Customer Experience Archives

Giving an Inch(oo) in the Magento Community with Aron Stanic

April 14, 2023February 8, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

We speak with long-time Magento Community member Aron StaniÄ‡ from Inchoo. We discuss all the changes in the community over the years as well as the state of Magento and its brand. We finish off with a discussion on the importance of expectations in the client/agency relationship.

Transcript:

All right. Welcome to this episode today. I have Aron StaniÄ‡. Aron is a long time a Magento community member. I think at least 25 years. You’ve been in the Magento community. Aron why don’t you go ahead, do an introduction. Tell us what you do on a day to day on your day-to-day life and then maybe one of your past.

Thanks, Brian, it’s great to be here. As you mentioned, my name is Aron StaniÄ‡. Currently Exploring what the future calls I was for 12 years employeed Inchoo Croatian based e-commerce agency in true ease, their famous word of famous company in the Magento world, at least.

And so I’ve spent my, my, the most of my 12 years there as one of the co-owners as well. I was mostly working around sales, marketing activities. And I worked a lot with merchants right. Directly with merchants. So one of my passions is you put it so other than e-commerce and you ex in particularly around e-commerce, one of my passions is running.

I can say him. As much of a passion as it is for you, because I cannot pull off those mileage is I think similar, especially in those temperatures that you do your rounds. But that has been a passion for my wife and myself. We started running actually in 2019 little did we know that habit will actually get us through COVID and pandemic with some degree of sanity.

Wow. Okay. That’s great. Yeah. And I think you’ve been to the big damn run I’m sure I’ve seen pictures of you at the big dam run. So was it the 2019 was your first big dam run or it must be since you started running in 2019. Yeah. Okay. I did run hearing nurse even before that. I used to play basketball actually back in high school and Rhodes college.

Big run was the one and only for me in front of the 19th. Yeah, it was the first time I was running in the desert and it felt great. It was a great drapes thing. But even before that, I used to have these 5k or three K runs that were in that. Organized that’s various other Magento meetings, right?

So we organized the developers paradise back in 2016 in Croatia. And then we organized to meet Magento’s in Azek, in our hometown hearing in Croatia. So each of those events also had its own small major on as a part of the agenda. Great. Yeah. So let’s talk today about Magento and the Magento association and where the community’s going.

What you’ve been involved in the association, or have you been involved at some level and what are you, what is your thought on what’s happening at that? Yeah. So I haven’t been formally involved with Magento association as such. I was involved in meat, Magento association, like back in the days, because we were organizing these events and we were constantly not just organizing, attending a lot of these events and we were also parts of some task forces back into the, but now since maybe since plenty, again, like 19.

Around the time. And before Adobe took over completely now, Magento association had its, I don’t think he ever had exact clarity right on, on what it should be after he took over from each Magento association because it was a very turbulent time and it still is around the ecosystem and especially in the community.

And now with the latest The fork side right there that you’ve heard with the Moscow, with the open source community Alliance being opened up. I think that this is very interesting times. I’ve noticed that with the initial Moscow initiative it opened up. And Magento association in a way to organize the task force that we live in big numbers is also then involved in but from the latest things with hero with, I believe on three there, I don’t think he’s that thrilled with how some of the conversations went around the whole magenta and keeping the brand or north keeping the brand within the Adobe ecosystem.

So we’ll see, I’m actually very curious and anxious to see what. Comes back with max, because I was just checking before the call there hasn’t been the official communication from the magenta open source community Alliance, since I believe in the vendor. Because then they were involved with Magento association as the members of task force that was supposed to.

Come up with a way of how to keep Magento community or Magento open source now, still alive, right? In one way or another. I for one would be very disappointed if it, if Adobe just simply don’t give up on on Magento community rights. And I can completely, I can totally relate to a lot of people, especially the contributors through the Magento open source who would feel in a way be betrayed.

Maybe it’s a harsh word, but they have to understand that point because when you’re contributing through an open source initiative, obviously there’s a notion then. Okay. If you’re contributing, if you’re putting your time and effort and it’s free, right. And you know that it’s free Should you expect anything in return?

And I think that anyone who was actually contributing did expect initially anything in return, but with the open source contributions, it’s inherent that there is not necessarily a quid pro quo, but th the sharing you’re sharing, not because he wants something. And not because you expect something back, but it’s understood that by this sharing, it will be better for everyone around you.

You know what I was thinking about it. But when you, obviously, you also have a you’re also our father and father of two kids. One is 10, one is seven. And for them the first things that we are learning, we are teaching them how to. We’re not talking to them about individual ownership and private property and its we’re teaching them.

Really good to hold on to something for the toy or to food or anything that you should share with someone else, not just because then they will share with you, but because it’s, these are the things to do. And I believe that open source is a great way of organizing efforts of individuals and agencies alike to, to add value to any ecosystem.

And over here we have. 12 13, 15 years, whatnot of people really heavily contributing. And now for it all to not necessarily fall apart, but for them to feel like it has not, again, been for nothing. Obviously a lot of people have made a very decent living and have brought their careers on a different path because of magenta and because of what Magento open-source was and still is.

But it’s he has got some other over a bit. They it leaves an author faced in your mouth. And the I’m very curious to see where this is going. I’m actually I can’t say that I’m ha I’m having a preference. Obviously it would be great if Adobe showed That there they understand the value and the strength of Magento can source and to not treat simply disregarded, but even if it happens now, if it’s business as such then I would.

Welcome an initiative that comes up with a fork because in the open-source world of e-commerce softwares, I don’t think that there’s anything still there that can meet that can match Magento’s community and Magento’s feature set. So there are contenders, definitely shopper is one of them, and there has been silliness and others, but no one has.

Really beer. Yes. And it would be a huge waste to just ditch it altogether. Yeah. It’s not only just the feature set. It’s also the ability to add all of your own features without having to have some external service as your feature. In a SAS platform, you’re going to have some external service that connects via APIs.

And the ability to do that inside of Magento is another uniqueness that it has. I have a theory on why Adobe does it, why it seems like Adobe is squashing, the Magento name, or doesn’t seem to care about open source. If you think about all the people now that have, that are making these decisions, nobody at Adobe that’s making these decisions is left from Magento.

All the senior management is Adobe, senior management and their goal is to create a suite around all the different Adobe enterprise products. And have a complete experience for the user. All their products are enterprise products. So it makes sense that Adobe commerce is a part of that suite. And why would they pay attention to anything that doesn’t, that isn’t part of it.

So if their goal is to get clients that can work in this. In this enterprise suite of products, so experience manager and target and all the other products that make up the Adobe. Their priority and their goals are not anything around, Hey, let’s get people onto a free version of it.

I think that experienced manager is a patchy sling. There’s a free version out there to use. There’s no talk about that. And there’s no community around that and I’m sure that actually there’s probably a small community around it, but there’s nothing that. Resembles, what is the Magento community, which incorporates hundreds of thousands of people.

So I think the mistake that Adobe is making is that they are forgetting where the software came from. And they’re forgetting about the path that smaller and medium-sized businesses will take to get to the point in which they now. And they now will be, could be part of that Adobe suite that would incorporate experience manager and all the other parts of that puzzle that Adobe would like to assemble, to make a complete experience solution for users.

I agree. I agree with that. Definitely been another thing is you mentioned that small and medium businesses might that the open source might be. Path words, they send the price level, but then, and I’m not sure that would necessarily be the case, at least for the majority of small and medium sized businesses that were usually that were original using magenta one to begin with even Magento.

When there were still no thoughts of squashing open or anything while he was still alive and kicking Magento two was still maybe a third too complex and overly robust. That’s pretty much made for the needs of those really small and medium sized businesses. And they make up the vast majority of implementations of Magento globally even now For them, even if Magento stays as such as Magento opensource or some within some other name complexity.

Losing its complexity is not yet getting it. The lecture of, in the field that Magento one used to have towards the, in the eyes of those small businesses, because they want something that’s fairly quickly set up that they can start selling tomorrow. And even in the pandemic during the pandemic, right there was when the lockdowns.

I remembered that the BigCommerce had a huge in the UK big commerce had a huge marketing efforts saying you’ll get the line with us in 24 hours. I think you could not do that essentially with my gender, even with some other open source platforms you could, if you had a really good theme and they had all the time in the world just for you, but SaaS platforms suffer a service platform such as Shopify and BigCommerce.

Took advantage of this type of, not just the pandemic, but also of where Magento 2 went and with all the issues that Magento 2 had in the previous versions and a lot of those small and medium size businesses rolled over. And you can see if you’re looking at BuiltWith or some other platforms, you can see where businesses who used to be on Magento, are now.

I know where did they go? So unless they stayed in that open source, and in that case, they might be still in Magento 2 even still on Magento 1, or maybe have considered Shopware or WooCommerce. If they are really simple businesses, then you have the other ones, the other huge batch that have actually moved away to towards the SaaS Platforms.

Yeah, and I think you’re exactly right. The messaging from Shopify for the longest time has been, their platform is easy and Magento is super complicated. I know that Derek Harlick and myself way back in to. 15 or 2016 did a presentation on getting Magento up and running in 90 minutes and selling something to the audience right there.

And it can be done, but you’re exactly right. The complexities that are there and the way that the admin is presented gives you everything you need and more. And sometimes just on a SaaS platform, there’s guard rails around it. You can only do so much. You can’t do everything you can do in Magento.

And if you were to say, or even hide some of those things, maybe Magento would be more popular. I know that we had, for a long time, we had the client of universal music and they the problem was that they’re the people that were deciding what they would like in their store knew they could do anything they want.

And when you can do anything you want, and then you run up to the saying, okay, you can do anything you want, but you have to also spend that much time and money to get anything you want. So with a SaaS base, you suddenly say you can get almost anything you want. Here’s what you can have choose from this.

And that. A lot of times it helps people to determine what they need. On the other hand, they promise you other things. So maybe you are limited in terms of the feature set and features and the innovations that you may have, but they promise you your time and they promise you the stability of the platform and they tell you it’s for your own.

And I can see that, but for example, I think there’s something also here involved.. If you take a look you’re graphically, right? Where SaaS has higher market share.. That’s US. That’s Canada. That’s Australia. That those are your, let’s say single markets countries, primarily while in Europe, where there are a lot of different small countries.

But if you disregard Germany and UK and all of this huge ones, then if you’re a business you’re usually operating regionally, not just now. And you have to take care of various facts you have to take care of multi languages. Multicurrency is, are local regulations. And this is where actually open source gives you the ability and the flexibility that you need even out of the box, Magento supports multilanguage multicurrency.

So in your. And if you think of that then, and connect it with who is leading the now Magento open-source community Alliance. If you take a look at the people, they’re mostly 90% European. Right there, not that many Americans actually, who are involved in that because again, they have either lean towards the view, Adobe commerce and the professional enterprise level side, or they’re in the SaaS business because SaaS makes sense, makes much more sense.

Then it’s much easier to adopt. In a single market, such as you know US. So in that sense, I believe that open source can meet the needs of European businesses still with much on a much higher level than. SaaS can, obviously you can, even the Shopify BigCommerce, you can add plugins that allow you to have, or go with Shopify plus then it opens up and you have the ability of multilanguage multicurrency and all of these things. But in its nature open source is much more flexible and it can respond to. Ever-changing regulations, of the European union in a much better way than then it is the case with SaaS it’s easier at the end of the day it’s much easier.

And it, a lot of Surveys have shown that in one or different researchers that, that ease of doing business in US as compared to you is much higher. So there, there are very little regulations, very little friction. You have an idea or a product you want to start selling online. Do it over here, you have to jump through several hoops and especially then you have to fire an accountant who can explain to you a lot of the details and intricacies about how much can you sell to a specific country and how much then you can you have the tax when you reach a certain threshold and these Northern states can not be done probably as easily as they can with opensource.

I just want to back up to some what you said about Mosca and and there’s two points like the con the most people they decided they’re going to do this fork. And then I do want to talk about the speed of change and the amount of people in those decision-making processes and how long it takes.

So I do disagree a little bit about the fact that the most was, I feel like the most good decision was made in a bubble in Europe. And I wasn’t exactly consulted or I wasn’t on the, I wasn’t in the inner circle in that I didn’t know what was happening until after it happened. And I also realized that there wasn’t an effort to bring it to a broader community because they would like to make this quick, they would like to make this a little bit quicker than if you have more people there’s going to be more disagreements.

So I don’t disagree that the most initiative is. Is I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing to keep things rolling. I don’t a hundred percent agree with the fork. However, I do feel like if Adobe’s not going to listen, if Adobe is going to sit, continue to sit on the bench and not recognize that there’s a strong community, that the fork is a great option.

But I do feel like because Willem and the team there recognize that if they don’t do something. And if they try to incorporate too many people that’s speed in which it takes to get agreement on what they would like to do is going to, it’s going to stall and you’re never going to agree on anything, you’re going to be stagnated. So I going back to that, I do want to talk about, I know that Karen Baker has continually talked about the fact that we need to be an inclusive community and she has a lot of very strong opinions. There are also going to be very strong opinions in the opposite.

And that then turns into stagnation. So how do we make, how do we keep this moving forward without this just being a European centric organization? What’s wrong with it being centered in Europe and just getting a. I do agree with that. We, the notion that the speed is here also very important.

I had a feeling that Adobe is letting the time clock play off, just letting it play out, then we’ll see what happens if it comes to that then we might need three act or not. And I think that you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned that some of those decisions and everything.

From the fact that there are no more regional Magento people left at Magento. So starting with Roy and Yoav and moving towards through generations and generations of these people. Yeah. You are completely correct. So then you have a feeling that The care for this product and for the community is in the hands of the community itself.

You don’t have strong organization or old, either sheep. That’s that has been throughout these years, running this product. And that’s definitely a challenge, but if you don’t know who is exactly calling the shots and how are these people decided, or who decides that they’re calling the shots.

Then you may get into a point where there’s just too much noise and too many distractions for them to be able to create anything. So inevitably in the way I see it, there’s going to be, have to be if the fork is. Really going forward, there’s going to have to be some type of an entity behind it. Leading it, calling the shots and it’s not getting, you can’t have 100% democracy and these things because we didn’t have it. Even when it was still open source within Adobe, within Magento, you still had contributions and pull requests and everything. And someone had to prioritize.

Yeah, I think what we’re thinking. Yeah. People were thinking the Magento association was going to take over the charge or a. The care for the product, for the open source product. But that was not even the initial idea. I don’t think that was why Magento association at the beginning started.

