Inside Commerce: Ecommerce Strategy, CX and Technology Podcast

Tune in for Kibo CEO's ecommerce vision for the future and insights into where Kibo sees the world of ecommerce heading and how they're preparing for it strategically and technically.

We're joined by Ram Venkataraman, who has extensive experience in technology strategy and leadership. We discuss:

Understanding how technology visionaries perceive the market is incredibly valuable. Don't miss out on Ram's insights.

MKM is the UK’s leading independent builder’s merchant, with branches across England, Scotland & Wales. Founded in 1995, they have branches across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom from Redruth to Elgin Norwich and Llandudno.

Ecommerce is an important part of the business, selling to trade customers and connecting online customers with local branches via free Click & Collect.

We're joined by Head of Digital, Craig McClaren, who talks us through MKM's ecommerce evolution story, migrating to a new headless stack built on BigCommerce and Bloomreach DXP.

Craig is an experienced technology and digital commerce leader with specialist knowledge and skills in composable commerce replatforming and devops team building from scratch. He shares insights into the technology decisions MKM made, the positive impact on the business and how, and why, they've built out their own internal engineering team.

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.

It’s fair to say that Maplin's MD Ollie Marshall has a been a Magento Open Source loyalist and enthusiast for many years. We recorded an episode with him two years ago on how Maplin built a scalable Magento solution, at which point open source aligned with the business and technical needs.

When he announced that Maplin's ecommerce stack would pivot, moving away from open source to a new SaaS solution, we thought it would be interesting to find what brought about the strategic change of direction, and why now.

In this episode we explore the commercial decision-making path, understanding why Ollie decided SaaS was the right approach and what made Shopify the right fit.

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:

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.