’s wrist.
Mentions with timestamps:
- Strike Graph: 00:00:01
- Lake Minnetonka Sailing School: 00:01:09
- PCI Compliance: 00:02:16
- Introduction of Justin Beals: 00:00:01
- Justin's passion for sailing and skateboarding: 00:01:09
- Joke about a giant duck at a fancy restaurant: 00:02:16
- Discussion about starting Strike Graph and entrepreneurship: 00:03:24
- Explanation of VC-backed startups and funding rounds: 00:05:44
- Discussion about revenue and valuation in startups: 00:08:21
- Mention of overvaluation in the tech industry in the past: 00:10:33
- PCI-DSS: 00:11:05
- SOC2: 00:11:05
- Audit or testing firms: 00:11:05
- "Standards and Certifications for Security Operations": 00:11:05
- "PCI DSS Compliance: A Pocket Guide" by Alan Calder: 00:14:20
- "SOC 2 Compliance Handbook: A Guide for Service Organizations" by Linford & Company: 00:14:20
- California data standards: 00:17:19
- European data standards: 00:17:19
- QuickBooks: 00:18:23
- Salesforce: 00:19:38
- WordPress: 00:20:52
- Magento: 00:20:52
- Shop: 00:20:52
- Stripe Graph: 00:21:14
- SOC2 certification: 00:21:14
- GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): 00:22:28
- Control centric design: 00:25:01
- User stories: 00:25:01
- SOC2 audit: 00:27:25
- ISO 27001: 00:29:17
- PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard): 00:29:17
- TE SACS (Automotive Supplier Certification): 00:29:28
- "Grok Magento" book: 00:30:06
- Strike Graph: 00:30:50
- LinkedIn: 00:31:59
In the podcast Talk Commerce, Brent Peterson talks to Chris Bach, the co-founder of Netlify, a platform that helps developers build dynamic websites, e-commerce stores, and applications. In their discussion, they dive into the concept of headless and composable architecture, emphasizing its benefits. Chris explains that headless architecture allows the front-end of a website to run independently but simultaneously access its back-end systems. In terms of composable architecture, it's about choosing and combining modules from different systems, providing flexibility, and promoting faster time to the market.
Additionally, Chris highlights some common hindrances to adopting headless and composable architecture and emphasizes the importance of considering the strategy holistically. By automating operational overhead with a platform like Netlify, businesses can focus more on building functionality and gaining business outcomes. Chris concludes by urging enterprises to consider both the components and the orchestration in headless and composable architecture to optimize the benefits.
In this episode hosted by Brent Peterson, guest Lauren Schwartz, CEO and Founder of the Loft325 Creative Agency, discusses her role in helping e-commerce brands grow their revenue through refined creative execution, paid social campaigns, organic social, and email marketing. The detailed conversation revolves around several topics, including the importance of TikTok in e-commerce, advice on content creation, thoughts on the potential ban of TikTok, the resurgence of Snapchat and the significance of trying new strategies to optimize performance and reach. Brent and Lauren highlight the importance of testing and adapting to new formats and platforms, particularly emphasizing the value of engaging with content creators and influencers. In the end, Lauren shares her plan to launch a new designer course for creatives who wish to enter the paid social fields for advertising.
In this insightful episode of Talk Commerce, Brent Peterson invites Tobi Buxhoidt, the co-founder of ParcelLab, a leading Operations Experience Management platform. Boasting a rich background in logistical operations and a passion for streamlining customer experience, Tobi shares forward-thinking insights on the role of post-sales customer interactions in brand success.
Born in Germany and based out of Boston, Tobi describes how ParcelLab operates on an international scale with several offices worldwide. The platform aims to revolutionize the way brands engage with their customers with data-driven experiences, an approach he believes can create a notable difference in brands’ relationships with their customers.
A large part of the discussion revolves around the role of returns in customer satisfaction. Tobi emphasizes the necessity of having a digitalized, tailored, and customer-centric returns process with varying approaches depending on the customer and the particular product. He cites examples from fashion brand Chico's and electronics company Bose to illustrate the practical application of this approach.
Tobi also touches upon the common assumption that returns should be free. While he understands the reasoning behind this, he reveals intriguing data suggesting that about half of consumers are open to paying for returns depending on the context.
Finally, Tobi gives a glimpse into the future of e-commerce in 2023, where he predicts a significant shift from customer acquisition to enhancing customer lifetime value. He suggests that brands focus on engaging their customers during the entire post-purchase journey, which he claims is critical for customer retention and building lasting relationships.
Tobi invites interested listeners to engage with ParcelLab further through its website, www.parcellab.com. Leveraging his experience and expertise, Tobi aims to help businesses excel in the post-purchase landscape, turning the seemingly mundane process of returns and operational moments into moments of joy.
Find Tobi Buxhoidt on LinkedIn here for more insights and engagements.
In the podcast "Maximizing Ecommerce Efficiency and Driving Towards Net Zero: A Discussion with Chloe Thomas," Brent interviews Chloe, a globally recognized expert in eCommerce marketing problem-solving. As the author of several best-selling books, a keynote speaker, advisor, and host of the award-winning podcasts eCommerce MasterPlan and Keep Optimising, Chloe shares insightful perspectives on sustainability, marketing trends, artificial intelligence (AI), and the role of AI in content creation.
Chloe passionately emphasizes the importance of small sustainable steps towards eco-friendly practices in the e-commerce ecosystem. Her approach suggests conducting a comprehensive supplier audit to spotlight potential areas for improvement. Besides, she underlines the need for businesses to communicate transparently with customers about their sustainability efforts.
Regarding the evolving dynamics of marketing in 2023, Chloe urges businesses to harness a deep understanding of their customers' emotional connections to their brands. Further, she talks about the imperative of staying abreast of changes in platforms like Google Ads, which could potentially impact profitability and sales if overlooked.
Concerning AI in content creation, Chloe articulates a vision where AI plays a supportive role rather than replacing human teams. While AI can generate base content, it's crucial to interweave brand identity and align messages with customer expectations using a human touch.
Currently, Chloe is focusing on growing her podcasts, finding new partners and sponsors, and planning new initiatives for 2023 to help her audience and sponsors more effectively. She also contributes to in-person and virtual events in the eCommerce space as a speaker and chairperson.
As an advisor, Chloe guides eCommerce business owners and marketers on business growth strategies. As a speaker, she frequently participates in premier online marketing events. As a writer, Chloe contributes regularly to the eCommerce and retail press, writes white papers, and has authored five books on eCommerce.
Chloe offers assistance in a variety of areas, including guest-speaking on podcasts or virtual summits, providing expert quotes, guesting on her podcasts, or becoming a board-level advisor for your company.
Away from her professional pursuits, Chloe has a flair for locating interesting TV shows on Amazon Prime, relishes pancakes and Lubeck marzipan, and enjoys reading works by authors such as Irvine Welsh, Susan Cain, and Chuck Palanuik.
In this engaging episode of Talk Commerce, Brent Peterson sits down with Amena Ali, CEO of Optoro, a company specializing in optimizing returns and reverse logistics for businesses. They delve deep into the world of e-commerce returns, discussing how an effective returns management process can greatly enhance customer experience and loyalty.
Amena shares insights on how retailers can manage returns to improve their bottom line, using AI to evaluate fraud risks and facilitate instant exchanges. She sheds light on the importance for businesses to adopt a customer-centric returns policy similar to Amazon's and the role of technology in making this happen. From discussing the importance of efficient inventory restocking to the increasingly critical role of reverse logistics, Amena provides merchants with valuable advice on enhancing their e-commerce strategy.
This episode is an eye-opener for retailers seeking to upgrade their returns management system, raise customer satisfaction and ultimately, increase sales. Whether you're a small-scale e-commerce business owner or an enterprise-level retailer, this candid conversation with Amena Ali offers valuable insights into transforming returns from a problem into an opportunity.
https://www.shopware.com/en/news/ben-marks-former-magento-lead-evangelist-joins-shopware-as-director/
https://www.groupbyinc.com/news/news-articles/groupby-delivers-next-gen-ecommerce-search.
Arv's LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvnatarajan/?originalSubdomain=ca
GroupBy's LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/company/groupby-inc/
Twitter, https://twitter.com/GroupByInc
Welcome to another episode of Talk Commerce with your host Brent Peterson. Today, we have the pleasure of chatting with Sean Chardhary, a seasoned SEO expert and the founder of Alchemy Leads. Based in Los Angeles, Alchemy Leads stands out in the SEO world, not just for its rapid growth but also for its unique approach.
Sean's agency is built on the belief that small, technically elite teams can execute complex digital marketing strategies more effectively and efficiently than larger firms. With a lean team of no junior staff, boasting over 103 collective years of experience in online marketing, Alchemy Leads takes on a select number of clients at a time, ensuring absolute dedication to each campaign they handle.
Their business model is unique, prioritizing client revenues and fulfillment so they don't rely on long-term contracts or outside investors. Sean proudly states that their hard work ensures they earn their fees month after month, with most of their clients sticking with them monthly for several years.
During this in-depth conversation, Sean shares his passion for the nitty-gritty of SEO, starting from his early fascination with Google's search algorithms. He helps demystify SEO, explaining how it is more than just smoke and mirrors and instead a solid strategy involving content, tech, and links.
Sean also provides an insightful overview of Google's EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) algorithm, discussing the importance of authorship in content creation, especially in sensitive areas like finance and health. He discusses the significance of WebCore Vitals and offers some useful tips on the complex link prospecting process.
If you're interested in the art and science of SEO, looking to boost your business's digital strategy, or simply intrigued by the unique ethos of Alchemy Leads, this episode with Sean Chardhary is not to be missed. Tune in for a conversation packed with valuable insights and learnings from an industry veteran.
In this episode of Talk Commerce, your host, Brent Peterson, sits down with a distinguished guest, Stephanie Bateman, a dynamic sales leader with a focus on meaningful business development and account growth. Stephanie's unwavering commitment to her work and her knack for devising simple yet effective solutions to intricate business problems have won her accolades in her industry, reflected in her impressive less than 5% annual client churn rate and extensive experience managing complex sales cycles that span over 60 days.
During the conversation, Stephanie shares invaluable insights on Gorgias, a cutting-edge customer service platform designed specifically for e-commerce merchants. Gorgias is built to support an array of tools, integrating support over email, live chat, voice, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and SMS into a single feed, enabling merchants to deliver top-tier customer experiences at scale on Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.
Boasting a current customer base of 10,000+ e-commerce merchants, including household names like Steve Madden, Timbuk2, Decathlon, and Sports Illustrated, Gorgias has become an e-commerce industry game-changer. The love for Gorgias among its users isn't just for its innovative product but also for its relentless focus on e-commerce needs and, above all, its lightning-fast customer service response times.
With successful fundraising rounds in December 2020 and this year, amounting to $25 million and $30 million respectively, Gorgias has doubled its growth in significant ways, including annual recurring revenue, customer base, and team size. The platform continues to expand rapidly, always in search of new team members keen to grow with them.
Don't miss this enlightening episode with Stephanie Bateman, where we dive deep into the world of e-commerce customer service and the ways Gorgias is making a significant impact. Tune in to learn more about Stephanie's journey, her strategies for account growth, and what the future holds for Gorgias.
In this riveting episode of Talk Commerce, we're excited to delve into the world of e-commerce monitoring and analytics with our special guest, Dave Hyman. Dave is the head of sales and the co-founder of Webeyez, a leading e-commerce monitoring and analytics solution that has made a name for itself by helping businesses recover lost revenue by tackling technical and operational issues head-on.
Webeyez's impressive track record, boasting $3M recovered from a single error for EQ3 and a massive 83% conversion increase, sets the stage for this enlightening discussion. Jomashop experienced a recovery of $420K from one issue and an impressive 37% conversion increase, while Imagination Media enjoyed 60% YoY growth and a $1M increase in sales for their clients, thanks to Webeyez.
An industry game-changer, Webeyez operates on a grand scale, analyzing over 1 billion data points and monitoring over 338 million pages every month. Their mission? To significantly boost businesses' revenue, enhance customer satisfaction, and cut costs through their comprehensive monitoring and analytics system.
In our discussion with Dave, we dive into how his approach to sales success is grounded in effective communication and a deep understanding of the client's needs. This allows him to build bespoke strategies that resonate with the client's business model, bolstering their market presence.
Dave also shares insightful details about the conception of Webeyez, a platform that empowers business and tech teams with the instant ability to pinpoint critical site issues that disrupt online sales and the overall buyer experience. Through data-driven insights, teams can make intelligent decisions and refine the online buyer journey to perfection.
Join us on this episode of Talk Commerce as we unravel the secrets of e-commerce success with Dave Hyman and Webeyez, and discover how data analytics can be a game-changer for your business's online growth.
To connect with David Allison, follow him on LinkedIn or visit www.davidallisoninc.com and www.valuegraphics.com.
In this insightful episode, we speak with Eboni Ryan, Head of Global Marketing at Digitalzone, who sheds light on the fascinating world of retail media networks. Initially birthed by retailers and now expanding across B2C industries, these platforms offer brands the unique opportunity to elevate their visibility within the consumer journey. Eboni uses Target as an example, illustrating how brands can boost their search results on retail platforms similarly to Google, but with a sharper focus on loyal customers. This creates a unique B2B dynamic as businesses aim to advertise on these platforms. However, while top brands often invest in these networks, the real challenge lies in capturing the attention of the broader brand market. Eboni also emphasizes the importance of evolving digital experiences and transparency to cater to a rapidly growing millennial B2B buyer demographic. Dive in to discover the immense value of retail media networks and demand generation in the current market landscape.
In this episode of Talk Commerce, Brent Peterson is joined by Brenton Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Twibby, a digital marketing agency focusing on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads. Brenton shares his insights on the importance of revenue and return on ad spend, and the potential pitfalls of focusing too much on impressions and clicks. He also discusses the changes in Google's ad platform, the shift towards AI, and how automation is shaping the future of digital marketing. Plus, Brenton shares his thoughts on the efficacy of SEO and organic traffic growth.
Show Notes:
Introduction
- Aaron Boike, co-founder of Three Click Mobile Fitness
- Aaron's journey from managing Snap Fitness gyms to starting his own business
Origins of Three Click Mobile Fitness
- Aaron's passion for helping others lose weight and enjoy life
- Mentoring under Benjamin Cowan, a local entrepreneur
- The booking process and focus on customer goals
Success Stories and Partnerships
- Brent's personal experience with Three Click Mobile Fitness
- Partnership with Performance Running Gym
- Building a community around the business
Performance Running Gym
- Purchased in May 2020
- Growth and involvement in the local running community
- Group runs, workshops, and seminars
Building a Community
- Offering free content and engagement opportunities
- Partnerships with Mylan My Shoes, a nonprofit that helps people reenter the community through running
- Connections made through running together
Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS)
- Implementing EOS in the business with the help of a local coach
- Benefits of EOS implementation, including the L 10 meeting
Getting Started in Running
- Aaron's advice: start with walking and gradually add running
- Sign up for short, inspiring races to stay motivated
- Brent's perspective on marathons and training
Online Presence and Future Plans
- Using an online idea to enhance a traditional business
- Three Click Mobile Fitness and Performance Running Gym's offerings
- Visit performancerungym.com to get started
Conclusion
- Aaron's journey from employee to entrepreneur
- The importance of building a community around your business and offering valuable services
https://www.linkedin.com/in/holman-matthew/
https://twitter.com/subscriptiondoc
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4bPOQPNvVYYwv_-ywHyzpQ
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesleyhensell/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx_LV0OmSG0NW3DwhenvW6A
https://www.instagram.com/riverbendconsulting/
https://www.facebook.com/RiverbendConsultingLLC/
Today, I have Dave Malda from Jitterbit. In this episode, we'll be talking about the top tech conferences in the United States and how they are shaping the future of technology. We also chat about ChatGPT, a powerful language model trained by OpenAI, which can answer any question you may have on a wide range of topics. So sit back, relax, and let's dive into the world of tech conferences and ChatGPT.
What is your perception of life in a war zone? Most of us can't imagine what it is like to work in conditions where air raid sirens are normal. We interview Roman Kuzub with Default Agency on his team, their work, and life in a warzone.
One of the most effective strategies for building loyalty with your clients is to send a handwritten note. Handwritten notes show a level of care and attention that cannot be matched by any other medium. Handwritten notes are a powerful way to make a personal connection and can be used to thank your client for their business.Handwritten notes can be sent as a thank you after a purchase, to celebrate a milestone, or to simply show appreciation for being a loyal client. The personal touch of a handwritten note will make your client feel like they are being acknowledged and valued. Rick Elmore shows how to build loyalty and show appreciation to clients by making a personal connection with them.
Brand-to-brand CoLab and innovative partnerships go beyond just creating a funny ad as you see in the Super Bowl. That's creative, but that's ephemeral. It's art. These Colabs that are being built today are conceptually interesting. They're not just visually arresting. You're like, wait a minute. What's that? It catches your attention. We interview Scott Moore, who is building solutions where you don't have to be Jay-Z or the CEO of Nike to do a collab.It would be best if you didn't have to be the president of Ralph Lauren. All brands should be able to say, Hey, these are my customers. This is what I'm trying to do with them. Who can I partner with to grow my brand? Unlock and Unleash the power of Brand to Brand collaboration.
Are you preparing for a Liquidity event in your business? When setting up an exit strategy for your business, it is important to consider the end goal. This means considering the timeline for when you plan to exit the business, the amount of time and effort you are willing to invest in the process, and the type of exit you are looking for. Consider the legal, tax, and financial implications of each option. Additionally, planning for potential risks and contingencies is essential to ensure a successful transition.
We are at a time when organizations are changing, and leadership is changing from a command control environment. Brent and Laura discuss the changing landscape of how leaders lead and how times are changing. In this episode, we talk about how accountability and how important it is relating to communication in leadership. The leader has to be accountable to their team.Leaders can learn more about how a culture of trust is one of the most important aspects in today's work culture. Business leaders may think that all the recent layoffs are giving them opportunities for more hires, but the truth is that we are still seeing historically low employment. Now enjoy this episode of Talk Commerce with Laura Boyd.
Sherry helps smart people solve complex problems. Sherry is the one you call when you're in burnout, feeling isolated, need to make a difficult decision, embroiled in a messy situation, out of ideas, and in need of a fresh perspective. Her superpower is bringing calm to crisis and insight to chaos. Sherry has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and two master's degrees. Sherry has been an academic, researcher, psychotherapist, and best-selling author.
Think about the last time you placed an order on an e-commerce site. You get a confirmation email, and what’s in it? Usually, only shipping and fulfillment information. Most online stores provide limited information and miss an excellent opportunity to upsell customers when they are not expecting to be up-sold. Irina Poddubnaia tells us how her solution helps store owners maximize their transactional emails and turn them into marketing contact points.
Have you ever wondered what the difference is between an accountant and a finance person? An accountant looks backward, and a finance person looks forward. Alejandro Santos helps us to understand the complexities and the simplicities in accounting, why you should be looking forward more than you should be looking backward, and how vital that finance person is in your organization.
Magento’s life as an ecommerce solution has been a roller coaster ride.Alex Teller is more excited about the future of the platform than ever. Alex talks about the flexibility of Magento and how it powered his business for over a decade. He dives into marketing and social media topics and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATMR5ettHz8
Jem Bourouh is a 24-year-old serial entrepreneur from Germany now living in Dubai. After being in the DTC space for more than four years and bootstrapping his e-commerce brands, Jem decided to invest and acquire other businesses, such as marketing agencies and ecommerce brands.
- Maier has been involved with technology and computers since childhood
- He began working in the IT side of a Halloween store in 2002
- He began teaching himself coding in 2009
- He got recruited to work for a luxury kitchen bath lighting retailer in 2010
- He has since gone on to form his own company and become involved in the Magento community, forming relationships and networking with other members to stay informed and provide better client services.
- Maier entered the e-commerce world without any formal development background.
- He took a job in 2015 that exposed him to advanced technology and software development culture.
- His company was renamed Bemair, meaning "one who enlightens".
- He is currently focusing on Magento, Adobe Commerce, Shopify, and headless platforms.
- He sees e-commerce continuing to form the fabric of our shopping society, but with the human connection remaining an integral part.
- He is a partner for Shopware and is looking to make headways into the Americas.
- He is urging people to support 4hcm.org, an organization dedicated to helping those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
- He believes luck and hard work are essential for success in e-commerce.
- He sees the venture capital ecosystem drying up and encourages businesses to focus on brand voices and engaging with customers.
- He encourages people to think of others during the holidays.
Alundas (Bam Bam) Havens started doubting himself as he worked through issues that stemmed from his time in the Marine Corps. He worked in positions that didn't have his core values and decided to start a podcast called "The Winners Paradigm."He created his brand of fear to teach any aspiring entrepreneur or human being that you can accomplish your dreams if you take action and learn from those who have been there.
https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/05/17/influencers-share-their-experience-from-adobe-summit
https://www.lovemasami.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynn-power-02b8904/
Reef Safe Sunscreen
https://olitashop.com/products/organic-mineral-sunscreen-lotion
We speak with Constanze Kratel who is the senior developer relations manager with BigCommerce. Constanze came from Microsoft and has been helping build a more extensive community of developers at BigCommerce. It's not just developer, developer, developer like Steve Ballmer used to say.There are lots of fun things in store with BigCommerce, and this episode gives you a taste of what is to come if you're a developer, project manager, or even a merchant. Lots of good things are happening at Big Commerce.
Are you a fearless leader? Do you shy away from hard conversations or dive headlong into them? We interview Kelli Williams, who recently took on the CEO role at Brand Labs in Minneapolis. Some of the work they do at Brand Labs is what they call fearless work, and it's all about having fearless conversations.It's about having conversations that you just started by saying, "You know what, I have some blind spots. I have some areas of opportunity to learn more to bring additional diverse thinking and to understand areas of bias or areas that I may not be comfortable with so that I can, as a business leader, create opportunities to have conversations and to create safe environments for all people on my team."
- Brent introduces Andrew and says they're an engineering manager at space 48. Andrew notes they're part of a local council community council, and Brent says they met the lord mayor. Brent says they're going to talk about the free joke project. Andrew mentions that DevX is an internal conference where they get together and exchange ideas. Andrew says they heard about the big hackathon organized by the bigcommerce team.
