Aaron Conant  0:18

Happy Thursday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant, Co-founder and Managing Director here at BWG Connect, a giant networking and knowledge-sharing group; thousands of brands work together to stay on top of digital trends and strategies. I run the focal point there; I spend most of my time talking to brands, just around digital strategy. And when the same thing has come up over and over again, we host an event like this, and we're always expanding our network as more and more digital experts get introduced to the community as a whole. And so super excited today. You know, we've done a lot with BigCommerce as a whole, but Steven Moy here, actually, we have a bunch of connections as well. So anyways, as we kind of kick this one off, Lauryn, I'm gonna kick it to you first if you want to do a brief intro on yourself, BigCommerce phenomics. That'd be great. Willing to get to see it, and then we'll jump into the conversation. Sound good?

Lauryn Spence  1:08

Absolutely. Yeah, I'll jump on. And thank you so much for teeing this up. So hi, everyone. I'm Lauryn Spence, I lead our agency partner program for the Americas at BigCommerce. I've been in the eCommerce Industry for nearly a decade, and I've actually run my own eCommerce business. I've worked with thousands of eCommerce operators, owners, size marketers – just across the board. So certainly excited to bring my point of view to the table and especially talking about these big waves and trends and AI, digital shopping, social commerce and the like. Just a quick note about BigCommerce Inc. Of course, we have the BigCommerce platform, which is a mid-market and enterprise open SaaS platform for b2c and b2b brands all over the world. We're a fully composable leading member of the MACH Alliance, giving brands a best-of-breed approach and freedom of choice but still delivering on the core values of SaaS with low TCO, usability, etc. But we've also acquired an ecom platform agnostic feed management and data syndication solution called Feedonomics that operates as its own subsidiary. But put simply, both BigCommerce Feedonomics we're simplifying enterprise commerce by helping brands grow revenue and reduce costs on their website and every channel where they may be selling and advertising online. So we'll dig into some of those omni-channel trends later here in this discussion, but collectively, we work with 35% of the IR 1000 brands in every single category that you could imagine and have consistently been recognized as a leading competitor on major analyst reports like Forrester and G2 Crowd and the light so it's a little bit about BC and VO.

Aaron Conant  2:42

Awesome. Thanks, Lauryn. Steven.

Steven Moy  2:45

Oh yeah, so Steven Moy, CEO at Barbarian. And I actually a long time and one of the few people who started doing eCommerce a long, long time ago, even before I entered the digital marketing arena. So I built my first credit card transaction in 1997 when web 2.0 is as came about on Microsoft's is over Netscape kind of been my stuff so long ago then when I got into more eCommerce when I was leading a lot of solutions for Sapient, it was this Publicis Sapient back then like if I'm working with state boasts you a member state or CVS or insurance company or the.com like a lot of eCommerce from New Balance, you know Puma and also Swiss Army so being doing eCommerce or for the longest time, and I've been with Barbarian for, this is my fifth year. I have a long history in the digital marketing space. I used to be the CTO of R/GA, and Isobar was the CEO in the UK for a couple of years and then 10 years at Sapient. Barbarian's part of Cheil. Barbarian's 40 years old. Cheil is the number 10 Holding Company advertising holding company in the world based out of Seoul Korea. Then you've never heard about Cheil if you think about it. They're 50 years old, and they are known for being an in-house agency for Samsung. So, thank you for having me today.

Aaron Conant  4:08

Yeah, absolutely. Quick note as well. If you have questions, comments, drop in the chat or the Q&A. And we'll try to answer those in real time as many as we can. So I mean, this is, you know, eCommerce trends, innovations, things that are out there. I don't see how we can't kick off the conversation with AI. Right, it's ever since, you know, ChatGPT, you know, the announcement came last fall. AI is a topic I mean, everybody thought it was neat. And now people are seeing it really hit home. We'd love to let you know how that has influenced the next big wave and digital shopping. I think that's if we're talking about innovations. We kind of have to tackle that one first. And if it takes up the whole 30 minutes, that's alright.