It was organized through to, again, they grow from Meet Magento association, but to be more a facilitator of networking and then knowledge exchange and those kinds of things. So we are not. Somewhere on defense or in the, in between. And whether someone will step up and say, okay, we’re doing it this way.

I know if they get their livid and then we’ll take it or we’ll give it, if not, I think if this gets dragged on for too long, then the other thing that, that, that works for him. Yeah. And take it or leave it as a good way to put it and sometimes take it or leave it as decided on 51%. So there’s going to be a, there’s going to be a very small minority that doesn’t agree with what you’re doing, but again, these decisions have to be made.

And I guess the only way to do it is just to wait in the court of public opinion in terms of how the Magento community is viewing it. I do want to circle back again to the European centric because the reality is the reality is that, that there’s a lot of people in America that.

That don’t have any stake in this. They don’t really care. I can probably count on my two hands, the amount of people in the U S maybe it’s more than that, but the people that are that have some, still have some passion about it the passion for Magento is definitely still rooted in Europe.

The bulk work of Magento is being done in India. Let’s face it There’s a ton of people. There’s tens of thousands of Magento developers in India, but they don’t they’re, their voices is heard in a different way. If anything, maybe there has to be a strong voice coming out of south Asia as well to help push this.

But I think from a commercial standpoint and we always have to go back to Adobe, has a commercial vision for their product and. This open source product fit into their commercial vision. If it doesn’t, we have to help them understand how it can if it and if they’re not going to listen then the fork is an inevitable, but I will say that as soon as that letter came out, I think the next.

Adobe had a post that said, no we’re committed to this product and here’s why, blah, blah, blah. Now the ironic part of that is that, that I can’t remember the person’s name at the moment. But he’s gone. He’s not part of the, he’s not even part of this effort anymore. So again, there’s been turnover and there’s new people that have no vision or they have no history of what Magento has been.

And so they, they have no idea why this should be at all important. And yeah, one more point about the board that the other part of a Magento association is a lot of the people that were involved in that these first two years of. Board level membership are gone. I think Ben marks was on the original board as an adviser.

He’s gone. Guido was on the board and I believe he’s gone as well now. So some of those people that have a strong opinion about where it should go are gone. Yeah. You are completely right there. So what’s the funny thing is that you mentioned India as one of the very important, the areas or regions where a lot of bulk of Magental work and implementations, and even globally is being done, not just in, but from and I noticed on the Magento association page that the next event.

The only one in between a little, two or three events that are left in the Meet Magento ecosystem is the one in India. It should be true to happen in early February. And then it’s followed up by, by Mexico land and I’m not sure what it’s called. We have a Baltics events scheduled for me, so we’ll see what happens there.

There, there’s still some of those efforts and organizations being, you did mention a really good point. About us agencies, not really getting, not necessarily invested, but involved in all these areas, they don’t see their own benefit. So you with what gentle and. A handful of other agency that I’ve known from these 12 years like Shiro and Creatuity who are based in the US are still there.

But a lot of others were either acquired maybe by some other agents, but Accentures and whatnot, by those larger agencies, or they have also switched right towards other solutions. So yeah that that’s why you see that European centerism and around around so interesting times definatly they have had some, we’ll be we’ll see where this all goes..

Yeah, I think gone are the days of the single Magento agency who only does Magento. Unless you are a a Viamo of the world that has that clout and enough business to sustain that at that high level, it is difficult to operate in there. Just, I think one last point on this, on the American side as these agencies solidify and get bigger..

The management also has a commercial vision of the product and the people who remembered what Magento was and where it came from are also gone. And so from a leadership standpoint, that agencies. If those agencies have no have no recollection of why should happen and their team, isn’t part of that community.

Then there’s also going to be a disparity in how that agency reacts to events. And. Things like that. And I think we’ve seen it. Mainly at the sponsorship level it’s been difficult to organize events in the U S there are assuming it’s a hundred percent going to be a developer event, which it traditionally has been, but like Mage Titans was a good example of how it worked well in Europe, but did not work well in the U S.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, because it was always, let’s put it this way, business oriented rather than community oriented. So one thing that I saw with Adobe’s acquisition, obviously Adobe’s and other companies similar to Adobe, they’re acquiring a lot of different businesses and it’s usual, it’s normal for them to then absorb that product that they have acquired or an agency or.

Within their own system renamed it, rebranded, whatever. I think that Magento is maybe the first one that, that, where Adobe in their own acquisitions felt the pushback, such a pushback from the community. And when you’re talking about in the scale and the real business numbers, five client numbers, This is small.

This is a small piece of apply, but it creates much greater noise. Then it’s probably the worst thing in their mind. I get just think of that someone at the top level saying, okay, what are these guys even talking about? What kind of community open source?

What are we talking about? It’s like, how can we get. Yeah. And why should we care about us as a brand? So I think that the ensemble handle some of these conversations that are also taking place. Yeah. I’m just writing that down. You said, how should we get rid of. And unfortunately it’s partially true.

They would like it to all go away and their vision of where it should be, I think. Okay. So let’s, we’ll, let’s just close out this topic on the Magento stuff, but I think that if we’ve identified the main problem with the Magento association, Adobe has been communication and Mosca really highlighted the fact that, Hey, if we make a lot of noise and somebody’s going to answer, so Magento association has answered and Adobe has answered. But I think the vision of where Adobe would like to see. The magenta opensource is so muddled that if they were to just come out with a clear statement that would be such a a boost for the community. And honestly it wouldn’t hurt their enterprise side of things.

There’s no downside to committing to something on the open source, even saying even having a public or having some public statements about open source. And saying how important it is to the community. There’s absolutely no. Cause they could change their mind in a year and again, we would be back in the same spot and they would, there would be nothing lost to them because the reality too, is that the enterprise level clients out there who aren’t using community, they don’t care about community either or right.

It’s it’s developers and at the merchants who are using it and have. Who believe in it that those are the ones that really have something in it. Yeah. He needs. And those third party providers, service providers who lean on to merchants wherever they are. And if they see that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses on a particular platform, that they will create an integration for that particular platform.

We’re talking about the ERPs or search engines or. Yeah. You mentioned it wouldn’t hurt, but I think that anything that they would come now from Adobe without it feeling. That, that it’s really honest and that they’re substantial. Let’s just follow the process, but that there’s real substance behind me with just know backfire.

So from my point, you mentioned that the vision is muddled. I haven’t seen that there’s any vision at all. To be very frank,, I assume that the vision exists for them for the open source. And it’s very difficult for someone probably to just come out and say that. Yeah, I think the same thing from the Magento association, I think what we’ve seen is a announcement in, in, around Magento Connect, which I think happened in September, October.

And and they said that that there’s a commit there. There’s going to be things happening from their side. And that there’s a podcast coming out. That’s gonna help support the Magento community. Actually, they didn’t say what the podcast is a commercial podcast and it’s just advertising Magento as a platform.

And I don’t know if you’ve listened to it my, my complaint and I’m on the membership community. For the Magento association. Our goal on the membership community is to grow membership, right? And I would think the best thing to do in a podcast is to make a short commercial for the Magento association to join.

And right now it’s completely free. So here’s my commercial right now is go to Magento association.org forward slash join and join it’s free. And eventually it’s going to be, there’s going to be a paid membership, but right now it’s free. And there’ll probably be some incentives if you’re already a member.

That you’ll be a founding member. Blah-blah-blah so that’s my little, that’s my little pitch on why you should join the I think that there, there is a lack of cohesive vision from the Magento association. There is a vision, but I don’t think. It’s communicated. That’s my thought on that.

Yeah. It’s all comes down to communication and it’s probably something that we’ll talk about in the next part of the conversation as well. How important communication you think. Not just between the members of the ecosystem, but in between the relationships between the agencies and merchants.

So yeah, definitely. We know the task force that was established right around the gentle can source. I think that the community likes some, again, some clarity and communication on where the task force is, what they’re talking about. The only thing I believe that we heard that. Those couple of speeds from Wheeler a week ago or something like that.

So yeah, that never seemed. Yeah. So let’s move to agency discussions and communications. A great is a great thing to talk about. What’s your approach from the agency side to make sure your clients are. You know what we did throughout these years, we’ll be okay. We created, we made a lot of mistakes.

We did some good things as well, but th the one thing that I. Strike it as the most important thing in any agency, client relationship any business relationship whatsoever is actually managing expectations now, because if a client comes, if a merchant comes to an agency or looks for an agency, they have.

Be very clear first and foremost in front of themselves, what did these, did they expect from an agency? Do they expect them to be a partner through partner and then they will rely on their advice and then maybe hire them, not just for the technical and for the development part, but also for some of the e-commerce marketing activities or are they just looking for someone to.

The solution. And that’s one of the most important things to have as, as initial conversations. Then you, as an agency could also decide whether you want to establish this kind of relationship. If there’s someone who’s just looking for you to create the technically sound solution, then they will then take over and manage and run them their own.

Okay. Perfectly fine. If we can meet halfway, if the expectations are. Ben’s a great place to start. On the other hand, if you, as an agency are looking for partners or for merchants who we can partner with, who you can grow with and help them grow, then you probably would not be that willing to take such clients.

We, you see early on. They don’t see you again as equals or someone who can contribute to the growth, the bottom line, but just expect you to deliver the code that is floats. So those are the initial conversations. So what are the expectations? What do you expect from this relationship? And then. Even beyond that, obviously you have to talk about the budget expectations and the overall total cost of ownership and within the e-commerce and within, especially with the open source, there’s a lot of education that has to happen from both ends.

You have to understand the client’s business, but you have to also. The client or the merchant understand options and weighing these options. And then teach them that it’s not a good idea to, to. To overall to over the blow the the installation with 1500 extensions, hoping that because each of them is doing their own part, everything will magically happen.

We’re not in the microservices yet. So if you know that there’s, there has been a lot of a ton of conversations around these kinds of things because they’re that. It’s it comes down to communication. Sometimes someone from the Magento side has communicated that it’s open source, it’s free.

Then you have thousands of extensions on the marketplace that you can simply plug and play. And help your business, help your installation be more complex. And then you have to manage again, the expectations not tell them that it was completely wrong, but explain why it’s not exactly like that.

And then when you were in that position and did, this is what has happened to me a lot of times, a lot of the times is when you are, have a good understanding of the product, which you should have, if you’re talking to a potential customer or the potential line, You are not avoiding some of the difficult conversations.

Sometimes you are even opening them. If you know that they are crucial to managing expectations properly. And then that puts you in a, why was he positioned? Because someone else is just pitching the solution, right? Someone else is just pitching the product, just the bank. Again, it depends who you have on the other side, if you have personal on the other side, who recognizes that and for understands, and who’s not looking for yes.

People on the other hand, on the other side of the table, then you opened up the doors to do some proper relationships down the road. But for me over the years speeds being a hassle sometimes managing no. Let’s say, and I’m not not saying anything against Magento, but understanding why their marketing and where they buy their sales theme does not know the product really well.

It’s because the knowledge of the product and potential issues and the downsides and the comparisons between others will inevitably Put them in the in the worst position it will not help themselves. If you’re talking primarily about benefits and what the product gives you, and then hand it off to an agency who needs to implement everything that you have promised, and that it’s easier.

The hard work comes down, comes back to you. So the experiences have been you have to prepare, you’re very open, very honest, because at the end of the day, if you over. Someone will end up hurting it will be either your product your project development team, or are you going to approach your manager for them will be in a pickle or inevitably there is going to be issues on the client side as well, because the new solution that you put out will not be what they thought it would be or where they, what they hoped it would be.

This is where I doing open source in general has to have these conversations with SaaS platforms. Let’s say that the conversations are faster. It’s you have that? It works in that way. Can I tweak it? No. K right then. Yeah, I can. So that means I have to adopt my business model to the platform. Thank you.

They’re leaving again. It’s faster. It’s clear. We don’t know source. You can do everything, but that doesn’t mean you should, right? Because he then jeopardizes the stability of the system. It jeopardizes the business. Model as a whole, if you start doing all too many customization, so managing these kinds of expectations has been in my book crucial for establishing good, solid, honest long-term clients relationships.

I gave a talk at Magento, imagine 2015, and the title of my talk was what to expect when you’re not expecting. And it was the, you hit on many of the same topics. So education uncom uncomfortable conversations has been one of the main parts of my talks at these events. My original talk was in meat, Magento or Magento live journal.

And my, my thought was I want to educate merchants on what to expect from an agency and how to maybe navigate some of those communication points. And the funny part about that was all the people that raised their hands were developers. You have developers, agencies and murders.

And the ones that are struggling the most are the developers who are on their own, who don’t, who, oh, maybe you’re not, they’re not communication savvy. And I think the makeup of a developer, isn’t exactly how well they communicate with people. Their makeup, a really good developer is a good developer because.

They’re engrossed in their technology. They’re not necessarily engrossed in how well they communicate with the client. So I think you’ve hit them all exactly right on the point. I think that the best thing Adobe could do is have an engineer on a call with a client to help the client understand what they can and can’t do.

But the thing is that happens, especially on magenta. The client will find out they can do it and then they’ll find out that’s going to be 500 hours and they’re like no, it shouldn’t be that much. I want to do it in 200 hours. And then there’s somebody at the agency, a sales person, normally, who would.

Yeah, we’ll figure it out. Let’s get this signed and that’s starting from the sales cycle and you hit it on the head as well from the how Magento used to sell a Magento enterprise for the salespeople start that. And it ends up having to be cleaned up by the project management team.

Yeah. And there’s even that’s, all of these things are coming from us being immersed in Magento as a product for these 10 or 12 years. So you cannot even blame. Some of these people who are actually, they’re also doing their own job, because a lot of those people, especially in the sales and marketing.

Thought or in a different way, or haven’t been directed, is there a job description and then understand completely from that standpoint, that we touched on previous from the business standpoint, it’s about the numbers, right? It’s about the new logos. How did they put it right then your sales, and then someone else has to clean up the mess. And then when you have invested several thousand hours, maybe in. That it’s not that easy to take on that Suncoast motion, and forget about it. Let’s move away and start something in you. Then you’re stuck and. Again, from the magentas standpoint, from the open source perspective of e-commerce softwares, there’s nothing yet there that’s matching Magento.

So anyone who has a fairly complex website especially if they want to create a lot of these things, even if they’re on, even with the notion that they’re on e-commerce or sorry, on open source, they sometimes feel stuck. I you because they might want to move away from agenda, but they understand that it’s very difficult to them.

