Future Commerce

Latest Episodes:

[STEP BY STEP] What Does “Fully-Integrated” Mean in the DXP Era? May 31, 2023

Show notes

This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? Joining us on the podcast in this episode is Rebecca Hall, Director of Digital Solutions Consulting at Blue Acorn ICI, and Doug Hatcher, her counterpart on the sales side of the business, a solutions consultant. And they're going to answer this question, "What does fully-integrated mean in the DXP era?” Listen now!

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In this episode:

{0:11:32} - “DXPs provide: a very good way to visualize and analyze how people are interacting with the brand so you can customize it and better personalize the experience people are getting to it.” - Doug
{0:14:46} - “The beauty of composable architecture and personalization is that you're really hitting those specific customers, really hitting those specific audiences, and you're serving up a unique experience almost per person. So it's not just per brand, it's per customer as well that we can really dig in and create a unique experience.” - Rebecca
{0:24:57} - “The team and the tool have to be mutually aligned. it becomes much more impactful when you're making software decisions because all of them are interdependent. Future-proofing to some degree is just buying more durable software that's capable of doing more and growing over time without you having to completely rip and replace.” - Phillip
{0:28:55} - “We're able to deliver, like immediately deliver, relevant experiences to your customers that may help them find what they're looking for and reduce some of the noise, as well as help you target immediately somebody who is actually looking for something specific.” - Rebecca
{0:37:51} - “There are things that these platforms can't necessarily predict or just have a capability for out of the box. So there's always going to be a need to do custom development. More and more though, the customization that we're doing isn't on the front end, isn't trying to build the customer experience in a new and unique way. We try to focus that on a custom configurator piece or one thing that we can compose into the broader solution.” - Doug
{0:44:47} - “ If we know what we have, we're able to use that data better and we can actually make better suggestions as we go along as well. It's all about data.” - Rebecca

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Associated Links:

Learn more about Rebecca Hall, Doug Hatcher, and Blue Acorn ICI
Listen to more Step by Step episodes.
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Get your copy of Archetypes, our recently published 240-page journal! Check it out at ArchetypesJournal.com
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

[STEP BY STEP] Mastering Omnichannel Integration for Seamless Shopping May 30, 2023

Show notes

This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? In this episode, we are talking to Keith Menezes, who's the Director of Commercialization at Walmart, the world's largest retailer. We're going to talk about how we master omnichannel integration and provide for a seamless experience not just for customers, but also for employees and some of the decisions that are made in making the technology that Walmart has built to create incredible omnichannel experiences available for the rest of the world. Listen now!

In this episode:

{0:06:28} - “A vibrant retail ecosystem where we're all really serving other merchants and customers, I think helps all of us.” - Keith
{0:10:32} - “It's not just about the technology, it's about the system, and then it's also about the change management. If you deploy a piece of technology and it just doesn't make sense in context of how the employee is doing their job and the UI and the experience itself is just complicated or hard to understand, adoption will plummet, but most importantly, customers aren't going to get what they're looking for, which then will ultimately impact their perception of your brand, and then loyalty, which is going to lead to churn.” - Keith
{0:14:49} - “What has happened in the market is you've seen the growth of outsourced fulfillment, other providers out there that maybe exist as marketplaces where customers may go, they'll place an order, and then this third party will go into the store, pick the items for you and deliver it for you. And brands have loved that because they've gotten the growth. But now two years later, post-pandemic, what they're evaluating is what did we give up to get that?” - Keith
{0:21:41} - “Fulfillment, even though it's invisible, it is an expression of your brand and you really have to get items to customers in the way that the customer is expecting them.” - Keith
{0:26:416} - “Retail companies are in the business to sell products to customers. And the evolution has been really slow. And I don't know if people have picked up on it, but we are now buying software that's purpose built to be transactional software because it's built by the people who have to power their own businesses on it. And that is a fundamental shift away from, "You need software. We build software. Here's your software.’" - Phillip
{0:33:45} - “Through Store Assist, we're giving you the capability to create these white label kind of fulfillment experiences. It's all your brand. We're existing in the background and then all the data that's coming back really is yours. You understand how customers are interacting with you and then empowering you to make decisions on what you ultimately serve up to your customers.” - Keith

Associated Links:

Learn more about Keith Menezes and Walmart Commerce Technologies.
Listen to more Step by Step episodes.
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Get your copy of Archetypes, our recently published 240-page journal! Check it out at ArchetypesJournal.com
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

[STEP BY STEP] What Does “Seamless” Mean in my eCommerce Operations? May 29, 2023

Show notes

This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? To start this season off, we welcome the CEO of Whisker, Jacob Zuppke, to share about his incredible amount of experience in building a technology company that today is omnichannel, selling in retailers, selling via an app, and making your life a better place by making your pets' lives better. Listen now!

