eCommerce IS the New Normal

Welcome to The eCommerce Experience - the podcast that turns YOU into an eCommerce expert. Your host, Andrew Rogencamp, shares his wealth of B2B and B2C business experience to take you on an eCommerce adventure.

Each month you'll hear from industry experts and meet people just like you - looking to take their business to new heights online.

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Andrew: Hi there, Andrew Rogencamp here. And we're back for our fourth episode of The eCommerce Experience.

What I'm going to do this time is we did a webinar with a company called Dialog earlier this week. And we were really just speaking of the state of eCommerce; where's that? And we had an interview with a eCommerce retailer called Saddlery Trading who also {indistinct 1:00}. And just ask some questions of the managing director of that company and what he's seen in COVID-19. 

Certainly, we've seen massive uplift with the customers out there that we know of. And it's interesting to see where things are going and how things have evolved in the last six weeks or so since I did the last podcast. 

So, this was a webinar that was done with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation. But apart from one slide that I show in the middle of it that talks about the most popular products out there today for year-on-year growth, everything else you don't really need the PowerPoint for. I was really just talking to it. 

So yeah, I hope you enjoy this podcast and we'll speak to you later!

The State of eCommerce

Andrew: Thanks very much, Bev, and thanks for the opportunity of allowing us to have a chat to your customers and just pass on what we have seen in eCommerce over the last couple of very strange weeks. 

So, what we want to do is start off by talking about the current state of eCommerce, and I'm calling at mid COVID-19. I'm actually hoping it's further than mid COVID-19. I just got an email from the Regatta Hotel, which I live very close to, and they're opening up Friday. So, I'm very optimistic about us being way past mid COVID. 

What we have been observing in our customer base and beyond. And then we can have a chat to Wroxton Innes or as we know him affectionately, Rocky, from Saddlery Trading, who's Calandra based company up on the Sunshine Coast. But he gives a great perspective of both a B2B and B2C perspective on not only the last two months, but where everything is going in terms of eCommerce from customer land. 

So, I guess to give an idea of the current landscape, we have seen unbelievable growth year-on-year, looking at what our customers were doing same time last year in March and April to this year. 

So, the last two weeks has been a very interesting nine weeks, not only for our customers, but for us in terms of some of the demands or requests that we're getting on changing some of those environments in a very quick way to get things done for our customers. 

I was on Retail Global, who do a lot of conferences and stuff like that; there was actually supposed to be a digital conference on the Gold Coast this week, but naturally, it's been cancelled. So, they're doing that all online today using Zoom and it's going quite we'll; I've been attending that most of the day. 

And one of the things that one of the guys from eBay has said is there's been a massive acceleration towards local sellers. And this probably relates to B2C more than B2B, but given that it's coming from eBay. And he actually said that's been happening for a while now, it's not just a COVID phenomenon. It's been happening for a while. But that's a that's a great thing for Australian retailers, is that things are moving towards local sellers. And I guess it's a great thing for Australian wholesalers as well because they're supplying those retailers. 

So, there's lots of businesses have been affected by COVID. I think probably, if you haven't been affected by COVID, you're probably working for the government or something like that. I think the figure would be even higher than 60 per cent now. 

But what we're seeing is, is that eCommerce is playing a key role in that contactless and cashless transactions and they are preferred by buyers and sellers. I know my wife's Italian and she is being a cash person since I met her. And for the first time, I've had to get her a debit card this week so she can transact out in the marketplace; nobody's accepting her cash anymore. So, I know things have changed when my wife gets a debit card. 

So, some of our observations. So, what we've seen is eCommerce leapfrogging five years. So, our customers are at points where they had planned to be in several years’ time. And really, in eCommerce, nobody plans out that far, but one of our customers, and this isn't pertinent to just one of our customers, this is across most of our customers. But one of them who sells musical instruments have quadrupled their sales, year-on year, in the month of March and April. 

