Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to check in to check out the E Commerce Growth podcast from Mobile first.
My name is Justin Ehrenstein and my co host is Connor Burke.
Welcome to check in to check out. Today we have John Arquette, E Commerce Director. Super excited to have him. He's actually going to talk to us about running an E commerce business through trying and in different difficult times and so really excited to just get into it. So John, before we really jump in, how you feeling today? How was your week?
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Week's pretty good. You know it's Friday when we're recording, so generally things lighten up. You know, by the time you get to Friday. I'm sure everybody out there can relate. You wake up in the morning, Monday intensity all around. And so that kind of eases up for me and, and my team by the time Friday midday ish comes around. So I feel pretty good consistently kind of this, this time of the week.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: So as ECOM Director, what do you own?
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Everything, right? So I own everything from the entire P and L in my, in my vertical. You know, all the, all the properties, all the platforms, all the ad spend, all the merchandising, the products, the team, the margins, making sure the inventory is good, that we're projecting the entire stack. Yeah. So everything, everything filters down to my EBITDA and my, in my EBITDA margin number.
[00:01:24] Speaker C: Do you feel like this is something we talk about with a lot of guests and it seems maybe something that's I think pervasive in the role of E Commerce director. But how do you deal with the burnout and having so much to do? You know, how do you manage what tasks to delegate, what tasks not to how to keep yourself from just getting overwhelmed by everything?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that's a, you know, that's the classic, you know, question because of course, look, there are different, you know, there are different E Commerce directors in different businesses and different sectors, categories with different tools and platforms and stacks to use. So I'm sure that varies for everybody out there. But you know, but for me I, I have pulled a lot of, I pulled a lot with me from my military days. You know, I was a, in the Marine Corps way back in the day. I was a Marine officer. I had a lot of Marines, you know, under my command and we operated under this concept of centralized command but decentralized control.
So for many, many years I have pushed control authority, reasonable decision making ability down and out to, you know, the furthest and farthest reaches of my team. You know, that way you are managing not everything. Every member of your team is doing in every area. But you're running your team, right? And then, of course, so you have, let's say you've got five people, you know, reporting to you on your team.
You've got five core, you know, people or items that you're running instead of 10 things they're doing times 5 people, 50 items to keep track of. So I do my best not to get too far in the weeds on where are we? On every KPI or every milestone, on every project or everything you're. You're running. And I extract, you know, or ask them to kind of give me the broad brush on a rolling basis so I'm in good communication with my team on the core subjects on a rolling basis. You can keep, you know, up to date with each other. That way you don't have to get too far down in the weeds all the time and really expose yourself to too much burnout. Sometimes it gets forced. There's a problem here. You got questions come from higher, the ELT team or whatever, and so you have to respond. But pushing down, like, responsibility and authority has. Has worked out for me over the years.
[00:03:37] Speaker C: I'll say, yeah, that's a great answer. I mean, it definitely sounds like it comes down to who you hire, Making sure you have a team you trust, allowing them to work and do what they do well, Tending to the garden you can reach, I guess, essentially. And hiring good gardeners.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Team. The team appreciates it too, you know, I mean, you know, how do you feel when you have really good room to maneuver? It gives you time to think, to ideate. You can take things to your boss. So that's, you know, that's one of my favorite, like, parts of the job is when I get this input from my team.
I love it. So my favorite thing to say to the team is, like, awesome, you know, idea. Like, like, how should we. How should. How do you think we should proceed? How can I help?
[00:04:15] Speaker C: That's a great answer.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Love that. And within your team, how. How big is it? And is. Do you have partners as well, or do you guys handle everything internally?
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Well, we have partners, you know, so, you know, like. Like most people, you know, outsource things that require kind of detailed, like, expertise that'd be difficult or expensive to build in house. Like the advertising agency, you know, some creative, some. Some consulting, you know, here and there, have multiple verticals at the company. So we have a highly, highly matrix team. And so I do a lot of sharing of people at shared services teams and so that's a, you know, that's a kind of a double edged sword. You work with people, you interact with them as if say they directly report to you, but they get measured, you know, by, by other people or, and you have to negotiate, you know, who gets what time from what personnel, you know, between your peers and other, and other teams in the company. So you know, that's, that's one of the things that I spend my week on is like negotiating, hey, which teams are doing what for, you know, what director and what vertical. Yeah, but I've, I've managed small teams and, and, and some pretty big teams. And I mean when I was in my 20s and I was a, you know, like a young lieutenant in the Marine Corps, I think maybe my biggest morning report was 157. So it was huge. And I've had, you know, I started some companies with one direct report and then the team. So yeah, building the team and hiring good people is fun.
[00:05:40] Speaker D: Nice.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: So what does your current day to day look like with your current team? What's it mean to be an E Commerce director at gol's from a day to day perspective?
