Future Commerce

Welcome to the LAST episode of Step by Step Season 8! We’re wrapping up the series with Tyson Graham, and will be covering the nuts and bolts of what makes headless interesting.  Listen now!Headless Needs a Real HeadWhat you want is optionality, but there is another level that isn’t just a first-party option in your eCommerce tech stack. there is an entire level we haven't thought about as an option.“People don’t buy protocols, they buy products.” – PhillipThere are some advantages of headless in a world where legacy technology is really just slowing down in a sense, and the world is speeding up.“We realized that there needs to be a head for headless that everyone can use, so the agnostic sort of storefront really is the head for headless. The advantages with optionality means that you can switch things in and out as you need them.” –TysonLike a myth or ghost story, headless is very similar. There can be a lot of misinformation spread.“The unique aspect of your brand as a merchant is that experience. The thing you own is the experience. You're not different because you have a subscription to X-provider. You're not different because you're using a certain CMS, you're different and memorable and ultimately creating value for yourself and shareholders and customers because of that experience.” –TysonIf you have the right setup, you can zig when others are zagging, but you can’t do that without the right technologies in place.Associated Links:Want to learn more about going beyond headless? Download our free Step by Step guide!Get connected with Fabric!Learn more about Tyson Graham and Vue StorefrontListen to our other Step by Step seasonsFind our other Future Commerce episodes on our websiteHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

For our 4th episode of Step by Step Season 8, we’re covering how you can take your brand from having an eCommerce project mindset to a program mindset. Jon Reily from bounteous is here to chat about the difficult parts of shifting mindsets, how we're rewriting the rules, and more! Tune in now!A North Star or a South Star?Currently, a lot of brands are struggling with how to move from having an eCommerce project mindset to a program mindset. The most difficult part is that brands need to break the stigma that eCommerce is this big scary thing when it's not.“We went from calling things just selling things online to eCommerce and then we went back to, well, maybe just selling things online again. Have we come full circle?” – Brian“It all comes back to the design and you have to ensure that the design is solid in order to make it work.” – Jon“The downside of all of these tools being out there and being ubiquitous and available to virtually everybody is it's like everything's a nail and we're walking around with hammers trying to find where to use them.” – JonIn some ways, the programs still need to be in place as you build the foundation, or else you’ll be painting when you haven't finished the foundation.We are rewriting the rules of eCommerce every day because there is no set way to do things, we’re all learning every day and channels are seeking out answers every day.“Every single piece of disruption that takes place in a sector, in the following sector, the disruption happens twice as fast.” — JonThe systems that we build have to be able to flex in the future.The simple fact is that everyone needs to agree on what the end state is, define the end goal, and have a long-term plan.Associated Links:Want to learn more about data? Download our free Step by Step guide!Get connected with Fabric!Learn more about Jon Reily and bounteousListen to our other Step by Step seasonsFind our other Future Commerce episodes on our websiteHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Want to get more from this season of Step by Step? Download our free accompanying guide. Personalizing Your Data ToolsAll the uncertainty around the economy, inflation, and interest rates is affecting decision making and freezing the market.“Redeploy budgets and focus on getting more out of the existing database of customers you have. Ensure that their journeys support what they're trying to accomplish as consumers and how they want to engage with your brand.” – Brian WalkerWe’ve been talking about personalization in eCommerce for decades, but very few brands are actually doing it.“Those who are personalizing tend to be the ones who have grown share over the last 15 years and continue to reap results. It's hard to have those same results if you're only using out-of-the-box tools.” – Brian WalkerHeadless makes a difference in a couple of key areas: The fluidity of the experience and how you can adapt and change it on a website as well as the common backend of your digital business.“People may have an expectation that headless means easy or headless means simpler. That's not necessarily true. So you really need to do your homework and understand what that means if you’re going to go down that route.” –Brian Walker“Your sales associates in stores or your service people in contact centers should be leveraging a common system and data store underneath so that they can serve the customer in a contextual, relevant way when you're engaging with them. Those are digitally enabled channels now as well. And therefore, everyone is a digital business.” – Brian WalkerAssociated Links:Want to learn more about data? Download our free Step by Step guide!Get connected with Fabric!Learn more about Brian WalkerListen to our other Step by Step seasonsFind our other Future Commerce episodes on our websiteHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Want to get more from this season of Step by Step? Download our free accompanying guide.A Blendification of BrandsState and local governments have continued to rely on sales tax as it is one of the three pillars that governments rely on for income.Retail invoices have a lot of key components because SKU, price, and tax all have to be correct. Recently, Michael is witnessing more retailers demanding more and more precision.Believe it or not, over the last 30 years, the sales tax base has actually shrunk. State legislatures have written bills to minimize what can be taxed. In turn, governments can only raise tax rates on discretionary income.“You always want to select a vendor that will grow with you and can actually meet your needs.” - MichaelThe biggest challenge that brands face is selecting the right vendor and not having the right systems to troubleshoot in the wake of a crisis.Retailers of all sizes come to the table with different billing systems. Pick a partner who can move smoothly between systems.Services overlooked when choosing a vendor are self-service ability and flexibility, so you can have the option to move your dollars around easily.“The voice of the customer should be the customer.” - BrianIf brands want to differentiate themselves they need to find software that allows them to be a part of the process.Associated Links:Want to learn more about how to take your brand to the next level? Download our free Step by Step guide!CO drops Feminine Product TaxesGet connected with fabric.Learn more about Michael Bernard and Vertex

