Inside Commerce: Ecommerce Strategy, CX and Technology Podcast

Buzzword bingo! Headless is thrown around a lot in our industry but amidst the noise there are some interesting projects emerging demonstrating the value that a flexible tech stack can have if the business properly understands the impact of going down this route. Today we’re talking to an expert who has stacks of real-world project experience. Jim Tattersall is Founder & CTO at Rotate°, who are strategic design & technology partners for ecommerce brands.

We discuss:

Stylitics is the world's largest producer of shoppable digital content for the fashion industry, supporting 50M shoppers per day with personalized inspiration from over 3,000 brands and across nearly 100 of the world's largest retailers. In this ecommerce podcast we interview Rohan Deuskar, Founder and CEO, to discuss what type of business outfitting tech best suits and why, how can ecommerce teams are blending automation with brand control and how Stylitics customers are using the tool to drive a genuine ROI.

The ecommerce platform landscape is busy and every year platforms update their roadmaps, increase feature sets and sometimes pivot strategically. That’s why we like to stay up to date with what leading vendors are doing and share with you their perspective on the market and where they’re taking the product roadmap. In this episode we dive into the world of Shopware to cover:

The interview is with Justin Biddle, UK GM for Shopware since 2019, and Ben Marks, Director Global Market Development since 2021.

As we're technology and vendor agnostic and our goal is to help you better understand the ecommerce technology landscape, our final episode of 2022 dives into the current ecommerce platform market to look at key vendors and ask:

We’re covering among others Shopify, BigCommerce, Optimizely, Elastic Path, Commercetools, Oro, Shopware and Remarkable Commerce. Please note it’s not exhaustive, there are so many players and we did reach out to a few others for their input but didn’t get a reply in time to include them.

In this ecommerce podcast, James interviews Erin Twyman, Senior Manager for Learning & Enablement, and Itay Vladomirsky, Director of Partnerships, at customer marketing platform Yotpo.

Erin and Itay share insights on how ecommerce teams make use of the Yotpo platform ecosystem to automate customer campaigns, including customer reviews, SMS marketing and loyalty programs. They also explain how the new Subscriptions product for Shopify merchants works and where the future roadmap focus is heading into 2023.

Whenever tax and duty handling is mentioned during an ecommerce migration, it usually raises a few sighs because it’s a highly complex area and people working in finance and compliance are used to headaches. In this episode we interview Avalara's tax technology solutions manager, Heather Wight, to get an expert view on latest tax developments. 

Tune in to get practical advice about the realities of handling tax & duties for international ecommerce. Heather covers

After 14 years at DHL building up a formidable knowledge of cross border trade, supporting a wide range of businesses to understand and plan for compliance, Heather moved to Avalara this year as a tax specialist and is ideally placed to give ecommerce teams real-world advice.

In our 155th episode we're joined by Phil and Dave from Paase Digital, who talk to us about how they implemented a personalised quiz (along with other CRM tactics and features) to help drive revenue and increase first party data capture for Curlsmith. 

We have a lot of discussions around Magento and how the market fit and customer type has changed since the move to Magento 2 and Adobe's acquisition. There is a lot of negative sentiments towards Magento as a platform, a common view being the total cost of ownership is always much higher than on leading SaaS vendors like Shopify and Big Commerce. Given our platform agnostic outlook, we like to stress test this type of assumption because every platform has its place in the market and relative strengths and weaknesses.

In this episode, we sit down with Lewis Sellers, a highly experienced Magento developer and MD of Pinpoint, a respected Adobe Commerce specialist agency. We ask Lewis where he sees Magento fitting in the ecommerce platform marketplace now, for what type of business and use case it's still the right platform and how to address known issues such as the complexity of support and maintenance and handling upgrades.

Content features quite highly in most ecommerce platform RFPs, especially with brands looking to focus on customer experience and not just commerce capability. Vendors talk about their page builders whereas businesses are expecting a CMS (content management system). In this ecommerce podcast we look at valid use cases for when investment in a specialist CMS is required because native page builders can’t satisfy the business needs. Please note by native page builder, we mean the inbuilt page builders on market leading ecommerce platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, Big Commerce and Shopware.

We cover what native page builders can do and when the page builder is sufficient for an ecommerce business, what page builders can't do that a specialist CMS can and how you can meaningfully evaluate a CMS to build the business case for investment.

It has been a challenging year for many ecommerce businesses due to tougher trading conditions following bumper years in 2020 and 2021. Some verticals like furniture have struggled to hit sales budgets as customers cut back on spend, and businesses are reevaluating the need to invest in capital projects, as well as tightening the opex purse strings.

With this in mind, we're exploring what can be justified reasons for investing in capital projects for ecommerce during an economic downturn. We ask is there a justification to invest during tough trading times, what are the risks of undertaking a big tech project during a recession and how do you mitigate risk and make the right decision?