Replicate that. Yeah. And sometimes impossible. Yeah. So I just we only have five minutes left, so let’s we have to close out. Unfortunately we have to close out this conversation just to recap what you said earlier the expectations of the client should be should be, you should learn those that the agency needs to learn the expectations of the client at the start of the project.

I’m an advocate of bringing the sales person in, because oftentimes to this, the client will say I was promised this and what the client hears sometimes is different than what the sales person says. That’s all just meeting expectations and then education, I think is what you said next. So listening to the client, helping them understand the way things are going to go.

And then also helping them to understand. So the client has to do some education and we have to do some education as an agency. And then I think that just to key in on that, what you said about having those difficult conversations and making sure you talk about that. As soon as you can, because the longer you wait, the longer there is for that time to pass.

And the client say you should’ve told me this a month ago. We could have dealt with it. Then none of the waiting around is going to help anybody. Is it did I summarize what you said earlier? Pretty well. Perfectly. All right. So Aron, what is, so you just briefly, what what is your future look like?

What are you planning on? I got, as I mentioned, I’m on my way out I’ve been having some conversations over these past several weeks with again, with some of the members of the community I’m taking some time off even though with restrictions now in Croatia, both colleagues, some online classes with the kids.

It’s not a sabbatical, it’s not really a relaxing time. But still it gives me some times to Re-evaluate what I have done over these 12 years see some of the things that I love doing see some of the things that I might not want to do again. And then I know the easiest way for me east of stay around e-commerce ecosystem, because I know like that in terms of weather, whether it’s going to be.

Similarly agency experience or something completely different fairly open to new experiences in that regard. Great. And as I close out I was give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug to promote anything you’d like, what would you like to promote today? Okay. I haven’t actually through things.

For one 12 years is 12 years. Hey, so each crew.net, I N C H O o.net for anyone who is looking for a solid or grave Magento. That’s you don’t have to look elsewhere. They’re still a great team who can handle any kind of Magento project. Other than that I’m based in Croatia, leading creation.

So great shot, especially is no fraud, especially in the U S for Fritzy and for the nice beaches. But one thing that, that has really been a good thing or. Past year or so throughout the pandemic is that the Croatia has opened up for these are the non digital nomads, right? So you have you, right?

So that’s the freedom of movements or anyone can work, travel anywhere, bar the COVID restrictions. Other than that Gratiot has starting in 2021 and starting to get digital nomads. It’s a perfect for any Nani resident, primarily for us people to stay, to live in Croatia for up to 12. No, no questions asked.

So it’s a permit for a long-term state. And this is being done. And this is being taken advantage of by a lot of us actually residents who are traveling, who have found, and it’s fairly affordable to live in Croatia. And there are a lot of different homes who are offering that type of long-term state options.

So if. In Kingsville for remote work and you’re looking for a country where you can actually live on a in a much more affordable way with your celery and learning from the states, from anywhere else in the world, and still have a great view. They take a, I dunno, take a swim in March if you want to.

So there they’re really great options for Nani residents or anyone who’s listening. You should visit DNA Croatia dot. So DNA, crayfish.com. That’s these are the no men’s association of, for creation over there. You can learn a lot about what it takes to travel, to come live in Croatia and work for your current employer or for yourself, if you are a freelancer.

So this is a great place to be. And if you do decide to come no, feel free to give me a call. Maybe we can meet for a coffee or. All right. That’s fantastic. And we cannot swim here in our lakes and March. In fact, yesterday I was out around the lakes and there was a whole group of people doing kite surfing which was really cool.

And it’s not surfing as you would think. It’s on a big frozen lake and they’re going across this lake probably 60 miles an hour with there’s both a wind surfing on the ice and there’s kite surfing. For if there’s no snow, if it’s just straight up ice, you can go more than 160 kilometers an hour on the ice.

It’s crazy fast and no more than a hundred miles an hour. Anyway, You don’t care if it’s fluid or solid, you just pull up. Yeah. Right now it’s all solid. It’s going to be solid until March our lake. We can run, we can walk on our lakes from December, until March anyways. Not a plug for Minnesota. If you like that winter outdoor lifestyle, that is a great place to be.

So anyways, Aron, I really appreciate you being here. It sounds like we’ll have to do a co we should do a follow up conversation with the, with your next chapter in life. And we can continue to talk about how we can improve Magento association and the communications around it so much for being here.

The psychology of cognitive customer behavior with Guido Jansen

April 14, 2023January 21, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

There is a new sheriff in town, leading the charge to Spryker. Guido Jansen tells us about his new role with Spryker. Most interesting is that we learn a little about customer behavior and his role as a community builder and Cognitive Psychologist. Guido is a community engagement specialist using strategic insight and empathy to understand, inform, and strategically engage both a worldwide ecosystem and the internal stakeholders who serve them. He has done hundreds of presentations, workshops, seminars, and conferences in over 25 countries about several topics around E-commerce and Psychology.

Transcript:

Brent: Welcome to this new year today, I have Guido Jansen and he is with Spriker and I’m very excited to talk to him, Guido. You are the global business and technology. Evangelists for Spriker and which in the blue room or the green room, we talked about that you’re the Ben marks of Spriker or the Ben marks of shop where, or the benchmarks of Magento or whatever.

Brent: However you want to say that. Why don’t you do a better introduction than I just did. And maybe tell us what you’re doing day to day and, one of your passions in life.

Guido: Oh, I have many passions brands. One of wishes now a Spriker indeed. Yeah, my background’s in the. I guess to try to compromise a bit that I have a background in psychology and what a usability part of of psychology optimizing a web shop off the debts.

Guido: The study itself at university I’m done. I don’t feel that old, but at university that didn’t have a lot of online things going on. In terms of examples. So that was mainly about the usability. I could think of thing machine or a way, finding an airports how that works. But I always applied this to align to e-commerce and in, started out with things like mumbo and.

Guido: Wait maybe I am old mama Joomla and a, and I switched gears to to e-commerce and Magento in 2008. That time when we were all playing around with cameras and virtual mark, and those kinds of things that Magento came around, which was this magical thing that was way ahead of its time. And we all add a great fun, I think playing around with that and did that for, 13 years.

Guido: And I think that’s also like 20 10, 20 11 that I met you. I think we met at a. It was the Moscone center in San

Brent: Francisco. Could be, yeah. Yeah. The fabric comm X dot commerce.

Guido: This will all be beeped

Brent: out with the knee, right? Yeah. In fact, I was just going through all my supplies. I was going through my old video just getting stuff, getting my mat cleaned up and I found of a video of the, in the intro or the, welcome from the.

Brent: PayPal slash Magento slash whatever eBay people. Yeah. And it was us coming out of the conference center and they all, there’s huge. Just all the employees lined up welcoming, everybody to the event. So it was definitely a well thought out event and it was fun how could you go wrong?

Brent: I don’t know if if the outcome was what they had expected, but it was fun. And then. A fun event, 2011, definitely.

Guido: Yeah. Events were a fun ride. Remember those events were fun. Now we had a lot of fun with that with Magento organized, a lot of stuff. For Magento we had the Mimi, Japan and Netherlands kickstart this whole global movement of Magento events.

Guido: And I’ve been lucky enough to to attend many of those those firsts, which are the best I think, to go through like those first events in a country where. People have heard each other’s names online on slack or on the forums, but never met in person. So all those awkward first meetings, or those are great to to, attend to.

Guido: And yeah, I and it’s also a, the Magento ecosystem is also where I met Boris the founder of Spriker and currently co CEO of Spriker. I think we met sills. 20 11 20 12 had a Magento agency. And some six, seven years ago when you started with we kept in contact and yeah, I would have lost a year.

Guido: I was working at a Magento merchants actually. And he approached me and said, Hey, we’re growing like crazy at Spriker and we need someone like you doing community stuff. Spriker we need something like that. So to support that. I don’t think you actually build this, build a community.

Guido: I The community is there and does its own thing. That’s what we see, which has the rights. But we need someone from Spriker to facilitate what’s happening out. There are very similar indeed to what’s. What bandage. And before that, around though, we’re doing a Magento. So yeah, that’s the,

Brent: yeah.

Brent: And I, I did I’ve interviewed my Miquel Turk for both Spriker and it’s an interesting and fun platform and one of the. I had made early on was about the who 15 and how we’re working on getting sub one second times. And he laughed at me and he said, yes, Spriker, we’re working on sub 400 millisecond times or something like that.

Brent: It is an interesting platform and I’d love to dive into it a little more, but first let’s I know that you have been involved with. In conversion rate optimization, I think from an e-commerce standpoint, that is one thing that is often overlooked, especially. A lot of clients will come to a technology partner and they’ll say, Hey, I want to build a fantastic website.

Brent: Then they leave those either the technology partner doesn’t focus on that or the client doesn’t see value in that. So can we maybe just have a brief conversation around, what does it mean for conversion rate and why is that? And so why is that even more important than the platform you’re on or the store build that you’re doing or any of those.

Guido: I think the conversion rate optimization traditionally it’s in the name. It’s, a bit limiting. It’s the oldest Christian in the Ciroc community. Let’s first define what it is. So Euro it’s about a practice of semi or semi-truck. Practice or figuring out what works for your online store which usually involves doing user research talking to users, doing surveys, translating those into a hypothesis on what could work and what’s, where you expect to be a better for, your store.

Guido: And then validating that through experiments. Usually that’s, an AB test. That’s, very short description of of, Shiro these days. And I think one of the things that was holding back Shiro, it depends a bit on the depends a lot on the area you’re in the business you’re in, but for many companies it’s, relatively easy to say what the ROI is for buying more ads, buying Edwards.

Guido: This is what I put in. This is what I put out. That’s, very straightforward and that’s something that then people try to apply to Shiro and that doesn’t really work zeroes more. Often long-term strategy, trying to figure out what worked for your customer. And it’s really hard to say at the end of the day, at the end of the year what came out of that?

Guido: Exactly. Which is also a bit counter-intuitive because we’re doing an AB test. So we can exactly say, this is what version a is doing. This is what version B is doing, but. The course of the year, like if you do three aunts or a thousand experiments what’s your contribution? I don’t know. And that’s that’s, sometimes hard for managers to get into and also it can also mean that you’re not even growing, but it can also mean that you’re not going down.

Guido: So your conversion rate stays the same. Your number stays the same if you’re in a declining business like a couple of last years with, if you’re in a, in a. Selling holiday houses, like booking.com. It’s going to be really hard to increase refresher rates or to, or avenue. But you really need a team like this to understand.

Guido: Okay, what are people still buying? What are the, changing consumer behavior to last year’s? And companies that do CRO well those are the ones that can survive this. And if you just keep buying more assets, that’s going to be a very difficult thing to,

Brent: to maintain that. Yeah. I think with the Google mistake or the Google ad mistake or the paid ad mistake has always been, Hey, let’s just throw money at it.

Brent: And money will also always get it there. And sure. It’s true. You can plow enough money into anything to make anything work, but there was a diminish diminishing return on that investment. And I think one thing we learned, I was part of the PayPal mobile optimization program for a year. And we did learn that number one, measuring and doing those tests matters.

Brent: Getting the merchant to get involved and see what’s happening. And then I think what you said is you are either not propping up, but finding what works best for you. And then even doubling down on that to make sure that you’re putting that investment where it’s really paying off, but learning things that are counter-intuitive.

Brent: And I think one of the things that we learned in the mobile optimization. Some of the things that you would think would perform better, perform worse when you think they should perform better. And I think from a from a psychological standpoint or any, type of human behavior standpoint, for me, that’s always very interesting to learn.

Brent: Why and why would something you would think performed better perform worse? And I think for the mobile one, I think was all about we’re going from this desktop. People have a perception of desktop and then people have a perception of mobile. And I’ll just say in the Western world, I’ll generalize.

Brent: Most of the time, we’re still on our desktop computer buying something it’s going more mobile it’s compared to the emerging markets where it’s, maybe they don’t even have a desktop and they’re buying everything online. Yeah.

Guido: Yeah and that’s counter-intuitive parts saying, okay.

Guido: We think this is going to work with. But it didn’t, that’s also a big part of why CRO can sometimes be a difficult conversation. Because w with management often, Ciro’s also an initially used just to prove whatever management wants it to prove. And that doesn’t always work. For example with, booking that I just mentioned that it’s booking.com.

Guido: It’s you can book hotel rooms there. It’s a big company worldwide. It’s based in the Netherlands originally. So that’s why I use it as an example. There are the example of running experiment. But they, publicly said it. Okay. One in 10 experiments is success. So that even for that company, that’s the pinnacle of AB testing and running experiments.

Guido: They’re really good at this. And even they well fail nine out of 10 times fill as in doesn’t go up doesn’t increase your conversion rates or revenue or whatever you’re optimizing. So you can imagine if, you don’t have your processes in place or you’re not as good as booking yet, that number is not as good as one in 10, but might be wanting 21 in 50 or whatever.

Guido: And that’s, also I think Bartel for whites white can be really hard to start For companies doing this because you really need to be dedicated. It’s not just running a three tests a year and then the hope for the best. That’s probably not going to work for you. So that’s makes it a bit harder than just buy more Google ads.

Guido: But yeah, you need to realize that. The traffic to your website, that’s part one, part two is getting the people on those websites to convert to whatever you want them to buy. And it’s still a very important blocking factor if that’s not, good. And if you’re double the amount of people converting on your websites, that’s probably going to stay there.

Guido: Even if you stop optimizing today, if you double that and you’re stopped today, it’s not going to be we worse tomorrow. Less like things with ads. If you still buy ads today, you’re not going to have any traffic any more tomorrow. So that’s going to be I think Sierra is going to be in the end.

Guido: There’s going to be a better investment, but yeah,

Brent: I think that looking at at what people are doing there, the op the, alternative is not doing. And then you don’t even know, then you’re really just sailing into a black hole without any knowledge or, thought about what you’re doing. So measuring it.

Brent: And I think I’ve heard is that it’s hypothesized, so you can come up with some experiments, you observe those, you measure them and then adjust after. So even, like you said, one in 10 or, one in 20. Those numbers mean that at least you’ve, found success in that little piece. And normally not normally, but let’s just say in the business world if you get a one and 10 on a stock pick and that stock picked does a thousand.

Brent: The increase in your business or your, return? That one in 10 usually pays for the nine. And I think if, as we dig in to CRO and we work in on those specific things with, clients and learn what is doing better, those that one in 10 is going to give a payback. And I’m guessing booking.com does it because it gives them a payback.

