E-Commerce Answers

In the last year BigCommerce has pushed hard to develop its platform, differentiate between its two main competitors in the marketplace, it has gone public, and it has managed growth in a time where adding talent has been very difficult. From our perspective as an e-commerce SI, BigCommerce is building space between its competitors and carving out a swath of the mid market B2B AND B2C marketplace where it is potentially the best fit for merchants; and it is doing this without alienating startups or enterprises for whom one of its versions is a good fit.

This recent Partner Summit visual illustrates how BigCommerce is positioning itself:

How BigCommerce Has Evolved its Offering in 2021

API-Driven and Headless Capabilities

The vision of an API-centric e-commerce application was shared at the recent Partner Summit, and best summarized in this visual:

What this means for developers like us, and our merchant clients, is that we are getting closer to being able to have our cake (customizability / integrability) and eat it too (secure, hassle-free, high performance infrastructure of SaaS).

B2B Edition

With the integration of the Bundle B2B App this year, BigCommerce now “officially” calls its B2B offering, “B2B Edition”. It offers enterprise level B2B functionality to businesses of all types and sizes. It enables store owners to facilitate their B2B operations online and provide their B2B customers with seamless transactions and convenient self-service account capabilities.

Key seller features include Corporate Account Management, Custom Catalogs and Pricing, Bulk Ordering Tools, Shopping Lists, Quick Order Pad, Sales Representative Masquerade, and a more through 3rd party apps.

Brightpearl, PunchOut2Go, and Apruve are also key integrations that will help merchants expanding their B2B e-commerce achieve their requirements objectives.

Multi-store Architecture

Rolling out a multi-store architecture has been a success for BigCommerce this year; and with the completion of their recent closed beta it is officially “in-market.” This recent feature alone has the power to differentiate BigCommerce from Shopify (which only provides secure single sign-on to multiple store instances) and gets it closer to the core multi-store feature set of Adobe Commerce / Magento which has supported multi-store architecture for some time.

Key points on its commitment to multi-store were provided recently at the Partner Summit:

So if you consider these two points together (API-centric and Multi-store), developers and merchants are presented with a powerful opportunity to integrate the specialty 3rd party apps they need within a multi-store context. BigCommerce can definitely support growing e-commerce businesses with global aspirations that don’t want to leave the more protected world of SaaS.

Speaking of international expansion, BigCommerce has expanded language pre-population to help international businesses jump start their expansion efforts:

Multichannel Management: The Channel Manager

The Channel Manager is another area helping BigCommerce to differentiate with businesses and especially e-commerce merchants that rely on a truly multi-channel approach. Businesses that have revenue somewhat equally spread over e-commerce channels like Marketplaces (Amazon, Walmart), Retail, and their marketing channels will gain great efficiencies from this tool.

Retail Business Support: Omni-channel Developments

BigCommerce is truly thinking about retail and supporting retail businesses, having ramped up features and roadmap activity during the pandemic. They’re focused across a wide range of retail as well, from smaller operations to larger retail enterprises. BOPIS (Buy online pickup in store) is core BC now, and as they look to the future they want to support retail businesses with multiple warehouses and inventory locations and multiple retail locations:

The Bottom Line

While BigCommerce is still a SaaS platform and therefore more limited than Adobe Commerce or Hybr...

If you already have or subscribe to an e-commerce infrastructure and you are considering major changes or re-platforming, it’s tempting to jump in and get proposals from a number of platforms and SIs, evaluate those, and pick a winner and move forward. But depending upon your situation and platform, it’s likely that you’ll actually speed up the process and ensure a higher ROI by engaging in some audit activities first.

We perform a number of audits for many different types of clients, and although the scope is varied and dependent on the client’s business and industry, there is a foundational framework that we can share for you to learn from. Hopefully this framework is helpful to e-commerce merchants that are beginning to formulate their plans for 2022.

Ideally an audit includes the following aspects of an e-commerce operation:

Customer Service Ticket Review

What your site visitors and customers think is most important, so reviewing any customer service data is a great activity. This can lead to more detailed investigation of aspects of the operation that need improvement. Customer Service ticket review should include both call center and website-sourced tickets; typically the more serious / difficult issues that arise from site performance are called-in versus a user simply filling out a web form. Often it’s a good idea to get direct input from your CS team too – they’ll likely have key issues ready to discuss based on what they deal with most.