- Andrew and Brent talk about plans for a big commerce conference in manchester. Andrew notes that there was a discussion in on slack and that they got some good feedback. Brent and Andrew talk about expectations as a developer.
- Andrew and Brent overview bigcommerce and the community manager. Brent and Andrew discuss open saas and how developers can get involved.
- Brent and Andrew discuss building an application and the difference between doing front-end work and being an experienced developer. Brent and Andrew overview how to stage the application and test the authorization mechanisms.
- Andrew says if they’re interested in expanding into ecommerce development, give them a shout. Brent notes that they’ve been to many of the events space 48 puts on, and they’re going to let john steal the one. Brent says it was a challenge to get the accent.
The use of AR technology brings spatial depth to the onscreen buying/browsing experience - delivering life-like photorealism, mobile responsiveness, interactivity, and personalization – key influences re-shaping the digital commerce industry today. Gaurav has set out to deliver meaningful & delightful enhancements to visual experiences by deploying 3D Computer Vision and AI technological advancements of Avataar’s proprietary platform. He believes that the way in which end consumers are discovering products today, will undergo a massive transformation with software and hardware evolution in the current decade and wishes for Avataar to play a major role in this.
No two shoppers view a website the same way. So why are searches always happening the same way? Put some text in, and hopefully, you get the right results. We interview Gina Yuter with Syte.
Syte’s product discovery platform empowers your shoppers to instantly find fashion, jewelry, and home decor items they’ll adore with inspiring visual search journeys that drive conversion and build long-term value.
Personal handle - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmanjita/
Company handles-
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/get-mason/
- https://twitter.com/getmasondotio
- Page speed deck by John Hughes: tiny.cc/irx-page-speed
- Forbes Finance Council Article: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2022/10/ecommerce-tips-holiday-recession-economic-downturn/
- Optty (Buy Now Pay Later Aggregator): https://www.optty.com/
- Hyva: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/category/hyva/
- Wyomind Shipping Extension: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2022/08/insights-why-click-collect-further-boosts-checkout-conversion-bopis-in-store-pickup/
- OneStepCheckout Seamless Registration Feature: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2021/10/onestepcheckout-for-magento-2-registration-account-creation-modes/
Personal:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoleh
https://www.twitter.com/nikhamilton
Company:
https://www.twitter.com/homeownering
https://www.instagram/homeowner.ing
https://www.facebook.com/homeownering
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGegoDlazIT6OZTQBCba4cw
https://www.pinterest.com/homeownering
Roger Brown
https://www.amazon.com/Private-Real-Estate-Investment-Analysis/dp/0123911176
https://www.mathestate.com/
Here are more links that might be of interest to your listeners:
This is the link to my product for people who want to plan for Homeownership: https://www.homeownering.com/the-formula-steps-to-becoming-a-homeowner/
And this is about the financial, real estate analysis I do: https://www.homeownering.com/reafe/
Here is a free equity report we have on our site: https://www.homeownering.com/free-home-equity-report/
https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1YqJDoMjwmOGV
https://sites.google.com/bigcommerce.com/devx-at-bc/devx
https://sites.google.com/bigcommerce.com/devx-at-bc/events
https://twitter.com/Stephen69153856
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenhilliard87/
@Stephen Hilliard BigCommerceDevs Slack
If you want to grow your business and increase your profits, you need to learn how to segment your email lists effectively. In this Podcast, Jason Anson explains the best ways to segment your email lists and provides you with some of the best tools, tricks, and tactics for ensuring that every one of those subscribers is engaged.
Look for the Free Joke towards the end of the podcast. We learn that most people don't understand Brent's Jokes.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensmcfarland
https://www.linkedin.com/company/epiphanycourses
https://www.epiphanycourses.com
Sometimes young people need a boost to overcome certain challenges that might be stopping them from achieving their dreams. We interview Danielle Asah, the CEO and founder of Day Dreams, a digital marketing agency that helps visionary entrepreneurs and professionals amplify their messages and build their brands.
Danielle also coaches aspiring writers to publish non-fiction books and has a book entitled Becoming your Dream Self, Seven Keys to Own and Control your Life as a Millennial.
She is also part of an NGO in the United Kingdom whose goal is to motivate people to follow their hearts and make a positive difference in the world via their own unique actions.
Welcome to the new Breeze theme. Consider it the new base instead of Luma to build your next theme. SwissUpLabs created their new open-source template to improve customer engagement and make your site the search engine's top priority.
With the Breeze theme, it becomes easier to provide an excellent user experience and higher sales conversion.
The Breeze Blank theme is designed for all devices and by multilingual clients. The minimalist design is great for any type of website, and the Blank options maximize your customization opportunities.
The theme maximizes Your Google Light House Score.
The brands winning today are building a community that drives repeat purchases. Loyalty is gained in drips and lost in buckets because there are so many layers of competition. We interview Ryan Alford with The Radcast agency in South Carolina He has been radical about marketing advertising for 22 years.
Open-Source and Software as a Service have traditionally not been aligned. The traditional SaaS model is closed code on a multitenant host. The Open-Source model is something you have complete control over, and you have to host it yourself.
Open SaaS brings the idea of open source to the SaaS Community. We talk to Katie Hoesley about the Big Commerce Hackathon and how developers can be active in a vibrant community.
We talk with Marta Molinska about how she has helped hundreds of Ukrainian refugees as they crossed the border during the war. We talk a little about the Magento Association and how Marta is helping with events and the community. Ukraine can still use your help!
When you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else. What are you saying no to?
If you’ve ever experienced burnout, it’s like hitting a wall. You’re done. You’re mentally and physically wiped out. You’ve lost your capacity to see beyond your present situation. Your life has become gray, devoid of color.
Lisa talks about her experience with burnout and how saying yes too much can contribute to this. This is a great conversational interview that covers a variety of topics that causes stress and burnout in the workplace. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisahammett/ https://www.lisahammett.com/book
BigCommerce Hackathon August 15 - August 26, 2022, Starting at 10:00 am CD
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Tom Robertshaw on Twitter - https://twitter.com/bobbyshaw
Space48 - https://www.space48.com/bigcommerce-apps
I can do it faster myself. It will take too long to teach someone to do it. I don't trust that the person will do a good enough job. You must learn to elevate and delegate if you have said any of these statements. Jeff J Hunter helps us to understand the importance of getting S#!t off your plate.
We interview Sushma Vaya with Ranosys from Singapore. Sushma has been organizing Meet Magento Singapore since its inception. We learn about Singapore's vibrant and friendly city-state and the great event the team organizes there.
Listen to the entire episode and give me your feedback on the MA Pledge commercial I created at the end!
https://meetmagento.sg
Why go to Meet Magento in New York City? Vijay Golani joins us today to talk about why to go to events, how to organize your meetups, and the importance of becoming a Magento Association member.
This bonus Magento Association special features Meet Magento Indonesia and Muliadi Jeo. Learn more about the Magento Association and the great community that it is building around Magento.
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What are you doing to retain your employees? Are you thinking of happiness, or is your business model churn and burn. Brent and Kalen talk about this subject in this short episode.
How to know if you’re sending too many (or not enough) emails.
What to do if you’re still sending every email to your entire list
https://www.elevateandscale.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-stout-6804a117/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLjeqLuTNUhhhDFw0YSzTxA
which is improve conversion rates, decrease abandonment rates improve their acquisition efficiency and spend. Create brand loyalty and get people engaged in coming back.
And what do you do? Like how do you get the what are the tactics that you use? What's the data that you use? What are the segments that you use to move those KPIs in the right direction? And beyond that there's a slow slew of other problems, right?
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Have you ever thought about the actions you should take on your marketing data? JJ Reynolds helps to eliminate the guesswork by using Google Marketing Cloud. JJ shows how his team can increase MMR while measuring the customer's journey. He describes how you can take your data from your CRM, Google Analytics, and cart platform and turn it into a real-time data dashboard for you to take action on. This is exciting stuff for both B2B and DTC marketers.
The Celigo platform is a world-class integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that allows IT and line of business teams alike to automate both common and custom business processes, enabling the entire organization to be more agile and innovate faster than competitors.
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An indeed managed, high-performance cloud solution built to optimize Magento, WooCommerce, and WordPress sites, stores, and applications - Nexcess has been serving SMBs and the designers, developers, and agencies who create for them for more than 20 years.
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Adobe Commerce is the world’s leading digital commerce solution for merchants and brands. With Adobe Commerce, you can build engaging shopping experiences for every type of customer — from B2B and B2C to B2B2C. It’s built for enterprise on a scalable, open-source platform with unparalleled security, premium performance, and a low total cost of ownership. Businesses of all sizes can use it to reach customers wherever they are, across devices and marketplaces. It’s more than a flexible shopping cart system. It’s the building block for business growth.
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JetRails is your hosting partner, providing the fastest fully-managed ecommerce deployments in the Amazon Web Services AWS Cloud and on dedicated servers. The JetRails platform is built for speed with caching and accelerators at every layer. We can scale you on-demand and help to integrate the latest acceleration techniques to keep your store fast and secure.
Our team consists of strategic thinkers with years of experience in infrastructure, Magento and ecommerce business. We do our homework and make sure we understand your business objectives before working with you to set technology goals. Our specialty is custom-made solutions for how you work, sell and grow. We think this is important because, at the end of the day, ecommerce is about people, not computers.
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Remember the days when you could turn on Google Ads and the customers would come flowing in the door? Those days are gone and Lewis Rothkopf walks us through techniques and ways to spend smart and measure often.
Lewis has led global businesses and revenue lines at the world's foremost marketing, ad tech, and media companies. Lewis has contributed to the demand-side global inventory supply chain, as well as mobile, video, and advanced TV, streaming audio, digital out of home (DOOH), social, and emerging channels businesses.
Klevu’s AI and NLP-powered discovery suite includes on-site Smart Search, Smart Category Merchandising, Product Recommendations, and Personalization enabling ecommerce websites to deliver shopping experiences powered by real-time shopper intent.
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Webscale is the Cloud Platform for Modern Commerce, offering security, scalability, performance, and automation for global brands. The Webscale SaaS platform leverages automation and DevOps protocols to simplify deploying, managing and maintaining infrastructure in multi-cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Webscale powers Fortune 1000 brands and thousands of other B2C, B2B, and B2E ecommerce storefronts across 12 countries and has offices in Santa Clara, CA, Boulder, CO, San Antonio, TX, Bangalore, India, and London, UK.
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Engineering-Focused eCommerce Web Agency & World-Renowned Developer Training Platform
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Sales Layer is a Product Information Manager in the cloud that centralizes product information and synchronizes it in all sales channels automatically (print, web, mobile, product feeds for retailers, and more)
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Also, Sales Layer adjusts intelligently like never seen before and builds a custom database for you. You can automatically reorganize your entire catalog and add tags, categories, or channels.
Focus just on the quality of the product information. This is the PIM Evolution.
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Brent and Kalarav talk about all things Magento and how the community has been embracing the changes that are happening with Adobe, Magento, and the Magento Association.
Kalarav is a Certified Scrum Master, Adobe Certified Expert – Business Practitioner, and Adobe Certified Professional Developer with more than a decade of experience in the eCommerce world. He is a Delivery Manager with BrainVire, working with clients all over the world. He loves to explore and discuss the technical architecture of platforms and the growth of other commerce platforms.
I was able to sit down with Mariano Gomide de Faria at ShopTalk 2022 in Las Vegas and we had a great conversation about commerce. The United States needs to catch up with the rest of the world with conversational commerce. Mariano tells us how big players are going to be skipping distribution and going straight to the consumer. The world is global by definition.
Just going back to to multi-store front the, if we put all these pieces together, you have a solution now that will work across borders, across currencies, across languages maybe help us understand how big you've already helped us understand how big of a hurdle it was, but some of the solutions now that people can go to market with and the speed in which they could do.
Yeah. So one example I love to use. I think it might've been the first or second multi-store customer to go live with us in beta.
This was months ago. This was last year. It's company called The Bullet Group that had. Motorola rugged phones. So these are phones that you can they're dustproof waterproof drop proof, rugged phones, and another brand called cat phones, like Caterpillar phones that they sell all across Europe.
They launched. I think they're up to I don't know, 20 plus stores for each of those two brands that are selling different currencies, different languages, all around the world. And they did this in a headless way. Meaning they've got, I think a WordPress front-end is the design. And then the backend is Big Commerce multi-store and it's a multi geo scenario.
Ted Baker is doing the same thing. Ted Baker just launched this great apparel brand. They have something like a dozen different stores, different languages, and different currencies. Again, that's the multi-tiered. Use case, but you could also instead do a multi-site current use case. Like maybe your initial store sells to consumers, but then you wanted a B2 B store to sell to your wholesalers and your retailers.
You can do that with multi-store. You could also come up with different brands. Sub-brands promotional launches, a store that you spend off and then spend. And the power of this is that when you spend one of these stores up, you can use the same integrations that were on your main store, all the investment you put into building that initial big store, integrating into your ERP or accounting system, your email marketing, whatever your payment solution is.
You don't have to replicate all that work. You can leverage it. That's really the power and the speed of multi-store, but I think it's illustrative that those first couple of examples I gave you they have a dozen or more stores and they did it out of the gate.
And I think the difference right now in the landscape of SaaS at least is the other, your competitors are all having to have a storefront and a different backend. And then they have to figure out how to manage all those multiple backends.
That is correct.
You're letting the client effectively manage one place, one place to do everything and then distribute out those SKUs and even multiple currencies with different checkouts in different countries.
My understanding is that with Shopify, you can clone a store and it's pretty easy to clone a store. You push a button. You've got another store. That's like your initial store, same theme, same integration, same currency of that. You can't do multi-store, which is one account. And then start changing all of that changing the theme and the currencies and the that have like same integration, same backend one account, one store, lots of storefronts.
You have multiple stores and we've always been able to do that too. This is much more powerful. This is. Very appropriate for many of the world's mid-market and large enterprise businesses who do have multiple brands, segments, and, or geographies, but so many small businesses want to do the same thing.
And that's one of the neatest things that we'll be doing next. We the announcement today is live launched for our enterprise stores, but we'll be bringing this to our small business stores, our $30 a month for $80 month. Our $300 a month plan, you'll be able to click a button at a store and boom, there you go. Storefront, I should say.
So you did mention that these cons are these new things coming up for the smaller merchants. What else is coming up with? Multi-store front? What are the things we have to look forward to?
So in addition to bringing it to a small business and click of a button store addition, another major area of investment for us is in international capabilities within our native Stencil framework.
So having multi-language we already have multi-currency, but especially multilanguage and some other geographic capabilities built into individual stores. Multi-store front will benefit from this. If you're using. Our native design framework and theming engine called stencil. If you don't want those limitations today, then you can go headless with us and do your front end and WordPress or content stack or content full or pick any other front-end framework.
We're a leader in headless but we're bringing some of that native in as well. And then a final release, which should happen next month. It's March should happen next month in April is multi location inventory. So this is also going to be helpful because for businesses who have multiple warehouses and, or the addition of retail point of sale, we'll have the full inventory API capabilities for you to use logic within Big Commerce to track.
Where is the inventory for each SKU, and then present that either to the customer. If the customer wants to make a choice, buy online pickup in store or within your shipping optimization to say customers located here closest warehouse is there shipped from that warehouse. So a multi-location inventory APIs are coming out soon and that's quite complimentary.
Multi-store front and the
multi-store, the multi location inventory is going to help in the omnichannel world. If somebody is trying to connect some of their outbound POS systems into Big Commerce, that'll allow the, that inventory to be available to the storefront. Yes. And today you can manage that logic outside of Big Commerce, but bringing it in is nice and scalable.
It's the sort of thing that would let us, for example, we're integrated in partner. With point of sale platforms like Teamwork Commerce, and Square and Clover. Another differentiator from Shopify who has its own proprietary. One size fits all point of sale. We partner with the market leaders and EPAD now in Europe ISEL these partners can then integrate the knowledge of inventory counts that they have in individual stores into the API.
And then the merchant who may be. Remote ship warehouses that are outside. The point of sale can integrate those as well. And so that complexity can all be orchestrated within Big Commerce relieving you from having to have an outside order management system or ERP that's handling all of that.
A lot of your enterprise clients are going to have an ERP there's this enhances that allowing actually to connect multiple ERP is each store or each you can grab the inventory from each of those ERP systems with the multi, with multiple inventory locations. So you'd have to have that. So that's right. I think that, that gives another advantage to that. We did mention a little bit about headless and I'm always interested in headless.
Where do you think headless is going in the next five to 10 years? Do you think the the idea of having this of a monolith where we have an easy. Easily added front end that's part of the system. Or do you think a lot of stores are going this headless route?
I think headless will only grow. For example, when people talk about the metaverse, if you start creating storefronts in the metaverse that won't be based on pre-packaged themes coming out of Big Commerce or Shopify, you'll be designing that outside of our framework and then integrating a Big Commerce in as a backend, more broadly.
There is a very rich set of frameworks and content management systems and digital experience platforms that companies can use for their front ends. I gave the Ted Baker example, they're using BloomReach, which is a really nice design and experience platform. I gave the example of The Bullet Group using WordPress more than 25% of the world's.
E-commerce. Our WordPress stores, right? And WordPress is by definition going to be headless because WordPress is a content management system without its own. E-commerce backend. You need to use Big Commerce or WooCommerce or another headless backend in order to commerce enable a WordPress site. But you think about the pop-ups, the popularity of all these additional frameworks, NextJS and content management systems like content fall and content stack, the high end, Adobe experience manager, Drupal and Acquia ones.
We don't work with like site core. There are a lot of these and what they do is they free up the designers to do things that are more innovative, less constricted than, the templating engine coming out of the e-commerce platform. We've got great. And you can do a lot with your design and stem soul.
The vast majority of our stores are in fact designing within Big Commerce because those teams are great, but increasingly brands want to be unconstrained and they want to really innovate in their user experience. And this is the advantage you get with headless. This advantage is that you then now have to integrate your front end and your backend Big Commerce is the platform that makes that easy.
Our biggest competitor is commercetools, a German company that's like at the extreme end of difficulty. Because it's just this giant, API switching network and you need a point solution to everything that integrates you need your payments, integrated your email marketing, integrated your your catalog management, integrated your backend ERP integrated.
It is a nightmare. Whereas Big Commerce has all this functionality built in and you get to pick and choose which functionality in which of the thousand plus apps that are already integrated. You want to leverage. And so there's so much less work to do headless and many of the front ends are so well integrated that we'll soon be putting them into our channel manager.
You can just go in and click a button and say I want a new storefront. And for this storefront, you can choose differently with each one for this storefront. And I want to use WordPress or the storefront. I want to use ContentFull and Vercel for hosting. You can, that will all be configurable straight out of the Big Commerce control panel.
Do you see Big Commerce now as being the leader in that sector and people
chasing you? It's not just that. I see us as a leader. So does IDC when. And this is two years ago, but they had their enterprise report on headless platforms and they showed us as a leader. If I remember right, we might've been the only platform in the leader quadrant, who is a true platform rather than a microservices platform.
Like the other one commercetools. Is there maybe Elastic Path. These are all purpose built for headless commerce platform. Yeah. They're very expensive and hard to pull together. Whereas, Big Commerce was a full featured platform that starting six years ago said we want to serve the use case of companies who don't use our templating engine.
The first two companies to go live with Big Commerce where giants Harvard business publishing, which is still headless with us today. General Electric. Those were custom front ends. And over time we've really built out our API APIs, our connectors, our GraphQL capabilities. And so there's no doubt that we're fully invested in headless and.
It's every bit our goal to continue to be the best platform in the world to do for most businesses to do headless commerce.
So just a little bit about performance. You mentioned GraphQL and for the non-technical people GraphQL is a newer, it's a w let's just call it one step above restful APIs where it's much more performant.
The coverage on GraphQL is very large on Big Commerce and most things are available via of GraphQL, which gives you a better performance on your store, out of the box.
That's right, but there's still some gaps. There are some, there are still some components of our product that don't have GraphQL APIs.
We don't have the full admin API infrastructure for just quickly provisioning a full store using GraphQL APIs. That's all being worked on.
Yeah. And then, going back to the admin and separating admin out, a lot of times the complexity that brings and the, you could still build it out with restful APIs, that's right. So I guess as we close out today what are you most bullish about for Big Commerce in the next year,
in the next year? Gosh, it's so hard to limit. To one thing, you're asking this question after the launch of multi-store front. So I would have probably named that if you would ask me that question two days ago, but we're on the other side of that announcement.
One of the things I'm most bullish about is international expansion. We were international from day one. The company was originally found in Sydney, Australia, and only relocated its headquarters to the U S. Two years in when most of the customers were there. So they, they moved to the customers now are headquartered in Austin, Texas, but we've shown that we're really good at hiring great talent and because of our open and partner centric approach, going into new geographies and immediately being able to successfully serve the local.
Customer and partner ecosystem. We did that spectacularly well, starting in the UK in 2018. I think it was that business. Absolutely booming. Since we expanded into Italy, France and the Netherlands last year and beginning of this year, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. Now each of those is off to a nice start.
So one of my aspirations is to get to a point where we're competing and serving businesses in every country just about in the world of all sizes. I have a real passion for that. I was an international relations major in college and, ran PayPal Europe for four years. So this is an area where I really get jazzed.
We're also a giant believer if I'm going to limit myself to two things. The other thing I'm most excited about is omni-channel selling. We bought a company last year called feedonomics, which is the leading feed management solution. In the world feed management is how any commerce company gets its catalog of products for sale from out of its e-comm platform or PIM or ERP and into the leading advertising channels, social networks and marketplaces that it wants to generate demand from an sales.
feedonomics is good, so good because they have, they serve something like 28% of the top thousand US online retailers. They not only connect you into Google shopping and Facebook, Instagram, and WISH, and Walmart and eBay and Amazon and Mercado Libre and all these other great channels, but they transform and optimize the data in each one.
So that your catalog looks exactly the way it needs to look to perform best on Google and then separately for Facebook and separately for eBay and M and each of these has different schema for texts, length, description, length, picture, pixelation, and feedonomics enables you to optimize for every one.
