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.
2022 Holiday Season Insights and Shopping Trends with Megan Blissick
It’s Black Friday, and we interviewed Megan Blissick with Signifyd. We talk about BFCM and the Pulse Tracker. Will the predictions be right?
You can listen to some of the numbers Megan gives us and compare them to what is happening! Signifyd’s Holiday Season Pulse Tracker compiles a live look at online sales with real-time adjusted season projections to bring you the fastest, most immediate insights into season performance.
Powered by Signifyd’s Commerce Network, the Holiday Season Pulse Tracker leverages data from thousands of retailers from a variety of verticals around the world.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce Today, have Megan Blissick. Megan is the head of Global Agency Partnership with Signifyd. Megan, go ahead, introduce yourself. Maybe tell us what you do on a day to day basis and one of your passions in life.
Megan: Ooh, one of my passions was fun. Yeah. Thanks for having mere.
Megan: I’m Megan. I had global agency partnerships at Signifyd e-commerce, fraud prevention and revenue optimization organization. So I’ve been with signify for I think, God, like two and a half years at this point. A lot of experience in the greater e-commerce. E brand management, digital marketing management, and the e-commerce ecosystem up until running partnerships that Signifyd for the past couple of years.
Megan: It’s been a great time. Love it there. And a passion of mine is rock climbing as a lot of folks I believe know at this point. When I’m not at conferences and events, I’m hanging off the side of a cliff .
Brent: And do they call that bouldering?
Megan: Bouldering is when there’s no ropes, but
Brent: Oh, so you don’t do that part?
Megan: No I get all the way up the top yeah, I get to get some really cool views up there.
Brent: I’m assuming you’ve seen the movie where the guy climbs El Capita, Is it called Free?
Megan: Yes I’ve seen a couple of those
Brent: movies. Any aspirations to do free solo for that one?
Megan: No.
Brent: I got super creeped out just watching that movie.
Megan: I definitely enjoy the rope element of rope climbing. I do that part where you fall and you don’t die. . Yeah.
Brent: That’s always a plus, right? Yeah. Cause in that movie, somebody did one of his friends died, I think.
Megan: It’s it can get really intense in the climbing world, but but me and my buddies we like to play it safe.
Brent: Yeah. Good. Before we get into content and after, now we’ve talked about rock climbing. Yes. I do have a project that’s called The Free Joke Project. Okay. And what I’d like to do is just tell you a joke and you can tell me if you think it should continue to be free. Or if we could charge for the joke.
Brent: Okay, here we go. Here we go.
Brent: I was trying to figure out why the ball kept getting bigger and bigger. Then it hit me,
Megan: Is this how this whole podcast is gonna go ?
Brent: Yes. All right. Since you were so good at that one, I’m gonna tell you one more and then we’ll move on
Megan: since, give me one more. Let’s go for it.
Brent: I entered 10 puns into a contest to see which one would win, no pun in 10 did.
Brent: Oh God.
Megan: How long are we doing this ?
Brent: We got another half an hour.
Brent: Okay, let’s go for it. Let’s go to, let’s go to real things now. Yeah. Commerce protection platform. Tell us about that. Yeah. In our green room, we talked about Signifyd being this fraud thing and we fraud protection, at least in my mind. And that’s what I thought about it, but it’s so much more.
Brent: So tell us, give us a little background.
Megan: Yeah. Okay, Brent, you and I have been working together the whole time I’ve been at Signifyd and you’ve actually been working with us longer than I’ve been around. So when Signifyd started, we were actually a fraud scoring tool. So what that really means is when a customer goes to a website they hit the checkout button and
Megan: we gather a lot of information about that customer based on not only the website they’re checking out on, but any other website within Signifyd network. That way if it’s the first time they’re at, REI buying a climbing rope but they’ve already gone to Moose Jaw and they’ve already bought some Caravaners we already understand a little bit about that customer more than the merchant on hand.
Megan: So that lets us make a better decision about whether or not that’s a legitimate customer. What we started realizing was, as we’re doing this scoring we are getting really strong scores getting better information than our merchants so that we could really provide them that value, but, They weren’t always taking us up on it.
Megan: So we started actually guaranteeing on our orders. So saying, Yes, we think this is a really good purchase. We think this person is correct. There may be, a couple things that look weird. They may be shipping it out of state, or the recipient doesn’t have the same last name. But ultimately we have enough data to stand behind this.
Megan: So we started adding a financial guarantee, and that’s where g. Fraud protection came from. So we said if we’re wrong and if it is fraud signify will pay the merchant back in full cost of product shipping, taxes, fees. And that really took us into another world of e-commerce fraud prevention, because what that did was not only prevent fraud, but we started actually increasing revenue and increasing order approval rate for our customers.
Megan: So we saw that. Getting rid of the fear of fraud, we are actually able to enable more transactions to go through. That really opened a door for our customers to see five to 7% revenue lift just by taking in more orders that they were at first afraid were fraud. So that really changed the conversation for us.
Megan: We are preventing fraud, but we’re really driving most of our value by driving more revenue. So we started looking. Further down in the conversation, what happens once that product gets there? Does the product arrive or does the merchants still have to pay for an item not received claim where they delivered the product got there, but the customer never got it.
Megan: So sometimes, that’s true. We’ve seen porch pirates especially talking to the holiday season. This is something that. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. People steal things off of porches. I’m sure you’ve seen some of those Ring doorbell videos. But sometimes a customer does get their product and they say they didn’t.
Megan: A merchant busy during the holiday season doesn’t really have time to look into all those claims. They don’t want to insult their customers that are legitimate and are good and are missing their products. So they’re taking a hit there. Signify said, continue down the funnel. Let’s cover item not received claims significantly, not subscribed, subscription cancellations like cancellation errors, order shipping fees.
Megan: So we started really enhancing our commerce protection from just that point of sale, continuing down the funnel. Now Signifyd hosts a variety of different products through our three main modules through our agent console, where you can really tailor your different policies and your orders through insights reporting where you can really understand your customers better.
Megan: And through our decision center, which is, our core product of yes or no, are these orders being approved or not? That allows us to hit into a couple different categories past the traditional fraud prevention chargeback recovery, account takeover protection, author off rate optimization pre off acceptance.
Megan: You’re not paying those credit card fees anymore. Along with that that core of products. So at this point, yeah, signify covers our merchants end to.
Brent: And we talked earlier that right now it’s before Black Friday, but this episode’s not gonna come until after Black Friday. . So you do have something new called a, or maybe it’s not super new, but a sales prediction tool or sales tracking tool.
Brent: Tell us a little bit about that and how that’s gonna play into the holidays. .
Megan: Yes. So this is actually a continuous project that I’ve absolutely loved. It’s been part of Signifyd since I started right at the beginning of the pandemic. When we, we sit right in that payment gateway. We get to see real time transaction data across over 6,000 different merchants in hundreds of different products categories.
Megan: So what that really gives us is a chance. Look at real time e-commerce data. So actually just today we launched our 2022 holiday season insights and shopping trends. So as things happen in real time, we’ll be able to track. Our holiday season projections against what’s actually happening this holiday season.
Brent: All right. Then I’ll make sure, I’ll put all that on the show notes that they can get the link to the report and they can look at it. You had mentioned some things that, that we’re looking at in. The holidays. Can you give us any insights that we might see for Black Friday? And I guess we’re gonna know if you’re right or wrong for Black Friday after this, but we still have Christmas, Hanukkah coming up in Yes.
Brent: As we go forward.
Megan: Absolutely. So we have. Three categories right now of holiday season predictions. We have one on total holiday spend. We have one on product volume, how much is actually going to be purchased, and then we have some cyber week predictions. So I think we touched on this in the green room.
Megan: The the holiday season is not Black Friday anymore. Between pandemic, e-commerce penetration and everything in between. Shoppers are buy. Gifts whenever they want, and and merchants are really catering to that. I think Amazon has two prime days now, or a special exclusive event coming up.
Megan: There’s already holiday sales at some of the major big box retailers. The the holiday shipping window and the holiday returns window has already started where there’s usually extended return windows so that people can buy gifts and then return them once they’ve been gifted and and not received kindly.
Megan: So there’s really a huge window of holiday shopping now. It’s not. Like that small peak that happens in that one week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and then again in that like Christmas and Hanukkah weeks. It’s really starting now and it’s going to continue until the shipping cutoffs occur in the end of December.
Megan: So we’ve got a long holiday season coming
Brent: up. Yeah, And it’d probably go all the way to July if Amazon takes us there. And then it’ll start again right after July. That’s when the pre-Christmas sales will start. Soon. You had mentioned in the greenroom as well about how you’ve extended, so traditionally Signifyd was that sort of right before the payment happens.
Brent: But now you’re extending it down the funnel even past into the delivery cycle. Tell. Where you see the biggest value for a merchant as you get through that. Let’s just say they, they, that is, it’s a client that, that makes it through or isn’t, It’s a valid client, but , it’s somebody that is trying to gain the system by saying something, I didn’t get something.
Brent: How does Signifyd help there?
Megan: Yeah. Item not received is a really interesting category. As Brent, I live in Brooklyn. I’ve had a couple packages stolen off my doorstep. It happens, there’s a, a couple of my friends happens to it too. But there’s also those merchants or those customers that, they say that they didn’t receive a product when they did.
Megan: So that becomes an item not received claim. There’s a couple ways that merchants, if they’re handling this on their own, they can deal with. You might have seen some of the backlash of some of these come up before. For example, on Amazon, if you claim too many items, so it’s not received in a six month window then you’ll start getting a flag of you must provide proof or, like you can’t return any items for the next like couple months.
Megan: Things like that. You can’t make this claim anymore. So there’s that volume approach, right? If it’s the, if then approach of binary rules, if someone returns X amount of items and y months reject. We all know that any binary system is just right for fraud. It’s very simple. If someone can figure out, Oh, I can return four items but not five, or I can return.
Megan: $200, but not 201. Then they’re going to push right up to the boundaries, create another account, anything like that. So there’s always a way to get around those binary rules. You’re also, if you’re managing things on your own, you’re risking an insult rate. And I will tell you there are. Vengeful customers that will let you know if you’ve wronged them.
Megan: We’ve seen them all online, if it, And it’s a terrible customer experience, right? So if I ordered something I was really excited about I get the notification while I’m out at work that, a package arrived at my door and then I go home and that package isn’t there.
Megan: You, you first have that sinking feeling and then, Text your neighbors. You ask if anyone else picked it up or saw it. You wait another day and see if the the shipping thing was just wrong and they hadn’t gotten there yet. And then you ultimately contact the company and say, Hey, I never received my product.
Megan: If they come back to you and say, Hi, we think you’re lying and you’re not getting your product or your money going to raise hell and high water. All over anywhere you can post a review or rating online. There’s a lot of places to do that. So you risk really insulting those good customers because that might also be a really high value customer.
Megan: It can be someone that’s shopping with you guys once a month that is going to go to your competitor and never go back again and actively discourage people from shopping on that site. So what signify does is, first and foremost, if you have our INR coverage, we reimburse our merchants. We say, We got it.
Megan: Don’t worry about it. That’s ours now. So our customers are taken care of immediately. We now also have an internal chargeback recovery team. So they will go and they will investigate that claim. They’ll investigate all claims that they think that there is a reason to look into and will go all the way through the entire process and order flow to figure out if that product actually did get to the intended recipient.
