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The Digital Marketing Podcast
10 Myths of E-commerce
00:28:51
Ciaran speaks to Jon Woodall, founder of Space 48, an award-winning eCommerce consultancy & Magento Solutions partner for forward-thinking retailers. With years of experience in e-commerce, creating websites that have gone on to be global...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers and today, listeners, we've got a really great episode for you. I think you're really going to enjoy this. I've got on. On Skype, I've got John Woodle from Space 48. And John's going to be talking about 10 Myths of E. Commerc. And when John sent me over what he wanted to cover, just at every point I was chuckling out loud to myself because there's so much truth in what John's going to say. But before we get into that, John, just introduce yourself to the audience. Tell us who you are, where you're from, what you do.
- [00:48]
B
Thanks, Kieran, and thanks for having me on the show. I'm John Woodall, as you said. I'm the founder and managing director of Space48 and we're an e commerce consultancy for retailers that are looking for fashion, fast growth and internationalization.
- [01:06]
A
Fantastic. And I mean, you've done some, some great work. Your team. I know we're the team behind Charlotte Tilbury website, which when I was running an agency, a lot of our clients would kind of point to that as, you know, the, the one to aspire to. And I think, you know, when that came out, gosh, that was probably. That's a while ago now, wasn't it? Kind of. Is it 2013?
- [01:29]
B
Yeah, 2013. Launch of the first site. September time. 2013.
- [01:35]
A
That was a Magento site.
- [01:38]
B
Magento, yeah. So we're a Magento partner. We've been working with Magento. Well, myself and my business partner Tony started out with Magento in 2008. So we're old timers now, really in the Magento world.
- [01:52]
A
If you haven't looked it before, I'd encourage listeners to go and have a look because actually I think it's a real lesson in, in clean execution, nice, clean, uncluttered design. Certainly one that I still look at. I know the team behind it have gone on to continually refine and improve it, as you'd expect they would. But yeah, check it out.
- [02:10]
B
Yeah, definitely. I think the guys at Charlotte Tilbury have done a fantastic job with it, seeing growth of that business and being part of that journey that they've been on and feeling like obviously we've contributed in terms of technology and delivery on Magento. It's something I know that we're very proud of as well. So, yeah, it's a cool story. Definitely go and check it Out.
- [02:31]
A
So let's talk about these myths of E Commerce. First of all, where did this all come about from? There's a little bit of a backstory to it, isn't there?
- [02:38]
B
Yeah. So I think having been in E. Commerce for the length of time that I have now, you get to a point where you realize that the thought process that people are going through is usually fundamentally what's wrong as opposed to tactics or strategies that are actually being used. And it was sort of born a little bit out of frustration of hearing the same things reoccurring again and again where people were taking a simple approach to perhaps what's a complex problem. So, yeah, just. Just really wanted to get my thoughts down on paper and help introduce a sharper sense of reality to the E Commerce world.
- [03:15]
A
Fantastic. So let's. Let's kick off with the first myth. John, what do you think the first myth that a lot of people still believe is out there in E Commerce.
- [03:24]
B
I'm not sure on the title. Did we go with. Did we go with 10E commerce myths?
- [03:28]
A
We did go with 10E commerce myths.
- [03:30]
B
All right. Okay. So first of all, I've got a confession to make. So I think that blog posts that are out there that say 10e commerce myths or 5e commerce myths, maybe sort of any numbers that feel like a round number. The first myth is that we've only got nine for you today. You know, don't believe everything that you read. I think we're all sort of sentient human beings, and we've got the ability to decide for ourselves what is right for our business. So the first one's a little bit cheeky and just to throw away.
- [04:07]
A
I think that's great. I think that's great because actually, because we're all so obsessed with, like, content marketing. You do, and there's always raging debates. Is an odd number or an even number a better thing to have in your list of things to kind of capture people's attention? And actually, I think you're quite right. Sometimes it doesn't have to be odd or even. It just needs to be true.
- [04:26]
B
Yeah, I agree with that. I absolutely agree with that.
- [04:30]
A
So let's. Let's. Let's go on to myth two, then.
- [04:32]
B
Myth two. So I think we put down here for myth two, we were talking about the platform itself.
- [04:41]
A
Yeah.
- [04:42]
B
So believing a new platform will solve all problems. So.
- [04:48]
A
But, John, that's true, isn't it? Surely if I get a new platform, like, all the problems, all the things I hate about the old platform will just Magically solved overnight and, you know, every kind of goal and aim we have for the business will just happen.