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In this episode:

{0:07:19} - “As you grow up from a company from small to big pretty quickly, I think you end up making a lot of decisions because you don't have a person for everything. We've evolved, but not drastically. I still want my department leaders selecting software. I don't want a central IT hub making those decisions on behalf of each department because I think that's a siloed approach that doesn't get each user what they want. ” - Jacob
{0:12:39} - “Having different perspectives is probably the most important thing. Somebody that represents different areas of the business and what their needs may or may not be at a later time. And then thinking through, can we get at least two years out of that?” - Jacob
{0:24:39 } - “Software decisions drive our hiring decisions. Moving from Google Cloud, when we were on it with Firebase and its suite of products, to AWS in 2017 or 18, has driven thee entirety of our decision-making process since then.” - Jacob
{0:32:05} - “You're working in a software every day. You're training your entire people around how to use it. If those people aren't part of the decision-making and then also future planning around what is next and how you intend to get there and at least being mindful of that, I think that you're making a decision in a vacuum, and I don't think that that's going to benefit any organization.” - Jacob
{0:32:36} - “You have to grow up at some point and big kid software makes you make decisions. You have to grow up and having juvenile platforms that make a bunch of decisions for you has its strengths. But it also may limit your ability to make decisions and grow an org and have informed decisions and perspectives from people who have had to solve a number of challenges, not just the software part.” - Phillip
{0:37:08} - “When you're oftentimes changing those decisions frequently you lose the trust in a team. Going back a few years, I think we were pivoting too frequently. And I think now that we've got a better way of approaching software decisions, we're making less frequent decisions that are more sound and more aligned with where the business is going for the next couple of years.” - Jaob

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Associated Links:

Learn more about Jacob Zuppke and Whisker.
Listen to more Step by Step episodes.
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Get your copy of Archetypes, our recently published 240-page journal! Check it out at ArchetypesJournal.com
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mockup Madness: The Gamification of the Checkout Experience May 26, 2023

Show notes

Mockup Culture is everywhere these days. We have seen things from Wes Anderson Star Wars to Gucci Spring lookbooks created in MidJourney, the possibilities are truly endless. Join Phillip and Brian as they explore the notion that we now live in a time where any dream can be transformed into reality, no matter how bizarre or outlandish. They explore how prominent brands like Telfar are embracing the concept, utilizing gamified pricing strategies to captivate consumers. As they dissect these phenomena, they unravel the concepts of "hyperstition" and "metamodernism" and examine their implications for the modern consumer. Stay tuned for some content teasers from Phillip and Brian, as they hint at what's to come at our Visions Summit in Chicago.

Tonal Shift

{00:09:42} “Why does Dollar Shave Club or Glossier choose a Shopify? There's an operational cost associated with selling online and it gets more expensive every day, especially the more custom software you have and the more esoteric your business model is online. By choosing a platform that imposes a constraint on you, theoretically, you can drive the cost down.” - Phillip
{00:16:09} “The things that create inherently shareable content and the things that are truly remarkable and worthy of talking about are things that are building so close to the edge of possibility that it requires a tremendous amount of investment.” - Phillip
{00:17:18} “What we're seeing, and you wrote a whole article on this recently on mockup culture, is this idea that actually customers and fans and audiences are now having real influence on the greater brand.” - Brian
{00:26:02} “Metamodernism is when a piece of content or something is created that's both critique and embrace of something. Some of these mockups are super interesting because they are commentary, they are ironic and sarcastic, but they're also good ideas.” - Brian
{00:31:01} “This multifaceted way of engaging in media and art has a direct bearing on commerce because commerce powers it all.” - Phillip
{00:40:55} “What algorithmic timelines do and what generative AI allows for people to create through hyperstition is that my idea of Hermes or Gucci or Nike is no longer fundamentally the same as yours.” - Phillip
{00:43:41} “It's not personalization so much as your brand is going to hit differently for different people. You need to hit the notes that say the things that you're wanting to say to that person that maybe achieve the same outcome for a different person, but it's done differently.” - Brian

Associated Links:

Find out more about The Visions Summit at RICE 2023 and make plans to meet us there!
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A Hero's Journey May 24, 2023

Show notes

What does it take to build a brand that stands out as a Hero? How does the Hero’s story inspire us and bring about positive impact in the world around us? Listen now as Ju Rhyu shares with Phillip some of her Hero’s journey in building Hero Cosmetics!