Brent: And of course they know their customer.

Guido: Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you’re interested, you’re all, if you’re, like I said you’re in an agency you want to sell these things to clients. I think it helps to frame it in a totally different way. Don’t, sell it as optimization senators, risk managers.

Guido: And a way to prioritize your backlog. If you run the experiments and you say indeed nine out of 10 would not have works. That may, that means that you save money on implementing those nine things that wouldn’t would not have worked anyway. So you don’t have to implement them. Just implement the one that does work.

Guido: And, you can also say to the strands that’s maybe you think you’re not experimenting, but you’re changing a little things on your websites today and tomorrow under the author, you still, basically, you’re still experimenting. You just don’t have any idea what the outcome mess of the experiments.

Guido: The overall sum, you know what happens at the end of the month when you’re looking through your books okay, this is what we solve, but you have no ID which. Which of those experiments that you’re, I don’t know that your content team and what your design team, whatever they or development team, whatever they deployed, you have no idea what those individual experiments contributed to the whole.

Guido: So you’re not learning anything. Exactly. It’s something

Brent: you can build upon. All right, so let’s tie this into Spriker. We, Came on to talk more about Spriker than CRO, but how how we

Guido: can do multiple episodes of breath is found. Good.

Brent: Good good So how well let’s, frame it around Spriker and, your role.

Brent: So some of your role is, going to be helping clients and some of your roles building a community.

Guido: It’s a bit of a it might, feel like a bit of a career switch, so I’m not, I won’t be. So for the last 10 years I’ve been running those experiments, running hero programs and actually building teams that do this.

Guido: So I won’t be doing that. That Spriker at least not, initially. It’s, more about the community part. The thing I’ve also been doing with. With Magento on the side for, 13 years. That’s what I’m going to focus on doing doing for Spriker, but it still feels a bit it still feels a bit similar, so I’m not running AB tests anymore, but I’m still trying to.

Guido: To get the best possible feedback out of that community and use that to make Spriker better. And it can be Spriker the product can be Spriker the services that we offer. So in that sense, it’s not that far from what I’ve been doing is Bombi. It won’t result in an AB test, only commercial websites.

Guido: But I still plan on running some experiments with the community to see what’s working and what isn’t, and then collecting that feedback we are building or expanding, facilitating the community that we have. That’s a, that’s the main goal. Some of the things. That we have. So we have a couple of subgroups within that community.

Guido: We already have a partner advisory board for both the solution partners in the technology part. That’s already running. I’m not involved with that. I’m currently working on seating, a customer advisory boards. So that’s existing customers getting them to get our coupler, like 15 customers, getting them to get R and R on a regular basis.

Guido: And I get feedback from them on how they use system and help them communicate with Spriker in a better. So that’s one thing I’m doing. The second one is regular user groups. So we already had to use a group sets Spriker before the pandemic, those are now being continued on our remote basis.

Guido: So we had our first one last month, which was really fun. Doing that and that’s, more aimed necessarily at at the strategy level. There’s more day-to-day users that are doing that. The, like most user groups are and a third one is that’s working on I’m not sure about the name yet, but like a developer attraction and adoption group.

Guido: So there will be people from, clients, from solution partners and from Spriker itself to she. Okay. What can we do to get, to attract more developers basically to Spriker. We’ve seen that with, Magento that has, can be quite the bottleneck if you don’t have enough developers out in the world.

Guido: So we have a great academy team. That’s a surprise. We’ve got some great courses to onboard people, both for people working in the back ends for developers itself or for people selling selling Spriker those courses that it’s something we have. So also I think learning from I’m not the only one from magenta and the spikers and the LA people with Magento background.

Guido: So Carol making sure that Spriker has really good documentation. So that’s a, this has been thinking. But the academy, of course only works if people know about Spriker itself, you need to get those developers on board first. And so that’s going to be part of that’s that third group that I’m working on to figure out, okay, what can we do to onboard more people more developers and get them enthusiastic about the platform.

Brent: It reminds me of the tech stack on spreads. The, what is that? The platform’s on, tech beach BHP. Perfect. Yes. So a Magento developer could, he could transition a Spriker or fairly, easy. Yup. Yup. And

Guido: multiple have

Brent: gone sour yeah. It seems to be. I think we’ve always said this with Magento.

Brent: It seemed like Magento had run the course with eBay and then mark Lavelle and the team came in and, really reinvigorated the community. It seems like red, another tipping point now did an amazing job at that. Absolutely. We’re at an another tipping point. So it sounds like some of your role is to listen to what the community is saying and maybe.

Brent: Not adjust commercial aspects of it, put at least adjust communication aspects. Would that be a good realization of, part of your role of how the community is reacting, not reacting, but forming strategy and forward-looking planning in to involve the community.

Guido: Yeah. And of course that’s something I experienced in the last 15 years with Magento myself being an active community member, but multiple working on the I’d never worked on the Magento site itself.

Guido: So I’ve seen something that Magento did really well. I’ve seen some things I think Magento could have done better. And that’s, definitely the part. And one of the first things I said two boars, whatever I’m going to do I won’t have sales targets. That’s an important one. For this job to work people need to trust you, right?

Guido: That, they need to be able to come with you with open feedback, open open criticism about whatever they think is important for them to continue their journey with with the products and that shouldn’t result in a call from the sales department next day, saying. Yeah.

talk-commerce-guido-2022-1-10__22-55-15: Why

Brent: did you do that?

Brent: Why did you say that? I’ve definitely I’ve unfortunately, or fortunately had those calls. It does get you. And unfortunately those calls do change a little bit of your direction as a, maybe even as an agency head or as a, or a community organizer in order to get money from. The not from the community, but from that entity and Magento was very good at saying, we’re never going to give you money for anything.

Brent: So that was easier. But in in order to get people, let’s just say, get people involved. There was a aspect of, we, you need to tow the line. And I agree there has to be some kind of line that has to be towed in terms of don’t don’t bash us on stage and at a meet Magento event, which actually happened.

Brent: And it should happen when it’s something that’s egregious. But there are I think there always has to be a commercial aspect to things. And again, so just help educate me. Is there a community version of spark or is it completely commercial?

Guido: It’s completely commercial. It’s the sources.

Guido: But it’s not an open source license. So it the full code is on the, is available and get up for everyone to see and to try and as a and if you’re like me too lazy to install it. So there’s there are demos available for the different markets that we serve. So we have B to B, to C we have we have marketplace solutions so that’s all there for people to see.

Guido: But if you want to use the product, then it becomes a commercial license and that’s fully based on either the items sold order. So it depends a bit on the business model and I guess on what’s our sales team agrees with

Brent: the clients. Okay. So it’s negotiable somewhat.

Guido: Now yeah so, they have it’s not necessarily negotiable, but there are levels that you can get to.

Guido: And then of course the better the price becomes lower. Yep.

Brent: Got it. Yeah. Marketplaces is certainly a, big topic right now. Everybody’s trying to do a marketplace. I think Magento has made the way Magento is, engineered. Isn’t great for marketplace applications. So tell us a little bit about how the marketplace would help a merchant.

Guido: Yeah, and I think w what makes breaker great is that it’s, it really focuses on the non standards business models, protocols, the sophisticated business model. And usually with specifically, I think with, marketplace with B to C it’s, usually straightforward and there are a lot of platforms supporting that.

Guido: And then you go to B2B or to marketplace usually. And like you said, with Magento You often get into the area of a lot of customizations. And then you need a platform that supports that the business models get more and more diverse, more and more when you go to B2B and marketplace and you need a platform to support that.

Guido: So I think that’s one of the, strength of

Brent: biker a Spriker started in Germany. And it’s branching out to the rest of the world. So what are. What are your plans now for the U S market? I’m assuming that’s the next big market to tackle.

Guido: Yup. So we got our first clients in in the U S and this is definitely, yeah.

Guido: Western Europe and the U S or for many platforms to go to markets, especially if that’s one of those countries, your, if you use your own country, U S is a big focus. We have already started there this year. Or 2021 last year and this year 2022 will be a big focus here and we will have we already had an exciting events.

Guido: There are last year, I think we’ll have one or two excite events. There are next year for context excites is the spike of fruition of of Magento. Imagine if if that’s, if that helps you with with context So that’s another, we are definitely focusing on that, but for me personally like I said, the one aspect that I find important is to grow.

Guido: That’s a developer base. And specifically for that, I think it’s even more important to be a presence. What is feasible in countries that are not Western Europe and the U S because there are a lot of development communities in south America and Africa in Asia, Indonesia, India. And that those are typical markets where marketing or sales is not active or not active yet, or not as active in, in as in Western Europe and in the U S so that’s going to be a fun challenge for, me and my team to, see outcome are we are, we can visit get visibility specifically in those markets, but in terms of sales we’re growing really fast in in the U S right now, I think this Fastest growth rates.

Guido: Yeah. So it’s going to be definitely a big one for 2020

Brent: type of merchant. That would be a good fit for Spriker.

Guido: Yeah. That, that will be the, customer like I said, that has a sophisticated business model and that is a tricky term, I think, because I’ve met a lot of, I’ve also worked agency side and every customer thinks they have a sufficient.

Guido: Business model. So that’s, always a up for discussion but a typical I think the best suit it’s like we just said with B2B and market. Those are definitely the customers that would be a better fit force. Private, I think B2C, although we do have some beets see clients that have more sophisticated mall.

Guido: Sorry if there’s, if it requires more customization then then your standard shop, that’s definitely a good one. Maybe, a good dimension for context that’s Spriker is a password. Oh man. It was on-prem before that we had on-prem we still have some on-prem customers but we only sell the past solution right now.

Guido: So platform as a service and which means we also everything, but there’s still a lot of customization that you can still do that you can either have an agency for, we have a lightness partner now. Our orders. You can do in-house if you have a development team in that.

Brent: Oh as I think that past solution and just to educate our audience, the past means that it is a single installation, but it is all, it was hosted by the vendor.

Brent: So you’re hosting the platform, you’re supporting the base code. But it’s the single issue, but it’s not shared, it’s not an instance that shared like a SAS solution. It’s not shared with thousands of people. How do you, then

Guido: you anchor customize it. You can build on top of that compared to with a SAS solution where you can customize some things through settings, but if it’s not in the setting, Then you’re done.

Guido: Yeah.

Brent: And it’s a big difference there. It’s the only way to customize that is to build an application that’s sitting outside of the application that would con connect via an API. You can’t build it directly into the software.

Guido: And a nice addition to that is that’s we’re going to release. I think there’s going to be a Q2.

Guido: I think that was announced. I hope I think Q2, we will release our SDK and AOP. That’s the. The application that the platform basically that we will have so then we’re going to have our own marketplace, our own app store for things to connect with. Spriker. So then we can have a shared database of whatever you want to connect.

Guido: If you want to connect your your email, your CRM, your ERP to Spriker. You can do that. And I think that’s especially interesting because a lot of things in Spriker are interchangeable. So w what the gardener calls package business capability. BBC’s which basically means that everything in Spriker it’s a collection of those package business capabilities.

Guido: And that’s, talk to each other through an API. So if you want to, for example remove that or use your own. You can remove practice checkouts and use a third-party checkout or your own checkouts. And that’s different elements in Spriker have. We have I don’t know the accounts, but we have several PVCs that consists of several undoes of modules.

Guido: You can just swap them out and especially with the AOP, that will be really interesting because then you can Israel can be relatively well, even more easy to do.

Brent: So coming back to the past model one of the complaints with the Magento version of pass is that it, doesn’t necessarily save the client any money on, maintenance because you basically, you’re hosting it on Magento, but they’ll help support your core, but they won’t do anything else then.

Brent: Answer support tickets. So is Spriker taking any different approach to that? Do they, are they doing some of the core updates on the code itself?

Guido: That’s a good question. And I don’t really, I haven’t worked with a Magental spouse version, so I don’t really know how to compare it to to that. But yeah, the this Riker core is maintained and it’s a it’s the same for everyone.

Guido: And you can then choose to update it for you. Yes or no. For all the different models. There are hundreds, I think we’re currently over a thousand modules of Spriker itself. They’re all versions. You can choose to update. Those were never Whatever works for you. You can you can, of course, ideally update them all when they come out.

Guido: And then that’s all on a rolling basis. I think on average, I heard someone say that on average, we have 10 releases a day. That’s something I’m definitely that’s, being maintained and that you can benefit

Brent: from. So the I, know that speaking to Mike McKell earlier in the year, he talked a lot about the BDB version and then the scalability and the robustness of the platform.

Brent: Maybe tell it, talk to us a little bit about the type of client that would look at B2B and skew counts and things like that.

Guido: Oh, yeah. In terms of we have those extreme examples, and last year at at the, excite conference we had one they have over 550 million sq use in their Spriker store, which I find mind boggling.

Guido: That’s that’s, very impressive. And yes, people order dare on a regular basis. It’s not just sitting there but they they sell electronic parts it’s and the case study is actually on my website. If you’re interested, it’s a sociability and this is the name of the. That’s the platform.

Guido: And yeah, I think In terms of, and that’s, why I think Spriker is very interesting to me personally. I was funded and that there’s already, there’s something I found with, Magento. I funded the B2B sites, that those those clients always way more interesting PTC sites because of those those tricky business models and the tricky Details that you need to get right in, B2B.

Guido: B2C can be hard with a lot of customers. Just the sheer volume of, customers. If you have a lot of shopping that those customers of customer behavior change can change fast, but with B2B also have this and the detail that you need to get, right? All those specific things for your business.

Guido: I was Working with a company that did prince and they printed basically on that. And that means that if you print on everything, it’s really hard to get templates for, printing. I know, yeah. Umbrella umbrellas, that’s a different cars. You can mugs pens, everything, all the merchant you can think of that they would print it.

Guido: And which, meant that it was basically almost all manual. For, the depends that some, automation but basically everything else was done manually, which is mind blowing, but then you need to keep in mind when, someone orders it they had their, our local supply was in the.

Guido: But if, you didn’t need a speed delivery, so if you needed a speed delivery, they would do that in a, in the Netherlands. And then you’d have an extra fee for that. But if If you would want to deliver, like in one and a half, two weeks, they would actually ship all the stock that was in the Netherlands.

Guido: Put it on a on a truck, drove it to Poland, and then there are people would unpack everything print it, put it back in a truck, drive it back to the Netherlands and. Because it was so labor intensive, that was actually cheaper to do that than just to print it in the Netherlands, which again is mind blowing, but then you need a system, a backend that supports crazy shit like that.

