Sinead Hammond:

This is Episode 3 of Shoppernomics, Fast, Furious, and Flexible: How to Accelerate Your Speed to Market. We are delighted to be joined on our E-commerce podcast today by James Gurd who is an e-commerce expert and co-founder of EcomChat. Welcome, James Gurd.

James Gurd:

Hi. How are you doing?

Sinead Hammond:

I’m good. I’m very good. Thank you. Very good on this cold Wednesday, November morning, but good anyway. I’d love for you to just give us a little bit of an introduction of yourself, your background, a little bit about EcomChat as well would be great. And yeah, just tell us a little bit about yourself.

James Gurd:

Sure. So yeah, I’m an independent consultant of background as head of e-commerce and retail. I’ve been independent for about 16, 17 years now. I focus on three things. One is e-comm strategy, so helping businesses understand where they should focus resource and investment, etcetera. Number two is replatforming, so helping people understand what technology fits best in their business and why, and what the implications of those tech decisions are. So this can be like advisory or full end-to-end project management. And interestingly, one of the listeners on the podcast I’ve done a lot of projects with, which is Paul Rogers, who has a similar skillset to me but more technical solution base.

And then I do e-comm training. It really is one-on-one, hands-on, or team training. In terms of what else? Myself and Paul run a podcast which is the Re:platform Podcast. So we spend a lot of time working with technology, evaluating tech, and getting to know technology vendors and getting to know how they should be used for different customers. So we launched a podcast and it’s focused very much on giving people access to the C-suite in technology companies. And also retailers showcase how technology gets used so people can practically learn what’s right for their business, discover new solutions.

So the Re:platform Podcast is basically the logical evolution from EcomChat, which no longer runs. That was a Twitter chat that ran for about eight years that me and Dan Barker ran. But Twitter chats have died of death. Where people go for information has moved on. So we decided the podcasting was the right medium and that’s where people increasingly have moved towards digesting information. That’s the summary.

Sinead Hammond:

Brilliant. It’s a good summary and it’s the same that’s why we’re here on LinkedIn audio events, trying another platform to discuss the trends going on in e-commerce at the moment. So it’s really, really great to have you here. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Before I dive in to some of the questions we’ve got prepared for you, I just want to remind listeners for now, and I’ll remind you again throughout the event. This is an interactive event so it means that as a listener, you can get involved in the conversation at any point. We’ll be taking questions at the end as usual. But if you want to send some reactions, there’s a little emoji button down at the bottom there which you’ve all been trying out. You can also actually get onto the stage as well, which is very cool. So you can just request to go on stage at the end, or during the conversation we can see how that works. So yeah, make sure you write any notes that you’ve got, maybe some questions on. We’ll answer those at the end.

And even if you want to be able to get involved through the LinkedIn event, if you go onto the actual event itself and write some comments in there, we can hopefully answer your questions at the end there as well. So lots of opportunity to get involved and ask your own questions to James.

Right, so let’s kick off. Starting this conversation, I want to ask you, James, what do you think are the key challenges that e-commerce brands are facing at the moment?

James Gurd:

Well, it’s been a bit of a messy year for many reasons, isn’t it? It’s been a messy couple of years. Some of these are going to probably be obvious to people listening. Number one, the economy, it’s inevitable, right? Cost of living, whatever you want to call it, people are spending less on non-essential goods. UK e-commerce sales was expected to drop anyway coming off the back of lockdowns as people return to stores and therefore less purchase activity going direct online. It’s dropping again versus 2022, but a lower drop than 2022 gets 2021, which is positive.

But yeah, it’s a non-essential spend. There are certain sectors like electronics have been hit. That’s partly because it’s not on a critical spend when you are struggling with mortgages, bills, et cetera. But also because of the economic pressure, people are waiting even longer now for things like the Black Friday, Cyber Monday deals. I’ve definitely seen the last couple of months slowing down in a lot of brands and a lot of verticals. People are deferring purchases and seeing repeat purchase activity for a lot of businesses has dropped off. So people tend to be buying now what they really need. Not that, “Oh, I quite like that. I quite fancy that.” So some fashion retailers have found that the number of purchases are dropping.

Now, not all businesses are hit though because luxury tends to be cushioned from economic blows a little bit better. But I think across the board where people have got product sets that aren’t essential purchases, they’re finding that fewer purchases during the year, some of the average basket sizes are dropping as well.

I think the other thing in terms that’s hitting e-comm brands, especially ones that I’ve worked with and from people I’ve talked to in the industry, is recruitment freezes. And that often, people don’t seem to worry about that, but actually when you build your strategy for the year and your budget for the year ahead and it’s dependent upon specific resources being in place to maybe utilize new tooling or to kickstart new campaigns, maybe you don’t have a proper CRM and you are bringing in somebody to manage that and to build out lifecycle marketing flows and improve your campaign management, all of a sudden that spends and that budget gets kicked. Well actually, that defers that ability to execute those campaigns, which then compromises your ability to add on those maybe those extra few percentage points to your revenue to hit your target. So a few people have been hit by that.

And that also then places more resource demands on existing people, which people are busy anyway. And when they’ve got their day-to-day jobs and then they’ve suddenly got big seasonal campaigns and fewer people are doing the work there was expected, then that’s a stressful period. So that’s definitely impacted ability to execute.

Also, seeing CapEx projects either being deferred or canceled. So big technology projects definitely as somebody who’s probably half my work is in the replatforming space, it’s been a much quieter year for new leads. Spoken to a lot of agencies and they’re in a very similar position, although Q3 has started to get a bit warmer and more leads to coming in, but the projects have been a bit smaller this year. I guess the big, what you call that, the million pound plus projects don’t seem to be there. All that, or people don’t want to talk to me about them, which is fine.

So yeah, and people aren’t quite as aggressive in their timelines. I think there’s more willingness to say, “Okay, maybe we’ll kickstart that project next year.” I’ve had two projects which were deferred from middle of this year to start of next year. I know a few agencies who’ve had projects that were due that should have been live by now that haven’t even started discovery. Others where they’re still in discovery when they should have been in build phase. So I think the appetite for moving these big CapEx projects at pace has reduced a little bit.

