iPaaS: Your Secret Weapon to Beat Peak Season Rush In 2024 — Mark Simon | The Importance of Good Data for Effective Automation, Challenges Faced by Smaller Companies with Automation as they Grow, How Modern Integration Platforms Facilitate Automation (#30

In this podcast episode, we discuss how to make this years peak shopping season a success with automation and AI. Our featured guest on the show is Mark Simon, VP of Strategy at Celigo.com.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Importance of automation in peak shopping seasons
• Challenges faced by smaller companies with automation as they grow
• Significance of adopting an "automation first" mindset in e-commerce
• The importance of good data for effective automation
• Identifying areas for improvement through automation
• How modern integration platforms facilitate automation

Links & Resources

Website: https://www.celigo.com/
Shopify Integration: https://www.celigo.com/integrations/shopify/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/celigo-inc/
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/celigoinc


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Transcript

Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
Welcome to episode 308 of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. In today's episode, we discuss how to make this year's peak shopping season a success with automation and AI. Joining me on this show is Mark Simon, VP of strategy at Celigo.com. So let's dive right into it.

Voice over [00:00:19]:
This is the e commerce Coffee Break, a 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.

Claus Lauter [00:00:44]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today, we want to find out how you can make this year's holiday season a success with automation and to some degree, also with artificial intelligence. Now to dive into that, Mark Simon is with me on the show. Mark is the VP of Strategy at Celigo.com. With over a decade of experience, Mark is an expert expert in guiding companies through digital transformation. Starting as a software developer, he rose to cto of a thriving e commerce startup. And then Mark led professional service at explore consulting, overseeing digital initiatives for more than 200 e commerce companies. Now at Celigo, he continues to drive success for clients in their digital journeys.

Claus Lauter [00:01:21]:
So let's welcome Mark to the show. Hi, Mark. How are you today?

Mark Simon [00:01:24]:
I'm doing great. Great to meet you, Claus, and it's an honor to be here. Thank you. I love talking about e commerce and growing companies and what we see in the market and, and what leads them to be more successful than others. We see a lot of this every day at Soligo, and it's honestly a fun topic.

Claus Lauter [00:01:41]:
Yeah, let's start quite broad there. And I saw on your website you just issued a survey that details 2024 shopping trends. So based on your survey results, what are the top two, three online shopping trends that retailers should prioritize in this holiday season?

Mark Simon [00:01:55]:
One of the things we see there is customers are looking for and enhanced customer experience. This is, this is a bit of a snapback from the pandemic, honestly, where we saw a big, explosive growth in e commerce and at a certain point, just having product to sell, having in stock, and being able to get it out the door, get it online was enough. But we see customers really returning to that, that concept of seeking out a good experience. And so a good customer experience is in a, is a real differentiator right now. And what we saw is that 85% of shoppers that we surveyed had one to three poor, what they consider poor or very poor experiences with online retailers last year. And that's important because when they have that poor experience, they're likely not to go back. And that investment made in acquiring that customer is gone. Essentially.

Claus Lauter [00:02:50]:
No. Very true. I mean, most companies, or a lot of companies, do not make any kind of profit on the first sale. It happens later on in the customer journey. Customer lifetime value. Now, when it comes to automation, a growing company always has pain. It's not the easiest choice to find the right system, to have the right strategy going there. What's your approach? Or what do you see with smaller companies that are on a growth path and come to the next level? What are they struggling with?

Mark Simon [00:03:20]:
This is something that comes up quite frequently for us because we're often engaged at Soligo. We're what's called an integration platform as a service. It's actually another acronym I passed that, let's be honest, none of us need another tech acronym in our lives, but what used to be called middleware. But we're a modern version of that. We're a modern cloud based version of an integration tool to cat next systems. And so very often our customers are bringing us in because they've struggled to scale as an organization. They're at a key inflection point. So very often we see organizations starting out with getting in, particularly that are majority e commerce or others, that maybe they're coming into e commerce, they're new to e commerce, but they're well established.