Guido: And, that’s what I find interesting. Those, clients of debt, those are the things that are holding. Or, things your system is holding you back on? I think that’s those are great cases for Spriker.

Brent: Yeah, same example that we worked with the eyeglass company that had the same idea where they, want part of the eyeglasses would get done in a factory, in one part of the city.

Brent: And then it would get shipped across town to put the lenses in the frames or whatever. Then they get shipped to the retail store, get shipped back, and then. Then get shipped to the client directly. If that’s that’s the if that’s the model that they had. And that was I know that for Magento, that turned out to be very complicated.

Brent: But, yeah. So I can see how that would from a standpoint of complexity and from a platform where you that’s, where you, the necessity of having a platform that you can modify and make your own. Essentially,

Guido: if you want to do a. What we call unified commerce. So your terminals in your stores, your physical stores, where people can can order stuff or clients can order stuff locally.

Guido: And that’s connected into your system complexity rises quickly. And also things like in the beginning with, Magento Magento was fixed right now, but in Magento in the beginning it was all already really hard to have multiple warehouses. There’s also, it was also another thing.

Guido: And luckily Spriker fixed that from beginning. That’s, something. We have a lot of clients that’s a doer multiple millions of revenue. That’s the things they want to fix and expect from from a platform to. Yeah, it’s F as a default.

Brent: There’s a whole bunch of buzzwords floating around in the community on monoliths and microservices and micro blah-blah-blah PWA.

Brent: Where is Spriker sitting in on that. And I guess from a technology standpoint, is it easier for a customer to get into it and not worry so much about the technology? Or are they going to have to. Not worry there’s going to be a certain amount of development needed to get things running.

Guido: It’s a past platform so, there will always be some some development needed to get at the Oregon. Although we do have a. We do have for there’s a front end that you can use if that’s what you want, but you can also add your own phone tents. It will need to be connected to, the data that you have or data that you have needs to be important.

Guido: So those are always things that, that needs. And yeah, there are a lot of buzzwords and it can be complex can get complex really fast. I’m still struggling with it myself. And honestly, the first time I heard the term monolith was with the open letter the Magento Ruthie last summer, they started complaining about how things were going and partially rightfully and that’s where I I formed encountered the term monolith before, but just disregarded it and then, but that, wasn’t the first point. I thought I need to look into this and then, oh, this is what they mean, but yeah for, a Spriker I think Spriker is more something that’s often listed in the.

Guido: Corner of things, a mock standing for a microservices, API, firsts cloud something and a cloud native and and, the headless. So those are also for. Yeah.

Brent: Excellent.

Guido: But that’s, like a, term that people use often. We, were not fully onboard with the microservices part of that that equation Spriker believes more.

Guido: And that’s what I just mentioned with, the package business capabilities. Microservices first will mean that everything is a microservice. That that leads to a lot of overheads very quickly. And that’s, not needed for most companies. And there are always exceptions. But it’s not something that you’d benefit from.

Guido: And then on the other end of the spectrum is the, monolith like a magenta was at the. Mainly and then Spriker sits, in the middle, which we find very comfortable and most lines seem to be for most lines. It seemed to be a nice balance between the flexibility that you would get with a, with API first and microservices.

Guido: But to have those package in things that make sense for the business package business capabilities. It’s not a developer term. It’s, business. It’s a business term. Alexa, you’re you to have a package business capability for you can have a CRM or an ERP or your checkouts or your phone tense.

Guido: Those can be different, capabilities of your system. And for, clients that just makes more sense. That language makes more sense and the way at least Spriker has built a, it also prevents the overhead that, you would get with only using microservice.

Brent: Yeah. I like that term, a package business capabilities.

Brent: Yeah, it gives the I think it, the idea of behind that is. You don’t there. There’s going to be a lot of solutions that would apply, but you don’t necessarily have to do the customization, but if you need to, you still can. So clients or merchants can feel better about. Making their solution work at a lower cost or at least a lower initial investment to get them up and running.

Brent: Yeah.

Guido: And the Spriker is also not. It’s targeting the local bakery rights. That’d be fair. It’s we’re, targeting a larger enterprise businesses mainly and those usually. Either an agency or their own development team that, can handle this. And that’s also where I think Spriker shines.

Guido: A lot of developers love working with Spriker because it’s so maintainable for them, they only need to focus on those extra things that are the, exceptions basically for their business and not necessarily maintaining the system behind us. That’s also not something I’m not a developer, but a.

Guido: Recurring daily tasks, not something necessarily that you’re looking forward to for doing for most people, at least I’m generalizing here, but most people the new things, that those are the challenging things. That’s what you want to do with most developers want to do. And that’s, what we enable.

Guido: And, along those package, business capabilities, one thing I I think you need to mention that’s not something that’s probably grant funded or something it’s a term developed by by Gardner Spriker was also they recognized Spriker as a, as efficient, airy in their magic quadrants last year.

Guido: And it’s only the second year that we, that the sparkle was even listed. And the magic quadrants. And we’re already we were spoken was the platform. We moved the most distance in a positive direction within that. Within the quite uncertain, there was really nice, but also if you look at this quadrant the market changed so much compared to when we started with Magento.

Guido: Like I said, with Magento, we had commerce where we had virtual mark and there was Magento And we had a couple of like Intershop or those kinds of more commercial packages. But right now the magic quadrants, the market is so different than Demetric wardens already contains like 16, 16, 17 systems.

Guido: And that’s like the creme de LA creme from, what gardeners selectors are the F right now are the hundreds of solutions that you as a company can pick. That’s a huge challenge, I think for both developers, both an agencies and clients to say, what on earth do I need to a, big year? A lot of we saw all of you included agencies that’s select a platform, right?

Guido: And you need to stick to dads and that’s what you invest in. And that’s what you then hope sticks when for, long enough. But also in, in debt, I think. And of course I am definitely biased in this in-depth. Spriker is positioned really well because it’s so open with the API, with those package B business capabilities there’s relatively easy to adopt for you as an agency or develop our work lines that fits really well with with whatever you have, right.

Guido: With the adjacent tools for e-commerce that you need to connect with debts because it’s focuses only on the, on you bringing development through the table for, everything that’s specific to your business and enabling that. I think that positions us

Brent: really well.

Brent: Five 10 minutes left here. What are you excited now for 2022? What do you see coming on the e-commerce horizon on the technology horizon? Do you think? I think one thing you mentioned is that there’s so many more technology players in that magic quadrant and it’s, you would think that we’d be seeing some more consolidation, but it’s almost as though we’re splitting it between SAS pass and on-prem, and then everybody.

Brent: There’s more of them. So what, do you see happening in 2022? What’s exciting. More and more. Yeah,

Guido: this is very exciting. I, do think and, actually I had the same thing with magenta. I never looked at other platforms and look the oldest competition that we need to fight. Those other platforms.

Guido: Apparently. The e-commerce market is huge and we all get to play a part in that. And there’s this place for almost all of us or these, a lot of us there is place for, Magento and there’s place for, a shop where there are a lot of business cases, that’s fifth with those, and we don’t necessarily need.

Guido: Bethel each other. And in a ring and the bolt flying everywhere that this was really needed. I think we can all focus on that’s the thing that we really good at. And looking at how fast Spriker is going in terms of clients and employees I’m not worried about that.

Guido: That’s a very exciting thing to be at. I’m actually for the past forever, every ever since I’ve. The works basically. I had this dream once working for like a SAS company, like Dropbox or Evernote that those were the companies I thought 15 years ago, that will be really cool to work at. So I have a, single piece of software and you can optimize debts and both from a usability perspective, but also you have this endless nearly endless world markets and form of your, that you got, that you can conquer that there will be really exciting.

Guido: And that’s, this is what I am excited about. This is my first time working on the platform sites and, doing this and Applying my, my experience with, community building for the first time in actually a professional way. I They actually paying me for this now, especially my dream job that had been doing on the side for, 13 years now.

Guido: So I’m very, excited about that. And it’s a great spot to be in with, Spriker it’s it’s very they’re, remote first. I’ve been working remote first for, but at least pre Corona, but four or five years. But it’s, so natural to the company. It’s everyone is remote first have with limited holidays.

Guido: That’s always nice to have I’m working work from Netherlands. I don’t have to complain and we already. Twenty-five holidays by default. So nothing to complain there, but it’s still nice to have, especially we have to, to kids like I do sometimes you need, you just need some extra because they’re the home again.

Guido: And And, building that community. And like I said, w what I really enjoyed with the Magento community, bringing people together, especially for the first time, I does have a lot of community first next year. And the awkward moments, the recognition. That’s exciting starting point at five that you see where people first meet the immediate charter and then build businesses based on that.

Guido: I clearly remember the first meeting magenta are organized in the Netherlands. To developers came to get our metadata for the first time. And now they have this huge Magento business that they sold a couple of years ago. And, that’s happened multiple times and that’s really exciting to me to see that’s happening and then to be at the start of that.

Brent: Yeah, I agree. So I like the idea of having an MMA. MMA cage match, but you’d call it Magento, meet Magento association, cage match, and we’d get Spriker and shop wire in there. And we’d just get some we just have a Throwdown and see who wins. That’s that’s one way to look at it.

Guido: That’s one way to look at it.

Guido: Like I said, I don’t necessarily need a cage measure. I think we’re, I think we can all we’re all in e-commerce. So that’s, a really good choice to begin with. And I think if we play at rise, we will all win big. What would be

Brent: a buydown instead of a Throwdown? I think. So we as, we close out, I always give people an opportunity to do a shameless plug.

Brent: What w shameless plug is just, you can promote anything you’d even a local school or charity or whatever it is that you’re, thinking about the.

Guido: I feel like I’ve been shamelessly plugging Spriker for us lost at least 20 minutes already. Yeah, but if you want me to continue with that, we have we have for looking for a lot of people.

Guido: As, everyone in the in the e-commerce sphere is, so if you’re interested in in dance and now working for a great European employer have a look at the Sprocket. Hiring people work white likes. That’s where we are remote first and work from anywhere. So a take your pick if you’re interested, definitely take a look there.

Guido: And on a personal note, we started out with a CRO. I have my podcast on the, on CRO still. It’s a weekly podcast interviewing experts in the field and that’s the last hero. So I have looked there and you probably already into podcasts anyway, since you’re listening to this, so might as well subscribe.

Brent: Absolutely. Yeah. We all need to share our subscribers and get people to listen more and learn more. I think that the, at first first this should be education. This should be learning about other platforms is not about Magento or whatever. The place where we can learn about what other platforms are doing.

Brent: And from my personal for 2022, I’m super interested in CRO and I have seen sodas seen the light and, why that’s so important for clients. So I applaud you for what you’ve done over the years. And just as a plug. You did organize the first meat Magento, right way back in 2009,

Guido: January 27th, 2009.

Brent: Wow.

Brent: Yeah, that’s amazing. And it’s, been such a fantastic journey for both the community building, which has been the most important part for me. Because that’s when I got introduced to right about that same time, that’s when I got introduced to Magento. And I think that community is what has driven the Magento to where it is.

Brent: And you have to give a lot of a lot of kudos, so to speak to the community for helping move that along. And right now there’s a lot of A lot of communication that isn’t and is happening in the Magento community.

Guido: Yeah. Yeah, I do think community a, is a huge asset for, you as a company, whatever you’re doing as a as a company community is one of those things that is the hardest to copy.

Guido: It’s all of us can copy your product. They can copy your servers, your pricing model, your business model. But it’s really hard to copy a, community. And I think that’s also the, one of the big reasons magenta was still so big, even with all those comp the competition that’s out there in, in that 14, 15 year that Magento was existing.

Guido: Something better probably has come along. And, maybe it has For that specific business model. But transitioning all those agencies away from, you or the developers to learn something new or clients to switch platforms. Clients don’t switch platforms every year. There’s, a time delay in that and, it gives them that gives you the opportunity to, improve your product again, because you have that community commitment from people through you in the company.

Guido: And that’s Yeah, I think I mean with Adobe taking over Magento right now, they’re well, they’re not investing in the name Magento anymore. That’s I think that’s abundantly clear with removing the name from the website. The logo was and magento.com now redirecting to to the Adobe website.

Guido: But, even for, the product It’s. Yeah, it’s hard to see a little of investment from, Adobe. What we hoped would happen when they took over. But still everyone’s using Magento. And it’s really hard. You, as a business owner, you or the Magento agency, it’s really hard to have everyone trained on a different, platform.

Guido: That’s not necessarily something you’re looking

Brent: forward to. Yeah. That’s so true.

Guido: Yeah. And so communities is a huge assets for four years of community. And then for user, as a business and that’s community, then in a broad sense, a sense of the word can be individuals, developers, the companies that, are attached to you and committed to

Brent: I think I get your name right there, ghetto Yonson.

Brent: Thank you so much for being here today. Ghetto is the global business and technology evangelist for Spriker. I look forward to seeing you in 2022 in person, somewhere in the world. Hopefully in the U S or in Europe maybe even at a race, we can do a race together. We did, we got through this whole episode without talking about running.

Brent: Next time we’ll do more of that. I appreciate you being here today. Thank you.

Guido: Thanks for having me.

Brent: Thank you.

Building a Customer Centric Culture

November 10, 2023December 9, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

Store owners want to get from out of their e-commerce business. Real conversations happen when building a customer-centric culture is a prime focus. Whether you are a merchant or warehouse distributor, or a manufacturer looking for digital commerce. You should look at your tech partner, either agency or the solution integrator, and make sure they understand the business aspects and the workflow of your industry.

Vatsal Shah offers transformation and growth to organizations and individuals by creating an inner drive. He helps them elevate their brand image, increase revenue and profitability. He founded Pragmatic Consultancy in 2008 to unlock their potential. As a business coach, he championed transformations of 69 IT, Digital Agencies, E-Commerce, and Retail organizations, trained more than 12K people and 184 CEOs. His clients spread across India, China, UK, Africa, Ireland, and the USA

Vatsal and I also discuss Vatsal’s involvement in Meet Magento Events

Transcript:

All right. Welcome to this episode. Today I have Vatsal Shaw. He is a coach, a CEO coach. E-commerce evangelists speaker. I’ve seen him speak in person. He’s a pragmatic at pragmatic consultancy. Sorry. Let’s all. Please introduce yourself. Do it much better than I just did. And maybe tell us one of your passions in life.

