Re:platform - Ecommerce CX and Technology Podcast

Our regular listeners will know that we keep a keen eye on the ecommerce tech scene. Whilst sources like Gartner's Magic Quadrants shouldn't be taken as the gospel, they do provide a useful benchmark for changes in the ecommerce vendor landscape.

A new entrant to the UK market has pushed into Gartner's reckoning in 2023. Scayle Commerce Engine has a strong pedigree in Germany and other parts of mainland Europe. MD Tarek Muller is also the cofounder of one of Germany’s largest ecommerce retailers, About You, which sells 400k+ products from 2k+ brands, generating €5 billion annual sales revenue.

The technology that underpins About You was spun out to create Scayle, providing a PaaS solution to other retailers including Deichmann, Otto Group and Depot. Targeted at larger retailers with a GMV of £100m+, the platform has already proven it's capability at scale.

For this episode we're joined by Tarek, who shares insights on the business strategy, vision and philosophy, and Rico Adler, Head of Solution Consulting At Scayle.

An insightful podcast interview with Jim Herbert, CEO at Patchworks, a leading integration specialist. Listeners will gain invaluable insights into the dynamic landscape of ecommerce technology. Patchworks, renowned for its prowess in understanding the intricate web of integrations, empowers businesses with seamless connectivity.

During the episode, Jim Herbert sheds light on the current trends in technology integrations. With a finger on the industry's pulse, Patchworks provides a unique vantage point, discerning the technology choices embraced by thriving ecommerce enterprises. The podcast highlights the prevalence and significance of specific integrations that are currently trending among businesses navigating the digital marketplace.

You'll also get a forecast of the industry's trajectory as Jim shares his perspectives on where ecommerce technology is headed. His predictions and analyses, rooted in Patchworks' expertise, serve as a compass for businesses aiming to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Introducing our new monthly mini-series, where James Gurd and Paul Rogers step back to summarise what's been happening in ecommerce technology in the past month.

Ecommerce is a fast-paced industry, with constant change, new market entrants and incumbents updating their products with new features and fixes.

James & Paul spend a lot of time looking at technology, talking to agencies and technology vendors, so this series is a digest of what they've found interesting, what is worth ecommerce teams thinking about, as well as highlighting interesting stories and cool tools they come across in their day-to-day work.

In this episode:

1. General market mood heading into November

2. Key vendor platform news

3. Major investments

4. Trends and cool stuff

The marketing automation space is quite crowded with tech, and we like to showcase as many of the leading vendors as possible to help you decide which platforms are relevant.

In this episode we sit down with Voyado to focus on their multichannel marketing and loyalty product, Engage. We explore what type/size of business the product suits, with examples of well known brands using Engage.

We look at the market view, exploring how quickly SMS usage is growing and how this varies across different sectors/verticals.

Then we dive into personalisation and loyalty, discussing what types of personalisation can be realistically achieved and what loyalty techniques are most used by Voyado's ecommerce customers.

Tune in for practical industry and product insights from Karl Stone, an experienced ecommerce technologist.

B2B commerce is growing, and maturing, fast! Many businesses are well aware of the trend, working to transform their sales teams and experiences to meet the growing digital usage of customers. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.

In this B2B focused podcast, we tackle key questions for DTC brands planning their B2B strategy:

• Why should DTC brands take B2B commerce seriously, when many are used to offline selling and have processes in place for account management and placing orders?
• How are changes in B2B buyer expectations shifting digital demands?
• What does a good online customer experience look like for B2B customers?
• What are the key ecommerce platform features and functionality your business needs to understand and offer?
• What are the operational challenges of evolving to provide a digital B2B channel?
• How does the commercial model differ to B2C commerce?

Tune in to get insights from a highly experienced ecommerce leader with a track record of implementing B2B ecommerce technology and implementation growth strategies for B2B retail ecommerce.

This is a slightly different episode, with Paul in Miami on a half vacation / half work trip. Paul invited Shopify expert Alex O'Byrne to discuss the most important platform updates from last week’s Shopify Enterprise summit.

Alex welcomed Paul into his lovely house in Miami Beach, which is definitely the most exciting place we’ve recorded a podcast!

The Shopify summit was really interesting, as it felt like a very different narrative and a different level of energy from Shopify, and a real insight into how they're targeting enterprise level customers by removing previous platform constraints or perceived blockers.

