episode Transcript
Podcast Introduction
You’re listening to “Gateway to E-Commerce,” a podcast by ClearSale. In this series, global ecommerce leaders discuss challenges, best practices, new tech, and secrets to success. And now your hosts, Sarah and Denise.
Denise Purtzer
Hello and welcome. This is Denise, and I’m here with Sarah today. Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s really exciting to both of us. It’s ecommerce strategies and how to choose the right ecommerce platform for your business. If you want to know about our team and who is recording these podcasts, you can go back to episode one, if you haven’t listened to that yet, where we go over a thorough introduction. But for this purpose, we want to jump right into it and talk about ecommerce platforms. It’s something that is near and dear to me. And something that I deal with pretty much every single day with our partnerships, but also, as we relate to merchants, it’s something that comes up with questions on “What platform do I choose?” and all these sorts of things. And while we might not have all the answers today, we’re going to have a lot of thought-provoking things to think about and hopefully steer you in the right direction so that you can make some decisions about ecommerce platforms.
Sarah, one of the things that I think is interesting to think about is the fact that so much has changed with ecommerce in the last few years, and thinking about the customer experience, what are some of the things that you’ve noticed that have changed?
Sarah Elizabeth
Of course. We have all this increasing volume, too, with this coronavirus situation. But not only that, I think that companies are realizing that customer service is key for their brands. So they’re investing more and more in personalization and putting the right products in front of the right people and integrating their ecommerce channels with their brick-and-mortar stores. So they are understanding more and more that people don’t go to online stores and start to make the decision there.
I think that most of the things that are changing are around customer experience. Companies cannot compete on price. Only if they are huge corporations like Amazon, Alibaba, others like that, will they always basically lead on pricing. So companies have to differentiate on customer experience.
Denise Purtzer
That’s so true when you talk about that personalization piece. It’s funny, because it’s almost impossible these days to forget about something in a cart or something that you might’ve viewed or put into a cart prior because it comes back to find you, whether it’s on Facebook or whatever the case might be.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yes
Denise Purtzer
If merchants are doing their job right, that is. So that’s definitely part of the whole ecommerce thing and making sure that you’ve got those marketing tools to support it. And thinking about that experience checking out, too, making it as fast as possible. I came from the payment side of things, and whether it’s alternative payments; people paying with the buy now, pay later type thing; breaking it up into many payments; or offering a wallet so all you have to do is log in and check out. All of these things come into play in making that a better customer experience as well.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah, that’s true. Everything nowadays has to be easy, and people are doing more and more mobile shopping, and we always have new social media. People are switching from different social media platforms. So now I have TikTok, and a few months ago, it was all about Instagram. A few years ago, it was all about Twitter, and the advertisement and things that you have to do for each one of them is different as well. But at the same time, everything has to be integrated.
Denise Purtzer
That’s so true. And that’s that visual aspect as well, right? With TikTok, it’s video, and being able to present your product in a more animated way is also an interesting aspect. Given that, I think that one question that comes to our team on the partnership side quite often is “I’m not happy with my platform anymore, and I need to move on to a different platform.” I think that there are many questions that pop up in our mind as we get this question. It’s very similar to trying to choose somebody for someone to date. It’s a very personalized approach, and it involves many, many factors. So what are some of the things that you think people should consider when they’re considering moving to a new platform or going online in general for the first time and selling online?
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah, I think that first of all, we have to understand there is no one size fits all. So that’s what is interesting about what you’re going to talk about today. We are going to help merchants to go over the questions that they should ask themselves and also to their platforms to make sure that the platform fits their needs, but you know that the needs are different. So there are companies, they sell high-value items only in the United States. There are companies that are based in Australia sending to the U.S. markets. There are companies that are sending to only New Mexico. So there are different aspects that we’ll have to pay attention to.
So this varies from how much they’ll cost, the flexibility that you are going to have, how much you should know about technology in order to be able to not only to install the platform, but also to keep it up to date. So there are many, many factors that we are going to talk about today. But it’s not a one size fits all, which is also what makes it a little bit harder. But I think we have good tips to give people that they should be thinking about.
Denise Purtzer
I agree. I agree. And really, I think one of the first things you have to think about is that technology piece that you hinted on and how tech-savvy is your team, or how large of a team do you have? There is the opportunity to get outsourced developers to build your website and to build the different apps or applications that might tie into the ecommerce platforms to do other functionality, like marketing efforts or taxation on your product per correct locale. Or payments or all these sorts of things that you have to consider.
