Interviewer: Hey, everyone. Welcome to what is bound to be another great episode. I’m sitting here with Jason Greenwood. He’s the founder of Greenwood consulting, and he brings over 20 years’ experience to helping brands in Australia and New Zealand and all over the world, architect, compelling digital shopping experiences. So he founded Greenwood consulting to offer B2B and B2C brands, eCommerce consulting services that compare with what the sort of attention, what he would call sexy retail brands get from agencies and other consultants.
He’s the host of At the Coalface podcast, which you should definitely check out. Also the author of “At the Coalface Digest”, which I have the URL up right now. It’s digest.coalface.social, but I’ll also have that in the show notes. He’s a speaker, he’s a mentor, he’s a content producer and he got married last year and he lives in a small, tiny, I shouldn’t say small, I’m assuming small off grid, tiny house. So how are you even doing this, Jason?
Jason: Oh, thanks, it’s awesome to be here with you. I live in an off grid, tiny house in Auckland, New Zealand. You’re right. And basically we run on solar with generator backup for our power. We have lithium batteries for our power supply. We run a composting toilet. We compost our kitchen waste. We basically dispose to land all of our gray water. We try to be as eco-friendly as we can, but one of the other main motivations for us getting into a tiny house was mortgages and house prices being what they are in Auckland. We were never going to be able to afford that, I guess, a regular home, but we wanted to have our own place. And this was a great way for us to do it, relatively cost effectively. And we don’t have any kids and we don’t plan to have any kids. And so for us, the tiny lifestyle’s just absolutely perfect. So we focus on activities and we focus on doing things as opposed to having things. That’s kind of our lifestyle.
Interviewer: That’s awesome. It’s becoming more and more of a trend. And I mean, you’re in New Zealand I’m in Canada and I mean the internet connection is great. So you’re on what like a 5g connection?
Jason: Yeah, that’s right. On a Wi-Fi 5g connection. That’s exactly right. It’s part of the Vodafone network and it’s good most of the time. When we first moved in about a year and a half ago, it was a bit patchy, but it’s definitely gotten better over the last say six months. It’s definitely got progressively better as they’ve rolled out more cell sites.
Interviewer: Amazing. Well, I’ve had dreams of driving across the country in an RV and never thought it would’ve been possible until COVID hit. And then our entire company now is remote and it’s possible and we’re all doing it. So maybe I’ll have to rethink my office here. I don’t know if I could go off the grid like you, but I could drive across the country in a camper.
Jason: Yeah. We’re looking at doing that too.
Interviewer: One day, I got two young kids, so not yet. So you’ve got a pretty rich history in eCommerce. Can you give us a bit of the background on who you are and kind of what got you to where you are today?
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. I’m super lucky, first of all, and grateful and thankful to be in this career. It’s treated me so well and it’s given me a lifestyle that I’m super grateful and thankful for. And I’ve met such incredible people like yourself and incredible vendors and partners and merchants and friends, and a lot of people in the industry that have moved from maybe professional colleagues to true friendships. And I feel super lucky to be in this space. And I have been doing it for over 20 years and I’ve worked. I had my own eCommerce pure play. I’ve worked agency side for several different agencies over the years. I also worked merchant side for new Zealand’s largest online retailer of natural health products. And then most recently before starting Greenwood consulting, I was director of solutions for a mid-sized eCommerce agency based down here in New Zealand with offices in Auckland and in Sydney and in the Philippines.
And so basically I’ve been working on the more technical side of eCommerce for most of my career, but I live kind of at the apex of business, marketing, digital e-com tech. So I kind of live right at the pointy end of all those things. And when I started my consultancy, really the goal behind that, there was a few different motivations for doing that. One was I didn’t see anybody else consulting in the way that I wanted to consult in this part of the world. And most consultants would do it say on either a retainer basis, a project basis, maybe an hourly rate basis. And I wanted to offer consulting as a service. So almost like a SaaS model, but for consulting. So flat fixed fee subscription, all you can eat, just governed by a fair use policy and let’s go work and let’s get some great outcomes.
And I’ve really enjoyed doing that. It reduces the admin overhead of running the business dramatically. You’re not trying to track every single minute of your time because at the end of the day, that’s just an overhead that you don’t need to have. You’re trying to get outcomes. And that’s really what your goal is. And so when you’re aligned both from a commercial perspective and from an outcome perspective with your clients, it can lead to really good outcomes. And so I saw it as a very blue ocean opportunity down here.
And then the second thing that drove me to do this is the fact that I don’t just consult on the eCommerce piece or the ecommerce front end piece. I consult across the whole entirety of the commerce stack. So ERP CRM, CDP PEM, marketing automation, point of sale systems, warehouse management, order management and inventory management. So basically if it has to do with commerce, I consult on it because all of those components I’ve implemented at one point or another, or at least most of those components at one point or another as a merchant. So I don’t just work on the theory side of it. I’ve done it. And I know all of, I guess, the pain of implementing large scale digital transformation programs. And I’m very fortunate that I get to bring that experience to the table when I’m consulting with my clients.
Interviewer: Okay. I want to dig into a couple things in this. So first of all, the model you used, did you see another agency, like doing a similar approach or did you come up with that billing model as a service yourself?
Jason: I came up with that on my own. The reason why I did it was because I didn’t see anyone else doing it. And I saw, over the years I’ve seen quite an extreme misalignment at times between the motivations of an agency or a consultant and the client. So at the end of the day, however you choose to bill, most agencies and most consultancies, they get paid by the hour. If you break it down, sure, maybe it’s a retainer model. Maybe it’s a project based model. Maybe it’s a time and materials model, but ultimately you’re selling time for money. That’s the ultimate model. And so in that model of selling time for money, the more time you spend on a piece of work, the more money that you make. And whereas a client obviously wants you to spend as little time as possible.