- [05:03]
B
Doesn't.
- [05:06]
A
Must be true, John, because when they spend a lot of money on this, so, you know, obviously our dreams are going to come true as a result. Right?
- [05:11]
B
Yeah, of course they are, yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. No, I think, you know, the problem with this is that, you know, by having the opportunity to implement a new platform, maybe it gives you access to some new features and maybe it gives you the opportunity to reset or perhaps even almost. I see some e commerce managers perhaps reinventing themselves by starting with a clean slate. And I do understand the approach to that. But we can't think that by making one decision to choose a platform, it's going to solve all of our problems. So I think what I see people get wrong here is that we're going to make a decision to go from one platform to another and it will solve all problems. The mistake that's made in that is just people aren't really taking a holistic look at everything that's going on with their e commerce business as a whole. Forget about just the platform. What's going on around that in terms of what does the customer really want or what do we really need to do in terms of delivering logistics or what's happening with acquisition channels? There's many pieces to the jigsaw that we need to put together and the only real way of understanding if we need to make that change or making sure, in fact, because it could be apparent that you do need to make the change, but making sure that you do the right things in terms of approaching that as a project is doing a very thorough discovery and understanding from your business and from your customers. What do we really need to do if we are making this move to a new platform?
- [06:38]
A
I completely agree with that. And certainly in my experience, new platforms, well, very often they're sort of rushed into because it's sort of new shiny toy syndrome and everybody wants the new shiny stuff and just believes all the problems are going to go away. And so there's not enough work goes into planning and mapping out what you want the system to do properly. And if that initial scoping, if that doesn't go well, if you don't spend enough time on that, exploring not just what the marketing and sales team want, but also what the rest of the business wants, it can really, well, you sort of reap what you sow, really. And if you don't lay a good foundation at that stage, the whole project's doomed. Doomed to failure and doomed to one of my other pet hates with projects like this, which is Project Creep. That's what we used to call it when we're building sites for people. And that would be, you know, you do a thorough scoping out and the client would agree to that and you'd start building and then you'd get Project creep with, you know, the marketing team would think, oh, we've just thought about this and can we do that before launch as well? And it's like, well, this isn't the right platform to do that or, you know, to completely need to throw everything up in the air again and then that's going to impact on time scales and stuff. So definitely, if you're looking at re platforming, spend more time exploring what everybody needs and kind of driving that through because that it can make such a difference and actually it enables this expert team, you've got to build it to really deliver on what they promised rather than you adding in extra stuff and just basically having to cope with the inevitable compromises that creep in when you do that.
- [08:12]
B
I always think about three P's and I think platform people and process. So platform in terms of selection and doing a very thorough. Is this going to give me what I need in terms of a roadmap over the next, let's say three years? Because it's going to be there for a minimum of three years. Do I have the people on my team and do I have the people that I want to work with from an agency perspective and do we have the relevant skill sets across that team as a whole? Because they will be very much like when we work with customers, we're really an extension of their business. So they have to be sure that they're happy working with us and the relationship is going to be very close and there's going to be some challenges and pain throughout a project as big as an E Commerce Replatforming and process is just understanding what's the right way of approaching this and can we agree that we've almost got a finish line that's a minimal viable product and we say that is what we're shooting for. That's where we need to be. Yes, there's going to be some change, but we're clear from the outset and we've got a good plan in place that we can deliver on.
- [09:15]
A
So let's move on to the next myth, which is in the area of acquisitions. I'm particularly passionate about this, so I.
- [09:22]
B
See this all the time. You know, retailers or E Commerce People believing that certain channels are not appropriate for their business or even just taking the same approach to acquisition that they would have done, let's say, five years ago, whether that's with Google AdWords or email or whatever it may be. So the examples would be email marketing doesn't work for me. Or I'm using the same approach to Google AdWords or Google Shopping today that I did five years ago. Yeah, it's a fundamentally different place and it's going to be more competitive. Strategies and tactics that you're using today would have to be different to a certain extent than what they were five years ago.