Mark Simon [00:04:06]:
They often start out with Shopify as by far the most common e commerce platform we see both for starting e commerce companies and ones that are more mature as well, and more established. But they have to get started with platform because you can hang out your shingles, so to speak, and get your revenue moving very quickly. But they often don't have the behind the scenes infrastructure set up to, to really scale yet. And that makes sense, right? You need to test product market fit. Can you drive, can you drive customers to your, to your site, to your channel? Will this work for you? Can you get the margins you need to be successful? All makes sense to proof those out before you build out that back. A lot of that backend infrastructure. But we see those customers hand, they start, things start to take off, you get that revenue flowing through and you can't grow to that next level. And typically, I mentioned customer experience earlier, you see it really reflected there and showing in breakdowns in customer experience.

Mark Simon [00:05:03]:
And so these companies, these growing e commerce companies start adding in. Really the first point we see is them starting with often a modern ERP solution or an order management system. And as soon as they start download that path and really that's the first step to true digital transformation, they bring in an integration solution at that point. So that's where we get introduced and then we would kind of work with them to set them on a multi step path to automation.

Claus Lauter [00:05:30]:
Now in ecommerce business, you have your plan, you have a marketing plan, your growth plan, but normally it does not go to plan. Things happen. So a smaller business might be an overnight success and need to scale very, very quickly or you just grow very, very slowly. What are the sort of the milestones? What you think is when do I need to think about automation? And you already mentioned where to start with, but what would kind be of process steps to really follow a, a.

Mark Simon [00:05:58]:
Safe pass there really you should be thinking about automation constantly. It should be a thought that's at the forefront as a leader in really any growing organization, but especially in an e commerce organization because the competition is so intense there. So we often talk to our customers and prospects about this in terms of shifting to what we call an automation first mentality. So it's very common that you're building out your organization and you're growing and you're launching these new go to market initiatives and maybe you're launching a new marketplace or a new sales channel or launching in a new country or you're selling a new product line and then you wait until you have pain points in the organization, very often negative impacts to that customer experience. We're back to there again. And when you do a root cause analysis on those, you're like, oh, wait a minute, oh, this data is moving too slowly from my fulfillment center back up, where our customer service team can access it, where we can get it proactively in front of the customer, or even worse, it's inaccurate. Often it's slow and inaccurate. And then you break down and say, oh, we need some automation or new automation here.

Mark Simon [00:07:15]:
Now that gets you on the path, but that is often too slow. And where the automation first comes in is shifting the thinking so that you're like, oh, we're, we're touching this system, we're fixing this process. And the first question team can ask, and this doesn't have to be a technical person, this is really best asked by a business leader, any business leaders, can we automate that and just start posing that question more? And that's a really, it's a way to just shift the mentality. And we see companies that adopt that approach doesn't mean you automatically automate it. But the team is thinking about it more and it tends to press in and that the result tends to be those, those companies end up finding more opportunities to automate early and they head off those problems. And it's actually easier to do that earlier in, in the process, before, before a process is fully built out and in flight, so to speak. And it gives these companies a significant advantage and things tend to run smoother. That customer experience is better data flows.

Mark Simon [00:08:14]:
The employees internally have a better experience, not only just the customer, and we see that being, and that becomes a significant competitive advantage for a lot of.

Claus Lauter [00:08:22]:
E commerce companies when it comes to integration. I mean, making the decision to go into automation is one thing, but putting into place completely different thing. You say data flows, every supplier out there for any kind of software solutions will say, oh, we have an API and you can get all the data there. But getting all these bits and pieces together to make it a working system needs a lot of experience, expertise, technical know how and putting it in place. And I think that's where you come in. How do you help your customers on that journey?

Mark Simon [00:08:52]:
Yes, and that's really a key point and that's for us is really how our philosophy as a company and as an integration platform is different. So you mentioned the difficulty of building out those integrations traditionally. And traditionally that might be done via, you've got a team of developers in your organization and they're actually coding up integrations between those APIs in moving the data. Well, that's, that's kind of the old school. And for the most part, I think of that as a little bit of the stone age. But then we had some more modern, we had the first generation of integration platforms, some more legacy tools that came and those were still developer oriented tools, meaning that to be successful using them, you had to be a software engineer, you had to be a developer. And I've seen this firsthand. I've had a team in my consulting background, I had a team using one of those legacy platforms and also using Soligo.