Lauryn Spence  4:51

Where to begin? Yeah, I'm happy to jump in from my point of view, certainly a hot topic by and large. What's crazy about it is outside of commerce, there's do you. We're trends that have permeated just about every industry and culture in the way that AI has. And like, obviously with ChatGPT, like I don't know, of another technology that has had that quick adoption, what they had like 100 million users in less than 30 days or something crazy. But from our point of view, you know, from the commerce lens, and you know, if you're an eCommerce practitioner here listening and like what this means for you, I think that it's twofold, right? Like, what does this mean for the shopping experience for your buyers in terms of, you know, ways that you can personalize, right, using different customer data and leveraging the info that you know about their previous purchase history, right to help, you know, recommend the right products, or in the way that your merchandising, you know, helping them search and find, you know, products that you're obviously selling across multiple channels. And then also back end type innovation and operating operational efficiencies, whether that's like predictive inventory modeling, and you know, different things that you could be doing for like fraud for fraud prevention, and internally, there's so many things, so happy to like, dive in deeper to any of those, but just holistically, I kind of think of it in those two categories, right? Like, how do you optimize the customer experience? And then how can you, as a business, create more efficiencies, right, so that you can focus on doing what you do best, which is growing the brand that you're working for, right, and creating those innovations?

Steven Moy  6:27

Yeah, I think that definitely does add on to that; I think the fastest adoption of generative AI, I think the difference between isn't new, but all of a sudden because of the accessibility because open right everybody can have access to it used to be IBM has, you know, many PhD you know, design the Watson the only IBM has it, or Adobe, oh, we talk about so many different things. And I think from a brand building marketing on top of in addition to you can also have a lot of application, we talk about customer data, and you know, we talk about data for for fo we truly believe, ignore all the technology, you know, buzzword and web three is decentralization and ownership or your customer data. And so every brand should start collecting their own customer data because for AI to work, you need customer data. So what am I good at like stitching the data together? Is this even more the same person buys at that store? And go online and carry on the tech talk and answer the email, you know, those are the things I think AI can help a lot with really building a customer profile. Second would be we talked about the whole customer journey with the ecosystem Railay merchandising recommendation pairing, you know that based on, you know, data, so AI can also help and from marketing automation like retargeting and a lot of things. Now, it's not that new, but all of a sudden, you have like more application to it. And then they talked about last mile; we talked about, you know, inventory earlier. And also we when we were prepping, you know, even shipping, you know, we talked about Amazon a few years ago, had a you know, has a pattern, you can do predictive shipping meaning that based on your customer data, your purchase history, you can apply and create more value for your target audience by maybe or maybe you need more toilet paper, which I touched on earlier. Just don't give a bit subscribe to it. So that I think the whole spectrum very excited. But I think it's go back to we'll sum up the topic we talk about, we need to have connected data, connected ecosystem, you know, the right setup, marketing technology, and then you have to have the connected customer experience. And then, you know, I'm from the advertising sites, we can help brand build that relationship with this. And last but not least, I want to touch on this the rise of the teacher though enable community because I'm watching this right, you know, you understand how long I've been working. So I used to be focused group, think about it, right? You know, you launch your product, you don't have the real time data and you go focus group, that whole cycle two or three years now. We ask Tech Tech Talk, they tell you, Okay, feel about your product. I think that product innovation cycle will be compressing even faster if the smarter brand can use technology, the right marketing technology, and what with the audience they can co create. I think it's fascinating, very exciting.

Aaron Conant  9:19

Well, yeah, I mean, just on that product development front, I know a lot of people are using AI tools for basically aggregating reviews and review sentiment and then using that as active feedback for both their own products as well as their competitions into the next round. But then also you can generate almost, you know, to the human eye, like the new prototype and put it out there for people to look at and provide feedback without actually creating it and having to do a photo shoot. It's been a crazy time. But you know, it does go back to I think, yeah, I get asked a lot will What is what is step one? And step one, what I'm pulling out from this is actually not trying to select the right tool, it's getting the data. Right. Without the data, I mean, all of these things work because you're putting information in and they're taking information out faster than any human could do it. Is step one just an aggregation of the data?

Steven Moy  10:24

I mean, there are a lot of technology available like BigCommerce and Datanomics and can make that, but from now from marketing, I wanna know Lauryn's perspective, but from a marketing right, you know, a lot of the historical, the bigger the company by design, unfortunately, the Western management science, you create silos, right? You have the.com Team video team a retail team, and then a social marketing team completely different. So I think if I have to advise anybody, any branch, I do, like capturing more holistic data, or getting their connected experiences by experimenting, connecting, let's say, two dots. So show.com, right, let's start there first. And then you should be able to in gray using the right set of tools, right? I Feedonomics is one of the three. And we like how they integrate that it's a different platform. And then you can data. So you can go out with your client to create, you know, customer data strategy because we see in the media side, we have a lot of media agencies holding a lot of T data, because of the privacy issue. And also, the platform will share data with you. So that's a way to build those breadcrumbs and use AI and connect them together. That's my humble opinion.

