Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
Welcome to episode 290 of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we'll discuss what businesses need to know regarding the evolution of ecommerce in 2024. Joining me on the show is Jayesh Mori, CEO of Experro.com. So let's dive right into it.
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This is the ecommerce Coffee Break.
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A.
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Top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome, welcome to the show.
Claus Lauter [00:00:43]:
And welcome to another episode of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to talk about what business need to know about the evolution of ecommerce in 2024. To dive into this topic, I have Jayesh Mori with me. He's the CEO of Experro.com. He has over 15 years of experience in scaling software, platform and businesses. And under his visionary leadership, Experro has become the Goto solution for global brands trusted to live a high performing, personalized and intelligent e commerce experience. So we have a lot to cover here. Let's welcome Jayesh to the show.
Jayesh Mori [00:01:14]:
Thanks for having me, Claus.
Claus Lauter [00:01:15]:
Yeah, you're welcome. Let's dive right into it. Talking about what's coming up, the evolution of e commerce. So before we go into the evolution, I want to go a little bit back in the past. You're doing this for a very long time. Give a bit of a background where ecommerce is coming from, where it has gone through before we go into the future of the evolution of ecommerce.
Jayesh Mori [00:01:36]:
Absolutely. I always love this question because this is not like industrial revolution. This is a decades and decades long journey. But in a few short vacants, I think the industry has made tremendous progress. But go a little bit back in time, I think 1990s. That's when the rubber started hitting the road with Amazon launching their experience, eBay coming to coming up with auction based ecommerce in 1991 and then.com boom, it started driving lot more experience driven commerce on web. And just with the widespread adoption of Internet in general, people love the convenience of ecommerce and we saw a lot of brands are going online. Then we have Shopify, Magento and Bigcommerce coming to the table and they are really, in my opinion, democratizing the ecommerce.
Jayesh Mori [00:02:37]:
They made the power of day to day ecommerce capabilities available to all the brands, even growing small businesses. That's when I think we started seeing the explosion in the market. Then mobile commerce started growing and recently, as we all are noticing, social commerce is growing now. And I think we are again at another evolutionary point where AI and data and customers expectations of personalization omnichannel experiences is again turning the ecommerce industry upside down and demanding every single growing brand to offer more personalized capabilities on their storefronts. And I think in future, as everybody is experiencing the new productivity that AI is enabling, there are lots of new things in store, like conversational commerce, assistant shopping, even AR and VR with more products and capabilities are coming to the market. I think ecommerce is in it for another revolution. But the industry has always embraced a new change and has always excelled and grown. So I'm looking forward to the future that is going to bring for us.
Claus Lauter [00:04:02]:
Yeah, I think it has been a long journey and it shows me also how old I am, because you said it started in the 1990s, and I remember these times fondly, and it's just a very long time ago now. You said it went through different stages of evolution, and I think it's a twofold thing. The evolution is on the one side is on the buyer, on the customer side, and the evolution is also on the merchant side, providing the services. And as you said, they went through different stages. Now we have generations who grew up for them. Ecommerce was always available and they potentially have a very different user behavior, customer behavior, than someone who is a little bit older. I want to go into the little things that you mentioned before when we're talking about how ecommerce have adjusted to different demand levels. Give me a bit of an idea on how the customer experience has changed over time.
Jayesh Mori [00:05:01]:
And I think the point you raised about the new generation is very valid. If we think about the generational shift, I think the millennials and Zenziers and Zenxers, they are taking over because they are probably the largest consumer market now. And their shopping preferences are very different than the shopping preferences of baby boomers and the previous generations. And like you said, this is a mobile generation. They don't know the life and world without Internet, ecommerce, mobile. So how do we actually enable them to shop better and cater to their preferences? That is a new evolution of ecommerce. And there are a ton of different preferences that we notice from this audience, new audience that we all need to cater to. And number one that we see is personalization.
Jayesh Mori [00:05:57]:
Every millennial or Zenzier, they are actually in love with the shopping experience that companies like Amazon are able to provide. As soon as you start looking for a product, Amazon will start suggesting you the similar products, complementary products, and with every click and app, your homepage is different and they're always nudging you towards exploring more. And in other words, I tell my wife that now you can window shop on Amazon too, because they will keep surfacing different stuff for you and you will keep exploring. This is the experience that the millennials and the new generation is looking for. And as a brand, it is very important for you to create that personalized experience if you want to have the new shoppers being engaged on your website, new shoppers being completing their checkouts that they haven't done yet, and even taking this behavioral data and experiences and really retargeting them on other channels that they absolutely love to hang out on, like WhatsApp, Instagram, even TikTok, and even their personal messaging apps and emails. How do you touch them across the channels? Because this is no longer an optional initiative or optional thing for the brands. They have to be omnichannel because the new customers expect them to be omnichannel.