And in fact, I was talking to this customer at the very start of COVID and he said -- Look this was back in the days when {indistinct 5:12}. We were getting hourly updates from {indistinct 5:14}. And he said, “Look, (with the stores closing down, they do half their revenue online, half of it in-store) with the stores closing down, I'm thinking we're going to have to lay some people off and stand some people down.” I spoke to a week later and he said, “I'm looking to hire 13 people. I can't keep up with the sales.” 

So, it was that quick, the turnaround. And it turned out that their online sales for March was higher than both their online and in-store sales for the previous March. And there's no other factors; they haven't had any acquisitions or anything like that. So, it's a true comparison. 

There's been lots of technology that we've seen deployed around AI, extra service features so that customers are being able to serve themselves more than they have been able to before. 

And new methods (this is especially around B2B) new methods of dealing with customers, with reps off the road. 

So, there's lots of businesses out there that we know that would say, “Oh, my customers won't order online because my rep service and they'll only order of the reps.” 

Well, in the last nine weeks, that just hasn't been possible. And those customers have either been ordering through the reps using video conferencing (which is really interesting) or they've been using their B2B website that's already available to them, but for some reason, they've just been resisting. 

So, we're seeing a big move to ordering online and getting more information online, rather than speaking to reps. I don’t think this is going to be the death of the reps, but it's certainly interesting to see how that's going. 

Now, one of the interesting things also is that, and it's a good barometer, is that Amazon are hiring 100 thousand new people. That's how many people they want to put on to cope with the new normal of eCommerce. 

So, there's two things to read from that. Obviously, that eCommerce is going to be the new normal for both B2C and B2B. Now, B2C, you know, it's not as if it's a new thing there or hasn't been for B2B for a while, but it's really that saturation point that it's coming up to that digital transformation. 

The other thing to think about, when Amazon thinks that they're going to hire 100 thousand new people, the challenge there for the rest of us is, is that competition for good skills in eCommerce. 

So, young people, they all they all want to have a company like Amazon or PWC or Ernst and Young or something like that on their résumé. 

So, for the rest of us who aren't an Amazon or a PWC or something like that, keeping people and hiring new people might become a challenge in the next six to 12 months with Amazon having that attitude out in the marketplace. 

So, yeah, make sure if you've got good eCommerce people, hang onto them, pay them well and keep them in exciting and innovative projects. 

On the flip side, COVID-19 is actually caused all these extra sales; it’s actually caused a lot of supply chain disruption for our customers. And if you think about it, if somebody walked into your business tomorrow and said, “Hey, look, I want to do business with you and I'm going to buy off you three times as much as what the total amount of your current customers are buying of you”, you'd go, “Wow, that's great. But boy, if we got some problems to deal with now.” 

And that was really, you know, back to what I was talking about is that musical instruments customer is that they face some real challenges about how to supply these customers that are all new customers. I think they had 4000 new customers in three weeks, which was a interesting step. 

So, one of the things that we've seen some of our more advanced customers doing is using CX. CX stands for Customer Experience to ensure their loyal customers are taken care of. Because what you've got to be careful of is that COVID-19 customer. 

So, whilst it's great to get new customers and those new customers, you're probably going to get a lot cheaper than you would get by doing paid advertising. In fact, that customer I spoke of again, he actually said to me, Gee, I wish they spent a lot of money every month on paid search on Google. And it turns out like it cost them about $120, based on what they paid on paid search. And how many new customers they get per year, it cost them about $100 to get every new customer. 

So, they're getting a whole lot of free customers now. And in fact, he actually bought his paid spend down to next to nothing because he was concerned about the amount of sales he was getting. He didn't want to overdo it and have no way of supplying all of these sales. 

And he actually said to me, I don't know if it's in jest or if he was being serious, “I wish I could go into negative paid search, so I could do something to have people not find my site for a little while, so I could catch up.” They literally had thousands of orders to catch up on. 

So, the message there is being careful about treating all of your customers the same way during COVID-19 because you're going to get a lot of customers that may never come back.

