[00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Commerce Today. My name is Joshua Warren. I am the CEO of Creatuity. We're an e-commerce agency. And had a lot of platform specific and kind of technology specific episodes recently. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about when you get stuck, and especially within your e-commerce efforts, your e-commerce projects, when you get stuck, and some of the things that I've seen that can help you get unstuck or that may be causing you to get stuck.

And I really, I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn talking with y'all and really enjoy it. But I have to admit. Some of the posts great on me, and one of the things that drives me crazy is the, here's what random personal experience taught me about business. And that whole style of post I think at first that was really cool.

Now it's so contrived. I'll never forget the guy that very seriously posted about what. Wooing and proposing to his fiance, taught him about B2B sales and how he was [00:01:00] absolutely roasted for that. However, as much as I don't like that, I have to admit that today's episode actually came about from some conversations I had with some friends, some colleagues as I was struggling with something personally.

No big. Personal reveal here. I just have a messy garage and I was trying to figure out, like I pretty much always had a messy garage and I feel really stuck with how do I organize my garage. And I've never found a good solution. Like literally this has been something that as long as I've owned a house.

This has been a challenge for me until recently when I just started breaking it down into smaller pieces and I just started looking at, if I have 15 minutes, what can I do in 15 minutes to make it a little bit better? And instead of it having to be perfect, instead of having to set aside a whole day and rent a dumpster and do all the huge project stuff.

Let's make small little improvements here and there. So that's the inspiration for what I was thinking about for this topic. But let's go ahead and dig right in. I have seen so [00:02:00] many businesses where their e-commerce operations are stuck. And this can take a lot of different forms.

This could be, they don't even have e-commerce. It could be they have launched, a small portion of e-commerce and especially with B2B distributors and with multi-store retailers. I see where. They'll dip their toe in and they'll do a little bit of e-commerce. But then they're just stuck in rolling it out bigger.

So for omnichannel retail, that might look like having just store pickup but not offering ship to home. Or for some of the B2B distributors, lots of times that's, they have one product line that they've launched with, but there's 20 other product lines they could add to e-commerce, but they're just stuck.

They're not doing it. Other times. And so in those cases, lots of times that's it could be fear driven of, oh no, this is such a big project. Like I don't even know where to begin. Could be complexity driven. It could be a truly very complex project. Sometimes it's even there's just resistance within the business to big changes.

It can be risky. I know there's e-commerce directors I talk to all the time that. [00:03:00] Or afraid of what if the project fails and how is that gonna reflect on me and what's that gonna do to my job? So definitely a lot of different ways that those projects will get stuck. Sometimes though, I see almost the opposite of companies will decide, yes, we're gonna do it.

We're not gonna be stuck. We are going to replace our e-commerce platform, our pim, our ERP, our warehouse management system. We're gonna do it all, and we're gonna do it all at once. And that's almost another form of getting stuck. And what I mean by that is they end up designing this project. It's kinda if I had said, all right, I am going to set aside a week to make my garage spotless, and until I can block off an entire week and have the money and resources and time spend an entire week improving my garage.

I just won't do it. And that's what those companies end up doing is they end up just basically constantly delaying the project because it is such a big undertaking that the stars will never align to where your warehouse team, your ERP team, your e-comm team, all agree that this is the perfect [00:04:00] six to 12 months to completely disrupt our operations while we rip.

All of these things out at once and replace them. So I already mentioned the solution to this is break it down into smaller steps and find small improvements you can make. And now if you go to conferences like I do, you hear all the time about data-driven decision making and about all the cool things you can do with conversion rate optimization, and just so many things around, making small improvements to the conversion rate and user experience on your site.

But so often that's just talk. So often when I go into an actual merchant's business and I look, they're not actually doing any of those things. And so I would say if you are stuck, you're not sure what to do next. You don't know what to do with your e-commerce business. Just set aside a little bit of time, kinda like the 15 minutes a day that I'm doing.