Claus Lauter [00:07:25]:
I think that's a very important point that you made there, omnichannel and customization. And I want to dive a little bit deeper into these two topics. Now, omnichannel sort of is clear. As a brand, you should be on every available channel that your customer is using, and you gave a good example there. Now, when it comes to customization, in the past, customization for a small medium enterprise, selling online was almost impossible. You had a system in the background, might be powered by WordPress, by woocommerce, which was sort of static. So basically you were just setting up your product detail page and that's what you had, and that's what the customer had to live with. This has changed a lot, and I want to dive a little bit more into that.
Claus Lauter [00:08:04]:
How do you use data nowadays? What kind of platform do you use to provide this kind of customization to your customer?
Jayesh Mori [00:08:12]:
The experience for most of the customer starts with your website most of the time, even though when you're selling on other channels. But the real experience of the brand is on your website. Like you say, previously, people were using WordPress and woocommerce and then they were limited. So then the Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, these platforms have started providing some more control over your catalog and some of the experiences that you can create. But right now, there is another evolution that is ongoing in the industry around headless and composable comps. And the idea here is to create tailored experiences that are important to your customers without compromising due to technical limitations of any platform. So as you have been in the ecosystem, you know that a lot of these platforms Shopify, Bigcommerce, while they offer great functionality, out of the box for new e commerce starters and even some of the small businesses, when it comes to creating a personalized experience that matches to the level of growing brand or an enterprise, they still haven't been there yet. And what happens is some of their limitations.
Jayesh Mori [00:09:32]:
For example, limitations on the templating engine, limitations that are related to search merchandising capabilities, ability to integrate other ERP systems or third party PIM systems. These things are day to day norms for the growing brands. Small business owner will not face these problems, but as soon as you have crossed few million in revenue, you are going to be in this ecosystem. And that's where these platforms fall short in creating that customized, unique experience that ties into the merchants ecosystem of existing technologies and tools they need. So what we are seeing is lot of these growing brands and enterprises are embracing this headless and composable approach. And what I mean by that is they are bringing best of the breed tools together. Let's say they will take Shopify as an e commerce platform. They will use something else as search and merchandising.
Jayesh Mori [00:10:34]:
They will pick another CMS solution. They will also build a custom store because they want to do some custom functionality that they require. For example, sometimes CPQ or product bundling or subscription model. There can be lots of differences. And then they will actually build this entire experience, launch it on their own, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing it, and really create that next gen site experience which is fast personalized and allows them to really give that payout experience to each and every customer. Now the problem with this approach is it's great if you are a large enterprise, that you can invest all of these resources, build it for months or sometimes years, and launch it, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars even maintaining it. But for smaller and growing brands, this is not a case because most of the companies that you see in ecommerce market, even though they might be doing 300 $400 million in revenue as a company, this is what we see every day. They don't have a massive marketing team.
Jayesh Mori [00:11:47]:
They don't have a massive development team. So how do you actually enable these brands to create tailored experiences using this new headless and composable trend and architectures, but still don't break their bank and don't make it hard for them that they have to actually become a dev shop versus becoming the merchant best merchant in their industry. That's where we see a lot of innovations are happening as well. Not just our platform, but other platforms are also innovating this direction.
Claus Lauter [00:12:24]:
Hey Claus, here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter ecommercecoffeebreak.com. I score and create 50 news sources so you don't have to, saving your hours of research. Grow your revenue with ecommerce news, marketing strategies, tools, podcast, interviews and more, all in a quick three minute read. So head over to newsletter ecommercecoffeebreak.com to subscribe as said, 100% free. Also you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. I think a very important thing that you mentioned there is you don't want to become an IT company because if you have a product that you want to sell, that's what you want to focus on.
Claus Lauter [00:13:01]:
And development, as you said, development can be very complex, very time consuming, is very expensive, so you don't want to do this. I understand your Experro.com offers a solution for that. Give me a bit of an idea what you do and what kind of experience the merchant will have.
Jayesh Mori [00:13:19]:
With Xpero we actually tried to solve this very problem, enabling growing brands, mid enterprises and even large enterprises to actually build tailored, headless and composable experience that are personalized omnichannel and directly fitting their brands needs across mobile, web. As I mentioned, omnichannel, email, text, everything. So as a product package we offer these immersions a turnkey solution if they want to go headless, if they want to build content rich sites with better AI powered search, AI powered personalization and leveraging all of their customer interactions data to create hyper targeted experiences across other channels as well. All in one platform. And the beauty of it is you can actually build your great headless experience in less than four weeks. We have out of box integrations on top of Shopify, bigcommerce, magenta so you don't have to replatform your ecommerce. You can just start leveraging expert with our out of box integrations with these platforms and few clicks, ten minutes your data syncs and you will start seeing your new headless site and you can start customizing the experience, integrate with your systems, improve your search everything within a few days, just with a few clicks and tabs and you don't need it large it team to build this thing or to continue to grow your feature set. Even if you have a single developer or two, you can maintain this whole site, we have a network of agency partners already who can help you build these experiences in a very cost effective way.