The last podcast I did was with a guy called Danny Phillips and he's a Customer Experience Strategist. And he explained to me about how taking care of you really important customers is so much more important than just having a blanket policy for everybody. 

So, what we're finding some of our customers are doing is using different order priorities with their ERP to be able to say, “Well, when an order comes in from this level of customer, somebody that's been dealing with me for years, I'm actually going to give it a higher priority than I would a customer that's just signed up with me today”. 

Having said that, you want to make sure that you're going to wow that new COVID-19 customer because they're a free kick for you. And what a great way to keep them on board, post COVID-19. In the new normal, you scored yourself a whole lot of new customers. 

So, the other thing I'd say is be careful not to divest at this time, especially in eCommerce, but to invest in eCommerce. Our director of sales and marketing, David Bickerstaff, has a saying is, “You don't renovate the hotel in summer.” 

And what that means is, is that now's a great time, your website, if you haven't got a website, now's a great time to actually look at getting a website, because there's a lot of other things that your people may not be doing. 

If they're on the job keeper, what a great way to use those resources to do things to either create a new website, eCommerce website, or if you do have a website, is to look at ways that you can make that website better. And that might be about content, it might be about functionality, because you can be guaranteed that your competitors that do have that capital to be able to do that are out there investing in their website now. I can tell you they are because they're spending money with us doing it. 

So, you don't want to come out the back of this with a website or no website and find out that your competition is way ahead of you. 

We've been saying for a little while now, we do presentations around the traps; we've done a couple of Microsoft ones down in Melbourne. And the research is that if you don't have, especially in B2B, if you don't have a B2B eCommerce website within the next five years, it is likely you will not survive. There's a book out by Brian Beck at the moment called The Billion Dollar B2B eCommerce. And it has all these examples of B2C sites that many years ago in the States said, “I don't believe online buying is going to take off.” And they were slow to the mark. And those, I think, Macy's is one of them and things like that. Those businesses are virtually out of business now. 

So, now's a great time to invest in eCommerce to make sure that you're ahead of the game. 

So, what I was saying before about that five years, I believe that's now accelerated to 12 to 18 months. If you don't have an eCommerce presence within 12 to 18 months, your viability is going to be in question. 

I just got this slide off a site in the US, and it's just a bit of an interesting graphic about what are the year-on-year uplift, based on the last six weeks of products that are being bought more than they were last year. 

So, most of them are pretty obvious. The dishwasher was a bit of a surprise to me, but I guess when you think it through, people are working from home, got a lot more plates to clean. That used to happen at the office. Now, we've got two dishwashers at our office for 40 people. So, I can imagine the amount of plates that that's being distributed throughout. Households now needs a new dishwasher. Washing machine, same sort of stuff. 

I know I just got a little word from my wife, who was just doing the ironing, telling me that I'm wearing far more clothes than I was when I go to work. So, I'm being encouraged to go back to work. 

Then all the sporting goods. So, we've got a couple of customers in that sporting goods arena. Hot Sports, one of them, they are literally -- they ran out of weights weeks ago, heart rate monitors, basketball shoes, all of our customers that we've got a couple of customers in the bike wholesale arena. Anything to do with cycling is just going crazy. So, it's really interesting to see where all those products are going. 

A couple of more observations. We've got a lot of customers in the PPE now. PPE is a term that pretty much everybody knows now, Personal Protection and Equipment; gloves, hand sanitizer, all of that sort of stuff. 

I think eight weeks ago, if you said to somebody at a barbecue, “We've got some customers in PPE”, they'd have no idea what you're talking about. These days, it's just a word that everybody knows. 

So, those customers are seeing massive growth, of course, and a lot of that moving to online. But they also are having massive supply chain issues trying to get those products in. Because a lot of them come from China and China is basically just selling to the highest bidder, which are generally our customers are now competing against countries too, not just suppliers or distributors in the rest of the world, but they're actually competing against governments to get those products. 