- [09:59]
A
I completely agree with that. And actually as marketers, we all have our favorite kind of channels that we focus on. Very often those can be influenced by who's in control of those channels and having success with them. And that's not always the best thing when the market moves. I think it's going to be some really interesting things happening with Facebook. And we used to get tremendous success through just kind of organic Facebook posts. But actually if you weren't watching the data, you'd have missed the fact that Facebook moved to much more of a pay to play model. And that could have a massive impact on your strategies and how you make that work. I had a client who actually called me in once because their business had dropped off a cliff. That's why they first got in touch with our business. Actually when we looked at what they were doing, they turned off their email, which was a bizarre thing to do. I'd never seen anybody do it. But what was really interesting, like they hadn't sent any emails out for two months. And when I asked them why they'd done that, they said, well, we looked at the analytics data and it and it really wasn't doing much for us. You know, we're only getting a couple of sales per email. But what they'd failed to understand was that when you send out an email, you know that the results you get back in overlap into lots of other channels. So you know, you could see a massive drop in in their organic traffic, big drop in their PPC traffic, and also a really big drop in their direct to website traffic, which fascinated me and it made me understand how big an overlap there is between a really key channel like email marketing and the actual results. Sure enough, they turned it back on at my recommendation and things went from strength to strength.
- [11:39]
B
Email's an interesting channel, definitely. You've got to also think about which device people are using to open that. Certainly myself, I open many of My emails on my mobile, and if it's perhaps something of interest or something that I feel I need to do some research on, I more than likely would take a look at it on a desktop or on my machine with a larger screen so that I can just take in more information.
- [12:06]
A
Yeah, and you're not alone there. I mean, all the industry stats that come out, I know Litmus do some really good surveys on this. And the number of people who browse and consume their email initially and kind of triage it through their mobile devices is enormous. So. Yeah, and analytics isn't so great at measuring people switching between two different devices. It tends to see them as two separate people.
- [12:31]
B
Yeah. There's tools like Ametria, for example, or Magento Bi. They have a business intelligence tool which will actually help you tie together what devices people are coming from. So providing you've made a sale, you can actually start to tie together what the user journey was, not just in terms of on site, but by device. So you can see that maybe this person over here did originally open an email on a mobile, but they later purchased on a desktop. But in actual fact, the original point of contact was over here on a mobile. So you can tie together different devices quite easily with platforms like Ometria.
- [13:11]
A
So let's move on to the next myth, which is your website doesn't convert into maximum sales because product pages take longer than one second to load. And that is one that I've heard. It's like, oh, well, it's not converting. It's because it's too slow. And I've read somewhere that you need to be loaded in a second. Why isn't that happening? It's like, oh, okay.
- [13:33]
B
Look, the reality of it is that speed matters. You know, it does matter. I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't have a fast website and you shouldn't aspire to make it quick and be doing everything that you can in terms of infrastructure and code on site to make it load efficiently. But it's not the holy grail that people seem to run after. I think what I usually see here is that speed becomes an issue when overall performance of the website in terms of sales is an issue. So that sort of someone searching for, right, here's one problem that's affecting the rest of it, but the reality of there's many other moving parts. I'm not saying you. You shouldn't do what you can with speed, but that also comes at a cost. So the time that you invest, making your website faster and faster and faster could well be time that's perhaps better spent on creating a new feature on the website that makes it more functional for the customer. Or time could be better spent on improving acquisition from Google AdWords. Or you could improve what you're doing in terms of your email journey. So I think it's just, should that really be a high level? Should that be a statistic that you're really monitoring? Yes, because you don't want it be to. You don't need to get too high. But should it really matter? Or does it really tie into the expectations that the business have got of you? Because usually the expectations of the business would be tied to commercial targets, I.e. revenue and profitability through the website. So it can make a difference. But I suppose I'm just trying to say let's not obsess about it because it comes at a cost.
- [15:10]
A
It does. I think there was a couple things I wanted to share on this point. I've certainly seen situations where a particular device or browser version actually had a physical problem within the E Commerce store that was blocking. And that's unless you're doing your due diligence and walking in the shoes of your customer and actually going through and making sure your website does work on multiple browsers, on multiple OS types. Things like that can actually be quite a bit tricky to kind of weed out because you just see kind of general poor performance. But it's worth kind of if you have a conversion issue, checking that. The other thing I think John, is a lot of people could do themselves some favors just by visiting the sizes of their images. There's so many websites out there, when you initially take a look at them, have literally hundreds of 3, 4, 5 megabyte image files and it's just not necessary. You need to be compressing those images for a good level of delivery and something like that really kill a website and a mobile.
- [16:12]
B
Yeah, that's a really common one that we see might be the marketing department is perhaps just without really thinking about it or considered it, uploaded a large banner or a large image. All of a sudden you've got a homepage that's like 5 meg. It's not going to be that quick. That's obviously going to really affect speed. So there's things that you can do to obviously guard against that type of thing. I think all I'm trying to do is make sure that people don't obsess over it too much because the majority of people that have pumped the content out there that are saying that how much you've improved sale by X amount is the likes of an Amazon, let's say where they're playing at an elite level. And the majority of people that I would deal with reality is small to medium size, even enterprise sized businesses. It's just that Amazon are off in the distance somewhere doing what they do. So there's just other ways of improving overall site performance and revenues and profitability. But yeah, make sure you catch the low hanging fruit. If you've got a huge image on your homepage that's making the page heavy, then clearly you need to do something about that.