Google Analytics Site Usage Review

Use GA to review flows and performance. It can also help you dig deeper on issues flushed out in your customer service ticket review. Performance issues can be flagged and then analyzed separately with 3rd party tools available especially for that. A deeper analysis of Google Analytics may be warranted if the audit is digging into marketing performance, but the ability to analyze and audit marketing performance will depend upon how many marketing metrics (Site Conversion Rate, ROAS etc.) are properly tracked.

Site or Application Performance Evaluation

Use the tools that are available to look at site speed, time to checkout, abandoned cart metrics and more. Deploy some folks to checkout on their own to validate any parts of the flow or process that seem to be bogged down – then identify the causes and fix them. The last two are the hardest part but are worth the time to spend and at a minimum an audit needs to identify those so they can be prioritized

Profit Margin Analysis / Cost of Sales

This is more of an accounting exercise than an e-commerce infrastructure exercise but it’s important to identify any parts of your experience or system that might be contributing to lagging profits. Many e-commerce merchants can get focused on total revenue and they forget about profit and how to increase profitable sales. Looking at the profitability of just the top ten sellers can expose a lot of opportunity while also highlighting where some unexpected damage to your bottom line might be happening.

S-W-O-T

The “SWOT” approach is an ages-old, high-level approach to reviewing a business; and it’s easy. Get some of the major stakeholders together, create a grid on a whiteboard and document the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats that are a part of the business as it is currently composed.

The Bottom Line

Use these areas of focus as a launchpad to compose an audit plan tailored to your business. Consider including a 3rd party in the process to define it and execute it; it will keep the exercise unbiased and it will help to quickly flush out the threats and the opportunities for your business before you get started on any kind of major project. If you’d like to talk more about auditing your site, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Bonus: Here’s a great article from payment processor app BOLT on 21+ KPIs that matter for e-commerce merchants

In April, Accorin was acquired by Wasserman, along with Gen Z / Millennial-focused agency Riddle & Bloom. It was the two firms’ second acquisition within a four year period. The first in 2018, merged a small but growing agency operation with PE firm, Teall Capital. This time, the acquisition merges our operation with 1600+ people, pushing us to think carefully about how we integrate with a much larger organization.

It’s still early but there are lots of synergies and opportunities that we’re certain are going to positively impact us and our clients. In particular, there are four key opportunities that we believe our prospects and clients will benefit from, now that we are a part of “Team Wass”:

Scale

We have a mandate to grow and that is supported by an organization with over 1500 people working for it. Wasserman is a diverse and progressive organization with a number of different agencies under their umbrella. In response to the increasing growth of e-commerce and related communication services, we don’t believe there is any type of work we can’t handle. While Accorin has successfully built a solid portfolio of mid market e-commerce work, we’re excited to collaborate with other Wasserman groups and work on large consumer brand projects in addition to our existing client base. We plan to support this growth through not only expanding our talent and resource pool, but also through additional acquisitions.

World Class, Complementary Sister Agencies

With Wasserman, Laundry Service and Cycle Media, our agency offering provides our clients and prospects with an opportunity to obtain truly world-class communication and branding services that are not just limited to e-commerce. Our world class e-commerce services can now be combined with world class creative, branding and media services provided by some of the top talent across the globe. You can learn more about the Wasserman family of brands and how they are integrated under Wasserman, here.

Progressive and Diverse. Seriously.

Since our acquisition in April we have learned a lot about our parent organization. It’s clear to all of us that work at Accorin is that Wasserman is incredibly diverse. We’re excited to be part of an organization that that has progressive values and employee well-being at its core. We’ve already learned so much about the values that are important to Wasserman and we’re committed to adopting them into our practices. We have firmly embraced diversity and inclusion training, a volunteer ethos, flexibility, work from home and in office choice, and much more. We suggest you simply follow team Wasserman‘s Twitter if you want to get the idea about how progressive this organization is. We believe that this is not only critical to our success, but will be key to us attracting and acquiring top-tier talent as we grow around the world.

