Up Next In Commerce

Starting a business is hard enough. Try launching and building an entirely new global sport. That’s one heck of a challenge. But when you have a good idea, a product, and an organic way to connect with people, it’s actually possible. Chris Ruder is the CEO of Spikeball, and he initially thought his little business would be a fun side hobby. The company idea even started off with the age old question, “Wouldn’t it be cool if..?” But within five years, that little business with zero employees was earning $1.5 million in revenue and attracting attention around the world. That didn’t happen by magic, though, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Chris and I dug into scaling a company by asking the questions you think are dumb — including to your own customers. For Chris, simply asking, “How did you find out about us?” was the turning point to finding an audience and then nurturing it so that it grows in the most organic way possible. He also gave the inside scoop on his Shark Tank experience, and why he encourages other entrepreneurs to take advantage of that opportunity if they are ever presented with it. Plus, Chris explains how he’s been navigating the supply chain issues, including by finding new ways to expand the company beyond just physical products. Enjoy this episode.Main Takeaways:Ask The Dumb Questions: Many new founders come into an industry with questions that may seem dumb or obvious, but they need to be asked. Find people around you who can help guide you or inform you so that you can continue making the right moves without having to backtrack. This includes asking questions of your customers. Ask them what they think, how they found you, and what made them click “buy.”Set Customers Up To Be the Hero: When you engage with customers, you can offer them the opportunity to be your ambassador, but in the most authentic way. Work with them to develop their own community and following, set them up to be the hero, and in turn, you will see more organic growth and brand love than simply paying people to promote your brand for you.The Shift to Stuff: The last two years have seen a major change in how people shop and what they shop for. Consumers have moved away from experiences and moved toward buying more stuff to fill their time and satisfy their itch. CPG companies have been forced to supply more than ever, and the logistics and supply chains have suffered as a result. Work with your vendors and shipping partners to find more creative solutions, and try to find additional ways to bring manufacturing closer to home — even if that means adding different kinds of goods and services to your product portfolio so that you are not beholden to the supply chain.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here. 

It’s not every day that a car salesperson becomes a founder and CEO of a SaaS company that is revolutionizing the way companies do localized advertising. But that’s the path that Diana Lee followed, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we went through the whole story… and dug into how her company, Constellation Agency, built a technology that helped marketers stop crying (literally) because it was so hard to create hyper-local advertising. We also dove into how to think about capturing data in a world without cookies, and we discussed why, if you’re going to be in the market for a car in the next year, you definitely need to be ordering one right now. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Scaling Creative and Locality of Ads: In the past, there was no easy way to do advertising at scale in a hyper-local way, which is one of the most effective ways to advertise. Making local ads was a problem that would take a month for advertisers to solve, and now it’s a one-click solution. By investing in this solution, not only was Constellation Agency solving a problem for itself, but stumbling on a solution that everyone in the industry needed and wanted.Life Without Cookies: The downfall of cookies is a worry for many marketers, but there is still a way to capture first-party data that will allow you to succeed. By rethinking the ad unit itself, and building all of the choice and preferences into the ad unit, you can ingest the consumer data you need in a way that you control.Don’t Water it Down: It’s a nice idea to be a one-stop-shop for your customers, but when you do everything, you’re never able to become an expert at anything. Find what you’re great at and focus on that because if you can be the best at one thing, you won’t need to do anything else because customers will flock to you for your expertise.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

To say that Eli Weiss has taken an untraditional path to where he is today would be an understatement. Currently, Eli is the Director of Customer Experience at OLIPOP, but his roots are in a traditional orthodox Jewish household, his education does not include a college degree, and his first job in the industry came as a result of him doing a powerpoint presentation to the folks at an emerging luggage brand about why they were failing. Yeah, not what you’d expect. But Eli’s whole career is about going above and beyond expectations — consumer expectations. From that luggage brand to NUGGS Vegan Chicken Nuggets, and now with OLIPOP, Eli has become a master of building out the ultimate customer experience, and he took us behind the scenes on this episode of Up Next in Commerce. Plus, he told us about the job board he set up to help people like him — with skills but untraditional backgrounds — so that more awesome folks can work their magic in the CPG space. This was seriously one of my favorite interviews, so I hope you enjoy it!Main Takeaways:The Road Less Traveled: Oftentimes, those with untraditional backgrounds or different levels of educational and career experiences get overlooked for jobs they are more than qualified for. Companies need to be willing to look outside the box and invest in people who can prove they have the skills needed to do a job, even if their past experiences don’t line up with who you normally would hire.Promises Kept: It seems simple, but one of the biggest things companies overlook when it comes to customer experience is whether or not they are delivering on the promises they make. Take a look at your ad copy, your website, your social channels and product pages and determine if what you are selling to customers is what they actually get.More Than a Customer, A Friend: When brands interact with customers, most of the time the entire interaction is focused on a sale. But the best kind of customer experience comes when a brand treats a customer like a human being, and when addressing them, the brand thinks, ‘what would my friend want or need in this situation?’ Even if someone is canceling a subscription, find out the backstory on why they are cancelling their subscription, maybe there is a deeper reasonthan what you expect and there is something you can do to reach out not to sell, but to show you care.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below.  Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