Yep. Thank you for having me here at the same time. Yeah. So in a nutshell, if I tell about myself, what I do is I help it companies, digital marketing companies and agencies grow from small to big, say from few million dollars to multi-million dollars or multinational companies. What I work closely with them in terms of strategy, planning, execution, creating organization structures, they’re liberal politicians pricing and.

And as a result, a lot of adult Shopify, big commerce agencies have grown. I also work with various mobile and app development companies available in development companies. So almost all types of ID, sector companies. And I’m fully focused on that. And my passion is when people grow and then they touch more lives and all prosperity at that time, I feel good.

So I’m a teacher at heart and businessmen as. I have a weird combination about education. I studied it masters, then marketing majors, then psychology and communication. So I try to keep on accumulating new knowledge and keep on sharing on different platforms. And yeah, my mission is wherever I am, I should be able to transform lives, whether it is individuals or.

And my individual passion and singing and drawing, bending, and singing as well. So are you going to sing a song for us today? No, because I may be singing in Hindi, but you’re a leg Indian language. Your target audience may not understand that. So we’ll do a follow-up episode with you singing. Oh, we’ll do the intro.

I will sing a song for you and meet with India, because then the audience is. Alright. Perfect. So today I’d like to split up the topics between the store owner and maybe the agency and see maybe there’s I know there’s different perspectives from both all was there’s different perspective there, the third perspective from the developer as well, but maybe you could go into what customer.

The store owners want to get from out of their e-commerce business. Yeah. So it has been my favorite topics since long. We have been reading on internet or maybe listening the dogs from specimens. And I started with the purpose. We might have read a book called Scott McCain, which is what customer really want.

And then a lot of popular conversation happens where customer centric culture is a prime focus. So what I always look at is when any e-commerce. Oh, no. Or you can say merchant or warehouse, distributor, or a manufacturer looking for digital commerce. The space, what they look at is their tech partner, either agency or the essay they understand the business aspects and the workflow of that industry.

They bring subject matter expertise on the table. They help them digitize their workflow instead of. Fixing them around a platform or a tool or technology, which is preferred by them. It is an interesting no six, seven points. I can recall from the court Mac in that customers are looking for a compelling experience and where the it companies or agencies.

Giving the customer service or development service or e-commerce maintenance service. And so on customer look at personalization and personal focus that how I can help their business, how can increase their revenue. How can I increase their order ROS and so on. But most of the agencies focus on tech part, or they are focusing on digital part or UX part all together.

Is there a very rare combination. Most of the essays don’t focus end-to-end servicing of the customers customers want reciprocal loyalty means they want me as a solution architect or business practitioner to suggest what not to do. Instead, I have seen a business analyst or e-commerce solution specialist keep on prospecting.

What next can be sold to the customer. And a customer wants differentiation. If. Same Gordon’s book purple cow. What they want is there as to what has to be remarkable or different. If you look at all different chains of retail store on store, we’ll have component. Similar, but the orchestration of the retail sales is different.

And the same thing happens when you talk about digital commerce. So I understand that functionalities can be same platform can be the same, but the way it has been delivered has to be different. Whereas I have seen that agencies are busy making excellent at their packages and selling the same thing again and again.

So these are some of the gaps which I keep one finding in the market and I’ve seen the biggest. Exactly do opposite side. And then the Grove as billion dollar company and the rest skip one, struggling and finding new customers, licensed valley, switching the platforms and so on. And and as a result, Merchants struggle in finding the right partner.

So it is not the problem in Asia. It is a problem. I have found everyday because I talked to agency partners in us, UK Australia, Singapore, and India. So I have seen this trouble going on everywhere. And I would say merchants are right now pretty savvy, but still they get confused.

What is right for them. Yeah I I agree with that. So what do you think agencies could do to interpret what the client wants? In my previous stock which I recently delivered at magenta association connect we recently delivered that Magento association connect actual problem statement.

Somebody is trying to solve. And then based on that research is done, right things. So it’s interesting thing I used to teach when there was a curriculum going on in India that help us start digital commerce. And I was affected in there. So I used to teach to the merchants and the business owners as well considered that you are going to the new city.

And if you don’t have enough money on you’re trying on, so you won’t buy a house or an apartment, what you will do as you go on. So that can be Shopify. If you grew up at big and if you are established, then you want a bigger system because you have bigger house like bigger family and you want to scale it bigger.

So then you can look at hosted SAS cloud platform, or you can switch to window. And if further you grow, then you can have only general solution, which is enterprise grid, which can be Adobe commerce or any other no. Solutions, which we see in the Gardner store. So with the need of the client size and scale, if it’s just them, things, it works in a different fashion and it will reduce the cost of ownership. What I’m seeing is merchants struggling in their profit and margin for each thing. And that’s where the number of site opens you find equal ratio. Number of sites gets school. Yeah, I think that’s been an ongoing thing for a long time.

Is the is the sites that go back and forth between either agencies or platforms that’s happened quite a bit. So in the beginning you mentioned some breakdowns that agencies should pay attention about. Maybe we could go over those again. You mentioned UX UI, what are some of those high level things?

If we were to take buckets, the merchant or the agency is offering and they are, and I think the other thing you said is they don’t offer. They don’t often offer all of the different things. They’re just offering one small segment of those broader orphaning offerings. What what are the things that that you mentioned earlier?

Okay. Interestingly, most of the agencies, they do requirement gathering. Then they do solution specification, but they don’t do like the product development companies do. So when you look at the product development companies or digital product development companies, what they run is a design sprint, or discovery sprint.

They go on MVP model. I have not seen e-commerce stores getting developed in. It just design, like you tell us what you want. We will package it, deliver. And then at the end we will support. I believe that business evolved over a period of time. What worked in 2018 may not work in 2020 and will not work in 22.

So it can be in a weaving model. Then we can keep on increasing the scope. Digital commerce where the technology and marketing can work. And then I’m doing Moscow analysis is very interesting stuff. And when I deal with merchants, I knew that mustache would have, could have, and won’t have eaters and I would rather recommend them what not to do then.

So yeah, it is not pro business when it talk about closing the deal. But what I have found is by doing this, I end up winning more. Sure. Yeah. So where then the agency comes in, if the client is asking for something that isn’t measurable or is measurable. So what I mean by that is a lot I think what you’ve said earlier was agencies will just do exactly what the client said.

And then they don’t often go back and measure the success of whatever they’ve been they’ve delivered. Maybe you could talk about some things that would be measurable that an AI would help an agent. Sure. In previous question also, I missed telling it so one is consolidation part second, I’ve seen that agency don’t focus on marketing automation, and it goes in the way of the customer.

So recently I have seen that some of the agency have picked up a conversation where they say client, that we work on value pricing or the amount of orders. Or the increase of the revenue have we will have a share out of it. It is called performance marketing. So that is lighting. New thing. Agencies should look at UI.

UX is already people have been doing, but I would say interaction design can be the next thing where they can look at ideal customer profile, which is ICP of merchants clients. And then based on that, they can create custom customer flows and personalization. These are the costly things. So all merchants can not afford.

I understand that, but the people were in terms of the enterprise who can go for it, they should look at it. And it didn’t say you should start looking at it for similar concept, but it does smaller scale. They can give to all the plans. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you would agree that a agency should offer it and let the client say no, rather than never say anything about.

Certainly. Yes. So w when you offer something, at least you are leaving a customer empower and they have rights to choose. So when customer feel empowered they love it. And instead of dictating, this is not right, this is possible. This is not possible. If we give choices to the customer where you made a differentiation between types of agencies.

So maybe you could explain or tell us the difference between an e-commerce agency and an it company. I think a lot of times those two things get blurred. Yeah. I have seen this overlapping conversations out there. I have seen the. Agencies have different type burners. Their primary focuses on UX design and they outsource the development.

Second IRC in a digital marketing and branding agency, but they have small development arm and then outsource development. Third is tech focused company, which is working on as a platform essay or implementation partner. And they don’t have to do marketing house. So this all three of them claim themselves.

And it was just very confusing to the market. And there are pure-play ID players in this. Menu also, you will find e-commerce development is one of the option. So I can see this four distinct types and then all claim that they can build an e-commerce store. So what they mean, maybe The right components.

They may degrade the jacket and put it live. But th that is where not the business begins. It is, I would say 20% of the nearest 80 is missing. Which is around the business and the workflows and marketing and so on. It’s a different way of looking at it. I have seen ID companies, how they build up in a different way.

What they look at is we will make one thing and sell multiple things. So there is a product approach. There are agencies which work like a B2C B2B approach. What I mean by that is there so end clients or they sell dedicated resources. And I think companies are more focused on selling resources, staff, augmentation, teams, selling, they are offering manpower to the other it companies, agencies, or to the end customers.

And so that is one of the VR selling. Services and gaining money, which is most commonly found in it. Companies or product development companies, unlike agencies. And then what agencies look at is how we can create a masterpiece, how we can win a project or a brand or a kitchen where we do value pricing.

And we may do less number of projects, but we will have be more. So these are the two different tracks that I’ve seen. People get confused between to try and both the things together and switching between two and so on. So don’t you think though, that in that to be in it, to be an e-commerce agency, you have to be an it company and not necessarily I asked an e-commerce or digital commerce agency.

Not an ID company, but they know how to do orchestration of all these components available. They do have programmers and developers, but Derek, their center is not technology or product. Their center is commerce. So now you look at the big four consulting firms. They do amazingly big implementations, but their core focus is commerce or retail tech, or digital transformation of retail chains, not a particular platform or technology.

They use technology to deliver. Oh, that would be the with, okay. So are you making the differentiating around platform rather than technology or rather than the skill set of the particular developer? Because it sounds like an e-commerce agency. If they’re only on Adobe commerce then they’re focusing on that and they can’t offer something.

I’m not saying they can not offer something else. I, you can see that most of the Adobe partners have started offering multiple platforms now, except couple of still they’re still low Adobe only, but rest of the people that have. No suggesting different platforms. What I’m seeing is their core concentration, even while department gathering and suggesting to the customer is revolving around the product platform or the technology.

It’s not that our own commerce. When you put commerce into the center where you start reading. What is the customer’s product? What is their differentiation? How we can create a story around pans products, and then you start building no canvasing their customer’s journey, and then fit commerce technology in that.

So it can be then in store catalog can be variable. It gets, so it brings the only channel solution. So what. So it’s what is the first priority technology first or commerce first? Yeah. Okay. I get it. So I think that a lot of the, a lot of the agencies that have been Magento only are focusing on making sure the client fits into Magento.

And what you’re saying is figure out what the customer needs first and then find the best solution for them. Okay. And then wherever the right components are fitting. Components and technology in the clients need. So it can be Magento. It can shop if it can be front end with Hiva or it can be used to a friend or it can be anything else.

It backend can be anything. It can be, anything can be anything. So it’s not necessarily that it only one product can be fitted. Yeah. You can have one product as a base and then you can revolve components around it, but the focus should be commerce, not the product we are. Got it. Oh as we move through this, then how can agencies become more agile when they’re making these decisions for on the behalf of clients?

Oh, it is a interesting phase. We are passing through. Now since last couple of years, we can see that there are different layers of solutions on the label. So the VA said different platforms available that our platform, which is economical, that our platform, which is for the mid range.

And there are platforms, which is expensive. Now, when you. I consider that if I’m an agency owner, what I have to do is I have to be agile in strategic decision making to sustain and grow. What I need to look at is my imbalance, what analysis I’m supposed to do. But at the same time, nowadays is a question on installed capacity.

So we build a one listing, can Google G nine metrics. It says capacity building of the company. Now all the agencies are supposed to be. Check a skill they have, they’re supposed to build new capacities. Earlier they were doing one of the tech work. Now they’re talking about composable commerce.

They need to learn or unlearn rather different ways of doing and calling and practicing e-commerce development. People who are front end developers, maybe. Be in need or maybe a different kind of rented would be in a need. So a lot of new things are coming up. So if I will be an agency on I would have forecast there’s interns on 1819, that what would be the next instead of being like, I would have been a late adopter of different front end platform.

Maybe she’ll get in Contentful, goes to a friend, a lot of many other things. And then we’ll look at how different vacuums forms can help me deliver what client. Second. What I have seen is agencies who have been settled records all or two and a half decades old, 15 decade, Allie, 1.5, which has been a seasoned player who have been gold platinum partners, adapting new change and embracing Jane needs.

Lot of evaluation with them, which leads a redesign of the process, recharging in no motivating people inside to learn new things and learn what they’re already good at or the best. And reshape the organizing structure. Earlier you had only one type of people. Now you have multiple type of people, a leader who used to be a king, maybe now he’s one of the manager.

So a lot of structure restructure happens. And then so this leads to a jail management. And if you go to any businesses, They teach different ways of managing business, but they I would say new terminology should be taught nowadays. It’s just got a general management because businesses are specifically it businesses becoming now a giant, it started project management.

Now it is business management. It also getting a day because everything new coming in new conversations are, I know their social commerce is going to play a big role because three platforms will be more now different ways of payment methods are. A lot of things have changed. So I would say the people who used to be great may not be a fit into the market sooner.

It would be survival of the test. I would say that, yeah. That’s a really good way to put it this, since things are moving, they’re moving exponentially quicker. It seems like you have to be agile when you, when it comes to your management process, just like you have to be agile when it comes to your delivery process of your technology.

You mentioned a composable commerce. I know that composable commerce and content and commerce are a big thing right now. Maybe you could explain what your thought is around composable commerce and how it fits into today’s. I think you are the better person than me do. Explain where this composable of commerce here with masters.

And I claim to remaster in commerce space, but I would say composable gives a lot of freedom of expression to the developer, or maybe an agency also to the customer where I have Liberty to choose what all I want and I can. No set up things together, which works in the favor of my business.

So earlier I would say it was made to order. Now it is assembled to order. So if I say in a simpler word, what is composable? Commerce is assembled to order depending on the client need, we assemble right components and deliver to this plant. And it, it breaks the boundary of one particular platform’s dominance.

It becomes open to everyone. We shared the pie and the pie is bigger than this word, compostable commerce is heading towards. And how do you feel content in commerce fits in with that? Last year in the UK happened to talk about content driven commerce. I always believe that we don’t buy products.

There was a popular tweet because of my session with Guidewire. I said that people don’t buy a product, people buy stories. So you don’t buy apple phone or for 100 back, you buy a story which is around math. Similarly, you don’t buy anything like the, I think you are using. Right now.