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Yeah, lot of meetings and a lot of prioritization and negotiation of those resources, you know, for like it could be counterintuitive, you know, when you move to larger and larger companies, one of the things everybody thinks is oh, more and more resources, bigger and bigger budgets, bigger and bigger teams. But one of the things I found goes along with that is sharing resources and teams. It's a bigger pie, but you gotta work hard to get your share of that pie. And so, you know, it's not as, it's not as fluid, you know, getting access to, you know, the, the all the time of all the people on various teams and maybe not even all lined up at the right time when you would prefer to have it. So most of my week frankly is say meetings and site reporting on what's going on in business. You know, everybody has kind of difficulties that come up have to deal with, but I do a lot of resource prioritization and negotiation.
[00:06:46] Speaker C: Like we see that in the agency life with larger clients you think like, oh, this would be a client I can really do something great with. There's a lot of, you know, material, they have a lot of users, they've got a good brand.
And then you get in there and there's so much red tape. There's, you can't, it takes you like months to get any kind of work done. Whereas like the smaller clients, you can't really make as big of an impact, but things are just moving crazy.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, like that, that's, that's, you know, that's right on, right on point. When I was at kind of smaller companies, you know, and I was, I was running a lot of kind of multi channel E commerce. So selling Amazon and Wayfair and Walmart and Target different places, I would have meetings with our counterpart teams, Wayfair and Amazon, those guys and one of the things they would always say to me and my team is, you know, like, you're an awesome partner. You do what you say you're going to do. We have these, the exact same weekly, quarterly, you know, monthly meeting with all these vend then there's no progress and they're at these huge companies where they are running into just that. And I got a smaller team, you know, and I have a lot more kind of tactical control to, to, to execute. So yeah, yeah. We find that we end up having.
[00:07:56] Speaker C: To do a lot of their job just to be like, what can we do to make you get the permission to get the permission we need? And then it ends up being this whole cycle. So I know exactly what you're talking.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: About from that and it's, I'm, I'm sure it's frustrating because I've seen this from my chair.
Like the agency or the vendor management teams, they just assume, you know, that you have all this control and you can just go get it done and.
[00:08:17] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: You know, they don't have any idea how long, how many contacts it takes to convince X stakeholder that we need to move in this direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, just go tell the CFO. Just show them this. Yeah, okay. Okay Mr.
I'll just, I'll just tell the CFO that.
[00:08:35] Speaker C: Yeah, let me get his attention first.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Yeah, that's funny.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: That's awesome. So you've gotten into this a little as an E Comm director, you only have time to be great at so many things. It sounds like you're great at negotiating to get the resources you need. What are, what are the skills that you utilize that you're great at now? And which ones do you rely on your team for?
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I would say, I mean I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm like that, that I'm super great at that or that is actually my kind of, kind of core strength. My core strength, I would say is managing and running the team, building the team, strategic direction and leadership of the team. You know, there's it's not hit or miss but you know, it's, you know, I, I have kind of an introverted, introverted kind of personality. So it does not come really naturally to me to go out there and just be super convincing to everybody else on all the teams especially because, you know, you guys might experience this. You bring all this kind of knowledge and experience to conversations and it's kind of difficult to tactically decide how far back in the kind of like experience or like, or E commerce proficiency everybody else that you're talking to has. So you can, you can make big steps. And I've made some where you have these built in assumptions when you get on a meeting and are, and are, and are you know, talking about something you need to get done for the agency or to, for your customers or on site. And not everybody really internalizes what you're talking about. And then if you get a little bit too far ahead of them, you've made a mistake, you said something wrong, it didn't hit right. You got to go back now, you got to have another meeting next week. You know, it's uncomfortable. So yeah, there's, there's, that's definitely not my, the top of my game doing that.
I'm much more comfortable like running the teams, I would say.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: And from a marketing perspective, obviously you've been a marker. Where's your strength within marketing?
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah, my strength is kind of similar which is you know, running the teams, doing marketing and not all the way down anymore in the tactical execution. So way back in the day I created the campaigns, I set the bids and the budgets and I wrote the copy and like I did it all and right. I'm not the guy that you want doing that anymore.
I, I still know enough that I can, you know, open up the hood and make the agency explain to me why they're doing this and hey, why are we allocating so much to brand campaigns again? Isn't this make our roas look different than it, than it kind of actually is. So you know, I still have the kind of technical and tactical proficiency to, to make sure that the agencies are not kind of pulling anything over on us and are doing the right thing. And, and I still have the chops to, to talk to them and make sure that they aren't getting too far afield too soon. But you know, listen, running the TikTok campaigns or being logged into the meta account, like, that's not me anymore. You do not want me doing that. For sure.