Creative Horsepower and Headless E-commerce

We believe the future of e-commerce is quickly growing away from the cart and the catalog type of mentality. Omni-channel experiences and customer experiences that are broad and diverse will weave their way into e-commerce transactions. This means that headless e-commerce and innovative merchandising experiences are going to become much more important prior to checking out.

By leveraging the creative collaboration of our world class e-commerce team and our new sister agencies, rich with creative, diverse talents, we have no doubt that we’ll be able to bring an entirely new level of e-commerce solutions to the table.

The Bottom Line

We’re excited to continue growing as an e-commerce agency but we’re also equally excited to be providing to our clients and prospects all of the other offerings that exist within Wasserman. We’ve already had exciting conversations with current clients about the other services within Wasserman that they can leverage; from branding assignments, to programmatic event planning on a large scale, to large digital and website projects that are focused on innovative consu...

E-commerce platform selection is an integral part of the services that Accorin provides to its clients. Platform selection is also what merchants think about a lot because they are constantly barraged with marketing messages from the platform companies; this makes sense; they have $millions to spend on marketing and we the SIs don’t. So we’ve decided to launch this very simple platform selector tool which we’ll evolve periodically.

Over time, we’ll add to the input questions and change the algorithm a few times a year accounting for platform changes that we become aware of. Initially we’ll start by recommending one of three platforms, depending upon input to the tool. But, we plan to evolve this tool and share the data so that our audience can evolve and learn with us; continuing to learn in the ever-changing spectrum of reasons why e-commerce merchants look to compare and ultimately choose a platform.

Starting with the Basics

At Accorin, we focus our e-commerce development work on three popular platforms:

Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento),

BigCommerce, and

Shopify.

These three platforms have an association with three very broad organizations of business requirements that we tend to see when we talk with prospects. Although every business is different we typically see levels of complexity that help us to organize requirements into patterns of business use cases, on both the customer and administration sides of e-commerce. So, this tool roughly aligns with the organization or requirements that we typically see. That’s how we’re starting with this tool (Fall of ‘21).

Collecting Anonymous Data from the Tool

There is an option to provide data if a user would like follow up conversations with an Accorine-commerce strategist or solution architect. We suspect many users who interact with the tool will, however, do so anonymously. Whether the answers are anonymous or not we plan to share the input data which we believe will help the e-commerce community understand how the landscape of e-commerce requirements is changing. We will post the data publicly once per quarter and provide some general observational analysis on the trends.

No data about user identity (name, email or company information) will be shared. We hope that this tool can provide e-commerce managers with basic insights into platform selection and we hope that by sharing the input data we can help our entire audience better understand the drivers behind platform selection.

What These Recommendations Mean / What They Don’t Mean

There are many factors that ultimately help us to identify which platform will work best for a merchant and it requires a lot more than answers to a few questions. But the tool can help users think generally and directionally about where their e-commerce technology choice might best be served. We obviously don’t believe that users should use this tool in a vacuum without considering many important factors. Using the tool provides direction. The recommendation provides direction. It is not necessarily an answer. By frequently reviewing and sharing the data provided by users of the tool, we hope to make the tool better over time and evolve the conversation around platform selection so that merchants, the platforms, and other SIs can all work productively to make e-commerce better using a starting point that makes sense.

The Bottom Line

Our E-Commerce Platform Selection Wizard is ready for you to use! If you’re actively trying to decide which platform you might build on or migrate your e-commerce site to, give it a try. If you’re just curious if the platform your website is built on is the best option for you.you can try it too. It’s free, and there are no strings attached as you’ll get your recommendation instantly!

Periodically, we will revise and re-launch it through 2022 and we’ll begin to share the insights and trends we see by the close of Q1 2022.

