Juliette Welch:
All right, we'll get started here. Thank you everyone for joining us for today's call, the inescapable reality of e-commerce in a post COVID-19 world. Shawn Windle is our speaker for today Shawn is the founder and managing principal of ERP Advisors Group based in Denver, Colorado. Also, Shaun Orthmann will be joining us today as our guest and chatting with Shawn on our topic. Shaun Orthmann has a background in e-commerce and digital marketing. On today's call, we will explore the changing customer experience and discuss how to find the best e-commerce software and CRM for your needs. Shawn and Shaun, welcome.
Shawn Windle:
Hello, thanks for having us.
Juliette Welch:
Yeah, thanks for joining this is great. So, if you're ready, we can just dive right into our topic.
Shawn Windle:
Yep, let’s do it.
Juliette Welch:
Okay, great. Alright. So, Shawn Windle to begin, can you recap the shift that we've seen in e-commerce following COVID-19?
Shawn Windle:
Huh, yeah, it's really been pretty remarkable and working with clients as well as kind of looking at some industry news and other trends that we're hearing about but e-commerce is always vital, you know, trillions of dollars are sold each year on online, of course, I think it's in the trillions. If you take out Amazon it definitely is less than that, but you know e-commerce was really important, but probably the biggest change that we've seen is, it's not optional anymore that unfortunately organizations, and I say organizations because I mean nonprofit but also for profit businesses, they can't rely on in person interactions anymore.
We've got a couple organizations that we're working with right now, for profit business of retail site a larger clients; distributor kind of a retailer in the Midwest, that has a site and they've realized that they needed to do some enhancements to it to kind of keep up with some of these changes, as well as we're working with a nonprofit organization that relied on a lot of phone calls and meeting with people to donors and they're not able to meet with him in person and ask for a lot of money. So, what do you do right and that's for e commerce has really come in. We definitely see a lot of kind of business. The business organization. So those businesses that have other businesses as customers where they did rely on maybe more of a personal sale. We're moving to e-commerce solutions for there too. So another client, you know I love to throw out the clients to kind of talk about what's happening here on these calls, but another client that consumer goods product your coffee manufacturer that we were just talking to you know they relied on e-commerce solutions, since the very beginning, since the first Super Bowl ad, but then another organization that we're working with their sales people went door to door, and sold specific industrial applications to other businesses.
They can’t go door to door like you're not allowed to go door to door so now what do you do? I think we've talked about this on some of our other calls that they've had to really move everything online. So, it's kind of interesting to hear that another big change that we've seen its kind of pushed more towards in commerce. Well, I mean, there's certainly a lot happening even though the last couple days, especially in the upper Midwest have just some unrest that's happening, but it's perceived to be a dangerous environment or for reasons of the virus as other things how dangerous it is; we're fortunate that it hasn't been as dangerous as what was expected.
But how do you still buy what you need to do, whether you're a business or consumer? So again, really getting to that e-commerce channel has just been. I mean, I really think if you look at, Zoom, like, right now we're doing a zoom. Okay, everything's normal no it’s not, we'd like to be in person, you know, but fine. We're going to move forward. If you think about the electronic platforms that we have today, like all over. I mean that's saved our economy like if we didn't have the ability to do what we're able to do remotely from our houses, what would we all have done? So, I kind of see e-commerce as just a category of those electronic platform solutions that again, zoom, and being able to save files on Box, cloud based ERP applications; we've talked a ton about that cloud based payroll systems, even.
But in this e commerce space, the ability to continue to shop and to sell items and receive items, of course you know, is it's just been extremely vital and it's not going to get any different and that's just domestic. If you think about even internationally it's going to be a while before I think folks are going to feel comfortable, much less be able to travel internationally, so as there's goods that are overseas and that you still need to interact with folks with buyers, with sellers, and vice versa. How do they do that? It's going to be through e-commerce solutions, so it is something that if we're not talking, we're talking to every client we have about it even software vendors are like, why do I need this? Well their inside salespeople don't have anybody to call, because they're calling the 1 (800) number for their customers and there's nobody sitting at the desk that they used to call to. Everybody's working on their cell phones so even one experience online it's just been so vital to keep things rolling.