And what it does is it makes it really easy for a business to advertise and generate demand and sell in so many more places where your possible consumers might be spending their time and that drives growth. So between multi-store, which is creating more of your own storefronts to sell to customers and omni-channel, which is getting your catalog distributed to all the other places where consumers may browse the internet or shop, omni-channel plus multi-store front, I think really is a one-two punch to help businesses succeed better on Big Commerce than they would elsewhere.
Yeah. And just as we close out here, I just wanted to make a comment on the challenges of going into new markets and how the open SaaS concept really helps to hurdle or get over those hurdles. It's possible for somebody in Bolivia or Uruguay to build a Big Commerce store and then to have a custom.
Checkout made with a custom payment system. That's a Bolivian bank and whomever is going to ship in Bolivia. Yeah. This is possible with Big Commerce where the majority of SaaS platforms, it is impossible.
That is correct. Although we also want to compliment that with having pre integration into, one or more of the leading payment solutions in Bolivia.
So the merchant doesn't have to go through that. If they don't, if they don't want to. Yeah.
I was just making an illustration
on that's right. We have that openness and flexibility as part of open SaaS.
That's great. Brent, as we close out the podcast, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you'd like to promote today.
You've spent a lot of time promoting multi-store front. Is there anything else that you'd like to promote that's even non Big Commerce?
Yeah, the only other thing I think I would promote that's related to Big Commerce that I haven't touched on yet is our B2B capabilities. B2B e-commerce is roughly as big as B2C and we're full featured. We serve B2B really well. We have a B2B edition with a whole bunch of core B2B functionality that comes out of the box.
And so if you're a B2B seller entirely or partially, we're a great platform for that.
Yeah, full transparency. We are a Big Commerce partner and we're using the B2B edition and it's fantastic. It works very well. Brent, thank you so much for being here today. It's been such an enjoyable conversation and I wish all the best for multi-store front.
It is a game changer in the SaaS business. And I say that from a. Background of another platform that is theirs, that is multi storefront. And I'm so excited to have this new feature inside of Big Commerce.
Thanks for having me, Brent and congrats to your parents who named you very well.
Welcome to this Big Commerce episode of talk commerce. And I have Brent Bellm here, the CEO of Big Commerce. Brent, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life. Great.
So I'm CEO of Big Commerce. I took over for the founders about seven years ago.
Big Commerce is a software as a service e-commerce platform where basically the software. Brands and retailers use to create beautiful, successful fast-growing e-commerce stores. We serve them all around the world. We're big, of course, in north America, but also Australia, New Zealand across EMEA, and very proudly have recently launched in Mexico with further expansion plans in south America.
We power brands of all sizes. Brand new companies and startups who get going for $30 a month, all the way up to some of the world's very largest companies. For example, Proctor and gamble runs a vast majority of its brands on sites all over the world. I'm dead commerce, SC Johnson, Unilever other customers of ours, just to pick one category.
We recently launched Ted Baker, a leading men's apparel and lifestyle brand. And we're one of the biggest software as a service. Platforms in the world. We IPO code two years ago and now trade as a public company on the NASDAQ. That's great.
So we're at ShopTalk today. And you had a big announcement yesterday.
Multi-store front. Why don't you tell us a little bit about a multi-store front for Big Commerce and what that looks like?
Yes, multi-store front is the biggest and most complex product release in our history and arguably one of the most complex and biggest product releases of any e-commerce platform in history.
What multi-store does is it lets any account or customer of ours, launch additional stores for additional brands, additional customer segments and or additional geographies. All from a single account. These stores can have the same or different themes and designs, catalog, checkout experiences, integrations.
The value of it though, is it's a scalable way for companies to expand how and where they sell, leveraging all the efficiencies of a single account. What is so powerful about this is that traditionally one could only get multi-store functionality from the most expensive large enterprise platforms, Magento enterprise, Salesforce, SAP, and what made it really complex to launch is our platform was originally designed for one account, one store.
You could have multiple stores, but they each had to have their own account, their own infrastructure. You're basically duplicating all your effort to build multiple. Every component of our platform had to become, multi-store aware. Catalog had to know which store it's referencing, checkout, which store it's referencing tax.
Every single component themes URLs had to be rewritten to understand which store am I talking about storefront for a given owner. And that rewrite took us three years. All while on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, meaning without disrupting the 60,000 roughly stores that are running every day, their stores keep running.
And then at the end of this path, they suddenly have the ability to add more stores without anything breaking on the stores that they had. Historically, that's really hard to do. Remember when Magento went from Magento one to Magento two, it was a rewrite. And a component of that was trying to significantly improve their multi-store front capabilities.
They had the benefit of being on-premise software. They could just throw away Magento one, rewrite it as Magento two and say, Hey customers, if you want this set of improved capabilities, you have to migrate. It's a total migration. You throw away your Magento one. And now you start over on Magento two.
You can't do that with multitenant. Software as a service multi-tenant means everybody's running on a single platform. And when you make changes, they have to not break the stores of everybody running. You can't tell them to version or upgrade or migrate. You have to fix it all while the train is running.
And that is what we have done. So we're immensely proud of it. It truly makes us a full featured complete platform for even the world's largest enterprises. And it's a very big differentiator, for example, from Shopify who cannot do this.
I want to back up just a little bit and just talk a little bit of a more more about SaaS as well and how much savings clients can realize in their SaaS offering virtues versus the on-prem.
You did mention that the having to upgrade and some of those breaking things. The upgrade path in a on-prem version, you do have to shut down and start up and spend money on doing that. Where are the savings then met from Big Commerce for the client when they're on just the SaaS platform,
when you're on SaaS a large portion of your software hosting and everything is included in.
You don't have to pay separately for hosting. You don't have to have an army of software engineers to maintain your code. You don't have to worry about security and bug fixing. It's all included. That starts for as little as $30 a month, and believe it or not on Big Commerce, if you go start a store for $30 a month, you're running on the exact same platform that Proctor and gamble is and all of our largest and some of the biggest companies in the world they're running on the exact same.
We're maintaining hosting, constantly improving performance speed each and every day. Our agency partners who are familiar with on-premise software in particular Magento often tell us that total cost of ownership of Big Commerce versus on-premise software can be anywhere from a 50% lower to 80% lower, depending on the nature of the customer.
And the complexity of their site. So it's a dramatic saving. I've always believed that this was the best solution for most companies who are, if you're a retailer or a brand, you're usually not a technology company and don't have world-class software engineers and it professionals, I believe in this for 22 years.
In fact, in the nineties, I was a retail consultant first, starting with retail stores, physical stores, and then going to. Internet stores. And when I cut the cord on consulting and said, I'm going to now bet my career on a single concept. What is the concept? I most believe in the world of e-commerce at the end of 99, I joined a company called escalate, which was one of the first SaaS e-commerce platforms back in the day.
I remember there being three or so others, I could name Yahoo stores. Volusion, Blue Martini. We were number four. There might've been a few others around the world. They didn't even call it SaaS back then they called it ASP. But at the time, this is like 1999, 2000 companies were spending five to $10 million to cobble together the software and the infrastructure and the hosting for their stores.
And Escalate came along and said, we'll do that for you, but only charge you 6% of your sales. But that scales and you don't have all the upfront costs. Incredible idea before it's time. That company didn't end up surviving and succeeding Yahoo stores and Volusion did, but they never really were able to modernize their tech stack as technology moved faster than they did.
But today I came back into Big Commerce and into this industry in 2015 with a total conviction that in the year 2015, it's fundamentally broken if on-premise software, no matter how good. And I knew how good Magento was because I partnered with them when I was at PayPal. My boss ended up buying them into eBay.
I was part of that evaluation in 2010. So I saw Magento taking off. I had all the respect in the world for what a great platform it was, but it was on-premise software. It burdened companies with having to license their software, then customize it, maintain it, secure it, host it. And most companies can't do that.
They certainly don't like the versioning and the upgrading. And I said it is high time that a SaaS platform was really the solution for the world's complex businesses. We'd already grown to number two in the world for serving small business. Shopify was number one, they had a five-year headstart on us.
And in the 2015, I said we're not going to catch them. We can't overcome their five-year headstart. They've already IPO. We have not. So we're going to do something they're not doing and nobody else is doing something that's new to the world. We're going to create what we call open SaaS. We're going to take a SaaS platform and open up every component and turn it into little microservices, catalog and checkout tax service, everything with our own API layer and SDK, so that the world's complex businesses.
Can customize can modify can't extend when they don't like our native functionality use partner functionality. We're going to try to make SaaS as open and comparable to open source and on-premise as possible. And so that is our mission. It's been that for seven years bringing enterprise level openness and enterprise level functionality to a SaaS plan.
So that the world's businesses can really optimize for whatever complexity or uniqueness they have, that's our vision for what Big Commerce is doing differently than any other company. It's religion for me. I think it's what a big portion of the world's companies need when they embark on the best path of e-commerce.
I liked the concept open SaaS, maybe talk about some differentiators, especially around the checkout and the payment section, Big Commerce does offer a lot of savings as well in that area. And maybe against some of the competitors, what are they doing in checkout and what can't you do?
Yeah. On some of the other platforms,
when I came into Big Commerce Shopify was already offering Shopify payments and more or less shoving it down the throats of their merchants. If you're a small business, you can either use Shopify payments, their proprietary solution. Or if you want to use someone else, you better hope they're integrated because that's up to Shopify.
And if you do, they surcharge you an extra 2% of all your sales. Now I come from a payments background too. I was doing internet payment gateways in the nineties. I was eight years at PayPal. I helped. Express checkout and build their whole merchant services business around PayPal Europe. For four years, I ran global product at PayPal.
I know payments. And one of the things I know best is that there is no such thing as one size fits all in payments. The needs of a business in Mexico , I was there last week, are completely different when it comes to payments and the needs of one in the United States or Canada and a solution built by Shopify a white labeled solution for north America.
Sorry. United States and Canada is not going to work in Mexico. Let alone pick any other country around the world. It's not going to work in B2B, but even for plain Jane credit card processing, there's real differentiation between a strike between a Braintree between CyberSource and Authorize.net.
Chase go to Europe, Adyen checkout.com. All of these companies do something different and special. It's not one size fits all. And so rather than in the pursuit of trying to take as much money from our customers as we can, which, what happened if we had a proprietary payment solution, our strategy is the opposite.
We go to each of these phenomenal payments players, and we say, let's partner, let's get you the single best integration into Big Commerce that you have with any platform in the world. So that if ever a business goes to you and says, Hey, we like your payments. Which platform can we best take advantage of it on, we want that to be Big Commerce.
I believe that statement is true for PayPal and Braintree for Stripe, for Chase, for Adyen, you go on down the list. We give customers choice and we don't surcharge them if they don't use our own proprietary product, because we don't have a proprietary product. We believe the specialists in payments are far better.
And especially with their diversity of. Then we would be, and that Shopify is by the way, if you want to know how you benefit from this, it's very straightforward. Just go to pricing on Shopify and compare that to pricing on Big Commerce. And you will see that you save a lot of money at all at the exact same size of merchant at every tier, you're saving a substantial amount of money using our payments players because our payments players compete against.
Whereas Shopify says use us, or, and we'll charge you more at every level. And if you don't like it, we'll surcharge you 2% to use somebody else. Now let's go to checkout. So if Shopify is making let's call it 2.9% off a small business. When they process the payments if they don't use Shopify, they want to charge them the 2% surcharge.
That means they have to control the checkout to. How much GMV, how much in sales of businesses getting so they can charge them that 2%. That is a core piece of the rationale around why at Shopify third-party checkouts are disallowed. You have to use Shopify checkout. They used to have third-party checkouts built by Bold, built by Bolt different companies, D versus T fast.
Or merchant-specific ones and they said, no, we don't allow those any longer because we need to know every single piece of data, every single sale. Cause we're going to charge you 2% if you're not processing the payments through us. Okay. That's how they make money. And they're really good at making money.
We, on the other hand, believe in our concept of open, which is that we do our best to make the best built-in checkout that way. But if you need to modify that checkout, you can do that. You can download the actual source code. I don't think this is possible. Any other SaaS platform you can download the source code that powers every single pixel in the Big Commerce checkout, modify it, re-upload it.
Now you've got a custom checkout running on Big Commerce that you've modified that this still maintains PCI compliance. That's pretty cool. You can also use a third-party checkout. We support proudly Bold and Bolt. And Fast and anybody else who creates a custom checkout, we support checkouts that are different other countries around the world.
You can have your own proprietary checkout. You can have a checkout modified for B2B and all the various B2B payment methods. We support that type of openness because businesses are complex businesses need to optimize for their geography and their customer and their use cases. And what we specialize in.
Is instead of a one size fits all playbook, open SaaS, flexibility, the power to let a complex business optimize for its complexity. And win that way,
Youth don't stop playing sports because they lose a game, they stop because they have a bad experience while playing. We interview Tim Williams about his company and his approach to youth sport.
Tim is the Founder and CEO at T.WILL Sports, a dynamic sports company that delivers a variety of youth, recreational, and competitive sports services. He focuses on youth sports and takes pride in the ability to educate through sports and the experiences that come with sports. His goal is to help parents and coaches to inspire greatness within youth.
With so much technological disruption, it is important to stay relevant and I can think of no better way than merging, acquiring, or being acquired. However, these transactions fail because critical deal processes, such as diligence and integration, are being poorly conducted without proven success techniques.
We interview Kison Patel, CEO, and Founder of M&A Science. As a former M&A advisor, he has seen these challenges first hand and set out to develop tools and techniques that address industry failings and enable M&A practitioners to drive growth and maximize value.
SAM GEORGE is a master at two things: discerning trends before they are recognized as trends and communicating these ideas to the public at large.
Sam was convinced he was insane. When anyone would not respond to his message, he would get upset. The process is predictable. He thought something was wrong. The delay must be related to him.
He wrote "I'll Get Back to You" to bring this issue to light and let people know they're not alone. It's important to realize that these emotions and thoughts are normal and can be changed.
Are you an entrepreneur looking for cash to grow? Banks, Venture capital, they all want a piece of you. Asher Ismail shows us a new perspective on funding a growing business and walks us through how his model will help entrepreneurs grow. Asher is the Co-founder of Uncapped. He helps entrepreneurs raise capital without giving up control of their business. The company was born out of frustration with the limited financing options available for European entrepreneurs.
Uncapped provides business advances of between £10k and £5m with 0% interest and no hidden charges, allowing founders to access fair and flexible finance. It makes money by charging a low flat fee which is paid back from future sales revenue.
Are you tired of the monotonous sales outreach that never seems to get traction? Do you need to contact thousands of prospects for your sales team? Need appointments booked appointments at scale? We interview Tyler Kemp with LeadRoll and talk about Qualified Sales Appointments For High-Ticket Service Providers and SaaS Startups
LeadRoll delivers unlimited sales bandwidth, quick turnarounds, and unbeatable service, helping your closers flood their calendars with qualified leads.
Do you want to create more engaging content in your newsletters? Jared Loftus helps us to understand the importance of a fabulous newsletter.
Rasa enables marketers to create newsletters that engage customers through curated content that helps to build relationships. They give businesses a way to provide a real benefit regularly for everyone on their email list. And not just regularly, but relevantly. Through automation, companies can engage with a new level of frequency without spending more time, effort, or money.
Imagine doom scrolling through Netflix, looking for the ideal show to binge-watch this weekend. Not the mind-numbing, watch while playing "Candy Crush" content, but the great shows that you really want to burn through 24 hours watching.
After reviewing thousands of low-budget horror movies and sitcoms, you finally stumble upon a hidden gem that you enjoy… but wouldn't it be easier if these incredible shows appeared automatically? Or if the entirety of Netflix was customized for your exact specifications? That's what Content Cucumber does (Well, they sort of do this)
Content Cucumber is a writing company. Their clients are metaphorical directors since everything they create keeps the individual wants and needs in mind. Their subscription-based service even lets business leaders update their blogs without lifting a finger, giving them more time to focus on their company (or watch Netflix).
We speak with Chris Chasteen, the co-founder of Content Cucumber.
How often have you gotten a handwritten note from an online store or a service that you bought something from? I bet you can remember when this happened last. David Wachs tells us about his unique business and his army or robots churning out thank yous and notes in your handwriting (But written by a robot!)
Isn't tax compliance fun? If you ever thought tax compliance was boring then you haven't met Shannon Kelly. Shannon (pronounced Shanuuun in Galic) entertains us with his tax compliance antics and then we dive deep into partner marketing.
Magento was born in Ukraine and the health and safety of our Ukrainian sisters and brothers are top of mind. Jisse Reitsma and Brent talk over a little history of where Magento came from and the strong Ukrainian community that has helped to make it a world-class e-commerce platform. We dive into Shopware and its advantages in today's market and close out with a little Magento Association talk. PWA to come next time
Contrary to rumors Magento Open Source is indeed alive and here to stay for a long time to come. Willem Wigman talks about the two different support models of Magento Open Source and how this will benefit the community.
Long Term Support from Adobe will be called the Magento Open Source LTS version. This is a very common practice in Open Source software. The Short Term Support or STS version of Magento will be supported by the community. We also talk about the benefits of a cleaner more streamlined version of Magento Open Source LTS and how this will increase the ROI of merchants all over the world using any version of Magento.
What is the future of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source? Vinai Kopp and Brent talk about the recent Adobe Developers Live Commerce conference and discuss the keynote. We talk about Mage-OS and how the community has stepped up to help Magento Open Source move faster into the future. We debunk speculation in social media and talk about how long-term and short-term support will work around Magento. The excellent news: Magento Open Souce is alive and well and will be for a long time.
Coaches are a dime-a-dozen, right? Maybe so. Maybe not. Perhaps you've never taken the plunge and experienced the transformation, Or you did and thought, meh. Been there. Was it YOU who went wrong? Maybe. Maybe not.
Henry Daas talks about his book FQ: Financial Intelligence as well as some of the highlights of the importance of having a business coach for entrepreneurs.
Do you want to sell your products across a multitude of Shopify stores? We interview David Perry on how Carro connects participating Shopify stores. This is done to enable cross-store selling or the ability for like-minded partners to directly sell each other products without the need for inventory, managing returns, or minimum order quantities. Sell your products on leading stores, sell their products on yours, or both! You can also discover and work with a massive list of top influencers with the free Carro Influencer Partnership service.
Do you know the four ways to add B2B business to your B2C Shopify Store? Avi Kumar helps us to understand some of the complexities around doing B2B on Shopify. We discuss different business models and how you can be successful on your SaaS-based eCommerce store.
Avi is the owner and chief wizard of Invisible PPC, a white label PPC company that is helping agencies break into new markets.
Four ways to add B2B business to your B2C on Shopify: Keep it simple, offer special Discount codes on the current B2C site for small-scale B2B sales and/or just testing waters. For more robust solutions consider Third-party wholesale applications. Simplicity and single store to serve B2c and B2B Use Shopify’s wholesale channel if already paying for Shopify Plus. This provides a simple ordering channel to receive B2Bo orders. Finally, a fully separate Shopify online store gives B2B customers the most leeway both during and after the project, enabling, among other things, different catalogs and promotions in different stores.
Trying to go online from the Distributer model, consider these points: 1. Is your distributor willing to buy the product/service online? First test with them. 2. Set a higher price on the website Vs what distributor end retailers can offer? Will keep your distributors/retailers happy and trust us clients are willing to pay higher prices on the Brand site. 3. Offer exclusive products online 4. Exclude distributor Geo from online and go in new areas. 5. Offer a percentage for online sales in their territory, this will buy their goodwill and support for online.
InvisblePPC White Label Google/Bing ads service focused local businesses, a great choice for small agencies working in the local markets. Highly cost-effective and ROI positive to run Google ads for local business niches.
Before the pandemic, most CEOs thought a 100% remote workforce was unsustainable. The new reality is higher productivity by employees who have had to work at home. We interview Karthik Chidambaram with DCKAP about employee happiness as well as his adventures in selling products.
We speak with long-time Magento Community member Aron Stanic from Inchoo. We discuss all the changes in the community over the years as well as the state of Magento and its brand. We finish off with a discussion on the importance of expectations in the client/agency relationship
The Indian Ecommerce market is progressing rapidly and merchants and agencies need to recognize its importance. Swapnil Ghone talks about his experience in the Indian market and we discuss some of the companies that are already succeeding.
Swapnil has nearly 20 years of experience in Sales/ Business Development/ Account Management, Project Management, Operations, Training, and Customer Services servicing the Indian market.
Artificial intelligence is amazing and is progressing leaps and bounds week after week. We interview Kate Bradley with Lately.ai and learn how their tools help social media managers produce and distribute social media efficiently while saving hundreds of hours.
Lately’s A.I. learns which words will get you the most engagement and turns video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts. Unlock which words will get you the most engagement with artificial intelligence that studies what your audience wants to read, hear or watch. Lately’s A.I. content-generator will then atomize any interview, webinar, conference panel, podcast, blog, PDF, word document, or newsletter into lead-generating social posts that get next-level results. Because that’s the power of artificial intelligence.
Brent: Welcome to this new year today, I have ghetto Yansen and he is with Spriker and I'm very excited to talk to him ghetto. You are the global business and technology. Evangelists for Spriker and which in the blue room or the green room, we talked about that you're the Ben marks of Spriker or the Ben marks of shop where, or the benchmarks of Magento or whatever.
Brent: However you want to say that. Why don't you do a better introduction than I just did. And maybe tell us what you're doing day to day and, one of your passions in life.
Guido: Oh, I have many passions brands. One of wishes now a Spriker indeed. Yeah, my background's in the. I guess to try to compromise a bit that I have a background in psychology and what a usability part of of psychology optimizing a web shop off the debts.
Guido: The study itself at university I'm done. I don't feel that old, but at university that didn't have a lot of online things going on. In terms of examples. So that was mainly about the usability. I could think of thing machine or a way, finding an airports how that works. But I always applied this to align to e-commerce and in, started out with things like mumbo and.
Guido: Wait maybe I am old mama Joomla and a, and I switched gears to to e-commerce and Magento in 2008. That time when we were all playing around with cameras and virtual mark, and those kinds of things that Magento came around, which was this magical thing that was way ahead of its time. And we all add a great fun, I think playing around with that and did that for, 13 years.