Megan: We’ve had some very funny ways that we found people and we actually now have made that into another series called Crime and Cocktails where every couple months we sit down in a webinar setting and we talk about some of the some of the fraud that we’ve seen in the industry where we actually catch some people that are claiming that they never receive their.
Megan: $5,000 Rolex, but they’re wearing it in their picture, on their Facebook profile. Or where someone says that they never got their above ground pool, but we find it on Google Maps. So we actually get to cover what really goes into some of these fraud attempts and how our teams are able to, trace back the entire supply chain to really find if these are legitimate customers.
Brent: Yeah. That takes a lot of tpa to claim a lost pool, but then set up the pool in your yard. My, I still love that one. . Yeah. My experience recently has been, I received a package from Amazon that was empty and it was also. Point zero one ounces, . So it clearly got through everything. And then Anne got the weight onto shipping and they shipped it.
Brent: It was just a, it was an envelope, but it was supposed to have some clothes in it, huh? And zero weight as well. I didn’t even have to argue with Amazon. They just sent me the new item. But I suppose as a consumer, if you get an, and it was a, one of those envelopes from Amazon that had the, and it wasn’t even sealed yet, so somehow nobody put the thing in it.
Brent: They just sent it to shipping, ran through their UPS thing, and then off to ship. But it’s not, I suppose too, as a consumer, you, if for whatever reason you get the couple of those in a row, you want to make sure. Back yourself up with your ring and all this other fun stuff. You. So I think you mentioned returns.
Brent: How do you go farther besides just the lost packages? Do you go into returns as well?
Megan: Yeah, and that’s actually, I’m glad you brought that up. That’s probably what I consider the most exciting opportunity space is especially going into the holiday season this year. We all know that e-commerce returns happen, but we all pretend like they don’t
Megan: And the really, the biggest bummer of it all is that it’s a much higher rate than in-store returns. Take fashion as a category in-store returns average around 10% of retail sales. eCommerce averages around 30%. And that’s really hard. Especially right now, we’re not in the best spot in the there’s an economic downturn.
Megan: We’re all aware of it. People are still buying, people are still shopping. When you’re really counting on sales and business and 30% of that is coming back in the door. That’s a big hit because that’s merchandise that was off the floor that couldn’t be sold. That’s also merchandise that gets damaged.
Megan: In return, about 25% of returned merchandise goes straight to a landfill. And, that’s just devastating both for the environment and for a retailer’s bottom line. And then seasonal items get marked down. Okay, return that fake Christmas tree, but you can’t sell that again until next year.
Megan: So now you’re sitting. Dead inventory and there’s a lot of companies that are popping up to really start solving returns. It’s making me really happy. Signifyd is partnering with a couple of those to be displayed soon. But what we’re also doing, and the reason that we’re really showing up in that space is actually in terms of, the consumer experience.
Megan: Returns is a one size fit all approach right now, and it’s probably the last thing in the customer journey that applies that. We have loyalty programs that incentivize good customers. We have tailored experiences so that if you have a certain IP address, then you land on a different website version on a homepage than someone else.
Megan: But why are we all doing the same thing when it comes to returns? It’s this blanket return policy of. 30 days or free shipping or something like that. When in reality our good customers should have the benefits of good returns and our abusive customers shouldn’t be able to return things at all.
Megan: Because you know that’s not a customer that you really want shopping on your site. It doesn’t matter if they spend a thousand dollars. If they return that a thousand dollars and end up costing you $300 along the way, that’s not a good customer. So what signify does now is we have a returns abuse api.
Megan: So what that allows us to do is actually take control. That customer return journey if they go on that. So say you put us in place right now. Holiday season has started. We’re getting all these orders in. Again the benefit of signify that’s. That powers everything is our commerce network. We work with so many brands around the world that we’re able to see 98% of online consumers.
Megan: So if you’ve shopped online you’ve probably shopped at a Signifyd store, which means that we know you. And that can be really good because if you’re a good customer and we’re using a merchant that’s going to say, Okay, we’re gonna prioritize our VIPs. Has a rewards account with us.
Megan: Anyone that’s been a customer for more than three years, you can set all of these rules yourself and say, Megan’s a good customer. She spends over a thousand dollars a year with us. If she initiates a return, immediately refund the money to her account before she even returns the product. Send a prepaid shipping label so that make it really easy on her to send that out.
Megan: Ask if she needs a box or. A mailer or an envelope and send that as well and, make that friction point that’s happening. Cuz no one wants a re I don’t wanna return a product. I didn’t buy it to give it back. But make that friction point something that’s really exciting for your customer.
Megan: Wow, that was incredibly easy. I’m going to buy from here because if something goes wrong, I know they have. So treat your good customers really well. And then, over here, Brent, you’re just returning everything you buy. You’re just, buying it to use it once and then put it back in the box and who cares if it’s broken?
Megan: You’ll just say it arrived that way and then shipping it right back. For customers that are doing, abusive behavior with your products, you can limit them. You can make their order final sale. You can, make it that they have to pay for return shipping. And they don’t get their refund until the item has been inspected back in the warehouse.
Megan: And then everyone else somewhere in between. So what we can really do with actually taking control of returns and looking at different customers, setting these different policies can ultimately create a really strong customer experience for your best customers and can shut out those serial abusers and just get them off of your site.
Brent: Yeah, and to be fair, it’s only because people keep buying me hair care products, but I keep returning them for gifts. It’s not that I’m trying to do it, it’s just that I can’t use it for anything. I guess I could re-gift it. That’s a good idea. You could re-gift it. . We have a couple, we have a little bit of time left and I got thinking that that, let’s put this episode live on Black Friday.
Brent: So let’s just say somebody is sitting there on Black the day after Thanksgiving still sort of stuff, Turkey, and they’re like, Oh, I’m gonna listen to a podcast. Oh, there’s a new episode out. What do you think that, And they’re gonna be shopping as a, as a. It’s too late to do something then. But as a as a shopper, is there ways to figure out, I don’t know how to say with that.
Brent: Is there is there trusted brands that you know that are gonna be a good brand to go to? Or is it is it just the typical trust that you have from a merchant or for the merchant and then as a merchant, this is a better question. As the merchant, before we get to Christmas, is it too late to add Signifyd?
Brent: I.
Megan: Not at all. If you’re a merchant that’s already using Signifyd you can effectively turn on something like our returns of use API or add in any of these additional layers of protection. If you’re not already using Signifyd any major e-commerce platform we’re already pre-built into.
Megan: Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus Salesforce Big Commerce. Neva, NetSuite, V tags all the good guys. And then, if we don’t have something built, we have we have APIs that connect in to everybody. If you’re working with an amazing agency like Magento they can get you set up and running and really quickly and, just start protecting your orders.
Megan: Start, especially when it comes to these big swings and volume. You don’t have the manpower to be manually reviewing all these fringe cases, especially when it’s 100, 200% the regular daily volume. Having a product like this in place, it’s quick to put in. And it’s quite effective, I would say, especially for the holidays.
Brent: Yeah. I always like to tell the story that we started in Mexico selling e-commerce in 2014 and one of our first clients had a call center that they literally called every client that put an order in cuz they were worried it could be a fraud client. . So they had, 20 or 30 people in a big room that would just make phone calls all day to confirm.
Brent: So that’s a lot of manpower. Yeah. From a volume standpoint, how much that, let’s think how much you can help something like Signifyd and help. And it’s almost at this point, it’s a necessity, isn’t it? Because if you think about the cost to the cost of returns and the cost of fraud and all those things that are around that this is something that is not just an insurance and doing that, but it’s also, I think you had mentioned a couple times just improving the customer journey.
Brent: Yeah. And improving the experience of the customer. And then for, from the merchant side, knowing that the customers are good is always a better way to do
Megan: business. Yeah. There’s a lot more trust in the entire transaction. And you’re right, it is essential because especially right now oh, a lot of companies are having a hard time and have big numbers to hit.
Megan: There’s, you can’t afford to turn down your best customers, so if someone’s hitting the buy button, that’s the highest intent they can really show you. And we can’t afford to turn away four or 5% of those customers because of the fear of fraud. So that’s ultimately how I always see it, is, let those good customers through and, Let them through that first time and they’ll come back, especially if they have a good experience end to end.
Brent: All right. A couple minutes left here. Megan’s prediction on the holidays what do you think we’re gonna be
Megan: doing? All right, so we’ve. Thing. So going back to those three categories, this is what what the amazing team had Signifyd. I had nothing to do with these numbers, but we have an incredible data team.
Megan: So they were really able to pull some of these insights based on what we’ve been seeing over the past, oh gosh, 24 months of eCommerce trends. Our first prediction is that cyber week growth is going to increase by 5% year over year. So we think there’s still gonna be a lot of volume, but we don’t think it’s all going to come from cyber week.
Megan: We’re predicting an 8% increase in November and December is total rise in terms of that product volume. We’ve been seeing people buying more recently, which is, it’s still haven’t figured things out in terms of the economy. I’m not even going to pretend to try, but we’re predicting an 8% change in volume of products sold in cyber week and a 5% overall volume in November and December.
Megan: We think people are still just buying more, but ultimately that cyber week, we think it’s gonna be down from last year. We think there’ll. 19% of holiday sales versus 21% of holiday sales last year. So people are spreading out their purchases, they’re starting earlier, they’re shopping later.
Megan: As more companies adopt better transition, better solutions they’re able to extend their shipping windows because, they’re not doing that manual review in house anymore, they’re able to actually approve and process orders faster. So they’re able to accept orders longer into the holiday season.
Megan: Yeah, we think it’s a wider range. People are buying earlier, they’re planning ahead. But there’s still going to be a lot of consolidation in Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
Brent: Yeah. And I think overall I was at the econ forum here in Minneapolis a couple weeks ago, and they gave out some numbers that said, E even though it seems like we’re going into a downturn, We’re coming off of such a hot cycle through the pandemic.
Brent: Everybody had to order online. Yeah, that online is still gonna grow even next year. It’s gonna grow 20% over the year before. It won’t grow 50 or whatever that number was. Maybe it was 10%. Anyways, it’s gonna be a good healthy growth in online no matter what over the year. And so people are still shifting from retail to.
Brent: Online, maybe not even, Or even buying more in the future. Yeah. And that as a merchant, you need to always pay attention to where your customers are buying from and where they’re gonna buy more from. Yes. So that cycle and reducing some of that friction in the. And the checkout and making sure that it’s a quality customer is such a important part of things.
Megan: Yeah. It’s really important. And those customers show up everywhere. They’re showing up online and then they’re returning in store, or they’re window shopping online, and then they’re making a final decision. It’s really important to meet that customer where they are, treat them the same.
Megan: Everywhere that you find them and make sure that they have the best experience with your brand.
Brent: Megan, as they close out the podcast, I get everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. , what would you like to plug today?
Megan: Oh gosh. Am I not plugged enough? I feel like it’s been most of us .
Brent: You can plug anything you want.
Brent: You could plug your climbing. Should I plug rock climbing?