[00:11:33] Speaker C: Yeah, fair.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Yeah, but and then too like, you know, how Much, you know, how much are we, you know, how, you know, what's our efficiency ratio? How much are we investing? Is that consistent? Are there seasonal fluctuations we should expect, you know, things like that? That's more my game now makes a lot of sense.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: The good news is that go it just allowed PMAX to take everything over. So it's easy.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: All you do. Yes. You just put your money in the slot, right. And then you just like high, you know, high return sales and return, right? Yeah, yeah, it's super easy nowadays and the attribution is perfect, right? Yep.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Oh totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: 100% to Google makes reporting a breeze.
[00:12:13] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Awesome. So let's look back at your career for a quick second. How did you get started in E commerce? I know you didn't go to school for it. No one did. So what was your kind of start into E comm?
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's funny like so you know, no one went to school for it. And when I got out of college, guys, the day I graduated college, Amazon had not even launched as a website yet.
[00:12:32] Speaker D: Right.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: So I didn't, I didn't even use email in college, guys.
[00:12:36] Speaker D: Right.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: So none of this existed. I got into E Comm at my own company. So I was in the service and then I worked in finance for a while and then my wife and I had a company selling stationary custom wedding invitations.
And you know, I kind of grew the wholesale part of that for, for a while and got some good distribution and then I converted that company from wholesale to direct to consumer e Commerce around 2007.8ish. You know, I started, you know we had, if you guys can picture this, I had a one page website, right. And I started just answering kind of facts on the website and the answers to those questions we stopped getting phone calls about.
[00:13:21] Speaker D: Right.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: So then I started putting info and product, et cetera on there and, and, and I realized the financials on customers coming directly to you versus through the dealers and things, it evolves kind of organically. And then I, you know, I, I had a, had a, a design dev firm in San Diego build us this super awesome experience where you could go on there and customize your wedding invitations and they would change colors and fonts and text in real time and save it on a collection page. It was built. Are you ready on flash?
[00:13:53] Speaker D: Right, right.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:56] Speaker C: You're really, I, I, yeah, the age.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: Is showing a little. There you go. Yeah, it was, it was awesome and it was kind of ahead of its time and at the time, magento was the only thing kind of going on. And you know, we knocked the socks off, you know, off that. And then as soon as the kind of the iPad was invented, I had to, you know, I had to rethink things and replatform.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: That's funny to hear. The iPad is something like a turning point.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like a totally new technology. Right.
And so it just, yeah, it made Flash, you know, unusable. There wasn't massive adoption yet, of course, exactly at that point. But there was enough. It was a problem. Yeah, I had to deal with it totally.
[00:14:36] Speaker A: And one of the things that I found in being entrepreneurial, because I was entrepreneurial in my career as well, is you just learned so much. Like the pace of learning, I believe, is like X of going into a company because you are having to solve every single problem and you understand how those problems connect to each other. Have you found that yourself and has that accelerated your career?
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Hundred percent.
And you know, that proposition is just kind of backed up by. You're writing the checks too.
[00:15:06] Speaker D: Right.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: So, you know, if there are things where you can, you know, make a decision, it's. It's worth it to hire somebody to help me figure this out. That's one thing. But often, you know, you don't have that kind of timeline.
[00:15:17] Speaker D: Right.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: If you have to figure something out, you need to figure it out like asap. Don't have time to think about it and then go out there and find some people might be able to help you and talk to them and vet them and get proposals and this. And that will take a month. You have to make decisions now.
[00:15:33] Speaker D: Right.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: So, yeah, so I, I often tell people in my team, I tell, I say this too. Maybe they get tired of hearing it. But look, I've done every single thing there is to do, from hosting to creating products, figuring out the platforms, copy, creative, SEO, advertising, partnerships, feeds, inventory, you name it. I've shipped, of course, I've shipped orders. I've dropped stuff off at FedEx.
I've been live on customer service for hundreds of thousands of calls.
Yeah, I will say that's one thing that maybe many e commerce teams nowadays don't have the benefit of, of having been on the front lines with the customers.
[00:16:16] Speaker D: Right.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: So you run the company, you take those calls or the emails, you can spot a trend right away and, and see if you got difficulties or opportunities. Maybe there's good and bad that comes to that comes with doing it. All right.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: When I used to hire e comm managers the first week and they would hate it, they Would hate every moment of it. The first week all they did was sit in the call center and listen to calls to get to know the customer and their customer problems. And they would like just talk about how terrible it was and how bad they felt for the customer service people, et cetera, et cetera. I said, now you know our customer, now we can learn what everything about this company. Let's start your real onboarding. But yeah, it's something that I think people need to be doing a lot more often. Just really talking to the customer in a meaningful way.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: Oh yeah, there is a direct, not even dotted line. A direct line to my current, you know, position and experience from taking phone calls from customers. Oh, I'm going to put that on the, on the webpage. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pre answer that. That was the beginning of it all.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Totally. I love that. So you started a company. What were a couple of the other key critical points to getting to an E. Com director, you know?