And then I think the other pressure, which is an interesting one, and it comes through saturation of choices. If I go back to maybe 10 years ago when I started working with businesses around tech selection rather than being in-house, there weren’t that many vendors in the space, which meant deciding what sort of platform you need and which vendors to look at or to bring into the pitch was actually simpler, although you didn’t have as much choice. Whereas now it’s very hard for people to know. For example with product discovery, do they need separate search and merchandising? Do they need a search merchant personalization engine? Do they need a full product discovery engine? What type of technology they need? Which vendors align with those technology needs? Who should they be bringing in and how to really tell the difference between the pros and cons?

Because marketing for most vendors is very, very effective. Unless you know people using the technology, it’s very hard from the available public resources to be able to pull apart and work out exactly which ones would best suit you, which is why I think businesses like Validify have been quite smart in specifically building software to help people do that. And it’s obviously something I spend a lot of my time, helping people make sense of the market. But I think with choice comes great responsibility and it also can slow people down in decision-making.

And then the final thing that I have noticed is a lot of people have moved it over to them on the SaaS platforms, Shopifys, BigCommerces. Disclaimer, there are others out there. I’m not saying they’re the only two, but Shopify’s absolutely smashed it in the last 12 months. And those product, those ecosystems are very different to legacy monoliths where building new capabilities takes a long time. They’ve got really vibrant app systems with thousands and thousands of pre-integrated apps.

And what I do see in some businesses is they get a bit paralyzed by not knowing which apps to turn on. So it’s linked to the comment I made before, but also sometimes because it’s so easy to turn it up. People just go ahead and cracking on with an app without having done the proper due diligence and find out that it’s not really done what they’ve wanted or it hasn’t worked, hasn’t had the impact. And I think sometimes the ability to do things quickly comes at the expense of thinking things through smartly enough. Not always. There are some very good businesses out there doing it, but sometimes I see people experimenting too quickly without thinking through potential impact of that decision.

So yeah, I guess those are the key. There’s a hell of a lot I will scan on it, but I think those are probably some of the key things I’ll tease out.

Sinead Hammond:

Yeah, definitely. All of the things you said, there are things that we’ve been seeing across the industry ourselves as well, and there’s lots of a huge amount of choice in terms of platforms, a huge amount of solutions that people could be using. There’s so many different options. So it can be quite overwhelming from a marketer’s point of view actually to go, “Okay. Well, what’s next? What do we do without doing far too much too quickly or lagging behind in the back?” And I think you’ve mentioned some really interesting points there about that.

Following on that technology thread, and obviously this is one of your key expertise areas, how can retailers use that technology to then automate processes and still give them that time to innovate whilst also making sure that they’re still offering that great customer experience? And obviously with AI, I’ve got to mention it. It’s been 12 minutes and I didn’t mention it so I think that’s a record. But with AI, how is that then also playing a role in this as well?

James Gurd:

Well, let’s get the AI buzzword out the way first. It’s amazing that in the industry, everyone’s obsessed with AI as if AI never existed before even though it’s been used for a bloody long time in so many different applications. I think the key change in AI is that the advent of open AI has basically democratized usage and it’s sped up adoption, because previously you had smart technology and forward-thinking technology companies investing in data scientists and that advanced level of skill that not everyone could afford to invest in to build out AI models, to build out capabilities like for example, natural language processing models in search and merch tools.

But that wasn’t the preserve of e-comm team. So your average e-comm team didn’t have easy access to be able to do that because it didn’t have the skillset to be able to use even the raw technology that was out there. But now you’ve got your ChatGPT. It’s the one everyone talks about. But there have been other tools for the last few years that have enabled things like your copy teams to be able to go in like Copy.ai where you could go in and generate reasonably unbranded product descriptions by inputting some simple commands around like tonality. Do you want it formal? Do you want it playful? Putting in keywords and it then using the AI to generate a description off the back of the inputs you’ve given it.

So these things have been there. It’s just the scale that OpenAI enables has made it easier for e-comm teams to not need to invest in a third party tool and say, “Right, we want some AI.” It’s actually, “What do we want to do? We want to use it for translations,” is a great example. And Jim Herbert from Patchworks, so we just interviewed on our podcast, add some fun videos on his YouTube channel about how AI is being used in business processes to enable people to automate process using integration layers to speed up time to market for things like product translations instead of having to go out to translation agency, being able to pull in data directly from a PIM into a platform that then uses the AI to create a translated version for French or German.

That then pushes that directly back into the PIM into relevant data field so that the business teams can set up that script to run and then they can go in and use their workflow within their existing tools to then decide is that ready? Do I need to human tweak it a little bit and then publish it? So I think there’s a lot of really, really good uses of it coming in, but the key change is it’s not dependent on technology companies. It’s the technology being made available to the e-comm teams or the SEO teams, whoever it might be, to execute things themselves. So I think that’s been really, really interesting.

My favorite use of AI and technology, we had them on the podcast, was Nibble, the AI negotiation chatbot. And if anyone’s working in e-comm, you’ve got your own insights and you’ve never used it, it’s well worth looking at because at first glance people think, “Oh God, negotiation tool. It’s going to offer people discounts and just hammer my margin.” But actually they’ve got some really interesting use cases where their tool’s been able to interject at the right times and on specific use cases on the site. And often negotiations at the point when people look like they’re about to exit without purchasing, and it’s proven that they reduce margin giveaway by avoiding blanket discounts and using AI to smartly determine what the optimal discount is within business parameters. So that’s quite cool. So hopefully that’s the AI but it’s not out the windows. It’s going to be constantly on everyone’s mindsets going forward. But I do think the practical use cases are interesting now.

In terms of processes, I guess some of the key things that have changed coming back to the point about the SaaS platforms is having grown up in the likes of Demandware and early days Magento and you had massive capability there, but you really needed WebOps teams and/or developers in order to configure the things to write script, to set cron jobs, to do processes. The average business user could not do that. The tooling wasn’t customer-facing enough.

Now in the likes of Shopify, BigCommerce, or Centra, you pick the systems. And even some of the legacy ones are trying to catch up here. You have flow-based builders enabling you for a simple interface to turn around and say, “Right. Well, when a customer does X, I want to push them into segment Y,” and that will trigger this campaign and the ability to create interoperability between systems in that other third parties in that ecosystem. Like you could take from a loyalty app so when somebody goes into a loyalty tier in Yopo, automatically push that VAR API into your Klaviyo and trigger the welcome series for that loyalty segment.