So I think you have to think about that piece and think about how much you want to outsource, how much you want to invest as well, or how much you’re able to invest, because starting out, you could spend as little as $29 to get up and running with something like a Shopify account, a basic version. But you could also be in the business of an enterprise-level merchant who might be investing $100,000 a year to get up and running with a more enterprise, more sophisticated, and a more tailored and customized approach.
So when you look at that span of things from $30 to $100,000, on up, it’s obviously a lot in between that most people fit into, right? And I think that that’s the first piece, is how much do you want to plug and play? And how much do you want to customize? And how able are you to support that on the back end technologically?
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah. And the key question that comes together is, how much do you plan to grow? Because you can choose an easy path now and have everything plug and play and a standard solution, but maybe one year from now, you’re going to be much bigger and then, you’re going to have new needs. And you don’t want to switch to a new platform. So you always have to build your store. And now, thinking about the future, especially in ecommerce, which is an industry that is growing at 20% per year, depends on the country, can grow even more. It depends on what you’re selling — you can grow even faster than that.
So always have in the back of your mind that you are going to keep growing, and by how much. It’s really important, so we can make the decisions now that are going to give you flexibility in the future.
Denise Purtzer
That’s so true. I mean, there’s a story that comes to mind, and it’s the Kylie Jenner lip kits that she launched a couple of years ago on Shopify. And it’s one of those things where nobody really knew how well it would take off. She had a big social following, and, of course, she’s a star. So there were all those factors to be considered. But going into that, they weren’t sure if they were able to sell the product and how quickly. And now, I believe it’s an over billion-dollar business that she’s involved with that was really born and raised overnight online.
So it’s pretty amazing how fast things can explode. And I think that’s really important to be able to consider the whole aspect of that growth, because not everybody can think five years ahead. It’s a lifetime when it comes to ecommerce, and you do have to put that into play a little bit, because one of the problems that occurs is people can outgrow their system. And so they’ve invested all this time and money, and then it’s nonexistent and doesn’t support what they need two years down the road, or eight months down the road or whatever the case might be.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah. So we have some platforms that have enterprise versions. So we have Shopify and Shopify Plus. We have the new Magento. So I think one important aspect here is that, maybe if we can explore a little bit more, it’s about the different kinds of platforms that we have or versions that we have.
So the self-hosting solutions and things like that. So why do you think it’s important for people to think about that angle?
Denise Purtzer
Yeah, so generally what I share with merchants is that self-hosted means that it’s very easy to plug and play. Everything is taken care of for you hosting-wise, meaning all your templates and everything else are out there taken care of and provided for you in one place. You don’t have to go to a hosting provider and pay additional hosting fees to make that happen, nor do you have to create those templates and things on your own. But with that comes less flexibility generally, right?
So it can’t be easy and be very customizable. Those are two different sides of the spectrum. So generally, you’re going to have templates that other people might have, or you might have the inability to add some of the functionality that you want, whether it’s a cross sell or an upsell, or maybe, if you’ve got thousands and thousands of products, that sort of system isn’t going to work as well for you. Then you might have to look at more of a customizable solution, which would be like a Salesforce Commerce Cloud or a Magento, Magento Enterprise. They have two different layers to their system, which is owned by Adobe now. So you get all that functionality as well that you have access to. And those sorts of things that you want to consider. So the hosted would be Shopify, BigCommerce, 3D Cart, those types of platforms.
Sarah Elizabeth
And when you talk about growth, another thing that we have to think about is not only the growth in volume, but also the mix of your products, because what is common, especially nowadays, the companies — they are launching niche products. You might start selling a few items that you guys can use, and then you want to grow really fast for your categories and new markets. So this is also another important aspect that you have to think about when choosing a platform, like how many SKUs can you have? How is the platform going to charge you for that? If we are going to have to pay extra fees to add new items or things like that. So it’s another aspect that merchants have to think about.
Denise Purtzer
That’s so true, and even just the responsiveness of the platform. So if it’s something that is out of your control for creating templates and things like that, is this something that’s instantaneous, or do you have to wait on your platform or somebody from your platform to offer support and test and launch something for you? One horror story that comes to mind is a company that has lots of products, they have thousands of thousands of products, and they’re switching them out constantly. So they’ve got very specialized pages and they’ve got ... it’s a type of jewelry that’s very, I guess it’s like collected. And so people are always waiting for latest releases and their limited releases. So all of these things come to mind when they’re launching their site, because they have to have special promo pages that disappear at certain times and things like that, or maybe only allows certain VIP members in earlier.