Juliette Welch:
Being able to pivot your business, you know like in an instant right has just changed everything.
Shawn Windle:
Exactly. Yeah.
Juliette Welch:
So, Shaun O, can I ask you and get your perspective, can you speak to how one goes about finding the best e commerce software for their organization and business?
Shaun Orthmann:
Yeah, sure thing. It depends a lot on the complexity of your requirements, because we're not going to be making specific product recommendations on this call, but it's definitely best to start by establishing the exact needs for your business or organization and establishing sort of what tier of e-commerce solution is actually going to be right for your business. Now if you're looking at a Wix as an entry level solution, that's really not going to cut it for most businesses, unless your number of view PCs, your product lines are under like a dozen or somebody just starting out. Really what you want to be looking for is something that's going to meet all of your needs and requirements and you need to look at, okay, do you have multiple stores was shared inventory? Do you need to be dealing with sophisticated discounts or time sensitive offers? Do you have a loyalty program?
A lot of these things, while e-commerce solutions are getting pretty fancy coming out of the box, still with a lot of these functions are a lot of these options you need to come up with custom solutions, and if you have something, for instance, sometimes if you're going to be doing advertising for instance, with your advertising platform, you need to have your product catalog actually married up in real time to that advertising integration so that whatever is actually in stock is going to now be visible in real time and your ads because you don't want to be advertising something that's not in stock.
You need to look at do you need a CRM integration, for instance, to follow up on prospects, or people who have bought from something. Now, do you want to upsell them to the next thing? You have to deal with things like regional price discrepancies sometimes. You have the whole process of shipping, tracking, returns. If, for instance, you're in the fashion industry, you're going to be doing a lot of returns and processing that and you need something that actually works well and is not just a tacked-on plug-in for that. So, the right software really should meet the majority of your requirements, without excessive customization or plug-ins, and so you need to find the right tier that handles, most of that.
And if you're a larger, if you're a mid-sized organization or larger, if you have an existing ERP you definitely want to find something that integrates well with that, and you're going to want to actually look at enterprise level e-commerce solutions. We've been hearing a lot about Shopify recently where it actually became the largest company in Canada with the highest value, and yet if you're at an enterprise level and you have an ERP solution, Shopify might not be the right answer for you. It's actually a platform I, interestingly enough, have a lot of experience with myself, and there's a reason why it's so big, right now, and at the same time, you can't do a discount and free shipping out of the box with Shopify, you need a plugin for that, you need a plugin for this for that. So, you just need to find what's going to be the right thing for you, whether that's Magenta or whether that's something that integrates with your existing ERP.
Juliette Welch:
So, with that said, Shawn Windle, this might seem so simple, but is there an e-commerce solution for everyone?
Shawn Windle:
Oh, that's a good question, you know the answer, kind of is yes, just because that's what we do it. We advise companies on enterprise software, so if you want it, we'll get it for you. But there's lots of different levels you know I think, Shaun that’s I'm excited for you to join the call today because john spent a lot of time building out e-commerce solutions. He's our Digital Marketing Manager and leading a lot of our social media, but also I think advising some of our consultants on even some selections that we have going on right now so you know you've lived in these products and you know that like any other enterprise software that you do have to find like Shaun, said the right, here's what we really need for requirements now. Oh, we wanted to increase the revenue in our, website by 4x. So, we're going to go buy the biggest product that we can right? No, no, but, but what we really need is we need to drive richer interactions with customers, they get on the site. We want to ask them questions. We want to show them videos. Want to give them real time reviews that are local to the area. Well, that'd be amazing. Good. Okay, so then we have the vendors over here let's check for those vendors to see who offer those features functions.