When you look down at your phone, do you see a little 5G symbol? Do you know what that means or what kind of service 5G is providing? To take it a step further, if you’re a business owner, are you connected to 5G? Is it helping your company move faster and operate more efficiently? Whatever the answers to those questions are, the problem remains that many of us, consumers and business owners alike, are still mostly in the dark about what 5G truly is, how it’s different, and why we’re actually only just scratching the surface of what 5G is capable of.On this roundtable episode of Up Next in Commerce, I dove deep into the mysteries of 5G with Geoff Coleman, Chief Product Officer at Gotransverse, Natasha Sachdeva VP Solutions Engineering at Mirakl, and Olivier Smith, Technology Lead from the Office of the CTO at Matrixx. We discussed what 5G is and is not, how it’s currently being utilized, and what kind of possibilities will be opened up when 5G is made available in a more widespread manner. But to get there, it’s going to take a lot of partnership with telecom companies, enterprise software businesses, and cloud, platform and marketplace providers, which is what brought my three guests together. It was a really interesting discussion, and I hope you enjoy it!Main Takeaways:Making It Sticky: What makes something like a marketplace sticky for consumers is how seamless the experience is for everyone. Whether you are offering local goods or using a marketplace to bring more wide-ranging products from all over the world to customers’ in your backyard, whatever you’re selling matters less than how easy the shopping, transaction and delivery experience turns out.How Marketplaces Create Growth and Opportunity for Sellers: There are limits to how ecommerce can grow and scale, and marketplaces offer a way to expand those opportunities. Marketplaces offer sellers speed and agility, along with resources that they cannot get elsewhere.Partner Up: As large and far-reaching as telecommunications companies are, even they cannot provide 5G to every industry. In order to advance the technology across all fields, partnerships with other large enterprise companies are necessary. This sets up a B2B2C model that requires finesse and understanding of different roles, particularly as it relates to delivering technology and services to the end consumer.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

Fraud has been a problem for centuries. And there have been bad actors and people with ill intent since the beginning of time. What’s different today is the tools and methods that fraudsters are using, particularly when it comes to perpetrating fraud online. Both consumers and brands are in a constant battle against hackers and fraudsters who are gaming and attacking their defenses and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. So to protect themselves and their cus, brands are putting strategies in place to limit their exposure to risk and stop fraud before it starts. But not only will that defense not last long because fraudsters are always coming up with new ways to run their schemes, more often than not the defenses a company sets up create a bad user experience for the very customers they try to protect. David Fletcher is the Senior Vice President at ClearSale International, and he and his team are helping to create better solutions, fight fraud, and help ecommerce companies process more orders while giving users excellent experiences. He told me all about it on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, and there are some great ideas for any brand to think about implementing. But even more than that, David and I went deep on some of the other hot topics in the fraud and privacy world, including the debate around two-factor authentication and what’s happening on the dark web. It was so interesting. Enjoy!Main Takeaways:Cutting Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face: One of the ways many companies fight fraud is through filters. If they see suspicious activity from a geographical location or type of customer profile, they set their system to automatically decline those sales in order to prevent fraud. However, in doing that, the company has set up a system that will generate false declines — declining legitimate sales based only on generic information that has been flagged. In order to truly fight fraud and not negatively impact other customers, companies need to be more specific and targeted with their efforts.The Unsolvable Problem of Fraud: No matter what you do to address fraud as it happens right now, there will always be new ways that fraud occurs as time goes by. It takes constant vigilance and attention to the environment you’re working in to stay ahead and protect your business and your customers. And while technology can help, having actual humans look into potentially risky transactions is the best way to identify what’s fraud and what’s not.Dig Into Data: By examining historical data, companies like ClearSale can get a full picture of how a company has operated and where its weak spots are when it comes to things like false declines and chargebacks, or other indicators of fraud. And from that data, you can almost immediately implement machine learning to improve your processes and get more orders approved.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

