Etail Solutions - How Brands Create Market Advantage with their Ecommerce Site

Darin joined Michael from Etail Solutions, for a conversation on 'How Brands Create Market Advantage with their Ecommerce Site'. Their discussion covers the time, talent, and treasure required to make your ecommerce site successful. We've time stamped these videos, hit play and be taken right to the spot you're interested in.

Darin's Background and Ecommerce History

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• Darin's history at Office Max, Wilson's Leather, and Second Swing on the 'backend' (before it was called backend).

Biggest Misconceptions in D2C Ecommerce

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• Overestimating the quality and state of your data, especially the product data. 
• Product data is how your customers 'hold a product in store' when they're online. It's critically important to have high quality data.

Pitfalls When Inheriting a Old Site

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• A shift from integration challenge coming from technical complexity rather than the technology itself.
• Team communication usually trumps how complex the project is for project success.

Best Practices for Ecommerce Success

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• Three themes emerge customer experience, user experience, and integration opportunities.
• Compress your checkout process as much as possible. Autofill and payment flexibility. 
• Different users use different tools (site search and navigation) during a path to purchase.
• $20B in lost revenue because of shopping cart abandonment from lack of payment options

Hub and Spoke Online Selling

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• Why have your own website when selling on so many other channels? Your site should be an anchor (in a good way), it's important to nail the customer experience across all those channels.
• Distributed commerce, but you have the MOST control over your site.

What Metrics to Watch

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• Foundational metrics - Abandoned cart rate, average basket size, traffic, time on site (This can dependent on YOU).
• Emerging metrics - Return on ad spend.

Channel Conflicts

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• Distritbuters may have had more power in earlier days because they were working with consumers directly BUT that mindset has completely flipped.
• Now customers are demanding that businesses sell directly.
• If you're a distributer, you can bury your head in the sand or you can be a part of the solution and collaborator here.

Go to Market Pricing When You Go Direct

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• How to price when you go direct? Basically, it's complicated. Balancing exisiting relationships with strategic pricing.
• Do you have the infrastucture (fulfillment, supply chain, warehousing, 3PL, last mile, etc) for this pricing?
• If you're worried about that, you're right to be.