Mark Simon [00:09:49]:
And my projects on a legacy I pass were 80% developers, 20% business analysts, and then leveraging Soligo. We were 80% business analysts and 20% developers. But the projects were small. We did the same amount of work more quickly, faster, and importantly in a more agile fashion. Thats really important. As companies look at this, e commerce says, well, I want to automate. Well make sure youre using the best tool set for the job because this is very much used to be the realm of the developer. Now you should pick a tool that gives you power with a really good user interface and the ability to bring in more of your business users in the organization doesn't mean you won't need developers, it means you just need less of their work and it's smaller.

Mark Simon [00:10:42]:
You don't need a senior of one or less experienced someone with maybe an mis background instead of a team of experienced computer scientists. Very different. Very different from a cost standpoint. And whether you're doing it in house or you're using say, an agency or a consulting firm or an MS managed services provider for you, the cost goes down. Relatively speaking. You can move faster. And so by selecting a modern platform, you can go faster. And then on top of that, it's a Lego.

Mark Simon [00:11:10]:
We've actually taken this further. So not just having a broad integration platform that connect anything to anything, we've looked at our customer base and said, hey, what are the things that are happening most? And one of them, for example, is we have a lot of customers that are selling on one or more ecommerce channels. Specifically the biggest one is Shopify. And so we said, hey, everyone that's selling on Shopify and has Netsuite, which is a leading mid market SaaS Erp, we say, hey, everyone that's using Shopify Netsuite, we can pre build all the integrations. We can have it pre built. And there's a lot of point to point out of the box things, but those tend to be in a box, but you get that flux, that speed and time to value with a platform that when you outgrow something and say, well, I'm going to do it differently because it's a business advantage, that's fine, you can do. You can leverage our platform so you really get our goal is to give you that quick time to value, but also the flexibility of using what we consider more legacy approaches and bring those together in one spot. And that's really kind of, you know, our secret sauce to give you that power with that quick time to value.

Claus Lauter [00:12:17]:
Hey Claus, here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter Dot in ecommerce coffeebreak.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 Dot e commercecoffeebreak.com to subscribe as said, 100% free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. Let's talk about timing.

Claus Lauter [00:12:45]:
We started with talking about this year's holiday season and to make that a success with automation, if you're a good marketer, you're months ahead of what you're actually doing. So we're looking at to Q four, we look at Cyber Monday, like Friday, all of these things. What is a typical timeline or what would be your recommendation in looking into automation right now and what are sort of the homework that the merchant needs to do before they get started?

Mark Simon [00:13:14]:
You should have started already, but you can still catch up. That's what I would say to your listeners. As we all know, we get into September and a lot of companies go into code freezes, both from an e commerce standpoint and into their business systems to make sure that they're locked down and ready to go. Whether they go into that, I see some going into that at the end of August. I see a lot of others. Certainly by mid October, things are locked up. Depending on the philosophy of an organization, that means that you really need to get thinking and planning about this right now. And specifically to that planning is looking at and asking yourself, really stepping back and looking at your top line business goals from last holiday season or your last peak.

Mark Simon [00:13:59]:
Like, did you achieve your goals, yes or no? And you might have had KPI's for customer experience and satisfaction and revenue, your margins, for example, you might have had top line KPI's for all of those getting down into detailed information on the customer experience, but you might not. And that's okay. You might just have, you might just be like, hey, we didn't hit our revenue goals and margin goals last year to the holiday season. But simply doing a good, thoughtful root cause analysis of those, why you didn't hit those goals will. If you break those apart, I guarantee just about everyone will find that a substantial, there's a substantial number of root causes pointing back to a lack of automation in the organization or a lack of quality in the automation so that the data moving around, either you don't have data that's moving in an automated fashion, or you have it that is, maybe it is moving, but it's not accurate. It's broken, it's not working right. If you do that root cause analysis, you'll come back often and almost every single time with multiple areas that you know where you can improve through higher quality automation. And now's really the time to be doing that work.