Tune in for the inside view on Shopify's enterprise play and exciting new features that are helping leading agencies counter previous limitations that made Shopify a harder sell to large global businesses.

Josh Scotton is the Co founder and CTO for personalisation engine Personify, and also an Editorial Board Member for Frontiers in AI. For those of you who’ve worked in fashion ecommerce you may know him from his days at Truefit.

True personalisation, not just changing product recommendations based on behaviour, is the holy grail for ecommerce. For example, being able to change the content view based on a user's profile to prioritise content types that person wants to see. Personify provide an anonymous real-time analytics & personalisation platform designed to convert unknown visitors into loyal customers with engaging, automated website personalisation.

In this podcast we unpick what real-time personalisation actually means, and explore tangible ecommerce use cases including content personalisation across different user journeys.

Salesforce Commerce has a long history in the ecommerce platform market, from the acquisition of Demandware to the birth and growth of SiteGenesis. SiteGenesis was built before mobile dominated online shopping, so there are newer architectural options for SFCC customers. Many Salesforce customers are facing a big decision: stick with an old SiteGenesis version, or twist to either SFRA for a mobile-first solution or the newer composable storefront.

In this episode we aim to dispel some of the concerns with remaining on SiteGenesis. Customers don’t have to migrate if they have the right SI partner to maintain SiteGenesis but there are pros and cons of staying on this path that need to be understood, for example limitations with the roadmap, maintenance of 3rd party connectors, effort doing releases and maintaining performance.

The market is evolving, with some Salesforce customers having already moved to SFRA or composable storefront, which is making other retailers review their platform choice.

We’re joined by leading SFCC agency partner Tryzens, who also have experience delivering solutions on ecommerce platforms like Magento and Shopify. Listen to Liam Downes, Director of Strategy and Success, and Shivko Rusev, SVP Salesforce Practice, share their views on how to approach Salesforce migrations and what type/size of business is best suited to the modern SFCC solution and why.

Tl;dr

• Why Elastic Path's new marketing mantra is the "Unplatform"
• Understanding the role of a modern ecommerce platform
• Under the hood of Elastic Path’s new product strategy and positioning
• Product roadmap for Q423 and beyond

Our industry has a habit of thrusting new buzzwords on the market that create more confusion than clarity! Elastic Path has refreshed its brand identity and is now talking about the 3rd wave of ecommerce platforms being the era of the "Unplatform".

We're playing devil’s advocate: this feels like marketing spin on what’s been a common theme in SME and enterprise for several years, reducing the role of the ecommerce platform and focusing on best in breed. We asked Elastic Path on to talk us through what they mean by Unplatform in relation to systems architecture & the overall technology stack, as well as operational implications for ecommerce teams.

Whilst we agree that the role of the ecommerce platform is narrowing, as businesses focus more on a connected technology stack simplifying the ability to isolate and retire specific components with much less effort and risk, we're not sure the industry needs a new buzzword to hang its hat on. Elastic Path has a lot of knowledge and experience guiding merchants through their technology evolution, so this episode provides a useful insight into their perspective on the market.

Tune in to hear directly from Elastic Path's Chief Experience Officer, Bryan House.

Tl;dr what we cover:

1. The key differences between headless and non-headless CMS solutions
2. Why some ecommerce business are moving to headless solutions
3. Crownpeak's integration capability with leading ecommerce platforms
4. Key feature walk through: content personalisation, internationalisation and accessibility

In our digital-first world, businesses are continuously adapting to satisfy ever changing customer expectations. Customers want seamless digital experiences across devices but equally the type of content people want to view can vary between mobile and non-mobile. Choosing the right CMS isn't always easy, as there are many vendors in the market and different technology models.

If you're considering a new CMS solution, it's likely you'll be wondering if headless is the right approach for you, as there is a lot of talk about the benefits of headless CMS. Going headless should never be a business goal, but a headless CMS may well solve your content challenges and provide the right tooling for your content management needs.

In this episode we take a deep dive into the Crownpeak CMS platform with Andreas Knoor, Chief Product Officer. Andreas explains the key technical and operational differences between headless and non-headless, as well as providing insights on how Crownpeak is helping other content teams.

Online grocery is an interesting industry when looking through a technology lens. Retailers operate in a highly competitive market with perishable product that needs smart algorithms and merchandising strategies to maximise sell through. Omnichannel selling stepped us massively during COVID lockdown, and Click & Collect and Ship To Store customer journeys are more important than ever.