Megan: Oh my, yes. Yeah. Anything you want. No, I would absolutely love to plug the incredible marketing team here because all these insights, all these analytics, all this data it’s, all of my partners know this. It’s something I talk about far too much, but, we have a incredible team of really talented and really thoughtful marketing folks that have really enabled Signifyd partnerships continuously.
Megan: We’re able to create really incredible content. It’s actually thought provoking. I hate how many times I even said pandemic in this presentation. They’re really able to bring this information to the table in a way that’s digestible, easy to use and easy to explain. That’s that’s my plug is when you have a great marketing team, let the entire world know
Brent: As, so we’re gonna close out now, but since it is Black Friday today, and we don’t know if I’m actually gonna get it done by it, but it’s gonna, we’re gonna assume that I have it done already and it is Black Friday. What should I go out or What are you gonna go by on Friday? Black Friday and I’m gonna be in the air, so I won’t be able to buy anything.
Brent: What are you gonna buy on Black Friday?
Megan: What am I gonna buy on Black Friday? You’re gonna laugh at me, but I really want a nice two person tent because I only have a one person tent right now and it’s very tiny.
Brent: Is your two person tent, the kind that sits on the side of a rock face?
Megan: No, but I hang, give you a little education that is called a portal ledge.
Megan: Oh, Portal ledge. Like a portable ledge. Yeah. Very cool. So now you’ve got a cool little lingo term for next time you’re out rock climbing or summiting, lcap .
Brent: Absolutely. Okay. If you don’t get your 2% in, then for the holidays, you’ll want one for a gift.
Megan: Yes. Any, anyone that’s listening that wants to send me a tent, I’m sure you can just provide my information in the comments, . All right,
Brent: perfect. Megan Bick is the head of Global Agency Partnerships With Signifyd. Thank you so much for being here today.
Megan: Thanks for your time, Fred. Always great to see you.
Brent: All right.
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Show notes
- 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/
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this Spoony holiday edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Thien-Lan Weber from One Step Checkout and she has done a much better job of her costume and background than I have Thien-Lan. Why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself, tell us what your day to day role is and one of your passions in life.
Thien-Lan: Hello, I’m Thien-Lan Weber. I work for OneStepCheckOut. So I guess most people know me otherwise. One step checkout is the main Magento extension to reduce for Magento one and Magen two. My passion in life, it’s eCommerce and drumming. I also like dress. And appearing on podcasts.
Brent: Excellent, thank you.
Brent: And so today before we get into our regular content, I’m gonna tell you a joke and then you are going to tell me if that joke should be free or if we could charge for it. Ready? You ready, ? Okay. I found out my girlfriend is really a ghost. I had my suspicions the moment she walked through the door.
Thien-Lan: It’ll be free.
Brent: Good. All right, Telan. I know today is Halloween, so I dressed up in my doctor who Christmas sweater, which I have my holidays completely mixed. And you are very well appointed in a a scary outfit with a span stuck in your head and you even have a great background. I appreciate that.
Brent: But we, let’s talk about the scary state of the economy and things coming. And then I think, let’s put it into context of what merchants can be doing to make sure that they’re getting everything they can out of their website. . Exactly.
Thien-Lan: Yeah. So yeah, not very funny. The current state of the economy is pretty gloomy.
Thien-Lan: We actually, I noticed that in New York when I went for McLin to New York, it was not as vibrant as 2018 and 2019 when I went and even the locals like Eric, and. Laura was telling, wa was saying that, A bit more dangerous. Lots of homeless people in the street. And I guess here in Europe we hear all the news about inflation war in Ukraine and yeah.
Thien-Lan: Worldwide inflation is around 8.2%. For the last 12 months in the US it’s yeah, around 8%. In Europe it’s around 10%, but with big discrepancies between countries like France, where I live, which is like 6%, and countries where Anton I imagine to expert lives in Estonia where it’s like 25%.
Thien-Lan: So yeah pretty.
Brent: Yeah. And so I know that there are ways in which merchants can help. And one step checkout is at the end of the funnel, let’s say at the checkout process. And I, you mentioned that you had done a article with Forbes about some points in which merchants can look or work through the checkout process.
Brent: Why don’t you explain a little bit about what that was?
Thien-Lan: Yep. We partner up with nata, who is a for finance council member to talk about this context and what eCommerce merchants can do as quick wins to get more sales this holidays. So it’s all about getting. Market share because consumers will have less spending power.
Thien-Lan: So the competition will be really fierce among all the brands. And you need to offer an experience that really appeals from the moment that people like even before people learn on your website up to the end of your online sales funnel. So today, I’m happy to share with you those four. and and they should be a lot, most of them should be implementable before this holiday season.
Thien-Lan: So that’s the good news.
Brent: All right, so let’s just tell let’s tell us the four points and then let’s go into detail on each one of them. Yep.
Thien-Lan: So the first point is to have a fast. Sorry. A fast website good performing websites. Consumers who go to your website, if they, it’s loading in more than two seconds, they’re going to leave and go to another website.
Thien-Lan: So performance is key here and throughout the whole browsing experience, you need to make sure that it loads fast enough so that people don’t leave and find items that they want, gift ideas, and put them into. So that would be by using themes like Hova, for example, on two, that makes the whole experience much faster and even helps you score rank higher in the search results so as to capture more traffic.
Thien-Lan: So that’s number one.
Brent: Number two, Okay, so I, Yep, go ahead. No, go for it. Number two
Thien-Lan: is around shipping. So with C we saw that by online pickup, in store, or click and collect is very popular. And sales going through those channels are going faster than eCommerce itself. So given that most of most of the time those shipping methods are more cost efficient, it costs nothing for the retailer to just have people come and pick it up.
Thien-Lan: It’s going to be very useful for consumers who can’t afford those extra five, $10 for shipping. So that was number two offer. More flexible shipping methods, including cost effective ones. Third one is offering flexible payment methods. And for the last couple of years, by now, pay later has been very popular as well because they allow consumers to pay, let’s say, in sport installments every fortnight, but without paying any.
Thien-Lan: So that helps when the budget is very strained to break it down into a longer period so you get your paycheck and you don’t pay anything on top of that. So offering payment methods that consumers like need for the holiday seasons is a big factor for to drive. And last but not least, having a good checkout that removes all friction from the checkout experience and allows consumers to place their order without forcing them to create an account or look for two coupon code that you might not have, or filling a lot of fields that will allow you to convert all that traffic.
Thien-Lan: And your efforts along the online sales funnel into an actual order.
Brent: So three out of the four are at the end of the funnel, which is probably pretty common that once they get through, number one, if it’s fast enough, they’re gonna, they’re gonna wanna buy something. What if you start at the top of the funnel with.
Brent: The Google has changed its its algorithms to now put more weight on the speed of your site. And if, let’s just say so one step checkout supports more than just Magento, right? There, there are other platforms that you’re supporting.
Thien-Lan: So for Dar, we are looking at supporting Que, but the priority is to support Magento two and Which makes Magento two much faster.
Thien-Lan: And is adding the sexy back into Magento,
Brent: adding the sexy back in, is that what you said? Yep. That’s good. . Okay. So having that sub two second load time, which in the past first Magento especially, has been unheard of. So some of the tools I guess people could use to help with that would just be Google Lighthouse and Google Page speed insights.
Thien-Lan: Exactly. Another resource that I found very useful and entertaining was a deck of slides by John Hughes from ue it was a hundred slides, but very funny ones about page speed, why, what you can do, and all the tips. We can add the links to the notes of this podcast. But this is a fantastic
Brent: Perfect. Yeah, and I will add the, I will add that to all the show notes. Alright, so let’s move on to shipping. So I think in the US anyways, shipping free shipping is the thing and Amazon is really driving that. Do you recommend that merchants do free shipping?
Thien-Lan: So that’s a strategic decision based on your cost goods sold, your pricing, your competitors.
Thien-Lan: So I can’t. You have to offer free shipping or you have to include shipping in your item price. I think depending on categories and consumers there might be different strategies that was better for you. But yeah, consumers one of the key reasons for carbon environment is when consumers see extra cost at the end of checkouts, so that often happens.
Thien-Lan: when checkout is on two pages with the first page with the item price, and then the second page with tax shipping all additional costs. So that’s a big driver. Either you state up upfront how much your shipping is going to be, or you put a threshold of. When shipping becomes free, and that works quite well to get consumers to pile up their cart and reach that threshold.
Thien-Lan: That makes sense for you financially. But yeah the most important is to be very up upfront and not have any surprises. When shoppers go to the end of checkout and see the final cost they have to pay.
Brent: Yeah, and I can say from experience that I have dropped out of the cart many times when I get to the end and suddenly shipping is a quarter of the cost of the entire order.
Brent: And I automatically go to Amazon then because A, I know that the ship, there’s no shipping. And then b, I also know that it’s gonna come in two days. The other, I think the other good strategy in terms of shipping, and I do agree that showing shipping up front is such an important thing to do. If you were to have a threshold of, say if you spend 50 euros or $50 and then you get free shipping, I think that’s something that I, that appeals to me and it also gets me to spend a little bit more money.
Brent: So if you’re at $49, you search like crazy on what does that $2 item I could get to get my free shipping maybe talk
Thien-Lan: a little bit about, Does that I do the thing I haven’t looked for. The product that is the same as shipping. If shipping is $10, I’d be like, Oh, I get that $10 items. I can have it for free.
Brent: Yeah, absolutely. And if merchants are very clever, they would also do maybe a little scale that says Here’s how close you are to get to free shipping. And if you just add this one more thing. And if they’re very clever, they would add some extremely high high profit items. As incentives to get over that shipping amount.
Brent: So say you’re at $9 and they have something that they charge $9 for, but they pay a dollar for it. Hey, buy this item and you’ll get over your free shipping. There’s so many tactics that merchants could use if they start thinking about the behavior of consumers. And as a merchant too, I think you should be looking at what your competitors are doing and trying to make sure that you’re not missing out on something like that.
Brent: So for example, if your competitor is just offering free shipping, but their every item is a little bit more expensive there’s a reason for it. I think we’ve seen that on Amazon. Sometimes those really cheap things are more expensive cuz there’s free shipping and I you mentioned that earlier.
Brent: About the free shipping part of it. The other one the second one or the third one you mentioned was flexible payments, and you mentioned buy now, pay later. Talk a little bit about that.
Thien-Lan: Yes I’ve been following the Buy now pay later trend for two, three years now. And it all started in Australia and today there are more probably a dozen brands who offer Buy Now pay.
Thien-Lan: the most popular in the US would be a firm and in Europe might be clown. And the whole objective what I find very interesting is that it’s a win-win for consumers and for merchants. The merchants pay a little bit more with our in terms of fees, but consumers get to pay. To slice their payments over six weeks and sometimes more without pay, paying in any interest.
Thien-Lan: So it’s, great for them especially when they are they don’t have much budget and and it. Showed to drive a lot more conversion. And also a lot of those brands, they have their own app. They have their own consumer database, so they give exposure to their own merchants through their apps.
Thien-Lan: So let’s say on the Klan apps, you will say you will have or buy from ex brands, and then consumers will go directly from the cla up to that. Instead of going through Instagram ads or, Google search.
Brent: Yeah. And I think the other thing would be to make sure that they’re at least saving the token for the credit card to check out.