So, a massive growth in the move of directed sales, that is reps selling, to online sales. We've seen a lot of our customers stand down their rep force. They're starting to come back online now. But those customers have now learnt to go online and do those sales. Which is great, because ultimately, it's going to allow those reps to do more value-added business when they're talking to customers, rather than taking orders. 

Reps taking orders, it's just madness. They should be talking to customers about products, about the value chain, about how they can help their customers more rather than keying in orders. 

We're also seeing a lot of D2Ca, what's called Direct to Consumer. So, generally, that's when a B2B customer is going direct to the consumer. And that's what Rocky, who will be talking to lately, that's one of his models. 

And you do need to be a little reasonably be careful about doing that because you run the risk of upsetting your actual customers, which are your retailers. But you've got to be also careful that that retail environment, I think Rocky will speak to this a little bit, is it's not going to die and you'll die with it as a wholesaler. 

So, direct consumer is a very popular way to do things. We've had a couple of customers in the food service business who are obviously supplying some of their products too. They have different channels. So, the products they're supplying to hospitals and all of that, going great. Products they're supplying to pubs, clubs and restaurants, not so good. 

So, when you're in the food business, you have a bit of a problem because unless your food -- even if your food's frozen and refrigerated, that food's got expiry dates on it.

So, it's not a matter of just saying, “Well, I'll sell that. I'll just stop buying it and I'll sell it later.” It's a matter of that food's going to be worthless in a period of time. 

So, some of our customers have done a direct-to-consumer model on that. There's been a few challenges around that with pack sizes, for instance. When a restaurant buys muffins, they'll buy 12 of them; a bit hard to sell 12 muffins to a consumer, but they've done reasonably well out of those models as well. 

We're also seeing quite a bit of B2B2C. So, where our customers, the example I'll give is we've got a customer that sells into the bicycle industry. So, their customers are bicycle stores. They're selling anything from pushbikes to helmets, jerseys, all that sort of stuff. Their customers’ stores are all shut down. A lot of those customers don't have websites or the ability to do that sort of eCommerce. 

So, what they've done is set up the ability for their customers, the retailer, to get onto their website, order a product and then have that nominated to be delivered directly to their customer. So, basically going from the wholesaler straight to the consumer and that's taken off and being well appreciated by their retail customers to support them in their tough times. 

There's been a massive drive to self-service as well. So, I don't know if anybody's dealt with Telstra in the last six to eight weeks, but they have done the negative thing that I spoke of before. They've said, “Right, we're only going to take phone calls and if the world is ending for you” -- And in fact, it's virtually impossible to get to that point. And everything else has to be done through the mobile phone app. 

And you basically, put in your inquiry, a little robot tries to answer you. It's got no idea what it's doing. And then you end up, having finally convincing it that I want to talk to a person, albeit on the chat app, and then they take four hours to get back to you. And then you respond, they take another four hours to get back to you. 

So, Telstra have done the opposite and they're going to lose customers left, right and centre for they should have facilities online that you can do that self-service to be able to do all that sort of stuff. 

So, for B2B and B2C customers, invoice reprinting, returns, statements, audit, tracking, all of that sort of stuff is really important to have. E-commerce is not just about selling online. It's about all those self-service features as well. 

And that drive towards contactless buying. So, it's interesting that contactless buying thought is whether that's going to continue to happen. I think people’s memories will start to fade after the end of COVID. But in terms of that contactless, I sort of acquired it and I've said this a few times about the Brisbane floods. 

You know, at the moment we're saying, “We'll never do this again. You'll never do that again.” But we said when the Brisbane floods happened, nobody's ever going to buy property on the river again because it could flood again and things like that. Well, guess what? People buy properties on the river and they're paying $5 million for it. 

So, I think people's behaviours will slowly change. But there has been a new benchmark set in what we're seeing. 

This raises some questions about the new normal. And the questions are, “What levels will these numbers stay at as stores across the world begin to reopen and we enter that new normal?” 