Their goal is to have you spend as little time as possible doing something because they want to pay as little as possible for an outcome. And so I looked at this and I said, how can I do this differently? Where I don’t have such high admin overhead to manage every single second of time so that I can make sure that I’m getting paid for every single second of time, but secondarily, how can I be tightly aligned with my customer to where we actually want to get outcomes as fast as possible with the engagements that my clients have. And really that was really the prime motivation for this was reduced admin overheads, and also being aligned with what the customer ultimately wanted to get out of the engagement.
Interviewer: And how is it going? Have you had to make adjustments? Did you find when you started, you were maybe, I don’t know, overworking for the prices charge? I imagine even though you don’t track hours for specific projects, you must keep track to still make sure that the unit economics make sense on it, right?
Jason: I do. And also to track it against the fair use policy. So I have a very generous fair use policy and it allows me to flex up and down any given month as required for the client. And so we understand, and we know, and we’ve seen that some months will be a little bit over kind of the fair use policy and some months will be a little bit under the fair use policy. And so we’ve built that into the model and we’ve also built that into our agreement and our terms of service agreement that allows a customer to flex, 20% over, 20% under, on a monthly rolling basis. But if they go significantly over for months on end, then it allows us to open a dialogue with them and say, Hey, do you need a more generous fair use policy and do we need to revisit your subscription fee as a result?
And then we can have a very open and frank dialogue based on their needs. And so I haven’t had to do that yet. We’ve been doing this just over a year now. We managed to land five really solid clients in our first year of business. And it’s been amazing. We don’t do any outbound sales at all. We don’t do any outbound marketing at all. Our business was 100% based on three things, it’s based on content. Social media content, podcast, et cetera, and making sure that we’re putting out what we consider to be hopefully very thought leadership orientated content, that’s super valuable in its own right and if you look back through my content, I don’t do any selling through my content whatsoever.
And then we have referrals from partners, both tech partners, as well as agency partners, where the client may, for example, come to an agency, not be ready for an agency yet. And they need a level of consulting to prepare them for agency. So those agencies will turn them over to us and then we’ll get them all ready to go, maybe write a, BRD for them, whatever, and then hand them back to the agency for delivery. And then the third one is client referrals. And so that’s really what we’ve built our model on, is content to raise awareness that we exist in the market and make sure that we’re showing what we’re capable of and where our knowledge and where our wheelhouse is. And then referrals and partnerships filling in the rest of the gaps. And it’s worked great so far. And I don’t have anything against, a lot of businesses have significant outbound marketing efforts, but it’s my hope and my goal that we never have to go down that path.
Interviewer: Well, with the method that you’re using to acquire business, it compounds. We think about this principle a lot is when you’re paying to acquire customers, your growth is you’re going to eventually churn customers. And when you’re paying to acquire them, it’s a never ending funnel that you just have to keep filling, keep filling. But when customer turns into more customers and through referrals, you’ve actually got a healthy business. And the more customers you get, the more they refer and the bigger you are able to grow.
So I think it’s the best way to go in my opinion. Give me an idea of, like you mentioned, B2B and B2C, some of the brands, what I want to get to is, some of the challenges you’re seeing now in eCommerce and what some of the brands are coming to you for your consulting and your advice on, but maybe just to kind of set the stage on that. What are some of the types of brands, like these are retail, they’re B2B, they’re maybe like some background on platforms they’re using, a little bit of context there. And then I’d love to dive into like what you’re seeing as challenges they’re facing right now.
Jason: Yeah. So our focus is primarily B2B. We don’t focus too much on kind of vanilla retailers that are doing traditional B2C, meaning they’re selling someone else’s stuff. We focus primarily on really, really hyper-complex commerce environments. So B2B environments and D2C, so direct consumer where a manufacturer or distributor or wholesaler is wanting to establish a direct consumer channel. And so that’s really the kind of environments we specialize in, just because they are so complex and not very many agencies and not very many consultants specialize in that. Because all of a sudden, when you’re in a B2B environment, then you have hyper complex product models. You have hyper complex customer models, you have hyper complex pricing models. Basically everything goes up by a factor of 10 when you’re in the B2B space from a complexity perspective.
And we’re very mature when it comes to kind of the design patterns of eCommerce and omnichannel, particularly in the traditional B2C world, we have a really good set and suite of technologies, of stacks, of systems that work together very well, primarily SaaS based, that either have out the box integrations or easily integratable because they’re SaaS and API driven and API led. And so you’ve got the Shopifys of the world, the big commerce of the world, the Vtechs. And then when you go into almost any component of the commerce stack, whether that be [11:24 PEN] CDP, whatever, there are some outstanding software out there in the market that does a really, really good job at what it does.
And so the B2C vertical for eCommerce and omnichannel is really mature, even from a personalization search and merge. Loyalty, almost every single piece of the stack is quite mature now. And I think the metaverse is going to set the cat amongst the pigeons on that front, but that’s probably a discussion for maybe a little bit later or another day. But B2B, it’s a different story. And B2B businesses largely either didn’t have eCommerce at all. If we look back to the beginning of COVID many, many B2B businesses and many verticals, either didn’t do eCommerce at all, or they hadn’t looked at their eCommerce implementation in 3, 4, 5, 10 years in some instances.
And it just sort of ran in the background and it was maybe a bit of a portal and maybe they could download some price lists and maybe they could upload an order, or they could email an order through, or heaven forbid maybe even fax a carrier [12:21 inaudible] but they were certainly not nearly as mature and certainly not as modern and experience as what we would’ve come to expect in the B2C world. And so I saw a massive opportunity there, and I’m still seeing that today. And we’re seeing that a lot of eCommerce platforms that have historically specialized in B2C, they’re not ready for the complexity of B2B and neither are some other components in the stack.
Now that’s rapidly starting to change as we have systems like Vtechs that are coming to the floor and obviously they’ve just gone public. We have big commerce coming out with their B2B edition and their bundle B2B app that eases a lot of the pain of B2B. And if we look at big commerce, some of the underlying functionality in the platform lends itself to B2B. Anyway, things like customer groups, things like price lists, things like custom facets and all sorts of other things that really you need to create a really rich B2B customer experience and provide businesses with digital tooling for B2B. And so that’s the kind of space that I’m working in.
