Aaron Conant  0:07

Howdy.

Jordan Brannon  0:09

Howdy, howdy.

Aaron Conant  0:12

How's life

Jordan Brannon  0:14

is going well, how are you?

Aaron Conant  0:16

Yeah, we got about 18 inches of snow to pass past 24 hours.

Jordan Brannon  0:21

That way you sound muffled

Aaron Conant  0:23

Yeah. Like a head cold so that's,

Jordan Brannon  0:33

that's a lot of fun. It's I sort of hit or miss. I've heard some team members that are in clients are super cold and others are, you know, just buried in snow. And it seems like it's all over the map.

Aaron Conant  0:47

Yeah, it is. It's just nuts. It, it just keeps Snowing and snowing and snowing. And we shoveled six times yesterday. And then the plows come through at 11 30 at night, the plows come through and you're like, Oh my gosh.

Jordan Brannon  1:05

That's so rough. Are you in one of those cities where it's technically your responsibility to shovel the sidewalk or whatever in front of you?

Aaron Conant  1:12

I am for a little bit longer here.Was there a doc for today?

Jordan Brannon  1:19

Yeah, it should have been shared over. I didn't get it out till this morning.

Aaron Conant  1:25

Maybe let me go look somewhere try to visit it. So yeah, because you're sweating today. I think this is pretty crazy. Pretty crazy.

Jordan Brannon  2:14

We're out here. We are projected to get a little bit of snow today. But it looks like it's just going to be typical Graham in Washington rain. So I don't think we're expecting anything different. So

Aaron Conant  2:27

it's pretty tempered by the ocean, huh? Yeah, we are as far north as I am. Right. I think as far north as we are.

Jordan Brannon  2:37

Yeah, we definitely the this side of the mountains, we've got the Cascade Mountain ranges, sort of traps all the warm ocean airs. And then the eastern side, you can get some pretty meaningful snow dumps and but over there in the plains is just not as much fun because you get nothing else to do with it.

Aaron Conant  2:55

Right? Yeah. Remember, then not to Bend Oregon a couple of times. For just on the other side of the Cascades. And it's like a desert climate. Technically, because the Yeah, they're the rain falls on the west side. But the water will run down on the east side. And so they're like a desert climate. They get like 360 Days of Summer year, but they've got all the water from the mountains it's Feeny.

Jordan Brannon  3:29

I know it's sort of fun. You get some you get some really great kind of climate variances in a pretty pretty short drive. But you know, technically a couple hours you can hit the mountains. Get on the water, the islands, you have those desert climates. You know, we have my grandparents little cabin up towards the ski pass. That's sort of fun to go up in the summer. It's fun to hit in the winter, too. So a win

Aaron Conant  3:52

awesome Hey, guys, thanks for joining still got, you know, five minutes, six minutes before we kick it off. Feel free to hang out just free call to chat here. Or you there's no visual now. Yeah, yep.

We went old school today. went old school.

Speaker 3  4:20

Alright.

Aaron Conant  4:24

Where are you at in? Are you in Illinois? I'm in Kalamazoo. So I'm a couple hours from Chicago and Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Speaker 3  4:30

Where? Yeah, I so the golden rule is in Chicago. I actually live in Northwest Indiana. So in in dire, like, Okay, last before you get into Illinois, but Kalamazoo is nice. I've been there a few times, with the Elgin area. And then we dip over to Kalamazoo and this is from wineries and breweries in that area.

Aaron Conant  4:54

Yeah.So I've worked at Perego and Allegan there for 11 years. Here's the project manager there then did all their EComm. So super familiar. But yeah, so did you get all this snow as well?

Speaker 3  5:11

Yes. Yeah, we got a lot of snow but it's fine Perego. Very. Yeah. The brother of the son that we would always go up to elegant with. We're and his wife actually worked at Perego. It seemed like everybody in Allegan worked at Paradise.

Aaron Conant  5:26

Everybody in Allegan works at Paragon. Who did you know there was a name?

Speaker 3  5:34

Jay Terpstra?

Aaron Conant  5:38

Terpstra he Yes, I know the name just because I was there. Wait. J Charles Terpstra.

Speaker 3  5:49

Charles family, that is Charles and his wife. Also. I think we're cool.

Aaron Conant  5:56

Yeah. So I'm in I'm in Kalamazoo, but my wife was actually an engineer there for a while as well. So yeah, there's lots of like, there's actually like, grandparents, and like, kids. That work there. Right. You've got some that are like 55. And then it's funny when you get like really old. He was like, Oh, my gosh, my grandpa to this. Oh, my God is in the middle of nowhere. It's really funny. Dennis and Erica, they thanks for joining just pre called chit chat here. Not too many people know our game. That's pretty impressive, though.

Speaker 3  6:34

Yeah, we had a buddy who had a lake house up there. So we go and hang up there on the weekends. And otherwise he I never heard of it either. Grand Rapids. Yes. Been there several times, but not so much. Right?

Aaron Conant  6:46

I was just like, where's that out? I was like, see you go north of Kalamazoo to the middle of nowhere. And then you turn left and head 10 miles into nowhere. And you'll end up there Jenny, Kim thanks for joining. Thanks. Happy Thursday. You know Friday he just pre called chit chat before we kick it off here Molly

Molly  7:17

Hello. Hey how are you.

Aaron Conant  7:22

limited drained here the snowy snowy dream. The Snowy snowy dream night Kalamazoo Kalamazoo Michigan the office is like everybody else was in New Jersey Cranford but when I kick this off, like four and a half years ago, that's where we kind of said nope for a year. Hey, Paul, how you doing today? Rhea. Thanks for joining. We still got about two minutes everybody before we kick it off, like the, you know, seems to be although this is just audio so there's, there's no extra time we're going old school, like pre pandemic days, right? Like the good old days. But, you know, there's still perpetual zoom run overs for a lot of people. So we're gonna give it another minute and a half two minutes. Shelby, posher, Tanner, thanks for joining. Again, you have questions along the way you have comments. Just hit star five, a handle go up on the screen and our side here. And we can unmute you and bring you in. We're gonna have to get to the point where we meet you. Hey, John, it's Aaron. How are you? I just sent you a note.

John  8:32

I know I just responded.