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Yeah, so I was running that company and I was running that company through the Great Recession of 08 09. So you know, I was selling an expensive product that was centered around like a huge life event. Weddings, right. Oh, when you know, kind of credit home equity lines dried up in the fall ish of 2008. Dude, the source of funding for my product like went away almost overnight. I had to, I had to pivot a couple times in my career because of huge kind of socioeconomic cycles or conditions. Right. So the recession 08 09, I had to rethink my product mix entirely. I had to, you know, I had to kind of bring it down market. I had to change, you know, materials. I had to change the website had changed production. I had to change the way we advertise for lower priced product. You know, before I was in E Commerce, I, I was working in finance when the dot com boom was busting. Very difficult environment in, in the markets, et cetera, with clients. You know, there's been, you know, kind of, kind of political environments, uncertainty. Like even in the past few months, you know, there's a, there's a lot of like pricing changes. Everybody's worried about margins, you got inventory coming from overseas, et cetera. So I'd say big inflection points are probably not, you know, I've done of course proactive things. You take care of the customer, you create new products, you take advantage of new opportunities and different channels that you, you're seeing. But the big, big points where you look back, you're like, man, you Know the iPad coming out and destroying my Flash site and a recession. Those are ones where you had to, there's nobody that can just come in and you can pay them a consulting fee and fix things for you. You know, big, big external events that really cause you to have to like pull on those bootstraps.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: I'll say that makes sense within those points. And I well done in all those successes. But now I want you to look at your failures a little because I think that's more interesting to help yourself learn as well as others. What, what were some of like what's one of the, your more memorable failures where you didn't succeed and what did you take away from it? How did it propel you in the future?
[00:19:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I've got a good one. I mean when I a couple roles after, you know, my own company, I was working at the, at this pretty awesome little kids furniture company, right. We made bunk beds and loft beds and you know, super high quality product and, and I saw, you know, if you think back this is probably 201516 pneedle got bought by a company called Jet. Walmart bought Jet. The Amazon teams from the furniture category were calling people like me. Wayfair had just, you know, kind of become Wayfair from CSN Stor stores. Things were going on in my category, right. Furniture because it wasn't deeply penetrated or hadn't, hadn't completely converted to a high, to a, to a deep extent from kind of brick and mortar to digital yet. And so there was obviously traction growing kind of in that category. And so I decided that we need to get serious about multi channel marketplace sales. Amazon, Wayfair, et cetera. And I knew of course look from talking to peers, you know, like you guys and me, that, that you really should not mess up Amazon. So I hired some professional help. It was the most expensive third party that we hired to consult with us and help us. Disaster fellas, disaster.
[00:20:48] Speaker D: Right?
[00:20:49] Speaker B: I sold $0.00 and $0.00 0 products in the first like huge launch of my flagship product line. We'd been paying the consultant for several months. They were pumping us up about how many millions we were going to sell and a big fat donut hole after even a couple months. And so you know, like at that point in that small company that was consuming a lot of cash. So I had to, I had to fire them and I had to rethink what we were going to list on marketplaces. The whole, the whole case for moving forward on Amazon, et cetera did not go away. So I had to like pivot from that total failure and kind of launch a different like strata price strata of product.
A little bit accessible price point, a little bit different materials, similar to what I had done with wedding invitations during the, during the recession. But that turned it around and started going like gangbusters. But it was, I mean that's one that nearly crushes you. You really have to convince the president and owners of the company, look, we have to take some precious cash, hire somebody to help us. That was the first real big bet that we took. Total, total fail.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: So within that was it that the agency wasn't doing their job? Was it that you chose the wrong agency or that like you gave them.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: The wrong strategy where yeah, I did everything perfect. Okay. Yeah, so remember the cartoon? Your concept's all right, but you might have bought it all wrong. Right. So the underlying concept with good, we hired a good agency, the CEO of that agency. And I like agreed on this. It was, we had a rock solid foundation. Our product line that we launched with was not the right price point for the Amazon customer at the time.
[00:22:32] Speaker D: Right.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: That, that was a super high end set of products. Like you're a dad, you have a 40 year old, right. A daughter. Like some of these products, big loft bed, bunk bed, play bed, cost a couple thousand dollars. That's not something you're buying on Amazon in a couple visits, like you're researching that purchase.
The price point was most users on Amazon were not prepared to do that on Amazon yet. You know, that was, that was more, that was 10 years ago. So a little bit different now. But you know, lower price point killed it. And then higher end products did a lot better on competing marketplaces like Wayfair, Target, et cetera. Eventually it totally changed that company. It was just, just amazing and really one of the best kind of stories of my entire career.