Aaron Conant  11:41

Yeah.

Lauryn Spence  11:42

There's so many ways you could take the conversation. But if we're trying to frame it around, getting started or just trying to figure out, hey, how do I make sure I'm not left behind and this way, where AI is now very much like here to stay, and it's something that I need to adopt and not fall behind? Especially when looking at your competitive peers? I think it's, I think it kind of goes back to having the right tools. Right. So Steven already mentioned, like, on the marketing side, like, you know, if you're not someone that's doing a good job of actively organizing and aggregating zero and first-party data, then you're definitely missing the boat, right. And there's a lot of strategies and things that you need to be doing to create value to incentivize people to give you that data so that you can remarket it later. Right. From an operational standpoint, Hey, how can I like take a crawl Walk Run approach, like what should I do with my eCommerce site, or, like, if I'm trying to use AI to make efficiencies to drive sales, that's where I'm going to come back and make the plug for like having the right tools such as something like a feed anomic. So to kind of, I didn't explain fully what that was. But if you're a brand new day, and I'm assuming you're not selling through one static channel, because those days are long gone, especially if you're a brand that has, you know, 1000s of SKUs or even hundreds of skews, you're likely selling on multiple channels, the competition is so high across these channels, especially like in this cookieless world where there's all these privacy concerns, like there's so much you need to do to optimize your data to make sure it's in the right schema to be represented well, whether that's in like a traditional marketplace, or even in like social commerce channels, say like a TikTok right. And that's like a really hard like a manual process where AI comes in for someone for a system like genomics, is that automation and optimization for that for you for that, right. So they're like, the underpinnings of the dynamics is all AI based. So if you're going to say like, Hey, I want to export products into Google Shopping, you know, some self serve solutions and others chant like apps out there, it'll get you like 65% the way there, the AI capabilities if you anonymous get you 95% of the way there and the other 5% is, you know, that feed management team to fully optimize so I think that's where I go back to working with a tool like the systems already exists to help you optimize and clean up and transform that data to where it needs to be and AI to do that, because no one can do it better and faster than AI and then making tweaks in there and using systems like do not mix where you can do back to Stevens points of AB testing because just because of bead might be optimized right like let's say you're trying to search for you know, women's shoes size three you think that's that's how I search for something, I might add a color in there, but maybe that's not the best you know, term or you know, the way the data needs to be structured maybe something else in another like orientation organization of those words needs to be leveraged so using AI to help a B test like how Okay, well this gave perform better will this be more better? Right? So I think you're going to have to invest in certain technology transformations such as tools like you know, Feedonomics or other eCommerce platform technology to even get started right. There's nothing you right now alone as a business could do without leveraging the right platform. I'm so that's what I would advocate for.

Steven Moy  15:01

No, totally, totally, totally. Because that's what I remember going back to being more agile, a lot of new terminology, I think for marketing technology business owners, right? I know everybody has technology that right, you know, McKinsey estimated 40% of it balance sheet is because of your business. So you need when you buy the, you know, the last batch of technology, you create more complexity for you. And then all of a sudden the AI last year NFT, like, who knows what comes into the picture, the test and learn like having a sandbox, what I call commerce lab, you should set up a lab, while you have the technology that you're on maybe your main platform using all those technologies, you should be my opinion, you should be able to carve out maybe a new product launch one campaign and put it on the technology sandbox that using some of new technology and test and learn and learn from it, like capturing data is it's okay, can they deliver that those kinds of meaningful value to your target audience where you can you can measure that and also try more growth. We got a lot of times, especially CPG company when you know, using them, for example, they don't own their relationship with the direct, you know, they don't have a direct consumer relationship. You know, who owns all the data is their partner like Walmart, you know, Amazon, now TikTok. So I think that's the test and learn like a lab like an innovation thinking, right? While you have your existing technology, maybe something you know, when you say, Well, I would advocate learning makes a big commerce like, you know, learn a little bit about the New World Order, right? The more you make the bigger the better. Right? Because every brand would work with specialty, the bigger, the more complicated, they have the technology that is huge on their book.