Aaron Conant  8:34

Okay, cool oh, I see like, we just launched yet, but anyways, super cool. Hey, Kylie, how are you doing? Hey, Alex.

Alex  8:52

Hey. How's it going?

Aaron Conant  8:55

Awesome. Awesome. This is Aaron BWG. So a minute or so before we kick it off, just pre call chit chat. And when we kick this off where to place everybody on mute? If we don't the the system does it automatically. And surely funny when it does that this too is ever speaking. But if anybody has any questions, hit star five ahead above in the screen. We can on my screen here and we can unmute you and bring you in the conversation. Or you can always email me Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com. That includes, you know, an hour after the call tomorrow next week. Never hesitate to reach out. Hey, Lou, how are you doing today?

Lou  9:37

I'm great, man. How about yourself Aaron?

Aaron Conant  9:39

I'm doing great. So I got a note from Nico. And he was so excited he's a cool man.

Lou  9:54

Yeah, he's one of my favorite for connecting.

Aaron Conant  9:56

Yeah, for sure. All right, my friends, Dennis, how's everybody doing today? Jeremy, how are you my friend? So the announcement was made.

Jeremy  10:11

It was need. It's true.

Aaron Conant  10:13

I had to laugh. I had to laugh when you sent me that note back. I can't tell you every day. I actually I reached him out. I reached out to him on LinkedIn. So we'll see if he if he connects with me. I told him I played on the same field as you only I played the trombone. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy  10:40

So I'm sure he'll be in touch.

Aaron Conant  10:45

I share he remembers the trombone player, you everybody Jeremy from TB, TB. 12. And we're joking just before and because we connect and I was gonna reach out, you know, they reconnect and he's like, I can't tell you if Tom's retiring. So larious still have a couple people dialed in here. Georgia, Maria. Hi, Leanne, Sarah, Tiffany, everybody. Just, you know what, I think we still have more people joining but just in the interest of time, we're gonna go ahead and kick this off. Happy Thursday, everybody. Happy Friday, Eve. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder and managing director at BWG Connect. Were a networking knowledge sharing group 1000s of brands, we networking knowledge share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be. I talk with 30 Plus brands a week to stay on top of those trends, network and knowledge share, would love to have a conversation with anybody on the line today. We'd send you a follow up email to set aside 30 minutes to chat on, you know what's going on in the space helps us decide, Hey, what are the were the topics we should do these events on? Just so everybody knows when do close to 400 of these educational events this year across a variety of topics, anything related to graph consumer, or Amazon or Alibaba or international expansion or metaverse. So check out our website. And you can just look at upcoming events. Everything if you're ever going to be at any of the big shows that are coming up, shop, talk Nikhil West, you know any of those, shoot us a note we'll be there, we're usually doing a small format, networking dinner. And we'd love to have anybody participate in one of those. The last thing is we want these to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time, if you have a question, hit star five will unmute you and bring you into the conversation like you ask. And or the other option is you can just email me questions Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com that includes an hour after call tomorrow next week, I always love getting on a call and, and kind of answering questions in networking as a whole, we are starting this three to four minutes after the hour. And just so everybody knows, we'll wrap up with three to four minutes to go give you plenty of time to get your next meeting without being late. And so with that, you know, it's been super interesting. As we've gotten into, you know, a year and a half, almost two years into COVID. This huge focus right now on direct consumer, people love the growth they see on Amazon, they don't necessarily want to grow at the same rate it is Walmart seems to keep stubbing their toe and there's a huge focus on direct consumer and owning that consumer as a whole. So we've got, like, awesome friend, partner, the network for pretty much since we kicked this off four years ago, working with tons of brands, the network as a whole and just all around, you know, great people, Jordan and the team over Coalition Technologies so Jordans on the line today to kind of walk us through what they're seeing as far as insights across the board. And that's where we got to this Hey, six budget must address strategies for your next eCommerce sites. And so Jordan, I'm gonna kick it over to you if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Coalition Technologies that would be awesome. And then we can kind of jump into the conversation. Sounds good?

Jordan Brannon  14:04

Yeah, sure. Thank you. My name is Jordan Brandon. I'm co founder and president at Coalition been in the eCommerce game for the better part of 20 years now, which is things scary. And primarily been focusing on site properties. Although as a as an agency now, we support a wide range of marketplace customers, but our primary focus has been on comms and eCommerce websites in that time. We've got a team of I think about 260 people today, covering a lot of the major platforms and major technical expertise and marketing expertise that are needed to be successful in eCommerce. So I tend to advertise myself in these calls as someone who knows a little bit about a lot of things but not necessarily everything about the specific things so you know, there's there's always the opportunity if you have follow up questions and and things that maybe I can't answer don't get to specifically today, we can introduce a team member who knows more than I do. And that's part of the value that we bring.

Aaron Conant  15:12

Awesome. And if you're looking for, like, literally any kind of advice, if you're looking for any help in anything direct consumer, don't hesitate to reach out to Jordan, we can connect you after the call, DNS Sr, just great friends, partners, supporters have a ton of brands, the network. So Jordan, where a month into 2022. Now, you know, I think, you know, I'd like to know, you know, what do you think 2022 will look like, in comparison to 2021? Even 2020. Right. It's, it's, so I mean, how did last year finished for you and your teams, your clients? If people want to have a gauge, just kind of a wrap up? And then you know, what it's 2020 to look like?

Jordan Brannon  15:54

Yeah, I mean, at 2021 was really exciting. We saw a lot of the continued growth that we had in 2020. You know, I think sort of the word we talked a lot about internally was, you know, maturity was sort of an emphasis point for a lot of the brands we're working with, you know, many of our new clients were newer, or new to eCommerce and weren't necessarily, you know, accustomed to acclimated to the growth that they saw. That also kind of came along with some of the new challenges we saw from 2020, that kind of carried over into 2021, COVID cycles, sort of common cadence, we saw with some of our clients with staffing, challenges, supply chain issues, you know, some bigger shifts and some advertising network performance. And so there was just kind of a range of things that happened in 2021, that, you know, introduced new wrinkles, but I think for a lot of brands was really successful year, we had a lot of success for clients, and I think most finished strongly up in their eCommerce practice, specifically. And I think, you know, maybe a couple of them did miss expectations compared to 2020. I think, you know, maybe that was tied to a kind of trying to plan around sort of the crazy run of growth we had in the latter half of 2020. In eCommerce. And so even when we did miss expectations are still seeing a lot of growth happen. I think for 2022, maybe, you know, we're anticipating really healthy growth, I think a lot of clients are fairly enthusiastic about what's out there, you know, sort of the inflation conversations and, you know, consumer demand expectations seem to be sort of the ceiling that's out there that a lot of people are talking about, and that may be a TBD of it. But overall, I think there's a good good shot at continuing that growth. In 2022.