Kornit Digital has always marketed itself as a developer of technology, which, in today’s world is pretty much what everyone says. In 2021, it seems like every company is either a tech company or a media company. So what is it that makes Kornit different from all the rest? Well, it starts with the fact that Kornit is creating technology that is more than just an app or a gadget: it’s developing tech to enable sustainable fashion production, which could have quite an effect on a $3 trillion industry. To achieve this end, though, means that brands have to start thinking and acting differently. Instead of supply and demand, it’s going to be all about demand then supply. Currently, 30% of fashion inventory is going unused and unsold. That negatively affects not just a company’s bottom line, the resources wasted in producing and then eliminating those items has a massive negative impact on the environment. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Omer Kulka, the CMO of Kornit, explained to me all the ways the company is working to bring new technology, a new business model, and a whole new way of thinking to the industry to start turning those negatives into something better.  And the change is coming sooner than you think, so if you want to be prepared, you’ll definitely want to pay close attention to this convo. Enjoy!Main Takeaways:Monetizing Trends: Everywhere you look, something or someone is going viral. For too long, it’s been next to impossible to monetize those trends, but that’s changing. By shifting to a demand and supply model, brands can create a system that allows them to meet the moment and deliver goods to customer that they want in the moment and then still be ready to deliver again when the next trend comes along.Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast: These days, if you’re not innovating and disrupting yourself, you’ll be out of business in the blink of an eye. The best companies in the world are always shifting gears and changing their skin to meet new demands. This takes a lot of strategy and preparation, but more importantly, it take great people and a culture where your employees are not afraid of change, they lean into it.The mash-up between physical and virtual worlds: Virtual fashion is fashion that doesn’t exist in real life — think video and computer games or even in the future on Instagram— and it is an exciting new opportunity for on-demand, sustainable fashion.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

On this show and so many others, you hear a lot about the success stories and the big companies doing new and exciting things. But the fact of the matter is that those tales of major profits and winning market share and scaling, they were almost always preceded by some really tough times and moments that have crippled many entrepreneurs who have tried to trod the same path. Conor Lewis is right in the middle of those extremely tough times. Conor is the founder of Fort, a company that sells magnetic pillow forts for kids. It’s a brilliant idea, and that’s not just my opinion. Tens of thousands of backers on Kickstarter agreed, and they pledged more than $2 million to see Fort make its way into their living rooms. And yet, despite the buzz and the big raise, Conor is at a crossroads. He is on the cusp of success, but dealing with massive supply chain and logistics challenges that are also impacting companies around the world. Right now is where a company like Conor’s can launch into the stratosphere… or not. So on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I was excited to talk to Conor and hear from him exactly what he’s going through, how he’s dealing with the challenges of a young CPG company, and where he thinks Fort can get to once he pulls the company through these rough early stages. This was a raw, honest, and interesting conversation that I think so many entrepreneurs and business folks will relate to. I hope you enjoy it!Main Takeaways:Hindsight is 20/20: There are certain areas of your business that you will have a handle on right from the get-go. Other things you will have to learn along the way. One of the things many first-time founders lack is access to a network who can help them, so they fly blind and they learn hard lessons building a network along the way, understanding how and where things could have gone better, and implement those lessons as the company grows.Competitor Adjacent: One hack new product companies can try is to find channels where your competitors are being talked about and try to position your own product there so that your potential customers can see you. But beware: there is actually some danger in which channels you chose - tune in to find out which.Move Past the Negativity: Whether you’re winning or struggling, there will be detractors, hard times, and negativity in more ways than you imagine. You have to do what you can to move past these negative people and situations. If it’s a customer, serve them in the best way possible (through refunds or replacements of goods) and compartmentalize the problem in a healthy way so that you can manage it, but not let it drag everything you do down.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