Unless you’re completely out of touch with the e-commerce technology world, you have been reading about and perhaps even working on “headless” e-commerce applications for a few years now. If you’re a business person, a non-technical entrepreneur, or a senior manager, you may not understand the concept and you might oversimplify it as a decoupling of your front end from your back end. This blog post will aim to summarize and boil down a number of headless approaches and applications to their core and describe in layman’s terms the value proposition of each. Using these 3 common examples, merchants can consider whether a headless approach and a CMS-powered experience on the front end can be coupled with a powerful e-commerce platform on the back end to create a great customer experience.

Example 1: “Build It / Configure It” Experiences

If an e-commerce merchant requires a user experience that includes a rich and detailed product configuration experience, there’s a strong case for a headless approach. Any product manufacturers or retailers that are selling products with many choices, options, and variants – especially if there is a “build it on your own” type of requirement – would do well to investigate a headless approach. An extreme example would be if you were configuring a car and adding it to a cart.

State of the art web-based auto configurators can contain 100 steps or even more. But more commonly e-commerce merchants that sell consumer products with many options, or B2B merchants that sell systems or technology products with many choices are perfect for a headless approach. The configuration experience can be controlled by a powerful CMS and that allows the transaction parts to be handled by the e-commerce platform. This approach allows the “experience team” to have flexibility to create custom configuration apps and experiences without having to worry about the transactional aspects or if the e-commerce platform’s CMS is powerful enough to create a rich user experience (like a complex configuration).

Example 2: “Autonomous Content Teams”

If there is an autonomous content team with rules, processes, and capabilities that are vastly different than the technology team that manages e-commerce transactions then there is a case for a headless approach – purely as a matter of management. The content creators, including product managers can manage the user experience as they see fit without worrying about how a changing catalog or new product alterations have an impact on the back end operation or the transaction aspects of the application.

The architecture of the headless system including the CMS, the PIM and the e-commerce platform need to fit the requirements of the teams, but once that is set the content / “experience” teams can have freedom to operate and merchandise without worrying about breaking some aspect of the e-commerce operation and they can work against a content production calendar without having to worry about using the e-commerce admin back end.

Example 3: PWA The Mobile World

Progressive Web Applications (PWA) / Performance.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are a hybrid between a resident app and a website – an application that works on your phone outside of the browser but can utilize the data from an e-commerce website when connected. There are some that argue whether or not PWAs are an example of ‘headless’. In a way they are since it can allow a merchant to give a user an experience on their phone without being connected to the platform. So there’s a “decoupling” of front end and back end there.

Merchants are targeting mobile phone users increasingly as consumers and business buyers use their phone more for everyday purchasing from e-commerce sites. More and more merchants are adding a PWA as an alternative experience outside of the core e-commerce site.

PWAs can also use a single page application (SPA), which allows an entire storefront to load only once and never again. This gives the app-like feel with su...

At Accorin we are advocates of Klaviyo as the highest performing, easiest-to-use email / sms service provider for e-commerce merchants. Klaviyo newbies love it because it’s easy to learn, which means you can teach relatively new e-commerce team members how to use it and how to manage important communications and marketing campaigns. Experienced e-commerce marketers also like it because it makes “advanced” marketing tactics, like personalization and segmentation, accessible and executable without getting into complex data queries and complex data imports or exports. If you work in e-commerce marketing or non-commerce digital marketing and you haven’t tried Klaviyo, you should really consider a free trial by clicking right here.

But the main purpose of this article is to give general e-commerce merchant team members our thoughts on which Klaviyo features and functionalities you should be mastering to get the most out of your marketing efforts. Some may be obvious, while others will make you a power user. So, let’s get to it.

Executing a Segmentation Strategy

Klaviyo has a fairly elaborate formula for “effective segmentation,” which is outlined in this helpful article.

To boil it down into simple terms, you’ll want to organize your customers into 3 general groups:

Frequent purchasers

Recent purchasers

Prospective purchasers (visitors that have not yet purchased)

These 3 general groups of customers are where your bread is buttered. So if you are not doing any segmenting at all, that is if you are still “spraying and praying” start out by creating segments based on behaviors that make sense for your business.

For example, let’s say I sell high end all natural pet foods. My most valuable customers are

Subscribers (they combine high average order value, AOV, frequency and lifetime value (LTV)).

New purchasers (new customers that bought in the last 90 days), and

Prospects and/or cart abandoners that have visited frequently but not purchased.

