Your New Field Manual: Introducing The Ecommerce Growth Playbook - Episode 135 of Commerce Today
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Joshua: [00:00:00] ~So ~not too long ago, I was on a discovery call when an e-commerce director told me something that had me almost literally face palming on the call. And he said, our site's fine. It's good enough for now. And in that moment, I knew that good enough was costing them a lot of money. It's silent tax on your revenue.

It shows up as slow pages, clunky, mobile checkout, frustrating search, all of these things chipping away at your growth. When nothing actually seems to be on fire on your side. And that silent tax and that conversation is what ~actually ~led me to write this book. The E-Commerce Growth Playbook. And if you follow me on LinkedIn, you probably saw last week, I'm super excited the.

First physical proof copy is here. It's on sale now. It's available to be delivered to you by Amazon on August 2nd. And I gotta admit, I did not mean to write 300 pages, but that is what I did. And. The reason I wrote it is I feel like the mid-market brands I'm working with are in such a [00:01:00] squeeze right now.

~So ~you're caught between these ~kind of ~scrappy, fast moving startups and the giants like Amazon and Walmart, and customer expectations are sky high. They want blazing, fast, everything seamless, everything. Whether that's. Delivery, whether that's the web experience, whatever it is, the expectations are insane.

Yet, on a mid-market scale company, lots of times your team is lean. They're ~honestly ~exhausted from five plus years of constant change, changing in the way we work, changing the way we shop, changing everything. And on average, they are juggling a tech stack of 14 or more different SaaS services you're subscribing to.

You. That's not fun. And that's not good for anybody, ~honestly, ~except maybe the people selling all those SaaS services to you. So continuing to run the outdated playbook, the outdated way of approaching e-commerce it's not just inefficient. It's gonna cause you to fall behind. It's gonna cause your team to quit.

It is gonna cause a lot of problems [00:02:00] that if you're not seeing them yet, you're about to start seeing them in your e-commerce business. Coasting and ~just ~doing what you've been doing isn't a strategy. It's a tax on every sale that you could be making. And so I wrote the book, the E-Commerce Growth Playbook, and that's what we're gonna talk about during this week's episode of Commerce Today.

I'm ~actually ~gonna walk you through the book and help you understand how to best use it so you can see if it'd be a good fit for helping you with your operations. And it's not theory like I the title of playbook. It's very much inspired, just like commerce today. If you're. New to Commerce today.

You might not know that we named the podcast Commerce Today because it needs to be things that you can apply to your e-commerce business today. And the e-commerce playbook is the same thing. It gives you seven day and 90 day playbooks for exactly what you need to do to grow your mid-market e-commerce operations and revenues.

It's ~really ~made for you to take notes, to do your Kindle highlights, to ~really just ~dig in and apply it directly to your business and create a custom. Plan for your brand. It's also [00:03:00] made, even though it is over a hundred thousand words long I wrote it with those of you in mind that ~just ~don't have the time to sit down and read an entire book and structured it in a way that you can pick it apart and ~just ~dive into exactly what you need in that moment.

But before I talk more about how to use the book, I want to tell you about. The three books ~actually, ~that I wrote into one. So there's ~actually ~three different levers that you can pull to improve your e-commerce results, and I've built the entire playbook around those three levers. The first one is customer obsession.

So this is about relentlessly removing the friction from the customer journey. So an example we talk about in the book is AEO Beauty and how their predictive replenishment program led to an 18% jump in repeat orders. So lots of great examples like that of different ways that you can look for all the friction in your buying process, remove it and increase customer satisfaction, and in turn how much [00:04:00] they're ordering from you.

The second lever that we talk about is having a scalable engine. ~So ~this is all about your tech stack and processes. ~So ~we ~actually ~have an example in the book of where a brand was able to lower their load times from four seconds to two seconds and saw a huge conversion lift off of that. ~So ~lots of times this isn't the fun cool stuff this is, or ~actually ~I think.

It's incredibly fun and cool, but this isn't the shiny stuff that's easy to point to. This is the nuts and bolts of how your ERP is integrated with your pim, which is integrated with your e-commerce platform, et cetera. ~So ~again. Yeah, not stuff that a lot of people want to really focus on, but through the four chapters in that section of the book, we walk you through exactly how to get that scalable engine to where you need it to be.

Finally, the third lever, and this is the one that I feel ~like ~people don't talk about enough I had a great conversation with a potential client about a month ago where. He ~actually ~did ask directly ~like, ~how should we structure our e-commerce team? And that was a breath of fresh air hearing that, [00:05:00] because people just don't think about the organization design of their e-commerce team or the way they lead their e-commerce team.

But that is the third lever that I highlight in the book. You need the right people in the right structure to execute. For instance, you have somebody that wakes up every day or gets their job every day and the first thing they think about is, how can we improve our conversion rate? A lot of companies don't have that.

And if you have that single person focused and responsible on your conversion rate, it can drive amazing results. we go into the book and give an example of a B2B seller who appointed a dedicated product owner. And they saw a surge in new features that were just before getting stuck in committee and just there was too much back and forth.

New features just weren't getting designed or deployed. When they made that one little organizational change, they saw a massive improvement in how quick they were getting new features live on their site. ~So ~I mentioned it's three books in one. And as you probably guessed, each of those levers is basically one of those books.

I did design it to [00:06:00] where you don't have to read it cover to cover. You can pick and choose, and I think a lot of you will probably pick one of the arcs or mini books in the book to be the one that you focus on. ~So ~the very first book is the customer experience. ~So ~that's four different chapters on.