Jayesh Mori [00:15:09]:
When post that, that's where the beauty starts. Once your experience is built, maintaining it does not require any technical resources, which is a huge departure from current headless approaches. Because when you go headless, even on Shopify today, you basically have to have a developer if you want to make changes to your site. Because there is no drag and drop builder on any headless platforms right now, we offer that capability. So your marketing team, despite your headless, they can make changes to your site and everything that they change will reflect immediately in a really fast way on your site. This is a hard engineering work that you need to do if you are doing headless on your own and every interaction that happens on this headless site, all of that data is captured. Now you can do content personalizations using it. So think about showing different banners when a shopper who has looked for kitchen products on your site versus showing a different banner to somebody who was looking for clothing products.
Jayesh Mori [00:16:15]:
And even if you are a single brand, think about location based experiences. For example, if you're selling sporting goods and you have a customer who is looking at the site from Vermont or Montana, maybe they will be more geared towards skiing equipments versus you're going to Texas. Skiing equipments are not going to sell there. So how do you sell something else to that audience? Maybe football. And these personalizations can happen in minutes. Think about tailoring products as well. Search all of these components. Right now you have to stitch together.
Jayesh Mori [00:16:53]:
But in this platform, everything is given within one go. So you spend less money, less time, and even you can focus on your growth versus focusing on the technology behind it.
Claus Lauter [00:17:05]:
Tell me, who's your perfect customer? When do customers come to you and what kind of platforms do they have in the background that they want to see integrated to go headless?
Jayesh Mori [00:17:15]:
If you are a brand that is actually doing more than $5 million a year, I think that's when I think the personalization and all of these technologies would start making sense. Because at that point you have already done all the basic optimizations. You have tried everything that you can from the ecommerce stores, and now it's time that you are thinking about what is next. Driveway for the growth for a brand. That's where our technology, like Expero, can be super, super powerful. We have customers ranging from, like I said, 5 million plus in revenue all the way to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue using the platform for the exact same reason and then from the platform perspective, we generally see customers using shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento and even some other e commerce platforms like commerce tool, SAP, Salesforce, leveraging, platform like experiment.
Claus Lauter [00:18:14]:
I like the idea that you can stay with the platform, the backend that you already use and then still take advantage of headless. Now when it comes to headless, I think one of the biggest things beside of being customization is also speed. Speed is in everyone's mind and speed is a huge contribution. The faster your website is, the higher are your conversion rates. Can you give me some examples of customers of yours where you have seen a huge difference going?
Jayesh Mori [00:18:40]:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Almost every single customer we work with, they are going through this experience. So we were actually working with large jewelry company for us. And before Experro they were really struggling with the speed and performance of your site. And because of that reason they were also losing sales. And since they migrated to Expero, their speed has improved by twelve x. And that's like a massive improvement because think about the jewelry company, the images, videos, all of these assets are very high quality because you have to create that luxury experience. Despite all of that, we were able to give them twelve x improvement and the site on the desktop is loading in less than a second.
Jayesh Mori [00:19:34]:
And it also has got really solid performance on mobile as well, where it is also loading in second and half, which is super powerful, especially when you have large number of customers in this industry segment coming from mobile. And they've seen a massive surge in their page use traffic. Even Google started showing them better love because the experience is better now. And they are also seeing real impact on the revenue. Just within first year they have posted really solid revenue growth, average order growth. Not that we can attribute everything to just speed, but it always helps even shopify Google, all of them have done these studies where they're saying, I think something like if 1 second improvement in your load time on mobile can actually result in 27% improvement in your conversion. And we see it live with this diamond example that I gave you. We have other brand, they are actually selling tools, hardware tools online, but they have a very similar experience.
Jayesh Mori [00:20:40]:
We were able to give them four x boost on their speed and that boost has resulted in better customer experience. The engagement is higher immediately. Within a month they see higher engagement on the site. They are seeing that their mobile customers are actually doing more checking out more products than what they were doing before and they've started seeing better orders just from the month of the launch. So there's definitely a big speed aspect that is ongoing in the market. Many merchants we talk to, many customers we work with, speed is always one of their big concern as well.
Claus Lauter [00:21:18]:
Now I think speed specifically with shortening attention times is very important and it has such a huge impact. And I think the example that you gave there was you save 1 second and your conversion rate just goes through the roof is a good example of that. Now I want to talk a little bit about the onboarding process. What kind of homework does a merchant have to do before they can get started with Xparo?