- [17:25]
A
Moving on to the next myth then, and I love this one, this one made me laugh out loud. Changing the way your site looks will improve the user experience. That is such a common thing that you hear maybe not always enunciated like that, but it's just kind of there in the background or if we change, it must be better.
- [17:43]
B
Yeah, you've got to look at where the change is coming from as well. What I usually see here is a change could be led by let's say, someone who's trying to do something different with the brand, someone who's just trying to change because they want the website to look different. There are already best practices in place of what you should do with an e commerce website. And just changing the look and feel doesn't necessarily improve user experience. And I think many people I've overheard have got caught up reading an article where they talked about changing the color of a button or slightly moving the position of a button by X amount of pixels. And you know, these things can all make a small difference. But all I'm really trying to say, say with this myth is that I'm saying this a whole anyway, we've all got very unique set of problems in front of us. I deal with many different customers that have got the same problems but are also very different. So taking that into consideration and the 20 odd customers that I deal with, I know that they've got the same problems, yet they're different. So they've got a unique set of problems to solve. So the only way of really getting to the crux of that and finding out what you should do for your website is being able to understand what is the, the data telling me. So if I look at Google Analytics, it's going to give me certain bits of information and I can read that and I can use that in terms of any redesign that I'm looking to do to sort of justify why I'm making these changes. But then the one Critical thing that I don't, I don't see many businesses doing and it really surprises me, and I think it's the, it's the digital world that we live in is that we've stopped speaking to the customers. So how difficult is it to set up a user group or even just do some phone interviews of let's say a dozen customers who buy from you on a regular basis or even if you wanted to take it to the extent of saying, look, I've got these different Personas, these are the different customers that buy from me. I've done interviews of these customers and this is what they're actually telling me based on a specific user journey on the website, which might be someone going from category page to product page to basket to checkout. That's the journey that I wanted to track and this is the information that it's actually giving me. So, you know, tying together the qualitative and the quantitative data to make decisions that are based on more solid facts rather than. I just think it should look different because it's going to make a difference.
- [20:06]
A
I completely agree. It's kind of, there is a science behind it. You know, it's not, it's not like I'm going to upset a few people now, but it's not like feng shui, which I've always been a little bit dubious. I saw a brilliant stand up comedian a while back now actually, who was saying, yeah, my life's taking a bad turn, I lost my job, my wife left me, the dog died. You know, life really couldn't have gotten much worse. And then I discovered Feng shui and I realized if I just moved my kitchen table slightly to the left, none of it would have happened. I think that's, you know, very often we read these articles about changing color buttons and the results that transpired as a result of doing that or moving something or making something slightly bigger. And we think, oh, that sounds an easy win, we'll do that. But actually it's the hocus pocus equivalent of moving your kitchen table slightly to the left. And I'm a big fan of things, any qualitative data you can get. Like you mentioned getting customers to give you feedback. I'm a big fan of things like what users do. We can actually recruit people who will perform a set. Agreed. Kind of route through your website, but you can recruit people that are part of the right demographic and certainly I highly recommend their service. I've used it in the past, different brands that I've worked for and that they kind of give you quite a guiding hand if you've never done this sort of thing, thing before. And it's so, so insightful and actually just spending a bit of time and money doing that at the design stage to check that, you know, what you've come up with is, is going to be a winner. Is. Is a real plus side, you know, it stops you creating a really leaky bucket that you're going to spend thousands of pounds funneling people into, you know, plug those gaps before you launch, I think is a really wise strategy to follow.
- [21:47]
B
Yeah. And if you've got, you know, if you've got that skill set in your team to be able to do that, that's great. But I think that's, for me, another. It's definitely an area where you benefit from bringing in the experts to do, to do something like that, research for you and understand what do these users actually want. We've collaborated with, we do some of this in house, obviously as well, but then one project we've actually collaborated with an agency in Belfast called Fathom and that UX is their thing, that's exactly what they specialize in. So seeing the sort of process that they take their customers through and the customer's customers is very detailed and it really makes you realize just how valuable that area could actually be. So making the right changes, in actual fact, a big difference, but you've just got to take the right approach.