Aaron Conant  16:49

Now, so a couple of things that I totally agree with. One is the lab side. I mean, my background, I'm a scientist, right, and we had an R&D budget. And there's the thing that comes along with the lab in that specified budget is that all the R&D budget goes away, right? It is just spent, but out of that, you get the things that potentially make you more money. And the flip thing is just it I think people had this freakout moment that they have to start developing all these AI tools internally. And they have, you know, created their own. And I think one of the number one things which kind of as you're saying, Steven is like, you already have partners today, go to them and say, what is new and this could be as much as like, you're just on the Google suite of products or Microsoft suite of products and just saying, hey, what AI tools do you have for me? Right? Going to a big commerce, what AI tools do you have? What do you have built in what are best practices, that brands don't have to be building on their own? Right? That's, I think, like one of those big like, I don't know, relief moments, as eCommerce is changing faster than ever before. But I want to blend in one other topic that comes up. And I know we could talk about AI for you know, 17 more hours. The other topic that is I don't want to say it's a buzzword. Because it's not, it is meaningful, but around MACH as a whole. And this whole MACH Alliance, MACH composable commerce MACH has been coming up. MACH for those of you who are hearing it just now for the first time. Can you walk us through why it's important, and why people should be thinking about this, you know, because they're gonna see the MACH Alliance everywhere, and MACH-approved tools and everything else?

Lauryn Spence  18:39

Yeah, I'm happy to jump in with that one. What's funny, much like AI and some themes there, that are not really being new, just being more accessible now to the public. That's kind of similar, like poseable commerce actually isn't all that new. But the term itself actually was coined technically, in 2020, I think by Gartner. But just kind of put it in layman's terms, like what composable commerce really means for anyone listening, if you're if you're new to this topic, it's really just taking a modular approach with your tech stack, choosing a best-of-breed solution to fit your unique business needs. So one really good example is saying, like, Hey, you might hear headless commerce right? As a really popular tactic. And what that means is essentially using a different head, right, like a front-end framework for CMS, DXB, and putting that on top of a different eCommerce platform, right, or replacing our theming engine with something else, right. And the reason people are doing that and gravitating towards that is because there's so much competition right now, with everyone being online, especially post-COVID. Like you have to find ways to personalize and differentiate as a brand. And the best way of doing that is through content. And through AI-based tools for some personalization, and these CMSes and DSPs out there do that. So a lot of people are decoupling your tech stack, to work with best-of-breed tools to do that very, very thing. And in fact, companies like Gartner, speaking of Gartner, they're predicting that people that take this approach are going to like this future freight approach, they're going to outpace their competition, like a hot 1.8 times faster or something like that. And again, other than just like, hey, there's needs and there's benefits around performance, personalization and having better experiences. Like, people are really moving away from Legacy enterprise Tech with like, very monolithic solutions, right? Like, gone are the days of like one vendor being good at everything. Right now. It's like a jack of all trades, master of none, we've got a commerce platform, a CRM, payments, POS; people are trying to move away from that and work with best-of-breed solutions. And there because there's so much innovation in each of those categories. So you're better off working with like the best of the best in CRM, the best of the best in commerce, that's the best and CMS versus trying to just go with one throat to choke, where you're kind of getting a diluted version of all those things. So that's kind of the what the why and then on the Commerce lens, we're a founding member and the MACH Alliance, we're actually a leading member of more headless implementations in the platform. And given our staff origins, there's a lot of benefits, it's still being very easy to use, but still taking this composable and headless approach. So that's definitely where we're leaning in, or our brands. And it's a really, really popular approach, especially with Enterprise eCommerce.

Steven Moy  21:18

Yeah, to add to that, I'm sure you guys know him all the time. So it's nothing that new, but the concept was timeless, right? Remember, we started off with componentized technology, remember, back then WebLogic, and all the other one to two then and then you have multi-tier architecture, if people saw me like, early 2000. And then you have service-oriented architecture, but the concept is basically building components. Because if you think about it from a customer experience point of view, we feel COVID. SRA tells a lot of things. So you should think about this as a zero dimension, customer interface, two dimensional, I'll explain why in the multi-dimensional zero dimension number one point voice, facial recognition, right? Things happen. So that's something without a screen-based way. And then again, in the two dimensional, you know, a lot of the big technology coming I thought about the screen, but and then you've got a multi-dimensional, which has now with a web three manifests coming back in is the more virtual reality, sometimes can be augmented reality. So having a loosely coupled echo come these composable no more than we're talking about architecture, you can cover what I call Omniverse, the digital world, your physical channel, if you need to integrate to your retail partner or your your own retail setup technology to the metaverse. I mean, they say we have rover Malibus. To play, of course, it was a little overhyped last year for some other reason. Because if you look at the world estimate that we have 1.6 billion people considered with this handicap, including autism, their first touch point may not be Tech Talk. So a lot of people may be wearing, you know, some kind of aid, so they can start interacting in the world. So the answer could be the amount of bus rides, but we have the thing multi-dimensional is three dimensions now your customer journey. So from that sense, I do agree Mark makes total sense. People should try to adopt that. Because that would be more dimension coming in the real world, right? We touched on like a report earlier. It's coming.