Standout Success

{00:02:47} Ju knew that acne care is an emotional and sensitive area of the market, and she wanted the name of the product and of the brand to be positive and connect emotionally with consumers who needed the solution the product would provide
{00:05:25} “When we started, even though we started on Amazon, I always knew this business would be an omnichannel business because when you have a pimple emergency, two day free shipping is great, but nothing sometimes is as good as being able to walk into a store and pick up a product that same day.” - Ju
{00:06:00} Hero’s first in-store launch went so well that it went nationwide pretty quickly, and then two years later was in Target where one SKU became a mulit-million dollar SKU within one year
{00:11:00} “I definitely have the philosophy that I'll always do what's right for the business. And if I'm no longer the right person, then I will gladly step aside and make room for a real professional.” - Ju
{00:13:34} “I’m constantly amazed at people who are at the highest levels of success or fame or however we hold them, when asked about who their heroes are, they pull out a Tom Rinks or a Scott Norton who has never been mentioned on Twitter, not once. I think that that's really interesting.” - Phillip

Associated Links:

Learn more about Ju Rhyu and Hero Cosmetics
Check out other Future Commerce podcasts
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Navigating Legal Landmines May 19, 2023

Show notes

Any business comes with risks, and there are many legal issues around advertising that can become major if a brand doesn’t have arms around what those are and how to avoid them. From differing terms of agreement to the variety of laws per state, there is a good deal to navigate, and it takes an expert to wade through. How do you realistically have a thriving enterprise or a business with these kinds of encumbrances? Listen now to our conversation with Robert Freund and his take on this changing environment and how it affects all of us!

Applying Old Laws to New Situations

{00:08:05} The rules of disclosure, that were never really clear before, are undergoing scrutiny and clarification from the FTC for situations such as an influencer receiving product and then creating content about it and other examples that can really determine strategy
{00:13:22} “The FTC's rule is that the disclosure has to be clear and conspicuous, which effectively means your audience can't miss it.” - Robert
{00:16:45} “These old laws and rulings that are not effectively law become a tangled web that we have woven because of the heavy commercialization of the way that content has emerged.” - Phillip
{00:18:21} “There's always that sort of lag time between what the law says, what courts tell us the law means and what marketers are out there doing.” - Robert
{00:25:08} Legal problems, whether legitimate or not, have always been a part of running a business, but the time frame for encountering a legal problem is business is much shorter now
{00:30:58} As advertisers get more creative and competitors get more daring, there will continue to be more pushback from the FTC and more lawsuits filed against business owners that can even look back as much as three or four years, so it’s important to not fall prey to using those tactics to justify staying competitive
{00:38:05} Legal entanglements and risk associated with them influence the way businesses are built and also where they are being built now, which actually changes the way we think about global commerce and global eCommerce, and that’s not necessarily a good thing
{00:49:58} “As you go to try and do something more and further that stands out, of course, the top influencers are pushing legal boundaries. That's probably how they got there in the first place.” - Brian

Associated Links:

Learn more about Robert Freund
Find out more about The Visions Summit at RICE 2023 and make plans to meet us there!
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Breaking the Hedonic Treadmill May 12, 2023

Show notes

Joy Howard's Early Majority is defying conventional eCommerce norms by building in public with their community. In this episode, learn about Joy's ethos for redefining brands with a “punk rock ethos,” the challenges of creating a unique online experience, and how Early Majority’s mission to redefine the good life is resonating with customers seeking a more meaningful, eco-conscious lifestyle. Listen now!

Street to Summit: Culture is What Makes Brands

{00:05:12} Why do so many outdoor brands make cool stuff for men and then have a women’s line that is pretty lame? There are cool outdoor women who want cool outdoor apparel, too
{00:09:17} Building in public is a slower way to grow a brand, but Joy views the enjoyable pace as a foundation for longevity
{00:11:53} “As soon as you decide that you're going to build community, you automatically have to have humility and you automatically have to submit to where everybody else wants to go too. Not in a herd or sheep-like way, but in a way that's deeply collaborative and mindful and listening.” - Joy
{00:18:19} The aesthetic of the brand helps to tell the story of who Early Majority is as a community-centered brand that sells apparel, and it so many ways, there is a distinctively different story being told
{00:25:44} The new counter-culture is actually looking for the right kinds of limitations and boundaries and structure
{00:31:22} Having a membership program within the brand was one very intentional way of addressing economic equality and providing accessibility for more people to be able to enjoy the product
{00:37:30} “Probably the scariest thing about everything that I've done so far and what really is against the grain is having that little bit of friction in the funnel up front.” - Joy
{00:42:21} The future of commerce is more cooperative, more supportive, and more offline, where people are able to find their community and their place in commerce in life-giving ways.

Associated Links:

Learn more about Joy Howard and Early Majority.
Find out more about The Visions Summit at RICE 2023 and make plans to meet us there!
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ignorance Plus Desperation May 05, 2023

Show notes

How do you find out what your customers are afraid of and what they already want? What has it been like for Aaron to go from being the long form guy at previous companies to now creating short form content? How does our personal story fit into the larger narrative and why is that powerful to consider? Listen in now to the discussion with Aaron Orendorff and hear this and more!

