Hello and welcome back to the Retail podcast live from NRF with Big Commerce. I'm lucky enough to be joined by Senior Vice President Meghan Stabler. Yeah, that alright. High five on now. Yeah, it's been a long. Day take number six, just in case you Why are we Live 5 live at the beginning of the show?
But anyway, as you can say, we're already having fun with Big Commerce. So Megan, Yeah, if you don't mind, just take us through about what Big Commerce does for those who don't know what the focus is. And what I'd love to know is what's been top of mind for a retailer's coming to you? During this show, all right. So Big Commerce is an enterprise e-commerce platform. So you know our our ability to provide the world's leading brands and retailers with world class ecommerce experience,
right, a modern tech stack. So people have probably heard about composability and things, right. So we're composable e-commerce platform. You probably got brands and retailers that are both B to C and maybe B to B. So we, we provide both capabilities and that sort of modern tech stack to really take advantage of you know what is needed in today's business that connect to shoppers wherever they are.
And then we have a subsidiary called Phenomics, which is all about optimising your data feed and feed management to make sure you're connecting to the channels that you care about where shoppers are out. So the Instagrams are tik toks, right? And so optimising data feeds is also one of the core things that we do. And and you build that as in like you help retailers with the whole stack in terms of from or is there one specific element of
that is that? Such no, the whole stack, I mean you know our focus is making sure that brands and retailers can build online unique experiences or offline unique experiences too and combine it together.
So as a modern ecommerce platform, we're not a monolith where a composable platform, you can just do pure either be you can have direct to consumer if you want to as well, yeah, or you can just be pure B to C So we enable you to combine all of those in in a tech stack with a high performing checkout, create unique, compelling experiences, integrate advanced functionality from many of our partners like Bloom Reach or Algolia, integrate content management systems like Content Stack or
Contentful into it and really build this wonderful experience. So we find brands and retailers literally a changing the way that they want to engage with their shoppers and their consumers online and they have to find those right. Tech stacks, Yeah, they make you work to connect to them. And as I said, they've also got to connect to the channels where I may be shopping their Instagrams that Tik Toks, right
and all those other platforms. So we enable that from within the platform and within our ecosystem of of providers to him. What's been in terms of when you think about your experience here at NRF and the the? The. Volume of retailers trying to solve their different problems What What's your sense? What do you feel? Everyone's all focused.
On look, you know it's 2024, beginning of 2024, people have people and businesses have spent that sort of fast, rapid couple of years through the COVID era, right. You know they had to rapidly accelerated into you know, buy online, pick up curbside, right. They had to think about buy now, pay later for shifting economic conditions. So we know that brands and retailers had to rapidly adopt
tech. You know, we're a couple of years past the pandemic and now the beginning to say, well hold on, is our tech stack that we have around us really the right one? We've been on Salesforce for a long time. We're Adobe for a long time. Yeah. And yeah, those are great platforms, but are they really delivering what we need for the future of where retail needs to be or the future of our brand?
Are we able to rapidly innovate and build into the platform and connect to shoppers on whatever surface they are, the mobile, the tablets or, you know, live stream shopping, all these other things? So there's the ecom, digital marketers. CDOs are really looking at what's next in retail. Yeah, they're beginning to think about what do we need to have in terms of tech stack? Do we buy one from everybody? Yeah.
Or can we think about things like Lego, right, and start to see we just need a advanced search and merge or we need to have a really good integrated CMS or we're going to have a really solid ERP or OMS or IMS, right? Yeah. It doesn't have to be all one platform, but we can integrate all these things, make it to what you want, right. So, you know, in the UK, right, where you're from, you know, the white stuff, Yeah, right. Or Ted Baker. Yeah, right.
Other brands, look, Hurler, right, high end fashion, right. They're really looking at what they can do. Or again, I talked about B2B, think about MKM building supplies in the UK, right. So traditional building supplies, but they need to have a modern tech stack because we as consumers are buying things from them.
But they also have that sort of wholesale distributors outside due to it that they need to provide that modern tech saying too, yeah, so we're seeing a lot of adjustment and people coming by the booth and saying, so tell me what you do and how you do it differently because we all say e-commerce and we all say online, right. What do you do differently? Checkout is strong for us. Building that composable platform, the integrations to get you live sooner is, is key
as well. So those are the really rigid conversations we're having with people saying tell me more. How do you just out of curiosity the ecommerce like is there a post element? Do you connect to the post? Yep. Or is there is there a post version of what you do online? You know we we do have a point of sale integrations across many of the different point of sales. We have integrations to like you know all different PPS.