Add to this mix demands from CPG brands selling via online grocery websites, requiring intelligent digital shelf analytics and merchandising tools to improve product visibility and sales rate.

The lessons learned in online grocery are relevant and useful to other ecommerce teams. In this episode we sit down with industry veteran Scott Miller, an independent consultant in the grocery industry and ex COO of Rouses and Pyramid Foods. Scott is joined by Prem Kiran, CEO at technology partner Hypersonix, who provide generative AI solutions to many industries including online grocery.

Discover:

• How online grocery businesses typically approach ecommerce performance analysis
• How online grocery retailers are using generative AI to help improve analysis and profitability
• Using Hypersonix to improve data connectivity and protect margin
• The business case for investment in generative AI

Tl;dr

• What is AI negotiation and how does it benefit an ecommerce team?
• How do you avoid giving away money you didn’t need to?
• Business controls to determine when to enable negotiation
• Examples of retail ecommerce stores getting results from this approach

Nibble is an award-winning chatbot for ecommerce that lets customers make an offer on the product page for instant results. Nibble's aim is to nudge undecided shoppers into action, to drive higher conversions and bigger baskets, with less margin sacrifice than traditional discounting.

To avoid giving away unnecessary discounts, you can program Nibble to appears only when you want it to and to specific customers. For example, you can make Nibble a subscriber-only benefit, product-specific, or trigger only on exit intent or dwell time. There are many use cases, including clearing excess stock through targeted offers and taking back control of discounting to protect margins and strike deals based on value, not just price.

Tune in to listen to founder and CEO Rosie Bailey explain the thinking behind the solution and how retailers are using the product.

What we cover: 1. What are the common operational issues ecommerce business face? 2. What is Airtable and how can it benefit ecommerce businesses? 3. How is Nolo Apps helping business use Airtable for operational efficiency gains? 4. How can businesses get started with Airtable? We've been keeping a keen eye on Airtable this year, as it's becoming more popular with ecommerce businesses. Designed to enable data connectivity and the building of apps to empower teams to work faster and more confidently, this episode dives into what it is and how it's being used. Oliver Rhodes has a stack of experience building out technology solutions for businesses doing between £1M to £200M in revenue. He recently co-founded Nolo Apps, specialising in designing and building apps on Airtable to help improve productivity whilst reducing running costs. Tune in for practical insights into how Airtable fits in to the modern ecommerce tech stack.

Product development is an interesting part of the ecommerce vendor landscape, and SaaS world is a constant stream of feature updates. This week we’re focused on one of our favourite vendors and we’re joined by a leading voice in the BigCommerce strategy team

This is part two of our two part mini series with BigCommerce. In this episode we’re covering checkout, payments, omnichannel, promotions and inventory management with Jordan Sim, Senior Director of Product.

Product development is an interesting part of the ecommerce vendor landscape, and SaaS world is a constant stream of feature updates. This week we’re focused on one of our favourite vendors, BigCommerce, and we’re joined by leading voices in the strategy and product development team.

In the first of two episodes, we talk to Aaron Sheehan, Director of Competitive Strategy about:

• General product strategy and focus

• Key capabilities like multi storefront and B2B

• BigCommerce's evolution into generative AI

We've been aware of Shopbox for a while but hadn't had the chance to look under the hood of this AI solution that powers product selection for recognised and anonymous visitors.

Cold start strategies are generally quite rare in ecommerce AI/ML tools, or hard to get working effectively. Shopbox is deliberately focused on kicking in from the very first click, aiming to show shoppers more of what they want. The end goal is increasing retail ecommerce profit.

It sounds simple but what's the reality? We sat down with Shopbox CEO Alan Gormley to understand how the platform is being used by retail ecommerce businesses.

More than 40% of online spending post-pandemic is taking place on ecommerce marketplaces, according to Wunderman Thompson's Commerce Future Shopper Report.

Marketplace platforms have been instrumental in the creation of new ways online buyers and sellers connect in a global marketplace, enabling seamless transactions for small businesses and large alike.

Selling on marketplaces brings its unique challenges, as each has its own processes and product data requirements. In this episode we talk to marketplace commerce specialist eCommeleon, sharing advice on how to approach marketplace selling and how their platform reduces manual effort and improve data quality.