So what’s happening now is people in different parts of the e-commerce business are able to connect, streamline, and set up automated processes which scale nicely, but do it quite easily with a visual editor rather than requiring coding language to build it out. I think that’s the massive benefit in e-commerce so far. And even for me, I’m not… Although I work with technology every bloody day in my life, I don’t consider this myself technical. A lot of people I work with are far, far smarter. They actually know how to do coding. I don’t apart from maybe bolding something on my WordPress site.

So for me, looking at the visual flow-based things that you have in Shopify now, BigCommerce and then tools like Klaviyo, et cetera, and even now Patchworks has launched its own flow builder. And for people who’ve worked with Patchworks over the years, well, when they look at that now, they realize how much easier that is for businesses to self-serve on an IPass even now without needing so much technical involvement. And that for me is the big change in the market.

Sinead Hammond:

Yeah, definitely. 100% exactly I agree with you. I’m the same as a marketer. Technology is something I work with every single day and it’s something I promote every single day, but obviously I feel I’m working with coders and front end, backend developers who speak the language completely differently to me. And I think it’s more about trying to sell in the advantages of having these processes behind you, that technology is supposed to be an enabler. And I mean obviously we’ve talked about AI there, but the different types of processes just how much easier things can be just by having those changes within the technology is really key.

You mentioned a couple of out the box SaaS platforms there. How is the e-commerce landscape changing towards these? I think you touched on it a little bit, but do you have any key success stories that in your experience that you can talk about here?

James Gurd:

Yeah. Just must I put a big sticker in front of me saying remain agnostic. Remain agnostic. Because mind you, even with being technology-agnostic, you can still have your favorites so it’s absolutely fine.

Sinead Hammond:

Sure.

James Gurd:

I think what… So SaaS is a bit of a catchall term, to be honest, because even big legacy platforms are providing I guess what is essentially a SaaS-style version in their e-commerce cloud options. But when I’m talking about SaaS, I’m talking about the Shopifys, BigCommerce, I guess, ShopWheres, et cetera. In the last 12 months, Shopify has accelerated the market share and has just absolutely smashed it from a roadmap point of view. And I think what we’re seeing at the moment is the cadence of releases out of those newer, although they’re not remotely new anymore, but the newer platforms. I’m talking about those two rather than the likes of a Salesforce or Adobe. Those legacy platforms have lagged way behind in terms of speed of release so they’re not dropping and shipping new features nearly as quickly.

And when you look at a lot of the release notes, it’s functional tweaks what’s already there. It’s fixing known issues. It’s adding in more technical capability to help developers. It’s less big customer-facing features. And also their ecosystems are not growing in the way that Shopify, BigCommerce is, or they don’t have the same level of pre-integrations. They’re not building out as many cartridges. And I think a lot of businesses now who used to say the Shopifys, BigCommerces of this world. Centra as well is another exciting one I think from Scandinavia that started to make good headway in the UK. It’s a fashion and lifestyle-specific brand but it’s got a lot of very good customers on it, is people are stopping saying, “Well, these can’t do the high mid-market to enterprise.”

And it’s changing that viewpoint now. Shopify have got Boden. I think Boden’s 500 million plus. So big businesses have changed their viewpoint about what the ecosystem is that’s right for them and what the vendor market looks like. And it’s no longer a case of going to, thankfully because it should never have been, but going to Gartner’s market leaders quadrant and going, “We’ll pick one of those.” Actually, although those platforms still have a lot of strengths and they suit some use cases well, they don’t just suit businesses based on a size of GMV anymore. Enterprise isn’t defined as GMV. It’s about operational complexity and process complexity. The businesses that are quite streamlined but a fast growth, and this suits the D&C brand space well, are looking for more flexible technology stacks. And this industry bangs on about composable so much and I can’t stand it because it doesn’t really mean much to me.

But what I will say about the term is as a strategy, it makes sense. It’s about flexibility and interoperability and the ability to isolate and retire without having to rip up something, rip up hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment and then redo another a hundred grand integration. So the aim of the composable approach is, well, you build a stack that’s flexible enough so you can isolate specific components without really derailing your business. And that makes perfect sense. And the SaaS models fit really nicely because they have that pre-integrated app ecosystem where actually swapping out a subscriptions app or a loyalty app. Yes, there’s work to be done. It’s not just an equation of rip out, off you go, but it’s not suddenly what it used to be five years ago on an Adobe. Well, okay, well if you’re doing that, that’s going to cost you a significant amount of money in development and integration work.

So for me, the landscape’s changing in one fundamental way is in a lot of projects I go into now, people aren’t talking about, “Is it Salesforce? Is it Adobe? Is it SAP?” It’s, “Is there any reason we shouldn’t go Shopify, BigCommerce or something like that?” So people’s thinking around which vendors are right is changing because their definition of what purpose and e-commerce platform plays has changed. And e-commerce platform for most is not something that has to do with order management orchestration, all these advancing things. It’s basically transactional and it’s trading-based.

Sinead Hammond:

Do you think that means that it’s changing the way that brands are investing with these changes?

James Gurd:

Yeah, definitely. Interesting. Just did a project recently with Paul where we were talking to the client about inverting the cost pyramid they’ve got. So looking at the cost pyramid along three cost areas, which is licensing, so core platform licensing being the main driver, then development and build fees and then support maintenance, and then the final one being enhancement. So how much money you are spending on a monthly basis to make it better either for your customers or for yourself or for your business users.

And the legacy monolith view is the bottom of the pyramid, the heavy part is the licensing. You go to platforms where it’s 1% of GMV. Well, 1% of nets rather than GMV. You get to 100 million plus. That’s a massive amount of money. And on a 100 million plus business, you can save a significant amount of money purely by going to… Take a Shopify, 0.25%. Yes, that’s a simplistic view because you have to do a proper cost model analysis. But a pure license fee alone versus a one percenter, you’re paying 560K more purely to use a software on 100 million GMV turnover year. So 560K mean that’s a massive amount of money on a license.