Guido: And I think that's also like 20 10, 20 11 that I met you. I think we met at a. It was the Moscone center in San
Brent: Francisco. Could be, yeah. Yeah. The fabric comm X dot commerce.
Guido: This will all be beeped
Brent: out with the knee, right? Yeah. In fact, I was just going through all my supplies. I was going through my old video just getting stuff, getting my mat cleaned up and I found of a video of the, in the intro or the, welcome from the.
Brent: PayPal slash Magento slash whatever eBay people. Yeah. And it was us coming out of the conference center and they all, there's huge. Just all the employees lined up welcoming, everybody to the event. So it was definitely a well thought out event and it was fun how could you go wrong?
Brent: I don't know if if the outcome was what they had expected, but it was fun. And then. A fun event, 2011, definitely.
Guido: Yeah. Events were a fun ride. Remember those events were fun. Now we had a lot of fun with that with Magento organized, a lot of stuff. For Magento we had the Mimi, Japan and Netherlands kickstart this whole global movement of Magento events.
Guido: And I've been lucky enough to to attend many of those those firsts, which are the best I think, to go through like those first events in a country where. People have heard each other's names online on slack or on the forums, but never met in person. So all those awkward first meetings, or those are great to to, attend to.
Guido: And yeah, I and it's also a, the Magento ecosystem is also where I met Boris the founder of Spriker and currently co CEO of Spriker. I think we met sills. 20 11 20 12 had a Magento agency. And some six, seven years ago when you started with we kept in contact and yeah, I would have lost a year.
Guido: I was working at a Magento merchants actually. And he approached me and said, Hey, we're growing like crazy at Spriker and we need someone like you doing community stuff. Spriker we need something like that. So to support that. I don't think you actually build this, build a community.
Guido: I The community is there and does its own thing. That's what we see, which has the rights. But we need someone from Spriker to facilitate what's happening out. There are very similar indeed to what's. What bandage. And before that, around though, we're doing a Magento. So yeah, that's the,
Brent: yeah.
Brent: And I, I did I've interviewed my Miquel Turk for both Spriker and it's an interesting and fun platform and one of the. I had made early on was about the who 15 and how we're working on getting sub one second times. And he laughed at me and he said, yes, Spriker, we're working on sub 400 millisecond times or something like that.
Brent: It is an interesting platform and I'd love to dive into it a little more, but first let's I know that you have been involved with. In conversion rate optimization, I think from an e-commerce standpoint, that is one thing that is often overlooked, especially. A lot of clients will come to a technology partner and they'll say, Hey, I want to build a fantastic website.
Brent: Then they leave those either the technology partner doesn't focus on that or the client doesn't see value in that. So can we maybe just have a brief conversation around, what does it mean for conversion rate and why is that? And so why is that even more important than the platform you're on or the store build that you're doing or any of those.
Guido: I think the conversion rate optimization traditionally it's in the name. It's, a bit limiting. It's the oldest Christian in the Ciroc community. Let's first define what it is. So Euro it's about a practice of semi or semi-truck. Practice or figuring out what works for your online store which usually involves doing user research talking to users, doing surveys, translating those into a hypothesis on what could work and what's, where you expect to be a better for, your store.
Guido: And then validating that through experiments. Usually that's, an AB test. That's, very short description of of, Shiro these days. And I think one of the things that was holding back Shiro, it depends a bit on the depends a lot on the area you're in the business you're in, but for many companies it's, relatively easy to say what the ROI is for buying more ads, buying Edwards.
Guido: This is what I put in. This is what I put out. That's, very straightforward and that's something that then people try to apply to Shiro and that doesn't really work zeroes more. Often long-term strategy, trying to figure out what worked for your customer. And it's really hard to say at the end of the day, at the end of the year what came out of that?
Guido: Exactly. Which is also a bit counter-intuitive because we're doing an AB test. So we can exactly say, this is what version a is doing. This is what version B is doing, but. The course of the year, like if you do three aunts or a thousand experiments what's your contribution? I don't know. And that's that's, sometimes hard for managers to get into and also it can also mean that you're not even growing, but it can also mean that you're not going down.
Guido: So your conversion rate stays the same. Your number stays the same if you're in a declining business like a couple of last years with, if you're in a, in a. Selling holiday houses, like booking.com. It's going to be really hard to increase refresher rates or to, or avenue. But you really need a team like this to understand.
Guido: Okay, what are people still buying? What are the, changing consumer behavior to last year's? And companies that do CRO well those are the ones that can survive this. And if you just keep buying more assets, that's going to be a very difficult thing to,
Brent: to maintain that. Yeah. I think with the Google mistake or the Google ad mistake or the paid ad mistake has always been, Hey, let's just throw money at it.
Brent: And money will also always get it there. And sure. It's true. You can plow enough money into anything to make anything work, but there was a diminish diminishing return on that investment. And I think one thing we learned, I was part of the PayPal mobile optimization program for a year. And we did learn that number one, measuring and doing those tests matters.
Brent: Getting the merchant to get involved and see what's happening. And then I think what you said is you are either not propping up, but finding what works best for you. And then even doubling down on that to make sure that you're putting that investment where it's really paying off, but learning things that are counter-intuitive.
Brent: And I think one of the things that we learned in the mobile optimization. Some of the things that you would think would perform better, perform worse when you think they should perform better. And I think from a from a psychological standpoint or any, type of human behavior standpoint, for me, that's always very interesting to learn.
Brent: Why and why would something you would think performed better perform worse? And I think for the mobile one, I think was all about we're going from this desktop. People have a perception of desktop and then people have a perception of mobile. And I'll just say in the Western world, I'll generalize.
Brent: Most of the time, we're still on our desktop computer buying something it's going more mobile it's compared to the emerging markets where it's, maybe they don't even have a desktop and they're buying everything online. Yeah.
Guido: Yeah and that's counter-intuitive parts saying, okay.
Guido: We think this is going to work with. But it didn't, that's also a big part of why CRO can sometimes be a difficult conversation. Because w with management often, Ciro's also an initially used just to prove whatever management wants it to prove. And that doesn't always work. For example with, booking that I just mentioned that it's booking.com.
Guido: It's you can book hotel rooms there. It's a big company worldwide. It's based in the Netherlands originally. So that's why I use it as an example. There are the example of running experiment. But they, publicly said it. Okay. One in 10 experiments is success. So that even for that company, that's the pinnacle of AB testing and running experiments.
Guido: They're really good at this. And even they well fail nine out of 10 times fill as in doesn't go up doesn't increase your conversion rates or revenue or whatever you're optimizing. So you can imagine if, you don't have your processes in place or you're not as good as booking yet, that number is not as good as one in 10, but might be wanting 21 in 50 or whatever.
Guido: And that's, also I think Bartel for whites white can be really hard to start For companies doing this because you really need to be dedicated. It's not just running a three tests a year and then the hope for the best. That's probably not going to work for you. So that's makes it a bit harder than just buy more Google ads.
Guido: But yeah, you need to realize that. The traffic to your website, that's part one, part two is getting the people on those websites to convert to whatever you want them to buy. And it's still a very important blocking factor if that's not, good. And if you're double the amount of people converting on your websites, that's probably going to stay there.
Guido: Even if you stop optimizing today, if you double that and you're stopped today, it's not going to be we worse tomorrow. Less like things with ads. If you still buy ads today, you're not going to have any traffic any more tomorrow. So that's going to be I think Sierra is going to be in the end.
Guido: There's going to be a better investment, but yeah,
Brent: I think that looking at at what people are doing there, the op the, alternative is not doing. And then you don't even know, then you're really just sailing into a black hole without any knowledge or, thought about what you're doing. So measuring it.
Brent: And I think I've heard is that it's hypothesized, so you can come up with some experiments, you observe those, you measure them and then adjust after. So even, like you said, one in 10 or, one in 20. Those numbers mean that at least you've, found success in that little piece. And normally not normally, but let's just say in the business world if you get a one and 10 on a stock pick and that stock picked does a thousand.
Brent: The increase in your business or your, return? That one in 10 usually pays for the nine. And I think if, as we dig in to CRO and we work in on those specific things with, clients and learn what is doing better, those that one in 10 is going to give a payback. And I'm guessing booking.com does it because it gives them a payback.
Brent: And of course they know their customer.
Guido: Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you're interested, you're all, if you're, like I said you're in an agency you want to sell these things to clients. I think it helps to frame it in a totally different way. Don't, sell it as optimization senators, risk managers.
Guido: And a way to prioritize your backlog. If you run the experiments and you say indeed nine out of 10 would not have works. That may, that means that you save money on implementing those nine things that wouldn't would not have worked anyway. So you don't have to implement them. Just implement the one that does work.
Guido: And, you can also say to the strands that's maybe you think you're not experimenting, but you're changing a little things on your websites today and tomorrow under the author, you still, basically, you're still experimenting. You just don't have any idea what the outcome mess of the experiments.
Guido: The overall sum, you know what happens at the end of the month when you're looking through your books okay, this is what we solve, but you have no ID which. Which of those experiments that you're, I don't know that your content team and what your design team, whatever they or development team, whatever they deployed, you have no idea what those individual experiments contributed to the whole.
Guido: So you're not learning anything. Exactly. It's something
Brent: you can build upon. All right, so let's tie this into Spriker. We, Came on to talk more about Spriker than CRO, but how how we
Guido: can do multiple episodes of breath is found. Good.
Brent: Good good So how well let's, frame it around Spriker and, your role.
Brent: So some of your role is, going to be helping clients and some of your roles building a community.
Guido: It's a bit of a it might, feel like a bit of a career switch, so I'm not, I won't be. So for the last 10 years I've been running those experiments, running hero programs and actually building teams that do this.
Guido: So I won't be doing that. That Spriker at least not, initially. It's, more about the community part. The thing I've also been doing with. With Magento on the side for, 13 years. That's what I'm going to focus on doing doing for Spriker, but it still feels a bit it still feels a bit similar, so I'm not running AB tests anymore, but I'm still trying to.
Guido: To get the best possible feedback out of that community and use that to make Spriker better. And it can be Spriker the product can be Spriker the services that we offer. So in that sense, it's not that far from what I've been doing is Bombi. It won't result in an AB test, only commercial websites.
Guido: But I still plan on running some experiments with the community to see what's working and what isn't, and then collecting that feedback we are building or expanding, facilitating the community that we have. That's a, that's the main goal. Some of the things. That we have. So we have a couple of subgroups within that community.
Guido: We already have a partner advisory board for both the solution partners in the technology part. That's already running. I'm not involved with that. I'm currently working on seating, a customer advisory boards. So that's existing customers getting them to get our coupler, like 15 customers, getting them to get R and R on a regular basis.
Guido: And I get feedback from them on how they use system and help them communicate with Spriker in a better. So that's one thing I'm doing. The second one is regular user groups. So we already had to use a group sets Spriker before the pandemic, those are now being continued on our remote basis.
Guido: So we had our first one last month, which was really fun. Doing that and that's, more aimed necessarily at at the strategy level. There's more day-to-day users that are doing that. The, like most user groups are and a third one is that's working on I'm not sure about the name yet, but like a developer attraction and adoption group.
Guido: So there will be people from, clients, from solution partners and from Spriker itself to she. Okay. What can we do to get, to attract more developers basically to Spriker. We've seen that with, Magento that has, can be quite the bottleneck if you don't have enough developers out in the world.
Guido: So we have a great academy team. That's a surprise. We've got some great courses to onboard people, both for people working in the back ends for developers itself or for people selling selling Spriker those courses that it's something we have. So also I think learning from I'm not the only one from magenta and the spikers and the LA people with Magento background.
Guido: So Carol making sure that Spriker has really good documentation. So that's a, this has been thinking. But the academy, of course only works if people know about Spriker itself, you need to get those developers on board first. And so that's going to be part of that's that third group that I'm working on to figure out, okay, what can we do to onboard more people more developers and get them enthusiastic about the platform.
Brent: It reminds me of the tech stack on spreads. The, what is that? The platform's on, tech beach BHP. Perfect. Yes. So a Magento developer could, he could transition a Spriker or fairly, easy. Yup. Yup. And
Guido: multiple have
Brent: gone sour yeah. It seems to be. I think we've always said this with Magento.
Brent: It seemed like Magento had run the course with eBay and then mark Lavelle and the team came in and, really reinvigorated the community. It seems like red, another tipping point now did an amazing job at that. Absolutely. We're at an another tipping point. So it sounds like some of your role is to listen to what the community is saying and maybe.
Brent: Not adjust commercial aspects of it, put at least adjust communication aspects. Would that be a good realization of, part of your role of how the community is reacting, not reacting, but forming strategy and forward-looking planning in to involve the community.
Guido: Yeah. And of course that's something I experienced in the last 15 years with Magento myself being an active community member, but multiple working on the I'd never worked on the Magento site itself.
Guido: So I've seen something that Magento did really well. I've seen some things I think Magento could have done better. And that's, definitely the part. And one of the first things I said two boars, whatever I'm going to do I won't have sales targets. That's an important one. For this job to work people need to trust you, right?
Guido: That, they need to be able to come with you with open feedback, open open criticism about whatever they think is important for them to continue their journey with with the products and that shouldn't result in a call from the sales department next day, saying. Yeah.
talk-commerce-guido-2022-1-10__22-55-15: Why
Brent: did you do that?
Brent: Why did you say that? I've definitely I've unfortunately, or fortunately had those calls. It does get you. And unfortunately those calls do change a little bit of your direction as a, maybe even as an agency head or as a, or a community organizer in order to get money from. The not from the community, but from that entity and Magento was very good at saying, we're never going to give you money for anything.
Brent: So that was easier. But in in order to get people, let's just say, get people involved. There was a aspect of, we, you need to tow the line. And I agree there has to be some kind of line that has to be towed in terms of don't don't bash us on stage and at a meet Magento event, which actually happened.
Brent: And it should happen when it's something that's egregious. But there are I think there always has to be a commercial aspect to things. And again, so just help educate me. Is there a community version of spark or is it completely commercial?
Guido: It's completely commercial. It's the sources.
Guido: But it's not an open source license. So it the full code is on the, is available and get up for everyone to see and to try and as a and if you're like me too lazy to install it. So there's there are demos available for the different markets that we serve. So we have B to B, to C we have we have marketplace solutions so that's all there for people to see.
Guido: But if you want to use the product, then it becomes a commercial license and that's fully based on either the items sold order. So it depends a bit on the business model and I guess on what's our sales team agrees with
Brent: the clients. Okay. So it's negotiable somewhat.
Guido: Now yeah so, they have it's not necessarily negotiable, but there are levels that you can get to.
Guido: And then of course the better the price becomes lower. Yep.
Brent: Got it. Yeah. Marketplaces is certainly a, big topic right now. Everybody's trying to do a marketplace. I think Magento has made the way Magento is, engineered. Isn't great for marketplace applications. So tell us a little bit about how the marketplace would help a merchant.
Guido: Yeah, and I think w what makes breaker great is that it's, it really focuses on the non standards business models, protocols, the sophisticated business model. And usually with specifically, I think with, marketplace with B to C it's, usually straightforward and there are a lot of platforms supporting that.
Guido: And then you go to B2B or to marketplace usually. And like you said, with Magento You often get into the area of a lot of customizations. And then you need a platform that supports that the business models get more and more diverse, more and more when you go to B2B and marketplace and you need a platform to support that.
Guido: So I think that's one of the, strength of
Brent: biker a Spriker started in Germany. And it's branching out to the rest of the world. So what are. What are your plans now for the U S market? I'm assuming that's the next big market to tackle.
Guido: Yup. So we got our first clients in in the U S and this is definitely, yeah.
Guido: Western Europe and the U S or for many platforms to go to markets, especially if that's one of those countries, your, if you use your own country, U S is a big focus. We have already started there this year. Or 2021 last year and this year 2022 will be a big focus here and we will have we already had an exciting events.
Guido: There are last year, I think we'll have one or two excite events. There are next year for context excites is the spike of fruition of of Magento. Imagine if if that's, if that helps you with with context So that's another, we are definitely focusing on that, but for me personally like I said, the one aspect that I find important is to grow.
Guido: That's a developer base. And specifically for that, I think it's even more important to be a presence. What is feasible in countries that are not Western Europe and the U S because there are a lot of development communities in south America and Africa in Asia, Indonesia, India. And that those are typical markets where marketing or sales is not active or not active yet, or not as active in, in as in Western Europe and in the U S so that's going to be a fun challenge for, me and my team to, see outcome are we are, we can visit get visibility specifically in those markets, but in terms of sales we're growing really fast in in the U S right now, I think this Fastest growth rates.
Guido: Yeah. So it's going to be definitely a big one for 2020
Brent: type of merchant. That would be a good fit for Spriker.
Guido: Yeah. That, that will be the, customer like I said, that has a sophisticated business model and that is a tricky term, I think, because I've met a lot of, I've also worked agency side and every customer thinks they have a sufficient.
Guido: Business model. So that's, always a up for discussion but a typical I think the best suit it's like we just said with B2B and market. Those are definitely the customers that would be a better fit force. Private, I think B2C, although we do have some beets see clients that have more sophisticated mall.
Guido: Sorry if there's, if it requires more customization then then your standard shop, that's definitely a good one. Maybe, a good dimension for context that's Spriker is a password. Oh man. It was on-prem before that we had on-prem we still have some on-prem customers but we only sell the past solution right now.
Guido: So platform as a service and which means we also everything, but there's still a lot of customization that you can still do that you can either have an agency for, we have a lightness partner now. Our orders. You can do in-house if you have a development team in that.
Brent: Oh as I think that past solution and just to educate our audience, the past means that it is a single installation, but it is all, it was hosted by the vendor.
Brent: So you're hosting the platform, you're supporting the base code. But it's the single issue, but it's not shared, it's not an instance that shared like a SAS solution. It's not shared with thousands of people. How do you, then
Guido: you anchor customize it. You can build on top of that compared to with a SAS solution where you can customize some things through settings, but if it's not in the setting, Then you're done.
Guido: Yeah.
Brent: And it's a big difference there. It's the only way to customize that is to build an application that's sitting outside of the application that would con connect via an API. You can't build it directly into the software.
Guido: And a nice addition to that is that's we're going to release. I think there's going to be a Q2.
Guido: I think that was announced. I hope I think Q2, we will release our SDK and AOP. That's the. The application that the platform basically that we will have so then we're going to have our own marketplace, our own app store for things to connect with. Spriker. So then we can have a shared database of whatever you want to connect.
Guido: If you want to connect your your email, your CRM, your ERP to Spriker. You can do that. And I think that's especially interesting because a lot of things in Spriker are interchangeable. So w what the gardener calls package business capability. BBC's which basically means that everything in Spriker it's a collection of those package business capabilities.
Guido: And that's, talk to each other through an API. So if you want to, for example remove that or use your own. You can remove practice checkouts and use a third-party checkout or your own checkouts. And that's different elements in Spriker have. We have I don't know the accounts, but we have several PVCs that consists of several undoes of modules.
Guido: You can just swap them out and especially with the AOP, that will be really interesting because then you can Israel can be relatively well, even more easy to do.
Brent: So coming back to the past model one of the complaints with the Magento version of pass is that it, doesn't necessarily save the client any money on, maintenance because you basically, you're hosting it on Magento, but they'll help support your core, but they won't do anything else then.
Brent: Answer support tickets. So is Spriker taking any different approach to that? Do they, are they doing some of the core updates on the code itself?
Guido: That's a good question. And I don't really, I haven't worked with a Magental spouse version, so I don't really know how to compare it to to that. But yeah, the this Riker core is maintained and it's a it's the same for everyone.
Guido: And you can then choose to update it for you. Yes or no. For all the different models. There are hundreds, I think we're currently over a thousand modules of Spriker itself. They're all versions. You can choose to update. Those were never Whatever works for you. You can you can, of course, ideally update them all when they come out.
Guido: And then that's all on a rolling basis. I think on average, I heard someone say that on average, we have 10 releases a day. That's something I'm definitely that's, being maintained and that you can benefit
Brent: from. So the I, know that speaking to Mike McKell earlier in the year, he talked a lot about the BDB version and then the scalability and the robustness of the platform.
Brent: Maybe tell it, talk to us a little bit about the type of client that would look at B2B and skew counts and things like that.
Guido: Oh, yeah. In terms of we have those extreme examples, and last year at at the, excite conference we had one they have over 550 million sq use in their Spriker store, which I find mind boggling.
Guido: That's that's, very impressive. And yes, people order dare on a regular basis. It's not just sitting there but they they sell electronic parts it's and the case study is actually on my website. If you're interested, it's a sociability and this is the name of the. That's the platform.
Guido: And yeah, I think In terms of, and that's, why I think Spriker is very interesting to me personally. I was funded and that there's already, there's something I found with, Magento. I funded the B2B sites, that those those clients always way more interesting PTC sites because of those those tricky business models and the tricky Details that you need to get right in, B2B.
Guido: B2C can be hard with a lot of customers. Just the sheer volume of, customers. If you have a lot of shopping that those customers of customer behavior change can change fast, but with B2B also have this and the detail that you need to get, right? All those specific things for your business.
Guido: I was Working with a company that did prince and they printed basically on that. And that means that if you print on everything, it's really hard to get templates for, printing. I know, yeah. Umbrella umbrellas, that's a different cars. You can mugs pens, everything, all the merchant you can think of that they would print it.
Guido: And which, meant that it was basically almost all manual. For, the depends that some, automation but basically everything else was done manually, which is mind blowing, but then you need to keep in mind when, someone orders it they had their, our local supply was in the.
Guido: But if, you didn't need a speed delivery, so if you needed a speed delivery, they would do that in a, in the Netherlands. And then you'd have an extra fee for that. But if If you would want to deliver, like in one and a half, two weeks, they would actually ship all the stock that was in the Netherlands.
Guido: Put it on a on a truck, drove it to Poland, and then there are people would unpack everything print it, put it back in a truck, drive it back to the Netherlands and. Because it was so labor intensive, that was actually cheaper to do that than just to print it in the Netherlands, which again is mind blowing, but then you need a system, a backend that supports crazy shit like that.
Guido: And, that's what I find interesting. Those, clients of debt, those are the things that are holding. Or, things your system is holding you back on? I think that's those are great cases for Spriker.