The migration away from legacy monolith platforms to headless SaaS solutions has picked up pace over the last few years, as the mid-market seeks more cost effective and flexible ecommerce ecosystems.

But no platform model or vendor is perfect, all decisions come with pros and cons. In this episode, Paul interviews the head of ecommerce and lifestyle brand J Lindeberg and their design and development partner, Grebban. He explores why the business decided it needed to modernise its ecommerce platform, why Shopify was chosen and the impact of deciding to go the headless route.

Tune in for practical insights into the decision-making process and implications of this ecommerce ride.

Dataships is an interesting niche vendor focused on improving ecommerce site compliance with data privacy regulations whilst simultaneously increasing opt-in rates to boost marketing activity.

What's interesting is that Dataships is able to dynamically change consent forms and opt-in capture forms based on a user's location, to ensure the website doesn't unnecessarily block legitimate opt-in permissions.

In this episode co-founder Michael Storan and head of partnerships Ian Madigan (who also happens to be an Irish international rugby player, which has delighted James) explain how the solution works and how ecommerce merchants are using it to get results.

ASKET boldly states that the world doesn't need another fashion brand. Their definition of progress is reduced wardrobes and people spending more on items that last for longer.

They adopt the same approach to their tech stack, investing in the best fit and quality systems to help them deliver the business vision.

In this episode we caught up with ASKET's Head of Data & Technology, Vidar Trojenborg, and Jonathan Selander, cofounder at their devleopmen t partner Made People.

We discussed:

• Why headless was the right approach
• Systems landscape overview and reasoning
• Selecting a suitable front-end and CMS
• Introducing a PIM
• Approaches to data management: data warehouse, CDP, BI

The Bottle Club is a multi-brand ecommerce store selling nearly 10,000 different alcohol products. It has achieved considerable growth over the last few years, implemented specialist 3rd party systems to enhance its ecommerce capabilities.

In this episode we talk to head of ecommerce, Tim Martin Harvey, about the tech stack, how they approach multi-brand selling on Shopify, the value the Akeneo PIM has added and insights into using Algolia to improve search and merchandising results.

This the concluding episode of our Amazing Women in Ecommerce series, AWIE was launched by Yotpo in 2018 to celebrate how women are leading and shaping the ecommerce industry.

In this episode we interview the wonderful ecommerce team at Astrid & Miyu, a contemporary jewellery brand whose positioning is “More than just a jewellery brand, we are a movement on a mission to revolutionise the jewellery experience.” Let’s find out more!

KOOKAÏ was originally founded in Paris in 1983 with a simple vision to offer fashionable, high quality pieces at accessible prices. In 1992, the founders of KOOKAÏ Australia introduced the Parisian label into the lives and wardrobes of the Australian woman, with the opening of their first boutique on Melbourne’s Chapel Street. 

As part of our series celebrating the achievements of leading women in ecommerce, we sat down with KOOKAÏ's ecommerce product manager to discuss how they're using Shopify to grow online sales and deliver an excellent customer experience.

Tune in to listen to Sera Volau discuss her role as a product manager and explain some of the ecommerce technology selection decisions the business has made.

Angie and her partner Bernard were driven to start ethical brand Kind Laundry to offer customers an alternative to single-use plastic jugs, with a mission to help eliminate 1 billion plastic jugs polluting our planet, every year. Their products are sustainable, contain no harmful chemicals and are much easier to use.

As part of our series celebrating the achievements of leading women in ecommerce, we sat down with co-founder Angie Tran to discuss how they're using Shopify to grow online sales and deliver an excellent customer experience.

This is part two of our podcast interview with Loop Returns founder Jonathan Poma. In the first episode Jonathan explained how Loop integrates with ecommerce tech stacks, the challenges they're helping retailers address and sensible strategies to manage ecommerce returns.

In part two, we progress to discussing customer experience considerations. We drill in to the state of returns in 2023, what changes Loop has seen, customer expectations and how retailers are meeting the demand for a professional and reliable returns service, including customer-centric tactics to help reduce your returns rate.

Tune in for industry insight and practical advice.

Returns suck! They represent lost revenue and reverse logistics adds cost and can also impact sustainability. Returns have been rising in the past few years, IMRG found that a quarter of all consumers return between 5% and 15% of the items they buy online. Your returns strategy can also impact sales: many shoppers check the returns policy before placing an order, with 40% saying they will not order a product unless the returns period is at least 30 days.