And if you look at the way people use the, I guess the legacy market leaders, they don’t take advantage of some of the core benefits of their platforms, like their inbuilt AI search and merch tools or their order management orchestration. They’ve got an ERP or they’ve got an order management software. They’ve got a third party specialist search and merch like a Klaviyo or an attractor, whoever it might be. So you are paying a license fee for tooling you are not using and there is no modularized license. It’s pay the license, you get the software. So if you can flip that pyramid and say, “Right. Well, you can save you 560K plus a year instantly,” that then starts to tackle some of the barriers, which is yeah, but it doesn’t quite do how we want to do our omnichannel order flow as well as this other platform does natively.

Well, actually you can tick off those customizations in the development project for a far lower cost and still come out as a net gain. So that’s why I think people need to think about where they’re spending. If you are spending most of your money every year on licensing, you’ve got a problem because you shouldn’t be doing that. You’ve got the wrong toolkit. You need to spend more on giving the business teams the ability to execute trading strategies, the ability to invest in the tools that make their life easier, and the ability to add better customer experience. And especially for teams that are building out front end capabilities where they are controlling the front end, whether that’s through a CMS or through a customer front end stack, if you can direct more investment into that area so that you’ve got greater speed to market and you can get new features out and you can increase your testing, that’s a far smarter way of using money in my opinion.

Sinead Hammond:

Yeah, I think that’s something that we talk about a lot. The saving money in one space to then free it up to innovate and do more of the fun stuff, the bit that brands want to be doing. You don’t want to be spending most of your budget on something that’s just there to keep the cogs, keep the lights on. You want to have that ability to innovate and move forward and pick up the next thing. And I think that’s why some of the investments, I think, as you were saying, there are changing into other types of technology or into other areas of the business so that they’re able to have that extra space and extra budget there to innovate a little bit more.

James Gurd:

Yeah, definitely. And that’s why I’ve been really impressed with platforms like actually Centra and Scale, who I just have on blog, but Centra are really, really smart, really well known in Scandinavia, but they’ve won some big business recently with our H&M group. So they’re going to be launching some really interesting sites in the UK. Theirs is really headless, which puts some people off, but actually shouldn’t because at the end of the day, you should look at a platform on merit and not worry about the front end solution straight up.

But I think what they’ve done really well is they’ve targeted fashion, lifestyle, and they understand how fashion and lifestyle brands think and they’ve gone in and built a platform around how they work. So when a fashion brand turns around or say something like, “We’ve got to launch a pre-sale of VIP 24 hours ahead of the main sale,” yeah, “Well, this is how you do it and we’ve got that set up and you run it like this as a price book and this is how you set the custom content.” And then the omnichannel flows for omnichannel fashion brands. They’ve got those set up and working fine. The back office tools are aligned with how those businesses think and act. So I guess the newer to market businesses seem to have targeted the business user with the technology. Whereas the incumbents, as I call them, the SAPs, the Adobes, the Salesforces, they have taken and bought out older tech and they’ve improved it massively, but it’s still technology designed by IT people for technical people, not for business users.

Sinead Hammond:

Yeah, definitely. Just to take a little pause for a second, just to remind people that if you’ve got any questions so far, and I’m sure people do because James has just so much information, let us know at the end. Write those down. You can step up at the end. You’re welcome to react as well with little emojis as well, just to let us know that you’re listening and that you agree. Or if you disagree, then obviously you’re more than welcome to. So yeah, just a reminder that we will be taking questions at the last bit.

So James, just a slightly shifting gear here. Brands who are not already on this journey of replatforming or embracing the future of having this more, this faster speed to market, what are the next steps for them? How can they keep up with this evolving landscape? What would you suggest?

James Gurd:

Cool. Yeah, that’s a good question. So then to keep up to date with the technology, not how they approach a project, yeah?

Sinead Hammond:

Yeah.

James Gurd:

Connect with smart people. That’s the most… Launch a podcast. Brilliant. But don’t launch a podcast because we’ve done that. So just-

Sinead Hammond:

Don’t compete, yeah.

James Gurd:

Yeah, shameless plug. Listen to our podcast. The only reason to listen to our podcast is because we showcase thought leaders in the technology space. So it’s not me and Paul talking about us and aren’t we great? It’s about saying, well look, find out for yourselves, what does the co-founder of this search and merchant tool say about their roadmap and where they’re going and what they’re focused on and who it’s for? What does this retailer say about their tech stack and why they moved to a BigCommerce or a Shopify or Accenture or a Salesforce?

So I think that’s really useful. There are lots of other really good podcasts out there as well I really enjoy that have different angles towards I guess technology and how people are using it, whether that’s something like Space 48, a cool podcast. Tim Richardson’s got a good one. Chloe Thomas’ eCommerce MasterPlan, and they all cover slightly different areas so none of us are directly competing, although sometimes there’s a little bit of crossover in the technology.

I would recommend always keeping on top of the vendor’s roadmap releases. So for me, I’d stay on top of all of the major platforms, whether it’s the SAPs, Salesforce and Adobes, or it’s Shopify, BigCommerce, Centra, Scale, you name it. I try and subscribe to wherever they do a, you know, get the alert. I bookmark where they’ve got publicly disclosed roadmap or release note parts of their site. And not everyone is as transparent. Not everyone shows it as well. Shopify, I think, is the gold standard with additions. If you’re interested in modern tech and you’re not looking at how Shopify does additions as a vendor, then I think you’re missing a trick because it’s a thing of beauty, even though it is obviously clearly a massive marketing and PR-driven exercise.

Even then, go and look at reviews. Gartner peer reviews, you’ve got to take peer reviews with a pinch of salt. You’ve got to make sure you check in who the reviewer are, what type of business, so you’re getting relevant reviews. But yeah, you’ve got G2 peer reviews. And then yeah, just I guess keeping alert. Like Google Alert, I still use Google Alerts probably because I’m slightly living in the past with technology and how everyone accesses the latest info these days. But being a social Luddite, I love things like Google Alerts. So on a specific vendor, there’s a news article. Something’s come out. At least it lets me go and have a look and if it’s relevant, great. If it’s not, then I don’t worry about it.

And then the final bit is just connect with people. The e-comm space, I love it because people share info. I know loads of consultants and we compete essentially, some of us for work, but there’s no preciousness to it. At least I’ve not come across it yet. And people are willing to share info and talk about which platform they liked, didn’t like and why, and which context it worked well or what issues they hadn’t foreseen happening. So any agencies you know or if you don’t and you want to know about specific platform, start connecting with the people on LinkedIn who are active from leading agencies in that marketplace. Connect with them, chat with them, ask some questions, read their updates.