But there is another thing to e-commerce that I think, I've especially been reminded on literally yesterday on a call with a client, where we're looking at an e-commerce solution for them, which is you're not just buying a platform or a technology solution. Very few customers actually really understand that right? They go to the market and they're looking at, they call, you know, 1 (800) NetSuite they talked to NetSuite and they buy NetSuite but who's going to implement it for you? But they get a bad team and it's terrible, and then you know some of the people probably even listening on this call go in and save them, which is great, but if you can't do that in e-commerce area like you can't do that at all, like don't just go out and buy a platform.
You really have to have somebody that's a design, in interactive, a digital marketing kind of a specialist, not just a technical person who knows how to make all plumbing work, but somebody who can say this is how we want to merchandise our products, and this is how we want it to look online, here's the kind of promotions that we have. Here's kind of the again the interaction that we want to have with our customer. And, you know, being able to pull those records requirements, if you will, like I said, is probably the primary thing like Shaun just said and matching it to a platform that's going to support it, but you really need sort of like a like an aesthetics kind of person. Again, you find these at the interactive agencies really. They're not like, you know, just go to a techie shop and get these are people that are like brand people, again Shaun used to do this kind of work exactly where it wasn't just Shopify, it was he talked to the customers’ requirements, he’d use the platform and kind of designs, much more aesthetic. There's an aesthetic wave to e commerce, that you know, there probably should be with ERP, CRM, and all the rest of that stuff, but there just isn't. I've said for years, that ERP should make video games and then people would love them to be interested in it, but we're still not there yet.
But an e-commerce site, man, the aesthetic is everything. Again, for another client, we did a study of about nine different sites versus theirs, and you can see differences. You can see how you drill through brands, how you get to products at a certain cost, how you look at all kinds of things that that's going to drive your shopper’s behavior. So long story short, you have to really be honest about what are we trying to achieve with our website or with our e-commerce or commerce strategy as it relates to online. And then match that to the solution that can do what you need now, and then certainly into the future too. So, look, if you just want to throw, like we have another client that's a wholesale distributor. Basically, they want to get into an ERP. They want to give the ability for their customers to order online.
Perfect, like well do you want to do substitute products, do you want to do special kinds of payment plans and everything else? Like, no, like, we really don't want that. We literally just want them to be able to click here's the items I want, click save and create the order cause it’s all on terms all their orders are on terms, they have pre-existing terms, they're not going to have new customers come to their site at least yet.
So, you know, some of the apps actually come with like a customer portal, that’s not that expensive to layer in, that’s going to be fine for them to start with and see how that goes. And hopefully they have prospective clients that find this, although they won't have access to it, but they'll have prospects, who are saying, hey, I want to be able to shop with you, and I'd love to do that online. No problem, then we'll go to the next gradient of the solution and kind of go up from there. So, long answer but key things are requirements to application, and platform capabilities; I think basically like Shaun said. You can start low, you can start high, you can start medium, but really look to what it is it's right for your organization and then just insert finish this question.
Remember, you need an aesthetics, or a design person kind of interactive agency. Like I said, I think they're called to a bigger extent if you want to go with a bigger site but you know if you're dragging, I don't know if there's a matrix Shaun, maybe I'll ask you this, after I try to answer it, but in my experience, I would say if a site is looking to drive more than maybe 10 million in revenue. Where it's not just a bunch of customers that already know us that are doing business, but there's a lot of unique customers that are coming to us. You really probably need like a third-party interactive agency to help you kind of build and design this thing with the right aesthetic for that group. What, what do you think about that, Shaun, sorry, Juliette, and I'm going to turn it on Shaun for a minute.
Juliette Welch:
No, that's great. Sure.