Set aside a little bit of time and say, okay, let's run through a basic checklist. Let's make sure we have the basics covered. And I wanna say the basics [00:05:00] covered. If you're considering some big projects for your e-commerce operations, very first thing I would recommend is make sure you have analytics, whether that's the free Google Analytics or a paid analytics pro product.

Make sure at a very minimum you have analytics and you're using those analytics. Because if you're considering a huge project but you don't know what's in your analytics data, you don't know how much traffic you're getting, you don't know what your average order value is, then you could very well be planning the wrong project.

And and who knows, maybe when you look at the analytics data, you don't need a huge new e-commerce platform. You just need to make some improvements to your front end experience. Definitely an easy way to start if you're stuck is make sure you have analytics. Make sure someone's reviewing it. And for those people that I'm talking to, which is so common these days that you are the entire e-commerce department and you are a department of one and you're probably doing a few other things, make sure Google Analytics are similar, is installed on your site.

Set aside 15 [00:06:00] minutes a day to just go through and look at it and just be curious, ask questions, say why? What does this mean? Why am I seeing this? What does this tell me? And there's a really good chance that as you do that some very clear projects and priorities are gonna emerge, where you're gonna realize where you can improve your site and what needs the most work.

And even as you start to plan that out, then don't go and say, all right, we're gonna do it all at once again. Use this kind of, maybe not exactly 15 minutes, but use this incremental progress everyday approach even to the projects that you're defining. So you might start by saying, we need a new front end experience.

The look and feel of our site has to be completely overhauled well. That's a big project. You're gonna have to get big budget. You're gonna have to be able to stick with that project over time. It could definitely, invoke a little bit of fear or resistance to change. Maybe break that down into smaller steps.

Maybe say, okay, I. What can we do on our homepage, or better yet, you've been looking at Google Analytics, find out what [00:07:00] pages are getting the most traffic, which could be your homepage, but also could surprise you. I've definitely seen a lot of sites especially in the B2B space where maybe your page about a specific product line is actually where you get more traffic than your homepage.

So find those high traffic pages. And say, okay, what's five things we could do to make this page better? And now you have five new tasks that you or your front end developer, your agency can start working on. And that's gonna be a lot easier to kick off and get started than saying, all right, let's have a whole new theme, whole new design for the entire site.

And since you're starting small, you're gonna see results faster and that's gonna give you that nice little dopamine hit. And you're gonna get that nice little progress boost by saying, okay we've made five improvements to this first busiest page. What are five improvements we can make to the second one?

And especially as you see, if you're getting a conversion rate lift, you're starting to sell more due to the changes you made on that first page, then that can help you get more budget for the [00:08:00] changes of the second page. That can also, if you're not getting the improvements you thought that can help you then say, okay, what are we gonna do different on the second page?

And literally just go page by page task by project task by task through your site, through the user experience, making those little improvements. Same thing really, if you're, maybe it's not the front end of your site. Maybe it's your whole tech stack. Maybe you're faced with, Hey, our e-commerce platform contract is expiring.

We know we don't like our current platform. What do we need to do next? And I see so many businesses get stuck on this because. The amazing thing, but also the dangerous thing about working in our industry is you can do anything, like if there is an idea you have, or more often, if there's an idea that your stakeholders have.

There's a way to implement it. There's very few things that we just can't do in the world of e-commerce anymore. And so what I see happen is really re-platform and platform selection [00:09:00] projects get bogged down in two different ways. One is you have been on your old platform for so long and customized it so much that your feature list is just a mile long of things that you want to implement in the new platform or.

Similar but different. Maybe you don't like your current platform and you or your stakeholders have this massive list of really cool things we could do if only we weren't on this platform. Either way, you end up with this huge list of requirements. It's gonna take a long time to find a platform that fits all of them.

You probably never will find a platform that fits all of them, and it's gonna take even longer to get budget approved, to actually implement all those things. And so I see these replatform projects stall out because there's this just laundry list of things that they want to accomplish all in the replatforming process.