Welcome to Season 8 of Step by Step. This season we’re partnering with fabric to discuss how brands can stand out from the crowd by investing in an experiential design. Tune in every day this week to hear from experts on how to unlock your eCommerce growth. Listen now!Is experience worth investing in?Ryan Bartley is the Founder of Fabric, a leading modular and headless enterprise commerce platform helping brands and retailers innovate and scale.Experience is not only your digital experiences and touchpoints within stores but also the brand touchpoints and the service level you give your customers.“What we're hearing from all of the companies that we work with is really a concern about just what the next handful of months and what the next year looks like.” -RyanStart targeting your software and figuring out how to serve your customers in the best possible wayIs now the time to rip and replace legacy tech or is it time to optimize it? It can be difficult to replace, so you should be working on ways to optimize your tech stack, but also looking for ways to optimize your content stack.“We at fabric personally don’t believe in the word customization, but rather in configuration. It’s your platform, not ours.” -Ryan“It's intuitive that you should improve your experience and service level because you look at the competitor set in your groups and they're doing it, they're not messing around.” -RyanAssociated Links:Want to learn more about how to take your brand to the next leve? Download our free Step by Step guide!Get connected with fabric!Learn more about Ryan BartleyListen to our other Step by Step seasonsFind our other Future Commerce episodes on our websiteHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Joining the show today is Karin Dillie, coming to talk about Recurate’s newest report, all things resale, from Gen Z to Boomers, omnichannel, and more! Tune in now! Reclaiming ResaleRecurate started as a way for brands to reclaim resaleRecurate has recently released a new piece of research called the Recurate Resale Report, they wanted to dig in and find the data on what is happening in resale“What we wanted to do was dig in a bit more into primary data and really understand the motivations and behaviors that are happening and what consumers want from brands.” – KarinIn their research, they found a new cohort of customers called “Circulars”: people who are buying and selling.Resale has happened in previous generations but it's happening differently now, you can interact more than you used to, and you’re able to interact across all the different channels, ages, and genders“63% of people want brands to do more. Customers are already doing this, some version of it, whether it be localized or online, and they want more help in doing it well.” – Karin“This is an element of omnichannel that is never talked about.” – PhillipEverything in direct to consumer era in a nutshell is the level of loyalty and experience that comes with the brandBrands need to learn how we create this omnichannel relationship with resale in the same way that we've done with channel flexing for buying IRL or turning to Amazon for staples.It’s all about building the resale operating systems that meet your customers where they want to be. The biggest part of this is helping customers understand that there is value in their items.Associated Links:Learn more about Karin Dillie and RecurateDownload Recurte’s Resale ReportSubscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceCheck out our newest Step by Step launching Monday!Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

In this episode, we dive into some of the best moments of the last year and a half of Future Commerce as it pertains to Web3. Tune in now!Giving Consumers Control Over Their Identity “Like everything else with new technology, the technology's awesome, but until you find creative people to use it in really interesting ways, it doesn't do a whole lot.” – Michael JaniakMags is someone who is thinking about the future of the startup ecosystem. She’s passionate about why and how people spend their time, money, and attention“I don't think I'm a consumer brands investor. I don't think I'm a consumer tech investor. I'm a consumer needs investor..” – Magdalena KalaThe journey of NFTs is still early. In many ways, they’re very similar to DTC brands as they become easy to launch, and the early movers have made a lot of moneyNFTs signal loyalty. They’re a way to assign value to what it means to be associated with a brand.“Hype alone isn’t enough to build an enduring brand or community.”There has to be a non-monetary reason that people are engaged in community — for sneakerheads this is the love of the culture and nostalgia that endures well past childhood. Sneakerheads come from many different backgrounds and walks of life. A digital goods community around sneakers may be much more durable than any other PFP (Picture for Proof) project.NFT Project creators are doxxing themselves now to increase optionality. There’s a lot more to gain by having a trusted reputation as a person than there is as a cartoon avatar.“I think of the community from which sneakers actually emanate. How can I make it so that anybody can be rewarded even for their participation, for their love of and the passion of whatever that community represents?” – Brandon Martinez“Everything we're doing online has an offline analog. We're reinventing a lot of our everyday normal commerce experiences, but we're doing it in a digital realm. And this is what Web3 unlocks for us; there's nothing new under the sun.” –PhillipAssociated Links:Infinite Shelf Season 1 Episode 8: WEB3 BTC DOA FUD WAGMI: WTFEpisode 240: “Magdalena Kala: "I'm a Consumer Needs and Wants Investor"Episode 262: Building a Web3 Company After the NFT CrashEpisode 266: There’s Nothing New Under the SunSubscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceCheck out Decoded, our newest limited seriesHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Vibe Shift, Say What?Brian is live from Etail East, covering what’s going on, how it went, and how far conference season has come since last year.We’re not talking about data anymore… we’re talking about vibes. We talk about them in The Senses, but the vibe shift is different for everything.“The funniest thing about this idea of vibe shift is that everyone is having a really hard time defining what it is and where we're going.” – BrianIn the wise words of Brian Lange, “you can’t have a vibe if you’re not with somebody.”Everyone is casting lots of their communal vibes into a pool, and a layer cake is happening of what the new vibe is. If the vibes are wrong, you go and find a new vibe.People are going to follow the algorithm no matter what, it's just who we are.“If the algorithm is the ultimate media, the message is humanity is unnecessary.” – BrianThe algorithm is taking over things that humanity can analyze, those being: what is, what could be, and what should be.“This person's livelihood is at the mercy of the algorithm.” –PhillipWhen you don’t update the algorithm soon enough, the crying selfie is what happens. Eventually, it leads to undesirable outcomes because everyone plays the game well.Associated Links:The SensesInsiders #128: The Asynchronous FictionThe Medium is the Massage from Marshall McLuhanEpisode 266: There’s Nothing New Under the SunVisions Episode 4: Our Sh*tty Robot FutureFrom the Atlantic: Why the Old Elite Spend So Much Time At WorkThe Network StateSubscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceCheck out Decoded, our newest limited seriesHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