So, we're seeing retail stores reopen throughout shopping centres, certainly in Queensland. I believe Victoria is just a little bit behind on that, but certainly, in Queensland and New South Wales, I think they're reopening. And it will be interesting to see how the change from the online presence to the in-store presence changes or whether it's that multi-channel, omni channel sort of environment where they're supporting each other. Those multiple channels are supporting each other. 

And so, will existing eCommerce customers increase their online shopping more than they had previously? I think they will. I think people have realised that online shopping, especially some of that older generation who have been forced into it over the last six weeks (six to nine weeks) will realise that it's not as bad as they thought it was. It's very secure. The deliveries happened pretty quickly. You're well informed of things and they'll stay there. 

And then about whether new online shoppers buy would prefer the comfort of buying from their own homes and offices and therefore spend less in-store and with reps. 

And so, one of the things we see in B2B and we've been seeing this for a while, is that that drive of the percentage of buyers, and we call them buyers in B2B. They're not shoppers; they're buyers. They're there to buy stuff. They're not browsing. They know what they want. They're there. And we call these people the digital natives. 

So, the digital natives, people that are now joining the workforce, they're aged between 20 and 30 and they've been buying online forever; that's how they know buying. And we sort of sometimes say, imagine you've got a 22-year old. They've just started with your business and it's their responsibility to buy the stationery. And you give them a 250-page glossy catalogue and you say to them, “Hey, Ben, this is how we buy stationery. Just walk around to everybody in the office, ask them what they want, write it down and then you can fax it off to the office supply company or you can email it or give the rep a call.”

A digital native would look at you as if you were mad, if you did something like that. 

So, those people are on board. It's the people in the later generations that aren't necessarily on board. But we believe this COVID-19 has brought about a new dynamic that they will be on board and that eCommerce is going to be the new normal. 

So, going forward, I'll just break it up into B2B and B2C. Obviously, a massive shift to digital. Both not just for selling online, but servicing online. So, those things like invoice reprints, order tracking and all of those sort of things, if you don't have those sort of things in your website now, they're the things you should be looking at getting, because they're the things that are not only going to help your customers serve themselves online, it's going to reduce your cost to service. And that's one of the most important things you can do going forward. 

And of course, then there's the remote selling, if you think about a rep. So, we've got customers that service the hospitality industry, restaurants, clubs, pubs, and they have reps that basically just drive around all day visiting their customers. And typically, it's going into a restaurant, talking to the chef or talking to the manager and things like that. 

A bit if you added up, during the day, how many minutes or hours that are spent in the car in traffic, getting to a customer's site, waiting for them to be ready and doing all of that, because most chefs probably don't want to be disturbed between certain types. So, you can't visit every chef at the same time during the day. That's a massive amount of time. 

And if you think about those reps now, what they could do is they can just use Zoom to do that interaction with the customer. Sit in the office, have all the facilities of what they need around them, even bring in other people, if they've got specialists within certain parts of their business that can talk about, you know, a lot of our customers that are selling to chefs and restaurants, they actually have their own in-house chef that can advise on certain types of things and stuff like that. So, bringing all that expertise in. I think remote selling for reps is going to revolutionize the way they do things. 

In B2C, we're going to see more innovation to support online selling. And I guess bringing out why people would rather go into a store than go and buy online. And one of those customer experience innovations to break the barriers down online, a really interesting one that Danny Phillips told me about in this podcast, was one of the reasons, especially around clothing, fashion, one of the reasons people go into a store to buy things is they're not quite sure what size fits them or even how the product looks when they've got it.

So, what some fashion retailers are doing online is allowing their customers, when they go to buy products, I want to buy a Nike shirt and I want a size Medium. It'll encourage me to actually get the large, the size above that, the size below it. And they've even got mechanisms where they can ship that to customers, but not charge them for the other ones unless they don't return it. So, they can take a token over their credit card and they give them a free satchel to return the sizes that don't fit. And then they can send them back or they could send them all back if they don't like them. 

