Inside Commerce: Ecommerce Strategy, CX and Technology Podcast

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:

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:

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.