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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#646: AI in e-commerce with Oren Inditzky, Wix
00:19:44
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- [00:01]
VRBO Narrator
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- [01:11]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
- [02:08]
Podcast Host
We are here at ETEL Palm Springs and seeing and hearing the latest and greatest in e commerce and retail. Starting an online store is easier than it used to be, but aren't there still a ton of things you need to know, plus all the coding and API integrations you need to do? Today we're going to talk about AI and e commerce and how low code and no code platforms are democratizing retail so it's easier than ever to run and scale online businesses. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Oren Idytsky, VP and GM of Online Stores at wix. Oren, welcome to the show.
- [02:40]
Oren Idytsky
Thank you very much Greg. It's really great to be here. Thanks for having me and it's great to be in sunny Palm Springs and be surrounded by all these great minds of E commerce.
- [02:48]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, I love it. I know it's always, it's a totally different energy doing these on site, in person, at events and some great stuff already today. So before we dive in, why don't we start by you giving a little background on yourself and your role at wix.
- [03:03]
Oren Idytsky
Sure. So today I lead the online store business at wix. So basically we empower merchants or basically anyone around the world to build, manage and grow their online store. Today we empower more than 700,000 stores and dozens of thousands are joining every month. Prior to Wix, I was head of product for one of the brands of Expedia. I led software product management for Dell and started to learn the fundamentals of E commerce and product management as an intern in Amazon.
- [03:33]
Podcast Host
Wow. Nice, Nice. All right, so yeah, you're the right person to talk with about this stuff. So let's start by talking about, you know, certainly we talk about AI a lot on this show, but not a lot about AI in E commerce specifically. So I want to, want to talk about that. And you know, again there's certainly a lot of talk about AI, but we're here at ETEL and lots of, lots of talk about E commerce. What are some of the areas where AI is currently playing a strong role in this area?
- [04:02]
Oren Idytsky
So I think already today AI is playing a tremendous role in E commerce. So within the past year we've seen tremendous advancements in this field and I think when we talk about it today, I mostly like to break it down to two major types of AI. So I think the first one is obviously the queen of headlines Gen AI which basically allows anyone to create e commerce related original content within a few clicks. So we'll talk more about this and about tools that I already see today that are being used and can really help merchant online. And the other one, our advanced algorithm within machine learning that helps people continuously optimize their store and do amazing things in terms of optimization, conversion, average order value and just making their store way better automatically. So we can talk about this now in terms of generative AI. So let's say if you just start a business, okay, AI today already at WIX allows you to choose the best name for your business, depends on your geo market target customers that you have. Then it can also help you find the right domain name that is available and is most suitable for your target market and even generate a logo for you. So these things used to be a lot of friction for people that wanted to start a business. And today, with a few clicks on the WIX platform, you can do it. Then you go to design a website. So if you want to do it really easily, AI can actually do that for you in advance, then you can continue from there and adjust it. And we see a lot of new merchants are doing a really great job in utilizing AI to generate the site. But then you dive deep into creating that online store. So in terms of written content, it's really great. So we have a capability that allows you to create product descriptions, but those are really aimed for conversion, aimed for SEO. So you basically give a few words, scan the image and then it generates the product, generation the description for you. And then we have the same capability basically for any other text on the website, whether it's homepage, frequently asked questions, basically any topic. It knows your audience, knows the context, knows your site, and generates the best content that you can have for your website. That's for written content. Now if you go to SEO, super important because in the past eight years, the customer acquisition costs went up by more than 200%. And SEO is a field for experts, a field for professionals. It takes a lot of time, a lot of money. But today we have an automatic AI wizard, just scans your site, provides you recommendation how to change your content, change your titles, your descriptions. So you really aim to go up higher in the search results and then in terms of imagery. So it used to be long, expensive, exhausting production days. Today even the small ones can easily generate imagery that looks really, really professional for their homepages and even generate packshots. So we see merchants coming in, taking photos of their products with their phone. With a few clicks, they're getting a really professional pack shot. And that's amazing. So these are, I think, the major thing that we see with Generative. They're really changing the way and removing a lot of friction from creating your online store. Then the other thing with the machine learning, so it basically takes information from buyer's interaction on the site, it analyzes it, then it can adjust things on your website, get again feedback from the real world and then continue optimizing basically an endless loop. So a few things that we've seen work really well is first of all, for example, showing the right products in the right order for the right user at the right time. When I worked at Expedia, I had a whole team that was responsible for sending you the right order for the hotel in your search results. And it really determines everything. They're like the entire benefit of those platforms are laying in creating the right order for you. So we have today a tool that we created with an integration of a third party to basically democratize this and provide this to anyone to show the right products in the right order. Then the other things that we see, so you probably know from the well known big brands, related products, frequently bought with, frequently watched with. So today anyone that can create a website can simply drag that in to your website. It learns your website knows what to recommend with what and AI does it for you. Another great thing that we see happening, so already today we have an agent that is a 24,7 available. What you can do is basically get all the information about your website, it scans your website and then you can upload PDFs and manual about anything about your product. So very quickly it knows about your product way more than you know. And then it basically acts as a proactive sales agent on your website, helping customers, guiding through the purchase and you can even guide it, hey, when you want to hand it over to you. Another great field that we see happening that also, you know the big guys we're using and it's being democratized these days by AI is dynamic pricing. So we invested and we're collaborating with a startup that allows again smaller merchants, small businesses to adjust their pricing to generate the most conversion and increase profits. So that's a great field. And another thing that I see coming in terms of startup that are pitching to us is everything around inventory management. It used to be a lot of art and science how you manage that and it can make or break your business. And now AI can play a really big role in this.