So all this functionality has to be built. So they had invested probably close to $100,000 into a platform. They were working to launch by the holiday season last year, and it came up to two weeks before the holiday season was really about to start. And the platform wasn’t able to get everything out the door and put up like they needed to. So essentially they had to revert back to their old system, without a lot of the functionality that they were building in new, and really had to revamp things marketing-wise and everything to support all the changes at the very last minute. So those are the types of horror stories that you don’t want to become part of and make sure that you avoid.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah, that’s terrible. Another thing that I was thinking about here is when you’re choosing your platform, maybe you can start with everything that the platform offers, but as you grow, you might want to integrate other solutions or platforms. So let’s say you might want to start with a payment gateway that offers everything in one package, or offers payments only to the United States. But maybe in the future, you want to sell internationally. Maybe your tax is going to be more complex. So it’s also important to look at the whole ecosystem from your platform. Which partners can integrate with your platform? What are the alternative solutions that you have?
So you make sure that you don’t get stuck with only features that the platform can offer. Because again, there are needs that might be specific for you. You might be selling digital goods and your needs are going to be different versus someone selling physical goods. You might be marketing to senior people. Then your store has to have the user-friendly aspect that you have to look at differently than if you’re selling to teenagers.
So there are many, many aspects that you have to think about when it comes to how much customization you can have. And I think this goes back to the partners that the platform has. And Denise knows that well, because she’s working the whole ecosystem of ecommerce. So we know that there are many, many solutions out there for different kinds of needs and different kinds of merchants.
Denise Purtzer
That’s so true. And I mean, you can’t just take it out of the box and say, “Okay, well, they’ve got payments built in, so that’s going to work for me.” Or they say, “We’ve got fraud screening built into the payment. So that’s going to work for me.” So it’s something that comes to mind, along those lines, are, somebody has an out-of-the-box payment systems, they’ve got fraud filters built in. So, a merchant thinks, “I don’t have to worry about a thing.”
Well, a lot of times, those are targeted to very specific verticals, like apparel at a $70 price point. And if you’ve got something like jewelry, or you’ve got a CBD product that has its own different levels of risk and types of buying patterns and all those sorts of things, then A, the payment company might not accept you because of the vertical that you’re in, then you’re out of luck there. And B, that built-in fraud screening isn’t always the ideal, because it’s not catered to your type of product or vertical.
So you have to dig a little bit deeper and figure out what you need to do. And we were talking earlier and you had brought up forums as a great way to find that out. And I think that’s so true. A lot of these systems have forums attached to them and the merchants can go on and talk to other merchants or get feedback from vendors and ask questions specifically. You can also read reviews on the different apps and different types of add-ons that are available within these ecosystems to make sure that you’re making the right decisions. And the good thing is there’s usually more than one choice. These add-ons, for instance, you could build the base and get the add-ons to work with you in that moment for the types of functionality that’s needed as you grow.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah, that’s true. And you mentioned CBD, which reminds me, it’s about something that is interesting or important for high-risk merchants. And maybe you don’t consider yourself a high-risk merchant, but some platforms, they are going to put you under the high-risk category, and some of the things that they offer or promise, especially under the payments and fraud area, they might not be true for you. Or, for example, there are some platforms or gateways that they do offer chargeback guarantees. But if you are a high-risk merchant, they’re not going to accept you for that.
So it’s always important to make sure that you qualify for all of the features that you are seeing being advertised. So some payment gateways and fraud solutions are only going to offer you some of these features after being with them for a few months. Or they are never going to accept you at all, if they’re considering the countries that you sell into or the category they’re in. So that’s why this aspect of forums is also important, because not everything is clear. And sometimes you have to find all the terms or conditions of the platforms or add-ons, or what you can take, what can be applicable for you and what is not.
Denise Purtzer
I think from a pure marketing perspective too, this is always fascinating to think about, and you know a ton about this, Sarah. The whole search engine optimization piece of it, and being able to market. I think merchants oftentimes forget, especially if they’re in a brick-and-mortar situation only, that once they enter ecommerce, it becomes a much larger playing field and they could be selling all over the world if they allow sales there. And then, they can find different marketing niches.
I had a friend who opened up a business that was selling this dryer, he invented it. It was to dry Camelback bladders for those drinking systems so they don’t get moldy.
Sarah Elizabeth
Which is useful.
Denise Purtzer
It is very useful. And he found out, I mean, he was just selling it and trying to do things locally, and things. Went online and started finding out that Germany was a huge target audience for him, because German mindset is don’t throw it away. Don’t buy something new when you can utilize and recycle and continue to use that same product. God bless them.