I’m working in these really complex environments where businesses are really trying to figure out how do we map this legacy business model to a digital world, and how do we exploit digital channels, particularly around digital and e-commerce self-service so that our sales teams, our BDMs, our BDRs, our field sales reps, et cetera, we can free them up instead of doing admin and inputting orders into an ERP. How can we free them up to build relationships with our customers instead, and then enable the customer for transactional self-service. So that’s what I’m seeing in the market at the moment.
Interviewer: Do you think, well, you mentioned that the tech stack of a lot of the commerce of the brands it’s become more and more mature. The concept of composable commerce is the space we play in at Bold, so we’re involved in it, but I see that as something that probably wouldn’t have been maybe possible seven years ago, just because of the maturity of all the individual components that you need to make up a unique commerce experience for whatever it is you are vertical, how you’re selling and where you’re selling. What’s your thoughts on, it sounds like that’s the approach you take with a lot of your clients, is a composable stack based off of their requirements? Is that a fair assessment or what’s your thoughts?
Jason: Yeah. So composable is a unique term. And most times it’s referring to a headless implementation, whether that be headless content, headless commerce or both. And in my experience so far, specifically for eCommerce monolithic is still the lion share of implementations. And for good reason. Headless commerce is still reasonably immature. It’s still reasonably expensive. It’s still time consuming to get to market with those implementations. You need a business that is pretty mature and is really wanting to eke out that last 10% of performance and terms of speed. And in terms of customized front end experience in UX, then I think it can make sense for some of those brands, but for brands that are just starting to dip their toes in the water of eCommerce to begin with. And they’re really, really early in their digital transformation journey, monolithic is still absolutely the lion share.
I haven’t done an implementation with any of my clients of a headless commerce implementation. And I don’t see that becoming the norm. I think that that’s going to slowly change as the major SaaS eCommerce platforms go headless themselves. And we’re already starting to see that with Shopify, with hydrogen and oxygen, and we’re seeing the front end framework being extrapolated out of the more monolithic components of the stack in the back end. And I think that once that becomes the norm and we’ve got SaaS front ends, because at the moment, most headless implementations are using a custom react front end. That is then self-hosted on something like a Netlify or something like that or maybe they might be using show gun front end, which is obviously a hosted front end with a headless commerce backend and a headless CMS backend.
So look, there are many different approaches to headless or composable commerce. But what I’m seeing so far is that it’s only the very, very largest and most mature brands that are considering headless seriously and where they can actually see the benefits in the ROI of a headless implementation, because it’s still very new. It’s still very immature. The major SaaS, monolithic SaaS platforms, your Shopifys, your big commerce, all Salesforce commerce cloud, they’re all monolithic still. And really the only thing that’s driven, at least down in this part of the world, the main thing that’s driven, even the discussion around headless is honestly the very, very poor performance of Magento 2. That’s been the catalyst for a lot of headless discussions to be honest. But rather than go headless on Magento 2, what a lot of brands have decided is the better way to go is to go to monolithic on a proper modern, fast performance SaaS eCommerce platform instead.
Interviewer: Would you say that skews towards B2B or a headless front end in the B2B world you’re probably bang on, doesn’t make as much incremental benefit as probably B2C when a customer is coming from, like you mentioned show gun, like actually had Finbar the CEO on the podcast. It was one of the earlier episodes, but he had some pretty interesting stats specifically from Instagram. When you’re scrolling Instagram and your thumb is basically on autopilot going to the next post. And if you click on an ad or click on a link, if it doesn’t load almost as fast as the next post, your thumb just kind of subconsciously goes back and keeps scrolling.
And he had some interesting data on some of the brands saw, some were 35%, some were 25%, but significant numbers of increases. But from social media, not from a Google search where someone’s going out, looking specifically for a product, I’m guessing your thoughts there are kind of skewed towards the B2B world a bit, would you say?
Jason: Yeah. But I also think that social commerce is going to get, that’s all going to move to in-app commerce anyway. So the reality is that whilst headless is a little bit of a stop-gap measure of today, contextual commerce, whether that be in-app purchasing, which still in the west were light years behind Asia, in terms of in-app purchasing. In-app shopping is pretty good, but in-app purchasing is not ubiquitous and it’s not easy, it’s fraught with friction, then that’s going to change. That’s going to change over the next few years. Then as we bring in the metaverse, we’re not even going to be transacting on eCommerce websites anymore, we’re going to be transacting in 3D environments. So there’s a lot of things coming to our industry that headless is a very specific solution to a very specific problem.
And I just don’t think that problem that it solves for today will always be a problem. And so I just think that whilst it’s suitable in certain situations and it warrants thorough investigation by some of the world’s largest brands, some of the most successful brands, some of the ones where they’re getting so much traffic, that a 0.01% lift and conversion rate is substantial, then I think absolutely. But for most brands in my experience, whether that be B2C, D2C, B2B, it doesn’t matter. There is so much other low hanging fruit for them to get right first, that I think that sometimes headless is the latest, shiny thing for developers to get stuck into because developers will do what developers do, which is to have fun with new tech.
Because headless is so developer heavy. And so developer-centric, of course developers love headless because it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of maintenance and it makes the implementation very, very sticky for the agencies that do those implementations because they’re so custom. And so I think there are a lot of commercial benefits for everyone other than the retailer in a headless environment. Yes. There are some benefits to it. Do I think it’s universally beneficial for all merchants today with the state of maturity that headless is, I would have to say that’s a resounding no?
Interviewer: Yeah, definitely agree on that stage. In the right scenarios, it makes sense. But I would still say for sure in the majority, it’s your bang on. You’re touching on a few things. I read an article you wrote, I don’t know when it was, but just all around the topic of what you call stealth commerce. And I think you’re kind of tip-toeing a little bit around it. I’d love to actually dive into that because I know that’s something that you have given a lot of thought to and have some opinions on of how commerce might happen in the future. And you’ve kind of called it stealth commerce. Can you explain what that is? And then I have some questions on it, but what is stealth commerce and explain the concept to me?
