Pulse Ecommerce Summit

Our team attended the 3rd Annual 'Pulse Ecommerce Summit’ on May 30th, 2024. This event is hosted by Vervaunt, an ecommerce and performance agency based in London. We were fortunate to have Managing Director of Vervaunt, Paul Rogers speak at our Transformation: Excellence in Ecommerce conference in Dublin in April, so naturally we couldn’t wait to check out the latest in ecommerce trends from across the water. Here’s a run down from our team on their key takeaways from various talks at the Pulse conference.

 

Image Courtesy of Paul Rogers - LinkedIn

Scaling Strategies for Ecommerce Brands with Percival and Kick Game, ME+EM and Rixo

• Pinterest Resurgence: As trends change, so does the growth and decline of various channels. One such channel that has seen a recent resurgence is Pinterest, especially when it comes to User Generated Content (UGC). Originally nestled under the social media umbrella, over the last number of years Pinterest has been putting more emphasis on ecommerce and product catalogue displays and partnering with influencers. It offers lower-cost top-of funnel engagements for brands that can reach wide markets.
• TikTok: Another channel that focuses heavily on UGC is TikTok. Despite content and privacy concerns, it remains a crucial channel for brands as it leads on product discovery through influencer collaborations. Businesses have seen growth by jumping on the latest TikTok trends with paid ads and user-generated content.
• Data Tracking and Reporting: Frustration with Google Analytics 4 has been a common theme in the industry since its launch last year. Many organisations are looking for more user friendly alternatives to track and report their data with solutions like Triple Whale gaining traction.
• Team and Training: Although focus can sometimes be on the tools, tech and data that drive a business forward, it is worth noting that at the core of every business still sits a team. Cross-departmental collaboration is key. For example, ecommerce managers can play a vital role in ensuring a cohesive customer experience by having a comprehensive view of the business.
• Prioritise Organic Growth: Implement organic growth strategies alongside paid marketing efforts to ensure a well-rounded marketing mix as it helps to build credibility and trust with the consumers.

Hear from the Platforms that Shape Ecommerce with Shopify, Centra and SCAYLE

• Tool Consolidations: Majority of companies oversubscribe and therefore have a vast array of tools that they use for processes and workflows. Sometimes too many tools can be counterproductive. By cutting back on your toolkit and focusing on the ones that simplify workflow and streamline processes, you will maximise your return on investment of each licence.
• Composable Strategy: Focusing on plug-and-play tools that act like building blocks. These will integrate easier than more traditional technology and ensure that you can adapt and evolve your tool kit as time moves on without being too heavily reliant.
• The Focus for the Future: B2B organisations are constantly advancing and trying to deliver more ambitious ecommerce products, including omnichannel opportunities and sustainable practices for their clients.

Streetwear Digital Renaissance: A Case Study with Hoodrich and Rebuy

• Implementation of Rebuy: Hoodrich have partnered with Rebuy to create more personalised experiences and have seen improvements across the board. Before they implemented Rebuy Hoodrich were focused on an ‘impulse buy’ strategy at cart level.
• 2 Week Case Study: The following results were seen after implementing Rebuy for a 2 week period: Average Order Value (AOV) increased by (8.42%), orders increased with Rebuy add-ons by 14.02%, and sales associated with Rebuy accounted for $1,104.85 (US)
• Cart Personalisation and Recommendations: Hoodrich understood that personalisation was key with their target market and wanted to eliminate unnecessary browsing and offer clear recommendations. By using Rebuy’s cart personalisation and dynamic bundles, Hoodrich have increased their AOV by another 15%.
• Customer Convenience: Another feature of the Rebuy ‘Smart Cart’ feature leverages custom tags to show complimentary set purchases and adding a size variant in the cart. These small changes have also boosted performance.
• Data Driven Decisions: Hoodrich also reported that by using Rebuy, they have more access to more detailed insights. This, in turn, enabled them to make smarter data-driven decisions, enhancing customer experience and increasing sales.

Image Courtesy of Hoodrich.com

Simplifying to Grow - How Top Brands Are Scaling by Consolidating Tech & Data with PANGAIA, Hera, Woolman and Swap

• Spark Ads: All the brands on stage have found TikTok Spark ads to be revolutionary. Spark Ads give the users more way to interact, including the options to click to the influencers' profiles, the advertising landing page of the brand and even the music being played in the advertisement. Although it creates less control on where the user will click through, it will create more authenticity for the brand by showing transparency behind who is creating this content for them.
• Consolidated Tech Stack: Brands are looking to limit the amount of apps they use, not just from a financial perspective but also so it is easier to consolidate everything together. It’s important to find apps/platforms you can get the most out of and can be used in multiple ways but also that chosen apps and platforms are flexible so that brands can integrate and allow for customisation and brand consistency.
• Enhanced Metrics: As companies are rethinking their approach to analytics, many are beginning to limit their resources and focus their efforts on building “super metrics” which are custom built analytics that collect data points from multiple sources to give a more comprehensive view of the business.