The good news? The technology has rapidly improved, with several specialist returns solutions available to merchants to automate returns management and implement a flexible policy to improve the overall returns experience for customers whilst minimising cost. In this podcast we explore what a good returns strategy looks like and tactics retailers are using to deliver the best customer experience with an affordable and scalable service.

For this episode we’re joined by Jonathan Poma, the CEO and Founder of Loop, a market-leading returns platform used by lots of large brands.

Ecommerce in the charity space is pretty damn interesting! Many charities have invested in their own ecommerce infrastructure and you'll find a surprising amount of retail innovation thrown in for good measure.

Oxfam is one of the UK's largest and longest serving Charities and has a challenging omnichannel model to manage, with 23,000 amazing volunteers running 560 shops nationwide, all adding inventory to the ecommerce site. What you probably don't realise about their product catalogue is that they sell premium brand items worth thousand of pounds.

In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Ostcliffe, Head of Ecommerce & Retail Innovation, whose job is to extend the business's reach to connect with supporters, donators and shoppers using every BIG RETAIL design and technology available now and in the future, to make the brand the sectors go to online retailer of their choice.

Tune in to learn what makes Oxfam's ecommerce operation roar like a finely-tuned engine.

Shopify continues its stellar growth, with revenue up significantly YoY, key features like Markets fully rolled-out and capabilities like POS and Payments extended into new countries. At the same time, it has had to divest unprofitable parts of the business like the fulfilment network to focus on the core product.

The Shopify marketing team has been busy promoting new releases and there has been a lot of talk in the industry about the impact of its evolution into enterprise with Components, as well as the benefits to customers of the new checkout solution. In this episode we get the insider view from a highly experienced Shopify developer, Max Rolon VP engineering at leading agency Half Helix, who has worked with a wide range of brands including Peloton, Ulla Johnson, Laura Mercier and Bare Minerals.

There are many businesses that have a strong ecommerce site for B2C for whom trade sales is a significant % of revenue, yet they don’t have a dedicated ecommerce platform or haven’t invested in the same way for trade customers. In this podcast we talk to ecommece agency owner Tom McCaul, who has helped a wide range of ecommerce businesses launch, scale and optimise B2B storefronts. Tom shares his views on the key features B2B customers need to make the website work for them, as well as technical considerations for merchants.

Tl;dr what we’ll cover:

• Understanding the B2C2B ecommerce tech stack

• Exploring key B2B features like trade accounts, quotations and loyalty

• Adobe Commerce spotlight: key strengths for B2B, platform challenges and workarounds

What we cover: 1. What is Front Commerce’s front-end solution for ecommerce? 2. What type of business does a headless front-end suit and why? 3. Product features, roadmap and integrations As businesses grapple with the relevance and impact of evolving technology stacks to deliver greater flexibility and speed to market, with headless and composable both dominating the marketing speak, there has been a rise in front-end specialists. With great flexibility comes great responsibility, so it’s important to understand how the front-end market is developing and what better way that to speak one of the leading front-end platforms in ecommerce, Front Commerce. Listen to their CTO and co-founder, Pierre Martin, and Strategic Partnerships Manager, Christian LeLaidier, explain how the platform works.

Having recently talked about profit optimisation for ecommerce with Hypersonix, we’re drilling down into technology solutions that help ecommerce teams improve monetisation of the onsite conversion funnel and today our focus is on Rokt.

We're joined by Rokt's chief product & engineering officer, Bill Barton. Bill was previously vice president, Alexa Proactive Experience, at Amazon, where he spent 10 years building and leading teams that developed Alexa’s spoken language understanding and knowledge capabilities.

Tl;dr what we cover:

• What problems Rokt is helping ecommerce businesses solve

• How the technology is being used by leading retailers & marketplaces including Ticketmaster

• Key product features & business tooling

Migrations are challenging but what’s it like when you’re doing it for the first time having previously not been in an ecommerce focused role?

Jodie Bratchell, ecommerce manager for leading equestrian brand LeMieux, moved into her first digital role in 2018 and shortly afterwards leapt into a Zencart to Magento replatforming project for B2C and B2B sites, as well as being the key ecommerce stakeholder in switching over payment providers.

Tl;dr what we cover:

• What it’s like transitioning to an ecommerce role?