Lauryn Spence  23:23

I like what you said really quick, just around like it preparing you for all of those channels. And like that's, that's the one point I'd want to leave people with, like why people are taking this approach. It's the future-proofing component like you're seeing what AI has done to commerce. And if you're working with a solution that's not you know, API first or you know, cloud base and you know, headless compatible, you are going to be left behind and missed out on innovation and trends and technologies that other companies are building. So having a MACH architecture gives you the freedom to choose and rip and replace needs because the tech you're using today is not what you might use tomorrow. Right? So that's like the whole reason that underpinning they think Steven did a great job of explaining why and what trends could come up. Legacy tech just will not keep up with these trends and can't integrate with these kinds of technologies.

Aaron Conant  24:10

Yeah, and it's moving faster than ever before. I think that's what everybody's catching on to. Right. If if, if you're not built with flexibility in mind, you will you will be left behind because everything's changing so fast. So even if something you're most excited about, we'd love to hear that as we kind of get to the end here. We're gonna try to end right on time. Is it something new that you're like, I'm so pumped about this, that I'll put it on people's radar, and they'll they'll google it when we're done.

Steven Moy  24:39

I was recently talking to some OG friends in the comments for a while exciting today, right? This is a more technology focused, I think technologists, CTO, CIO, and even CMO in some cases videos all the way to engineers used to think like your mixologist. You're making a cocktail. You have existing technology investment and new stuff coming into the inner picture, you should be able to, I would call technology innovation transformation is mixing the technology to focus on solving a business problem. It's not about technology, right? It's about oh my god. Oh my audience on TikTok. Now, what are we going to do? Right you need well, maybe using technology for them now makes a nice fit into tech talk. And then you got that whole lifecycle, you can collect more data. So we will advocate when advice will be as a technologist, myself, thing, like a mixologist, you're making the best cocktail technology cocktail. That's exciting for me.

Aaron Conant  25:37

Awesome. Lauryn, and I'll kind of kick it over to you, like key thoughts and takeaways, things that people have to be thinking about, or you're excited about as well.

Lauryn Spence  25:49

You know, nothing that would be different than nothing more exciting than AI Right? Like it. You can't really like trump that at the moment with

Aaron Conant  25:57

Not even the metaverse. AI trumped the metaverse, which was the topic.

Lauryn Spence  26:03

Yeah, because because they have real right Metaverse, we're still kind of figuring out what that is going to actually be. But I'd say right now if I'm putting my practical hat on, and what's coming up next, what to focus on my mind is all around the upcoming holiday season and making sure that you're doing the right things. Now, to prepare and optimize all that juicy data we were talking about to capitalize and maximize your online sales. The solutions that we've discussed around the dynamics and others are exactly the kind of tools to help you prep and optimize all this data, you might be trying to aggregate and optimize for various channels. So I would be really, really focused on that cyber five prep holiday prep, and just doing what you can to get through the holiday right dollar optimizing, like take a walk, you know, crawl, walk, run approach, but started looking inward and making those evaluations internally.

Steven Moy  26:59

Setting up a commerce lab. Right to try.

Aaron Conant  27:03

Yes. Yeah, I totally agree. And set aside the R&D budget and let people know we're spending it. Right that we don't know what the results are going to be. Well, this has been absolutely fantastic. Lauryn, Steven, next time, we're going to set up an hour to talk.

Steven Moy  27:24

Maybe two days, days.

Aaron Conant  27:30

But everybody really likes to end here on time. So Lauryn and Steven again, thanks for your time today. Thanks for being such great friends, partners, and supporters of the network. With that. We're gonna wrap up this webinar here, everybody, take care, stay safe, and look forward to having you in a future event. Alrighty, thank you, everybody.