But that was a crushing, crushing defeat.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: But you wouldn't have known it until you did it, like until you took that risk, until you put yourself out there.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Yeah, and the agency was stoked about it. They were telling us how awesome our products were and you know, all that stuff. And like to this day I don't know how much of that was just, you know, pumping us up or if they really thought that too. I, you know, I have to believe they were, you know, earnest about it. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I don't know.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: So now we're going to get into the checkout portion of the show. What are some of the things that you've Learned running e Commerce through uncertain times. You've been doing this a while, you've seen some ups, but you've probably seen a lot of downs. What do you, how do you prepare for yourself and what do you do as you. Because we're in a little bit of uncertain times with tariffs, I think, impacting a lot of people. I think economic trends are mixed. So what are you doing to prepare and how do you think about uncertain times?
[00:24:17] Speaker B: I have never gone wrong by talking to and listening to the customers.
[00:24:22] Speaker D: Right.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: So when in doubt, go back and sit in the call center and listen to the customer service calls or take some.
[00:24:28] Speaker D: Right.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: Or interview your customers again. Right. So, you know, that's probably something I kind of overlooked in inflection points is when I went back and took another second look at having conversations or getting info or feedback from my customers. Man, it kind of reopened, you know, your eyes at that furniture company. I, you know, relaunched a new site on a new platform and I read the content strategy and we just got information from customers that we never, we just, we just assumed our way right over the core proposition these customers were telling us.
[00:25:01] Speaker D: Right.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: And it changed the whole direction of the flagship line and website of the company and doubled it and then tripled it. So, yeah, so in my experience, I'll say if you're as closely connected as you can be to your customer, you're going to be able to make kind of tactical decisions and you have to maybe eat a few margins or spend a few advertising dollars or, you know, kind of refocus your inventory more specifically here, whatever it is tactically you have to do. But, you know, if you're going through uncertain times and you're disconnected from your customer, you probably can be a lot more trouble.
[00:25:32] Speaker D: Right.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: But if you, you know, if you have a, you know, like I've seen, I've seen you post about things like testing, you know, Justin, and, and, and doing things on site. I have always tried to. Sometimes this gets away from you, but if you do, if you're looking at the data on site or GA data or margin data or category data, but nobody on your team can articulate kind of like a hypothesis on how this filters all the way down to what the customer is experiencing, feeling doing on your platforms or your sites or on the marketplaces, man, you probably have a, you should probably pause, you know, before you continue. Like I, it's hard to do it a hundred percent of the time, but I like to have an articulable hypothesis, like, about how this is like going to affect the customer, why the customer would do this or that in conjunction with whatever test or change, you know, we're making. So customer, customer, customer.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: I love that. I couldn't agree more. So how are you currently talking to your customers? What, what do you find works to really understand what the customer's feeling and needing?
[00:26:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now, luckily enough, my customer look in the military segment. These are young military members. Okay. So I was a young military member back in the day. Luckily for me, right there, there is a, you know, there is a, there's kind of a, you know, there's a through line that goes from a current day soldier to John. When I was in the Marine Corps in the 1900s, as my son loves to say, all, you know, all the way back, all the way back to the Roman Legion.
[00:27:03] Speaker D: Right.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: You know, like those guys cared about their feet and how much their gear weighed and stuff like that. So there are some things that I know about my customers that I know are not likely to change.
[00:27:13] Speaker D: Right.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: What is likely to change is where are they consuming content, you know, who's influencing them to buy stuff, et cetera.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: How, how do you listen to your customer? How do you talk to your customers? How are you getting feedback?
[00:27:25] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I, I read all of the like product reviews on the site. I read all the Q&As.
Love that. It's hard to look at all of the customer service inquiries because you're on a huge other team that's supporting. But my brand also has 105, 106 stores out there around the country, on and around military bases. So, you know, there's a whole retail team that funnels up like real life, day to day, everyday experience. But I read all the SMS responses.
Sometimes they're not.
[00:27:55] Speaker C: That's funny.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Sometimes they're pretty salty and fun. So, yeah, so I try to look in as close to the real time as possible at what these guys are bothering to respond to.
And then I, you know, like I color it with my own experience.
And then of course we have, you know, like I said, things bubble up from all those stores all the time, which is, which is a real advantage, you know.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: Totally, totally. And you know, the customer story, you can be probably empathetic to them in a way that a lot of others couldn't.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: Oh yeah. And like this has helped in a very practical way. So, you know, like maybe you guys know or don't know this, but when seasons change and you got to have different gear, different, you know, clothing or uniform items, like if you're a Soldier like you have to have those. Like if you, you know, back in the Marine Corps there was one day a year when you seasons change and you roll your sleeves up and then the fall, you roll your sleeves down. And that's kind of like a, you know, that's a, that's like a seasonal change when you need to show up to formation with a certain uniform item. You know, these soldiers have to have things and it's not like you roll into the office and your blazer isn't exactly right. Like you show up to formation, you gotta have all your gear in one sock. That's a huge deal. Like not everybody on say the merchandising teams or the inventory teams or the content or creative teams understand that your uniform as a soldier, an airman or a marine is the most visible thing about you. You're walking across base, first sergeant is like, get over here, come here. Like, let me see this. You know, got an Irish pendant on your uniform or your name tapes jacked up.