Aaron Conant  17:45

No, I was a term maturity. Like it better. I was saying, like, Hey, we're on like, digital 3.0. Not to be confused with web 3.0. But like, digital 3.0, where in the past, it's been like, especially I think we're just saying people are like, Hey, I got a check box, right? Do I have images? Do I have content? Am I doing, you know, Facebook? Am I doing? It's all these check boxes that were taking place? Right. And so that maturity index definitely seems to be a key word for a lot of eCommerce initiatives. You know, they got kicked off in response to COVID. And then now we're at this point, you know, we're getting the strategy, how does everything, you know, connect together? What is how does that form into the next evolution of the eCommerce site as a whole? You know, a lot of companies revamped, you know, relaunched or launched, updated, you know, eCommerce experiences of the past few years. So, what should they be considering? You know, next, right? What's the shelf life at this point in time, especially with the ease at which people can, you know, jump around from platform to platform, you know, without it being a 24 month initiative? You know, what's the shelf life as an eCommerce site? And what should they be considering to do next? Yeah.

Jordan Brannon  19:00

Yeah, I mean, I think maybe the latter half the question I we use your are recommending, you know, at least, you know, an annual design and user experience, update, data driven, you know, take a look at what you're seeing from your audience, your sales and marketing channels, you know, do some competitor research, but, you know, I think sort of at least an annual meaningful, you know, refresh on on an eCommerce site as appropriate. doesn't have to necessarily be a really big effort. But I do think brands should be putting a more concerted focus in on their site experiences, that the content that they're hosting their the visuals, at least once per year, you know, sometimes we'll encounter and you know, my econ director or marketer, who's sort of thinks, Well, this is a product refresh, that's sort of what we're talking about. It's really not, you know, new product new photography doesn't necessarily equate to a meaningful update. And so, we really are recommending with our clients at least once a year, spend some time you know, go through review your data review your marketing channels, salesperson formance and then evaluate what your data is telling you and think about, you know, is there performance gains? Do I understand why is there performance erosion? To understand why, and then use that to drive some meaningful updates that year?

Aaron Conant  20:12

Yeah, so what are the things that you recommend and then looking at, you know, as a whole, because I do like, I like some of the highlights, which is just replacing the imagery doesn't count. But, you know, there's the other side is like, people hate it when the grocery store like reorganizes, where things are at, right, and it gets a little bit frustrating. But I like what you said, which is data driven. So what are the things that you'd remember, you can kind of recommend looking at, across?

Jordan Brannon  20:44

Yeah, usually, I mean, we key in on Device Centric reporting. And this is, you know, sort of the the value out of having a.com site experiences, you know, some of the different other places that you can be running eCommerce are going to have fairly limited insights into the actual user experience, and what that looks like, or feels like to a customer at a data level. And so I'm going to check those Device Centric reports. You know, most of our audiences today that we're working with for clients are pretty segmented by device type. mobile platforms iterate very frequently. You know, if you look at sort of the trend line for device turnover for mobile customers, there still is really healthy churn in terms of what devices they're using, obviously, there's been some bigger operating system updates browser updates in the past 12 months. And, you know, so you want to be checking there, I think, you know, you can see real stable solid audience categories drop quickly in terms of performance based on some of that technology, turnover hardware. And so, you know, if you, you know, see something and you kind of want to dig into some specific spot, that's probably where I'd start. Also, you know, look at your marketing channels, a lot of marketing channels tend to end up driving traffic to different locations on your sites, you know, if you're a company that really depends on product feeds, individual product rankings, you look at those product page experiences. And so you can go through and you can kind of say, like, well, here's, here's sort of the key landing pages, key landing page groupings or templates, you know, that, you know, either underperforming or over performing, kind of considering what we're doing there, and then sort of look at, you know, how do you respond. And so, if you happen to have a couple of channels that are really big and important to you, in terms of driving traffic and driving revenue, you know, get more granular in them and their particular, you know, content that seems to be more compelling in terms of driving a conversion of better, you know, average order value, and better setting customer expectations. You can see a lot of opportunities for those refreshes, just coming out of some some real basic and relatively accessible research.

Aaron Conant  22:47

Know, awesome. So those type of reviews refreshes, do they help extend the life of an eCommerce site as a whole? Is that kind of, you know, how you see people utilize utilizing it? And then another question comes in around app rationalization. So let's tackle this, you know, extending your life eCommerce site, and then we'll jump into another question that comes in.

Jordan Brannon  23:09

Yeah, so maybe the first one. Yeah, I mean, in theory, if you are doing these refreshes, or you are doing a lot of housekeeping and maintenance, and sort of the worst situations that we step into Ra, a three year decline, and nobody seems to have really figured out why. And sometimes it really comes back to a lack of that refresh. You know, you know, according to the marketing director, you know, or whoever is owning that particular channel, nothing's changed, you know, they're kind of doing the same thing, but we're seeing sort of a decline. And, you know, again, sometimes that's underlying technology and templates that aren't working. So, yeah, do those, you know, refreshes, you know, look at sort of maintenance activities along the way, you're usually in a lot better position where you won't reach sort of at critical breakpoint with an Ecommerce site and you can extend its life quite a bit longer. The other benefit, I think, is that they do tend to just preempt bigger security issues, which I think a lot of eCommerce brands need to be more cognizant, cognizant of, and can really also help sort of expedite a future relaunch, or rebuild, you know, usually when you do those annual refreshes, there's more up to date information about the how and why behind your build today. And that can make sort of the project of replatform or recite launch a lot easier to achieve. Since everything is more current, you know, your plugins or extensions, your theme, your framework, your your tech stack, things like that.