Jayesh Mori [00:21:42]:
Understand the need, whether they need to go headless or not. And there are a few symptoms that you would see as a merchant. For example, you will see that you want to create this tailored experience or some customized features that you're not able to do in Shopify or bigcommerce or whatever platform you're using right now. You always find yourself trying to fit the square packet round hole and it just takes dev effort and lot of apps and extensions. At that point you have outgrown the UI capability of the platform. So are you having any of the limitations that are blocking you or restricting you from creating that best experience that you want to deliver to your customers? Are you needing to integrate lot of different systems in the background too? And this you will see in b two B space as well. And in the space where some b two B brands are leveraging PIm systems and ERP systems. Do you happen to find yourself in that land? And if you happen to have needs for integration, are you able to do that with your current platform? Because most probably the answer would be not to the fullest extent the way we need it.
Jayesh Mori [00:22:56]:
The third obviously biggest factor is do we need improvement in our spade speed and can it actually help us improve our conversion or average order value? Because it's always a choice whether you need it or not need it. Sometimes it's nice to have, sometimes it's must have, depending on the industry and mobile experience. Do you have lot of customers on mobile? Because optimizing mobile is hard. It's not easy. So if you have a lot of customers on mobile, you absolutely want to look at it. On top of that, do you want to offer personalized experiences, better search that is like Google and Amazon experience where it can really understand the context of what customers looking for and really using all of this data to automatically personalize web experiences and using this data to drive other channel experiences as well. If you find yourself in any of these needs or areas, Expera is the platform that can help once you've identified the need. Other preparation steps are all you need to have.
Jayesh Mori [00:24:04]:
Is your e commerce platform ready to go? And then you need to have idea about what your new experience should look like and then we can help you along with our partners really design that new experience which has the help of Xpero in a matter of weeks.
Claus Lauter [00:24:21]:
Okay, that just answered my question on how long it will take to get up and running with this system. Tell me a little bit about the pricing structure. How does that work?
Jayesh Mori [00:24:30]:
So expert, actually, we have a platform licensing cost, but it is based on what modules you want to leverage from the platform. If you just want the headless CMS, then there's a smaller price. But if you want CMS plus search plus personalization, there's a different price. But we really kind of make it easy for the merchants to pick and choose what they need to improve their experience. There is a fee for these modules and there is also a usage cost. These fees are based on usage. The only reason we put it on the usage base is because that also incentivize us to make sure that the merchants are growing on the platform and we grow with them. But compared to the large providers or enterprise scale providers that you see in this space or on the other end, stitching everything together, all of these tools yourself, you will always find Experro's ROI is tremendously high and way more worth it because it's all one stop shop integrated.
Jayesh Mori [00:25:32]:
All you have to do is start using it.
Claus Lauter [00:25:34]:
No, I think there's a huge advantage there. You come to a system that is proven, that is tested, that is working, starting from scratch and developing something for your company. Yeah, that's sort of a two sided spirit. So I would always scratch my head before I go in that direction. Before we come to the end of the coffee break today, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?
Jayesh Mori [00:25:55]:
So one thought I have is around AI, influence of AI and personalization that I think a lot of merchants needs to take in account as they are growing their, trying to grow their brand. We talked about the changing generation, but how will you actually start infusing AI into your store experience? Whether it's search, whether it's products that you are surfacing to the customers, or even whether it's you leveraging the data to understand customer behaviors on the store and using that behavioral insights, empowering other experiences on the store, or maybe on other channels too. If you don't have a strategy to do this now, or you are not thinking about this then it is going to actually become a hurdle for you and continue to grow. So I think it's super important that we keep this AI based personalization in mind as we all are trying to grow our ecommerce businesses.
Claus Lauter [00:26:57]:
Yeah, I think AI will be probably the biggest benefit of going into the future for a marketer, for a developer to speed up things, and also, most importantly, to deliver a better customer experience. I think AI should be on everyone's list. Where can people find out more about you guys?
Jayesh Mori [00:27:16]:
They can definitely visit, experiment and check out our offering plus reach out to us. I am on LinkedIn. They can directly reach out to me jsmory or you can just drop me an email as well. Js@expert.com we always love to hear from questions and share our stories or listen to what interesting things they are doing. So we are all ears from any channel.
Claus Lauter [00:27:41]:
Okay, I will put the links in the show notes then you're just one click away. Yeah, I think it was a great overview of the evolution and what's coming and I think we are looking into bright times, specifically with the help of AI and headless e commerce. And I think if you have a store out there that is growing fast, then there is only one thing you need to do. You need to look into headless to be able to compete in the market. Thanks so much for your time today.
Jayesh Mori [00:28:06]:
Thanks Claus, appreciate it.
Claus Lauter [00:28:10]:
Hey Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the e commerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more actual guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast, simply like comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.