Yeah. Yeah. So you’re it because somebody might have you on a great story about it, and then you happen to buy that. So people don’t buy products, people buy stories around it. Look at the community into inclusive Magento community. It is a spirit and the story which holds us together. So it’s always that it’s, they want a product.

And then when you talk about expiration of. Nowadays generation Zed is coming in. The next set of buyers are doing this enzyme. They are patient, they are digital, they’re tech savvy. They read about brands and then the juice products, which connects to their values, which is a girlfriend which builds loyalty and trust.

There are some of the key points we can find in McKinsey article, how their behavior prints, and then looking at that continuum and commerce will be the key. When you talk about DTC brands that are more towards advanced story and content, their philosophy, why they read it and so on. So it is going to be a interesting part.

I know that you mentioned earlier around growing your e-commerce business, what do you think it takes to sustain and continually grow an agency in this e-commerce world? Recently. Oh CNS not only e-commerce development, but marketing of store using marketing technologies arrow, maybe automation.

And then there can be a huge gap when. Need of skilled manpower of which we need as a merchant automat, no manufacturer to run my e-commerce store. If agencies start focusing on giving that service, which is called e-commerce process, outsourcing EPO which is called manage e-commerce stores.

So some of the people I have seen some companies have started this. Since one and a half year are doing there, get catching wildfire. What it does is this allow merchants or manufacture to focus on the core business and rest of the grunt work, which they need to manage the store also done by the agency.

Maybe a subcontracted partner agencies have, but that can be new addition to grow it and see business second, I would say no, client is small, maybe a new birding literacy brands can be a unicorn and coming two, three years. So it is a scale look at how they can start small and then grow along with the.

And working on performance marketing alone or the client or e-commerce tool can be an amazing thing. And the way I recommended we should look at Jeannine metrics, which is called installed capacity. So what kind of team competition? I have skilled metrics I have inside the company, how to keep on checking and updating it to stay into the market.

Yeah, I think you you mentioned something interesting there about about no client is too small and oftentimes you do get a big client that has a small idea that wants to grow it. So that’s a great way to look at it. Hey they, this is a really big client, but they want to do something that’s as a test.

And there’s all kinds of tools out there too, to test their ideas. And you as an agency or as an agency has to be willing to take up that test and move forward with that with that client. And it could be a small client and the agency believes is them or could be a big client that has a small idea that the agency believes in.

I think both are very valid. You mentioned Meet Magento a few times and I’d like to go into Meet Magento’s now. You attended all the Meet Magento India. I had been doing most Saul. Yeah, I turned it all and I have taken a role play in four, not one, not in one because I worked my top was not selected by you.

I would say that this kidding, but yeah, in the in the first episode of Magento, I here I was. Then in the third one, I was a anchor and speaker and hopefully contributing this year as well. And then not only in making much of the India, I have been contributing to split, went into Singapore, Indonesia, UK, wherever I get an opportunity.

Recently I contributed to Magento association connect. Yeah, I know Magento community because I started my gender with Magento when the first meter release was there. I still didn’t call it Dave and I was, I used to do a job and my CEO gave me a big printout of what into architecture and then the data structure and.

What the hell how this can be possible. I’m talking to them eight, nine. And since then I have been, then I left my ID job. And then at that time I used to be e-commerce product manager. And then later on, I started my consulting career and help a lot of e-commerce agency grown using Magento. So the idea has been fantastic journey.

And personally, I love orange. And now I’m forced to love many more colors, like green, blue, and so on. So let’s just say, we’ve been talking a lot about agencies as an agency. Why would an agency want to attend any Meet Magento? Yeah. There are a lot of things. One. People don’t generally spend time on reading or entrepreneurs are busy managing things, which is coming up in their daily routine.

So consider that if I want to have a quick review of what’s new into the mix. Good a bit Magento, you will find world’s finest speakers talking about the new trends. What is coming next? And then know you can quickly learn and whatever you feel interesting. You can go back and explore. Second you meet like-minded people.

And have a drink with them. Third it’s fun to be with the community. It’s a different you have talk to like-minded people. You talk about your case studies and you learn from each other’s experience and exposure. That’s the reason you should read and go into Meet Magentos. Personally, I have been to imagine as well, four times.

So it’s altogether different vibes when you meet in person nowadays it’s drier because. We are on zoom and then delivering session on hoopin. But yeah, but all who below, but when it goes back normal, I think it’s. Interesting conversation happens when we meet. Yeah. And I think some of those conversations happen in person and different conversations happen in person.

And you feel more enabled or more empowered, I think on both sides to have more conversations and things come up that wouldn’t normally come up. It would never come up if you didn’t attend. And I think it’s harder on zoom too, to have those open conversations. What about why would a developer Juan and with tandem Meet Magento event?

Okay. So I would say they have numbers. Life is pretty boring sorry, developers. I love you, but yeah, that’s how it is. You love computer and poor more than the people around many may not agree to it, but yeah, I have seen that you’re focused on. What is to be delivered as a tech park. So if you want to revive your human feeling go and meet your friends at windows.

And then actually in the way you’ve learned from each other, feel jealous that somebody knows more than me. And then you go back and put up more hustle and learn what it does also have certification coupons going on. So you’ll go and attempt your exam. They get a day off, maybe paid from your boss and then go and attend video.

I’ve seen that developers can learn a lot of things. They’re focused towards that, but there, they can also attend business tracks, or you can say margin tracks to see how commerce at the play. I always seen that funny part, that developers and then the lead in tech technical. I don’t know why that I’m not interested in business tracks.

Actually what they are making is actually empowering the business. So they should look at that also as a perspective consider that if they want to become a freelancer agency owner, they should attend business track to understand how this business. Yeah. I you bring up a great point about developers on how the developers should have a bigger, a broader view of the solution that they’re doing when they’re doing their coding.

A lot of developers fall into that trap of, Hey, I’ve been given this task, I’m going to do this task without asking any questions, attending those business tracks, lets you have a chance to learn the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish. I want to key on one point you said, why would a boss let their employee attend?

And so my question is why should a boss give their employee time to attend a Meet Magento event? If I would be a boss, I would let my all employees go and sponsor tickets and then I will see them go and see the world, how it goes. Why? Because when they go there, they see the tracks, they look at different parts of where people coming from.

Different part of world, some from America, some from Germany, Europe, maybe Singapore, Austria. In the place where you are, and then they learn how to, how they communicate, how they behave body language, they learn soft skills. They also explore presentation skills. I will not, some of the team members, I would push them to talk as well.

I would push my developers to deliver a talk as well. There is a different exposure to develop a person’s personality. And then yeah. It is always good that there is a trend as well, that other, we know many business agency owners come there for shopping, you know what I’m talking about so that they take away into those developers that is part of life and part of business.

But at the same time if I’m having a great culture, if I’m paying well, I should not worry about my developers going here and there. But then I would put them as a brand ambassadors as a. And from what my brand have a snowball effect, bring many more people like you into our company and let’s throw together that can also be a talk I can deliver as a boss too much.

Yeah. I think you brought up a great point about that, that it is a two way street that your people are out there to recruit other people. And it is a, it is an open forum and giving them the opportunity to learn more about what’s out there in real life and talking to other other people in their same industry.

You learn a lot from that. And I know in the past I’ve learned a lot just from attending, talking to other agency owners you learn their experiences. Certainly there’s going to be some filtering around that, but you do learn about how they’re experiencing their customers now. And we did, we earlier, we talked about how maybe clients jump between platforms.

Clients definitely jumped between agencies. As you start to be great, big talk to bigger agencies, you’ll learn this big clients been with this agency and this agency, and they they seem to change their mind every two years or every year sometimes. I wanna, I want to key on one more point that you made too about about speaking at events like this and how these smaller events and actually Meet Magento is not a small event.

It’s been quite large. But it’s not as it’s not as, I don’t know how to come. It wouldn’t be compared to say Adobe summit there. There’s not the same budget. Let’s just say that the why would, what is the PR what would, let me try to phrase this question correctly? Why would a person want to speak at an event like that?

Okay. So it’s an interesting question. Many people ask me you are not going there to sell your service or promote your CEO coaching course. You are not an agency. You are not a developer. You are not part of Magento. You’re not running a Magento farm, or you are not running WordPress from why you keep on talking there.

So I say there are a lot of tech, people are there and a lot of agency owners have. If I have some idea and if I can get a platform to share, it’s amazing to get. And then I would say a lot of. URI or I would say followers, or you can say fans, I have earned in my life of who appreciate what I talk is thanks to Meet Magento.

A lot of people in those, I have spoken even in word games and also in university forums, but meet Melinda has given me helped me a lot of respect in the country where I’m living. And it has actually made me a better personally. And that’s the reason I should go and talk there. It actually, when I’m supposed to prepare for a talk, I’m supposed to do background work, study research.

It also helped me improve my intellect as well. So it’s amazing to. Yeah. Yeah. So I would just key in on to couple of those points, that number one, it gives you an opportunity to learn how it is in front of other people. And it helps you to collect your thoughts and put them into a format that helps you to communicate to others.

And you will get direct feedback from others and how your presentation went good or bad. I know that we’ve been talking about giving some coaching. If there’s younger people that would like to present we could help them give them some coaching on how and I’m sure that you would also be good at giving some coaching to younger people or maybe people that are not so experienced in public speaking.

I would also say that since this is virtual, it is a lot easier to do a presentation to people because you don’t, maybe you don’t see them out there in person. And there’s not that extra pressure. There’s some pressure still, but you don’t see them there in person. So there’s a lot of opportunities and I think the biggest one is just that.

In preparing you end up learning so much about what you’re presenting that in that presentation all that time, it takes to put it together. You end up learning 10 times more than you could possibly have known before you started that presentation. I would add one point there considered that what all knowledge I hear.

If I can summarize that knowledge in 20 minutes. Think about how well I will be making my pitches to the customer. So it helps me create framework that how I can compress my conversations still, it can be crisp and effective, so it helps in business development as well. So where’s the train. All right. I promise I have one last question about meat Magento.

Why would the merchant want to attend a Meet Magento? Oh, it’s interesting. At one particular place, merchant can see what all kinds of technology he or she needs is available. All the boots are there at the same time. He or she can validate different vendors standing there. Third, they can validate whether that vendor is good or bad, because you will always find people who can give feedback about them for they can learn new things fifth, they can also meet a product company, employees, like they meet one another.

You will always find people from Adobe. You’ll always find people from.digital. So we’re actually a platform or a product. So you can go and talk. You can get. It started on the live meeting. People were from payment gateway or processor like PayPal. People is always there. So you’ll find there’s a merchant.

I can find quick solutions so I can have quite answers to my questions, which I have been thinking in my office. I can just go for a few hours and get those answers. All right. So you brought up one more question. I apologize for not, I’m going to have another question. One. The last question about me, Magento prompts.

Why would one of these eight, what would one of these tech companies sponsor? I Meet Magento event. So there are multiple reasons. One, you get promoted locally, so you be attractive to the new employees. That is one of the biggest advantage tech or is get when they promoted me Magento.

Second, if the merchant’s footfalls are there, you catch that merchant as well, and a third, any type of brand promotion happening, you should have an opportunity to do it. Why? Because unless you are visible on earth, how people will notice you and how you get Get more leads or the mileage. So I would say attending events and sponsoring events is one of the channels of generating leads or getting visibility.

So people should spend money there. Yeah. Excellent. All right, so let’s just switch to the Magento association for a little bit, as we close things out. That’s not, yeah, we won’t get into anything contentious, but I know that. Suddenly because of because of some people they’ve made some noise in our community and it started with the hoof a theme, and now it’s culminated in this may major open source community Alliance that has put some of us would look at it.

Some people would look at it as some division and others would look at it as it’s coming together. So I feel as though that it’s helped us to come together better because really this open letter that. Has prompted Adobe to wake up the Magento association to wake up and suddenly we’re all talking. What is your view on that?

So when people are sleeping here to make noise, to wake them up, there’s the first answer sake. Sorry. You can say that openly, but yeah, that’s there. And second, I am also part of modern day association committee ISO a committee called diversity and. And you might have a red a blog coming out from from the chosen ones who is going to take a head Magento open source.

So DNI committee actually played a good role in choosing who can be the next stars betters. I would say it was intended, it was spending, but this noise helped them do it faster. So sometimes I believe people perform better and faster in pressure and that actually have happened and I go the same then does help us merge together instead of splitting into two.

So I think now it can be a better roadmap we can see, and I hopefully See that open source survive grew and try because a, I would say whatever market share Magento has, the majority of it is open source. The Adobe commerce. So if it thinks then there will be a vacuum in the middle layer of open source e-commerce systems.

Yeah. And I think all these things are coming together now to show the importance of where the community fits in. And Adobe’s also acknowledging that the open source product has a great hold on. What the commercial product does and that they can’t simply ignore it and continue on with plans without talking to anybody.

I wouldn’t say Adobe cannot do it. The reason is open source clients. Are there potential prospects to convert into the pain? Licensed claims anybody who’s on opensource would likely to if they grow likely to buy at a promise. Actually for them, it was a lead generation platform. Instead of putting it on back burner, they should look at how they can tell.

Yeah, no, I agree that this has been the, this has been the question since 2010, since the enterprise platform came out, is how do you, is it a competitor or is it a lead generation or a One league below, like in, in cricket you have a premier league, right? You have a a great big league and then you have the leagues that are at, and everybody promotes the top.

So clients, the clients should, their aspiration of a client should be driving to the top and having this premier platform that you’re going to be on a Gobi needs to look at that open source as the, as. Driving place that helps people to move to the top. And I think in the past there’s been hundreds of thousands of users on the open source platform and they need to make sure that they’re.

Attending to those users because of bad experience and open source, and essentially means that they’re not going to go to that commerce platform because why would they even had a good experience. So from the Magento association point of view, then w I think there’s only 2000 members and I think there’s a hundreds and hundreds of thousands of developers that are in the Magento community.

How can we get more people to join Magento associates? They have created a committee which is commit a community building, or you can say it, it adds more registration to the Muslim association, but I believe that it’s not marketed, but if it is communicated it will work. Just for example, if you go on LinkedIn and you search Magento.

And you just select Southeast Asia countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Singapore. LinkedIn search ends at 50 to get results. And then it’s dot.dot. You will find more than 50 to give people if you just stand that those many. Now you think about all different continents, Africa, USA.

Russia, Australia, New Zealand and so on. So this can be, this has to be, I would say 20 X or 30 X community and registered on Magento association platforms. I think it. It needs marketing. It needs a declared hash. And then we’ll look here looking at people registering here. And I think it’s not promoted by.