So, he found out that that was a target audience that he had. And then he started building out functionality specific to that audience. So it’s really interesting the paths that you could find along the way, and sometimes you don’t even know you’re going to go there. But search engine optimization is one thing, too. And not every platform, especially five, six, seven years ago, had that functionality built in. Merchants didn’t understand the importance of that. But then, as large marketplaces and things opened up, they had to get more competitive and find ways to drive traffic. So, any thoughts on that?
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah, this is where you can talk about marketing for ecommerce for hours, but there are some simple aspects that people don’t think about. So can you think about how important is the quality of the search bar on your store? Because people have to find the product that you’re selling, and they’re not always going to use the exact terms that you put as the name of the product. So there is intelligence there.
We can talk about the multiplatform advertisements. So how can you know that that person that is on Instagram is the same one from Facebook and the same user on G-mail? So we can advertise to all the platforms at the same time. How can you leverage the search terms from people? So how can you do remarketing? So how can you know that someone was looking for, I don’t know, for a computer on Google? And then you can find that same person on Instagram and put some ads for that person.
And you always have to remember that ecommerce, it’s a lot about, like, you’re not necessarily needing what you’re buying. Sometimes people buy because they’re bored, because they have free time, because they want to cope with something. So the advertising aspect, it’s really important for ecommerce merchants. And we see a lot of merchants, they invest a little bit on Google and they skyrocket their sales, which is also funny on the other hand, because — not funny, sad actually — because the moment that you can start to get attention from advertisement, you also get attention for fraudsters.
Denise Purtzer
That’s so true.
Sarah Elizabeth
So, it’s also something that you always have to have in the back of your mind. And if you are seeing a huge spike on sales it’s because my ad strategy, are all these legit sales? Or do I have lots of fraud over this year? Because they know that if you’re growing fast, probably you have some flaws in your system because any company, when it’s growing too fast, has its issues. It’s hard to keep a company on track of everything. So it’s another aspect that you have to think about.
Denise Purtzer
So much to think about, for sure.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah. Then it can go back to the add-ons and partners. You don’t have to necessarily do everything by yourself. There are lots of companies that are specialists on what they do. So you can outsource payments to a company that specializes on payments. You can outsource your marketing to a company that does that, and maybe you want to do that from the beginning. So if you think about the core strategy of your company, maybe in the future you might want to move some of these departments to in-house teams. But what we are seeing that what’s working more and more nowadays, it’s having companies that are specialized on what they do so merchants can focus on the core strategy. Like, what is my next target market? What is the solution? What I’m sending today, is it going to be valuable for the market in two years? Do I have advantages if I open a legal entity in another country or things like that?
So it’s a lot that I have to think on your core business, so it can be overwhelming if you start to think about all these different aspects of marketing and payments, the logistics, but the good thing is that they are good companies, and that integrate really well with the main platforms that you can use.
So that’s also another interesting aspect. You don’t want to choose a platform that it’s isolated, unless it’s a niche platform. So, we have cases of platforms that it’s specific for a market, and Denise knows a lot about them. That’s one case, but when we talk about general merchandise, you want to work with one of the big ones that are well integrated in the whole ecosystem, right?
Denise Purtzer
That’s absolutely true. And one of the niche platforms that just came to mind is Punchmark. They’re a partner of ours that works specifically in the jewelry industry. And that industry right now is struggling so much because they do rely so much in that brick and mortar and that local one-to-one interaction in order to sell a really high-priced item with a lot of emotion tied to it a lot of times — like a diamond engagement ring, as an example. And so there are platforms that cater specifically to the jewelry industry, like Punchmark, that provide all kinds of expertise specific to jewelry industry. And so if you’ve got a very specific product, look at those niche products or those niche platforms too, for sure.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah. But on the other hand, if you sell electronics, which is one of the biggest categories on ecommerce, you don’t need that, right?
Denise Purtzer
Correct.
Sarah Elizabeth
Electronics, general fashion — these are big categories where you don’t need a specific platform.
Denise Purtzer
Correct. Correct. You might want some specific tools so that you can work to show it off better, or making sure that your SEO is better so that you’re showing up when you’re selling iPhones versus everybody else selling iPhones, because the product is the product. There is no point of differentiation. That’s where pricing and being top of mind become more important or fast shipping — those sorts of things.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yes. And another aspect that I think is important, we always have to think, “What if things go wrong? What are we going to do?” So an aspect that I had to think about is what kind of support can you have from your platform? If you’re going to have 24-hour support, if you can call them, if you have to open a ticket? And then, again, you can go back to the forums and see the experience of other merchants. Do they usually get the care that they need? Do they have a direct line with the platform? Maybe they’re not going to give you that on entry level, but maybe as you grow, you’re going to have a direct line with them. And before that, you have to stay with online FAQs and things like that. So this is also another area where I think it’s important for merchants to investigate.