Mark Simon [00:15:14]:
Because at Soligo we can help reduce the effort involved in the nuts and bolts of that integration. And in the case of where we have our accelerator products, our integration applications, we actually can provide a viewpoint on, because we have a thousand customers that we're integrating to Shopify, we can bring a viewpoint of hey, here are the best practices that we see and we've actually implemented from a process perspective. But the larger you are or the more specialized you are as an online seller, the more it is likely it is that you're going to have some unique business processes and with those unique business processes, those are going to be a little different. And with that, you might need to redesign how some of your processes work internally as an organization to take that next level, to improve those, to improve your outcomes, to hit your business objectives. And that's going to take a little bit more work. So that's why you want to make sure you start now with a really good analysis so you can identify where's the process work. That's where are we lacking in process? And then implement a new or improved process from an automation perspective. And it's tying those things together that will really lead to success.

Claus Lauter [00:16:21]:
I think a lot of companies right now, brands out there are busy right now in rethinking their process steps when it comes to implementing AI. And how much does AI factor into automation for online retailers?

Mark Simon [00:16:34]:
AI is so interesting right now because over a year ago, with the advance in the large language models and the new gen AI tools out there, all of a sudden everyone thinking about and seeing these new capabilities. But for the majority of companies, it really hasn't had a tangible impact beyond some basic, what I call co pilot accelerators. Whether it's literally using Microsoft's copilot for some day to day tools, or using chat GT to help you write marketing copy, for example, it's helped on the periphery, but it hasn't really fundamentally changed the core of a lot of organizations. And the reason for that is because in order to take advantage of new AI tools, whether you're working with things directly, like shibt behind the scenes, using the open AI APIs to build essentially internal AI enhancements to your system stack or your product stack, what you have to do is your data has to be in good shape beforehand, meaning you have to have high confidence that you have reasonably accurate data and good ways to identify when it's not accurate. Because AI is just another tool in the automation toolbox. It's the shiny, bright one that has an amazing future ahead of us, for all of us. But you have to apply that tool in a way that you're now accelerating automation with AI. And if you start with bad data, you're going to get automated garbage.

Mark Simon [00:18:16]:
And that's really the trick. A lot of companies struggle with that, especially smaller companies. That's natural. Larger ones do. But you have to be working and make sure you've got the automation in place in your organization, that you've got the data connected, that you're making sure it's clear, clean, that you have some assurance that you're working with that good set of data in order to apply the AI. And that's what we see is really the biggest blocker right now.

Claus Lauter [00:18:42]:
I love the term automated garbage. I've never heard that before, but I think that's what's happening in a lot of organization, as you mentioned. So who's your perfect customer?

Mark Simon [00:18:50]:
A fantastic customer that I think of that comes to mind immediately is purple is the mattress company. So super cool customer that's done fantastic things, leveraging our product over a number of years throughout their explosion as a company, explosive growth as a company. They have a team that leverages Soligo, that uses Soligo to help accelerate the business. That's an example of someone that's a vertically, vertically integrated manufacturer driven by online sales and leveraging automation in Sligo specifically to fuel that automation very successfully.

Claus Lauter [00:19:31]:
Walk me through a typical onboarding process for a new client. What steps are involved? How long does it take?

Mark Simon [00:19:37]:
I hate to say it, this sounds like a real consultant. Well, it just depends. We see everything from, you know, if a company is coming in and they already have the systems up and running, that's a big thing. Do you have your, your e commerce platform up and running already? So is Shopify up and running for you? Is your Amazon store up and running? Great. So if Shopify is up and running for you, you've got a head start and specifically running the way that you want, you're happy relatively with how that's functioning. And then do you have your other systems up and running? Is your order management system, whether that's an ERP, like Microsoft Business central or Acumatica, or it could be an SAP product, whatever it is. Is that up and running and already implemented? If so, that means your processes are already working. Your items masters, for example, are already figured out.