So, give that customer that experience of, “Well, I'm just going to buy that product, I'll have it delivered to me and then I'll return it if I don't want it.” And it's not as if the merchant doesn't want you to do that, they're encouraging you to do that. Whereas previously, those returns were seen as negatives. So, it’s some really interesting things happening back there. 

And we say time is of the essence. You know, these things are accelerating. Everything that I've heard today on the retail global stuff is that everything has accelerated in terms of getting these things to market. If you're not getting these things to market today, I can guarantee your competitor is getting these things to market.

 

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Australian eCommerce

Okay. So, what we are going to do now is bring in Rocky!

So, to give an intro to Rocky, Rocky is the managing director of a company called Saddlery Trading, and they are Australia's largest supplier of horse-riding equipment. They supply everything from saddles to things called bits, which after dealing with Rocky for 10 years, I've still got no idea what a bit is, but I often see it on his website. 

And he's not only a wholesaler to a whole lot of saddlery retailers out there in Australia, in both cities and obviously out in the country, he's also a retailer. So, he's also got a company, a retail store called Greg Grant Saddlery, who's been around -- how long have they been around, Rocky, 20 years, 30? 

Wroxton: Since about 1975. 

Andrew: Yeah. So, a long time; started by Rocky's father in-law, Greg Grant. So, he sees things from both the retailer perspective, the B2C perspective, the B2B perspective. So, it's a really interesting chat. 

So, Rocky, thanks for taking the time to join us. Look, we chat on a regular basis and about how eCommerce is changing and the nature of business. Before COVID came along, what have you been seeing in your industry that's been changing quite a bit? 

Wroxton: In the in the online B2C space, a lot of growth over the last couple of years. And as you said before, and we have the same policy; like we thought all in five years’ time, it's going to be this. Well, it's that five-year level now. 

Andrew: Yeah. It's really accelerated, hasn't it? 

Wroxton: Yeah. 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Wroxton: Yeah. But we were seeing steady growth, year on year, for the last -- I think the websites were really starting to ramp up since, maybe 2011, 2012 and then we've seen a steady growth since then.

Andrew: That's good. Yeah. So, I know one of your strategies is to move as much business online as you can. 

Wroxton: Yes. 

Andrew: You travel to the States often. You've seen some really good examples over there of some great online businesses in your industry.

Wroxton: Yes. Well, a really good friend of ours; he’s like my second dad. He's been at me for the last five or so years, “Rocky, you got to get everything online, mate. Forget about wholesale. Just go full on and just do B2C.” 

And it scares me because, if you lose your B2B customers, because that's the biggest part of the business, you lost the business. And he said, “No, don’t worry about that, mate, just go for it.” 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Wroxton: But it's a really hard juggling act. But you've got to make sure you look after your B2B customers. 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Wroxton: We always make sure that what we sell online, B2C, is the same price as we offer, B2B. 

Andrew: Yeah. So, you're not competing with your customers. 

Wroxton: Not competing against them. 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Wroxton: I mean, the beauty about our business is 90 percent of the brands, we own and we've built them up over the last 40 plus years. So, it's not as though they can go and buy those brands anywhere else, anyway.

Andrew: Right. Okay. 

Wroxton: Yeah. 

Andrew: Yeah. Great stuff. So, we watch your numbers with you and we talk on an on-and-off basis. They were doing pretty well before COVID. What happened early March? 

Wroxton: {indistinct 29:03 – 06}. 350 percent increase in sales in March, same in April and May. It dropped down a little bit in May, but it's still 150 percent either by the same time.

Andrew: By the year on year. Yeah, incredible. Oh, just compared to January. Okay, well that's significant. 

Wroxton: Compared to January, not last year. 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Wroxton: Compared to January. So, if you compare it to last year, I haven't got those figures. If you compare it to last year, it’s probably 200 percent or something like that.

Andrew: Yeah, incredible. So, has that caused you any, you know, like I was talking about before, those supply chain issues, picking stuff like that, or because your wholesale’s probably down a bit, you just sort of got from Peter to Paul type thing?