Brent: So second time around, you don’t have to enter all that information. Talk a little bit about that friction that happens in shipping and payment in your check.
Thien-Lan: Yeah so yeah, as I said, the number one reason for car abandonment is high shipping costs. So that’s why it makes sense to offer various options and buy, install to buy online pickup in store.
Thien-Lan: Is a interesting one. And yeah, we’ve partnered with French Magento extension provider called Why Your Mind That does very good quality extensions to allow that and add all these options. So the, this is The more payment and shipping options you offer, the less friction you get because consumers want certain options and if you don’t have them, they will go elsewhere.
Thien-Lan: So for shipping, that’s a great one. And for payments, either, they, one of the reason why they leave a website is also when they don’t trust the website. They have never heard of that band before, that the item is interesting and they don’t want to leave their credit card. So in that case, they would rather, for example, use paper.
Thien-Lan: And so it’s a good one to offer as well.
Brent: Just going back to the shipping I spoke with somebody earlier who said that they clicked on an Instagram ad and they were they needed something for a holiday. I don’t remember the holiday, but they needed it by a specific date and they said the shipping would be three to five days.
Brent: Their date was two weeks out, so there was plenty of time the two weeks came and went and there that nothing was ever shipped. Talk about the importance of maybe some reviews and having that knowledge that, hey, that item is actually gonna get there on time. Because I think sometimes people also wanna know that I’m gonna buy this and I need this, and if I don’t get it in this amount of time, I’m gonna go somewhere else.
Thien-Lan: Yep. So I guess there are two things here. One is setting expectations. So having the right information, the accurate information about when the item is going to arrive at your place is important. The other day I went to a local merchant and they have their own calculation and algorithm saying, Oh, for shipping it might be three, four.
Thien-Lan: But then they don’t re, it’s not accurate. It doesn’t really talk to the carrier. So it’s not, that trustworthy. So if you can, have the right timing and specify information about. When the order is going to be processed, when is going to be packed, when is it’s going to be shipped, and based on how far the consumer is, how long it’s going to take to be shipped, that would be the best.
Thien-Lan: But yeah, otherwise it is better to, overestimate the shipping time, then underestimate and then disappoint.
Brent: All right. So let’s get then to the, Oh we’ve talked a lot about frictions. Tell us about how, maybe, how one a checkout can help reduce that friction with the client at checkout.
Thien-Lan: Yep. After shipping cost being the number one reason for car and the number, the second one is forcing consumers to create an account. So how many times have you been to a website where, Click on cards I want to pay. And then you have that page that says, Log in, I’ll create an account. And you can’t do anything.
Thien-Lan: You can’t, pay, you can’t get your item. And 25% of consumers leave at that point. So we, OneStepCheckOut we’ve been addressing that. Thanks to feedback from a lot of our merchants and clients, and what we do is we allow to create an account by simply using all the information that anyone would answer when they fill out their shipping details.
Thien-Lan: So email, first name, last name, address, and the only thing you need to add it is a small tick box where consumers can enter their passwords twice and that creates an account. So we call it seamless account registration, and it replaces that, account creation wall that is making, 25% of people leave.
Brent: Do you find at that stage some people forget that they have an account and they fill out all that information. How do you get around the idea? , they go through that, they forgot that they created an account and then they click and then it comes back and says, You already have an account.
Brent: Please enter your password. And then they’ve forgotten their password and by the time they get around to finding it, they’ve left because they forgot they were even what they were ordering. Yeah,
Thien-Lan: that happens quite a lot. So yeah. I think we also allow people to check out as. And then have the account reconciliation later after.
Thien-Lan: I have to get back to you on that. But I think that would be the sensible thing to do because you absolutely don’t want people to be stopped at that point when they’re ready. To give you money and to pay for that item.
Brent: Talk a little bit about the idea of one step checkout. What, like the reason why it’s called One Step?
Brent: I think that’s obvious, but a lot of people don’t think through all the different steps that they have to go at checkout.
Thien-Lan: So it all started with Magento one, and back then checkout was six steps. So it made a massive difference to have all those steps into just one. Above the fold with one single button that says Order now.
Thien-Lan: So you can fill out all your fields and not click any next button, just one big button order now.
Brent: So it’s making sure that there’s almost nothing you have to do make sure you complete checkout. How about making sure that users The right address and things like that. I’m assuming, integrates with other plat or other services that help find the right address.
Brent: Yeah, go ahead.
Thien-Lan: The key advantage of our product is that we integrate with. 90% of the third party extensions that are out there. So address validation, that works really well. Tax calculation shipping estimates, any shipping extension hundreds of payment extensions. So whatever you need, you can integrate it with one step checkout.
Brent: All right. I wanna switch directions just slightly. Okay. Are you seeing the same amount of people on Magento two using your services, or do you feel like it’s declining right now?
Thien-Lan: So with Magento two, we could see that it’s on the other side of the product maturity curve. The number of install.
Thien-Lan: And the number of orders for Agen two has been slowing down. But as I said, with Hova, it’s been picking back up, so that’s why I’m saying it’s bringing sexy back. And so a lot of, I would say, yeah, big proportion of new orders from west of checkout, from gen two are driven by hiva things. .
Brent: So you would, you could say that HAFA is changing.
Brent: HOA is ch is saving Magento from the dorans, from the tomb.
Thien-Lan: Let’s say that .
Brent: Absolutely. So if you have something that we started off with spooky and scary. What would be the biggest thing you could tell a merchant that they should think about for. website and for their checkout process,
Thien-Lan: I would say yeah, performance is key.
Thien-Lan: So today people don’t want to wait. Most people would buy their holidays, gifts on mobile, so it has to be mobile friendly. Loading really fast, allowing them to browse and or even, guiding them into what would be the most interesting, the best selling products because people are also looking for inspiration and then removing friction all the way through to check out and let them place their order without asking them for too many questions or asking them to do too many things.
Thien-Lan: So a lot of a lot of that friction is also in the order. Subscribe to our newsletter, get $5 off. Remember this, do this, do that. And you’re like, Go away. Go away. I want my product. And then someone calls you, you do something else, and then you go to another website
Brent: to shop. Yeah, that’s, that’s a great point.
Brent: I do, I’ve had quite a few guests that say, Love you learn to love the popup, but make sure you don’t have the popup in checkout. Because it I agree. It’s so annoying when you’re typing in. All of a sudden you get the popup and says, that, says, Enter your email address and subscribe to our newsletter when you could have a checkbox in your checkout that says, I’m, I’d like to subscribe your newsletter , because you’re putting your email address anyways.
Brent: Exactly. Yeah, that’s a really great point. Popups popups, especially on mobile. I think the other thing is that merchants still are thinking desktop first, and we’ve talked about performance and we’ve talked about friction in the checkout. Friction in the checkout is even more when you’re on mobile because it’s so much smaller.
Brent: So having that easy to use navigation is so important. Do you have any words of advice for people to. Enter as little as possible for the checkout. For mobile, You mean for consumers? No. For a merchant. Is there anything that they can do to reduce the amount of things like you, You said that having options for shipping, but I think.
Brent: At some point, if you have so many options, that’s too many options to show on your mobile phone. Is it recommended that you have as little options or making sure that they don’t have a lot of opt or even that’s where the free shipping would come in, where they don’t even have to choose shipping because it’s free.
Brent: Anything that, and that helps merchants check out on mobile quicker.
Thien-Lan: Yeah, that’s that’s an interesting point and I’ve seen it with. A lamp company. So they are the biggest in Europe. They have lamp.de eliminations.co, uk, lamp.fr, and 13 lamp sites across Europe. And for all their websites they have, they almost removed the shipping method.
Thien-Lan: Section because they have one carrier, one shipping cost, and you don’t have to choose. So that makes the whole checkout form much shorter and it’s quicker. People don’t have to wonder, Oh, what do I want? It just tells you what you’re going to have and that’s it.
Brent: So you’d say they’re helping us shed new light on the checkout process?
Thien-Lan: Yep. They help. Yep. They help simplify the whole thing and I guess they’ve seen that consumers are happy with that. So why give the choice when you know it’s the best options for you as a merchant and consumers are happy?
Brent: Excellent. Telan we are running outta time. And as a bonus on the episode I do want to do another free.
Brent: Because it’s Halloween and I have a Halloween joke for you. And then we’re gonna go into our shameless plug. But before we get there, I do have a special Halloween segment joke for you today. So again, this one is free or paid. Are you ready? Ready. Why did the policeman ticket the ghost on Halloween?
Brent: It didn’t have a haunting license.
Thien-Lan: paid with
subscription .
Brent: Excellent. Good. All right. Yeah. Tn Lan, Thank you so much. As I close out every episode, I give our guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like. What would you like to plug today?
Thien-Lan: The only thing I didn’t mention was that Natasha Sonoma from the Forbes.
Thien-Lan: Council is the CEO of Optt, O P W T Y, and that’s innovative platform that allows you to acquire and manage all your, by now, pay later brands all in one space. So that’s really cool because depending on your. Not all the favorite brands are the same. And if you operate in lots of different countries, you can acquire them all at once, and then in the panel you can see who is performing better and you can dial up that down based on your storefronts.
Thien-Lan: So that really helps consumers have the preferred payment methods. And in terms of integration, that helps all the hustle. talking to each of the brands, integrating them into your two checkout, and then seeing which one works for you. Yeah, excellent. For one, it’s not a plug for one step checkout, but for Opti, and that is compatible with one Step out as well.
Thien-Lan: So it’s like a Lego blog. You have one to click out, you plug Opti and from Opti you can have access to 60 by no pay later. .
Brent: Very cool. Thank you so much. And I will put all these in the show notes and I will try to get this episode live as soon as possible so we are not so far away. Ka TA’s Halloween and it won’t go live today, I’m afraid, but we should have done a live stream.
Brent: That would’ve been a good idea. Yeah. Anyways thank you so much for being here today. 10. Who also helps on the Magento Association. I appreciate all your work and she’s now showing us a nice sticker for one step checkout. I would encourage everybody to go there for their Magento two sites, and I would encourage everybody to use hfa.
Brent: Our newest HofA is our newest sponsor for Talk Calm. So you’re excited about
Thien-Lan: that as well. There you go. I wasn’t even paid to talk about them. ,
Brent: thank you so much. Have a great. .
Thien-Lan: Thank you. Bye.
Akeneo Product Cloud is more than just a PIM with Kristin Naragon
We all want to keep our customers happy, so significant investments were made into CRM. Later, merchants found that the employee was being neglected and invested in that. The final piece to the puzzle was the product and the Product Information Management system.
Akeneo has now moved PIM to the next level with Product Cloud.
Kristen Naragon explains how Akeneo Product Cloud works and helps us understand PIM and how it enables you to get and maintain happy customers.
Akeneo also offers a full host of Akeneo Training classes to get a better understanding of how the system works.
https://www.akeneo.com/what-is-a-product-cloud/
What you will learn from this podcast
- Kristin Naragon is Global Marketing and Strategy for Akeneo, a mother of two and a Peloton enthusiast.
- Akeneo provides a PIM (Product Information Management) solution that helps turn browsers into buyers.
- 2023 is projected to be the year of the PIM, as businesses are now realizing the importance of investing in product experience.
- Akeneo offers both open-source and SaaS solutions and has been helping customers with product gathering, enriching, and getting to market faster for ten years.