Aaron Conant  24:26

Also, now, even elaborate a little bit on this app rationalization, you know, which says, you know, using this as a vital part, and how often should it be done? And this is gonna highlight, you know, if you think, you know, from two years ago, the number of new players in TAC that's come in to enhance the site experience or, you know, whether it's, you know, payments or site experience or personalization or search or, you know, recurring payments or subscriptions, you know, just a million different that have popped up, like Have you seen that part of this as well? And then how often should people be looking at that to kind of, you know, you know, trim out the pieces that they don't need anymore? Yeah, this is

Jordan Brannon  25:10

probably the biggest liability spot for most eCommerce brands is app rationalization extensions, plugins customizations. What I mean by that is that it just sort of looking at the unexpected sinkholes in eCommerce today, especially ones that can be really expensive. A lot of it is app driven, extension driven. And there's a few categories that falls into one is liability and compliance issues. The second is security. And then third is performance, like performance. And so sort of liability issues. Apps, especially in some of the larger app ecosystems are not necessarily privacy compliant, they may not be that secure, they may not be accessible. So you could be paying for sort of an accessible extension, but you have additional apps that aren't covered by that accessibility tool, you could go through a process of an ABA audit, you add a new app, all of that work sort of goes out the window, that can open up, you know, again, you know, actual liability in terms of, you know, lawsuits, or at least demand letters. Again, sort of thinking about if you're in a particular region with more restrictive privacy rulings, I know California, New York, EU, then in most of the West Coast, now, actually, in a lot of the Northeast, you can be in a situation where your app is, is is a big liability for you. And so that's sort of one part, again, mentioned security as being a potential risk. Again, often these app developers are much smaller than the Shopify is of the road. And so their security practice may not be as mature, there's sort of an assumption that if it's published in the App Store, that there's a higher standard of security. And that's, again, not always the case, especially in the larger app markets, like those from Magento, or WooCommerce, or Shopify, you can run into issues where, you know, the app becomes compromised, and your store becomes compromised. As a result. Shopify has been sort of trying to clean that up a bit within their app marketplace, because there's so many, but it's harder to spot. So that's kind of other than performance, if you kind of look at what's making your site slow. A lot of times it is those those apps and those extensions that are bogging you down. And so going through that app rationalization process a lot more frequently keeps your store clean, secure, and quick loading. When you add an app, one thing that I would really advocate for that a lot of brands don't think about is, you know, have sort of a process to sort of audit that after it's gone live, you know, have a calendar reminder, something we are checking back on that, to really evaluate if it's finished, and also have sort of a testing methodology did this after we want, as we see uplift in conversion rates? Do we see, you know, more time on site to see people engaging with new products? What was the benefit of it, and have some way of evaluating that when you install, that way you can quantify the value you're getting out of it. And again, that becomes really easy to make those rationalizations on the fly rather than sort of like, well, now we have to redesign, we still need this app or not, that can be a problem.

Aaron Conant  28:12

Awesome. Was it? So quick? Like, is that like projects that you do for brands as a whole? Can they come in? And just Okay, awesome. Yeah,

Jordan Brannon  28:23

yeah, part of any number of our audits as usually, as you know, we will start working with brands as a result of, you know, a demand letter for ADA, when they start working with them as a result of a core with vital issue. Security issue, you know, something like that can be kind of an introduction, and, or just a more general sort of project scoping, evaluating apps and extensions almost always comes up as a really high priority evaluation. All right. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  28:48

Awesome. Love it. So turning that Gail, kind of the concept of a bigger website redesign a replatform update? You know, how often are you recommending that clients? You know, complete that effort as a whole? Right, the bigger?

Jordan Brannon  29:04

Yeah, I mean, right now, we're, you know, typically just, I think, actually little shy of four years is sort of what's happening when I first started working, you know, in sort of this agency role. You know, our first clients, you know, that we were beginning to bring in for redesign work had been with their platforms for six years plus, and that's basically incremented down every year since then. I think part of that is because it's like you mentioned earlier, it's pretty easy to do, and there's sort of the there's a lot more institutional knowledge about how to do it. And so I think a lot of brands are moving fairly quickly. Now. You know, we have some significant holdouts on that four year timescale, on average, but um, I think overall, there are some things that help accelerate that,

Aaron Conant  29:47

I think, I think actually just really good. I think it was a giant sigh of relief. I just got an email like, thank goodness, I think you're thinking that had to be every one or two years. So they're like, Oh, thank goodness, like the full blown thing is only every four years now. So anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but

Jordan Brannon  30:01

Yep, yeah, I mean, there are some underlying assumptions I've liked that at first is, you know, the website platform really does need to be kept up to date, you really are extending the life of that when you are doing some regular work and maintenance on it. And so it's kind of like a car, you put oil in it periodically, and stuff and the road, which is something I had to talk to my wife about a few times. But second behind that there's sort of needs to be regular maintenance and upkeep on sort of the template and themes that are being used. So you know, you have your underlying software with, you know, Shopify or big commerce, they have frameworks that they're doing Magento, you know, that they're providing upgrades, those have to be updated, you also need to make sure your template or theme is being updated. And then as we already touched on, you know, you're doing some maintenance on your plugins or extensions, custom scripting you're doing. And if you aren't doing those three things, then, you know, a bigger overhaul may be needed sooner, you know, usually, as a result of some exposure of the one of those gaps in site goes down sites compromised, you know, maybe issues, privacy issues, things like that. The other thing that may drive sort of a faster change that you see at your website platform make a bigger update to its core software, you know, you may want to evaluate, you know, sort of a faster timetable. Shopify just announced this online stores 2.0 initiative unite this past year, and a lot of Shopify merchants could see a pretty good value in overhauling their kind of underlying theme to take advantage of some of the new features and functionality and performance improvements.

Aaron Conant  31:29

Now, Shopify has come up a bunch, but you know, a lot of times, if you are looking at other ones in a Shopify is they're everywhere, right? You know, who else do you guys work with? What do you recommend? You know, in Why do you work with them? What should be in kind of a solution set for people as a whole?