Mark Simon [00:20:27]:
That means you'll have a much quicker implementation. We see some companies coming in and getting, say their shopify ERP integration up and running in a matter of days. If they're using one of our accelerating products or integration applications, they get that going up very, very quickly. If they have those business processes defined. All right. If not, we remove the technical part of the integration, the mapping, and actually wiring the systems together. We make that as easy as possible, but you still have to do that business process work and make sure your endpoints are implemented. So those are often the biggest questions, like, oh, are you ready? If you're not ready, you're going to have to do that first, and then we can get this down to days or weeks, something that might have otherwise taken, you know, might have been measured in months before.

Claus Lauter [00:21:12]:
Interesting. So how does your pricing structure work?

Mark Simon [00:21:16]:
So, our pricing structure is based off of how many systems you're connecting to, how much data you're moving back and forth in the types of data. We think from an integration standpoint, we think of this as flows. A flow might be taking your sales orders from shopify and bringing them into your ERP or OMS. Another flow would be bringing the updates to those orders when they've been filled with tracking information, bringing that up. That's an example of two flows bringing your inventory information upstream into Shopify. That's a third flow. So your number of flows and how many systems you're connecting to really determine the pricing of our platform, and then it goes from there. If you need additional platform features that are more enterprise oriented, well, we have an enterprise offering for our platform that starts at $72,000 that has some of the things that customers are looking for and for comparable enterprise products.

Mark Simon [00:22:13]:
That's a very disruptive price. And then we also have much, much lower end solutions. If you're looking to just connect, start very simple, very small, and only connect two systems with three or four flows, we can get you up and running for a fraction of that price, really down at the price point that's comparable to some point to point black block solution. So we really give customers that full spectrum knowing that someone might be starting this automation journal only have two or $3 million of revenue, perhaps. So we have a lot of customers on that end. And while at the same time we're working with Fortune 50 companies as well to automate their integration processes around e.

Claus Lauter [00:22:51]:
Commerce, I think a big advantage is that you as a brand, as a DTC brand, you can grow with illego, the bigger you become. You don't have to change the system at some point, you just can grow with you guys, and the system grows as you grow. 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?

Mark Simon [00:23:11]:
I wouldn't say it's something that I haven't shared, but I'd come back to that automation first concept. And that's really the thing that everybody listening can take away from this and use to start changing your organization and shifting to that automation first culture. Just ask when you're sitting in a meeting, you're talking about something new and you don't hear people like, oh, can we automate that? How can we automate shift the conversation a little bit, just start posing that question. And that's where we start to see. That's where you, as a listener, as a leader in an e commerce company, can start to accelerate your digital transformation as a company.

Claus Lauter [00:23:48]:
Yeah, I think it's a mindset thing. Once you're in the right mindset, then automation becomes much, much easier. Where can people find out more about you guys?

Mark Simon [00:23:57]:
Best place to go is celigo.com. That is celigo.com. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, social media. We're in all those usual places, but come to our website, check out what we do, and you can really get a sense of what we do. You know, we have thousands of e commerce companies that are part of our customer base. So this is really, you know, and why e commerce, automating e commerce business processes is our bread and butter. This is where we've really started as an organization and grew out of. So, you know, we love to help companies achieve that vision of an automated business and be more efficient.

Mark Simon [00:24:38]:
And we can get, we can help give you a roadmap, how to get there. You don't say, I don't know where to start. That's great. We can help you. I don't know what to integrate. First. We can help you because we can show you, hey, what, what have successful companies done?

Claus Lauter [00:24:49]:
Okay, perfect. I will put the links in the show notes. Then you just want to click away. And I would recommend to our listeners, if you're growing, reach out to Mark and his team to get your own roadmap. Mark, thanks so much for your time. It was very interesting.

Mark Simon [00:25:00]:
It was a pleasure. Thanks, Claus.

Claus Lauter [00:25:02]:
Hey, Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the ecommerce 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 impactful 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.