- Akeneo is also well-suited to help with social commerce, providing consistency and speed to new channels.
- Social media and influencers are essential for creating a consistent brand image.
- Transparency is important to younger buyers.
- Akeneo PIM can help merchants get products to market quicker by providing checklists and automating manual processes.
- Akeneo Product Cloud allows for dynamic data to be combined into one product record, which can be activated in multiple channels.
- Experimentation is key to discovering new channels and reaching new audiences.
- Akeneo PIM can help businesses pivot quickly in times of crisis.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Kristin Naragon. Kristin is Global marketing and Strategy for Akeneo. Sorry, Kristin, why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us one of your day to day, what your day to day role is, and maybe one of your passions in life.
Kristin: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brent. I’m really excited to be here. So I try to introduce myself, not by my work. And I try to remove myself from being defined by just the the work that I do. I am Kristen Naragon. I am a mother of two kids who are I think are just the most interesting humans on earth.
Kristin: And I love to travel with my family, my husband and my kids, we like to travel quite a bit. Maybe it’s quite a bit just from an American point of view, but we’ve taken the family to far flung places like Indonesia and Japan and Columbia and all across Europe. So we we have a good time and enjoy exploring new places and learning learning how other people around the world live.
Kristin: So that’s a little bit about me and a passion that I have. A Peloton enthusiast, and I will wake up at ungodly hours in order to fit in a ride or a workout with Peloton. So maybe that’s a plug for somebody else’s business. But I’m a little bit obsessed And in my day job.
Kristin: What I do to make sure I can afford my Peloton is I am the head of global marketing and strategy here at a Akeneo. And I have been with the company for two and a half years. It’ll be three years in February. Gosh, I joined right before the pandemic started, so two hot weeks in the office.
Kristin: And. Got to meet a few people and dispersed. We were. Building and changing a strategy all remotely in a new company was a bit of a trick. But we’ve we’ve done some great things. So that’s a little bit about me and what I’m up to.
Brent: So for the listeners who don’t understand what a PIM is why don’t you give us the 10,000 foot view of a PIM and then let’s dive into PIMS more as we go.
Kristin: Yeah, so PIM it’s hard to explain if if you’ve got zero knowledge, but if we’re trying to talk to our grandparents and let them know what it is, it’s essentially those it’s a solution that helps turn browsers into buyers. And so if you think about what we do as consumers to go looking for researching products that we are interested in purchasing and read all of that information about the product.
Kristin: Find it in different locations, represented in different ways. The PIM serves that up in mo in the most delightful ways. So where the solution that helps those buyers feel more sure. About the products that bra and retailers are selling.
Brent: I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it being said that 2023 is going to be the year of the PIM.
Brent: Why do you think that PIMs are trending so much,
Kristin: Yeah. Oh man. I love this because the way that we see the world is that there are three key assets that any merchant, brand, manufacturer, any commerce business has. The first are customers, it’s pretty important to a business.
Kristin: The second are employee. And the third, of course are products. And so that first wave of investment was around that, the customer and obsession with the customer and the customer experience. And so centralizing the record for customers and then engaging with them in all the ways that a customer, they think wants to be engaged.
Kristin: And so huge industries have been developed around that customer engagement. The second wave has been around that second asset, which is employee. Maybe you might argue it’s going in the wrong order, but it is what it is. And so especially now since Covid, but it started well before this industry surrounding technology and consulting new innovations and supporting that employee experience, that life cycle of an employee from recruiting talent.
Kristin: Onboarding them, engaging them, health meters with employees. All of that is exploding right now. So the customer experience first and still going strong, employee experience wave is here. And if you’re watching it, it’s growing big and tall. That third pillar of a business is the product experience.
Kristin: And woefully neglected still a huge challenge for businesses, and it’s the thing that falls apart. If your customer experience is falling apart, it’s probably due to. A bad product experience. And so they’re waking up to understand, oh my gosh, the missing ingredient and this whole thing that I’ve been investing in is actually investing in that product experience.
Brent: Yeah, and I think one of the fun things or interesting things that I’ve always seen as the pin is that you can then put all of your product into one place and diversified into multiple channels. And as now we’re getting more into omnichannel, pin is even more important. To keep that continuity in product across all channels.
Brent: Yeah, for sure. Maybe talk a little bit about how Akeneo can effectively get over some of those hurdles when you’re talking about continuity of product. Yeah, there’s
Kristin: so many hurdles that we we help our customers with and, you talk about the destination, so it’s always the last mile.
Kristin: I think that a lot of. A lot of people are interested in it, right? The last mile’s, always the heart smile, but actually in. This wave , what we’re seeing is that it’s actually starting way back before the last mile. You’ve got the whole marathon in front of you before you get there of product, gathering product information from wherever it comes from.
Kristin: So if you’re. A retailer, a distributor, it’s coming from maybe thousands of different brands trying to get that information. But even if you’re a brand manufacturer yourself, oh my goodness, you have agencies that you’re working with. You’ve got the creative people, you have the brand people, you’ve got the order management, you’ve got a lot of sources of information that you need, and to get together in one place that’s hard.
Kristin: Pin helps with that. And then certainly, Accelerating that speed of getting the information. So you gotta to crunch that hard work down into as much automation as possible so you get to market faster that last mile of getting to market faster. You gotta enrich the products, make that easy and fun to do, and then get that into all of those destinations.
Kristin: Now we talk about sales channels, which is absolutely one destination for product experiences to show up for your prospects and your customers. But it’s everywhere else too. So think of the end of your post purchase experience. If you’re calling up a particular brand and you want, you say, Hey, I bought this product on this particular site.
Kristin: I need to know X, Y, Z. You really want the person who’s picking up the phones to know exactly what it is and know more about the product than potentially was served to that person. So pin information actually gets served to support that full life cycle of customer information to things. The the customer support teams
Brent: as well.
Brent: Yeah, I think so. Can you started back in the early teens, 2013, something like that? Tell us some of the beginnings of that and how that has impacted how PI have has grown and how it fits into the today’s puzzle or all the different pieces you need for a fully rounded e-commerce and store.
Brent: That’s
Kristin: right. Yeah we we certainly support e-com, but it’s really commerce at its core in all the different destinations. But yeah, back to your question, it’s 10 years. We get to celebrate our 10 year anniversary at at our upcoming user conference in Paris in, in March. And Pretty excited about that.
Kristin: My goodness. Has, have things changed in that last 10 years? Can you have started with the founders who were working on the backend systems? E-commerce solutions like Magento. And they were, hands on keyboard trying to move products from one place into the e-com system and really just saw it loud and clear the problem that managing that product information and getting it into the direct to consumer channel.
Kristin: It was just a total nightmare. And so that’s where they began is trying to solve that problem. And they created an open source solution. And so anybody can go right now on GitHub or wherever you download your open source solutions. and find Akeneo who there, and it’s a powerful solution that’s just available to anybody.
Kristin: And I think that was the part of the vision was they knew this was such a vast problem that they wanted to provide a solution to anybody who needed it. And so we have 80,000 downloads of that solution. Across the world. So clearly it is any customer or any business with a product to sell has this problem and we’re helping them to solve it.
Kristin: And so that was that was the roots of the business. And since we’ve evolved into a full SaaS composable offering we fit into whatever stack a company might. And integrate neatly into whatever ecosystem is in the customer’s base. And so it’s been a quite, a, quite a journey, quite an evolution.
Kristin: And the value that we’re providing and the depth and the breadth, I think we. You hear it with our customers. Gosh, I’ve sold a lot of products before. I’ve been exposed to a lot of different solutions and I’ve talked to a lot of customers in my life. I have never talked to so many happy customers as I have here.
Kristin: It’s creepy, like not creepy, but it’s just, it’s almost unbelievable how delighted these customers are with the Kenya. And so it’s just a, it’s a wonderful, just a wonderful place to, to grow. .
Brent: Going back to the beginnings and the reasoning around, so open source has been a big part of what helped software grow in the last 10 years.
Brent: Yeah. And the is certainly open source and has a community version that’s free for people to download and use. We do tell us some of the importance of that in how ge, how maybe getting users into PI and exposing them to pi, how does that help Akeneos brand to have that open source?
Kristin: Yeah. It’s interesting, it was new to me of this open source model before coming to a Kenya, and what I realized is that especially in a market where as we discussed this it’s it’s been around for a while, the category, but.
Kristin: I think since the 10 years that we’ve been able to expose the, with the free open source model to so many different people, I think the education process, it really has accelerated the education process for what Apam is. Because I think it’s still one of those categories that people are learning about, right?
Kristin: Like learning exactly where it fits into their tech stack, Learning exactly how it solve the value that it bring. The problems that it solves. And so that open source nature that I think has really helped to sort of seed buyers with an educational tool. Now what we’ve got done recently, actually this year we released also a SaaS free trial.
Kristin: So it’s totally free, no credit cards, nothing. You just put your name in and you go, you get a 14 day free trial, it’s SaaS if you’re not a developer or some IT person who really understands how to install, an open source product, I am not one of those somebody like me can go in and just start the free trial on their on their computer and be done.
Kristin: So you’re, you can experience the Akeneo. Value over the course of 14 days. And I think that’s also part of, our heritage is getting the word out there, understanding the value that a solution like ours has to offer is really been helping us to expand the growth of the business, but also the solution at.
Brent: So on a tangent Akeneo has always been known for their purple three-headed. I think it’s a dragon, it’s a hydro, a hying. Is there a story behind that?
Kristin: Yeah. Her pronouns are she and her name is Ziggy. Yeah, she’s evolved as well over time. And she’s taken on some iterations, but she was initially brought into the fold by a very creative person on the team who, took on the adoption of Ziggy and she was the three headed hydro for multi channel.
Kristin: And so at first she was the bad guy. She’s multi-channel, like hard to wrangle. She was evil. But she was tamed by Julia, who is our persona the PI power user. And now they’re best friends. So she and Julia Julia and Ziggy are now friends and Ziggy. Part of the, ah, man, to get your hands on a Ziggy people really like, So you can come to our booth or at any show or come to our user events.
Kristin: You might be able to find some limited addition gigs to adopt and take home with you. Our customers love them, .
Brent: So one of the things that that is coming up in, in commerce now is social commerce. How does PI fit into social commerce and how can new merchants or merchants that are established and have a PIM or are looking at.
Brent: Utilize that for social commerce.
Kristin: Yeah. Gosh. And social commerce is such a broad category too, and it keeps evolving by the minute and some platforms are even taking down the actual transactional piece of it. So I guess when I think of social commerce, that’s everything from the influence piece, the browse piece, the.
Kristin: Showcasing piece to the transactional components of it. And so if you think about it with those two buckets, I think PI is absolutely able to and should be serving that consistent. You talked about a consistent product experience no matter where you’re browsing. and it’s no question in my mind that unless you have a centralized product record, you have consistency in how you’re describing and showcasing your products.
Kristin: If you’re not doing that on social channels, you’re totally missing the whole point. And so driving consistency there is absolutely like table stakes critical these days. And I think the other so consistency is one, but also speed to those new. Random channels that seem to pop up as, as often as they do.