Shaun Orthmann:
Yeah, I would agree with that, and it has a lot to do with the complexity of what you're selling also, and it also it depends on, is it a big-ticket item as well. See if you're doing, if you're taking some product or service from a wholesaler or whatnot, and you're basically turning it around maybe you don't need something so complex, but if you're trying to sell something like a car, like look at the Tesla site that was not an out of the box e-commerce solution that was a boutique custom website and people actually will buy their Tesla through that site.
At the same time, not everyone needs that, but you have to actually try to recreate the in-person experience online and this was actually something I was just talking to one of our consultants about yesterday. Actually envision that your e-commerce site is your virtual storefront. They need to actually see, here's your logo. Good. You walk into the store, what are the different sections of the store? That should be clearly laid out on your site, you should be able to find what you're looking for in that store and easily take your shopping cart to the checkout without getting confused or getting lost, you know, just like Target or Walmart or something like this you know where to go to find it, and it's the same on a website, you should be able to know where to go to easily be able to pay for something.
You've started seeing things in your own consumer experience where there's like one click purchase because they're trying to get rid of the barriers to being able to purchase so that's what I can say to that.
Shawn Windle:
Yeah. Makes sense.
Juliette Welch:
So, Shaun O, speaking more to that if someone has never had an online presence before, what are some basic steps to prepare for an e-commerce implementation?
Shaun Orthmann:
Wow, you know, want to get really, really basic it starts with like Shawn Windle was saying, you actually need to find a good web developer who has that aesthetic, but you also want someone who specifically has e-commerce experience. You need somebody who has been through this before, who has been able to iron out the bugs and so forth. You also want somebody who is not just a developer, but they can establish what your sales funnel is if you haven't already done that yourself it's still good to work with the marketing agency or the web agency to actually figure out how do you get people from the top of funnel who'd never heard of you before, how do you actually take care of your hot prospects, people who already know your product and they just want to be able to buy it. And you know they'll look at even things like, do you want to have those annoying pop ups on your site? Well, the reason they're there is because they actually work, but it might not be right for your exact product line.
Now, what I would like to speak to, though, is there are some things that seem to always get overlooked and one of the most important is to actually make sure that you get your SKUs in order, your shop keeping units, you know that unique identifier for every single product. I had some clients that I worked with before, where they were just kind of doing it on the fly, there is no real rhyme or reason to it, and so let's say you want to go and select every single variant of black slacks and if there's not a good system there in your SKUs, and you're like, maybe they suddenly went out of stock, or maybe you want to replace them, or maybe you need to update the photos, you need to have the SKUs in place and actually have a sensible, sane system to your inventory so that you can do whatever work you need to, because otherwise, what ends up happening is you're overpaying somebody to go in and do it manually and you're just wasting time and effort at that point.
Another thing is make sure your product photography, your tags, and your descriptions, for all of the products are actually very professional and thorough and detailed because again, you don't want to go back and do that work after your site is live. Do all of that work ahead of time and if you actually establish a format or a system for it, then it just makes it easier when you add new products from that point forward, and the reason you want to do that actually, is because all those descriptions and tags and even the quality of the photos, and so forth, it all helps with your search engine optimization.
If nobody can find your site, there's no point in building it in the first place, and I have actually seen it happen where a major company is not even ranking well for their own name, and other companies will actually run ads against your name so that they're showing up at the top; Google is going to show the ads in the very first position. So, if you at least need to be showing up organically below those ads and it's something that just needs to be thought with from the very beginning; so that's, those are just some basic steps to actually get in place to prepare for it.
Juliette Welch:
Great information. Thank you for that.
Shawn Windle:
Point on that too Juliette, so Shaun, I think you said something that it kind of continues to be like it really comes back to me how that interactive experience on the e-commerce site is really a reflection of you like your organization. Now you would you say as you've done, you've been doing a ton of research for this call, I think, again, working with some of our other consultants. That do you think that changed with this COVID-19 this whatever this new kind of style of business. We think it's always been like that or what does that mean going forward for this organization?