You know, these guys have to have this stuff and it has to be squared away and it's really hard to understand that unless you, unless you have experienced it. So yeah, I can, that's kind of advantage for me, you know, kind of being in charge of a business that I internalize that totally.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: And one more question is, so you take these user findings, whether you talk to the customer, whether you're empathetic to them, whether you're reading the reviews, the SMS feedback, how do you then apply that? Do you put it on your site and kind of measure what happens? Do you run experiments? How do you measure the impact or how do you know you're heading in the right direction? As we're going through these changing times, how do you know that you're making the right progress?
[00:30:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it can be really hard because especially for me and my customers, man, listen, you know, I wouldn't want, you know, this is, this is public, but there are plenty of people out there who run data driven businesses. Please be careful about the disconnect between the data and what you are assuming that your customer is actually thinking or doing or why.
[00:30:32] Speaker D: Right?
[00:30:32] Speaker B: So, you know, soldiers have to buy things, but soldiers also want cool options. They're young. You know, it's really, it's really hard to overestimate how much young soldiers need to feel that sense of belonging to their unit.
[00:30:47] Speaker D: Right.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: And their, and their service. And so if everybody else in their squad, their squad leader, their platoon leader has a certain piece of gear, wears it a certain Way super influential. So if you see some, you know, you look at data, we all know data comes from one place, right? The past. Okay. There is a connection, like I said, starting so and so today to Lieutenant Arquette back then to the Roman Legion. But you know, guys discover new brands of gear or new cool things and they can, you know, experience or latch a hold of, you know, micro trends too. There's no way to tell what that's going to be by looking at, you know, you know, this week, last year in the, in the data necessarily and then two or two, three, I don't know. But whatever it is you're doing based on the data, if it's not authentic, you can really harm yourself. So I spend a lot, probably more of my time making sure that whatever insights I'm able to extract from the data, that however we project those in a test, in copy, in photography, in email or sms, you know, messaging, that it's as authentic as possible.
[00:31:54] Speaker D: Right.
[00:31:54] Speaker B: So, you know, I pulled this, this young woman who was on our team, you know, doing emails for us, I did a lot of work with her and I said, hey, listen, we're going to start changing the messaging on some of these emails and don't get worried, but where am I use the word kill, right? We're going to say killer deal or this kills. And so hopefully we start using some, you know, not over the line language but some. If it makes you, as a kind of a young civilian, a little uncomfortable, that's probably perfect, right? And that's going to be super authentic, you know, so, you know, I would say that you get some directional guidance from, you know, added insights. Fair enough. But if you take that hypothesis and you position it as authentically as you can, at least for my audiences, probably a lot of audiences, that's probably more important, right?
[00:32:45] Speaker C: I think that's, that's huge. That's such an important part of. I'm surprised at the number of people who don't take that level of interest in their user.
And I think it does help that you've got some background to it. But it's such a important part of like understanding how they're thinking, getting that constant feedback and not letting. I think so many people do that too. I love that point that you made that you look at the data, don't let your own personal feelings about that influence how you interpret it.
But yeah, I mean, it sounds like you're down in there, you're understanding the user and just by having that connection with them, that's what's allowing things to flourish for you. And I think that's so important. I think a lot of people don't do that. They don't get, they don't get down in the call center, in the trenches with people and actually learn what their product is like from the other end.
[00:33:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's, you know, in my part of that is not everybody understands. Look, the higher up the chain of command you go, the less and less, you know, people, I think, I think, and in my experience are perceptive to the big risk of losing a customer forever by being inauthentic. It's one thing to run a test and say, oh, does this price point or that price point or, you know, you know, Amazon's changing where they're putting the titles on their listing pages now. Some are above the photo and some are below. That's a test.
[00:34:06] Speaker D: Right.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: But if I, if I use a term that is some baloney civilian term to my military, active duty military customers, those guys are gone forever. And they know I'm full of bs, Right. If you're selling pots and pans to chefs and you say something incorrect, you know, all these years of credibility you've kind of built up can go away, like, in a second. So just like kind of political risk and things like that. There's, you know, that's, that's the danger I do spend some time every week trying to mitigate is let's not rush into anything based on, you know, just kind of the broad spend on this campaign versus that, that campaign, because there are other factors involved that could, that could really lose us customers forever.
[00:34:48] Speaker C: Yeah, I just go off on a tangent or a soapbox if I go on this too much longer. But there, there's a thing about people testing usability that I think Justin, one gets hung up on, and I think he's right about this. But it's. People will sit there and like you were saying, they'll move buttons around, move things around on Amazon. Let's try to make it easier. Let's reduce the friction. But I think what's worked for you and what is the thing that most people are missing is it's not necessarily the friction that's bothering people. It's the emotional connection. It's the story. It's the, the idea that you understand what their problem is. You've got the solution. It's just right over here. And that's how you, if you can communicate that in their words and their vernacular, that's going to move them through. No matter how much friction you have on your site.