Jason: Yep, you’re right. I coined that term a couple of years ago because I didn’t see anyone else in our industry really talking about it. And I didn’t see anybody even willing to own up to the fact that in the future, a lot of transactions that we recognize as transactions today, as consumers, in the future will be unrecognizable as a transaction. And let me explain what I mean by that. So as of today, even with the most seamless and frictionless eCommerce website experiences today, it’s fraught with friction. You still navigate the site. You still find what you’re looking for. You still maybe go through a home, category, PDP, cart, checkout, payment method selection, putting in your address, selecting, maybe click and click. Like there is just every single step of the buying journey today on most eCommerce websites is just fraught with friction.
And I think in the future, I mean, if we were to compare that level of friction to 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, when mail-order catalogs started to become common with Sears and some of the other major brands in the United States in particular, we actually haven’t moved despite the massive advancements in technology, despite the massive advancements in marketing fire power, despite the massive advancements in personalization. Despite all of those things, the model itself is still largely a digital version of a mail-order catalog. That’s the reality. We like to pat ourselves on the back and I’m no different, I like to pat myself on the back for all the amazing customer experiences we’ve built over the last 20 years.
But the reality is if I’m brutally honest with myself, we’re really just digitalizing a mail order catalog and trying to remove points of friction along that journey. And if we look to the future, I think that is not going to be the experience that stays in market. I don’t think it’s going to be the experience that wins. I think we’re going to move to a model of smartification of almost everything. Everything is going to become net connected and largely most of our purchases are going to be based on automation. So in other words, we’re going to have smart clothes that are going to be embedded with wifi chips, and they’re going to be tracking how many times they’ve been washed, how thread bear a piece of clothing is, for example, and then it’s going to automatically communicate via wifi, most likely with Amazon, or even if it’s your favorite retailer, your favorite D2C brand.
It’s going to automatically communicate with them at a certain point to where almost like, you know how today with a given retail store, you have like min maxes, okay, I’m going to always have in this retail store, I’m always going to have five units of this on the shelf. And when I go below five units, I’m going to automatically reorder from the supplier and get it shipped in. We’re going to have the exact same thing in our daily life. We’re going to have smart vehicles that automatically when it’s time for an oil change, that vehicle is going to automatically communicate and book us in with our local mechanic. It’s automatically going to order the oil and filter from our preferred supplier and automatically have it shipped to them and then automatically send us a notification in our calendar. Automatically going to add the booking to our calendar. And all of a sudden, all we’re going to have to do is take the vehicle in at the appropriate time because it’s all happened seamlessly behind the scenes, no ringing a mechanic, no booking in, no ordering the oil and filter, no ordering the parts. It’s all just going to happen.
We’ll have to, pre-approve all that process to happen, of course, but it’s a one time approval. And then it just happens almost like subscriptions of today. But most subscription models of today are kind of dumb. They don’t take into account fluctuating usage. They’re just a standard fire and forget. And you have to with your standard subscription model where, I don’t know, let’s say you sell supplements and someone signs up for a subscription and they get this bottle of pills that’s shipped once per month. Well, if they want to modify that because they have a new family member that starts taking that supplement alongside them, or they’re going away on holiday and they want to put it on pause, they’ve got to actually log in. They’ve gotta pause, cancel, resume, change frequencies. They’ve got to do all that manually as a customer.
Whereas in the future, we’re going to have smart subscriptions, whereby for example, as long as you’ve ordered something at least twice from a retailer, they now know what your average purchase frequency is. And they can automatically adapt that and do smart bumps whereby they can smart notify you and say, Hey, if you go and look at your cupboard, you’re probably running out of this item. Based on your purchase frequency you’re probably running out of this thing right about now, would you like us to automatically send you another one? Or would you automatically like us to auto subscribe you based on your purchase frequency and we’ll dynamically adjust the frequency based on demand? And then we’re going to have smart fridges that will automatically make sure that we always have a bottle of ketchup. It’s going to track when fresh fruit and vegetables go in there and when their expiry date should be with machine vision, there’s going to be all this stuff.
And then we’re going to automatically be connected to our local supermarket where our smart fridge can automatically place orders for us, because we always want to have a chicken breast in the fridge for example, and we always want to have certain things in the fridge to cook with. So this smartification of the world is going to make the reordering process. You’re not going to have to go to a website to reorder many, many things, and it’s just going to happen seamlessly. And your credit card details are going to be stored. Your delivery address is going to be stored and it’s all just going to happen. And that’s why I call it stealth commerce, because you won’t even recognize that transaction as a transaction, because it just happens all of a sudden, it just turns up on your credit card statement and the stuff just gets delivered to you.
So we’re fast getting to a place where websites, eCommerce websites themselves are largely going to be obsolete. Now you’re not going to be 100% obsolete because there’s always going to be certain things that are spur of the moment purchases that surprise and delight type of shopping and buying for others and gifts and all sorts of other things. So do I think that’s going to go away tomorrow? No, I don’t. But I think that a lot of the traditional eCommerce, as we see it today will eventually move to a smarter commerce model that’s more automated.
Interviewer: I can definitely see it. There are certain segments that I think are totally rip for this right now. And we have a subscription platform at Bold and we have like 20,000 brands using it for subscriptions and there’s APIs that you can update subscriptions with over voice. Alexa can check in and say, Hey, do you need another bag of coffee right now? Or should we snooze your subscription a week? And SMS can trigger. And they can reply one if they want it shipped now. I’ve seen one, I can’t remember the name of the brand, but there was a coffee company that actually built the first bag of coffee, came with a weight pad that you connected to your Wi-Fi home network. And you put the coffee in your cupboard on top of the weight pad and it knew the exact weight of the coffee and when it got to a certain point, it knew it needed to reorder, it just did an API call to ship next subscription now.