Brent: Yeah, same example that we worked with the eyeglass company that had the same idea where they, want part of the eyeglasses would get done in a factory, in one part of the city.
Brent: And then it would get shipped across town to put the lenses in the frames or whatever. Then they get shipped to the retail store, get shipped back, and then. Then get shipped to the client directly. If that's that's the if that's the model that they had. And that was I know that for Magento, that turned out to be very complicated.
Brent: But, yeah. So I can see how that would from a standpoint of complexity and from a platform where you that's, where you, the necessity of having a platform that you can modify and make your own. Essentially,
Guido: if you want to do a. What we call unified commerce. So your terminals in your stores, your physical stores, where people can can order stuff or clients can order stuff locally.
Guido: And that's connected into your system complexity rises quickly. And also things like in the beginning with, Magento Magento was fixed right now, but in Magento in the beginning it was all already really hard to have multiple warehouses. There's also, it was also another thing.
Guido: And luckily Spriker fixed that from beginning. That's, something. We have a lot of clients that's a doer multiple millions of revenue. That's the things they want to fix and expect from from a platform to. Yeah, it's F as a default.
Brent: There's a whole bunch of buzzwords floating around in the community on monoliths and microservices and micro blah-blah-blah PWA.
Brent: Where is Spriker sitting in on that. And I guess from a technology standpoint, is it easier for a customer to get into it and not worry so much about the technology? Or are they going to have to. Not worry there's going to be a certain amount of development needed to get things running.
Guido: It's a past platform so, there will always be some some development needed to get at the Oregon. Although we do have a. We do have for there's a front end that you can use if that's what you want, but you can also add your own phone tents. It will need to be connected to, the data that you have or data that you have needs to be important.
Guido: So those are always things that, that needs. And yeah, there are a lot of buzzwords and it can be complex can get complex really fast. I'm still struggling with it myself. And honestly, the first time I heard the term monolith was with the open letter the Magento Ruthie last summer, they started complaining about how things were going and partially rightfully and that's where I I formed encountered the term monolith before, but just disregarded it and then, but that, wasn't the first point. I thought I need to look into this and then, oh, this is what they mean, but yeah for, a Spriker I think Spriker is more something that's often listed in the.
Guido: Corner of things, a mock standing for a microservices, API, firsts cloud something and a cloud native and and, the headless. So those are also for. Yeah.
Brent: Excellent.
Guido: But that's, like a, term that people use often. We, were not fully onboard with the microservices part of that that equation Spriker believes more.
Guido: And that's what I just mentioned with, the package business capabilities. Microservices first will mean that everything is a microservice. That that leads to a lot of overheads very quickly. And that's, not needed for most companies. And there are always exceptions. But it's not something that you'd benefit from.
Guido: And then on the other end of the spectrum is the, monolith like a magenta was at the. Mainly and then Spriker sits, in the middle, which we find very comfortable and most lines seem to be for most lines. It seemed to be a nice balance between the flexibility that you would get with a, with API first and microservices.
Guido: But to have those package in things that make sense for the business package business capabilities. It's not a developer term. It's, business. It's a business term. Alexa, you're you to have a package business capability for you can have a CRM or an ERP or your checkouts or your phone tense.
Guido: Those can be different, capabilities of your system. And for, clients that just makes more sense. That language makes more sense and the way at least Spriker has built a, it also prevents the overhead that, you would get with only using microservice.
Brent: Yeah. I like that term, a package business capabilities.
Brent: Yeah, it gives the I think it, the idea of behind that is. You don't there. There's going to be a lot of solutions that would apply, but you don't necessarily have to do the customization, but if you need to, you still can. So clients or merchants can feel better about. Making their solution work at a lower cost or at least a lower initial investment to get them up and running.
Brent: Yeah.
Guido: And the Spriker is also not. It's targeting the local bakery rights. That'd be fair. It's we're, targeting a larger enterprise businesses mainly and those usually. Either an agency or their own development team that, can handle this. And that's also where I think Spriker shines.
Guido: A lot of developers love working with Spriker because it's so maintainable for them, they only need to focus on those extra things that are the, exceptions basically for their business and not necessarily maintaining the system behind us. That's also not something I'm not a developer, but a.
Guido: Recurring daily tasks, not something necessarily that you're looking forward to for doing for most people, at least I'm generalizing here, but most people the new things, that those are the challenging things. That's what you want to do with most developers want to do. And that's, what we enable.
Guido: And, along those package, business capabilities, one thing I I think you need to mention that's not something that's probably grant funded or something it's a term developed by by Gardner Spriker was also they recognized Spriker as a, as efficient, airy in their magic quadrants last year.
Guido: And it's only the second year that we, that the sparkle was even listed. And the magic quadrants. And we're already we were spoken was the platform. We moved the most distance in a positive direction within that. Within the quite uncertain, there was really nice, but also if you look at this quadrant the market changed so much compared to when we started with Magento.
Guido: Like I said, with Magento, we had commerce where we had virtual mark and there was Magento And we had a couple of like Intershop or those kinds of more commercial packages. But right now the magic quadrants, the market is so different than Demetric wardens already contains like 16, 16, 17 systems.
Guido: And that's like the creme de LA creme from, what gardeners selectors are the F right now are the hundreds of solutions that you as a company can pick. That's a huge challenge, I think for both developers, both an agencies and clients to say, what on earth do I need to a, big year? A lot of we saw all of you included agencies that's select a platform, right?
Guido: And you need to stick to dads and that's what you invest in. And that's what you then hope sticks when for, long enough. But also in, in debt, I think. And of course I am definitely biased in this in-depth. Spriker is positioned really well because it's so open with the API, with those package B business capabilities there's relatively easy to adopt for you as an agency or develop our work lines that fits really well with with whatever you have, right.
Guido: With the adjacent tools for e-commerce that you need to connect with debts because it's focuses only on the, on you bringing development through the table for, everything that's specific to your business and enabling that. I think that positions us
Brent: really well.
Brent: Five 10 minutes left here. What are you excited now for 2022? What do you see coming on the e-commerce horizon on the technology horizon? Do you think? I think one thing you mentioned is that there's so many more technology players in that magic quadrant and it's, you would think that we'd be seeing some more consolidation, but it's almost as though we're splitting it between SAS pass and on-prem, and then everybody.
Brent: There's more of them. So what, do you see happening in 2022? What's exciting. More and more. Yeah,
Guido: this is very exciting. I, do think and, actually I had the same thing with magenta. I never looked at other platforms and look the oldest competition that we need to fight. Those other platforms.
Guido: Apparently. The e-commerce market is huge and we all get to play a part in that. And there's this place for almost all of us or these, a lot of us there is place for, Magento and there's place for, a shop where there are a lot of business cases, that's fifth with those, and we don't necessarily need.
Guido: Bethel each other. And in a ring and the bolt flying everywhere that this was really needed. I think we can all focus on that's the thing that we really good at. And looking at how fast Spriker is going in terms of clients and employees I'm not worried about that.
Guido: That's a very exciting thing to be at. I'm actually for the past forever, every ever since I've. The works basically. I had this dream once working for like a SAS company, like Dropbox or Evernote that those were the companies I thought 15 years ago, that will be really cool to work at. So I have a, single piece of software and you can optimize debts and both from a usability perspective, but also you have this endless nearly endless world markets and form of your, that you got, that you can conquer that there will be really exciting.
Guido: And that's, this is what I am excited about. This is my first time working on the platform sites and, doing this and Applying my, my experience with, community building for the first time in actually a professional way. I They actually paying me for this now, especially my dream job that had been doing on the side for, 13 years now.
Guido: So I'm very, excited about that. And it's a great spot to be in with, Spriker it's it's very they're, remote first. I've been working remote first for, but at least pre Corona, but four or five years. But it's, so natural to the company. It's everyone is remote first have with limited holidays.
Guido: That's always nice to have I'm working work from Netherlands. I don't have to complain and we already. Twenty-five holidays by default. So nothing to complain there, but it's still nice to have, especially we have to, to kids like I do sometimes you need, you just need some extra because they're the home again.
Guido: And And, building that community. And like I said, w what I really enjoyed with the Magento community, bringing people together, especially for the first time, I does have a lot of community first next year. And the awkward moments, the recognition. That's exciting starting point at five that you see where people first meet the immediate charter and then build businesses based on that.
Guido: I clearly remember the first meeting magenta are organized in the Netherlands. To developers came to get our metadata for the first time. And now they have this huge Magento business that they sold a couple of years ago. And, that's happened multiple times and that's really exciting to me to see that's happening and then to be at the start of that.
Brent: Yeah, I agree. So I like the idea of having an MMA. MMA cage match, but you'd call it Magento, meet Magento association, cage match, and we'd get Spriker and shop wire in there. And we'd just get some we just have a Throwdown and see who wins. That's that's one way to look at it.
Guido: That's one way to look at it.
Guido: Like I said, I don't necessarily need a cage measure. I think we're, I think we can all we're all in e-commerce. So that's, a really good choice to begin with. And I think if we play at rise, we will all win big. What would be
Brent: a buydown instead of a Throwdown? I think. So we as, we close out, I always give people an opportunity to do a shameless plug.
Brent: What w shameless plug is just, you can promote anything you'd even a local school or charity or whatever it is that you're, thinking about the.
Guido: I feel like I've been shamelessly plugging Spriker for us lost at least 20 minutes already. Yeah, but if you want me to continue with that, we have we have for looking for a lot of people.
Guido: As, everyone in the in the e-commerce sphere is, so if you're interested in in dance and now working for a great European employer have a look at the Sprocket. Hiring people work white likes. That's where we are remote first and work from anywhere. So a take your pick if you're interested, definitely take a look there.
Guido: And on a personal note, we started out with a CRO. I have my podcast on the, on CRO still. It's a weekly podcast interviewing experts in the field and that's the last hero. So I have looked there and you probably already into podcasts anyway, since you're listening to this, so might as well subscribe.
Brent: Absolutely. Yeah. We all need to share our subscribers and get people to listen more and learn more. I think that the, at first first this should be education. This should be learning about other platforms is not about Magento or whatever. The place where we can learn about what other platforms are doing.
Brent: And from my personal for 2022, I'm super interested in CRO and I have seen sodas seen the light and, why that's so important for clients. So I applaud you for what you've done over the years. And just as a plug. You did organize the first meat Magento, right way back in 2009,
Guido: January 27th, 2009.
Brent: Wow.
Brent: Yeah, that's amazing. And it's, been such a fantastic journey for both the community building, which has been the most important part for me. Because that's when I got introduced to right about that same time, that's when I got introduced to Magento. And I think that community is what has driven the Magento to where it is.
Brent: And you have to give a lot of a lot of kudos, so to speak to the community for helping move that along. And right now there's a lot of A lot of communication that isn't and is happening in the Magento community.
Guido: Yeah. Yeah, I do think community a, is a huge asset for, you as a company, whatever you're doing as a as a company community is one of those things that is the hardest to copy.
Guido: It's all of us can copy your product. They can copy your servers, your pricing model, your business model. But it's really hard to copy a, community. And I think that's also the, one of the big reasons magenta was still so big, even with all those comp the competition that's out there in, in that 14, 15 year that Magento was existing.
Guido: Something better probably has come along. And, maybe it has For that specific business model. But transitioning all those agencies away from, you or the developers to learn something new or clients to switch platforms. Clients don't switch platforms every year. There's, a time delay in that and, it gives them that gives you the opportunity to, improve your product again, because you have that community commitment from people through you in the company.
Guido: And that's Yeah, I think I mean with Adobe taking over Magento right now, they're well, they're not investing in the name Magento anymore. That's I think that's abundantly clear with removing the name from the website. The logo was and magento.com now redirecting to to the Adobe website.
Guido: But, even for, the product It's. Yeah, it's hard to see a little of investment from, Adobe. What we hoped would happen when they took over. But still everyone's using Magento. And it's really hard. You, as a business owner, you or the Magento agency, it's really hard to have everyone trained on a different, platform.
Guido: That's not necessarily something you're looking
Brent: forward to. Yeah. That's so true.
Guido: Yeah. And so communities is a huge assets for four years of community. And then for user, as a business and that's community, then in a broad sense, a sense of the word can be individuals, developers, the companies that, are attached to you and committed to
Brent: I think I get your name right there, ghetto Yonson.
Brent: Thank you so much for being here today. Ghetto is the global business and technology evangelist for Spriker. I look forward to seeing you in 2022 in person, somewhere in the world. Hopefully in the U S or in Europe maybe even at a race, we can do a race together. We did, we got through this whole episode without talking about running.
Brent: Next time we'll do more of that. I appreciate you being here today. Thank you.
Guido: Thanks for having me.
Brent: Thank you.
- Cody notes that they work with D2c brands.
- Cody mentions that the mission is to educate brands on the right way to do influencer marketing.
- Cody says there are influencers that have zero social following and their job is to get influencers to rally around their brand. Cody talks about how influencers are choosing to represent you as much as you are trying to represent them. Cody mentions that there’s a long-term consistent vision and mission for that relationship.
- Cody and Brent overview whether social media platforms have changed. Cody talks about how there’s more access into their lives through social media. Brent notes that the market has grown for influencers by the fact that you can become an influencer by going to your iPhone and embracing a brand, taking pictures, and pushing that.
- Cody talks about how the ability to create content consistently has made it easier for influencers to become influencers. Cody notes that people end up buying fake followers or trying to speed up the process. Brent says the goal as an influencer would be to influence a idea to promote it. Cody notes that there's always at least one influencer in your space.
- Brent mentions that if a business is looking for help from influencers, they could be an influencer. Cody says they want to get the product into those influencers hands. Brent notes that they follow hoka and see reviews for shoes online.
- Cody says if the influencer is not thinking of them, they would be outreaching them, dm-ing them, or emailing them to get ahold of them. Cody mentions that if they are a runner, a consistent runner, and they’re putting out captivating content, they will attract running brands. Cody notes that the best way to scale is just the more people that have your product, the more relationships that are going to be able to build.
- Cody says working with genuine advocates is the best way to scale. Brent notes that they find something defective or not great about the product. Brent says they should think about the customer experience with their influencer marketing.
- Cody notes that they want a longterm community of influencers that are talking to their audiences consistently. Cody talks about how the time is transactional one-off posts with influencers. Brent notes that brands constantly are trying to hit this, like one-off drug.
- Cody says if brands are investing in tech talk, that’s something they need to be doing. Brent talks about how it’s easy to create content for multiple channels.
- Cody notes that they identify 500 influencers on a month to month basis, get them the product they search after they get them, and see their organic performance. Cody says they run facebook and instagram ad accounts. Cody notes that their role is to keep growing the business as co ceo.
- Cody says they want to be judged on sales. Cody mentions that a lot of the leverage of influencer marketing is starting. Cody says they’re measuring the amount of content. Cody mentions that the metta dashboard on facebook is giving you all the metrics. Cody talks about how you’re not going to see direct, this came from this influencer.
- Brent mentions that it’s an invite type of thing where you’re identifying people that are generating certain amount of content or influence in that industry. Cody notes that most merchants and brand owners that come to them are looking for a lot of ugc or creative, and therefore leveraging that content within facebook. Cody says they’re producing a pool of people that have proven to post free of cost without us even asking.
- Brent and Cody say that the best influencers are people that the product and brand fits into what they’re already doing and talking about. Cody notes that most of the time, what they catch them off guard with is that we’re not asking for anything in return.
- Cody mentions that when they get the product, they feel obligated to return something to the brand. Brent says they see more and more influencers saying they purchased the product. Cody mentions that stats show it doesn't make a difference.
- Cody says apple has made it harder for facebook to track checkouts, add to carts, and the reporting. Cody notes that the roas is down 50%. Cody mentions that ios 15 has been with email updates. Cody notes that certain effects on email marketing will be in display through apple.
- Brent asks what would they overview to a brand if they would like to get started on influencer marketing. Cody says they’re ready for influence marketing because it’s the same thing you want that first impression, second impression, and third impression to be awesome. Cody notes that they’ve worked with startups all the way from the m and m's of the world.
- Cody mentions that their sweet spot is top line revenue of two to 30 million, and they've worked with b2b brands before. Brent inquires if there is any difference between promoting their product and sending a physical item to influencers. Cody notes that they have an influencer marketing course called influencer blueprint.
- Cody says they give away all of their templates and communication flow and worksheets budget, calculators, and everything in between. Cody notes that they’re active on twitter at cody widdick and instagram at cody widdick. Brent says they are an influencer marketing consultancy agency.
- Dick says they're the founder and CEO of online growth systems, and they compete competitively in parkour. Brent asks where do you think the future of commerce is going. Dick notes that the next iteration of commerce is v commerce or voice commerce.
- Dick says Siri is going to integrate with commerce. Dick notes that they're going to get a commission on every dollar that gets sold through Siri. Dick mentions that voice commerce is going to be big, and a lot of ecommerce companies have seen traction in those areas. Dick talks about how you can optimize your current ecommerce site to be integrated with voice buyers. Dick says virtual and augmented reality is going to be the future of commerce.
- Brent mentions how coaching and business coaching can be done virtually. Brent says the next thing coming from voice reality is voice commerce. Brent notes that merchants worry about Alexa looking at the amazon store first and the rest of the list. Dick mentions that the best way to optimize for SEO is to write it in a way that people would speak. Dick talks about how you want to make sure you're ranking for keywords that are written the way people talk.
- Brent mentions that google has consistently changed what they look for. Dick says a good way to test this is to bring out your own phone. Dick mentions that field test it. Dick talks about how blogs are a great way to do it, writing articles and having that be a part of the process. Dick mentions that the third way is a frequently asked questions page, which is powerful for voice search engine optimization.
- Brent notes that ten years ago they worked on midwest hydroponics, and they built an faq section. Brent mentions that if they are going to write a blog article, make sure they link to the product they want them to buy. Dick says the manual way to do it is to look at your website and identify how many links are on each page. Brent mentions that you can integrate different features to add something like one to three different articles that they could read thereafter.
- Dick notes that bucky supply was successful before they started helping them, and they were successful after. Dick mentions that Ryan, one of the co-founders of Bulk Reef Supply, was an expert and came up with his own tank food. Dick says if you want to get momentum, do take the amazon playbook.
- Brent talks about how merchants don't always look at being the leader in their community, and that bulk reef supply has done well by getting down into that community from the ground up. Brent notes that there are other companies that are building communities that are keeping people involved. Dick talks about how youtube is exclusively marketing to other people who are consuming youtube, and they only charge you for the volume of what you're using it.
- Brent discusses the idea that in the past lost leaders would physically sell something. Brent notes that they’re trying to get people to do the same thing. Brent mentions that a lot of smaller business owners forget that if they have a tool like Magento or BigCommerce, a lot of those things are built-in. Brent talks about how it’s important to understand getting people to sign up for a newsletter. Brent mentions that google analytics is a great tool to determine where they’re going and where they’re exiting.
- Dick notes that ecommerce clients created a brand new product category. Dick says there was a different marketing approach to get the product in front of customers. Dick notes that they would create a video that's less than a minute long and put it on social channels. Dick talks about how you got 30 seconds in an elevator to pitch to an investor, and you got less than 10 seconds on your Instagram feed. Dick mentions that you need to capture attention quickly and communicate the value they're going to get and give them that call to action.
- Brent talks about how to look up Entrepreneurs' Organization for advice. Brent notes that there are many opportunities for small business owners to get knowledge. Brent talks about how right now is the best time to be in ecommerce because you have the same tools the big companies have. Brent says you can list your products on amazon and utilize their network to get products.
- Dick talks about how a lot of ecommerce companies should consider subscriptions. Dick says everybody is familiar with dollar shave club, and that's a company that's competing for a commodity, it's disposable, and your lifetime value is greater. Dick mentions that you can put a unique spin on this and make an e-commerce brand or ecommerce company with a monthly subscription. Dick talks about how part of the value is that you don't know what you're going to get every month.
- Brent notes that the fish of the month club was a great model to get people interested in a product. Brent talks about how entrepreneurs are a different breed and don't always act the same way. Dick notes that the Entrepreneurs Organization has an accelerator program for companies that are between $250,000 in annual revenue and a million in annual revenue. Dick talks about how it's a great way to learn a lot.
- Brent says Andrew Dunman was one of the partners at bulk reef supply. Brent notes that it’s been a great conversation and look forward to the next one.
- Leslie and Brent discuss being an entrepreneur. Leslie notes that you need to have a desire to be an entrepreneur and not be dependent on getting a job. Leslie says they started their journey 30 years ago when they didn’t want to get a job.
- Leslie notes that they weren't a successful entrepreneur until the last eight to nine years. Leslie says they wanted to elevate their income and the money they were making. Leslie notes that the purpose of their book is to help other women entrepreneurs.
- Leslie says the first and most important key is that you need to want it. Brent mentions that a young lady turned down a six-figure job to do her passion.
- Leslie notes that if you have any passion or desire to be doing something other than what you're doing right now, it's important to follow that. Leslie says it has to be like you human beings, they don't jump off cliffs unless they're really forced, they do not leave comfortable situations, and they don't leave comfortable relationships. Leslie notes that if you're too comfortable, you're not going to do anything.
- Leslie says they’ve wanted to return to the USA for several years, but their husband had a job and he works for a company. Leslie notes that it’s not so comfortable to do these things and it’s not so comfortable that they rented out or their apartment in Zurich. Leslie says it’s key number seven in their book, which is about pumping the water.
- Brent notes that as an entrepreneur, having faith and knowledge that work will yield some results. Brent talks about how complacency is easy to be complacent in a job where your paycheck isn't always tied to the fact that you have a new idea or want to make something better.
- Leslie notes that this is a limited mindset issue that is keeping women small and keeping them from playing big. Leslie mentions that it’s very important that women look at their belief systems around money. Leslie talks about how in order for women to step into power, they need to create money.
- Leslie notes that they traveled for seven months, bought a teak handicraft in Bali, went back to New York, and started selling it at street markets. Leslie talks about how Amazon started FBA fulfillment. Leslie says they can help you send it to them, send it to them, and they will ship it for you.
- Leslie notes that they manufacture women’s mostly resort relaxed, colorful clothing from Bali, and they sell it on their website and on Amazon. Leslie talks about how there are 200 million more people looking on amazon than they are on their own websites. Leslie mentions that Amazon is a phenomenal platform for businesses and anybody who wants to start an e-commerce business really needs to be selling on amazon.