Jordan Brannon  31:50

Yeah, most commonly, we work with Shopify, big commerce, in Shopify and Shopify Plus, you know, sometimes people separate them in their heads, but we work with both big commerce WooCommerce. And just by Store account, to a lesser extent, we work with Adobe Magento, suite commerce, Salesforce commerce cloud. So we work with a good handful, again, to sort of the advantage of, you know, team of 260s, we can we can staff in a different variety things. You know, our actual sort of our origin story was, you know, we actually came out of a coalition of the agency came out of our own eCommerce efforts. During college, we were doing drop shipping businesses, through Ecommerce, so some b2b categories, I would start blogging about the experience, you know, producing content and how to use some of the different platforms that are available, then. We started getting inquiries about well, helping choose eCommerce platforms build eCommerce platforms market them. So that was where we kind of kicked off. You know, so platform selection is still one of our major strengths, probably one of the most frustrating things, to our eCmmerce platforms we do work with, we're talking to a lot of merchants each month. And we're not sort of all in on Shopify, or all in on big commerce, they're all in on Magento. And so that kind of frustrates our partners there. But it does allow us to make a better recommendation, I think, to the merchants we do work with. So we call ourselves platform independent. Although we're not platform agnostic, we really do think that there are some platforms that are better and will work better for particular merchants.

Aaron Conant  33:20

So, you know, dialing back into, you know, kind of our topic, what's your first, you know, big strategy that brands need to consider for their next eCommerce site as a whole?

Jordan Brannon  33:32

Yeah, I and this one is probably going to be, I don't know, maybe a little surprising, maybe even seem a little off topic. But just the, you know, again, from the perspective of an agency owner and seeing sort of the, the biggest problems we're seeing with, with clients, either new or existing, I'd probably flag things that are tied back to staffing related, I think, you know, looking at all of the feedback we got from from merchants last year, either ones we're working with in an ongoing basis during the project for just talking to one of the biggest issues is staffing in terms of keeping eCommerce growth happening. Most of the brands we talked to are what we call unicorn dependent. Now there's one or two key legacy players that are, are driving most of the things that are happening, and perhaps that's who's on the call today. You know, from an eCommerce site perspective, they hold almost all of the keys to the castle, they hold the sort of the institutional knowledge about why certain skeletons exist and why certain things were added. And because of sort of the turnover we're seeing in sort of the market as people you know, take new opportunities, you know, are shifting from brand to brand or kind of looking at their own professional growth is staffing becomes a real concern, especially as you want to grow. I think about 30% of our clients left last year sort of reported staffing turnover in sort of key eCommerce teams. And that was pretty disruptive. I think, you know, for a lot of them, they felt that actually costing them dollars. So I think kind of putting that in the form of an Ico commerce sites strategy, I'd say pick a platform and an approach to a website built that really reduces the challenges of growth that you you're going to face in the present job market. There are a lot of different agencies and contractors and eCommerce specialists, and eCommerce platforms that are advocating for a lot of great new features. But those features and technology often die when the person who onboards them moves on. So a great website, if you're looking at doing a replatform rebuild redesign, it should be approachable and manageable with relatively little training. They should not require specialized technical knowledge or skills to maintain and manage, and great website platforms really should equip you with a solid base of training materials and resources.

Aaron Conant  35:45

Is to tie that back to like real world scenarios, you know, what is? What does that look like for us? You know, what, what actionable steps, what do they look like.

Jordan Brannon  35:55

And then a lot of brands are just not considering that difficulty at all in terms of their replatforming decision, you know, so they, they are sort of going after the new scope, the feature, the performance, the speed, you know, sort of addressing maybe some some organizational gaps, they've seen where they'd like to have more automation. And they're not really prioritizing sufficiently sort of ease of use training accessibility of the the actual administration of the site, you know, platforms that are easy to use as sort of the actionable starting point. Shopify and big commerce are both pretty notable in that regards, compared to a lot of them as part of the reason we've continued to use them. You know, look at training and documentation that's there to support the platform. Shopify is pretty solid as a front runner there, just due to the size of the merchants and affiliates and different audiences that they can attract. Their internal training collateral isn't particularly good. And it's maybe not as thorough as big commerce. But there's a lot of other people who are producing content that helps solve, you know, the common Shopify problems, support teams, how you can access them as another big one, you know, compared to a lot of the bigger platforms you work with, that are maybe you know, more familiar to enterprise brands, Shopify and big commerce tend to have better overall support that's more accessible. Um, it does vary based on your plan tiers. So you know, if you're on a lower level plan support can be more ho hum. You know, I think just from a straight kind of reporting basis, most of our merchants on Big C, big commerce unit specifically will rate their support a bit better than on Shopify. There's some common complaints we see with Shopify, where, you know, system outages and issues are maybe less publicized and promoted than other platforms. So it can be kind of hard to figure out, if your site's down because of something with Shopify or an extension or, you know, something local to you. Adobe Magento tends to be pretty deficient in that regard, getting the kind of kind of common platforms, a lot of that sort of work gets outsourced to a reseller, and vendor. So if you're looking at an Adobe Magento, build, make sure there's a scope of work for that. And then I think finally, I'd sort of say like, you know, you've picked a platform, that's good look at how your site is going to be built. You can build on Shopify, but you can be really extension dependent customization dependent. And so all of that sort of training and onboarding and support, you have become sort of a moot point. And this is also where I put like a really big sort of red flag and asterik around brands who are considering headless. You know, headless is inherently more complex than sort of an eCommerce platform monolith. Unless you have the technical resourcing internally, or maybe through an agency or contractor like us, be careful with sort of just jumping in on headless, headless does a lot of things. And in some ways, if you have the organization to support it, it can actually be more simple. But the system as a whole tends to be more complex. So you're adding in extra pieces you maybe wouldn't have through a monolithic, you know, just on Shopify sort of build. And so I think that would be sort of a big thing. If you're going to scope the new website build, really dive into each of the major sort of business, prioritize components and fashions and features that you want. And make sure that there is something there in that scope and in that plan that you can scale your team with, or you can respond to sort of the disappearance of a unicorn in a timely fashion.

Aaron Conant  39:09

Awesome. No, I love it not definitely not was expecting to save for your first strategy. But it goes in line with a lot of what I'm hearing right now from staffing as a whole, right? If you look at, you know, pretend pandemic, there's 1000 people that really know EECOM now, there's this requirement for 10,000 people because everybody's ramped up their positions. And then there's this giant talent gap. I mean, that's, we have a sister companies for everybody on the line today, if you're looking to hire BW G talent that taps into the network here of digital professionals for and they're just going rampant right now with people looking in hiring, right for the right people for digital roles. So, you know, from your standpoint, how big of an issue do you think that staffing or training or onboarding, you know, problem is three commerce merchants so you kind of have the same boat?