You know whether you're using PayPal, Braintree or using Agen or you want to use Stripe or you only use advanced checkout Stripe link right one page checkout. Our role is to make e-commerce as seamless as possible. Not just for you as the administrator and the builder of your your site and the experience and embedding AR and virtual reality and all those other new things that are coming are using AI to to to really streamline things.
Yeah. But also to make sure that you're connecting to the fastest checkout the the sort of Google pays and the apples and the wallets right Or getting into stripe link one page pass useless checkout and those are the punishes we have. And why is that important? Because if I'm a purchaser on a site, we're always, always getting interrupted and doing different things right.
I wanna make sure that I'm giving you, as the brand or the retailer, the ability to check somebody out immediately without going to multiple pages. Yep, I want to give you the ability. If you are saying you know what, we see a lot of the demographics that we want to sell products to on Instagram or are on TikTok, we want to give you that ability to check out on into Instagram or shop on Instagram, right, and
make it seamless, right. So having the integrations with our partnerships and our ecosystem is core to enable the brand and retailer really to grow and to acquire the shoppers wherever they are. In that instance, right. I my view is biassed by because of two things, emotional or neat, right? The emotion is, Oh my gosh, I love that blouse or I love those sneakers.
I'm gonna have the same thing. So instead of an emotional, in the moment purchase, if you're doing the right retargeting or advertising, yeah, I want to be able to convert them right now. Or it's a. Need so looking forward, I mean interacting in one of the talks I was out there was talking about how every retailer will have its own AI, right As us as consumers will have our own AI retailers will have their version of AI and I guess that led itself to what you're
saying. Do you build that yourself or do you buy into somebody else's vision of what you what you can have? So let me be a little bit controversial. AIAI is nothing new, right? We've used a I for a very long time in our lives. Retailers and brands have been using a, it's an algorithm, right? The algorithms have got smarter. They got speed and scale to them now and now we're infusing it with data, right. So that's the generative AI,
that's the other things we got. So AI is nothing brand new, it's just speed, scale and then the incorporation of data right to it. We've been using AI in product data feeds to normalise data to optimise, give you a stronger return on ad spend, improve your ROI and essentially get your product described the right way for the different schemas. Sure. Instagram's requirement for how you describe a product is very different to TikTok is very different to Amazon. So, right.
So we've been using AI to help really make sure that we remove that manual effort and streamline it. We've got a in the product, right.
So if you're doing search recommendations, right, you've you've got inside it. I think AI as a whole including for B to B by the way is like in improving the the order management, right, or the invoice creation through AI because we know from history and from data what you're trying to do. So let's add those things in check mark instead of you manually putting the things into your your, your, your baskets and doing it. So we are embedding AI into the product, right.
We're infusing it to help you make predictive analytics to show you what's going on into the data, into combining data leaks through, you know, Google Data Cloud and other things. So AI is big, right? I mean, I I can't walk around so many boos without seeing AI AI. AI, AI is the next step. But you've got to be cautious on AI as well. How are you going to use it, right.
I I don't think chat bots are there right now when it comes to it. There's a booth opposite iOS that has a generator that has an AI, hey, I'm a AI person here to help you and you know it's AI, right. So I think we got to, we used to go, but for today's retailers and brands, look for the Econ platforms that are helping streamline and optimise what you've got today, help you generate your product listings and your descriptions, right.
We've got things that are different variants during a blue sweater, right? You want to describe the material, you may have different colours, different sizes, different options. AI can help normalise that so you don't manually have to do it. And obviously wishing you, if we do things manually, we tend to err, yeah. So I think a I is is very beneficial in a lot of different things.
Final thoughts in terms of where next NRF, yeah, we're coming back, Yep. What do you think you would have achieved, helped retailers achieve in 2024? What should they be doing in 20? 20 I'll tell you a couple of quick things. Optimising, normalising your product data feeds and speeds into as many channels as you can do. And that's one thing we can do real quick. Provide an ROI in about a month and show you the value of doing that and why.
Return on ad spend improved average order value rate. All of the things that we wanted to wanted to do 2 would be speed of checkout, right? Making sure you got one page password. Let's check out on key PSP's and wallets. Apple, Google Pay, PayPal, Stripe, Adrian, maybe others in top of it too because they have to check the people out. And probably the third thing is showing that, you know, we have one of the fastest if not the fastest checkouts in the world on our platform for brands and
retailers to use. Right. Perfect. Mayor, it's been. I don't need to check your surname again because that's good. That's good. Thank you. Cheers Alex. Good.