- Brent says Amazon will sometimes take a really good idea and start sourcing that directly. Leslie talks about how you have to be branded and get a brand registry.
- Leslie notes that the way to be successful in e-commerce is to know who you are serving.
- Brent says the branding part of it is the key, and it helps to build you out in big box stores.
- Leslie notes that first of all, you need to have your why you're about to step into this world. Leslie mentions that the next step is to create content that would serve that person. Leslie says one mistake people make is not going to amazon and brainstorming on amazon. Leslie notes that the best way to find products is to read reviews.
- Leslie mentions that make sure they have an online bookkeeping system. Leslie notes that they need to know their numbers and get intimate with them. Leslie says part of that is measuring and knowing where traffic is coming from.
- Leslie notes that to find a bookkeeper that knows a system called profit first. Leslie says they've written a book called Money and freedom, seven keys to seven figures, and it will be coming out. Leslie notes that go to their website and get access to a video that says three things to do before 9:00 am to make seven figures.
Hola Nestor, muchísimas gracias por acceder a esta entrevista. ¿Cómo estás?
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Nestor, ¿Por qué no nos das una pequeña introducción sobre tu experiencia laboral?
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Muchas gracias Nestor, en este episodio me gustaría abarcar un tema super popular estos días, especialmente durante estas dos últimas semanas. El Miércoles pasado aprendimos que 1,6 Millones de páginas de WordPress sufrieron ataques con la intención de crear un nuevo usuario no autorizado y el Viernes pasado aprendimos sobre Log4Shell, la vulnerabilidad en Java que pone en peligro a medio internet.
Así que no creo que haya un tema más relevante hoy en día en el mundo de la tecnología.
Nestor, ¿Qué es lo que opinas de lo que está pasando esta semana?
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Bueno pues, imaginemos que tengo un sitio de WordPress y que el miércoles pasado recibí un mensaje de WordPress diciéndome que un usuario nuevo ha sido creado y que yo, como el administrador, no reconozco el usuario. Así que entro en mi WordPress y efectivamente tengo un usuario no autorizado con un rol de Administrador.
¿Qué es lo primero que debo hacer antes de contactarte?
¿Dame una definición sencilla de un WAF?
¿Que es un ataque DDos y Fuerza Bruta?
¿Qué son las medidas de endurecimiento, o hardening?
¿Qué es la Autenticación de Dos Factores, o 2FA?
¿Qué es una Copia de Seguridad? y ¿Cómo nos aseguramos que no está corrupta?
¿Cuál es tu respuesta a la pregunta de con qué frecuencia debo actualizar mi sitio web teniendo en cuenta que me puede crear problemas de incompatibilidad?
¿Cuál es la importancia de elegir un hosting bueno .vs. barato?
Have you ever wanted to do something out of the ordinary in your Shopify store and then found a small application to do it? When you use SaaS, you don't own or control any third-party code, and you depend on a small army of developers to host and maintain all your applications on Shopify. Sander helps us understand the benefits of a hosted solution and how Shopware will help merchants run their store more effectively and less expensive than a SaaS-based solution. He talks about "Flow Builder," which lets merchants customize specific workflows on their system without needing a developer or a third-party application. We talk about how easy Shopware is to start developing for a developer and how the tech stack is "Developer Friendly."
Sander gives us some 2022 tips for merchants. Tell your story, make sure you have robust product information, own your customer relationship and make videos! If you can't make all your videos, encourage your customers to make them for you.
We finish with ShopwareUnited.com, a global community for Shopware users.
Sander Mangel is a Solutions Architect on the Global Market Development Team for Shopware.
Welcome to this fantastic new episode of talk commerce today. I have Rick west, the CEO and co-founder of field agent. Rick, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us maybe one of your passions in life. The spirit. Thank you so much for having me. I started by telling people I am. Father of three husband of one granddaddy to two.
And so from a family perspective, I spend most of my time chasing my grandkids. Now, if you jump over to the business world and what that looks like gusta passionate for me, if you have for decades has always been that creative side of things. So there's, I've never met a. I didn't love sitting down on a whiteboard and trying to figure things out.
So whether it's a personal problem, a business problem, whatever it may be. I love lowering my head with a whiteboard, figuring things out. That's great. So I know that you're involved in marketplaces. Tell us a little bit about what you're involved in right now. Yeah. So fill an agent. I tell people we started field agent well over 10 years ago in the pre selfie days, brands.
Before you had a front facing camera. Alright. No video, iPhone 3s kinda days. And we started that work is really around data collection and capturing information. And what we've seen over the last 10 years is that we really created a marketplace, a B2B marketplace for our clients to go and find retail solutions.
And it's been pretty cool. It's it's the same B to C concept that people see every day when you shop on Amazon. You find what you want when you want it. We've created that same type of experience from a business standpoint for all of our clients that are wanting to engage at retail. So it's been pretty exciting journey.
This is so I, when I think of B2B marketplaces, I think of something like Alibaba is it something like that? Or how does that go here? Here's typically think of Alibaba and you you go down that path for many businesses. When you look for a marketplace, it is click on a link that takes me to a phone number to call a plumber, click on a link.
It takes me to a business consultant, click on the link and take me to someone that can do graphic design in our world. We've taken those services and those products and say, log in to our marketplace. And after you make two or three clicks, we take you to. We actually have you check out Brent, which is crazy, right?
Because all of the B2B marketplaces are going to take you to a connector to have two or three other phone calls, two or three other meetings. And we've done this work long enough that we know the questions to ask. We can take you right to check out. And by the time you check out two or three minutes later in near real time, you're getting data and results coming back your way.
And so that's the revolutionary change of spam we put on the marketplace. Interesting. So this is a product, more of a product led marketplace than traditionally what we've seen in the past. Maybe you could explain what that means. Product led marketplace, or if I move in going down the right street, listen, you are astute and listen.
That's why you're on this podcast brand. That's why you do what you do. But no, in all fairness is that. When you look at the concept of product led, I'm going to use the example that most people use with around COVID and zoom. If you are not a zoom user during COVID you probably became one.
So I think they went from somewhere around the numbers of 30 million users to 200 million users in six months. In order to do that kind of growth. If they were a click and get to a salesperson or click and do a demo instead of being able to knock out that growth in six months, it would have taken them 10 years and 103,000 employees working six days a week just to go from 30 million to 200 million.
So product led growth in its simplest term says, can you get someone to the point where they can buy something? Without a sales person engaged. Brent, think about our world today. I was talking to a guy the other day. He just purchased a car on broom, no sales person, three clicks. He spent $45,000 on a car.
He never touched, never seen. And I've got another friend in real estate that just sold a home last week to a person from overseas coming into the U S bought a home sight unseen. Now, if you can buy a car and a house, surely to goodness, you can buy research, marketing, sampling trial for the B2B perspective.
So we know the industry is going that way, but the concept of product led growth is just that you do not need a sales person to tell you how to buy a car. Vroom has automated it and it's truly product. Yeah, I know that a lot of our clients are, have moved to B in the commerce space. And one of the worries that sales people have is that this is going to take away from one of their key roles, which is doing the selling.
Do you see this as being a extra tool that a sales person could have at that end, whatever that end B2B merchant is, or do you see this. Something that's going to replace the sales person. And w you can imagine I'm trying to do the work that uniquely designed for, and there's a guy that has interesting leadership podcasts and Mr.
Andy Stanley, and he talks about if you are in your sweet spot, you are doing things that only you are uniquely designed to. And Amazon has figured out it's not designed to sell a $10 pack of batteries. Okay. We've also figured out it's not to sell other items, but what it is designed for, if you're a salesperson, you look at truly what that, that DNA, that the things that are driving for you is that you're still going to have custom work.
You're still going to have enterprise engaged. And you're still going to be looking at longer term, how do you scale within a company and how do you continue to grow that way? But most of the initial contact I would ask. It's going to be product led, marketplace driven because I don't think from a sales perspective, you need to continue to try to send emails, send people, text messages, and call them.
Hopefully you're gonna get someone on the phone. None of us want to shop that way. That being said. There's more than ample opportunity for that same salesperson to help someone go broader to renew, to look at subscription. How can you grow the business in that way? Yes, I think it's going to be a tool for a sales person.
It's going to be amazing lead generation aspect for people that really. More of handholding. And so I'm excited where this is going to go. Yeah. I think you hit the main thing there is that lead generation and that tool, or that an extra channel enablement for the sales person. And I think as a store owner, or as an entrepreneur or business owner, you have to be aware that you need to include.
That aspect when, I mean that you have to include the salesperson aspect in it. But then not to scare the sales person by saying, Hey, this is going to be a new channel. You don't get any credit for this because they're like the post-sale, there's always questions that are going to be the client. I think part of this is having the client.
Speak to the person and on their own terms, rather than the traditional model of a B2B sales person is calling out, making sure that they're in front of them at the time they want to purchase. This lets the client dictate some of those terms and when they would like to purchase and and lets the sales person then go back and do the best, the better part of customer relationship.
Maybe you could walk us through, what does the journey look like now on the marketplace for for the B2B? Yeah. So I think in many ways Brent, the Amazon has taught this well, okay. Now whether you like Amazon or not. You can look at all the other e-commerce worlds have followed suit.
And I think B2B is going to follow it in similar terms. So in our case we try to create a frictionless environment. So you can log into field agent.net as an example, and the basically browse for a solution. You're saying, gosh, in my case, I'm a marketing person and I'm looking for trial sampling or ratings and reviews.
And once you make a decision that says, yes, I'm looking for ratings and reviews, then you simply click on that product. To answer a few questions, review the cart, and it's going to tell you, based on the number of reviews you have, it's going to cost X per review. You submit payment, or in our case with a lot of our clients, because they're enterprise type clients, they've got a purchase order to set up and invoicing and you say click.
Yes. And then within no time, you've got an email coming back saying, check your dashboard. You've got ratings and reviews on this location. So it really is a click cart under five minutes experience. And. No, we didn't think this up, right? Again, I keep going back to Amazon as the poster child, we're simply saying we have been taught over the last 10 years to shop a certain way.
We're naive to think that the business world, the B2B world is not going to go down the same path. We're not going to try to retrain you and say, oh Amazon and Walmart and other e-commerce sites have taught you to do it this way. Let's do it in a completely different way. That's crazy. We want your fingers to feel the same.
We want your eyes to follow the same path and it is click, click cart checkout, go to a link, go to dashboard, and we've made it really that simple. And it sat well, it doesn't sound like, I think one of the interesting aspects is that you're adding services, not just a physical product and the traditional model has been selling a physical product in the B2B model and especially in the marketplace.
Tell us more about how you've integrated services and is that a larger percentage of what you're doing over the physical? Yes. So think of it in terms of the secret sauce. And so in many cases, as we expand our marketplace, obviously we have our own products, but we also have third party providers similar to an Amazon model, which means they don't produce too much.
Amazon brings a lot of different folks in. So when we talked to a third party provider and let's say that they're in the merchandising space for the sake of argument and a merchandiser would come in and say, okay, Brent what do you need? You said, okay, I need you to go to a certain retail location.
Pull a display out, build the display, put pricing on it. And it's a service. You have to explain those things. Brent if we've learned anything over the last 10 years at filled agent, it's that there's not 50 different ways to go to the back room, to pull out a display, to put it up and to put the price on it.
There's, it's a fairly rigid process. And so what we've done with third-party providers is to say, let us help you methodically work through. The most basic way to have people answer questions that you would be asking so that you can take a service. And execute that service without talking to the person.
And it's really hard. So yeah. Let's have him answer a few questions. Then I can schedule a meeting. I said, Nope, no meeting. So yeah, but I really want it. I really want to have that meeting Brent, so I can talk to them. I said why do you want to talk to them about I just want to ask them if they have any questions.
I said what questions would they ask? They might want to know this. Okay. Let's make that an optional question. They're like, oh yeah. What if they want. Let's make an optional question. Next thing you go from three questions to five or six and they're like, okay, if they answer all those questions, I can execute a service.
Exactly. Like them purchasing a product. So it does require the end user to answer some questions. You have to know what you want. And listen, bro. There'll always be a group of people that want to be spoonfed. That said, I don't want to, I don't want to do this. I want someone to schedule a meeting with my three guys and your three.
And, you know what bring it, it's always going to happen that way. But for the folks that are growing up in this B2C world, transitioning into B2B, they really want to sell. They really want to explore on their own and they want to be able to make their own decisions. So that's pretty cool part as we talked to, yeah.
You mentioned the car model of the car, the idea of buying that car online. And I think the risk there's a bigger risk in buying the used car online through room, but Tesla has it down for buying the new car online and configuring and asking all those questions upfront. And then. And then telling you, okay, your car is going to be ready in a year.
I think that this is the model where we're all going and you bring up a great aspect of this. Is there a certain kind of service that works best in this? Or is there is it open to any kind of. I think it's the old joke of outside of life sciences and medical and emergency services.
Let's not go that route because you need a trained professional to probably engage you a little bit and probe some, but even on the use car aspect of it, listen, a friend of mine when he bought his car on broom, he had a Carfax on a used car. So if he wanted to go use, he could go down that route. But to answer your question about the type of products.
Any type of service that has been an operation over a period of time that service provider knows the 80% that's required to offer a base service. I don't think we're ever going to eliminate custom services because I know you sell a blue this, and here's the size. And I want a custom size and my own special color.
Okay, then we're probably going to have some engagement there, but for the 80% of services that are relatively straightforward, if I need a plumber to come to my home, I should be able to click, and I have a clogged toilet. I have a leaky faucet, and I take a picture of the faucet, which shows the kind that it is, submit that photo hit a button.
And the next thing a plumber shows up at my house. I don't know that I need to have a phone call to make that happen. So that being said, I don't think. It's going to be a question of what services you can, it's going to be within the scale or within the framework of services. What types with eighteens vertical will you actually be able to do?
I think that's a, that's an interesting point. And if we look back when e-commerce first started, there was Yahoo stores or there was a bunch of th there's customer. Carts. Let's just put it in a frame of the, of buying a store buying a service to sell something. And then we went to is extremely customization.
So before Shopify, before big commerce, we went into this phase where you had to customize everything and everybody got in. Everybody started thinking. Yeah, I'm going to have to set up the store and I'm gonna have to get a developer involved. And now what e-commerce is evolved to is click.
And if you need some specialization, there's somebody there to help you. I think this is where it's going. Maybe you could go into a little bit, what is the, so there's been, there's another company that started at the same time called Amazon. You mentioned that a couple times. What is the effect?
What is their effect on this market and how does that play into what your. Yeah. We have to be careful. And in our case, when I use it's like everyone says, Hey, I'm the new Uber for this. I'm the new Uber for that. And I don't want people to think, oh, Rick is saying, he's the new Amazon for this.
But the Amazon effect is so true in that we never dreamed you would buy again, a car or a house or other things the way we buy those things today. And so the trust factor, just the fact that you understand five-star reviews. That's as good as a referral as anything else. When I look at the fact that Amazon gives me the volume of things and I can look at a video and I can engage.
Just all those fastest over the Amazon effect has taught us unless you use millennials and gen Z as an example. So if you're entering into the workforce 18 to 21, 22, or you're that millennial you're in that mid thirties or so. This is second nature to you. It's what you expect of an online experience.
It's what you expect from a purchasing experience. And so I think what the Amazon effect has given us validation or permission to say that we can take services and go into this space. I don't know that 20 years ago, if I'd gone down this route, Brent, I don't know that I would have had the permission. I don't know that it would have been validated the way it is today.
I can tell you that the way field agent launched is that when I first started, I would hold up a phone and say, we're going to take a photo in a store and we're going to capture data. And we're going to come back to you and tell you the price. And Brent, I literally had executives from multi-billion dollar companies say, but Rick, how are they going to upload the photo from their phone to a computer to send it to me?
And another guy said, yeah. And another thing, Rick, how are you going to train them to take a picture with their phone? Can you imagine having a conversation today? You'd be laughed at, but these were serious. And they had no clue because they all had blackberries and they were used to this digital aspect of sending out a camera, et cetera, go through.
So I think in today's world, we're a little bit in the same way. Had Amazon not been in front of us, I think they would say, but Rick, how am I going to know you're going to do what you're going to do? How am I going to know. To do these things and Amazon has already taught us. So we're on the coattails of the Amazon effect.
And if you look at the the aspects of that and where research is coming in today, I think Forrester was saying that three out of every four B2B buyers would rather self-educate than learn about a product from a sales rep. And that's a Forester research. And I saw another one that it was a big commerce study and it said that it was something like.
6% of B2B buyers do not use online marketplaces that 75 of B2B procurement spending is going to happen to get an online marketplace within the next five years. So the big industry guys are studying it because they can see where it's going. We're just pushing on the front end, especially within the category of retail.
And we want to be on the forefront of that. If I have my own product or service, what does it look like for me to start moving from that? I'm going to have a sales person call and they're going to log their entries into my ERP system to moving onto a marketplace. Like what you have. Yeah. So if you were a third party wanting to be on our marketplace today, there are some companies that are fairly astute technically and they could communicate via API enlisted, Brent.
From a technical standpoint, you've got other priorities. They may say, I'm not even interested. I know I could do that. Eventually we say, okay, don't worry about it. And so we have a very simple process to them to log in we walk them through the basic steps so they can upload things to create their first product.
And from there they can copy and paste and move things along but longer term. It will be an API integration short-term it really is more of a forums type of thing where they're engaging. We're going to send data to them. There'll be somewhat. But the moment they're ready to scale. That's when the light bulb goes off and they're like, wait a minute, I'm just going to API.
It's going to drop right into my ERP system. They'll never have to talk to anyone. It's all really clean because they've seen the data come in. They know what they're receiving. And then from our perspective, I don't want to have to talk to them to be able to get data back to the client. So their API is going to give me the data and I'm going to send it back to the client.
Technically astute folks would say yes tomorrow, but in most cases it'll probably feel a little bit manual. For the first go round. And do you think this is a new channel? Would you see this as a new channel for a merchant or? No, let's just say you're, I'm a manufacturer. I'm am a service provider and I want to provide my service.
I have my own website already that I'm providing it through. This is another channel that can use like Amazon or something like that. Or do you see this as something to replace what they're already, what they already have and what they already. So let's talk about the Amazon journey. Okay, Amazon I think it was, and again, I have no data to support this other than conceptual data.
And I could, I should do the research sprint to know this, but it was probably a decade plus before a company like Nike would sell on Amazon wouldn't do it. They had their product and specialty stores and malls. They wouldn't put their product in Walmart. They wouldn't put it at Costco and Sam's because they had all these malls and specialty places.
Today, you can't find a big name brand. That's not on Amazon. So the first piece of thing I would say is for a large brand looking at this, I don't expect them to jump on this bandwagon tomorrow. I get it. But when you look at the smaller guys are saying, listen, I'm looking for eyes on my brand and on my product.
So in our case, I've got thousands of eyeballs coming into my marketplace, shopping for retail solution. If you were a mid tier brand, let's say you're a hundred million, 200 billion, $500 million company. Why wouldn't you want to use my funnel? SEO, branding, eyeballs, coming into my marketplace to see your product every single day, because Brent, you and I both know their funnel and their sales folks are focused on the big kill.
The big thing. Okay. And if I look at the thousands of the things that we're driving today, why wouldn't you want to put that product on our marketplace? Similar to why many people throw their products on Amazon saying, how can it hurt? And then they realized, oh my goodness. It not only did it hurt. The way it's set up, I'm getting more volume than I ever would have dreamed because of the eyeballs they have coming in looking for a specific area.
So we're a little bit early in that phase, but obviously we're driving our products to the marketplace and we've got a good business over the last 10 years. So eyeballs are not going to hurt. You had mentioned earlier about the costs of how of setting up or and how. How merchants are selling online.
A lot of merchants come to us and they want to set up their own marketplace. What, is there a tipping point or do you have a secret sauce that would preclude them from trying to set up their own thing compared to going on to field agent? Yeah, let's look specifically at this services area versus product is products.
So a little bit different as we talked before, but services. The third parties that we've talked to today, so I said, listen, you need to have a brand presence. You want to continue to drive. The question you have to ask is, are you going to put in the technical resources necessary to be able to sell your art, your items or your services in a product led way?
Because you don't have a Shopify drop-in module that lets you do all this. You're a manufacturer or you're a service provider and that's what you're good at. And you want to get people to call you. So let us do the heavy lifting. Let us work to get your services into our product led approach. Let us take that and go drive it.
Why spend the technical resources on it? So that's number one. The second piece along the same lines is it gets back to focus. I get where you're focused and there's certain verticals that are really important. I'm a fairly broad aspect of things. And I tell people we've got 600 active logos of the largest companies in the world.
They're buying retail products from us. If you want those eyeballs to look at your product because Brent, think of how long it's going to take for you to get set up as a vendor. If they'll let you get become a vendor, how long is it going to take for you to develop the relationship? And will they take your phone call?
Now I'm offering an opportunity to sell direct from field agent. They're not gonna make that same effort with company a or B because they don't need another vendor. They've already got a provider. They're not going to go to that route. So we think we offer two distinct. Capabilities or opportunities to save them a ton of time and effort, which is the technical side, which is technical debt.
And then also just the opportunity side of doing that business. So if let's pretend I'm an agency what is it that an agency would want to get in? What why would an agency pick field agent to recommend one of their clients to go onto your platform? I think it goes back to impressions and eyeballs.
Again, if you're looking for a company that's, well-known in the industry one that's trusted and you've got all the major players in. Yes. I trust what they're bringing to market. That's the kind of name or brand I want to put my product or service under number one number two, because we're in the retail space and it's not just a generic marketplace, the eyeballs that are coming in and the synergies we provide.
We're not P we don't have eyeballs coming into our marketplace, looking for cars. We don't have eyeballs coming in, looking for an electrician. We have people coming in looking to solve retail. They're coming in and trying to solve a product lunch. They're trying to figure out trial. They're looking for marketing solutions, merchandising solutions.
So it's very specific eyeballs coming in. And that would be the primary driver. If I'm an agency saying, gosh, this is where I'd put the eyeballs because for where I put the services, because this is where the eyeballs are. And is there a bar, a certain type of service you're looking for to be on it?
