eCom@One with Richard Hill

Nathan is an experienced eCommerce logistics professional and eCommerce entrepreneur. Having been given the opportunity to work at the Sydney Olympics in a logistics role after finishing university, Nathan has since taken on a number of senior roles helping businesses to optimise their fulfillment processes. 

In this episode we spoke to Nathan about the basics of eCommerce logistics, from deciding whether to fulfill orders yourself or to source a provider, to what you should be considering when sourcing that provider so that you pick one that is best suited to your business.

We also discuss the pros and cons of both free and paid delivery, as well as the increasing demand for free next day delivery since the boom of Amazon Prime and how smaller businesses can start to implement it in an efficient way.

The quality of your business’ delivery service has a huge impact on your customers’ perceptions of the business, which is why it is essential to get right. So get listening and take in the great advice Nathan has to offer to nail your business’ logistics. 

Tobi Oluwole is a Nigerian entrepreneur based in Ottawa, Canada. During the day he works as a Merchant Success Manager at Shopify. He is the Co-Founder of 3Skills - a company that has helped more than 150 people land full-time jobs in Canada since 2019. Tobi is also the Founder of TPS Accelerator which is an 8-Week virtual program that teaches people how to build a second stream of income with a side hustle. 

In this episode, Tobi talks about how he’s helped Shopify stores grow their businesses and the specific tools within Shopify that can make a massive difference to your customer experience. He explains the biggest mistakes merchants make with their stores that could be hindering their growth and gives advice on how to avoid them. 

With the number of eCommerce businesses hugely increasing since lockdown, Tobi also discusses ways to get ahead of competitors if you’re selling in a competitive niche, such as drilling down into your target audience and focussing on testing your products. 

If you’re a Shopify store owner, or are thinking of starting a Shopify store, then this episode is definitely for you! 

Jim is the Vice President and General Manager EMEA at BigCommerce. Having spent more than 20 years working in digital strategy, eCommerce and in the tech industry, Jim brings a wealth of knowledge to this episode. 

Technology has always been his passion and since studying Computer Science at university back in the early 90’s, he has since taken on a variety of roles within the industry, as well as running his own eCommerce agency until 2015. 

In this episode, we talk about the main benefits of BigCommerce and opinions on other similar platforms like Shopify, the common mistakes he sees stores make when they’re trying to grow and what you can do to avoid them. Jim also gives some great insight into how to better understand your customer journey and how that understanding can inform better decisions, as well as how simple changes to your checkout experience can drive more sales. 

If you’re an eCommerce store owner using one of the big eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify, listen in for some great practical advice you can start implementing to boost your website performance. 

Alastair is the Founder of one of the most widely used websites in business, Company Check, which allows you to check company financial and director history. He has also founded several other companies over the last 20 years including UK Data, Carsnip, and more recently, mScore. 

mScore was founded to solve the frustration from endless, and often useless company meetings by allowing employees to score each meeting based on their efficiency, with the aim of dramatically cutting down the costs and time associated with them.

In this episode, Alastair talks to us about how he left the corporate London life and found freedom with his own businesses. As well as giving us some insights into what his businesses do, he also deals some great advice for starting your own business, how to choose the best business model and tips on hiring the right people for your company.

So if you’re a budding entrepreneur, then this is the episode for you! 

Jack is the Global Head of eCommerce at OKA, a luxury furniture retailer offering unique furniture collections in the UK and more recently in the US. Last year, Jack also founded his own sustainable men’s sock brand, Sirluxe Socks. 

In this episode we discuss his role at OKA, including which marketing strategies work best for them, how to target your audience more efficiently using SEO, as well as talking about the differences between marketing in the UK compared with the US and the best way to alter your strategy to best suit each market. 

He tells his story behind the creation of Sirluxe Socks, from the initial market research, planning the logistics, to mapping out the plans for future growth. He also shares how he manages his time in order to successfully run his eCommerce business alongside his full-time senior role at OKA. 

Simon is the Founder of Archmon, a growth marketing consultancy based in Lincoln, which is dedicated to helping clients maximise their performance through actionable media plans and strategies. He’s worked with a number of big brands over the years including Samsung, BT, Vodafone and Tastecard.

Simon is also an industry writer, mental health champion and author of his brand new book, Back to Basics: 21 Ways to Increase Marketing Performance and Success.