Jordan Brannon  39:57

Yeah, we just on that point, we We do not do staffing. And so I think we're in a situation where they're just that this is sort of a freebie, but I think it does result in kind of millions of dollars in lost investment there.

Aaron Conant  40:17

Yeah, so, you know, how big of an issue, right? Is it for you as a whole? Right? Like, I mean, you. So you said you don't do staffing? Just because I have a cold people take me? Is that mean, you just don't, you know, augment staff, you work alongside them? So them having a competent person for

Jordan Brannon  40:36

your recruiting service? Yeah, yeah, we, we've grown a lot over the last 10 years, but we're not currently offering recruiting services. So if you're looking for but as an agency, we're sort of built there to be able to provide that support. I think, you know, we, we had, you know, probably 80 or so people, we first started talking to you, and we're at 250. Now, you know, I think part of that growth, we've been able to support through an LMS. And things like that are really valuable. Give me a quick mode, I'm gonna go move a dog away from the tour real quickly.

Aaron Conant  41:07

That's okay. No, it's super interesting. Just, you know, everybody on the line today, that that is something that's hit everything from direct consumer, to Amazon to international expansion, is there's this complete gap, and you probably all are feeling it as a whole, where we're waiting for, you know, why there's 10,000 open position, there's only 1500 people who really, really know it well. And just having a lot of patience with that, you know, 8500 person gap is trying to rapidly come up to speed. What we see, you know, over and over again, is now this this competition, it's across the board. It's not just the brands, it's also ad agencies, that Amazon agencies, and then we have a lot of these aggregators, like the THRASS, CEOs and other, you know, people just gobbling up a ton of the talented staff that out there. You know, how are you? How are you addressing, you know, Jordan as a whole, right? Yeah.

Jordan Brannon  42:06

Yeah, sorry about that delay there. Yeah, we really put a big emphasis in sort of the training piece of it. So we developed an internal elements thing I mentioned that before you actually go to it, it's named after my second board, it's Romi LMS comm it's free. You know, we have I think, probably around 700 or so different lessons that are in there built into like 100, different kind of tiered courses. But it's really easy to, again, if you're in a smaller team, you know, there are a number of great sort of learning management software solutions out there. Or you can just get real simple and start to build up training materials in Google Docs and Google Sheets. But that was super critical for us in terms of being able to scale, recording some of what we were doing, why we were doing it, even just in a simple video, you know, allowed us to bring someone in, not have to sort of, again, live with skeletons or unicorns. And it made it really easy for us as sort of we saw in a growth happening, certainly, you mentioned sort of the increased competitiveness and the eCommerce job market. And so that's really been a value add for us we can we can continue to add people, as clients are really looking for more support

Aaron Conant  43:18

Fosso so Romy, ROMYLMS.com so right,

Jordan Brannon  43:22

that's it. Yep. And it's awesome. So you can you can sign up and we won't charge you for it. So it's not a promotion there for me.

Aaron Conant  43:30

Yeah. Awesome. Love it. Very cool. So what is strategy number two, as you look at new website initiatives as a whole, yeah,

Jordan Brannon  43:40

I think omni channel is sort of the big big one that I'm I'm kind of recommending making sure that you are omni channel capable through whatever eCommerce platform you're working with. I think when we sort of looked at a recap of 2021 versus 2020, our fastest growing merchants via eCommerce last year fell into a couple of buckets, you know, merchants who are already doing DTC eCommerce and added in some new retail or wholesale or b2b eCommerce channels, or brands were in you know, more of a b2b focus, and I've done sort of the reverse. A lot of eCommerce platforms that we work with and emphasize tend to have meaningful support and abilities for omni channel brands or brands that want to do omni channel. So I think again, just sort of as creating opportunity and room to grow. If you think about sort of a four year lifecycle. I think that's something you really want to make sure that you have on the table. Even if you're not necessarily planning on going to a traditional sort of omni channel approach. Usually the underlying functionality that is there tends to be beneficial elsewhere. So the API's the integrations, the features. They can be used to personalize your content or your catalog experiences in a greater way. You can integrate into new advertising technology or platforms more capably, you know, before sort of native integrations are present. So there's sort of a an ethos that comes along with an eCommerce platform that is, you know, really kind of aware of the opportunity in omni channel that can be really beneficial and be, you know, somewhat freeing as an eCommerce brand and eCommerce director, where you can look at sort of pivots and opportunity without necessarily trying to wait for someone to build some new extension or something like that. So, and I think a lot of our brands just were pretty surprised by how easy it was to add in b2c, or b2b or a new marketplace for a retailer without really happy to do a big overhaul to their core eCommerce platform when they're on the right ones and see a meaningful increase in revenue outcomes as a result.

Aaron Conant  45:44

So if you were to like, stack rank your big platforms, right, on omni channel capabilities, right? How, how would you do that? Because I have it in my head. But it's, you know, just, you know, from talking to brands, but we'd love to hear, do you guys are working with so many people you can replatform on anything? Like, how would you? How would you rank it from, you know, Omni channel capabilities?

Jordan Brannon  46:08

Yeah, kind of keeping focused on the E commerce platforms themselves, I'd say big commerce is probably number one for us. It does have a lot of native features to support, you know, kind of omni channel audiences, sales strategies, you know, marketing, inventory management, they've talked a lot about their multi store, they've invested a lot in b2b. Those can be opportunities to enhance and increase omni channel capabilities. They had that acquisition of economics, which can be very valuable in some regards, there, they have a really fantastic API. So if you're working with more strange or unique omni channel efforts, that can be really beneficial. Again, if you're kind of looking at needing to create some sort of direct integration, um, Shopify is really strong as well, they've put a little more focus on this lately. Overall, I think sort of the simplicity and in terms of Shopify is focus tends to work against complexity in a new omni channel initiatives. So you know, as long as you're sticking with some of their common integrations, that can be, you know, easier to manage, you know, an omni channel effort through a Shopify store. But a lot of our Shopify merchants eventually tend to shift some of that omni channel responsibility away from their eCommerce platform, as they increase in complexity and tend to rely more on another software as sort of the core of that, that effort, just again, sort of given some of the structural limitations in a single Shopify store environment, Adobe Magento is as strong as big commerce. But, you know, I think just kind of based on the overall cost of ownership, the value of the platform, some of the performance things we have as a concern, we tend to sort of rank it lower than big commerce.