So you've just narrowed some of the scope that you do. Is there a is there something that you shine in a service that you would shine in? That would be a no brainer? Yeah. Obviously field agent is known for data collection and trial and sampling from marketing standpoint. We've got people coming in for that.
But what we started to realize is that you have adjacencies just as you would have adjacencies in a store, Hey, as you're shopping for bread, what's next to bread. As you're shopping for milk, what's next to milk. As you look at this data collection and what's next, we see that the easy verticals for us and which is where we started is primarily in merchandising e-commerce and data.
And. Those are three big verticals that we see are natural because when you're looking for problems to solve at retail, it's normally an e-commerce problem. It's something that's happening in the physical store. It's something around marketing merchandising that I'm dealing with, or I've got all this data, what am I going to do with it?
So those were three logical pieces. Now that you get to tertiary secondary, Jason. We start getting into, Hey, I've got some stickers. Could you manufacture stickers or, Hey, I've got another specific problem. Could you connect me with someone that could do corrugate? Those will be tertiary things.
I think you're going to continue to see, fill out our. Okay. If we change gears a little bit, go into the aspect of being an entrepreneur. I know, I think you had mentioned her when in our green room that you're a very long startup. Maybe you could go into a little bit about your own journey to getting this started.
I tell people at Brent that there's not a lot of podcasts around technology e-commerce or the business world. Start out by. Thanks. So you've got a hillbilly from Appalachia on the phone with you right now. So I started out by saying I came from a very rural area hollering Kentucky from Appalachia and through relationships and getting to university, university of Kentucky had an amazing opportunity to start with this company called Procter and gamble was just an amazing path for me.
And so my. My startup or my starting into that area so that, Hey, within this corporate world, what does that look like? So as an entrepreneur P and G allowed me multiple opportunities to grow and to do things I never dreamed I'd be able to do which then took me overseas. And I spent a couple of years in Hong Kong and a year in Bangkok.
And that was really my first true entrepreneurial experience. I had countries to work with from. South Korea, Japan, all the way down to Australia and all the countries in between. So truly had a taste for that. And then left the company in 2001 to start this. Shopper marketing firm here in Northwest Arkansas.
And that was 20 years ago. So I tell people I'm a 20 year startup, right? And then as you grow and pivot, eventually it turned into filled agents. So that's kinda how I got here from this small town Appalachia guy through corporate America, one of the largest companies in the world into this entrepreneurial mechanism, micro chasm that I'm in today.
And now I'm a CEO of a tech company, which is. And you're a CEO of tech company in Arkansas, but we did talk about that. You're in the a bubble that you're in a Walmart bubble is what can I call that a Walmart bubble that you're in you're in a region that people wouldn't normally think about for being tech and entrepreneurial and.
Happened. Yeah. That there really wasn't. If you go across the United States and you look at these little buckets, if you look at you guys, 20 years ago, you would say, look at where Dale headquarters is and all the companies that had to come around Dell because of this lean manufacturing inventory scenario, and look at all the startups that happened around Dale.
You can look at gosh, Walmart and the same perspective you have Walmart and all these supplier teams that started circling around Walmart. And so when we moved to Northwest Arkansas to start this entrepreneurial journey there were probably two or 300 customer teams that were working with Walmart.
Now there's 1800 customer teams. All of their major providers have offices here. And so Brent, I can be to any major multinational company. That sells a product at retail. I can be to one of their senior executives in less than 15 minutes. You can name any major brand in the world. And I can literally drive from my home and be at their office of 15 minutes.
It's unlike anything you've ever seen. And because of that, as people come to this area and say, gosh, I liked the lifestyle. I enjoy the area and the outdoors, the cost of living. The fact that the Waltons and the Tysons and the hunts that put all this money into infrastructure here, I think I'm going to stay and they choose to stay and they start an agency.
They choose to stay and they start their own entrepreneurial journey. So retail entrepreneurism, we would argue. Within this bubble is pretty significant. It's amazing. The number of startups that are happening here because of that economic bubble that was surrounding Walmart. Yeah. It's such a interesting place.
And I think something that I'd never had realized so in the Rick west journey what is the next, what's the next step for you? What's the next step for marketplace? Yeah. Yeah. So as we also, we wish we had the answer to that, we wish knew exactly what the next step is going to be. But as I look at it for me, if I've learned anything over the last 20, 30 years of my life is that I think success, and this is whether it'd be business success or personal success it really falls the path and depth of relationships.
And so what I'm striving to do now, Brin. It's a cliche, but the whole giving back aspect of it. What does it look like to mentor other startups? What does it really look like to be a part of this ecosystem in a different way so that I can help other people be successful in what I've learned over the last 20 years as an entrepreneur?
So that's what's next for me is spending time in this ecosystem. Now I'm also changing chasing my grandkids, obviously chasing them around a little bit, but that's kind of me and this space, I think for the company and marketing. If we're talking a year or so from now, I think what you're going to find is not only have we grown in the expansion of the marketplace and what it looks like, but I think what you're going to find is it's going to be a standalone name that I think is going to be synonymous with B2B e-commerce if we do this it's not going to be people saying, so what does field agent do and how does that play out?
They're going to say, oh, if you're looking for something to solve, At retail, this is where you're going to go. So we expect to be more of a household name within the retail ecosystem. And that's what we're going to start driving. It's less about the services aspect of it. It's really helping people understand what we're doing.
So as we close out here what are you doing? How do you keep up with technology and what's happening out there and especially in retail what are you reading? What are you listening to? So it gets into that aspect of who you recommended. So my favorite podcast right now, bar none is it's called flip my funnel.
Are you familiar with flip my funnel in Sanger? Nope, go for it. You've got listen. Sanger is he does a daily podcast. Brent, think about this daily podcast. Crazy. Right now he's got a few other people that are guests that kind of help him out, but it's 30, 40 minutes every day. And it's primarily driven with account-based marketing.
So if you're familiar with the funnel concept of account-based marketing versus all these leads, throwing it very broad. And so that's a specialty set, a lot of great experience in started Terminus sold that spent some time in Salesforce, but he brings a very unique perspective to the B2B world that I'm in and this account-based marketing world.
And so fantastic podcast always has something interesting on it. So that's been really cool for me. To listen to I had just started a book. I had it right here sending me somewhere. It's called faith-driven entrepreneur. It got the name of Henry Casner went from Raleigh, North Carolina and went out west to Silicon valley.
And so he's taking his faith and he's driving that through investors and entrepreneurship. And so that's been a cool book. And then I always recommend to folks, if you're on the. My personal favorite right now, the GABA name of mark Sisson, familiar with markup. So if you read my listen, I love the concept and this is going to age me, but I love the concept of what does it take to build a routine in your life and a process in your life, such that you can live to be a healthy 100 years.
Not just to live and be in a wheelchair. What does it take to, to live that last X number of year, years to have a very healthy lifestyle? So I love that aspect of mark and where he's going. And so that's been pretty, pretty cool. He's also matched up with a guy by the name of Peter Atara that does exact same thing about living this healthy lifestyle for the next 30, 40 years.
So that ages me a little bit, but that's also been pretty cool. I know I challenged my dad. My dad was a runner and he's 83 now, but I we go back and forth and I just saw a lady that got the world record at 101. W for her age group for the a hundred meter dash. And it was I think, 37 seconds.
So my dad actually was just here. He just went back. He lives in Montana. He said, he's going to go out to the track and see what his time is for the a hundred hundred meter dash. And he was a runner for 40 or 50 years doesn't run anymore, but walks every day. So I think I think that's such an important process in aging and and as we do get older to recognize that the physical part of it plays into your mental part of it.
And part of it is if you want to go out and run for four hours on a Saturday morning you are going to think about something and you're going to have something to strive and work through. You don't have to run for four hours. I think that mental part and that physical part go together. I always say that.
And I try to say this at mile 19 of a 20 mile run running is 90% mental and the other 15% is in your head. So I see how tired people are when I say that to anyways, to do that math that's really good. Okay. I'm a cyclist guy from. I go out and for me to do a couple hour ride on road bike, there's nothing like it.
I don't put AirPods in, I don't try to listen to things. I really li I really use that time to clear my head and to think, and there's nothing like an hour or two ride just to clear your brain. So I'm a big fan. Yeah. If you get on a fat tire bike, you come to Minnesota and you can ride on the lakes. Not when it's 20 below.
It's a whole industry here anyways. So as we close out I always give people a chance to do a shameless plug. So what would you like to plug today? Listen if you're one of the listeners to this right now and you're saying, yeah, I get it, Rick, but I'm not really sure.
Listen, tricep, the shameless plug is you'd be surprised how he fits. And cost-effective, as in like how little it's going to cost you to give this a, try to see if this could be something that could really impact your business. And so I'm the easy button you can DM me on LinkedIn. You can get me a Richt out west at dot net.
I'm just no more than an email away. We'd love to have a conversation. And even if it doesn't match up in marketplace, I'd love to come alongside and help the next generation, figure it out. This B2B product led marketplace world. I'd love to be helped somebody. Great. Yeah. Thanks for mentioning those.
Contact him for we'll put all these in the show notes as well. So make sure you look that up at at talk commerce talk hyphen commerce.com and we'll have all of Rick's information there, Rick. Thank you for joining us, Rick west CEO and co-founder of field agent. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Yeah, Brett enjoyed it. Thank you. Yep.
Store owners want to get from out of their e-commerce business. Real conversations happen when a customer-centric culture is a prime focus. Whether you are a merchant or warehouse distributor, or a manufacturer looking for digital commerce. You should look at your tech partner, either agency or the solution integrator, and make sure they understand the business aspects and the workflow of your industry.
Vatsal Shah offers transformation and growth to organizations and individuals by creating an inner drive. He helps them elevate their brand image, increase revenue and profitability. He founded Pragmatic Consultancy in 2008 to unlock their potential. As a business coach, he championed transformations of 69 IT, Digital Agencies, E-Commerce, and Retail organizations, trained more than 12K people and 184 CEOs. His clients spread across India, China, UK, Africa, Ireland, and the USA
David and Brent talk about Unconferences and how they differ from traditional conferences. We talk specifically about the https://unconf.us in Orlando Florida on January 21st, 2022.
The marketplace model is getting more popular and platforms to choose from are growing every day. Bart talks about his experience as an agency and how he has helped medium and large merchants create their own marketplaces. We discuss the differences between Magento and Shopify.
New rules from Google require you to have a fast website, and we go over web vitals. It's not good enough to have a fast desktop website, and you need to have a fast website across all devices. The episode was originally going to be a stand-alone podcast but seemed well suited for CyberMonday. David Arago and Brent Peterson have a conversation about the importance of website speeds regardless of whether you have a commerce site or a content site. David talks about how he has successfully gotten 100 on WordPress in Google Lighthouse.
Are your clothes made where you live? Where does the cloth come from? Shannon and I dive into some of the sustainability questions that you should ask when starting a clothing business. As the founder and CEO of Factory45, Shannon has worked with Idea-stage entrepreneurs to launch clothing companies that are ethically and sustainably made across the globe.
Shannon got her start in 2010 when she co-founded {r}evolution apparel, a sustainable clothing company for female travelers and minimalists that was featured in The New York Times, Forbes.com, and Yahoo! News.
To date, Shannon has worked with over 150 entrepreneurs in the sustainable fashion space, many of whom have launched some of the most transparent supply chains in the fashion industry. https://factory45.co/
Shannon has worked as a consultant for crowdfunding projects that have surpassed their goal amounts by as much as 300% and has worked closely with startup apparel companies from all over the world to create ethically-made products with a focus on environmentally-friendly materials and transparent supply chains.
Shannon is a strong advocate for increasing supply chain transparency through sourcing, localization, and storytelling. She’s been named a thought leader for the future of fashion by Ecouterre and Triple Pundit, and she frequently writes about conscious consumerism and the intersection of fashion and environmentalism.
For years the SaaS Market has not had a great solution for B2B... until Now. Bundle B2B is a SaaS application that offers enterprise-level B2B functionality to businesses of all types and sizes. It enables store owners to facilitate their B2B operations online and provide their B2B customers with seamless transactions and convenient self-service account capabilities. Alec Berkley, the co-found and director of business development with BundleB2B explain how he got started and how his solution will benefit B2B users.
With core capabilities that allow users to easily manage front-end and back-end B2B processes, Bundle B2B can be utilized to fit the needs of any growing B2B Commerce business and improve the B2B self-service experience for both store owners and their customers.
We've all experienced the feeling of a magical post-purchase experience and the lasting impact it can have on our relationships with brands. Consumers want more from their brands, and brands need more in order to deliver.
We interview Russell Griffin, the CRO with Ohi. He has flipped the script for e-commerce fulfillment, transforming it from what is traditionally seen as a cost center into a growth engine. Brands join the Ohi platform to deliver powerfully fast, brand-focused, and memorable post-purchase experiences that enable them to grow.
We interview Paul Lima with Lima Consulting. We had planned on diving into Adobe Experience Manager but our conversation went to business and the four types. Listen to learn what they are and get some great wisdom and insight from Paul. We cover the four main areas of business, Selling Products in your store or on a marketplace. Selling services or even selling lead generation. Selling experiences like Disney does or selling your audience. Paul further identifies 64 sub-categories within the four business models.
Author, speaker, and visionary, Paul has spent more than 25 years leading companies and helping the world's premier brands transform their digital futures.
Prior to starting LCG in 2004, Paul served as one of the America's first cyber-warriors in the US Army. After retiring from the Army, Paul became a product development leader at SEI, the leading global trust accounting platform. There, he led six FinTech solutions and oversaw their evolution, including an effort to web-enable Trust3000 Anywhere, the firm's flagship product, responsible for processing $1.5 Trillion a day.
Paul is the author of the digital Transformation Maturity Model. He is an Adobe Certified Expert and certified with several Google products.
Paul holds a has a Bachelor's of Science from the Military Academy of the United States at West Point, and a Master's Degree in technology management, jointly awarded by the University of Pennsylvania Engineering School (SEAS) and the Wharton School. Paul speaks Portuguese, Spanish and English.
Jay El-Kaake is the CEO and founder of Fera.ai - Beautiful, simple reviews for Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce, and other eCommerce platforms.
In mid-2019 Jay made the difficult decision to switch Fera’s focus to something new: PRODUCT REVIEWS. With all the FAKE and fraudulent stories, he believed that merchants needed to help to show the world that they’re legit. To support his new focus he added automated review requests, 3rd party verification, and every other feature you’d expect in a reviews app - and then some. It took over a year to get there and today Fera is the BEST REVIEW APPS for Shopify and BigCommerce, with nearly THREE THOUSAND 5-star reviews.
Twitter: @aforman22 @getgivz
IG: @getgivz
LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-givz/ & https://www.linkedin.com/company/givz-inc
What is the meaning of community? What does it mean when you go into a software community? We meet Ami Verma, the owner and founder of Techies India. Ami and Brent talk about how unique and wonderful the Magento Community is and why it is filled with "LOVE". We talk about specific topics around marketing and what that means in different parts of the world. We learn that Ami went to every Meet Magento in 2018!
The ecommerce landscape is changing. More choices are here and more are coming. I speak with Stefan Hamann the CEO of Shopware and Ben Marks, Director of Global Market Development. They are bringing Shopware to the world and in this episode, we talk about the benefits of Shopware for the US market. We talk about the ease of use and especially the ability to start on a SaaS platform and move to completely custom on-prem. This is something very unique and exciting to the e-commerce world
We interview Chase Clymer with the Electric Eye Agency. Chase helps brands scale on Shopify. He also hosts a podcast called "Honest eCommerce" where he interviews brand founders. We talk about Shopify and who is the right fit for a Shopify project. We talk about agency/client relationships and what is a good fit? We go over educating a client on their respective platform and how to get them up to speed on that feature. We go into detail on what platform makes sense for what merchant and talk about why a merchant needs an agency to help them. We discuss some differences between On-Prem and SaaS and even dive into some SaaS vs Open Source.
This week we interview Ivonne Rohner with CoachTech Summit. We talk about all things AR and how AR can help entrepreneurs in their growth through virtual coaching. Learn how you can blend VR and coaching and we talk about the XR BootCamp which is one of the well-known virtual boot camps for Virtual Reality.
This week, we interview Brittany Allen, who is on the Digital Trust and Safety team at Sift Fraud Prevention. We learn about Sift and how it helps merchants decrease friction in their checkout while stopping fraudulent transactions. We talk about the "Merchant Risk Council" and some of the latest hot topics, and the big one being crypto currency. Brittany gives some great examples of what merchants can do to mitigate fraud, and we also talk about how consumers have a responsibility in fraud prevention. We go over their fraud index and why fraud is up more than 300% in the last two years. We talk about the "fraud economy" and ways that merchants can protect themselves. Not to leave out running. We learn that Brittany is a budding runner, and Brent exerts pressure to sign up for the 2022 New York Marathon.
This week we interview Sandra Gonzalez and Sergii Ivashchenko with Adobe. We discuss the new Magento Upgrade Compatability Tool (UCT) and why this tool is so important to Merchants, Developers and Agencies. We talk about the specific features and how this tool will reduce the cost of ownership for all merchant runnign Adobe Commerce. We also talk about how some other tools like the Magento Coding standard project and the Site Wide Analysys Tool will all work together to make the development process for an Adobe Commerce store easier and more efficient.
"This week we interview Alessandro Ronchi with BitBul, a Magento Agency in Italy. He has organized Magento events and appeared at many conferences across the world. He is a member of the Magento Association Content Committee. Brent shows off his shirt from the x.commerce event in San Fransisco in 2011. We talk about the Magento Association and the Magento Community. We dive into Meet Magento and some critisisms about this. We talk about the importance of small events and why the Magento Association needs to pay attention to these. We discuss Magento 2 and it's future. There is also some forshadowing on helping Adobe understand that Merchants want to see a road map. We learn that Alessandro's heart is in Magento and still in Magento. We learn about Alessandro's passion... and guess what? It's Running. "
This week we interview Courtney Taylor and Jeff Campbell with Fidelity Bank. Courtney tells us how she is the matchmaker of the banking business. We learn how peer groups will help every entrepreneur succeed in their business. We talk about how important it is that your banker knows your business and you as a business owner are not just a number. We talk about trends in the banking industry that relate to commerce. We dive into a lot of great subjects that business owners should know and do with their bank.
This week we interview Jakub Winkler (No relation to the Fonz) he has some very strong opinions on the MOSCA letter and why this has happened now.
This week we interview Tomas Gerulaitis who signed the original letter for the Mage Open Source Alliance.
This week we interview Jenifer Roth, the President and Co-Founder of GrowthMode Marketing. https://growthmodemarketing.com We discuss B2B marketing and why every business owner needs to break down what they are doing for marketing and measure, measure, measure! Jens’s best advice for an agency? “Listen to your clients” We talk about the reasons why entrepreneurs need to hire a marketing agency some of the benefits and ROI they will get in return. This is a very informative episode for merchants and agencies. We also discuss how diversity helps us all be better business owners.
This week we do a pub interview with David Arago and talk about the speed of WordPress and why content providers need to be aware of the speed of their site just like an ecommerce provider. We recorded this outdoors at Steel Toes brewery in Saint Louis Park MN
This episode was hosted by Kalen Jordan. The interview happened on the behest of Kalen to talk more about the Mage Open Source Community Alliance and the recent letter published.
Community Letter
https://www.mage-os.community/blog/the-future-of-magento
The Magento Association Response
https://www.magentoassociation.org/commerce-co-op/full-article/a-note-from-the-magento-association-board-regarding-magento-open-source-1
Adobe's response
https://community.magento.com/t5/Magento-DevBlog/bg-p/devblog
1) Hyva x OneStepCheckout live store: haardenexpert.nl
You can also provide more contact by linking to this:
https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2021/08/hyva-onestepcheckout-partnership-improved-magento-2-experience/
2) Examples of recent Magento 2 stores
https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2021/07/magento-2-examples-2021/
3) Link to my rock band videos
South Attitude Youtube channel
Welcome to Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Anna Völkl. Anna is the lead Magento developer and release manager at Economics the leading Magento agency in Austria. We dive into a great discussion about Magento security and tools merchants should use to help secure their Magento store. We talk about a day in the life of a Magento developer and Anna shares some of her passion around the Red Cross. We discuss the Magento community and the re-opening of Magento events someday. We all miss them!
This episode was recorded on July 21st, 2021
This week we interview Howard Tiersky, the CEO of From - The Digital Transformation Agency. Howard helps executives win in today's digital world. He is Wall Street Journal's best-selling author of "Winning Digital Customers, The Antidote to Irrelevance". Howard has been named one of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers to follow today by IDG. As an entrepreneur, he has launched two successful companies that help large brands transform to thrive in the digital age. We have a great conversation around the digital experience, how customers navigate it and what a business owner should do to stay relevant in today's world. https://wdc.ht/order"
This week we interview Danny Verkade with Cream. Danny is the CTO of Cream, a leading Magento agency in the Netherlands. He is also on the Magento Association Board. We discuss his experience with the new Hyva theme and how it fits into the Magento ecosystem. We go over some of the tools that merchants can use to constantly evaluate the performance of their website. We talk about how someone can easily get into Hyva and why they should! We finish up with some conversation about the Magento Association and the future of events, big and small.
Hyva website delivered: https://vollebregtaanhangwagens.nl Reading: https://techcrunch.com
This episode was recorded on July 21st, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Rachel Fefer with Gorgias. Rachel talks about customer experience and how ecommerce merchants need to “Step up their game” for customer experience online. We go over some real-life examples of great and not-so-great customer experiences. Rachel walks us through the time to respond to a request (How long is too long), personalizing the experience and data silos. This is a fun and informative interview.
This episode was recorded on July 8th, 2021
This week we interview Yoav Kutner. The co-founder of Varien, Magento, Akeneo, MageCore, and Oro Commerce. (What didn't he found!) He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council. We talk about the early history of Magento and go into the Oro Business Application Program. The BAP that Yoav developed is the foundation for many solutions on the market today. These include Oro CRM and Akeneo.