Workshop: Conversion with Globall-e, Advanced Commerce and Onepilot

• Introduction to Global-e: Globall-e offers a simplified avenue to localised ecommerce for retailers who are selling around the world. They also offer multiple shipping options which can help improve customer satisfaction.
• Personalisation: Caching is the enemy of personalisation and retailers should focus on building a personalised shopping experience by tailoring which products are displayed to the customer segments based on attributes, known as Product Sequencing for Conversion. It results in increased average order value and higher conversion rates.
• Outsourced Customer Service: Onepilot offer a resource for businesses to simply and effectively outsource their customer service. Their model is based on a price-per-ticket cost and they provide omnichannel support for a wide variety of industries from B2B SaaS, to marketplace to travel.
• Product Listing Page: Most people see the product listing page but this doesn’t equate to seeing the whole catalogue and in fact many people will only see about 3% of the catalogue so there is a need to focus the efforts of the merchandising at the top of this page.

Image Courtesy of Paul Rogers - LinkedIn

One-Time Shoppers Are Killing Your business: Retention Secrets from Revolution Beauty and Ooni.

• Shopper by Type: It is important to understand what type of shoppers you have, then base your offering on what will make them return to your store. For example, if you know that your customers are discount/promotion oriented, this may be an avenue to pursue to encourage repeat purchases and loyal customers.
• Acquisition vs Retention: Many businesses focus their marketing budget and efforts on acquisition. However, it is important to assign a certain budget to retention also. Ooni detailed how they were still an 80/20 split between acquisition and retention and working towards making this into 50/50 split. It is worth noting that these decisions are not made on a whim and that by looking at data, they can see where they will get the best return on investment.
• Community Building: Sometimes building community does not have to be about offering discounts and free products but instead just making them feel recognised. Focusing on personalised communication - such as thanking loyal customers on their anniversary - encourages customers to stay engaged with your brand
• Loyalty Points Discount: Revolution incentivises people to use their loyalty system. By offering products on discounted points, it makes the loyalty systems feel more valuable because they can reach some rewards quicker as they don’t have to accumulate full price in points.
• Change of Brand Position: Initially Ooni had focused their community building efforts on educating people on ‘making the perfect pizza’ however they have recently changed their brand position to creating memorable moments together. This shift in brand positioning has proven to be successful for Ooni in their community building efforts.

Building an Effective Roadmap - Prioritisation, Testing and Measurement of Success with Lick, Castore and Champion

• Build a Strong Foundation: From the start it is important to choose a tech stack and partners that can support the business long term goals. They will need to be adaptable and scalable to ensure this.
• User Centric Optimisation: Dive deeper into your site and analysis more than just homepage analytics. Behaviour trends also arise on collection pages, and products pages. This will give you a deeper understanding of the customer journey.
• Continuous Improvement: Always be looking to improve and refine. By focusing more key metrics and engagement metrics, you can see what improvements to make. Zoning and heat mapping can also help to track what areas users are interacting of your site.

Disappointment Inc: Signs Your Teams Are Building Bad Products and How to Stop Them with Decathlon.

• From Ideas to Insights: Don’t rely on guesses. Focus on building consumer centric products that are validated by research and customer insights. Products need to truly address the needs of a client and should not be based on internal opinions and whims.
• Avoid Wild Guessing: It is important to recognise signs of wild guessing when it comes to product development. This includes internal opinions that have no justification, only based on assumptions. These don’t focus on customer-centric, data driven approaches that will lead to time and resources being spent on developing the wrong product.
• Acquiescing to Authority: Building products provides critical thinking skills and teams should not automatically defer to authority opinion.They should feel confident in their ability to use data to challenge assumptions and ensure that the best product is built.

Customer: The Evolving Dynamics of CX with Dr Martens, Strathberry and ex-Laura Mercier & bareMinerals

• Understand the ‘Why’: Although tracking is important, this talk emphasised the importance of understanding the ‘why’ behind these interactions. Customer insights should be layered with sales data and reviews to paint a complete picture before changes to the CX are made.
• Optimising the Entire Journey: It’s important to understand post purchase just as much as it is to understand the journey to purchasing. Using review tools and analysing returns will give a better picture of the customer lifetime value.
• Product Decisions: Move beyond traditional methods and involve customers in the product decisions. This way you will get a better understanding of demand, whether it be for colour choices, or other variants. Using channels like Reddit can be helpful to locate followers based on subreddits, allow them to participate in voting, to foster a sense of community. It’s important to be transparent when it comes to this and ensure these communities know they are dealing directly with the brands.

The Future of Ecommerce: What Brands should be doing in 2025 with by Association Only, We Make Websites, Ask Phill and Grebban

• Highlight Tool: This talk covered some interesting tools that can be used across platforms but the highlight tool was a plugin for Figma, called Instant that allows for seamless design transfer to Shopify enabling faster and easier storefront creation
• Metafields: There is a move away from software like Launchpad, as Shopify now allows for the creation and scheduling of discounts and content changes.
• AI and Machine Learning: No conference would be complete without a nod to AI and machine learning. This talk highlighted how it is still very much finding its place in the ecommerce industry. Although it does offer some interesting opportunities such as translation services, there has been a move by luxury lifestyle brands to return to manual merchandising for a more creative and curated approach.