Aaron Conant  47:52

Awesome. So, you know, after omni channel, you know, being prioritizes strategy, where do you go? Where do you go next?

Jordan Brannon  48:02

Yep, social commerce. I think for us, we've talked about this many times, they're in both in a call. And I think, personally, it's where the money's at. And I think that's, it's, it's only going to increase in 2022. I expect that Facebook is going to be working to increase it's sort of eCommerce support, and kind of move away from just econ platform dependency this year. I think that, you know, the challenges that they're facing from an advertising standpoint will necessitate that they try to own more of the transaction, you know, to try and, again, create value in what they're doing on the advertising side of things. And so I think, you know, that may be a shift that's going to happen and may influence sort of eCommerce platform selections a bit more this year than it has in the past. But again, you know, the brand, you do want to make sure that there is a real commitment between your platforms that to tie into social commerce initiatives. Tick tock over to Google, I think is the most visited websites this past year, end of last year, or maybe early this one. But you know, Facebook and Instagram continue to carry kind of a lion's share of people's time online. So, you know, I think it kind of a modern social commerce enabled eCommerce site is going to allow you to publish product, promote sales, get promotions, and sort of new initiatives out across your social channels, will allow you to tie your social customers back into a brand own browsing and shopping experience. And then it also allows you to support content that the sushi social user is going to find engaging. So it kind of creates a real destination opportunity where you begin to own that customer instead of the social network itself. Hmm, love it.

Aaron Conant  49:39

So who's your platform winner there? Is it big commerce, Shopify? Magento?

Jordan Brannon  49:44

Yeah. For us, it's probably Shopify. I mean, the main thing with with that is just Shopify because of its popularity sort of has been given keys to the castle for a lot of these social platforms. You know, they get sort of the first shot at social commerce integration. In advertising technology. So often if there are any sort of big new launches, you're probably see Shopify habit first. Big Commerce has done a pretty good job of keeping pace, but they're, you know, usually a month or two behind if there's something new. So Shopify does tend to win for us on that one.

Aaron Conant  50:20

Awesome. So now we're up to number four. You know, what's your, your fourth strategy, you want to see a new eCommerce website initiatives and in the coming year?

Jordan Brannon  50:31

Yeah, I think old is new here. I think that for me, we're really trying to push our brands to rethink sort of their content driven commerce experiences, it sort of sounds kind of obvious, you know, like what using content to drive eCommerce seems sort of, you know, one to one. But a lot of eCommerce content strategy for brands is sort of fallen into this kind of malaise of just blogs, product pages, and social media posts and sort of, there's a cycle of kind of sameness that's been happening. And for our clients last year, some of the fastest growth that we saw if we could kind of tie it into specific landing pages or content marketing efforts, really happened with dedicated landing pages that really had a transaction focused experience that were really meaningfully differentiated from your typical product or category page. So we had clients who were doing their own unboxings of their own products, which sort of seems kind of silly sometimes. But it was really effective product demos, sort of video reviews are written reviews of their own products, no product breakdowns, listicles, which is a kind of any sort of ranked list article. longer form articles, style guides, trend alerts, that content ranks really well with search engines that shares well, on social converts well as a landing page for paid, it's easy to support with email and SMS, influencers, you know, often like to participate in those campaigns, and sometimes even host that content for you. affiliates, you know, again, you often will see some good conversion rates if you're using affiliate as a channel. But a lot of brands just aren't really doing it. And part of the reason is that they haven't put it put the pieces together in their e commerce sites. And so if you are looking at sort of a new site build, I'd really look at, you know, building in these sorts of templates and these sorts of experiences into your navigation and into the sort of technical features that you have. You know, one of the changes, we're not seeing posts COVID is the willingness of customers spend a lot of time and money online, great content, it can be really easily lead to great transactions, and the more you can shorten the distance between the two, I think you tend to see uplift, is that results that?

Aaron Conant  52:40

No, I think content is huge. It's one of the topics that come up over and over again, you know, from your experience, where can brands find ideas for, you know, some of this new types of content?

Jordan Brannon  52:50

Yeah, I mean, I look at what's ranking well, in Google, you know, go to YouTube, look at what's doing well, there, you know, look at, you know, what's trending on a topic in a social media channel. You know, again, if you're not resource to sort of go through a bigger creative iteration, you don't have a creative agency that is going to produce a lot of this for you. You know, usually you'll find some fairly form of low cost, low effort, opportunities in terms of what's already performing. And so recreating some of that with your own product, or brand touch is usually pretty easy to do. And it can be trialed really quickly with your own audiences to see its effectiveness. And so that's sort of a very approachable thing for us. And again, think outside of eCommerce. So just because the site is doing well, the YouTube video that's that's focusing on a particular thing is doing well is not necessarily, you know, selling the product directly that don't limit yourself and sort of say, well, eCommerce only, you know, usually just adding the buy button and kind of ending with sort of that, that buy opportunity is going to have a good result.

Aaron Conant  53:53

Well, it's awesome, awesome tips. Moving on to number five, what's the next strategy you're pushing for a bigger site, revamp, redesign, replatform, whatever it might be in 2020, to

Jordan Brannon  54:05

invest in your ability to upsell and cross sell. Given the inventory challenges that we saw a lot of our brands facing, introducing additional product lines and categories is really critical in determining whether they were able to meet or exceed growth from 2020 into 2021. cross selling upselling was the most effective way to launch new product lines. For our merchants, we found that, you know, you didn't necessarily have to introduce a whole new navigation to the site. But sort of beginning to introduce new products or cross sell upsell opportunities was really effective. And we are then able to often turn some of those into unique marketing funnel sales channels themselves, and that can then sort of, you know, create an inverse where you're then using those things to help sell your core product or category. You know, upsell cross sell really sort of knows helps build larger EO V's which is desirable. But I think you know, many brands are sort of ignorant of how much you can add as an upsell or cross sell to a typical order. And so they rely on sort of what I call dumb opportunities or dumb strategies, meaning it's either a simple app or merchandiser, you know, with some relatively arbitrary method of picking related products or cross sells. And so looking for opportunities to improve on that. There's different apps now that kind of tie in, you know, actual order data, browsing data, customer review data, to help sort of drive more intelligent upsell, cross selling experiences. And then make sure you're integrating them throughout your entire site funnels. So content pages, collection, pages, category pages, product pages, cart, checkout, follow up emails, retargeting campaigns, really think about upsell and cross sell opportunities as a full journey rather than, hey, we throw them in front of somebody in the product in the carton, that's enough.