• The experience leading a replatforming project for the first time

• The benefits of deep customer & product knowledge when replatforming

• Advice and insights on how to effectively manage a project

In this podcast we discuss Paul Smith's recent decision to move from Magento to Centra's headless platform, interviewing Paul Smith's head of digital Hannah Bennett and Ed Bull from their development agency partner Limesharp.

We've known Limesharp for many years due to their background in the Magento ecosystem, and talked about ecommerce platforms a lot. Last year Ed started working with Centra, a platform we've got a soft spot for! Paul Smith is Limesharp's pilot project and Hannah and Ed have worked together many times of the years.

We were excited to hear about their experience of working with Centra and how the migration is going, we hope you enjoy the project insights.

Businesses consistently underestimate how useful client side testing can be in refining the process for releasing new features and new platforms, before potentially wasting a huge amount of time and money. It's fascinating to see how consistently people's desire to build a site they can be proud of leads to them taking their focus off their customers. Dave Mullen is an experienced CRO specialist who knows how to help businesses fill this knowledge and skills gap.

Tl;dr what we’ll cover:

• Integrating testing into full site replatforms & new tech launches

• A sensible approach for validating new websites

• The role testing should play after launch

• How to run a proof of concept

Trading is tougher this year, with some sectors like housewares impacted by the prevailing economic gloom. Therefore a focus on profit is logical and in this episode we talk to our sponsor Hypersonix about their profit optimisation technology solution for ecommerce businesses.

We cover:

• How Hypersonix enables profit optimisation for ecommerce
• Using AI/ML to identify potential business risks
• Integrations paths and product roadmap

Get hands-on advice from a highly experienced ecommerce CTO.

Nick has focused on implementing back office systems and processes for many businesses and in this podcast he talks us through some projects he’s led, key lessons learned when selecting and implementing an ERP solution and gives advice on how to evaluate back office systems to make smarter decisions.

Cabiri specialises in helping businesses through technology change and they have a lot of experience building composable solutions, which seems to be everyone's current architectural obsession. The project that caught our eye was the relaunch of Debenhams.com on a composable stack in an 8-week project, so we decided to find out how this was possible.

The term composable is used a lot in the industry but there’s still a lack of knowledge in many organisations regarding the operational, technical and financial implications of this approach, and it’s not right for everyone. Indeed, amongst the success stories are a few car crashes where money has been burned and projects ditched.

In this episode we sit down with Cabiri CEO and Founder Rex Bigger to get an expert’s practical view on the implications of a composable project and how Cabiri is simplifying the migration towards this architectural approach.

Tl;dr what we’ll cover:

• Challenges and risks going composable

• How Cabiri simplifies project delivery

• Implications for resourcing and team structures

Centra is an API-first ecommerce platform that is focused on helping fashion & lifestyle brands expand into new markets and win global customers. It is growing in the UK based on a solid reputation in Europe with an impressive brand roster including Stronger, Sandqvist and Nudie Jeans. The platform is headless by design and boasts impressive native capabilities and ecommerce tooling including multi-storefront with international tax and duty handling, robust order management flows and a lightweight PIM geared to fashion and lifestyle brands.

We've been fans of Centra for a while and see 2023 as the year when it starts to get more traction with UK customers. In this episode we interview CEO and co-founder Martin Jensen on Centra’s current go-to-market strategy, its core products focus and future releases, as well as how the pricing model works.

Patchworks is well established as a leading integrations platform for ecommerce businesses. They recently launched a business intelligence (BI) solution built on Microsoft Power BI to provide a data lake and visualisation solution for customers wanting access to the data flowing through the platform.

In this episode we discuss why Patchworks launched its BI, what it offers ecommerce teams and what the product vision is for the future. Tune in to hear directly from CEO Jim Herbert.

Part two of our two-part mini series with The Gym Group.

The Gym Group recently invested in a large scale replatforming, evolving to a headless architecture to fix known issues and provide a more flexible and scalable ecosystem.

In part two Digital Product Director Jim Hingston and Digital Trading & Ecommerce Leader Seanpaul Walsh dive into the operational implications of change and how they planned for new technology adoption so the business was ready to make use of new improved systems.

Part one of our two-part mini series with The Gym Group.

The Gym Group provides the lowest cost no contract 24/7 gym nationwide, an impressive offering. Its online presence is more than an ecommerce store, it’s a bookings engine, content portal, exercise hub and customer service tool rolled into one that has to connect a vast customer base across more than 100 gyms. Its digital ecosystem handles millions of interactions every week, so technical performance and scalability is critical to success.