Sinead Hammond:

Great. And once you’ve been convinced yourself and you’ve got this idea and these ideas of how you want to transform as a brand, how can you then sell that into your own business? Because I feel like a lot of people I come across in e-commerce, they do the learning and do the connections and the stuff you’ve just been talking about. Do you have any advice for professionals who then want to have these transformation projects within their businesses? What would you advise there?

James Gurd:

So yeah, let’s break this down because the first thing is buy into starting the process. Deciding on technology is way down the line. Don’t even worry about it now. The mistake that I see too many people make, and I always try and tell people to stop it, is go into which platform they want or like and say, “Right. Well, we like Shopify and BigCommerces.” Forget it. You don’t even know why yet. Unless you’ve already done all of the due diligence and you have a very clear reason, rationale why they are right, stop and do the internal piece first.

And number one is you’ve got to have buy-in that you need to do an assessment. And the only way you get buy-in is if the relevant director has said, “Yes, go ahead. I want us to do an assessment, see whether we’re on the right tech or not.” And to do that, you’ve got to have a business case for spending the time and effort because if you’re busy trading and times are hard economically, taking a chunk of people’s time out of business rather than focusing on trading or improving whatever it might be, is not going to land well unless there’s a business rationale for it. So the rationale has got to be hey, we’re hemorrhaging this amount of time. So I did a project with a B2C2B company. They had about 18 million turnover. The biggest issue they had was a proprietary platform that wasn’t particularly well-supported, that was way out of date compared with leading vendors, but it was slow to do anything on it. So they had to spend so much time to even create promotion.

Now, you would expect on a modern platform, if you want to create a promotion of 20% off people who spend 100 or more in this category or by this day, that should be a matter of minutes. Done. Great. It’s worked. It’s live. Each of these promotions was costing them 300 or 400 pound in developers’ time because the developer had to code and turn it on, which is crazy.

Sinead Hammond:

Gosh.

James Gurd:

Yeah, exactly. But this still happens. I’m not saying that Shopify, BigCommerce are perfect platforms. No platform is. There are always issues with each platform. But the modern tech enables you to sell and serve better. So flip that and go right, what are the inefficiencies? How much time and effort? And then timestamp it. So we did it with my customer. We timestamped it and we estimated that each year about, I think somewhere about 25 to 30K was being lost on just nobbling around doing stuff that you didn’t need to do basically and paying developers for stuff they shouldn’t be doing. And also it was just fundamentally pissing off the team because they were bored doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing. They’re e-commerce professionals. They want to do fun things. They want to do stuff that makes them motivated and also helps them on their CV.

So you built a business case which is, look, we could save this amount per year simply with a better technology. We also think we could reduce some big projects like launching a CRM, integrate with CRM. That integration could have been 15K cheaper. And we think we could increase potentially conversion rate, whatever metric it is you could target based on the current system limitations by X with a better tooling. And then if you flow that and say, “Right. Over three years, here’s the potential cost saving and here’s the potential revenue game.” You put that in front of a director, they’re likely to be a little bit more enthused of, “Right, go ahead and spend 10% of your time over the next X weeks putting a structure to this and tell us what we do next.”

So that’s the starting point and not enough people do this. They jump into the emotional bit of, “I hate this platform. It’s crap. It doesn’t work. That doesn’t land.” You’ve got to land that unless the whole business has already said to you, “It’s crap. Find us a different platform,” you need to be a bit smarter. And I think once you’ve got people on side of, “Oh shit, there’s a commercial reason why we might want to evaluate this,” then you’ve got the time to put the structure in place. And then you’ve got to think about what are our commercial drivers is? Where are we now? What are the issues? What are the opportunities? What’s good about the current tech that we don’t want to lose sight of? Realistically, what’s our budget? What are the constraints we’ve got to work within? What’s our strategy and how’s that changing and how will that will change hands on e-comm? All of those things that give you the context of what’s driving a decision and what you need to fix with new tech.

And then you need to look at your stakeholders and you need to look at the stakeholders in the context of what the scope is. So what does e-commerce mean? Do you have multi stores? Do you have omnichannel integrations? How wide is the e-comm platform got to be in terms of what it plays with? And then you do simple interviews with key stakeholders to get their perspective. So like the merchandiser manager or the digital marketing or whoever it might be and say, “Right. Do the good, the bad, and the ugly of the now, where’s your roadmap going? What do you need in the future?” Capture that and basically then get a realistic lens of where the business is at, where it wants to go and what it needs from an e-comm platform to then help you go back, and right now we can sensibly look at the market and say, “Which of these vendors will align with our strategic principles and with the core requirement areas?”

If you’ve got really high end B2B demands, you’re not going to go, I know some people out there will disagree me instantly, to a Shopify right now. I know Shopify’s pushing its B2B but it is not as advanced as some of the others out there. Arguably it could well get there within a couple of years or maybe 12 months. But if you’ve got really complex B2B set up and that is 80% of your online revenue, then I wouldn’t have that as a strong candidate right now. BigCommerce is ahead of it. Even the likes of a Salesforce from a functional point of view, not from a cost model point of view, but there are specialist platforms out there as well that are very good depending on your integrations as well, like what ERPs, back office, anything else you got. There are some platforms that have preexisting proven integrations and connections with them that help you de-risk your project. So I think it’s just structure and proper due diligence about what’s driving a new potential platform before you look at vendors.

Sinead Hammond:

Yeah, I think that’s really important because I think you can get so far down the line of buying into something and then you realize, “Gosh, this actually isn’t going to work for so many of the reasons.” And so I think having that proper discovery process, really understanding your goals, really understanding what this is supposed to be doing in order to support the business before you even start, it’s all really, really important advice there. On that, are there any, without naming names of course, are there any kind of stories of big mistakes that have been learned by either yourself or by brands you’ve worked with? I know you’ve worked with tons of brands that maybe you suggest listeners don’t repeat themselves.