Denise Purtzer
Very true. Very true. And just ask your peers. A lot of times it’s getting that input, finding out people that are selling similar products. There are all kinds of groups on LinkedIn, on Facebook that are specific to the ecommerce platforms and even vertical-specific, or women-to-women entrepreneurs— all these sorts of things where you can really mesh with people that you feel comfortable with and ask them those tough questions outside of the realm of a salesy environment. So you’re getting some true input.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, because again, this can be overwhelming. We know that, but there are people in the industry, and the good thing is that they are many, many stores out there. So you have people to ask, too. So it’s not a new market, so we were talking earlier that how many stores we have seen each month, new stores, Denise?
Denise Purtzer
Shopify itself sees 60 to 70,000 a month these last few months. And they’ve got 1.6 million stores that are live on their platform. And that’s one out of, I think G2 says there’s 370 ecommerce platforms available out there as of May this year.
Sarah Elizabeth
We’re definitely not alone.
Denise Purtzer
It’s a very big number. I don’t know if anybody has their finger on the pulse of that exact number, and it’s growing dramatically right now because people have some extra time on their hands, potentially if they’re not working. And they’re thinking about other creative ways to make money. So there are people who dabble in ecommerce and are able to do it part-time on weekends and evenings and then build it into a full-time business. So it is what you make of it. The time you put in is what you’ll get out of it. And that research up front, I think, is what’s so important — to go over the things that we talked about. Consider where you want to be in the next five years, not just where you are now, and consider the types of products you’re selling, the types of functionality you want, how much you want to spend. All of these sorts of things really add up to give you an overview of what you want to choose then for an ecommerce platform.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yes. And also remember that it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s not just you have a few items and you can start sending it. You have to coordinate the inventory. You have to think about why people are going to buy from your store and not from another one. So why do we see that might be interesting for people who just want to test the waters working as drop shippers, which is when you don’t own the inventory for your store. So it’s just for small merchants, if you are unsure if you want to be in this market, you are unsure about how does it work? Am I going to have enough time? This is what I like to do? You might consider starting as a drop shipper. There are solutions for that inside the big platforms, such as Shopify or BigCommerce. There are also specific communities for that, like Drop Shipping Lifestyle Group. So this is also something that, if you’re not sure if you want to start on this industry, this is something that you might consider.
Denise Purtzer
That’s a great suggestion. They even have classes around how to become a drop shipper on Shopify, like Drop Shipping Lifestyle teaches that and gives you all of the tools out of the box that you need. And so it really holds your hand through that process and allows you to understand how to become an online marketer.
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah. It’s a good side of not being alone and the bad sides that you have lots of competition.
Denise Purtzer
Yeah, yeah. But generally the drop shippers will sell larger ticket items that are heavy and might not be inventory at other places, like wine cooler cases or hot tubs or steam showers or all these sorts of things that are high ticket items. So you’ve got a very specific audience that you’re working with, a high ticket item. So a little bit more margin in there to pull from.
Sarah Elizabeth
People might be amazed if they realize how many bounce houses are sold every month, for example. We have lots of clients that sell bounce houses, and some of the specific items. Usually you have a store with just a few SKUs, but they are very specific and okay, as Denise was saying.
Denise Purtzer
Getting creative during these times, right?
Sarah Elizabeth
Yeah.
Denise Purtzer
Well, great. I think we’ve learned that there are countless ways to evaluate and choose an ecommerce platform. You just have to make sure that you’re investing enough time into your launch to account for that customization, the testing, the tweaking that’s needed that you have a successful launch. And then obviously we would be failing if we didn’t remind you that security is about more than safely handling sensitive data. That’s something that we didn’t get into all the compliance and stuff, but hiring and outsourcing those partners to make sure that they’re doing everything according to the legal and security reasons are so important as well.
So if you’d like to know more about how to prevent ecommerce fraud, visit our website. We have a ton of resources dedicated to this very topic, as well as lots of other things that we’ve covered today. And that said, www.Clear.Sale. And if you have any questions, you can always reach out to us at podcast.clear.sale.
Thanks for listening to the Gateway to E-Commerce podcast, where global ecommerce leaders discuss challenges, best practices, tech, and secrets to success. You can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Play. And please don’t forget to leave us a review. Join us next time for episode five, where Rafael is going to share an update on the latest news in ecommerce. See you then!
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For more ecommerce insights, visit us on our website at Clear.Sale.