The Story Within The Story

{00:06:31} Good writing that is a mix of good content, emotion, storytelling, and enough of the right juice to get eyes on it works, even when you are not exactly the expert on the subject
{00:08:58} The tension between knowing a little bit about a lot and being willing to take risks and be open to learn makes it hurt less when you are actually proven wrong
{00:18:18} Three levels of Aaron’s strategy for Future Commerce: Originality with accessibility, capturing the demand, and cleaning up the technical side of things
{00:25:41} After six years of experimentation at Future Commerce, we feel more than ever that our content is worth discovering
{00:43:19} Have you ChatGPT’d yourself? I mean, we have a draw to be known and to do something that has meaning
{00:47:16} Writing incredibly compelling content is exciting, being found and generating traffic is even more exciting, and it’s also critical
{00:51:12} “The place to always invest is what's the voice, what's the value, what's the creative angle, what's the thing that we can do in a way that no one else can? You build a back catalog of just day in, day out, put in the reps, you've then amassed this war chest, and then it just becomes so much easier to actually get this out into the world now that I have something worth sharing.” - Aaron Orendorff

Associated Links:

Learn more about Aaron Orendorff and Recart
Find out more about The Visions Summit at RICE 2023 and make plans to meet us there!
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“23 Metrics That Matter” Apr 28, 2023

Show notes

The guys sit down and hear from Kiri Masters about her newest report, Fit For Purpose: 23 Next-gen DSP Metrics That Measure What Matter, and the incredible insights found within. As always, Kiri provides interesting ways to look at important metrics like only she can. Listen in now and hear more!

The Gorilla in the Room

{00:05:13} Kiri found that her clients needed to take a step back and understand what was happening at each stage of the buyer journey based on a better set of metrics that, as her new report is called, are fit for purpose. They really fit for each stage rather than metrics that don't give the full picture
{00:09:41} Metrics such as Competitor Audience Acquisition and Review Page View Rate are original metrics discovered by Kiri and her team and are indicators that shed light on whether or not specific campaigns are working for a brand
{00:18:51} Whatever used to happen on the brand side with technology is now something that can happen inside of platforms that are actually commerce platforms, but they're actually valuable marketing tools unto themselves now for understanding not just your consumer, but potentially conquesting others, which reorients how we think about Amazon
{00:21:16} “All the typical non-retail advertisers are looking to Amazon as well because they have a lot of data about who we are, how we act, and what our interests are.” - Kiri
{00:24:58} With all of these channels and with the complexity of Amazon's DSP that perhaps arbitrage does need a little bit of an update because the definition of what arbitrage means might need a little bit of an update
{00:31:11} “We had the paid media wave, the social media wave, and now we're in the retail media wave, and each successive wave had a shorter and shorter ramp up time to be something meaningful. And the ramp up to retail media spend has been the shortest of all.” - Kiri
{00:34:34} Are retail media networks overhyped and are these distractions when everyone and their mother is trying to build one right now?

Associated Links:

Check out Fit For Purpose: 23 Next-gen DSP Metrics That Measure What Matter from Kiri Masters and Acadia
Find out more about The Visions Summit at RICE 2023 and make plans to meet us there!
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Future of eCom is Dead Celebrities Apr 21, 2023

Show notes

The way that we buy is changing dramatically. Folks make less concerted purchases of a higher order value based on this really brief calculus of what kind of a product it is, where you are in your need for that product. Over the past seven years of doing this show, we’ve seen how much attention has been fractured. Parasocial relationships are entertainment mixed in with social media mixed in with commerce. Listen in now as Phillip and Brian discuss these ideas and more!

Entertaining Relationships

{00:03:26} Le Creuset has a new colorway, and their paper bag reveal video led to an interesting discussion on why cookware is a leading edge category in DTC
{00:13:39} San Fran is back on the map with tech innovation, according to folks in AI, and it’s funny how chat style interfaces are reminiscent of the discourse we had about conversational commerce six years ago on Future Commerce
{00:21:19} Is faking it the only way to get the American audience to buy into live-stream shopping? Why is this a problem?
{00:24:25} But wait, would live-stream shopping work? Maybe for cookware?
{00:32:45} “If you look at most of the recent jumps into culture from brands, it's really to just get people to look their way for a minute. We're already in the attention economy.” - Brian
{00:40:21} “If it wasn't for the Apple iTunes end-user license agreement, we wouldn't have a paradigm for consent.” - Phillip
{00:54:41} Retail sales in-store are still by and large the majority of how people shop, and there is still a lot of room for growth in eCommerce and digital shopping

Associated Links:

Find out more about The Visions Summit at RICE 2023 and make plans to meet us there!
Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.