Shaun Orthmann:
I would say it's actually even more important now more than ever, that you actually do need to focus on that going forward with COVID-19.
Shawn Windle:
Yeah, I don't, I think that's if anybody if the guys on the call can get, I mean, we talked about, always, always, always, always, we talk about a lot of stuff on these calls, I have to go back later be like, wait, what do we say what we try to get to, but a really important thing, I think, to what you're saying is that saying it is more a reflection of your brand which I mean I'm a CPA. I'm a systems guy like Shaun is more of a brand management, marketing, kind of a person, that's why you get to good views, but even from my view, I can see how, you know, the site really has to reflect, who you are. Like we're going through a big website redevelopment right now, we had started that before COVID-19 but I'm kind of glad, because you know a lot of, here you go right, a lot of folks got to know about us through a lot of networking that we would do at in person events. We haven't had any in person events in the last three months, so Juliette's been like, oh, where can we go get more events and we're doing more calls and stuff. So now all the sudden, you know you've helped us Shaun to get higher on the rankings on Google, so if somebody is out there like, Oh, ERP consultant or whatever software consultant, I should use more words so this video gets picked up, I think for SEO.
Shaun Orthmann:
Well, we can fix that in post also.
Shawn Windle:
But we maybe don't get a second chance, if our side, was ok now it's got to be perfect.
Shaun Orthmann:
Yeah. And just to that point on the branding and so forth, and what the site looks like and feels like it absolutely should all be of a piece, you know, with your physical presence and so forth. Because right now, it's actually having to a large degree, if not entirely replace, that physical presence. So, there should be a consistency there, I'm actually just thinking of one of the, one of my favorite clients that I had to write for at one point, actually, I was averaging about three swear words per page because that was their brand. There is no there they were selling sort of like cheeky or interesting sort of products, you know, like mugs and pins and sweaters and so forth like that very much tying into the meme culture and so that was what was needed. And there was probably 80 colors on every single page also because it was vibrant, but at the same time that would not fly for a construction client that I had and it was primary colors, it was three colors and the text that I wrote for it very much matched that because you had to be reflecting that brand of it was a Foundation Repair Company and well you have to have a strong foundation, so then the language that you use for that, even down to the descriptions of what you're saying and the photos, all of it has to show that stability, so I completely agree.
Shawn Windle:
Yeah, I think we just had a question or a point that popped out to that I would I would totally agree with about how important it is to understand your processes before you start looking at any kind of solution. I think that's definitely our kind of bread and butter, even over other advisory consultant, ERP selection firms, because everybody kind of does that, but we really look to the as is and what ideal scene would be and then can bring in the solution. But I will tell you on these e-commerce solutions, it's a little bit different. Yes, we need to understand order management and even kind of lead to close processes, and then certainly order to cash, and how we integrate with the fulfillment, the inventory that payment systems and all that stuff is vital, but just be aware on this e-commerce site that there is like this, like Disney factor that can come in and creativity that could be the difference between yeah we've got an e-commerce site in like, yeah, we really got it. So, I think that's a good point, though, about underlying process. For sure.
Juliette Welch:
Well Shaun O, Shawn Windle, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your expertise with us today. Appreciate your time.
Shawn Windle:
Thank you, it's always good.
Juliette Welch:
And thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We do appreciate it. And please reach out, let us know if you have any questions. We're happy to help in any way we can. Be sure to join us for our next call Thursday, June 18 the evolving role of CRM in the wake of COVID-19. Please, go to our website ERP Advisors Group.com for more details into register. ERP Advisors Group is one of the country's top independent enterprise software advisory firms; ERP advisors group advises mid to large sized businesses. On selecting and implementing business applications from Enterprise Resource Planning. Customer Relationship, Management Human Capital Management, Business Intelligence, and other enterprise applications which equates to millions of dollars in software deals each year across many industries. Thanks again for joining us today everyone, we appreciate it.