James Gurd:

Yeah. Do you know what? I think that the biggest mistake is lack of structure and comms upfront to take emotion out of it. So we all are guilty of conscious and unconscious bias. It’s inevitable. Whether that is, and I’ve heard so many things said to me at a time where a chairman has basically told the e-comm team that, “Pick your vendor. SAP, Salesforce, Adobe, Shopify, BigCommerce, this is the best because I spoke to my investor friend and he’s put it in one of the businesses they own. We should use it.” So you have all of these dynamics that you’ve got to take out. You’ve got somebody who’s the merchandising lead who used to work with, say, Magento and hated it because the site was rubbish, but it wasn’t Magento’s fault. It was just a poor implementation.

So you’ve got to unpack all of this bias and if you start with a, “Hey, what tech should we look at?” That bias comes straight in and floods out, and then people aren’t engaged. If you stop them with that process I just talked about and then it’s an unambiguous, “This is our goals and objectives. These are the issues we’re unpacking. These are the functional areas we’re focusing on. This is the business and technology principles we have to adhere to,” it’s very easy to quickly go, “You don’t like that? Okay, that’s fine. You don’t like it. But this ticks the box from all of those strategic drivers. Great.”

So that’s the number one thing is find a way to not silence people. Never do that. Let people express opinion and encourage it, but get them to express platform-centric opinions at the right stage. What you don’t want to do is waste loads of emotion and time arguing about, “I hate Magento. I love Magento. It’s crap. I love it. It’s brilliant.” If I’m never going to look at the platform anyway because it doesn’t align strategically. So shift those decisions, those discussions later on basically, but have that documentation to come back to you. If somebody keeps saying, “I really don’t want to do it. It doesn’t work. I don’t like it,” come back and say, “Well, look. We all agree these principles. That now doesn’t adhere to where we’re going strategically so we need you on board with this.”

Then yeah, don’t always accept at face value. I’ve worked with so many consultants, agencies, vendors, different people and vendors from pre-sales to developers to pure sales and marketing. And there’s such a wide range of knowledge about the actual technology and technology from an implementation point of view. So don’t accept what somebody tells you. If somebody says, “Yes, we can do that,” that’s not enough. You’ve got to find out how. You’ve got to have evidence for it and you’ve got to see where they’ve done it. And if there is no evidence, then you can’t believe that unless there is an answer that’s given back that convinces you that there is a solution that is workable. So really pull apart anything that’s told you when you’re looking at technology. I’ve been in projects where people have said, “But we were told that it could do this,” and they realize they’ve got a 20 grand extra development cost because it didn’t do it how they wanted to.

Sinead Hammond:

Wow.

James Gurd:

And that links to the second part of that point, which is map your bloody processes. I’ve had a business who refused to spend a couple of grand on a BA to map out the right processes so they could evaluate it because they didn’t think it was worthwhile. And that then leads onto these cockups where the process isn’t the process of how a new solution does. It doesn’t align with how the business needs it to be done. And then for you, either have to compromise your process or you have to customize your technology or you have to get in an additional third party to get the process working. So yeah, nail your processes and don’t just port across what you’ve got. I had somebody port across processes and it was just crap. They basically took a process that was put in place because the old tooling wasn’t right and put it into a new system and then just the business team are still pissed off because the process was laborious and took longer than it needed to. So yeah, nail processes, that’s a big thing.

Other things that have gone wrong, there are some things you can’t avoid. I’ve had a couple of projects. One recently, one a while back where we were latter stages of selecting a vendor in principle to go into discovery. And then there was a change of investment from the VC level, which then led to a complete change. And that project being torpedoed because the investors had a different mindset in terms of technology. So you can’t do anything about that. You just have to accept risks sometimes in projects.

But the one thing you can do is engage properly with the C-suite. Whether it’s a C-suite, whoever’s got the board level or leadership level, ownership and budgetary control, engage them from the start to make sure they’re bought into the process and be clear on when they need communication and what they need to convince them to sign off a project. If you don’t know that from the start, you’re going to struggle to get them to sign something off later. So put the time into engaging with stakeholders from the top to the bottom of the business but in the right way. The director doesn’t need to be sent daily updates. They’re going to get a bit annoyed with you if you do that unless they specifically ask, but make sure they know that progress is happening. If there are issues, escalate them quickly because the other thing where I’ve seen things copped up where people have hidden problems because they’re scared of telling people or they think they’re not telling people better because then they’re not stressing other people out.

And I’ve had this before where somebody’s had an issue with content. So they’ve had to do a whole suite of photography for a launch and they had a problem with the studio cocking things up and they didn’t tell any of us. And we got to the date when we were meant to be pushing all of the product photography into the staging environment to start all of the QA work, and they didn’t have any of the bloody images. In the end, it was meant to be a four-week delay. It led to I think it was about a 12-week delay in launch because the problem was bigger than that. And that person got, obviously what that did to that person’s profile within the business wasn’t that positive. They were persona non grata, and I feel sorry for them because they made the wrong decision, but they did it with good intentions.

But you can’t… In a project, you’ve got to be transparent. These projects are complex. They involve lots of people. They’re stressful. Things go wrong. It’s inevitable. Humans and technology, we’re totally prone to error. But when there’s a problem, surface it, be transparent. And if you’ve done something wrong, just own up and go, “Look, I’ve made a mistake.” That enables whoever’s running the project to stop and go, “Right, what’s the impact? What are the dependencies? Let’s make our project plan realigned.”

And then that leads on to, I guess my two final points are on issues. And not having a project owner from a project management point of view sounds grandiose. But even in small businesses, one person has to be responsible for the delivery. If you’ve got three people saying, “No, we’ll all do it together,” you can guarantee that they’re not coordinated. Tasks will get forgotten. People won’t be working to the same dates. There’ll be dependencies that aren’t understood. You can’t have that. You need somebody who’s got a centralized view to know whether people are pulling their weight and whether you’re on track or not.

Even setting up a simple project plan in Asana, it’s not expensive to use Asana. It’s not complex to do. We’re doing it for a really small client of mine. I think they’re only a few million turnover at the moment because they don’t have project management discipline. We’ve got a simple Asana board. There’s only three stakeholders but now they’ve got a timeline view. They’ve got deadlines and they know what the tasks are and they know what the dependencies are if they don’t complete things. So they feel in control of the project rather than not invisibility.