Wroxton: Yeah. Well, it's funny you say that because everyone always tells us, “Oh, you carry too much stock. Your stock turn’s too low. You should be increasing your stock turn.” And now I can laugh in the faces of those people because we don't have any stock issues, because we carry a lot of stock. 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Wroxton: The only country we had problems with was India, because we import a lot of stuff from India as well. And in the whole scheme of things, it's a very, very small percentage.

Andrew: And I think you're right about that stock -- Yeah, that stock thing is really important because I know when I've been shopping on the line in the last couple of weeks, is price is actually being less important; I'm just trying to find somebody that's got it in stock. Because if somebody that doesn't have it in stock, my inference there is, “Well, they're probably not going to get it for weeks.” Yeah. 

And I was actually speaking to another customer of ours. He's very much of the same mindset as you. He supplies parts to John Deere tractors and stuff like that all out and repairers out in the country. And, of course, they've been through the drought. And he actually did refurbish the hotel in winter. 

So, while the drought was on, he put a whole lot of money into making the website the best in the industry. And he's one of those guys that stocks everything. 

And I spoke to him the other day and he said the website is just going unbelievably. And he said, “If we didn't put all that investment and that time into it, getting it all right when the drought was on, we'd be gone now.” And he said, “There's competitors of ours that have closed down because they don't have what we've got.” 

And he's big on keeping stock as well. He keeps stock of everything he sells online in these warehouses. So, yeah, that's good. 

So, where do you reckon you'd be if you didn't have a website in COVID-19? 

Wroxton: We’d be okay, but yeah, nothing where we are at the moment.

Andrew: Yeah, that's good. You’ve still got a bit of a smile on your face, mate, there I see. So, that's good. 

Wroxton: Yeah, that's right. 

Andrew: You'd still pay the school fees. 

Wroxton: Absolutely. 

Andrew: Yeah, great stuff. So, what's the future? I know you've recently appointed a full-time digital eCommerce manager of some great experience from a very large company she came with, and she's kicking some great goals, just continuing on that growth period.

Wroxton: Yeah, fantastic. 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Wroxton: Yeah, it's been great. I've just had a meeting with them this morning. And because those guys have been working from home. So, I got them all in and they're back. They're back in the office next week.

But just to catch up and stay they're at. And in that meeting, there was eight people now who look after B2C. 

Andrew: Yeah, it's incredible. 

Wroxton: So, its growing.

Andrew: Yeah, it growing. 

Wroxton: Yeah. I mean, a couple of years ago --

Andrew: It’s just part time for someone. 

Wroxton: Yeah, part time. 

Andrew: That’s right; it was.

Wroxton: And I know, you know very well, like with me, I'm ringing and annoying you all the time about Andrew, what can we do to make things better? And you've always got, as you said before, about that guy selling spare parts for John Deere and whatever. You've got to keep up with it and fix the hotel up in winter.

Andrew: Yeah, that's right. 

Wroxton: Yeah. 

Andrew: Thanks, Rocky. I really appreciate you taking the time to have a chat to us and give us the customer experience. I guess this is one last quote from Gwyneth Melva: 

“COVID-19 has created a sense of urgency in fully embracing digital transformation, not just talking about it, but acting on it.” 

So, it's really interesting to see how that has changed the times in the last nine weeks. I think we're in a really exciting time around eCommerce. There's going to be a lot of innovation that's happening over the next 12 to 18 months. So, yeah, I really look forward to it.

Andrew: Well, I hope you enjoyed that podcast. It certainly gave some insight into where eCommerce is out at the moment and how different customers are seeing some massive increase, how they're coping with it, and yeah, where we see things going from here.

So, yes, I'll see you next time on The eCommerce Experience. Thanks for listening again. My name's Andrew Rogencamp. You can follow me on LinkedIn at Andrew Rogencamp; just search for Andrew Rogencamp (R-O-G-E-N-C-A-M-P). I'm the only Andrew Rogencamp in the world. So, thanks for listening. I'll speak to you next time.

 

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