- [09:07]
Podcast Host
So that was a lot just, I mean in a good way. But just to go back to some of the beginning of what you were saying, you know, some of those things where you know, let's say you're a smaller company, we'll get to some, maybe some of the larger, what the larger companies would do as well. But you know, you're a small retailer, you have a great idea. But there's been traditionally all these things kind of prohibitive to starting a business. And you just mentioned, you know, a name, a logo, a domain like basically a customer service team, you know, all of these things, it's, it's pretty amazing what can be done and to your, you know, to use your, to democratize this, this ability when again anyone who's ever set up an E commerce store and probably forgot five of those things that you mentioned and then had to figure out how to do it and all that. And now to be, you know, to be able to do this in, I mean I would imagine a few clicks, but like still pretty, pretty easily. That's a pretty phenomenal change in the way that things are done.
- [10:10]
Oren Idytsky
Yeah. And this is within just the past year, I think. It was a big revolution and we can see how it removed a lot of friction, increased the conversion and the speed. We see it every day with the thousands that are joining our platform every day. The speed in which their stores are up and running just tremendously increased it. Yeah.
- [10:28]
Podcast Host
So how does, you know, let's maybe start with if there's like a small, medium and larger company there. Like how should, is there a difference in how they should think about how AI helps them in their and their e commerce?
- [10:42]
Oren Idytsky
I think the way to think about it is not to give yourself a score by how well, how often and how much you integrate AI, but just stick to your business goals. I mean the business problems stayed the same. We just got a great new gift, a tool that can do the work for you more efficiently. So the way I think about it, just you know, figure out your goal. If your goal right now, if your problem is like how do you increase traffic? And you now use AI, we didn't even talk about it. To create your social posts, to manage email marketing. So you generate your goal for what you hope to accomplish. You keep the same KPI that you used to do, whether it's traffic or conversion and balance rate and you just use AI and you see how it works. It's same way for us at wix. When we started to introduce AI to website creation, we started small and we see that it actually doing really, really well, in many cases better than the traditional templates that we have. And now we funnel most of our traffic towards AI site creation. Same thing for fulfillment. If you have inventory management, price management issues and use AI instead of using it manually, you still define your problem, define your goal of what you hope to accomplish in the same KPI that you measure and you put AI to the test. And if it can help you, it can help. So I would say you just stick to your business problems and the things you want to accomplish and you use AI as a new tool. And if you probably didn't think about AI, search it, Google it, there's probably a tool that can help you and go ahead and give it a try.
- [12:16]
Podcast Host
So I want to talk a little bit about. I know a lot of the things you mentioned, if not all are part of wix. I want to talk about wix E Commerce and just kind of where it fits. Do you mind just talking a little bit about where does it kind of fit in the market?
- [12:32]
Oren Idytsky
Sure, definitely. So I think everyone knows WIX as the leading website creation and WIX E Commerce is basically a very robust e commerce platform that allows anyone either, you know, a do it yourself, self creator, first time merchant, all the way to an enterprise to create an online store, design it, manage it, meaning sourcing products, managing orders, inventory, pricing, everything you need, all the way to growing it. So features like back in stock, pre order built in marketing features or any integration that you can think about. So we provide that will allow you to sell through various channels, whether it's your own branded online store. We allow you to sync your products with a few clicks to marketplaces to expand your reach, whether it's Amazon Wish, ebay, Instagram for example and also a point of sale. Yeah, and that's basically the platform that we have now in terms of our positioning within the market. I think what really differentiates us is anything that's related to ease of use, efficiency, versatility and cost effectiveness. Because we grew up as a web creation platform. So we have unmatched no code design capabilities. So the ability for you to change your site, design your site without any code, quickly and efficiently, it's something that we have and we built around that. No one has has the same capabilities. The other thing that we have, even though we have a very robust and open platform with APIs and hundreds of different apps and third party integrations, I would say the way I look at it with my team, if this is essential for broad reach of our customer, we either have this capability natively or we're going to build it so that pretty much needs that it's ready for business. Out of the get go you get all the essential capabilities from loyalty to subscriptions to pre order inventory management. And you can always expand and, and make it flexible with third party integrations. And last but not least, given that WIX is not only an online store e commerce platform, we have also WIX restaurants and WIX donations and WIX events and WIX services, you can really expand your business beyond retail. And we've seen snowboard sellers having tuning sessions and we've seen merchants doing events or collecting donations to give impact for the community. So you can really grow beyond the traditional retail. With just a bunch of clicks you enable a whole new business vertical. So these are our differentiators and to
- [14:57]
Podcast Host
kind of go back to some of the AI things that you were mentioning, you had mentioned some of the analytics and like measuring average order value and all those things like that. So I would imagine then the AI capabilities are pretty seamlessly connected with the E commerce. Is that.