This is a simple segmentation strategy but if I design unique messages and timing of messages to each of these our overall performance and growth is almost certainly going to increase. Incredibly, Klaviyo quotes that campaigns that utilize the behavioral data (used to create segments) perform 11X better than campaigns that don’t.

Setting Up a VIP Segment

Following on from that first one, it’s important to really treat your absolute best customers and a separate group. You’ll need to classify your best customers based upon value metrics that make sense for your own business. An easy metric is anyone who has purchased and accumulated LTV of $xxx or higher. You can decide if your VIP segment should include subscribers and high LTV customers, but remember to apply the rule by a frequency metric that makes sense. VIP customers of most brands, CPG businesses, and consumer-focused companies tend to respond very well to offers so it’s worth it to make offers compelling and rewarding to each of these members.

Use A/B Testing to Learn What’s Effective

Lots of marketers know they need to test but they don’t because they’re too busy trying to find campaign concepts that drive results. But it’s important to test and no other tool makes it as easy as Klaviyo.

After you set up a campaign, you can easily set up a second version of the same campaign with a different content component you would like to test by clicking on “add a variation” – the result of which will walk you through a very easy-to-use process to set up your test.

Tests we see our merchants utilizing to drive higher performance include: testing subject lines with alternative CTAs, Different landing page versions, different offer percentages, alternative product imagery or graphics.

A/B testing is not very scientific with Klaviyo; it’s easy and for that reason you can address that little voice in your head that says, “maybe we should have made that offer X rather than Y” and you can TEST! A great feature of Klaviyo’s A/B testing is the ability to ...

In this episode, Frank and Graham are joined by CEO of Webscale, Sonal Puri, to talk about e-commerce security, scalability, performance, headless applications, and the story behind Webscale.

As expected, 2021 is proving to be a very active year for all of the major e-commerce platforms. Many are pushing their resources hard to release new features and merchants are pushing platforms to expose their roadmaps in an effort to stay in front of the features they need in the future. If you’re a merchant planning on migrating off of a sunsetting platform (Magento 1, Oracle / ATG Commerce, etc.), these key developments may expedite you through your consideration and review process. If you need an easy place to start from scratch, consider checking out Accorin’s own Platform Decision Tool.

Don’t have time to do your own research? Well that’s OK because here are what we feel are the major developments across the e-commerce platforms that we interact with on a daily basis:

Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Integration of Magento into the Adobe stack continues; with good reason because the entire stack is so powerful, Adobe reps are pushing merchants with headless requirements to consider integration with Adobe Experience Manager and other parts of the Adobe platform. Look for some really, really big news about Cloud coming out soon. Spoiler: DevOps and performance geeks will be very excited.

Feature wise, Adobe Commerce out of the box B2B is gaining wide acceptance and praise. At Accorin, we have clients running multiple storefronts off of a single instance who are using Adobe Commerce as a de facto procurement system for their largest customers, some of whom have hundreds of people buying off that one customer account. Hierarchical access, Purchase Order Approval, Quoting, and deep “company as customer” functionality is helping B2B merchants to gain considerable lift and process efficiency.

Adobe Commerce CE is going to be announcing a CMS change for the better soon; the specifics remain confidential beyond the Solution Partner network but there should be a public announcement soon.

Adobe is very, very focused on performance improvements. During the Solution Partner Open House for July, the product team expressed tons of confidence that their work to make PWA faster and generally perform better will be paying off soon.

Adobe is proud of the adoption of the new Adobe Sign integration with checkout in Adobe commerce – this is gaining acceptance and has been a contributor to Adobe winning deals over competitors from B2B merchants – a big addition to the suite of self-service features!

BigCommerce

Of course the announcement of B2B Edition was the biggest news of many stories coming out of Austin so far in 2021. B2B edition enables SaaS-focused merchants to get core B2B features: customer groups, price tiers, company customer logins with N accounts in an integrated SaaS offering. Read more here.