And then that’s the other one is is things that have gone massively wrong is where people are relying on emails. And that’s just an absolute disaster in project. I hate it. I hate working on projects where the client insists on email because I can guarantee you that people won’t respond or they’ll miss them because they’re buried in an inbox, or somebody will send an email to 20 people and no one on the email have a bloody clue who’s meant to respond or act. It just becomes carnage. So yeah, not using proper project management discipline is one of the biggest sins for me because it’s so easy to avoid. That’s a ramble.

Sinead Hammond:

No, it’s good. It actually leads onto my next question and really, well, because you were mentioning the kind of people that would be needed to support this internally. Internally, externally, what kind of other job roles or talents should be being focused on or being invested in order to support this? Because a lot of digital transformation projects are enormous, right? So who would you want around on your team, I guess, to be able to successfully carry this out?

James Gurd:

I always bring this back to you using a project RACI. So instead of stressing about how many people or what stakeholders, it’s right, what the roles and responsibilities a project needs to be successful. So at program level, you’re right, it’s different. At program level, you will have a program manager and you often have individual project managers for the project streams within it. So that was when I worked with House of Fraser. It exactly how it was cut up because there were about seven or eight major projects underneath the program, a central program owner who was responsible for the project discipline across all of those industry projects, individual project owners who were managing the project work streams and the project planning and tasks and all the project like RAID lists like risks, actions, issues, decisions, logs, et cetera.

Most businesses aren’t doing programs. They are doing projects. So they need a project manager, and that project manager can be depending on the size and complexity. If it’s a complex project and you don’t have a skilled and experienced project manager, pay for one. The investment will be worth its weight in gold because your project will go live quicker and with fewer issues and be better controlled budgetary-wise than if you rely on somebody who doesn’t really know how to do project management. If you’re a smaller, less complex, so maybe it’s you are a single store or UK store, you don’t have loads of complex integrations, you’ve got a small team, you could siphon on someone from the e-comm team to be the project lead alongside the right systems integrator agency partner who has a really good technical project manager leading that project discipline. Which then leads me onto the external resource, which I’ll come back to.

So then internally, the other roles you need, you need subject matter experts. Let’s say your business that has a trading team and you’ve got a digital marketing team and you’ve got your core e-comm team. You’ve got your other disciplines outside of e-comm that have dependencies, finance for example, content, whoever it might be. You need a subject matter expert from each of the areas that has a dependency with e-commerce to represent that area. And their responsibility is to coordinate to and fro the project. So they coordinate their team and their team’s got to do inputs, come to meetings and all complete actions. And they also receive info back from the project team, which is, “Hey, we’ve got this output. We need you to review it by this date. Can you make sure your team does?” So those are essential. You’ll have loads of other minor stakeholders underneath that. But the SMEs provide the coordination. If you try and get everybody feeding into a project manager when you’ve got a business with 30 or 40 people who are involved in the project, it’s quite confusing for a project manager to manage that many people individually.

The other resource but it can be provided by the SI, and again, on that point, is a business analyst. If you don’t know how things work, if you don’t, don’t know, the business process order management, it’s not mapped out. And let’s face it, how many retailers are very good at business process documentation? Not that very much. If you don’t, you’ve got to have it because you’ve got to know how it works now, where the system dependencies are in integration points, what’s broken from a customer and a business point of view, and therefore what your 2B process should be because that’s what you need to take into a project.

So now if I come back to the SI, for me, choosing the right SI is one of the most important decisions in your entire process. Most businesses aren’t going to build in-house, right? They don’t have their own development teams. So they need a platform-centric experience development partner who has got the skillset to do technical project management and leads. So they are able to take the requirements and the project scope and cut it into a spec and build that into development queues and sprints, manage the developers, make sure the developers are working to the client’s goals, and provide that communication with the client project leads that develop.

Often I turn on the SIs to do the BA piece because most retailers, brands I know, they don’t have BAs because they don’t really need them day to day. It’s normally the preserve of larger businesses. And actually, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to pay for a contract BA because it’s very hard to get a contract BA for two months on a small project because they’re off doing big projects for 12 months where they’ve got guaranteed income. So a lot of SIs bring BA resource to them and it’s just a cost line on your SI that you need to factor into your budgeting.

But yeah, SIs, for me, SIs are one of the most critical relationships here because they are a partner. A good SI gives a toss about your business. The project wants to get it over the line. They support you when the shit hits the fan. They help you rescue situations when there are issues. They help you by fighting your cause within their agency if things aren’t happening or something’s not been done right or a task wasn’t in the release or it was meant to be. So I think that the role of an SI alongside an internal project team is absolutely critical.

And then on both sides, both the SI and the client team must have a senior level project sponsor who has the authority to make decisions. That’s decisions on budget, decisions on project launches, resourcing, because they have to sit as an escalation point. Things do go wrong. And if you have the right escalation path, you can unpack issues quickly. If you’ve got no one who’s there, who’s able to make a decision, it slows everything down.

Sinead Hammond:

Yeah, 100%. As someone who works for an SI, I can very much agree. I’m not biased at all but very much agree with that relationship is so important. And it’s important to be not only about the skills, I guess, of the SI but I guess even the kind of personalities because I guess they become your partners throughout these projects, as you were saying there. So it’s literally critical to be spending time really checking and looking into who you’re going to partner with and work with for that. I agree there, definitely.

Quick reminder. We’ve got four minutes left so I’m going to ask James one more question, but quick reminder to anyone who’s listening, that we will be taking questions at the very end if you want to step up and get on stage, or you can put them in the LinkedIn event as well. But James, just one last question for you. Just looking forward, what is your vision for the industry? Do you have any upcoming projects yourself?

James Gurd:

My vision is all replatform projects to be done by me, is that’s my vision. On a serious note, less evangelism over technology would be, I think, people are becoming a little bit less pushy around certain things. So we’ve had a couple of years of pushing headless, pushing composable, MACH, et cetera, and I think the technology that sits behind it and the principles are sound but I think the evangelism confuses people because most business people I have ever spoken to aren’t sitting there thinking, “I want to go headless,” or, “I want to be MACH”. What they’re thinking is, Shit, I can’t get to market quick enough,” or, “I’m struggling to launch a new storefront. What do I need to do to fix it?”