In this episode he talks about the difference between brand and performance marketing, and how to decide which one is best for your business goals, how to pick the right eCommerce tools for performance, as well as what he thinks the future of performance marketing looks like. 

Simon is incredibly passionate about mental health education and in this podcast, he shares his experiences with imposter syndrome and what we can do as a society to normalise it. We also discuss how lockdown has affected mental health, and how it's distorted our relationship with work.

Rand is the creator of Moz, formerly a blog and online community where SEO experts could share their ideas and expertise and now provides a range of SEO solutions that are widely used around the world. More recently, Rand founded SparkToro, a market research and audience intelligence tool designed to better inform business’ advertising and content strategies. 

His journey into SEO started as a matter of necessity when he couldn’t afford SEO professionals for his web projects, so had no other option than to learn how to do it himself. It was his frustrations from his own learning journey that inspired him to start his own blog, SEOmoz, with the hope that he could make SEO easier for others. Since then it has reached millions of people and has grown to become Moz as we know it today. 

In this episode, Rand talks about his journey of founding both Moz and SparkToro and discusses what exactly he attributes to their success and how these tools have been able to help eCommerce businesses enhance and fine-tune their marketing strategies. In this open and honest episode, Rand also discusses the personal and financial challenges he has had to face since building his businesses. He also touches on how to tackle your team’s and of course, your own mental health as a business owner during the current lockdown.

Want a smarter way to market your business? Of course, you do. Join us this week to find out how, from one of the most influential people in online marketing. 

Mareike Turner is the Director of Operations & CX at Payability, a leading funding platform based in New York, which have been providing flexible cash flow solutions for eCommerce marketplace sellers since 2015.

Mareike grew up in a small town in the North of Germany and later moved to Hamburg to start a career in offline trading. Her career then pivoted towards eCommerce 6 years ago when she was offered the opportunity to work for Etsy in New York as an Account Manager, where she helped creative entrepreneurs from all over the world to grow their businesses. Following this, she made her move to Fintech company Payability, where she now manages a team of CX experts.

In this episode, she talks to us about how Payability helps eCommerce businesses with cash flow, as well as giving some fantastic advice on how to manage your cash flow effectively as a business. Also, as an expert in Customer Experience, she shares how you can improve the CX within your own business, as well as stressing the importance of receiving customer feedback and how to use it to create better experiences in the future. 

Do you want to find out more about how you can manage your cash flow better? Want to create a better experience for your customers? Then listen in for some great tips and tricks from Mareike. 

Paula Thomas is the creator and host of the Let’s Talk Loyalty podcast, where she shares her expertise on loyalty programmes, as well as interviewing loyalty marketing experts from all around the world. 

Paula found her passion for loyalty schemes while she was working as a Marketing Manager for a major airline 20 years ago. She was tasked with getting more people to book directly through their website, and her solution? You guessed it. She led the development of their first customer loyalty programme and since then she’s been working on world-leading loyalty schemes for brands including Avios, O2 Ireland, AIB and The Entertainer Group. 

In this episode we talk about the power of loyalty schemes and how they can maximise the business out of your existing customers. Paula discusses several ways businesses can implement loyalty schemes, as well as how to create incentives people can’t refuse, where loyalty schemes are headed for in the future and the best ways to measure your loyalty success. 

Want to find out more about how to get the most out of your existing customers? Time to listen in and find out how to draw people into your brand with offers they can’t resist.  

This week we’re joined by Joe Daft, Head of Robotics and Greg Downey, Robotics Business Consultant at Orderwise Warehouse Robotics. OW Robotics specialise in driving growth in UK businesses through flexible and scalable warehouse automation, using state-of-the-art technology that improves efficiency of up to a massive 90% and labour cost savings of up to 50%. 

In this episode they talk to us about the different robotics solutions that are available to eCommerce stores and exactly how automating your operations can save you space, time and money in the long term. We also discuss how robotics are no longer just used by eCommerce giants like Amazon, since the pandemic has now forced thousands of businesses to consider the implementation of robotics solutions in order to keep up with huge increases in demand.

Joe and Greg give some great advice on how you can get started with robotics as an eCom business, as well as insights into when you’ll start to see a return on your investment, how it all works and what the future of robotics could look like in the next 5 years.  

If you’re an eCommerce store and you’ve not already implemented any automated solutions, listen in to find out how it could help your business grow with ever-increasing demands.