You know, they're going to be, they're going to feel that connection and they're going to be able to follow that line through to the end of it and understand that this is, this is what they need. I think a lot of people do that. They get too caught up in the smaller details and they're not understanding that their user doesn't care where the buttons are. They just want to know that this.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: Is the right product and some of the data can see you the wrong way. Like let's say you're trying to really reduce friction in their, in their, in their flow.
[00:35:52] Speaker D: Right.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: And so you're trying to reduce the time from PLP view to add to cart or whatever. Well, if you've got something really interesting or you got a cool product and now that user wants to see all your Q and A is on the product page or the reviews or, or compare it to something else, you may do something awesome for the customer that increases like your time on site, which is what you wanted to kind of, you wanted to reduce the number of pages at a time like considering this product. And that's not what the customer wants to do. So you probably have some assumption that I want to get them through in fewer pages or I want to get rid of interstitial stuff between add to cart and checkout or whatever, when maybe they don't. Maybe they want to put it in here and then compare it to something else or show it to their body or you know, all kinds of things that you're not going to be able to tell by looking at, you know, your synthesized GA4 data, you know.
[00:36:47] Speaker C: Yeah, 100% agree with that.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: I love that. John, you've had some amazing insights so far and now I just want to tap into maybe something a little more forward looking. As you look at the E commerce landscape for goals for E commerce in general, where do you think the opportunities will be?
And AI is not an acceptable answer. I know it will be fueled by AI and maybe even less so for you because you are looking for something authentic and that's where you really rely, which I completely agree with. And AI gets you so far away from something authentic. Where do you really think the opportunities will be for y'?
[00:37:23] Speaker D: All?
[00:37:23] Speaker A: Or E commerce in general?
[00:37:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you know, look, of course, you know, AI is part of this answer. But like I can remember when everybody was saying the phrase.com, the exact way they're saying the phrase AI now.
[00:37:36] Speaker D: Right?
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:37] Speaker B: 95Com.Com.Com Nobody knew what it was going to be. Shopify didn't exist, Magento didn't exist.
You know, mobile E commerce did not exist, Amazon didn't exist or whatever. So in my mind, AI is similar to that. It's this huge open, you know, open field or blue ocean or whatever you want to, or whatever you want to call it. But in my mind, like AI is going to change things in probably one, not one, but probably a significant way I'm thinking about is there are plenty of companies out there that are selling on websites, B2B companies who have, you know, pretty old antiquated tech stacks, old ERP systems, custom platforms or whatever. You know, some of us have been trying to modernize those here, you know, recently or over the past several years.
But listen, with things, I'm not an AI expert in any way, shape or form, but if you look at the way agentic AI is going to just explode, you know, making tools like a Shopify or marketing platforms better and better and better and more and more efficient. The companies that are on these old stacks with all these old platforms are now not just 15, 10, 15, 20 years behind.
Next week they're going to be 30 years behind and even farther.
So, you know, in the time it's going to take them to kind of take an old, you know, stack and change it and get on a new platform that has some AI stuff built in, everybody else will have gotten up to speed on using it just like every day. Like, think about your creative teams. Like think about your creative teams that just go into Photoshop or Illustrator and they delete a background with a click or something.
Like way back in the day you had to select this and use it and it took an hour.
You had to, you had to stuff up and cut it out and use more photography. So if you just think about the things you can do, like magic in kind of creative platforms, think about what's going to happen on E Comm platforms and marketing platforms and, and things like that. And so in my mind, there are going to be a lot of big companies and the leadership teams of those companies are going to have to wake up very, very soon to the fact that they, maybe they should have listened to people like us two years ago and gotten their foot onto platforms that will just be able to have these modern tools built in and then they don't have to go out there and build an AI team and build stuff themselves and things like that. So I'm looking forward to having a lot of tools and platforms and systems figure AI stuff out for me so I can use it just like Photoshop.
[00:40:16] Speaker A: Totally. I think like what you're talking about is the cost of being on a home built solution or, or an old solution that isn't necessarily being upgraded is going to be a lot higher because you're just going to be. While the costs may not go up, but the opportunity cost is just going to explode.
[00:40:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:33] Speaker A: And it's not only just for the E commerce platform, it's for the cms, it's for the marketing platform. Every single platform that you decide to own, build because you needed the custom solution.
Now the cost to have parity and tools is just going to be exorbitant.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: Absolutely. You know, before you could get away with just servicing the cost of your technical dash, I'll make the, I'll just make the interest payments, right?
[00:40:55] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: Just like you said, the opportunity cost, you know, everybody else is going to be getting rich and they're going to become AI billionaires.