“Digital is gaining the experiences we’ve had all along IRL” — today we sit down with Seyi Taylor to chat about the online experiences we take for granted, the actual capabilities of web3, and how commerce gives us emotional resonance. Tune in now!“Third-Party Cookies Be Damned”The ability to have control is attractive to brands, and that's one thing web3-based loyalty platforms provide, which creates incentives for merchants and brands to be more experimental.Regarding whether web3 is anything new or novel: “What it's actually enabling is more modalities to come into the digital space that we're accustomed to having in real life.” -PhillipThe way we use tokens right now isn’t going to stay this way. Right now tokens are all the hype, but soon they will become a way to get stuff done.Pokemon Go is back on the craze, even though it's a blast from past of six years ago. The question is, will we get engrossed in AR examples that are layered over top of a reality we already cohabitate in?“We've spent the last phase of the internet in this situation where people really didn't care as to where the data was, but we’ve started to see that shift of “where is my data?”’- SeyiRegarding the growth of browser plugins and blockchain analysis: “Third-party cookies be damned. All the work is done for you because we can attribute anything, theoretically.” -PhillipIf the medium is the blockchain, what is the message? “The thing that's happened on the Internet is it's been a great access revolution without a lot of ownership.” -SeyiAssociated Links:Learn more about Seyi Taylor and ShopthruThe Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhanPokemon Go CrazeSubscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceCheck out Decoded, our newest limited seriesHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

We live in a world that doesn’t work all the way. Is the amount of automation and machine learning and AI and even robotics that we're implementing in the world, displacing people's jobs and having a human impact?Show Notes“It's creating some dynamics where a much smaller number of people can drive outcomes with a much larger number of dollars. If we're not really effective at promoting financial literacy and asking some big questions about what's different looking 20 years ahead from what the last 20 years were like, then there's going to be some collateral damage in the system that I think is really bad for everybody involved.” - Mike Lackman“You can automate things to make them more efficient, but you have to know how to do it well in the first place with a certain level of agency and authority and getting your hands dirty with it.” - Michael MiraflorHow often are we designing the software stack before we even have a product and before we have even have addressed the customer’s problem?“Just blatantly throwing software at problems to solve problems, thinking that it's the software that overcomes the deficiencies of an impractical product or business, I think is itself inherently a challenge that we're all facing in our industry.” - Phillip JacksonWhat are some of those things that we're bringing into being or what we're building in the world that are laden with our biases?“One of the most frustrating things about customer service is when you end up on the phone with a system that is trying to replicate that of a human voice, human interaction, or human way of answering questions... You don't have to try to trick me to think that you're a person because you're just not. I would rather hit a series of numbers…to get you to answer versus me interacting with this AI as if you were human.” - Michael Miraflor“You have to get a gauge on what young people are thinking as expressed by what they're wearing and what they're doing. If you can't really get a sense of that, because the dominant form of social media is encouraging the proliferation of micro trends that really aren't a reflection, but they send a smoke signal, then you might have something that's a bit problematic on your hands.” - Michael Miraflor“The interesting piece here is that when we talk about this dystopian sort of like, well, this AI future, we're all going to get pushed around this and that. The alternative to that has to be an institution with enough trust and credibility that we're willing to let them become tastemakers, editors of newspapers, curators of fashion, pairers of coffee, those kinds of things.” - Mike Lackman“There was a dark side to those things that we do see as unifying, which is they tend to have some sort of pretty strong editorial, perhaps even tyrannical authority associated with them to be able to set those standards in place. And I guess my point of jousting with you on that when we think about AI, the counterpoint to letting the system just run the algorithm unchecked is that someone has to put guardrails on that.” - Mike LackmanWill the outputs of AI technology like Dall-E applied to commercial uses be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run?Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand OfficerMike Lackman, CEO of Trade CoffeeAssociated Links:The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at Hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!