They recently invested in a large scale replatforming, evolving to a headless architecture to fix known issues and provide a more flexible and scalable ecosystem. In this podcast Digital Product Director Jim Hingston and Digital Trading & Ecommerce Leader Seanpaul Walsh share the inside view on what drove the need for digital transformation and how they approached project planning and delivery to set the business up for success.

The current global and local economic outlook is as bleak as today’s winter mist. Online retail boomed during the pandemic and online traffic and sales maintained a higher than pre-pandemic level throughout 2021 but towards the second half of 2022 and into 2023 the sharp bite of increasing costs and consumer nervousness around spending bit hard.

For some businesses, capital projects are on hold. For others, the need to improve tech infrastructure to support business growth or even protect existing sales means they need to press on but with a sharper eye on budget. In this episode we look at ways businesses can sensibly manage project costs downwards without having to rip the heart out their scope and functionality.

Tl;dr what we cover:

• What are the biggest costs areas in a project and how do you manage them?
• What project efficiencies can you introduce to shave cost lines?
• What are the nice to haves that can be cut without materially damaging ecommerce project success?

Ecommerce payments is a big topic, so it helps to understand how key technology providers are supporting ecommerce businesses around the world. Mollie currently supports more than 130,000 businesses globally across a broad range of industries and regularly publishes data on payment trends to share insights with the industry. 

We sat down with UK country manager Josh Guthrie to discuss the key global ecommerce payment trends from the last 12 months, how Mollie's commercial model works and some of the key features its customer depend upon, including daily settlement, recurring payments and support for local payment methods.

Tune in for platform insights and practical ecommerce payment advice.

Testing is done by lots of ecommerce teams to make incremental improvements to their website. Fewer fully embrace experimentation.

Experimentation is done without a fear of failure or expectation of outcome. Testing is done with with an expectation of a winner. Experimentation leads to new things, while testing validates assumptions. Experimentation is dangerous, while testing is safer.

In October 2020, Episerver acquired leading global experimentation platform Optimizely and rebranded as Optimizely. For this episode, we sat down with David Carlile, Senior Director Product Strategy, to discuss how the platform enables ecommerce teams to uncover customer insights and create high-performing experiences.

An interview with leading Shopify agency We Make Websites co-founder Alex O'Byrne to review Shopify's current market position and go-to-market strategy. Alex shares his perspective on what Shopify's big recent announcement about Components really mean to ecommerce merchants and whether or not it marks a fundamental architecture shift or rather a marketing play to establish its credentials as a composable solution. 

Tune in to learn from a respected Shopify thought leader how Shopify is positioned against market leading component-based platforms like Commercetools, where its heading with its product strategy including the capabilities of the new B2B offering such as native price lists as well the value proposition of Web3 and how applicable this technology is to mainstream ecommerce (Alex isn't a fond Web3 proponent!).

Most people consider Commercetools as an enterprise solution, competing against alternative models like Salesforce and Adobe. However, there has been recent discussion about Commercetools growth product plans to target the mid-market and how the mid-market will become more important from a product strategy point of view. 

This episode features an interview with Chief Strategy Officer Kelly Goetsch, a co-founder of the MACH Alliance and respected technology thought leader. We explore the current product focus, key platform capabilities including search, content and B2B.

Buzzword bingo! Headless is thrown around a lot in our industry but amidst the noise there are some interesting projects emerging demonstrating the value that a flexible tech stack can have if the business properly understands the impact of going down this route. Today we’re talking to an expert who has stacks of real-world project experience. Jim Tattersall is Founder & CTO at Rotate°, who are strategic design & technology partners for ecommerce brands.

We discuss:

• What is the real value proposition for investment in headless?
• How does the challenge & experience building on different headless platforms compare?
• What is Studio' s preferred front-end tooling?
• When isn't headless the right approach for an ecommerce team?

Stylitics is the world's largest producer of shoppable digital content for the fashion industry, supporting 50M shoppers per day with personalized inspiration from over 3,000 brands and across nearly 100 of the world's largest retailers. In this ecommerce podcast we interview Rohan Deuskar, Founder and CEO, to discuss what type of business outfitting tech best suits and why, how can ecommerce teams are blending automation with brand control and how Stylitics customers are using the tool to drive a genuine ROI.