And things like that are, I feel very, very right for this model. That part that I feel like is further away is the discovery. I can see it in the clothing that there will be smart, in clothing they’ll be able to tell how it’s washed, but the discovery of new products, like that’s the part that I still haven’t got my head wrapped around, how that will happen. And maybe there’s this layer of curation that’s built in. And actually I read something yesterday that I feel might answer this for me. Peloton right now, their stock is down. And there’s a number of companies looking, whether this will happen or not, but rumors are that Nike might be looking, Apple might be looking. Amazon is potentially in the mix as well too.
And one of the arguments with Amazon buying Peloton might be that the trainer that you’re riding your bike or you’re running on your tread and you see the trainer, you want to wear the shorts that he’s wearing, you can buy right there or the water bottle they’re using. It’s a seamless commerce experience because it’s going to become, instead of a Peloton membership, it’s part of a prime membership, like maybe a prime premium that comes with Peloton, your payment and everything, you’re not going to check out. You’re just going to want to get the same shorts that the trainer on the Peloton. To me, I didn’t see how discovery would fall into it, but I’m starting to. It’s definitely interesting.
Jason: Yeah. I totally agree with you. I think discovery is still a key dopamine factor, that’s part of our biology. The discover find success model feeds the dopamine receptors in our body. And so biologically we’re not going to remove that anytime soon. So yes, I think commerce will be everywhere, but I think we’re going to, even in those scenarios, as you pointed out, we’re going to so remove the friction that we will not recognize it as a transaction like we do today. And so whether that be through AR glasses that interpret QR codes on clothes in a store and can automatically add it to our cart and or can automatically add it to a wishlist or a compare list.
And then we can automatically check out with just looking in a certain direction through our AR glasses. And then all of a sudden, it just turns up in our door we see something in real life looking for our AR glasses and we click a button and we go, I don’t know what that thing is, or I don’t know who makes it, or I don’t know what brand that is, but I really like it. And I want to find something similar to that online, and I want to buy it. We’re going to have shortcuts to the commerce experience that are aided by AR and VR and AI and auto curation and clothes boxes, and all sorts of ways in which we’re going to be able to do discovery in ways that we can’t even fathom today.
That’s where discovery will go. We’ll have discovery everywhere. We won’t go to a specific website or a specific experience to discover something. Discovery will be woven into every single facet of our daily life. And it can happen anywhere at any time and almost everything will be net connected and that’s where discovery starts to become universal.
Interviewer: So until we get to that point, which I agree we’ll get there. Brands right now, I mean you mentioned before some of the friction points. You mentioned entering address information or payment information, different things, I guess is maybe a bit of a selfish question too, because Bold check out is a big part of what we do and that’s something we’re always trying to optimize and we think about a lot. What are some things that brands can do right now to remove, maybe they can’t go full stealth, but they can remove some friction to make it better. And technology needs to catch up maybe a little bit, but it’s definitely getting close. What are some things brands can do right now to remove some of that friction and the buying experience to become stealthier?
Jason: Absolutely. And I mean, if we look at something like a Shopify for example, with shop pay, when you put in your details on one Shopify store using shop pay your credit card details, your address details, et cetera, that’s stored by shop pay and any other Shopify website that I shop on from them moving forward, unless I need to edit those details. They’re instantly available to me as soon as I authenticate using my email address. And that’s part of Shopify’s ubiquity. They have 1.7 million websites on Shopify. And so there are a lot of brands using Shopify. So just that one thing alone can remove a ton of friction.
And the problem I have with so many of these other sort of quasi one click checkout experiences like vast and bolt and some of the other one click checkout experiences, they’re just not ubiquitous enough. And the reality is they’re just not running on enough websites to where, the promise of them is to be more like shop pay. But the reality is it’s just not yet and may never get there to be honest. But if someone like Stripe was to do that, if someone like Stripe was to come out because Stripe powers so much of the internet, from a payments perspective. If they were to come out with effectively a digital wallet, a tokenized digital wallet that basically anywhere Stripe was deployed, both in store and online and effectively was almost like a one click checkout like shop pay was, and it could be woven into any checkout experience anywhere, I think that’s something that will reduce a lot of friction.
The reality is there’s no good silver bullet solutions out there in the market today. But what merchants can do is they can enable tokenization and select payment methods that can be tokenized. You’d be shocked at the number of websites I still shop on because I do the vast majority of my shopping online. I do almost no shopping in person. I even do grocery shopping online. I do everything online. So I would say 95% of my shopping is online. And you would be shocked at the number of websites that don’t even use a saved credit card gateway or a tokenized gateway where I put in my credit card and I can choose to save it. So then the next time I shop with them, I don’t have to put in my credit card details again.
I would say over 80%, maybe even more of the retailers that I shop with on a regular basis, don’t save my credit card details for me, even if I wanted to. It’s really simple things like that, it’s an absolute no brainer, but brands just don’t think deeply enough about every single potential friction point and pain point on their website. They just don’t think about it enough. And so they go into a conversion rate optimization program, we’re changing colors of buttons and positions of buttons. And I don’t know, maybe a category page layout or maybe a super menu layout and bits and pieces. And that’s all fine and good. Don’t get me wrong, but there’s still so much low-hanging fruit out there of friction that before they get into the final 2, 3, 4, 5, 10%, they need to tackle the low hanging fruit of the 90%.
And one of the ways I suggest that brands start to wrap their head around all these friction points is to implement voice of customer technology on the website at every single point they can. Something as cheap and simple as feedbackify, which is going to cost a brand 20 bucks a month and a JavaScript widget on their website, where someone can give feedback from every single page on the website and it will track the URL. It will track the browser they’re using. It will track all the things you need as a brand to be able to troubleshoot an issue or to go back to them with a meaningful response. And then what we used to do, when I was at health post, I plumbed the email address of feedbackify to automatically send its messages into our CRM and raise a case automatically, so that we could automatically go back to the customer via the case management system in our CRM.
So I think there’s lots of creative ways. You can do things like that to create a feedback loop with your customers because I can guarantee you, if you’ve got pain points on your website and you give customers an easy seamless way of giving you feedback, boy will they.