Kristin: I think without a pin, without preset. Centralized system, your speed to those new channels, your speed to market to those new channels is just a nightmare. Whereas with a proper pin, you’re able to open up a new channel, select the types of content, because every channel has different content requirements.
Kristin: But just modify the content that already exists and gets it, get it into the channel. So it’s not like recreating an entire process just to open up one social, new social channel. , it’s as simple as, clicking and reconfiguring. So I think it’s speed to those channels, being able to test out if those channels work for you, for whatever objectives you think that they should be achieving is just so much faster with with a setup pin.
Brent: And I think just going back to the traditional model of just doing eCommerce through one store, the reality of what’s coming is now we are gonna have maybe even when they talk about headless, maybe it’s not gonna, you’re not, you’re gonna be, everything’s gonna be done through all these channels.
Brent: And I know that in an earlier interview this year, we talked about even conversational commerce where. It’s done through chats and things like that. Yeah. So I think that retailers and merchants need to know that they need to stay at least somewhat ahead of the game or stay with it so you can continue to sell and see the channels that are out there.
Brent: What are the trends in in that social commerce head first type of thing that that Akeneo is jumping onto. . Yeah.
Kristin: So if you think about a certain generation of buyer out there, of which I am not one of they are all over social and the influence that social people, influencers on social media channels have and the impact that it can have on your product.
Kristin: And for brand managers out there who want to control their image having the ability to have a central. Like I said before, just single source of truth for your product information and being able to get that into the hands of when possible influencers is absolutely one one thing that is part of, making sure that your brand image stays consistent even if it’s in the hands of somebody that you’re not paying.
Kristin: The second thing is that those younger consumers value transparency. . And so I think being able to provide in those social channels really truly transparent information about the product itself, but also layering in brand values inside of those social moments with your product. So not even discrete from.
Kristin: Side by side and integrated with your product story that is insanely important for buyers of a certain generation, . So transparency is critical and social is if you’re not there you’re just not existent. And those influencers have power. So if you’re not feeding those influencers with the.
Kristin: Information, they’re just going on their own. Those are the trends that we see, which, I think a pin like ours actually supports really nicely.
Brent: And as your team gets bigger, I think that the importance of having different roles on your team to do different things and I think it applies especially in c let’s language One of the features that I particularly like about Akeneo is the ability to do the, to do checklists of things.
Brent: So you could you can see when your catalog is done in English and maybe your catalog isn’t completed in Spanish, and talk about how how that team aspect and even how that the aspect of having the ability to see when pieces are done and getting things launched quicker and not having to dig through mounds of data to figure out what isn’t and what is.
Brent: How that can help a merchant get things to market quicker.
Kristin: Yeah. I’m glad you point that out because it’s one of the usability features of the solution that I think, doesn’t, is not like the sexiest thing to go talking about, but it’s once you get the product, you’re like, Oh my gosh, thank God.
Kristin: We recently did a total economic impact study with a few of our customers, and found out that retention was one of the outcomes. Employee retention and satisfaction was one of the outcomes of leveraging Akeneo PIM. And the reasons that were given were exactly what you talk about. So it’s the ability to see.
Kristin: Among a lot of products that you have to enrich. You have to get ready for getting to market, see what status they’re in, in, like you said, which language, but which market, which category, which family of products. So you can triage your day and not just waste time combing through and list lists of products.
Kristin: So it’s just a a quick way to understand where you are in your day to day job. And not be like, dragged down in the quagmire of lots of the Excel spreadsheets on lists of products. The other thing that we discovered was that since those employees were not, Drag down with some menial, matching and v lookup tasks that they were a even more satisfied because they were able to do the higher value work.
Kristin: The work that was actually more interesting of writing colorful descriptions, actually looking for what are the right brand images to put against these products. And so actually taking those extra steps to make their products showcase much more brilliantly on the places that they were going.
Kristin: So employee retention was a really wonderful outcome that we, we discovered with with the, those who are using the PIM.
Brent: I think you can create and I’m gonna use all the wrong words, but like a workflow where you can have certain things that have to get done before the product’s ready to go.
Brent: Oh yeah. Which ensures that the product’s gonna be as great and beautiful as it should be when it goes live. Whereas your typical, if you are using some back end of any nondescript eCommerce system you’re not gonna have all. There’s not gonna be all those things in place to ensure that product is the way it should be across all areas. And even as a manager, then it makes it difficult if you didn’t have that tool in hand to make sure your product looks super great for your customer to see.
Kristin: Yeah. No, it’s true. And the time to market is the, is so employee satisfaction and retention is absolutely one of them.
Kristin: But then time to market is the other benefit and the outcome of that because the speed with which you’re able to triage and understand which categories are ready to go. This is high and you, a lot of automation is happening behind the scenes so that you don’t have to do a lot of the manual work that probably you’re doing with spreadsheets and other old fashioned things to get this product information into one place.
Kristin: As an example, one of our customers who’s a seller of, Apple. Apple doesn’t give anybody any information prior to a launch of a new product, Of course. And so even, Staples. And so they would take them, I think, upwards of two weeks to, gather that information from the product launch and get it up onto their channels and into their markets to sell it.
Kristin: My gosh, that’s how much lost revenue over two weeks period. That’s that. That is an impact to the business, and now they turn it around in a matter of hours. Simply due to that process that they’ve nailed down, leveraging the interface of the PIM and all the automations and checkpoints and quality controls that we’ve got.
Brent: One other benefit that you have is that you can have a third party vendor have limited access to start making that product ready. Not, maybe Apple wouldn’t do this, but if you have a vendor who is giving you a product and they’re, they know everything about it and they can, they have access to your system, they could be starting that pre-product input before your team even has to get a hold of it or a lot of that work would already be done to get it live as soon as.
Kristin: Yeah, totally. And so that’s the one solution for retailers and distributors is that onboarding solution to allow third parties to get in there and import their product information alongside other components. But there’s also inside the administrative rights of the core PIM itself, we have a bunch of customers who have seasonal release.
Kristin: And so they have a ton of products that they just have to get out the door in various season, and they find that it’s actually. Really valuable for them and their community actually, where this particular customer is to hire students, like working students as well as retired people to their offices.
Kristin: Give them, these are the three things that you’re working on. And that’s all the access that they have. So they have their list of products that they work on and the various fields and attributes that they’re allowed to enrich, and they find that their time to market. So much faster. Their flexibility with their workforce is pretty darn high, and they love being able to, to hire into the community people who might otherwise not have those types of opportunities.
Kristin: And it’s just this like win, win all around.
Brent: Talking about new product launches and I know that Akeneo recently unlocked a new product, at the Unlocked Conference. Thank you. Tell us about Akeneo Product Cloud and how that’s gonna change things and enhance things.
Kristin: Yeah, we’re super, super excited about this.
Kristin: This this for us is the way that the category evolves. One of the things that we clearly. Encountered in working with the customers that we have and, the benefits of having 80,000 installs of the product and open sources, having conversations with people to see what other pieces of information help to the browser, turn into a buyer.
Kristin: And if you step back and you think about all of those components of product experiences that help you and I discover to learn to make the purchase it’s more than what a traditional modern pin can consume or should consume. You go up on any product product page, you’ll see things like customer reviews, you’ll see things like and if it’s a dynamic pricing that’s not going inside of pin because it’s hot changing by the, this millisecond sometimes pricing.
Kristin: There are things that, let’s see what other components that we can think of that live outside. So there’s order information, right? So understanding if there’s availability of that product in a certain store that’s near you. Those are all components that naturally and should live outside of a traditional modern PIM like Akeneo.
Kristin: But that also serve that browsing to buying experience. And so the product cloud is that evolution of a composable offering that allows merchants and commerce leaders to get their products and showcase their product. Anywhere with any product information in one single pre in place. So it broadens the scope of product information to both warm and hot data.
Kristin: So non-static, non, once and done marketing data to that more dynamic data, puts it all in one place and allows those merchants to do analytics on performance. Of those products in all of the destinations to where it goes. So we’re pretty excited about this. It’s an evolution of building out the various components for us in this product cloud vision that we’re painting out there.
Kristin: But I think we’ve got the backbone of it with the pin with our app store, with our connected marketplace to. All the destinations that that we need to get them to, to the product information too. So we’re pretty excited about the product
Brent: cloud. Is the, so you’re gonna tie in the ERP and any disparate systems that would be connected to the it’s you’re talking about having everything coming into one place and then spitting it out to the multiple channels again.
Kristin: Yeah, exactly. If you think of the PIM is now one component, one composable component of the entire product record. You’ve got a dam, you’ve got order management systems to serve, availability needs in the product record product life cycle systems that allow the searcher or the buyer or the consumer to understand where the inform the product was sourced from potentially since that’s now.
Kristin: A real transparency, like I said, is a real need for BA browsers and buyers to understand where the sourcing material has come from and how it was sourced some of that lives in a system like a plm. And to be able to combine all of those elements into one full product record in the single source.
Kristin: So now the full product record is elevated at a product data platform level and then shipped out and activated into the various channels that it needs to go. That’s what we now mean by a product record being activated into the various destinations where it needs to go. One of the other value propositions that I’m really excited about there is essentially.
Kristin: Now you’ve got the customer record. Oh, sitting in a CDP or a crm. You’ll have the product record completely. Sitting in a PDP product data platform, marrying those two and syncing those two data sources allows for analysis of your business that you’ve never had before. And so up leveling that centralized product record to that centralized customer record is just gonna.
Kristin: Further unlock so much growth for these businesses.
Brent: That really helps the marketers, the top three things in marketing is measuring. And that will give a lot more insight to how well they’re performing. Absolutely. Kristen, if you had if you had a little juicy nugget that you could give a merchant as we’re going into fourth quarter, Black Friday this busier time.
Brent: What could you give a merchant? What would you what do you think the trend is now in, in this the end of 2022?
Kristin: Oh, Juicy nugget. I love experimenting. I do that myself for my marketers in my in my team. If we’re not experimenting, then we’re not trying, we’re not failing.
Kristin: We’re not we’re not getting out there and making sure that we’re the best showcasing our offering in the best. . And so I think for merchants out there, it’s the same. It’s if you can’t quickly experiment in a new channel, if it’s a sales channel or marketing channel you’re missing out, you’re missing out on exposure to new audiences, or you’re missing out on, being able to showcase your products in ways.
Kristin: You couldn’t on a direct to consumer channel, potentially with with a, the YouTube influencer channel that’s coming out. So I think it’s it’s pretty imperative that, this season, if you wanna try something new, the quicker you can get there, measure it, understand it, pull it off.
Kristin: It’s, if it’s not working, but expand it if it is. I think that’s the real power in expanding your business. .
Brent: Yeah. And just to help listeners understand how easy it would be as you have everything in your PIM and you have a new channel that’s now available, all those channels are gonna be connected within api.
Brent: And all you do is connect the two. And even if it’s such a new thing, there’s tons of middleware that can get you in connected if it’s not available. But generally those larger channels or the new channels that are out there, they’re gonna be available to connect to. And just as we wanna sell that particular thing to somebody, that channel wants that connection with you to sell through.
Brent: So I think that’s a great, That’s a great point that you’ve made about how. The time to market is so greatly reduced by having your product all in one place and ready to go.