Yeah. And I am on the I am on the membership committee. We don’t have any control over marketing. I think it has been suggested a few times that we do marketing as well. But what I believe is when solutions are not working, then the fork works, so sometimes you need to make new. No.

Then it starts working ultimately the benefit of Melinda community association unless you get more membership, how we can monetize or how we can grow big or how we can pass on more benefits. So it’s needed it as it has to be marketed, but then you always find great influencers in particular country.

They are not even leveraging those influencers to gain more membership. Yeah. And I think one thing that I just thought of that it seems like a no brainer is when we do a Meet Magento event, we should ask if those people would also like to join the Magento association, there has to be some way of opting people into the Magento association.

If they sign up for Meet Magento event, I think those two pieces are disconnected at the time. Yep. So if those data was pulled into the Magento association membership, it will create a magic. So I would say by default opt-in can be a choice that if you registered to Meet Magento, you are attempting for free the part of Magento’s position as well.

Excellent. We’ve solved everything. Thank you so much. We have used up our time and I, we had talked about going for 30 minutes and we’re coming up to an hour. So I think I I think we have to we have to wrap things up now, but I appreciate your time. I know that earlier I asked you if you could give me a shameless plug, so why don’t you go ahead and give me a shameless plug about anything.

Perfect. Lots of Shaw. The CEO is this right. CEO of pragmatic consultant. So when they get all right, yo coach. Perfect. Okay. It was great speaking to you today. I appreciate your time. A lot of first time we dogged in this land. The log of first time we talked about this lent the log of first time we talked, taught this length, the law of first time we talked with this lent.

Thank you very much.

Flipping the script on e-commerce fulfillment

April 14, 2023November 25, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

How Ecommerce Brands Can Use the Ohi Platform To Deliver Powerful, Fast, Brand-Focused, And Memorable Post-Purchase Experiences

We’ve all experienced the feeling of a magical post-purchase experience and the lasting impact it can have on our relationships with brands. Consumers want more from their brands, and brands need more in order to deliver.

We interview Russell Griffin, the CRO with Ohi. He has flipped the script for e-commerce fulfillment, transforming it from what is traditionally seen as a cost center into a growth engine. Brands join the Ohi platform to deliver powerfully fast, brand-focused, and memorable post-purchase experiences that enable them to grow.

Why Ecommerce Brands Should Care About The Ohi Platform

Brands are clamoring for more from their post-purchase experiences. Even as they’ve transformed fulfillment into a growth engine, however, most e-commerce brands continue to service customers based on their ability to meet delivery windows. This approach doesn’t address the problems that lead customers to bounce from retailer to retailer. It also doesn’t allow retailers to gain a better understanding of the customer.

Post-purchase experiences can be difficult, and the world is evolving at breakneck speed. When customers have another option, they’ll go to it.

What Are Typical Post-Purchase Experiences Consumers Experience?

Perhaps the most common post-purchase experience is that of frustrated shoppers.

Being stuck with slow shipping or delayed products is just the tip of the iceberg. Poorly designed websites are on the list, as are poorly documented checkout pages.

Products that fail to meet buyer expectations, a lack of product reviews, and poor after-sales experience don’t help.

How Has Ohi Revolutionized the Post-Purchase Experience?

A business can get most of their shipping and post-purchase experience wrong in just one click or screen.

Ohi’s service allows small, growth-stage companies to expand their network of fulfillment centers across the United States in a unique way that saves money and energy.

Micro-warehousing means that brands can avoid the much higher environmental costs of maintaining traditional warehouses or offering next-day or two-day shipping on a plane. This also eliminates the much higher costs of long-term leases and fees associated with air travel.

Ohi’s Post-Purchase Experience Solution offers a top-to-bottom way for merchants to deliver powerful, fast, and memorable post-purchase experiences to their customers.

How Ecommerce Brands Can Use The Ohi Platform To Deliver Powerful, Fast, Brand-Focused, And Memorable Post-Purchase Experiences

Ohi integrates directly into your website, always keeping your brand first. Your brand + Ohi instant commerce = the kind of growth every e-commerce and marketing leader dreams of.

By providing enjoyable post-purchase experiences, Ohi delights your customers and keeps them coming back, increasing their order frequency, average order value (AOV), and ultimately, your profitability. The math is simple; adding Ohi unlocks growth for your brand.

Since ecommerce is a high-touch experience, we had to reimagine how to support our customers and build more intuitive experiences on the backend.

Conclusion

The process of understanding customer needs and anticipating the e-commerce buyer journey requires us to consider what the shopper experience will be like. How is the customer purchasing journey organized? How do they find a product, determine which one to purchase, research the competitor options, and so on?

The answers to these questions all depend on having strong brand standards for these attributes and having a clear view of the entire purchase journey.

Ohi is looking to the future of fulfillment and the future of warehousing.

The four basic sales types with Paul Lima

April 14, 2023November 22, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

We interview Paul Lima with Lima Consulting. We had planned on diving into Adobe Experience Manager but our conversation went to business and the four types. Listen to learn what they are and get some great wisdom and insight from Paul. We cover the four main areas of business, Selling Products in your store or on a marketplace. Selling services or even selling lead generation. Selling experiences like Disney does or selling your audience. Paul further identifies 64 sub-categories within the four business models.

About Paul Lima

Author, speaker, and visionary, Paul has spent more than 25 years leading companies and helping the world’s premier brands transform their digital futures. Prior to starting LCG in 2004, Paul served as one of the America’s first cyber-warriors in the US Army. After retiring from the Army, Paul became a product development leader at SEI, the leading global trust accounting platform. There, he led six FinTech solutions and oversaw their evolution, including an effort to web-enable Trust3000 Anywhere, the firm’s flagship product, responsible for processing $1.5 Trillion a day. Paul is the author of the digital Transformation Maturity Model. He is an Adobe Certified Expert and certified with several Google products. Paul holds a Bachelor’s of Science from the Military Academy of the United States at West Point, and a Master’s Degree in technology management, jointly awarded by the University of Pennsylvania Engineering School (SEAS) and the Wharton School. Paul speaks Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

How Jay El-Kaake Automated the Fight for Legitimate Reviews

April 14, 2023November 18, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

In mid-2019, Jay made the difficult decision to switch Fera’s focus to something new: PRODUCT REVIEWS. With all the FAKE and fraudulent stories, he believed that merchants needed to help to show the world that they were legit. To support his new focus, he added automated review requests, 3rd party verification, and every other feature you’d expect in a reviews app – and then some. It took over a year to get there, and today Fera is the BEST REVIEW APPS for Shopify and BigCommerce, with nearly THREE THOUSAND 5-star reviews.

The Fight for Legitimate Reviews

The battle for your reviews has just begun. In 2019, Fera spent a lot of time dealing with scammers and con artists. They wouldn’t spend any time on the “good reviews” they promised, but they had plenty of the bad reviews.

In a blog post about Fera’s war on fake reviews, we discovered when fake reviews are floating around on the internet. It makes it so much harder for customers to buy a product with confidence!

Today, Fera is fighting back by:

Automating Review Requests and Verification
Automated Reviews on BigCommerce
Removing User Comments

What This Means to You

To have a thriving business, you need reviews and endorsements. But with all the fake reviews you’re getting from confused customers, reviews apps like Fera are a great way to boost legitimacy. You can even prevent fake reviews in all of your marketing and customer service.

Jay El-Kaake’s Struggle

In late 2016 Jay realized there was a problem in the market – and a BIG problem. He set out to build the solution in the spring of 2017 – that solution being Fera. When the plan was first evolving, he had been running Jay El-Kaake Art Productions and doing freelance marketing and art for clients. He was producing full-time work, creating more than 500 paintings per year and selling them in the gallery and his website, and performing marketing for other art and design clients.

The motivation to create Fera was driven by a recent business failure. On a previous job, Jay was contracted to do online marketing for an ecommerce store, where the owner neglected to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to promote their website.

Automating the Fight for Legitimate Reviews

Also, in late 2019, Jay’s team released a new application, HYPREP, to scan for fraudulent reviews and improve the effectiveness of paid advertising. Now, when a user visits a website for the first time, the app scans the site for hundreds of new, relevant social media profiles and automatically adds these accounts to an advertiser’s campaign. It’s the first on-site solution to take advantage of thousands of new potential human sales agents for every campaign.

Today Jay and his team passionately help merchants harness the social proof and urgency psychology of customers to increase sales. Fera is already being used by over 100,000 merchants worldwide.

Conclusion

If you’re a merchant concerned about the security of your reviews, worried that the numbers of reviews were going to be inflated, or have received false reviews – stop worrying. It’s easier than ever to create, manage, and track reviews, whether it be on Facebook or a centralized site. With Fera Review (and similar products), you can prevent the most egregious violators from being able to abuse reviews and ultimately stop the fake ones from being a detriment.

Industry guidelines and best practices (such as the FTC’s) still require 100% of reviews to be legitimate. And your company should set goals of a 5-star rating – to make it easy to distinguish between good and bad reviews. But, Fera is the perfect tool to handle reviews with the least amount of effort.

Offering Donations Instead of Discount Codes Increases Conversion Rates with Andrew Forman

April 14, 2023November 16, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

Tis’ the season to give! We interview Andrew Forman with Givz.com. Offering a discount isn’t always the best idea when enticing people to buy. Andrew walks us through how offering donations and giving to charity instead of discount codes increases your conversion rate. We discuss why discounts are problematic for the long-term profitability of a business and how brands are embracing the move towards social good. Andrew explains how giving away money will outperform a traditional discount – It is true! This is a timely episode as we are coming up to Give to the Max Day.

Why Offering Donations Instead of Discount Codes Increases Your Conversion Rate

Money is king. A massive portion of your company’s annual profits is made through money spent on direct mail, promotional, and ad spending.

One of the most significant issues with discounts is that it’s just a temporary hit to your bottom line, and all it does is increase your expenditure on mailing lists.

Why is Money Really King?

A recent article from the Financial Times revealed that the average luxury brand spends around $3 million on mailing lists alone. This doesn’t take into account the amount of time people spend browsing their emails.

Offering a discount code is a quick solution to an easily solved problem by having an intelligent email list manager build out your prospect list.

The Problems With Offering Discount Codes

The best online stores that we interact with daily are giving discount codes simply because they want to be part of our daily lives.

Giving away discounts to get users to do things they don’t want to do is like training a dog to do a specific task without the owner’s consent. If you are preparing a dog to pull a wagon, is this ethical? Is this ethically right if you’re training a dog to do something more helpful, like picking up litter?

Discount codes are a privilege to be had because most of us are content to give them away.

The Benefits Of Offering Donations

Of course, to offer up a donation instead of a coupon, the first question you should ask is why you’re doing this. Why not just use your standard discount code?

This is where you get into the whys, when, where, and how. It’s essential to figure out why you want to offer your customers a donation instead of a discount code.

It’s All About Impact

One of the most popular reasons to donate your discount code is because the customer is already involved in your business’ cause. In fact, 35% of customers are willing to support charities even if the cost is higher.

By offering them the opportunity to make a donation, you increase your impact and customer experience. You’re also making it easier for customers to make a difference, which you always want.

Discount codes have been around for years, and it’s not a new concept. Yet even though this model has worked for so long, the times are changing, and brands are no longer interested in protecting profits at the expense of social good. In fact, there is a growing trend of brands taking the drastic step of totally boycotting discount codes in favor of generous approaches, such as promoting donation schemes.

Looking at this trend, it would seem that the future of a brand lies in focusing on making a social contribution. In order to do so, a brand needs to use every tool at its disposal, especially discount codes, to draw consumers to them. Some brands are so committed to building social value that they have abandoned discount codes altogether.

Conclusion

The rise in digital technologies and marketing innovations means that traditional ways of doing business will struggle to compete against the multi-channel and omnichannel environment created by companies in the modern era. While a move away from offering discount codes will initially see competition increase, those that adopt a different approach may be able to build long-term relationships with customers that work to their advantage in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Bitcoin and the Merchant Risk Council with Brittany Allen

April 14, 2023October 29, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

Learn about fraud, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in our interview with Brittany Allen, who is on the Digital Trust and Safety team at (@GetSift) Sift Fraud Prevention. We learn about Sift and how it helps merchants decrease friction in their checkout while stopping fraudulent transactions. We talk about the “Merchant Risk Council” and some of the latest hot topics, and the big one is cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. Brittany gives some great examples of what merchants can do to mitigate fraud, and we also talk about how consumers are responsible for fraud prevention. We go over their fraud index and why fraud has been up more than 300% in the last two years. We talk about the “fraud economy” and how merchants can protect themselves.

Not to leave out running. We learn that Brittany is a budding runner, and Brent exerts pressure to sign up for the 2022 New York Marathon.

Howard Tiersky | Digital Transformation

April 14, 2023September 14, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

This week we interview Howard Tiersky, the CEO of From – The Digital Transformation Agency. Howard helps executives win in today’s digital world. He is Wall Street Journal’s best-selling author of “Winning Digital Customers, The Antidote to Irrelevance”. Howard has been named one of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers to follow today by IDG. As an entrepreneur, he has launched two successful companies that help large brands transform to thrive in the digital age.

We have a great conversation around the digital experience, how customers navigate it and what a business owner should do to stay relevant in today’s world.
https://wdc.ht/order

Creating a great customer experience with Rachel Fefer | Gorgias

April 6, 2022September 7, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

Rachel talks about customer experience and how ecommerce merchants need to “Step up their game” for customer experience online. We go over some real-life examples of great and not-so-great customer experiences.

Customer Experience

Transcript:

Transcript:

Transcript:

How Ecommerce Brands Can Use the Ohi Platform To Deliver Powerful, Fast, Brand-Focused, And Memorable Post-Purchase Experiences

Why Ecommerce Brands Should Care About The Ohi Platform

What Are Typical Post-Purchase Experiences Consumers Experience?

How Ecommerce Brands Can Use The Ohi Platform To Deliver Powerful, Fast, Brand-Focused, And Memorable Post-Purchase Experiences

Conclusion

About Paul Lima

The Fight for Legitimate Reviews

Jay El-Kaake’s Struggle

Automating the Fight for Legitimate Reviews

Conclusion

Why Offering Donations Instead of Discount Codes Increases Your Conversion Rate

The Problems With Offering Discount Codes

The Benefits Of Offering Donations

How Brands Are Moving Towards Social Good

Conclusion