You can probably guess what I'm gonna say, break it down into smaller steps. This time around, I would actually call it phases. I would basically say, [00:10:00] and maybe not even go with phases. Ultimately that's what we're gonna do is design it out in phases. But you could internally talk about those phases as what are our actual must haves for launch?

What are our should haves, could haves, and then what are our, like bottom the list, nice to haves and really. Lots of times you're gonna naturally think, oh, we should just focus only on the must haves. The good news is with a lot of platforms, some of your could haves, should haves, nice to haves are gonna come with the platform.

So you can still check off some of that list, but the reason you're breaking it down into these different categories is to look at your list and say, okay, are 90% of my requirements nice to haves? 'cause if so, by using this list in the decision making process, I'm gonna overwhelm the platforms. I'm gonna overwhelm the agencies.

I'm gonna overwhelm the decision makers, and we're never gonna make a decision. And so it's a really good opportunity to stop and say, okay, from this giant list of requirements. What are the things that we actually must [00:11:00] have to launch on the new platform? Now, this isn't to say that your new platform shouldn't do more than your existing platform, but I just see so often where people, their idea of more is just more, it's not more revenue, it's not more profitability.

It's not. More growth for the business. It's literally just let's have more of these cool ideas implemented and cool ideas. They can be fun to implement. And I know sometimes you'll have a stakeholder that's in a position where you have to implement their cool ideas, but if you really. Okay, hinge the whole project on let's implement literally every cool idea on our list.

In the first phase when we launch, you will never launch. Heck, you will probably never even decide on a platform. So definitely break it down into smaller steps and don't let yourself get so bogged down on this huge, massive list. That is coming up on the time that I have for today's episode.

I know this seems simple and it's funny, even when I was [00:12:00] talking with some friends about my garage, I'm like, yeah, I know. To break things down to the smaller steps, like I know to stop looking for perfection and you just look for these little wins. I've read all those books, I've heard all those speakers.

I know those things, but I wasn't doing them. And sometimes it just takes a friend to give you a kick in the seat of the pants to say, Hey. This knowledge that you already have, you need to go apply it and you need to stop being paralyzed because you just can't figure out what to do next because you have so many different options, so many different opportunities because you're aiming for perfection.

All those things that hold us back. Sometimes it just takes somebody saying, Hey, snap out of it. Let's make a list. Let's focus on what's most important. Let's get those things done. And so take this as my friendly kick in the seat of your pants to go out there with your e-commerce business and just again.

Start with your analytics. Take a look at what's your busiest pages, especially busiest pages that maybe aren't contributing as much to your bottom line as you would like. And then just [00:13:00] define very small, quick, easy win type tasks that can be done to those pages. Or if you're facing a re-platform, a major upgrade, some big project like that.

Again, break it down into smaller steps and really focus your decision making process and your initial implementation on those smaller steps. Something I didn't mention earlier is that the other great thing about our industry is your website is never done. Just because you launch it, just because you launch a new design, a new platform, whatever new project it is, doesn't mean you then just stop there and never do anything else with your website.

You will do more things, and so by focusing on the most important things for that initial launch, then once you go live, you can start on the next list. And maybe it's your nice to haves from earlier in the process or maybe in the process of launching the new site, you're gonna discover some other new must haves.

Either way gives you the flexibility that. You have your new site live, you're ready to do the next wave of improvements. And everyone's gonna be a lot [00:14:00] happier than if you're still sitting around in conference rooms debating e-commerce platforms and trying to make a decision. Hope you found this helpful.

Again, my name is Joshua Warren. You can find me on LinkedIn. I have a Creed 2D Gold background behind my head because there's a lot. Of Joshua Warrens on LinkedIn. On my profile, I have a link to book an appointment with me that will actually give you a free 30 minute slot on my calendar to talk through any e-commerce challenges you're having, e-commerce opportunities you're having.

Maybe you just need me to sit down with you and tell you, Hey, stop it. Go ahead and make that short list and start going after those quick wins. And I'm more than happy to do that. And yeah, hope y'all are all having a wonderful day, and I will see you next week on Commerce Today.