Interviewer: Do you think, you mentioned the shop pay and other wallet options. Do you think there’s kind of a battle right now going on? I’ve been on some websites. I pretty much do all my shopping online as well too. And sometimes there’s a checkout button and there are eight different options there, Amazon pay, Apple pay, Shop pay, Google pay, you name it pay, PayPal,
Jason: All the 15 line out, pay later services.
Interviewer: We’re going through this interesting time right now where everyone’s got an option for it, but I have a hard time seeing a world where specifically in the wallet space, that devices don’t win. And the reason why I say this is like, I use an iPhone and I use Apple pay. And if a site has apple pay, there’s nothing that can be better than that. For me, I click, it scans my face. It’s checked out. It’s not even a click, actually. It just scans my face. It can’t be faster than that. And as long as I’m shopping on my computer, my Chrome has my credit card saved. My address saved. As long as a checkout has fields, the meta fields proper in the checkout so I can fill it in properly. I don’t ever enter anything anyway.
To me, the devices are really what are in poise to win. I just have a hard time. I think shop pays great, but so is PayPal, so is Amazon pays, so is whatever. I think it’s hard for me to see a world where the devices don’t become the glasses you’re wearing in the VR, whatever. That seems to me to be what will win. I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?
Jason: Yeah, I would largely agree with that. I think where the stumbling block happens in that environment is non ubiquity. And I’ll give you an example. So I’ve wanted to implement apple pay on my iPhone for years, but Kiwi bank, which is the bank that I bank with, doesn’t support apple pay and so their credit cards can’t be linked to apple pay. It’s declined when I try to link them. And so I’ve never used apple pay because I’m not going to change banks just to be able to use apple pay. And I think this is where cryptocurrency and Web3 is going to start to have a massive, massive impact. I’ve only just started playing.
I’ve been following Web3 really closely for probably two years now in the underlying technology, but I’ve never dabbled in cryptocurrency or crypto exchanges or looked at the underlying technology of specific blockchains. But over the last few months I have. And I’ve actually just, and I’m going to start talking about this much, much more in my content. I’ve opened accounts with a couple of cryptocurrency exchanges. I’ve started buying cryptocurrencies and I’ve started dabbling in that and transferring crypto between wallets. And I’ve started to understand because in order for me to understand something, I actually have to do it and I have to test it. I have to taste it. I have to try it and I have to have skin in the game to do it.
And so my education comes through doing and so I was like, fine, this Web3 thing ain’t going away. It’s going to be a big deal. I need to understand this a lot better. So I need to start digging into the tech. I need to start understanding the tech. I need to start using the tech and I need to see and start to translate how this is going to impact our industry because I believe it will have the biggest impact ever of any new technology. I think it is the new version, the new generation, the next generation of the internet. And it’s so funny because I just literally today, did a crypto transaction where I moved some crypto from one wallet to another wallet and it literally took like five seconds and it was so simple.
And so I basically requested a deposit on one exchange and it generated the hash key that I copied and pasted into the other exchange and the other wallet where I wanted it to be sent from. And that was the link, that hash provided all the information the blockchain needed to move that instantaneously from one wallet to the other. And if we look at Solana, for example, Solana pay, which they’ve just announced, it’s going to make payments that fast and that seamless for merchants customers, and peer to peer. And it’s just going to be insane. The level of FinTech that is going to roll out over the next 24 months is going to make the last 10 years of FinTech look like we were all novices.
The amount of change that is going to come through DeFi apps and some of the new blockchain tech that is coming. It’s quite frightening actually, the pace of change that we’re going to have over the next 12 to 24 months. And I think crypto largely, or central bank digital currencies, because almost every major central bank is working on this because they know what the threat of crypto is. And they know that if they don’t get their act together, that crypto is going to largely replace them. And I tell you, it’s going to get so much more frictionless because of the speed and the virtually zero cost nature of being able to move crypto between accounts.
Interviewer: And the security. I’m not an expert, but I am following it. If what the promise of it holds true. I think basically everything you said is true. I think that the big question mark is will it come through right? Because if it does, it has the promise to add security and trust. It’ll remove all the intermediaries, to be able to buy directly from a brand without every trust intermediary in between, and that’s what visa is. That’s what banks are. None of that is actually needed anymore. You can go directly between, but also the ability to build on top of it. I’m really, really curious where that goes because in a world where you can authenticate people and basically make web apps, essentially 100% secure against hacking and the wrong people accessing data, it’s mind blowing.
And I think when you talk about the metaverse like, it reminds me just so much of in the early nineties when I remember people’s like, it was weird, the worldwide web, like if you think about that, like the word web, it just even sounds like a weird thing. Like what’s the web? And I remember people buying domains, anything that sounds, like right now we’re talking about the metaverse. Why would someone want to own a space in the metaverse or own the same way we were talking 25 years ago? Why would someone want to own a domain on the web?
Jason: Why would someone want to have a website for themselves, for example.
Interviewer: Like where is that website? It’s in the web.
Jason: Why would I want to shop online and why would I want to put my credit card details in online when anybody could just steal it? That was the thinking. I remember because I graduated high school in 1992 and that’s really when the consumer web was really just starting to get kicked off and you’re right. Everybody was, I mean I was in boots and all because I saw the future, even then I recognized this is a big deal and this is not going away. This is going to explode. And I kind of jumped in boots and all, really early on, but you’re right, kind of everybody who was kind of middle-aged at that time was saying very similar things to what I heard people say about smartphone, to what I hear people saying now about the metaverse and NFTs and smart contracts and cryptocurrency and virtual commerce and all that stuff.
We, as people oftentimes say things that just patently aren’t true and we say things and we do something totally different. So what we found with smart devices and I know you’ll remember this, I remember, I had a Blackberry Pearl before the iPhone came out and then I had one of the earliest generation iPhones and what really made the iPhone, what made it ubiquitous and what made it so amazing was two things, A, a usable touchscreen web browser. That was the first thing. And then the second thing was a couple of killer apps. So you now had a reasonable device to actually do email on. It was actually really good at email. Then you had a device that could do other things with other business focused apps that made it super utilitarian to you, that it was actually useful, it wasn’t just a play thing. It wasn’t just an entertainment thing.