Reducing the friction in the customer experience and the customer journey. Engineering better user experiences, improving search, improving checkout. It's where honestly you'll find the fastest path to lifting your conversion rates. Then the next four chapters we dive into e-commerce technology. ~So ~we go under the hood, we look at the si, silent killers of margin.

~So ~tech debt slow site speed, all the things that can get gummed up in your data plumbing really helps you improve that engine so that your growth doesn't break it. An entire chapter, for instance, dedicated on composable versus monolith. What's the difference? What does that mean? How do you then adopt that composable commerce mindset into your business, even if you have [00:07:00] a monolithic site structure on the tech side.

And then finally, the last four chapters. Those focus on leadership and organization all about people. So organization design for today's challenges, managing change when everyone is just exhausted. And how to hold your vendors, partners, and agencies accountable. So I call it a playbook. A playbook is useless if you don't actually run the plays in the playbook.

And so I have designed it to where you don't have to read all 300 pages cover to cover. I'd love it if you do, and if you do that, reach out to me, I'll buy you a coffee and would love to get your feedback. But for instance, if your site speed is on fire, you can jump straight to chapter 3.4. If you're wrestling with the relationship with your agency, you can go straight to chapter 4.4.

Each chapter is completely self-contained. There's a reality check, some benchmarks and an action plan where you can put that chapter's concepts to use and to work in your business right [00:08:00] away. Another thing if you have the print edition, I'm still trying to work with Amazon on the Kindle side to figure out exactly how this might work, but for the print edition.

There is an extensive index where if there's a particular subject that you're struggling with, look it up in the index. There'll be a, at least a few different pages that you are referred to, and you can dive into solving those problems right away without reading the whole book. I do suggest before you dive in, whether you go cover to cover or skip chapter to chapter or section to section benchmark where you're starting.

~So ~write down your baseline metrics, your conversion rate, your a OV, your repeat purchase rate, and how often you're deploying new features to your site, and then use that as your scorecard as you implement the playbooks throughout the book. Then finally, chapter five is your master plan. 5.1 is a tactical 90 day sprint.

That stacks up wins from across the entire book into real momentum. So your first 30 days of that action plan, [00:09:00] and it goes into exactly what to do in the book. I'm not gonna give you all the details here because hey. Trying to get you to buy the book, but the first 30 days~ really ~focus on plugging the leaks.

So you do a tech debt triage, you do a friction audit, a lot of different things to identify where your low hanging fruit is for improving your e-commerce operations. Then the next 30 days you will accelerate and align. You'll pilot some new personalization features some new omni-channel experiences and ~really ~start to experiment.

And then the last 30 days of that action plan, walk you through how to compound whatever positive results you've already gotten and how to future proof things and ~really ~decouple your monolithic technology and tighten your vendor controls. So that's a lot. And as you can tell from the size of the book, there's a lot that I cover in it.

But I would ~just ~say ~really ~the overall message of the book is stop, coasting, stop saying that your site is good enough. And ~just ~start shipping [00:10:00] improvements. One small change that you do this week or next week onto your live site could be the start of a chain reaction of improving your e-commerce results.

So pick one task from one chapter. Start a 10 minute timer. When that timer goes off, see how much you have defined and can actually start implementing on your site. I love books. I love reading. I love theory and knowledge, but I've learned that in the world of e-commerce, it is all about turning that knowledge into actual improvements on your website as quickly as possible.

I would love to be able to work with each and every one of you through my agency creativity and actually do some of these things for you, but I know there's a lot of you that. Time, budget internal politics. There's various reasons that you either can't hire me or can't hire any agency, and so I wanted to make sure that all the knowledge that I have gained from.

The hundreds of episodes of commerce today, the 500 plus projects that I've helped implement, and ~just ~all the conversations I've had with [00:11:00] everybody out in the world of e-commerce. I wanted to distill all that information down, all that knowledge, and share it in book form so that y'all can benefit from it, whether we ever get to meet or work together or not.

So the book releases on August 2nd. Please check it out. It is on Amazon. It will be on Barnes and Noble and many other bookseller websites and even some bookstores. It's releasing in both Kindle and paperback format as well as the audio book is actually in production right now. So you'll have lots of different options of how to consume it.

Would greatly appreciate it if you bought a copy, but even more than that. Reach out to me with your feedback. Please leave a review on Amazon if you have a chance that will do so much for people finding the book. It's crazy ~just ~how much impact Amazon reviews have. In the book, I list my contact information.

Of course, you can always find me on LinkedIn as Joshua Warren with a creativity gold background behind my headshot because as I always say, there's a lot of Joshua Warrens. [00:12:00] Speaking of which I discovered that there are some Joshua Warrens that have published books on Amazon that are. Not exactly safe for work.

So that's been a fun process. That's why you'll actually find the book under Joshua S. Warren on Amazon. But even then, I discovered there's another Joshua S. Warren, and please don't go look up what he's written. If you don't do it on your work computer. I promise that's not me. But find my contact information there or on LinkedIn and if you do read the book and you apply something from it reach out to me and let me know what that was.

Like I said, I'll buy you a coffee next time I am in your town. And speaking of being in your town, I have some upcoming trips for some e-commerce events. In Albuquerque, Austin, and a few other cities. So if you would be interested in attending one of those it's everything from some happy hours to some dinners and a few other fun concerts that we're sponsoring.

So if you are an e-commerce director, e-commerce manager. Working in e-commerce and a merchant and would be interested in [00:13:00] attending an event with me. I'll even give you a free copy of the book if I meet you at an event. Again, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Joshua Warren, and I would love to chat with you.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy my new book, the E-Commerce Growth Playbook.