Other noteworthy BigCommerce developments include:

The development of a Multistore release, which is driven by its brands that want to expand internationally without opening up new accounts

Their Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) will be a significant offering to many of their merchants

Offering Walmart as an integrated marketplace offering, which will allow merchants to drive sales on Walmart Marketplace while managing all transactions centrally on BigCommerce.

Shopify

We’re sure we aren’t the only ones who were excited to hear Shopify announce Store 2.0 at Shopify Unite at the end of Q2.

If you missed it, you can rewatch the announcements here:

Don’t have time to watch the announcements? We’ll summarize the key points.

Store 2.0 will allow merchants to have a design control panel to control the major blocks or content within key pages. Merchants will have a ‘no code’ and ‘max code’ option for creating and editing the storefront depending on one’s level of comfort with front end / React developers.

Checkout gets an overhaul, providing much more flexibility and integrations with over 100 payment providers; apps can be applied to check out now as well.

Shopify will now also allow you to store more data about your products, customers, order...

At the end of June, Shopify held its 2021 developer conference Shopify Unite (virtually) and the Accorin team tuned in to read the tea leaves and get some insights into what Shopify might have in store for us in its development roadmap. For many merchants and brands, especially in the B2C world, Shopify is synonymous with “e-commerce.” We have heard prospects say “we’re looking to build out our Shopify channel in addition to our Amazon channel” when what they really mean is they want to build out their D2C. That is how pervasive the Shopify brand is with the small business world now. 1.7mm merchants use Shopify to run e-commerce businesses. That’s a massive number.

But enterprises have now for years adopted Shopify because of its scale, its ability to support “enterprise” B2C brands with solid infrastructure and staging environment (on Shopify Plus), and front end theme choices. Extending core Shopify functionality relies on an app ecosystem which provides plentiful options for those willing to manage all the apps outside of the core Shopify interface. So what is Shopify looking to do next? The content of Shopify Unite provide some insights:

No Code, Low Code, Custom Code

The value proposition of Shopify for developers is really captured by the metaphor used a few times in the update; “No Code, Low code, Custom code.” Shopify intends to start with merchants and grow with them from store version #1 through their evolution to a highly customized user experience. They are going to achieve this operating metaphor by expanding the graph QL API availability and adopting and promoting the API-First mentality. New core themes (Liquid, you need more friends!) and a new storefront cart API will include new cart capability “from the ground up” and a preview playground with mobile data integrated.

Incentivizing the App Ecosystem – Dropping the Rev Share on Apps

As of August 1 Shopify is going to drop the rev share requirement for app developers. This is big news and a sign that Shopify wants to truly incentivize app developers to innovate and break new ground extending core Shopify e-commerce features. The way it was described, “partners will pay $0 on everything developers earn from the app store every year up to the first first $1mm and thereafter only 15%. What does this mean? Watch for the Shopify app ecosystem to explode; Shopify is going to bet that the e-commerce development world can drive a lot of innovation and adoption of its platform. As an app developer and owner of an app available for Shopify, we firmly believe this is good news for everyone in the ecosystem and merchants alike.

More Themes and Easier Theme Editing

Front end developers and merchandising managers will love that Shopify is moving to full git integration for full theme development. New themes are going to be announced on July 15 – we’re looking for faster mobile themes and simplified mobile-first themes with full editing ability.

Checkout Flexibility

Shopify is going to continue to expand flexibility for developers to change Shopify checkout and now beyond just Shopify Plus; this will help Shopify to shed the long-standing reputation that designers and developers don’t have any control over checkout look and feel and UX. The focus will be on app extensions to checkout, UI extensions, overhaul of scripts and new payment platform options ‘enabling more payment flexibility all around the globe.”

Performance

Shopify claims that it is now going to be within 100k of anyone in the world with its hosting and DN infrastructure. This is going to increase overall performance but so will page rendering enhancements with the front end improvements and an overall focus on storefront performance across from and back ends.

The Bottom Line

It seems like Shopify is focused on incentivizing app development and performance in the short term. I was expecting more specific announcements like some new R&D efforts or even partner trial programs for B2B functionality but there was ...

Frank is joined by Accorin's Head of E-Commerce Delivery, Graham Lubie to discuss how the first half of 2021 has gone; both internally and for Accorin's clients.