We talk about Oro Commerce and why it makes sense for a B2B company to use this platform. Yoav gives us some insight into his thinking on self-serve platforms and how to reduce any resistance to the B2B buyer journey. We discuss how different the journey is for B2B. Yoav gives us the three driving factors that ORO delivers.
This is a great episode and must be shared with all your friends and family. Even your grandparents will love this show.
This episode was recorded on August 13th, 2021
Welcome to this special Tech Edition of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Joseph Maxwell and discuss his new book, “The Art of Ecommerce Debugging”. The video version of the podcast includes an exclusive unboxing of the book. Joseph goes over his motivation for writing this book and how it will help developers be better developers! Joseph discusses the mindset of resolving problems. We go over TAD (You can listen to know what that means). We talk about work-life balance and how Joseph handles this. We talk about documenting your code. Joseph gives his top 5 things developers should do. (Hint number one is XDebug). The one thing to double your productivity is XDEBUG! Joseph talks about Magento certifications and why this is so important. Why NOT get certified?
This episode was recorded on July 30th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Neil Twa. Neil is an executive mentor to business owners responsible for over $100M in Collective FBA Sales. He has helped to launch, grow, and scale 7 and 8 figure, high ROI Brands. He is the CEO of Voltage Holdings which launches, operates, scales, and acquires ecommerce brands with a focus on Amazon FBA. He owns multiple ventures including Voltage Portfolios. His partners include Kevin Harrington, the original shark on the hit TV series Shark Tank and the inventor of the infomercial. He has sold 1000's of products leading to over $5 Billion in sales. He focuses’ on buying ecommerce brands to take them direct-to-consumer across multiple channels. We discuss how you can get started on a new business selling on Amazon, with little to no experience, and how you can take your existing business to Amazon FBA and automate the delivery of your products. This is a great conversation around why a business needs to embrace all channels and even why a business needs to sell some branded products!
This episode was recorded on July 15th, 2021
Welcome to this Bonus Episode of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we host a panel with Amazon Web Services and Wagento on how Wagento was successful in launching more than 200 stores on AWS and Magento. Kenny Rajan - AWS Senior Solutions Architect runs us through the benefits of AWS and why you should host your Magento store on the AWS Platform. Brent walks us through the solution that was brought to Universal Music Group to help launch 200 Magento stores in a short amount of time. If you are listening to the podcast, you can find the slides on the website at Talk-Commerce.com
This episode was recorded on July 7th, 2021
Monika Milewska
Team Leader @Magently
A long-time member of Magently. Has participated heavily in building what Magently is today. Currently the Team Leader and the interface between the team and top management. Always looking to improve and to take care of the well-being of the team. Privately, rides a bike till she drops, loves to travel, and blog about it.
Antoni Paszkow
Senior Magento Developer @Magently
Antoni is calm and collected and hardly ever appears to be moved by anything, which is probably a good idea when working on Magento with the many adventures it sometimes hides. Privately, enjoys a good hike in the mountains with his camera, works on his fitness a lot, and is no stranger to the subject of self-defense.
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the ecosystems, and communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Eric Landmann with Earthling Interactive. We kick off with how merchants are using eCommerce platforms and look especially at B2B and how B2B merchants are utilizing their catalogs. You may be surprised where they are missing out. We look at some specific features for B2B and touch on Adobe Commerce and Oro Commerce. We talk about the shifting platform landscape and look at SaaS verse on-prem. We learn that Eric is an avid ice climber and lives in Bozeman Montana!
This episode was recorded on June 16th, 2021
Welcome to this AWS bonus edition of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This is another bonus episode on our series of interviews on Amazon Web Services and how it has helped merchants and content providers save money and increase performance. I interview David Arago and Jason Camp on getting started on AWS and what technicians and merchants can do to start off on the right foot (or server).
I am currently looking for subject matter experts in this field to talk about different aspects of AWS. Please go to Talk-Commerce.com/lets-talk and start a conversation!
This episode was recorded on August 11th, 2021
Welcome to this special tech edition of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Joseph Leedy with Wagento Creative. Discuss Magento extensions and integrations and look at the difference between the two. Joseph helps us understand why merchants need to take some extra time to vet any new extension they install on their website and developers need to be prepared to ask questions on why the extension needs to be installed. We discuss the Magento marketplace and why it is a good place for merchants to look for extensions. Joseph fills us in on what he is working on now and what interesting extensions he worked on in the past. We discuss our Unconference in Orlando Florida in January of 2022 and why Merchants and developers should attend. Joseph Leedy is a Magento developer and certified developer for Wagento Creative, an Adobe Gold Partner.
This episode was recorded on July 14th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Tyler Jensen with Wolf Automation. Tyler Jensen is a merchant and a Magento Association Membership committee member. We talk about Adobe Commerce and some of the pitfalls that merchants can fall into, especially around modules. Tyler tells us about his idea for a Merchant Hackathon and Brent hopefully will make it happen in the near future. We talk about the Hyva theme and how the theme can do better on the documentation of the theming. Tyler mentions that that theme will be so successful that Willem is going to get tired of answering all the questions. We close things out with some great merchant advice for anyone on Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce. Tyler is a system architect with Wolf Automation, a leading supplier of industrial automation equipment.
This episode was recorded on July 12th, 2021
Welcome to this AWS bonus edition of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we start a series of interviews on Amazon Web Services and how it has helped merchants and content providers save money and increase performance by using Amazon Web Services. I am interviewing David Arago and we are featuring these bonus episodes from different brewpubs. This brings out an honest conversation on moving to the cloud and you will hear how cloud services will save time, money and add tons of flexibility!
I am using a new ZoomP4 recording device and this was my first time using it. I did not bring a change of batteries. It did not change the quality of the recording, but it did allow us to go out, get batteries and get a second beer.
I am currently looking for subject matter experts in this field to talk about different aspects of AWS. Please go to Talk-Commerce.com/lets-talk and start a conversation!
This episode was recorded on August 6th, 2021
Welcome to this tech edition episode of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Christian Münch, Head of Development for N98 in Germany. We talk a little bit about the history of MageRun, the Swiss Army knife for Magento. We talk about Magento and headless commerce and Christian helps us understand some alternatives to just going headless with a single app.
This episode was recorded on June 30th, 2021
Welcome to this special Episode of ULTRA Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Dave Crow and Professor U with UltraCommerce. We learn about the platform, its history, and why it is a fantastic solution for a multitude of merchants who are looking for a robust ecommerce platform or an order management system, or a product information system, or even a marketplace! Wow, this is fantastic! Professor U joins us to talk about partners and who should and can get involved.
This episode was recorded on July 8th, 2021
This week we interview Vinai Kopp who is a big advocate of the new Hyva theme. We discuss why Hyva makes sense for every developer, agency, and merchant. Vinai gives us reasons why Agencies need to embrace Hyva and get their teams on board. He also talks about the benefits for the merchant to use it. We go into the differences between PWA and a monolith and dive into microservices. All this while not getting too technical. You have to listen to this episode to hear Vinai’s opinion on PWA vs Hyva!
This episode was recorded on July 7th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Michael Turk, Senior Director Solution Consulting with Spryker. We start off the show with how Brent tricked Michael into running a marathon. (How often that happen?) We discuss the origins of Spryker Commerce OS. We examine headless verses monolith and dispel some notions that headless makes things complicated. We also dive into what makes solutions too complicated. We look at some very impressive stats on checkout rates on B2B and B2C.
This episode was recorded on June 24th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the ecosystems, and communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Sonal Puri, CEO at Webscale. We discuss the meaning of “Modern Commerce '', how online retailers should be thinking about new technology (the shiny new thing is sometimes the best), and how Core Web Vitals is something that requires every merchant’s attention (yesterday). We also discuss Jay Smiths’ “Edgy” open letter, as well as how Webscale prides itself on always pushing the market in terms of features and capabilities. Sonal also shares how important she feels it is that we mentor young people today, helping them complete their education and finish college.
This episode was recorded on June 21st, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce, ecosystems, and communities they work and live in.
This week we interview Stefan Willkommer with TechDivision in Germany. We discuss Adobe Commerce, Magento Opensource, and the health of the Magento community. We dive into Adobe Commerce and Adobe Experience Manager and look at how it is working for merchants, even in the mid-market. We learn about the fantastic new office space that TechDivision has built and has yet to have people come back to. Stefan gives us some great books to read as well as some great advice that any business owner should ask.
This episode was recorded on June 14th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Sonja Franz with Integer_net in Germany. We discuss the Magento community, online events, and the Magento association. We talk about diversity in the tech community and what everyone can do to help be more diverse. Even bald white guys. We touch on the new Hyva theme and finish with some ballroom dancing.
This episode was recorded on June 10th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Eric Erway with Adobe. We discuss PWA studio and how big merchants are adopting and using it. We talk about how vibrant our Magento community continues to be and he gives us a low down of the local meetup seen in Austin with ShipperHQ. Eric tells us how merchants will save money and get ROI from using PWA studio. Eric balks at the chance to present in person, in Minneapolis, in January but gets excited about Disney World in Orlando Florida for an Adobe Hackathon in 2022.
This episode was recorded on June 9th, 2021
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Joseph Maxwell with Swiftotter. We discuss how important it is for a developer to get a certification on an Adobe product. We discuss how everyone on a team should have a certification or accreditation on one Adobe Product. We talk about how agencies need developers to get certified and how merchants need to make sure their agency has certified developers. Joseph introduces his new book “The Art of Ecommerce Debugging”
This episode was recorded on May 12th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Willem Wigman with Hyva, the revolutionary new Magento theme that will change your life! Did I say change your life? Yes, this shows how powerful the Magento community still is and continues to be! We talk about the origin of the name, not to spoil anything, but it’s good. We discuss the impact on site speed for merchants and how Google is changing the game for your website and how it is ranked. If you are a merchant you need to share this episode. If you are an Agency you need to get on board with Hyva and get your Devs teams there too.
This episode was recorded on June 9th, 2021
Welcome to Episode 22 of Talk Commerce. Where we talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Tadhg (Tige), Bowe, with Monsoon Consulting. We discuss Magento and the community. Tadhg pronounces Hyva in a different way. We have some notable Irish quotes and a good bit of Craic (That’s fun in Irish)
This episode was recorded on May 26th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Tom Robertshaw with Space48 in the United Kingdom. We give a little history on Tom’s e-commerce survey that he started publishing while he was still at University. We get into the ever-growing community on BigCommerce and talk about BigCommerce and BigCommerce Apps. And how could I talk to a Magento Master and not talk a little about Magento.
This episode was recorded on May 26th, 2021
Welcome to Episode 16 of Talk Commerce. Where we talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview TJ Gamble with Jamerson. We discuss BigCommerce and how the choice of simple is often better than complex for your average merchant. We discuss his show Ecomerceaholic and how he has garnered worldwide fame from the show. We close out the episode with another pitch for a Hackathon in Orlando Florida in January of 2022.
This episode was recorded on May 25th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Sharon Lambert with Adobe from Dublin Ireland. We talk about diversity in the Magento community and the steps we can take to bring more diversity to the community. Sharon suggests we do a panel on diversity for the show. Brent makes a feeble attempt at an Irish accent and Sharon gives us some action items to be inclusive in our community.
This episode was recorded on June 4th, 2021
Talk Commerce a Tech Edition Special. Where we talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Aaron Sheehan, with DEG Digital. We discuss Magento Solution specialists or now called Adobe Certified Expert - Adobe Commerce Business Practitioner. We discuss how important the role of a solution specialist is for any agency building an Adobe Commerce Solution. We also talk about and mispronounce Hyva. The is so much more to this episode and it is a much listen to!
This episode was recorded on May 26th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce. Where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Laura Trejo with Seis Diez Services in Mexico. We have a great conversation about commerce in Mexico and what platforms stores are using. Some of the choices are surprising! Laura tells us how the Magento to Adobe name change has been confusing. We learn about a new commerce platform called Tienda Nube https://www.tiendanube.com.mx. We talk about marketing in Mexico and more! This episode was recorded on May 26th, 2021
Welcome to Talk Commerce a Tech Edition Special. Where we talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Jisse Reitsma, with Yireo. We focus on developer training on React, Vue, or the new Magento Hyva Theme. We look at training from the Merchant, agency, and developer perspectives. Jisse gives us actionable feedback for training on what to ask as a developer, what an Agency should look for, and what a merchant should expect. Did you know that Jisse is an accomplished Pianist? (He plays Chopin!) We talk about how open source is not free and close it out with a little bit of Hyva and more pronunciations. Brent tries out his new portal podcasting system with mixed results. (Please send me your comments!)
This episode was recorded on June 4th, 2021
Welcome to Episode 15 of Talk Commerce. Where we talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Ben Marks with Shopware. We discuss Shopware, Shopware and Shopeware. While talking about Shopware we also discuss community and how he started in the Magento Community. We explore open-source and how Shopware is positioned in the open-source community.
This episode was recorded on May 18th, 2021
Welcome to Episode 14 of Talk Commerce. We talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Thomas Fleck with Oro Commerce. We talk about B2B stores and how a platform built for B2B can give maximum ROI to the merchant. Oro Commerce enables business growth through its open-source platforms focused on B2B and CRM. We discuss Meet Magento Germany and how it started. We also go over BlueGento and how it was effective in launching stores quickly for Universal Music Group.
This episode was recorded on May 17th, 2021
Welcome to Episode 13 of Talk Commerce. We talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce.
This week we interview Muliadi Jeo about Meet Magento Indonesia. Muliadi is an eCommerce Consultant, Magento Solution Partner, and Magento 2 Certified Solution Specialist, currently the Chief Technology Officer at the eCommerce agency SIRCLO in Indonesia.
This episode was recorded on May 18th, 2021
Welcome to Episode 12 of Talk Commerce. We connect the dots in your commerce experience between the developer, agency, and merchant.
We interview Mark Lewis from Netalico (Not Metalica). We discuss Shopify, SaaS Platforms in general, and lots of great conversations around how Magento and Shopify can work for certain clients. We also talk about how Netalico sounds a lot like Metalica.
This episode was recorded on May 11th, 2021
Welcome to Episode 11 of Talk Commerce, a Tech edition special. These episodes are focused on commercial development and will have content relevant to the merchant.
We interview Miguel Balparda from Nexcess, An Magento hosting company. We talk about Magento development environments and how it is moving to the cloud. The interview takes place from the Minneapolis / Saint Paul Airport.
This episode was recorded on May 14th, 2021
Welcome to Episode 10 of Talk Commerce. We talk about the immersive commerce experience for the developer, agency, and merchant.
We interview Ray Bogman from Adobe. We discuss Adobe Professional services and why every agency and merchant should use them. We make plans for an epic bike trip at the 2022 Adobe Summit from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas.
This episode was recorded on May 10th, 2021
We interview Japhet Perez from Space.bar, an Agency in Mexico. We discuss VTEX and how it has grown in LATIN America. We also reminisce on Mage Titans and the first one that was hosted in Mexico City in 2017.
This episode was recorded on May 6th, 2021
Adobe Firefly project
https://www.adobe.io/apis/experienceplatform/project-firefly/docs.html#!AdobeDocs/project-firefly/master/overview/what_is.md
Adobe IO
https://business.adobe.com/summit/2021/sessions/extending-magento-commerce-with-adobe-io-s604.html
Lars Blog
https://larsroettig.dev/how-i-learned-react
Disney
https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/
Welcome to Episode 7 of Talk Commerce, where we talk about commerce in this new digital world and how it touches the merchant, consumer, and agency.
We interview John Hughes this week with Fisheye, A Magento-only agency in the UK (Not many of them left!) We cover Hyva and his recent blog post. We also talk about the Magento community and how it is rallying behind the new theme.
This episode was recorded on April 24th, 2021
How much more exciting does it get than when a software patch hits the market! Deryck and Brent talk about the new 2.4.2-p1 patch along with the 2021 release schedule
https://devdocs.magento.com/release/
The Site-Wide Analysis Tool (SWAT) provides 24/7 real-time performance monitoring, reports, and recommendations to ensure the security and operability of Magento Commerce Cloud installations. The Site-Wide Analysis Tool provides a dashboard and reports with system insights and recommendations based on best practices that you can use to address detected issues. The service is available in production mode for Admin users with permission to access user role resources.
We interview Arron Moss of Zero-1 and MDOQ this week on helping developers automate their Magento CI pipeline and how this saves big money for merchants
This episode was recorded on April 14th, 2021
We wrap up a busy week at the Adobe Summit and today go over the Magento Association Connect conference. Brent talks about how important it is to have smaller conferences to get people used to speaking in public. Deryck talks about the importance of David Depner’s talk and how his Google knowledge is important to Magento.
This episode was recorded on April 30th, 2021
The #AdobeSummit #AdobeSneaks is available here
https://business.adobe.com/summit/2021/sessions/summit-sneaks-gs8.html
You can find the Magento Association website here https://www.magentoassociation.org/
You can tweet about the sneaks using these hashtags!
DailyShuffle
SavvySearch
ProjectLiveWire
CatchyContent
AccountAce
SegmentTuner
DimensionBuilder
At Summit, Adobe introduced innovations across Adobe Experience Cloud, unveiling new enterprise applications with Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, its next-generation Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP), its industry-leading Marketing System of Record through the integration of Workfront, and new Adobe Experience Platform capabilities to deliver real-time personalization at scale. Additionally, Adobe announced new content and intelligent commerce capabilities including a strategic partnership with FedEx.
Following is a summary, with links to press releases or blog posts, of many of these top news items. Be sure to return to the portal in the coming weeks and months as we roll out enablement and additional resources pertaining to these announcements.
New Adobe Application: Adobe Journey Optimizer
Built on Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer is the industry’s only enterprise application designed to help marketers optimize the customer journey across any outbound or inbound customer touchpoint.
SPP and Exchange members can register for a post-Summit webinar on Adobe Journey Optimizer, scheduled for May 4th
Industry’s First CDP Architected for First-Party Data
Adobe’s next generation Real-time Customer Data Platform is the only enterprise application architected from the ground up for first-party, data-driven customer acquisition and engagement. It serves as a centralized hub for first-party data, provides real-time, machine-learning-powered personalization at scale, and offers a new Segment Match capability that lets brands collaborate to expand their own first-party data sets through partnerships. New Look-alike Segments allow brands to identify additional customers who share similar attributes to their best-known customers.
Plus, the B2B edition of Adobe Real-time CDP allows customers to bring together both individual and account profiles for complete intelligence and activation to help B2B companies think and act like B2C brands.
New Adobe Application: Customer Journey Analytics
The industry’s first enterprise application that allows brands to integrate and standardize their online and offline customer data, enabling anyone – not just data scientists – to connect that data, easily visualize it in a unified view, and better understand the entire journey to better inform marketing strategies. Customer Journey Analytics is extending the types of insights brands have access to by introducing new AI capabilities and features that enable brands to visualize the customer journey in full context across multiple touch points.
Updated Branding: Magento Commerce is now Adobe Commerce
Adobe is officially consolidating the branding of the licensed commerce product from Magento Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud to the single brand of Adobe Commerce. The corporate Magento brand is also retired; all corporate references should be Adobe. Please see the updated branding guidelines* on the portal.
Adobe Commerce Capabilities
To help companies drive business growth, new Product Recommendations, powered by Adobe Sensei, unlock new ways for customers to discover products. New Live Search delivers fast and hyper-relevant results and search experiences on a merchant’s site. Plus, an integration between Adobe Commerce and Adobe Sign will roll out globally the second half of this year enabling merchants to easily deploy digital signing processes as part of the customer journey.
Adobe also announced a new strategic partnership with FedEx that will enable Adobe Commerce merchants to integrate their storefronts with FedEx ShopRunner, allowing them to offer customer benefits such as free two-day shipping, one-click checkout, seamless returns, and the ability to take advantage of FedEx’s logistics intelligence to optimize their shipping spend.
Adobe Experience Platform Customer Momentum
The Adobe Experience Platform and ecosystem power thousands of brands globally and deliver real-time personalization at scale across more than 17 trillion segment evaluations every day across applications and services.
New Marketing System of Record
Adobe previewed its new Marketing System of Record, which will be the single source of truth for connecting and managing work across the entire marketing lifecycle, from strategy and planning to execution and measurement.
Adobe Experience Manager Innovations
New innovations include Headless Content Management System capabilities, which deliver immersive content as data over APIs and bring advanced AI to content automation. The newly launched Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials will become the default asset management capability in all Adobe Experience Cloud applications and be fully configurable to ensure access to the best content.
Adobe Powers Digital Healthcare Innovation
Adobe is now powering digital experiences for seven of the top 10 healthcare providers, eight of the top 10 healthcare payers and nine of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies—delivering experiences with agility and at scale.
Day 1 Schedule:
- 9:00-10:00 am PT – Keynote Ft. Serena Williams
- 10:00-Noon PT – Innovation Keynotes with customers and Adobe execs
- Afternoon: Session, networking, and workshops of your choosing. Build your schedule here: https://portal.adobe.com/widget/adobe/as21/catalogsum2021?
Options for Keynote + Innovation Keynote Viewing:
- Tune in to the Twitter Events Page Livestreams here: http://adobe.ly/SummitTwitter
- Tune in and register on the Summit Site here: https://adobe.ly/3e2o9Ss
Additional details + resources attached in the Insiders Know Before You Go Guide!
Deryck and Brent talk about Adobe Digital Learning Services and how important it is for the merchant to learn how to run their ecommerce store. Deryck makes an attempt and coming up with the theme tune for Talk Commerce. Action-packed Episode!
Brent Peterson chats with FairPlay Co-Founder and COO Andrew Devlyn in this third episode of Talk Commerce!
Fairplay is a financing and analytics platform for your eCommerce, which uses data processing to invest in your digital marketing campaigns and inventory.
For fast-growing ecommerce businesses that generate consistent sales, Fairplay offers smart financing in exchange for a small portion of your revenue until the financed capital is repaid plus a fixed service fee. https://getfairplay.com/
Brent and Kristof talk about the Magento community, Magento extensions, the quality of extensions, when we started to working together (2009) and of course the fact that Hawaii and New Zealand are only one hour apart (but 23 hours really)
Brent Peterson and Jisse Reitsma discuss all things frontend, including PWA Studio, Vue Storefront, and the new Hyvä theme for Magento 2! We hope you enjoy Talk Commerce EPISODE 1!