You could actually be productive on it for the very first time. And everybody, even in the beginning of the iPhone when the app store was very small, everybody had their pet app. Everybody had one or two apps that they go, oh my God, I couldn’t live without this app. It might have only been one or two, but it was those one or two apps that kept them in the ecosystem and kept them lapping it up. And all it’s going to take is one or two killer apps in the metaverse. And I think we’re going to have the exact same scenario. And so you and I, because we’re old enough. I think you’re quite a bit younger than me, but we’re both old enough to have seen this pattern play out over and over and over again where people go, oh, I’ll never have a smartphone.
Oh, I’ll never go online. Oh, I’ll never have a Facebook account. Oh, I’ll never have an Instagram account. Oh, I’ll never shop with Amazon. I’ll never buy from China. I’ll never, all these, I will never. And 99% of the time, they’re total bullshit. And we’re going to see the exact same thing play out with the metaverse, where it’s for the nerds and the gamers to start with. But it’s rapidly going to go mainstream. Once we hit that tipping point, then it’s going to rapidly go mainstream. And I think apple, particularly with their AR glasses, which in theory they’re working on and their high end VR kit, if anyone can help make a technology go mainstream, it’s Apple. And I think what we’ve seen with Apple, particularly with the development of their own chips now. Their chip sets are 100% focused on low power consumption, low heat and high performance.
Now whether you’re sticking that in an iPhone or whether you’re sticking that in a tablet or whether you’re sticking that in a laptop, whether you’re sticking that in AR glasses or VR glasses, doesn’t matter, the goals are the same. low power, high performance, low heat. And so I think apple has a shot at helping to turn this stuff into some mainstream stuff really quickly.
Interviewer: Yeah. And I think for me, the big takeaway on it is pay attention to it. Be involved, read on it. What you said, sign up for a few wallets, buy a few different coins, buy an NFT, just get involved. It’s just the same way that you played with the web when it came out, it’s a dabble in it because you need to know what’s going on. And if you’re not at least involved, you’ll miss it. And it’s hard to play catch. And I think right now you’re right. It’s a couple really killer use cases for it are going to be what tips it over the edge. It’s kinda like the world is watching. And once that comes out, the early adopters are in, but now we need to get to the next level.
Jason: Yeah, couldn’t agree more. And the funny thing is that you don’t have to go crazy. I mean, you could go and literally spend 50 bucks on an exchange on buying a couple of cryptocurrencies. You could go and spend 20 bucks on a non-mainstream non-popular NFT on open sea. You could go up and set up meta mask for free. You could go and create an account on Coinbase or FXT or whatever, and you can create those accounts for absolutely free. It doesn’t cost you anything to create those accounts. It doesn’t cost you anything to start thinking about how is this going to affect me in my daily life and potentially in my work life, particularly if I’m in a marketer or I work in the digital space, all this stuff is going to start having a pretty big impact pretty quickly.
And you don’t have to break the bank to go and do it. It’s almost like, what I tell people that say, oh, you know, I’d love to get into e-commerce. I’d love to go and set up a store. I’d love to go and do this, but I don’t even know where to begin. And I’d be like, well, where you begin is you go and sign up for a Shopify site and you get on their cheapest plan and you spend 10 bucks a month or whatever the hell it is, 15 bucks a month, set up a Shopify store, load up some things, get some things there. Maybe just do drop shipping at first, just to dabble it. You’re not doing it to make a killing. You’re not doing it to turf in your day job. You’re not doing it to become a millionaire. You’re doing it. If you treat it as a learning exercise, as opposed to a get rich quick scheme. I think that is how you can depressurize wanting to dip your toes in these new waters.
Interviewer: For a guy that lives off the grid and composts everything in the field behind you. I wouldn’t expect you to be so passionate about blockchain, crypto, NFTs, Web3. It’s interesting. I love it though. I think you nailed it. I think if everyone approaches business with curiosity, I think that is important. And I think approach things with a thesis, with a question and not just because this is an opportunity to make money, but approach it with a question. And it sounds like that’s how you’re doing this. And I think everyone listening, if that’s the mindset they have, I think that’s probably where they should be right now. Just be curious about it and see how it plays out because it is still early, but it is definitely going to be something for sure.
We’re a bit over time, but I want to get like, just to spin this back here real quick for like maybe a couple practical things. A couple real quick questions. Like I don’t want to call them lightning around questions because you don’t have to say in one word or something, but couple quick ones I want to end with. And first one, I’ll throw this out there. What is one of the biggest mistakes you see merchants selling online making?
Jason: Not investing enough in product data and not investing consistently enough in product data. And when I’m talking about product data, I’m talking about both the product model and making that consistent across their catalog, meaning their parent-child relationships and their actual, how products relate to each other, but also structured and unstructured product data and treating it oftentimes as an afterthought and treating imagery as an afterthought, product tagging, fascinating, filtering categorization, all that, everything to do with product data I see that so often treated as an afterthought. And whether you’re buying a product on a website, on Amazon, through social or in the metaverse without good, consistent, high quality product data, you’re simply going to sell less end of story.
Interviewer: You’re the first person that said that, and that makes so much sense from so many angles, whether you’re from the omnichannel angle, from SEO, from search, from insight search, from personalization, everything. Do you have a pet peeve when you shop online?
Jason: About 95% of the time I hate the online shopping experience and it’s mostly because I see the same mistakes being made over and over and over again. All the way from poor categorization to a poor search function, to a really crappy click and collect experience where I might not even know what a product is available at a given store until I get to the checkout, to not knowing what shipping is going to be until I actually literally get to checkout because that information isn’t transparent and readily available on the website.