- [22:38]
A
I think also it really helps having somebody outside of the project who's not involved or invested in any of the decisions or features to take a really objective view because, you know, if it's somebody in your own team, it's not easy for them to say, actually, guys, your baby you've created, it's really ugly. That's really hard, brave thing to do. But if you've got, you know, an external somebody, they'll quite happily tell you how ugly a baby is and what you need to do about it.
- [23:05]
B
Yeah, I think you've got to be. If you're going to approach a project like this, you're naturally going to be, you know, you'd like to think you'd be proud of your project, but to become a, you know, the sort of champion of it, you really need, you really need to be able to bring people in, people in who can, you know, you're going to allow them to critique what you've done and coach you through it, but also challenge you to let you go on to bigger and better things. You know, you really. I think that's an important Part of having the right team anyway. You know, I wouldn't want people around me that didn't challenge me personally.
- [23:42]
A
So the next one is another favorite of mine. This next myth that your big data tells you everything. And I think the noise around big data's died down a little bit, thank goodness, because it reached a real crescendo, or probably about a year or a year and a half ago. But just explore this a little bit more.
- [24:02]
B
Yeah, I think you've got to be extremely careful. And you're right, it was very fashionable just over a year ago, maybe 18 months ago. And your answer was in big data. But there's some people out there that are much smarter than me that you'd really need to bring in to understand what your data means. They would be able to create some extremely clever models that would show attribution models maybe that show you look, this is exactly what your data says. That's still one aspect of it. And what we were saying on the last myth, really, is that we have to take a little bit more of an intuitive approach to this and we can actually go and speak to our customers. And it still surprises me that businesses, e commerce businesses don't do this. They're just not talking to the customer to find out what's wrong or how they can actually improve their e commerce proposition as a whole. And those questions might not just be in relation to what's going on on the website, but delivery, for example. Delivery is a huge part of E commerce. We've just had a delivery arrive at home this morning, waited in for. There's maybe a couple of things around that that that particular retailer could have done that would have made it easier for me or us as a family and would have improved my overall experience. Great website. Works really well. Shame that the delivery wasn't quite right. So just if they were to pick up the phone and call me, I'd be able to give them that feedback and say, look, this is how it actually worked out in comparison to a delivery that I took at the weekend from AO.com where we had a new washing machine delivered. The service was great. Really, really good. We got text messages to tell us when it was going to arrive, and it was an update, and we were waiting and also got a Saturday delivery, etc. Etc. Yeah, this other delivery's kind of also interfered with work. So, yeah, just feature your customers.
- [25:49]
A
I think that's a great insight. And actually, I do wonder whether maybe the drive and excitement over Big Data was that we all thought, oh, brilliant, we don't actually need to speak to our customers anymore. The data will just tell us the answers. It'd be so much better to get that top level aggregated. And actually in reality it's just not the case. It's so much simpler to just speak to. Even a relatively small sample of your customer base can give you hugely valuable insights that could make a tremendous difference to the bottom line if you were to actually make some changes as a result and improve things.
- [26:24]
B
Right? Yeah, without a doubt. I also listen to when I'm in and around customers that I work with, certainly on their premises, you listen to the type of things that they're talking about. And I think it's, I think I've heard it in the film somewhere as well this but they might be celebrating the number of followers that they've now got on Instagram or the number of followers that they've got on Twitter or whatever it may be. And it's this popularity competition. But what does that really mean? You know it means something obviously because it translates into. It can translate into pound to pound coins or dollars or whatever. But are we actually talking to those customers? Do we really know what it is that they need or are they just another like or are they just another follow going that extra step to really understand your business? I think one of the great examples that I follow out there is a company called Zappos that are based in the US The CEO is a guy called Tony Hsieh, wrote a book called Delivering Happiness. I think anyone in the e commerce world that's a book that's definitely worth while reading. And it's just his, I guess his philosophy around running a business and how the culture that he's created and the customer service that he offers is. Well, in my opinion it's really, really good. Maybe not out of this world, but the type of things that he's doing, the approach he's taking to customer service is something that we can all learn from.
- [27:51]
A
I hope you're enjoying the interview so far. Join us in part two where John and I will be discussing the belief that every e commerce business can become an overnight success success. We'll be exploding some mobile website conversion myths and discussing the strategy of shooting from the hip and not needing a plan. We also discuss how to identify if you are the problem your business is facing. Thanks for listening to the digital marketing podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free benchmark skills test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide. To help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date, just visit targetinternet.combenchmark.