- [15:14]
Oren Idytsky
Yeah, definitely. It's built into the system. For example, if you go out there, let's say you want to add the new product to your store so you have the ability to insert the text for your product description or almost next to any feature in our system you would see the nice AI stars where you click on it and you can generate that with AI. Same thing with the product photo. Same thing with, you know, generating Google Ads, Facebook ads, email marketing. So we have AI integrated almost into every step of the platform and this, you're going to have even a bigger impact. We definitely see all the teams within Wix stopping their effort, trying to make sure that every significant action that could be done on our platform could be done via AI as well. And then basically there's an AI agent that's kind of there for you. You can talk to it and it would not only do the work for you, but it would also recommend you what you should do at every step of the way to be more successful.
- [16:05]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about checkout and what's coming there or what's already here and what's coming there?
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Oren Idytsky
Yeah, I think what I've seen throughout my years in E commerce, I remember the days where all the efforts, all the companies, all their startups were focusing on bringing traffic, so marketing solutions then once this was exhausted and obviously there's always innovation there. You've seen deeper in the funnel, people are working on whatever you can do to increase conversion, average order value. And then I remember that when you talked about in product management when I was in other companies, hey, no one actually looked at checkout. It was just this generic field with the least amount of traffic and you just purchase. But after we've done all the work of really optimizing the entire funnel, I see a whole new frontier happening with innovation and checkout and what's happening today? I think several things, all the major platform within the last few years made the checkout more open and that means that you can integrate apps and third party solutions. And you can look here, right here at Etail, how many solutions are here related to checkout or post checkout services? You haven't seen those things a few years ago. That's the first thing. The other thing that you see is the ability to do no code customizations of checkout. As well. This is happening too. The other thing that we see happening these days is using AI to personalize checkout and offer personalized offers such as promotions and so on, specifically for you based on your profile at checkout. And these are things that we haven't seen before.
- [17:40]
Podcast Host
Yeah, nice, nice. So related to checkout then and really, you know, E commerce in general, you know, what, what's kind of on your radar? What should you, you know, what should customers be expecting in the months ahead? Like where's the focus?
- [17:53]
Oren Idytsky
So I think several things that we're working on is as we spoke about bringing really AI into every aspect of the workflow to make things more efficient both in terms of creating the store, managing and growing your business. We're going to see it, I think all across the board. I think in terms of checkout you'll see more and more new capabilities coming such as personalized offers within the checkout, even greater amount of flexibility and you being able to change it, customize it, offer new things and more and more applications and third party providers that are offering great new things in terms of cross sell, upsell and post sale services. So I think these are the different areas that I see even within the next few months that you're going to see more and more within E commerce.
- [18:38]
Podcast Host
Great, great. Well, Oren, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you. I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [18:48]
Oren Idytsky
It's a great question. I think that as part of the week's mentality and DNA, as much as we like to sit together, plan our strategy for the year, what we're focused on, we'll always listen to our customers and what they're asking us. We see the market trends and we look at the data and we have no issue at all to turn our strategy 180 degrees when we see a new opportunity. So we do that too. Also, as a company based in Tel Aviv, we have what we call the Israeli chutzpah. Okay. Which is the ability to challenge the status quo, to debate. So even as much as we'd like to stay focused and have a plan for the year, it's in our DNA to constantly look at what's happening in the market, where the opportunities are, what customers are asking to really maneuver the ship accordingly.
- [19:30]
Podcast Host
Yeah, love it. Again, I'd like to thank oren Ditzky, VP&GM of online stores at Wix for joining the show. You can learn more about Oren and WIX by following the links in the show notes. And stay tuned for more of our interviews from Etel Palm Springs 2025.
- [19:47]
Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.greggkilstrom.com that's G R E G K-I H L S T R O M.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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VRBO Narrator
The agile brand.
- [20:50]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [20:59]
Podcast Host
Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [21:03]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [21:10]
Oren Idytsky
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [21:11]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [21:14]
Oren Idytsky
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty.
- [21:19]
Strayer University Announcer
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