Look, we’ve come a long way. Don’t get me wrong. We’ve come a long way, but I just see so many brands recreating. And this is largely because of the FOMO effect of our industry, right? The fear of missing out. We are oftentimes in industry of followers. You look at fashion brands and if a fashion brand and famous fashion brand implements a new e-commerce platform. And I don’t know, let’s say it’s Shopify or whatever, then you’ll see their five competitors adopt that same technology or that same stack, usually within a couple of years because we have this nature, this fear of missing out nature. And if it’s good enough for them, it must be good enough for us. But the reality is I’d like to see brands being more critical of their overall experience and do more secret shopping of their experience. And getting some more honest feedback about their experience.
Because I think we all are consistently making lots of the same mistakes and some of them are hard to fix. Don’t get me wrong, but some aren’t and I think we can get a lot better with a lot of this stuff. And again, that whole not being able to save my credit card when I check out and having to put it in every single time. I buy online, I spend probably far out, this is embarrassing to even admit, but I spend probably 200 to $300 a month on very, very nice bourbon through a really good high quality online retailer called whiskey and more here in New Zealand. And from a service perspective, they’re amazing. Like they ship fast. They are cheaper than any bottle store by far, they’re the cheapest on the net in New Zealand for what they sell, great service, great selection, great pricing. But their website experience is just an embarrassment.
Even logging in is difficult. They don’t allow save credit card, doesn’t support save credit card. It looks like it does, but it actually doesn’t. And it asks for my details every single time when I go to check out, even seeing stuff that’s out of stock is difficult. They do have labels, but it’s not consistent across the site where those labels show. So sometimes you don’t actually find out a product is out of stock until you get onto the PDP page. And then when something is on special, they only put the specials on their homepage. There’s no label, there’s no strike through. There’s no indication that something is on special across the website, universally, unless you’re on the homepage. And unless you’re in the special section of the homepage. So there’s just lots of little, like all those things sound so stupid but not only would I probably spend more embarrassingly with them if they fixed all these issues but I would just love them even more than I do. And with a modern eCommerce stack, they could fix all that almost overnight. You know what I mean?
Interviewer: Totally. So to flip it around then what’s a store you think is doing a great job. And if you can’t think or your favorite online store to shop at? Is there’s any brand, you would say that, given where technology is today and everything else that you think does a really good job, stands out, any come to mind?
Jason: Yeah, there’s one that does a pretty good job here in New Zealand, Australia, they’re called Catmando, and they’re an outdoor gear brand. They’ve been working on their e-commerce presence. They used to be a client of mine way, way, way, way back, many years ago in my agency days. And they’ve really consistently invested vast sums of money into their e-commerce experience to the point of even building an in-house development team. And they do a really good job. They’re not perfect, but I tell you, their summit club is amazing, which is their loyalty program, which has lots of benefits other than just discounts.
And I like that. I like the fact that there are really tangible benefits of being part of their summit club, other than spend, earn and spend. And their product range, their product attributes and display of product information at the appropriate times, their checkout experience. They do a good job. They do a really good job and there are a couple of others. Pack and Save funnily enough, theirs is a very rudimentary. It’s about as rudimentary as an e-commerce experience as you can get, but it does every single one of the basics right.
I can always find what I’m looking for. I can always add it to my cart. If something’s out of stock, it’s 100% clear. It saves my credit card and my address details. They make it super easy to reorder either items or lists and turn previous orders into lists. It’s not pretty, it’s not a beautiful experience. Don’t get me wrong. The UX is a bit clunky and a bit ugly, but I tell you, everything on their website just works. And I totally respect that.
Interviewer: Interesting. I have to check both of those out, last question. What’s your favorite thing about your job?
Jason: Wow. Can I only pick one? Literally, I can’t imagine doing anything else. And my wife is a millennial. She’s a fair bit younger than me. And I love the fact that I’m more into tech even than she is. I’m more up to play with social media than she is. I love the fact that my industry forces me to stay young at heart and young in my thinking, because it’s such a fast moving space and it’s always changing. And it’s hyperdynamic and what was sexy yesterday is not going to be sexy tomorrow. And you really have to stay on top of things. I mean, if I took six months off, man, I’d have some learning to do when I got back. And I love that. I love the fact that it forces me to keep my finger on the pulse of pop culture and tech and the relationships that I’ve formed.
It’s those two things that stand out to me. I’ve made some amazing, amazing friendships through this industry. And people that have moved from one agency to another or one tech vendor to another, and I’ve stayed friends with them right throughout the whole lot. And sometimes it’s over 10, 15, 20 years and I’m still communicating with them to this day. And we still occasionally will do business together or work together. And when we cross paths, it’s always a refreshing, friendly thing that happens because you’re like, oh, I haven’t talked to you in a couple of years. It’s great to catch up with you again. And it’s great to be working with you again. And it’s the people and it’s the need to stay sharp and to stay current that I absolutely love.
Interviewer: I love it. I couldn’t agree more. Well, this has been awesome. I really enjoyed this conversation. For everyone who made it this far in the episode, you’ve got a few places on the web people can find you. I know you’re fairly active. Where would you like to send people and feel free to list of all I know you write a lot. You’re fairly active on social media. Where would you like to send them?
Jason: Yeah, I’m active almost everywhere. And even if you just Google my name, you’ll kind of see all the channels that I’m active in, because I’m reasonably well represented for good or for bad and the search results. So it’s just, Google Jason Greenwood. But if you really want to follow me, I put out almost all of my content or at least links to all of my content on LinkedIn. So I post there almost every single day and I have done since 2018. And then of course, even when a new podcast episode comes out, for example, I’ll do a post about the episode to LinkedIn and I’ve started to repurpose a lot of my TikTok content to LinkedIn as short videos. So really LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to get ahold of me. You can of course go to Greenwoodconsulting.net if you really want to potentially engage with me. But you know, the reality is if you go to LinkedIn, you’ll figure out pretty quick what I’m about and if it’s interesting and you want to follow my content and you get something out of it, I would love that.
Interviewer: Awesome, thank you so much bye.