[00:41:04] Speaker D: Right.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: Figuratively speaking. While you're like, oh man, you know, should we move to Shopify? Should we get a modern platform? Oh, I don't know, you know, you know, are we going to scrape up, you know, 200ths of a basis point, you know, on our merchant fees or something and you argue about that, you know, for six months.
Yeah. So I think some of those things are going to bring, are going to come to light real fast. We've all been in a situation where a member of the leadership team says, hey, why aren't we doing this? Or why aren't we, can we do this?
You know, yeah, those guys are on an amazing, you know, platform. Or I could do this in 30 seconds on Shopify, but this is an IT project that will take a month on the current structure. So yeah, those, those sorts of things. I think that gap is going to get bigger and bigger, faster and faster.
[00:41:51] Speaker C: I agree with that completely.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: As someone who has built an E commerce platform from the ground up that's no longer running, it sounds so sexy. Like I'm going to have total control. I'm going to be able to do anything in the world. It's going to be amazing.
I would advise against it heavily and.
[00:42:04] Speaker B: An analogy I've used is, you know, if it, if we want to have all this control, if you want to build all this stuff yourself, like our IT team could certainly build an email platform and an in house like messaging platform, but we're using Microsoft Office.
[00:42:19] Speaker D: Right.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: Like we're paying all this money for all these licenses. Why wouldn't we just build this ourselves and host it in the basement, you know, you know, so, so anyhow, yeah.
[00:42:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's an amazing insight that is really useful to certain E commerce leaders or certain really more the executive team that's like sitting on the sidelines just figuring out what to do. I love that, love that so much.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: Yeah, and you've heard that pitch too from like platforms, you know, you're an E commerce and then a platform pitches you and they say, hey, listen, you have complete control and flexibility and you do everything from scratch the way you want it. I'm like, well, you know, like, shouldn't it look like something out of the box without a few hundred grand worth of work and you know, thousands of hours, you know, can we get to look like something hour one and then we can, you know, refine it, you know, so yeah, that, that, that, that sentiment, you know, at companies who have their own platforms and, and purposes and I think tools.
[00:43:15] Speaker D: Right.
[00:43:16] Speaker B: You know, to the extent that platforms and people who have, you know, tools for people like me are building AI agentic, AI particular into their tools, like, that's awesome because I'm, I'm not going to be able to keep up. Like, you know, a lot of people think about just like generative.
[00:43:34] Speaker D: Right.
[00:43:34] Speaker B: Searches and stuff. Like when was the last time anybody out there even executed some kind of Boolean type search on Google or on a, on a, on a, on a marketplace. Now these people are all going to spend 18 hours a week like learning how to refine and get awesome at their prompts. Like it's not going to happen in my mind.
That's right.
[00:43:56] Speaker A: There'll be a couple specialists, but no, for the most part it won't. I think that's right. So lastly, to tie it up, what's on your reading list? What are you excited to dig into? What are you listening to? What's keeping you excited right now? Whether it's personal, professional, any of the above.
[00:44:11] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, like professionally, of course. You know, I don't have all the time in the world to keep up and get up on everything. Right. So look, of course I have LinkedIn open all the time. Your posts come up, Justin.
[00:44:24] Speaker D: Right.
[00:44:24] Speaker B: I like, I'm following. Like you guys know who Dylan Whitman is, right? He's kind of like a serial like E Com investor and entrepreneur and that guy's putting out killer like agentic AI content now. So like I follow him. He puts out something almost every day that I appreciate. Some of it's crazy in the weeds, but you know, like we all have kind of a cadre of, like, people we follow and slash, interact with out there. So I do my best just to see what, you know, guys like. You know, like you guys and me and my peers are saying, you know, kind of every day. I don't go to a lot of conferences because I take a lot of time.
So professionally I'm trying to keep my nose above water just with my peers, because especially I'm trying to pull this, like, larger perspective. 95, 96, 97. If you just try to kind of keep up with everything that was going on in dot com, the. The world of dot com, like, impossible. Like, everybody were talking about all these, you know, all this software people were building and. And, you know, people were so proud of how they were writing HTML and creating their own style sheets and this and that and, you know, crazy ideas for dot com companies. You know, if you just look back at the gazillions of hours people wasted trying to keep up with, you know, the next guy on all this stuff, that was no factor, you know, by. By say, 2001 or something. So I'm trying to be a little judicious with my time and brain power.
I know. That's. That's.
That. How's that?
[00:45:57] Speaker A: I love it. That's perfect. That's perfect. Yeah. And as I'm writing things, I try to think, like, what's going to be true in two years from now? Like, what's still going to be true? Because I can.
There's a lot of things that'll change, and I'd rather speak to what was true two years ago and will be true two years from now. That's how I think about it. So thank you so much for your time, John. This has been truly insightful.
[00:46:22] Speaker B: Yeah. It was a pleasure talking to you guys.
[00:46:24] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:46:26] Speaker D: Thank you, Sam.