So a greater focus on talking about business challenges, business problems, business implication, the pros and cons of different tech and how different tech architectures and models and how it fits. That for me is my vision of what really good technology space is. It will help businesses make better decisions. So it doesn’t mean don’t talk about these things but don’t start with that as a talking point. You should go into a business with what are your issues? What are you trying to solve with technology? And then headless might be the right solution, but going in and telling somebody they have headless for me is absolutely useless if you don’t know that business.

Greater transparency over cost. So not trying to obscure. I’ve seen this before, people go, “Yeah, launching this platform, it’s cheaper than platform Y.” I’m sorry. I don’t buy that because it’s very hard to be that definitive all the time in every use case. I’ve actually seen cases where I know Salesforce is very expensive from a license point of view, but I’ve actually seen a project, I actually worked on a project where Salesforce overall cost ownership was lower than the comparative platform simply because the business was happy to use Salesforce’s native tool and it wanted to use some of its order management capability. It wanted to add in its CRM in a phase 2. And when you started to look at the alternative model with all the additional tools like an additional third party CRM, the integrations to that, the third parties within that ecosystem, it actually worked out a little bit more expensive. So you need transparency over the full cost model, not just the upfront cost and the licensing. What does it look like over three to five years? So that transparency over costs and more sensible and honest discussion on that.

And then my other vision is businesses to not make knee-jerk reactions. Invest long-term in your tech stack. Don’t replatform to replace your e-comm engine. What is your technology vision for the future? Where do you want to be? What do you want technology to do? How do you want technology to work and support the business? And where do you want to be over the next 5 to 10 years? Because you don’t want to put in an e-comm platform today that you rip out in three years. You should be putting in an e-comm engine, not platform, that is going to stay with you and that you can then add in the other capabilities around it and you can rip and replace key tools whether you need to swap out a search and merch in two years time,.but you do that without having to re-engineer the entire e-commerce platform.

So I just think that that whole thing about composability is right, but it’s about getting people to think about that as a strategic approach, not as an architectural platform decision. That’s what I’d like to see, basically.

Sinead Hammond:

Absolutely. No, it’s really very much something that we talk about as well is just thinking about it from a strategic approach. It’s so important because you can get hung up on that technology and get hide in knot. So I think we’re definitely aligned with that.

We’ve actually hit 2:00 exactly. I’m hoping LinkedIn audio events doesn’t just turn off the… Cut me off going through. But does anybody have any questions in the audience that have been listening? Anything you want to share? You can request to be on stage if you want to. This is where everyone is all quite shy. I did actually have a pre-submitted question from somebody who was on earlier about had to go catch a train, James, if you’ve got two more minutes to answer. He asked, “With so many platforms available, how do you avoid wasting a huge amount of time doing product selection?”

James Gurd:

Oh, great question. Do you know what’s interesting? I’ve just written an article for this, for Chloe Thomas for her e-comm tech site because I spend so much time doing these process people. So again, it’s about I use the word processing and I know it’s because I’m essentially a dull human being, but it’s about starting off and with that whole piece of, “Okay, so what’s driving the need for technology? What’s the role of an e-comm platform? What are my business principles around it? Are there any specific things that I need an e-comm platform to do versus not do?”

So for some people, they want an e-comm platform that can do the full end-to-end order management piece. They want all the management orchestration and logic in there. Some people want an all-in-one platform that offers you like the Shopifys of this world where they have a payment engine in there without you having to pick a third party payment, integrate that, and have a separate relationship. So you’ve got to define those business principles. Then your technology principles. Is there any constraints you’re working with in the business? From an IT point of view where I’ve worked business where the IT said, “We don’t do SaaS products,” which is an interesting one. And I’ve seen others where they’re like, “We only want SaaS. We don’t want on any on-prem or et cetera, or we don’t work with these specific businesses.” And it could even be one I worked recently where they have specific environmental standards because they’re B Corp cert, specific environmental standards. Therefore, the vendors have to demonstrate even with their hosting facilities, the hosting have to be demonstrating high level of environmental standards, et cetera.

So you catch all this stuff. You define what the scope is. What does e-comm mean? We’re international with three stores. We’re multi-currency. We’ve got two DCs to connect. We are not omnichannel. We don’t have any physical stores, et cetera. We’re not B2B all this bit. You do your stakeholder interviews and you pool that information together and you look back and go. Right now we’ve got a framework of defining what we need as business. They’re much easier to go and look at the market and go, “Right. Well, which of these vendors aligns best with this?”

Bring in cost as well at this stage, just high level cost. So if you can’t give away more than 0.5% of your GMV to pay for a license, that automatically excludes certain platforms. So it’s really useful to have all these discussions and then go and look at the Gartner reports of Forester Waves. They give you some useful of info. Go into Gartner peer insights, all the stuff I mentioned earlier. Speak to your network. Start to gather back information about which ones align well, which ones are strong in the areas you need basically. So it’s not a perfect science, but enables you to then shortlist, and I say shortlist two to three max, to do detailed demos and engagement with. But don’t start off by talking to 20 vendors because they’ll all tell you they can do everything. I love a lot of the vendors in the space, but only certain ones are very good from a pre-sales engagement of being completely honest about whether they’re right for you or not.

Sinead Hammond:

Yeah, excellent. Brilliant. Thank you very much for answering that one. We have run a little bit over time so I’m going to close the conversation there. Thank you so much, James. You’re great to talk to. So many insights just gained just from an hour of chatting with you, which has been fantastic. Thank you so much to everyone listening as well, people coming in and out throughout the hour, which is great. The recording for this will be available in the next few days if you want to listen back to it or if you want to take some snippets or there’s anything else that you wanted to listen to. Obviously James and myself are available. I assume, James, you’re okay if anyone wants to ask any questions or connect-

James Gurd:

Yeah, sure.

Sinead Hammond:

… with us on LinkedIn as well. And yeah, thank you so, so much for joining us. Just a reminder that the next Shoppernomics event will be on the 15th of November, which is two weeks today at the same time. We are joined by Tanya Child who is currently working at Q Gardens and also has worked at the VNA and Pantone, which is going to be a very exciting conversation about change management. And yeah, thank you again very much for joining us and look forward to hopefully seeing you again soon. Thanks very much. Bye.

James Gurd:

Bye.