Kristin: . Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what, we know, we noticed this with And I think a lot of learnings came out of covid on so many different dimensions, but when we were trying to support our customers through Covid and the impact that it had on their businesses the ones in our ecosystem they were able to make these pretty significant pivots.
Kristin: We had a company that would sell to airlines. So they sold things like fuel to airlines. They sold things like everything in bulk to support the flight. And Covid hits, What do you do? So their big idea was to pivot to consumers. So they’re selling to, they’re selling to businesses.
Kristin: Clearly. They decided to take their wear. That actually suddenly were pretty useful for people because they had things like hand sanitizer in bulk. And so what they were able to do is do some repackaging but sell to consumers. So they spun up all that product information that they had in the kidney that they were using to sell to businesses, re, just tweak some of the descriptions to make it more consumer friendly.
Kristin: And they push direct to consumer within a matter of months. That’s a business pivot . But they accessed a whole new market through consumers because they have their product information sorted. Wait, that’s experiment, an experimentation at scale, and that’s business survival. And so now coming out of Covid and flights are all back, they have two consumer bases now buying bases now that they’re able to accelerate.
Kristin: The world’s your oyster in that case, right? Just in terms of new markets, new channels that you’re able to experiment with.
Brent: I do wanna make a D2C, B2B point too, that the PIM is a channel to print as well. Yes. And if you’re a B2B and you have traditional, maybe one channel through some kind of website, but you also have a printed catalog PIM is a great place to put all of your products in, and then you can output to a printed catalog just like you do to any other channel.
Brent: You can think of it as electronic and digital, but that digital turns into pieces of paper at the end, and rather than having somebody comb through, pages and pages of InDesign documents or whatever you’re using you can start it in your PIM and then output to some product that, that actually is the printable version.
Brent: Yeah,
Kristin: I was in my CEO’s office a few months ago and he proudly has displayed on his. This massive catalog. It’s like this thick and dense . He puts it on my lap and I’m like, Oh that’s, I could do some weight lifting with this, but it’s entirely powered by the kidney and the level of detail and the product information that’s in here.
Kristin: It, this is not a lost business of selling with a product catalog for many industries. And if you have to sort through all of that, all of those dense pages of product catalogs in product information manually, oh my Lord. And if you get something wrong, the expense of getting something wrong in a printed catalog that you’re doing thousands of, this is.
Kristin: Business impact. So yeah, getting the product information right and all of those checks and balances that you’d want for your digital, easy to pull down a misspelling on a, your direct to consumer channels. But if you’re have a misprint a spelling error in a catalog that has already been printed.
Kristin: you’ve got a problem. So all of the checks and balances that go into that are pretty important for those channels as
Brent: well. Yeah, and I, so Kristen, I think you and I could talk about great solutions for PIM for the next three hours, but unfortunately we are out of time. Yeah. As I put, as I close out on a, each of our podcasts, I give a chance for the guests to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like.
Brent: What would you like to plug?
Kristin: I, it’s the mission that we’ve got is to make sure that we provide a solution for anybody who needs it. So I’d say go to Akeneo.com and just start the free trial. And like I said there’s no, no credit card and nothing’s needed. You just put your your name in there and.
Kristin: There’s a live chat inside the food trial. You can explore the experience all on your own time and all on your own. Or if you need help, we’ve got that too. So I would just say check it out. If you’re curious about what exactly it looks like and under the hood is there for you to open up.
Kristin: So atkin.com is the shameless plug that I’ll put out.
Brent: Yeah, and I’ll put all, I’ll put all the links on the show notes. Kristen Naragon, thank you so much. Kristen is the VP of Global Marketing and Strategy for Akeneo. Thank you for being here today.
Kristin: It was my pleasure. Thanks so much, Brent.
Interested in a beginner’s guide to PIM? Check out this article.
SaaS by SaasWest BigCommerce with Heather Barr
BigCommerce is Open SaaS means building a great community around it. Heather and Brent talk about the growing BigCommerce community and how to get involved. @hnbarr_
Heather walks us through how to get involved and introduced to the BigCommerce community. There is a lot of firsts happening at BigCommerce, and the community is strong and growing.
Heather tells us why it is unique in the commerce space and especially in the SaaS space. So many things in the works, and this is the perfect time to get involved. Will there be a BigCommerce event in Austin? SaaS by SaaSWest?
https://sites.google.com/bigcommerce.com/devx-at-bc/devx
Check out the post on why you need a community manager.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Heather Barr. Heather is the community developer manager, or the developer, community manager with BigCommerce heather, go ahead, introduce yourself. Do a much better job than I did . Tell us your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Heather: Yeah, absolutely. So great to be here. Thank you so much, Brent. Like you mentioned, I am the developer community manager at BigCommerce so I basically just do the day to day admin type things with our developer community spaces. The most puppet is our Slack. In addition to that, I build out some programs and host events and things like that.
Heather: And now that we have a really awesome solid developer relations team I work. Very closely with them to do exactly that and just improve the developer experience or try our hardest to do that at the commerce. And one of my greatest passions is it actually is somewhat of a newer passion.
Heather: Maybe in the past, like year or two, I have built out a, like a van, like a camper van out of a old like Amazon truck. And so I really love traveling around in that and just doing some camping or glamping I guess you could call it. But.
Brent: All right, so now I’m super jealous and maybe after the interview we’ll have to talk about camper vans cuz I had the same idea out of an old, like a sprinter van or something.
Brent: Yeah, I love that concept and it gives you an opportunity to get out on the road and see things. So that’s super cool. Okay, so before we start the really fun interview, we’re gonna do the free joke project. And I did prep you on this, so it’s, I’m gonna just tell you the joke and then the goal is this a free joke or is this one we could charge?
Brent: So I have a very, I have a quick and simple one today. Ready? All right, I’m ready. To the guy who invented zero, thanks for nothing.
Heather: I like that one. That one is definitely charged worthy. It’s simple. It’s to the point. And it definitely
Brent: crack a smile. All right. Good. Do you wanna try one more or are we good?
Heather: I like that one, but if you have another, I can handle
Brent: another. All right. I got an easy one. Okay. What does scholars eat when they’re hungry? Academia nuts. .
Heather: Okay. ha ha, I really like that one. good. That one I would pay for .
Brent: Thanks for playing along. Yes. I need a little jingle for that, I oh, definitely. I’ll think about a jingle later on. All right, so let’s dive into the bigCommerce community. I’m excited about the BigCommerce community cuz I was just, I was at the partner summit and it has this sort of open source vibe that some of the other communities have. Tell us how, what you’re doing in the community and how you’re helping the community grow.
Brent: And tell us a little bit about the Slack channel and. Yeah, go for it.
Heather: So we have a Slack workspace and we are working on getting it to a point where we can just like fully blast it. But everyone listening to the podcast definitely reach out and get involved. I can have a link for bread that he can share, so you can join us there.
Heather: But yeah, that’s our most popping space right now. But we have other things going on in the community as well. The slack is just more of the I guess a real time peer-to-peer resource that we have available for developers and partners who are building solutions on the platform. And so in there we host some series events like AMAs.
Heather: We’re asking anything events with some of our product members. So basically if. People in the community have some interest in meeting with like someone from product or a team from product like mobile or headless or page builder or building widgets or whatever it is. Then basically we get those requests and then we just host like a small sort of intimate meeting in Slack and one of our like dedicated channels where you can just ask product anything about that topic.
Heather: So those are really cool. And we do those we do about two to three or four possibly every year. And we can increase that if we get a little bit more resources or help . But yes, so that’s one of the main things I guess going on in like in the Slack. We also have some other types of events depending on, like what you as a partner or developer are interested in.
Heather: Let’s say you want to I guess market or just promote your service to merchants and just have a space where you can talk openly about it and just have a real conversation about what you’re solving for and what are the, maybe the plans to come and so forth. We have an a series event like that as well.
Heather: We do it two to three times a year as well. And that is in our customer facing community. But to sign up, it’s through our developer community and then through My partnership with our developer relations team, Katie and Steven and Constance, which I know you already met with Katie. We are doing some bigger events, so those are really awesome.
Heather: So we did our first hackathon, which was really great. We planned to do many more and then, Also this past year we actually had our first community lead event too, which I know is huge, like in the space where you’re from. But it’s new here at BigCommerce and I really hope to see like more of these types of events and other types of content just like organically forming.
Heather: But that was with Space 48. So they held a, like a paneled type of, Virtual event where they basically were able to grab some partners from the community and just share tips and all types of stuff and just like things that they’ve learned like while developing on the platform. And it was completely community led and it just blew my mind.
Heather: It was so awesome. And yeah, I mean there’s just a lot of firsts going on right now and our developer community, and I think that is what’s really exciting is because, we’ve been building it for a couple years now, our. . Yeah, so we’ve been building it for a couple years now, and it’s just like we’re finally getting to a point where we’re able to.
Heather: see these types of opportunities and like actually really go forward with these types of opportunities ourselves, like internally. So I would say the big thing about getting involved in our developer community right now is that there’s a lot of firsts. So if you have any ideas or if you just wanna be a part of the beginning, like it definitely has.
Heather: That type of vibe where it’s like we’re, we’re getting that momentum and so we have a lot of stuff in the works and we have we just have a lot that we all wanna do as well. So it’s a really good time to participate.
Brent: Yeah. And I can say that we worked with Space 48 on that first event in for another community in Austin in 2016 with Shipper HQ and Karen Baker.
Brent: Nice. , that was organized and we ran that until 2019. So it was it’s a great place and I’m gonna propose that we, we do a big the big Dev X or whatever we call it. Yes. Event in, in Austin next year. Maybe we should call it BigCommerce by, we have to think of a name to mimic off of, So by Southwest, right?
Brent: Ooh, okay. Commerce by SAS or something like South SAS by sas. Yes. We’ll have to, oh
Heather: my gosh. Include you in the party planning committee. SAS by sas. Thinking of. So next year big developer things. And we’re starting to start conversations about those now and seeing who we need to talk to make these things happen.
Brent: Yeah. And there’s a great event space that we’ve always, we’ve done it in twice. It’s called Trinity Hall. It’s on Trinity, and I don’t know. Anyways. It’s in downtown Austin, but yeah. All right. So if I’m a new developer and I want to get involved in the developer community, and I, maybe I wanna build an app, is there a, is there like a place that, So I’ll join the Slack channel, and then is there a way for me to easily get started?
Brent: Walk me through pretending that I’m a developer and I really would like to participate in the BigCommerce c. .
Heather: Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of different spaces where developers can try to, reach out or get involved with others. But I would say Slack is definitely the most popular, but it’s not the most visible.
Heather: So that is something that we are working on now as far as like how to get that to be a more visible place and whenever we are able to get it to be a more visible place, that’s the other side to it. So depending on where this app developer, came to us or found us, whether it’s Twitter or our help center forum or stack overflow or whatever it is we would be reaching out.
Heather: So that’s what my team does. We reach out. And then also Katie, she’s really great with our Twitter. . So yeah, we basically would get in contact to find out what you’re trying to do, and then if we feel that, you’re an app developer, so we would obviously send you the link to get involved with our Slack community, and then there you can connect with other developers, other partners that have been building apps forever.
Heather: And so you have those resources but also build that relationship with you and then really provide some resources that help you individually, but that’s like linking the correct docs to you or different. And right now actually our developer relations team is working on a like an app series or they will be starting soon.