Aaron Conant  55:59

No, I love it, because it's, it's going back to kind of how we kicked it off, which was this idea around maturity, which is where we're getting right, the initial thing was fine, right? As you kicked it off, get those simple apps, put it in place, you know, it kind of, you know, plugs a hole. But as we're going into 2022, and this massive acceleration we've been on and learning curve, you have to go next to the next level, right? We're going beyond checkbox now or where we're actually having a strategy behind it and how it all connected. So your your final tip as a whole.

Jordan Brannon  56:36

Yeah. Last one, for me is site speed. And I kind of touched on this at the top of the call. And there was a question about sort of, you know, app logic and rationalization. But site speed is, is a big deal. Just sort of looking at the work that we've done on client sites, that has improved site speeds, we almost always see that improve organic marketing reach, and then also see it to improve conversion rates and other acquisition metrics. So, you know, we've been, you know, obviously, core web vitals was sort of a big focus this past year. And, you know, the challenges we run into as a very capable Development Agency is that existing themes and existing designs and existing apps commitments really are sort of the, the ceiling that you run into. And so that's where bigger rebuilds can often become necessitated. And so I would, you know, also maybe highlight a lot of the big eCommerce platforms have made their underlying frameworks faster in the last year or so. And so if you are even staying with your current platform, and sort of just creating a new iteration, you're not replatform, anything like that, you should still see some speed up lift. You know, maybe when you're planning the project, I would probably say, you know, look at establishing some benchmarks that you'd like to achieve, you know, talk about those with your technical provider and design team, you know, if that's an agency like us, great if that's, you know, you know, third party developer or someone else, great, just kind of have some benchmarks in mind, and work with them on in terms of sort of, you know, some give and take, you know, having 35 apps is not the way to be a fast site. And so, you know, consider which things are important for kind of the initial launch and maybe which are less important than being faster. So, you know, maybe a few things to sort of keep in mind on that front. premium themes often look good on sort of the surface, but end up underperforming in real world site speed and Cora vitals type tests. So, you know, be kind of careful and mindful of sort of using pre built themes, a lot of them are sort of built to kind of cram every widget they can into scripting, and make it look cool for you when you're shopping, but can really backfire. In terms of performance later. Extensions, we've touched on a lot, just can be a huge bog down. So you know, the more extensions and plugins, you're adding in your scope of work, or someone else's adding in your scope of work to address your feature set, the slower you're going to be. So don't just sort of accept like, we're going to do this with an app. You know, that, yeah, that can work. But also sort of be aware of the costs and the speed. So if the sort of the new scope, the new site, iteration really is plugin dependent, reconsider the feature or reconsider the platform. And then maybe, I think I'd say like, you know, building a cadence of optimizing the the media content, images and videos before they hit your site. So one of the areas that we see a lot of brands that get the new site, it is fast or faster, but then they don't update the photography team, the merchandising team, the marketing team. And so then it gets progressively slower because they are continuing to produce an upload kind of unoptimized content for the site in terms of speed, and CC sort of degradation over time pretty quickly. And so, really make sure that that's part of your your business practice. Again, maybe going back to that, you know, education piece I highlighted earlier. And then maybe just also, is it sort of a last one sort have an interesting testing discovery, which is really well known with core web vitals, core vitals, looks at field data, and it doesn't sort of have any discernment tied to region. So you can have an international audience that's visiting a common.com property. And with a may have a slower connection speeds than what you would have in the United States. And if that audience is sizable, it potentially begins to actually pull down your overall field data. And so Google views your site as being slower, because of sort of the net total of your audience performance. And that can be a problem. And so think about an international strategy. So if you do touch on a few different regions of the world, some with you know, more disparate speeds, you know, do consider, you know, some way of addressing that either through a new top level domain, maybe through a new sub domain, you know, some of those strategies or just segmenting your audience can make you a lot faster in your your corwith Vitals assessments, and improve ranking, which again, in turn can improve some of the marketing outcomes for you. So that's probably my last review on that one.

Aaron Conant  1:01:14

Yeah, no. No, it's like, almost like perfect timing here. As we get to the end. You know, a quick thank you to everybody who sent in questions, obviously, anybody you need further information needs any help whatsoever, from strategy to execution to platforms election, the app rationalization, you know, Jordan and the team at Coalition Technologies are helping a ton of friends of the network out 100% worth putting some time on the calendar with them. You know, they're leaders in the space, and there's very few of them that are out there that can actually perform. That's kind of what we found, and so worth having a follow up conversation with Jordan, his team, I would love to have a conversation with you as well. You know, just to get ideas for Upcoming Events, topics we should have, but also more than happy to knowledge share across the board on what's happening across everything. direct consumer international expansion, like Jordan brought up is huge for us right now a huge topic. Amazon always is there, but drop shipping and SEO or whatever it is. So we would love to have a conversation. We don't sell anything here all networking, knowledge sharing. Jordan, any kind of key takeaways, as we wrap up here, pretty much right on time?

Jordan Brannon  1:02:20

No, no, I mean, I think we covered a lot. Again, we do offer a free audit consultation. So if you'd like to have us take a look under the hood and give you some recommendations, either for the new site or just some enhancements to your current one on on site performance, user experience, marketing, accessibility issues, privacy, compliance, security, you know, any of the things we were here, we'd love to have the chance to support you. And if there's an opportunity for an ongoing engagement, also here. Awesome,

Aaron Conant  1:02:47

whether it will thanks again, Jordan for your time today. As always, you know, thanks for being such so willing to share openly across the board. Thanks to everybody who dialed in look for file email from us. We'll be in touch everybody. Take care, stay safe and look forward to having you heard of future events. Probably everybody will see already thanks again. Jordan. Alrighty, byebye.