Heather: Because that is a gap right now too. It’s partners and developers are just like people that are new to building solutions on the platform, having that hard time getting an app off the ground, I guess you could say. And so that is something that we are actively working on right now. But I would say, the best or like the vibe right now in the community on how we could help is just really getting to know you one on one and providing those resources to you one on one. So it is more of a, Hey, let’s connect, let’s help each other, like that type of vibe. As we continue to grow, we can scale and can provide more resources and pump out more resources ourselves.
Heather: That’s when, you know we can provide those links and you. That content.
Brent: Yeah. And there, there are regular public facing document doc, there’s a dev doc series that you have that’s public, so I could start there and then also get in contact with you to join the community and get going. How about I know that you mentioned having your.
Brent: First hackathon. , what are the plans around maybe having an in person
Heather: hackathon? There are plans to having an internal hackathon. Yeah, that was our first one and it was a blast. And it got a lot of people excited. So that was like external people as well as like BigCommerce employees as well.
Heather: Everyone was just so comforted about the hack up on. And with that comes more I guess you could say. So teams, approaching us saying, Ooh, like we wanna, what about our thing? What about our thing? And they also third party at companies as well, saying Ooh. And so there is a lot of interest, which is really good for us because we get to plan out in advance let’s do this hackathon, virtually this one hybrid, this one in person or whatever it is.
Heather: And we can plan all of those out. And maybe we can make all of them hybrid. Maybe we can try different locations. There are a lot of ideas. Basically just a lot of ideas on what we wanna do as far as getting one planned. We’re not sure which one we’re gonna do next. Actually we do have one next, but we can’t talk about it right now.
Heather: And it. , that one maybe virtually. But midyear or like maybe late in year, I think we’re gonna try to do something a lot bigger, and that would definitely be a hybrid or in person. And then potentially doing some like small, like little dev challenges virtually, or even like doing some small popups in person would be really cool.
Brent: Yeah, I think we usually cap hackathons at 80 or a hundred people just because of the amount of people that you could fit in a room and we always hit it after an event. And it was always really fun. How about including people other than developers like project managers and solution architects?
Brent: Do you see a space for them in the community? I definitely
Heather: do, and we have some of those Those types of roles are people with those roles in our developer community Slack right now. And so basically our developer community, Slack it’s like a umbrella acceptance. I guess you could say if you sit under the technical umbrella at all, if you work with.
Heather: Your developers. If you’re a CTO or a solutions architect or something like that, then you definitely are what we’re trying to have in this space. But for these events, I definitely see a benefit in having them. I think project management especially would be. Excellent to have because that’s what they do in their job and they really help the development lifecycle.
Heather: And so I think there’s a huge benefit of having like one project manager, like per team. I think that would be a really nice way to divide it up and then just really have a lot of success in the hackathons and from the submissions and on a team level.
Brent: Yeah I, There, there are some other events that happen in other communities that are longer, or maybe they’re a weekend event, maybe a Friday night through Sunday event.
Brent: And then you, where you come together, build your ideas that you want to do. Then you put a team together and then that team goes and tries to get as much done as they can. By Sunday night. , so that comps would include a project manager or some kind of a architect, maybe some, there’s a lot more room for roles there.
Brent: Yeah. And then some people that aren’t so technical wouldn’t feel left out and they can participate in the event and have a lot of fun.
Heather: Yeah. I think the more diverse the team can be the more successful it can be, honestly.
Brent: Where do you see the BigCommerce community going in the next year or two?
Heather: In the next year or two, I see us doing so many more events really honestly. I see that being our, I guess our biggest opportunity is doing hackathons, doing smaller like developer challenges and then also just Getting ideas from our community as well. If there’s something that they, like our members really want to push out or just wanna be involved or really want us to push out or, and just see as an opportunity, we are all ears for that.
Heather: Like I said earlier, like we’re just in a time of a lot of firsts and so we are so open to making this the, this community. The best it can be for our members. We really want to hear from our members. We really want to just give them what they want. And I definitely see events being a huge thing for us this upcoming year.
Heather: And that’s a whole different type of just a broad range of types of events that I see coming.
Brent: Are there any plans around, seeding other sort of community leaders to. build communities in other countries. In other areas.
Heather: Yeah. So that would be that would be incredible. I think so there’s a lot of like really mature communities and then also just some really engaged like younger communities that are doing this right now.
Heather: And that have been doing it for years. And that’s something that I would personally love to see. Like for the Hackathon, for example, we had people that were, it was a worldwide type of event and it was really cool to see because we only had two weeks to really announce it. But it was like split between many continents, so it was, it would be really nice to just have I guess like focus groups or just user groups or just super, just whatever we wanna call it, but just like based groups in different regions.
Heather: And I think , like Magento or a lot of other types of different communities where they have they host like their own meetups and stuff like that. And even if it’s super casual but then we can be involved like on our side of hey, like we can help organize it or whatever. But then yeah, like y’all totally own it, like y’all are there.
Heather: Let us know how we can help. Notion does this I really love that productivity tool and they. They have a really excellent community, but but yeah, I definitely see that. I’m not sure how realistic that is for like this coming year since we’re like, we’re just now being able to like host all these really cool events.
Heather: But hey, if it happens, like I am all for it and I, yes, I’m like for making it happen to you. So whatever I can do to help with that and if we have a lot of interest and a lot of engaged people in different regions, like I am definitely for helping getting that. ,
Brent: I know in the agency space it BigCommerce is growing so fast that it’s been difficult to sometimes find developers and so you have to train developers.
Brent: Is there a easy way for an agency head to say, get to, to hire somebody that’s been involved in another SAS platform and convert them or help them understand? Getting up and running on BigCommerce yeah. So we
Heather: have like big dev boot camps. That’s one of our excuse me, that’s one of our products or one of our services for getting started.
Heather: It’s like an onboarding type thing. So if you are a developer or if you have a developer that is like new to building on BigCommerce and you really wanna set ’em up for success Big Deb Bootcamp is a great option. Excuse me. Yeah, so you can get involved with Big Deb Bootcamp. I can actually get the link for you and I.
Heather: Include it so that you can try to like, push that out with your recaps and all that. But basically it covers developing on stencil on different types of getting started with like headless all of our APIs. Goodness. And just basic development, like getting started developing absent themes going over all of our resources basically.
Heather: So it’s a really nice program to get involved with if you’re new or if you’re just like trying to take advantage of what other resources are available to
Brent: you and do you see developers quickly being onboarded and getting up to speed. On BigCommerce
Heather: I guess you could say it really depends.
Heather: So with BigCommerce, we have developers that are, like third party developers as far as everyone, is a third party developer, but we have freelancers, we also have like developers that work for our partner agencies, and so it really depends on their relationship. I would say as far as what type of onboarding they get, which is something that we are working on as far as onboarding just developers in a better way in general, no matter you know, who or we know what they’re with.
Heather: I would say our. Are our partners. They have I would say more visibility to the big Deb Bootcamp. So I’d say that is something that kind of sets that like those developers aside because if you are a partner, you have more visibility. You just know about it more. If you’re a freelance developer, you probably have to discover it in a little bit of a different way, which is possible, but it’s not as visible to you.
Heather: So I would say. as far as like resources, like big dev bootcamp, it is a little bit more accessible if you are a partner. But then everything else as far as our documentation and our communities, like those are all very open for any sort of developer. So no matter if you are just doing freelance or you working for an agency or one of our partners, then you have access to the community.
Heather: And with that you have, the community team and then also Dev Rail to just walk you through whatever you would.
Brent: and I would imagine that the amount of BigCommerce developers is like an iceberg where there’s the ma vast majority that aren’t involved on the Slack channel.
Brent: And it would be great to get ’em all involved. Yes. . Yeah. So maybe a message out to all the agency. Heads to tell their developers that there’s this great place that you should join and absolutely get questions answered, right? I think that’s the main key about the Slack channel is that if you do have questions, there’s so many people in there that are so smart, then that can help you get those questions answered quickly.
Heather: I agree and if you are a partner listening to this podcast or this interview we are going to have our own spot on the partner newsletters, the agency and tech partner newsletters. So that’s new and keep a lookout for us. We’re hoping to keep coming monthly with new content and also always having that CTA where you can share with your development teams to have them join us in the developer community.
Heather: We would love to have all of you.
Brent: So a, as we finish things out today if you have one like little nugget that you could give a developer who’s starting right now besides joining the Slack channel Yeah. What would you tell them?
Heather: I would really tell them to take advantage of. Us. That would be me, that would be Katie, that would be Steven, our developer advocates.
Heather: And it’s not only through Slack. We are, you can meet us on Twitter, you can meet us at some events. You can meet us wherever LinkedIn, this podcast. If you are struggling and you’re maybe posting on Stack Overflow or in the help center, reach out to us like dms because we wanna get to know you and we wanna get to know like how we can.
Heather: Not only just you, but also just every other developer that might be going through like a similar experience as you. And we really want to talk and connect and we do. And so if you’re a developer and you’re not super into that, totally understand. I would say something that could help.
Heather: Ah, goodness. Reaching out really does the best, even if it’s like on a GitHub repo or something, just letting someone know. That’s really how we make our changes. Even product. If you comment on GitHub or if you submit an issue or anything like that, or reach out to us in some way, or even tweet at us or whatever it is reaching out does.
Heather: Really help us make it better. So if you can find a way to reach out to us in some way that is what I would
Brent: recommend. Yeah. And there’s also a BigCommerce Twitter community space now. Yes. As well. So that’s another good place for people to join. And there is more people in that space than another platforms I’ve noticed recently.
Brent: So that’s good. It’s being used. Yes. would add that as a developer and I’m going to admit that I started as a developer a long time ago. It is sometimes hard to ask questions and reach out and you really wanna solve it yourself. But once you’ve once you’ve paired up with, if you find somebody who can really help you, and I know when I got started I found somebody could help me.
Brent: And I think I was on MSN Messenger way back in the day and man did they help me, and there was so much more that I could get through with a little bit of guidance and mentorship. That, I think that the big com, I know that the BigCommerce channels can offer you even better than stack overflow or something like that.
Brent: That gets your question. You ask questions that’ll get answered quickly. So I can’t advocate more for using that and taking advantage of that as a developer. And it’ll really launch your career as a developer and help you accelerate your learning and getting things done. And then I would also say play around in a sandbox environment and make some stuff.
Brent: Yeah,
Heather: absolutely. I second everything that you say. I agree a hundred percent. I can’t agree more actually.
Brent: Great. As we close out, Heather, they I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. Okay. What would you like to plug today?
Heather: Goodness. I’ve been prepping for this question. I’m not sure I’m having a hard time threatening a shameless plug.
Heather: I’m not gonna lie, but I will say if you could invest in a. Reusable water bottle. You can take it to the airport, you can take it everywhere. If you could fill it up. I actually went to a place to eat not that long ago and I was like, Hey, can I just fill up my water bottle? And they’re like, Yeah, do it.
Heather: Of course. So definitely get yourself a reusable water bottle or a few. That’s my stainless plug, .
Brent: Cool. Thank you so much. Heather Barr, the community development developer manager for BigCommerce thank you for being here today. Yes, thank you
Heather: for having me.