Throughout the years, Walmart has brought the idea of the superstore to life. Its name is ubiquitous, most Americans live within eight miles of a Walmart, and within the store, you can find everything from groceries to automotive services to custom paint production. Seriously, there is very little that you won’t find within a Walmart. And, on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Cynthia Kleinbaum Milner told me about how that competitive edge is something that Walmart wanted to lean into as it evolved into the digital era. Cynthia is the VP of marketing for Walmart Plus, Online Grocery and Mobile App, and part of what she does is help Walmart use the power of its retail presence to engage with customers in an omnichannel way, this includes on mobile, which we touched on a lot in the interview. We also dove into Walmart Plus, and how Cynthia positioned Walmart Plus different from the competition, by getting the deepest understanding of what customers want and why. Plus we got into Cynthia’s own journey and how she has developed her skills as a marketer to land at one of the biggest global companies ever. This was such a fun episode, I hope you enjoy it!Main Takeaways:Going Backward To Move Forward: The world changes so rapidly that oftentimes the skills you are using now as the main part of your job will be peripheral or inapplicable in just a few years. Rather than continuing on one path doing only what you know, it might be a better long-term strategy to step back and learn in other emerging areas to make yourself more well-rounded. Even if you have to make a lateral or backward move right now, in the long run you will be a much better and a more skilled worker.The Full Experience, Online and Off: Walmart is more than just a grocery store for those who go to physical locations. Naturally, the online experience had to be more than just one kind of shopping experience as well. Creating an app that makes the entire experience of shopping better, has to be the goal. Whether that means bringing in scan and go features to use in-store, or an endless aisle to shop from online, or building in additional services like financial help and delivery, there has to be more to your app so that you are providing customers with the ideal experience.Making Membership Worth It: Too often, brands have membership programs that have one or two benefits that customers use every once in a while at best. But if you’re going to have a membership model, you want to make it worthwhile for customers and the business. There should be services that you can’t access otherwise, you should be adding value to your customers’ lives, and you should always be striving to add features and services that save time and money for your customers, which will make them want to use your app and come to your store even more.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

How new parents shop for their babies is unlike how anyone shops for anything else. I know, I’ve been there. You’re anxious, you’re thinking about all the things your baby will need, but you’re also thinking in stages of what you’ll need three months from now when your baby is in a completely different stage of development. It’s overwhelming and the brands in the baby market are mostly just selling products, and not selling how to have a better experience as a parent. Lalo is one of the unique brands that is putting the parent’s experience first, and that strategy has helped the company quickly grow into a favorite brand among moms and dads everywhere.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I chatted with Michael Wieder, the co-founder of Lalo, about what it was like to create a new kind of shopping experience for parents, and how a little bit of light stalking went a long way to help Lalo figure out exactly what parents want and need. We talked about what it takes to bring a product to market with organic and authentic connections with influencers and consumers alike, and we got deep in the weeds of what strategies Lalo used to communicate with current and potential customers in order to improve not just the products, but the entire experience of buying products for your kids. Plus, we talked a bit about how Lalo has approached fundraising, which is a little bit controversial these days. Enjoy the episode!Main Takeaways:Influencers Are People, Not A Marketing Channel: You have to tap into an influencer’s psychology and why they would actually love a brand, rather than paying them to market your product just because they are popular. Reach out to people who you know you can connect with, and ship them product to help them fall in love with the product first, then partner with you later. Not only does that form more authentic relationships, it saves you from wasting product and time on potential influencer relationships that won’t work.Keep it 100: How you communicate with customers should be all about keeping it real. Think about how you would want to be communicated with, and treat your customers in that same way. And in order to deliver the right messages that also lead to actual sales, you have to focus on a few key pillars: technical, functional and emotional benefit.Get on My Level: Hiring the right people is the biggest challenge to growth. Not everyone will care as much as a founder, but you need to find people who do truly care and buy into the mission of the company and will fight to help it become better. You can also tap into the people who love your brand most to bring them on as advisors. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript here: https://bit.ly/3zTMJOt---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

What do eyeglasses, blockchain, and social media all have in common? If you answered nothing, then obviously you haven’t heard of Lucyd. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I sat down with Harrison Gross, the Co-founder and CEO of Lucyd, a smart eyewear company that is bringing hardware and software together in pretty incredible ways. Harrison told me all about how the company was built on IP from research universities — an underutilized trove of crazy cool ideas — and how Lucyd’s crowdfunding backers became the perfect beta testers for the Lucyd Lyte glasses, which are glasses fitted with bluetooth technology that allow users to talk on the phone, listen to music, engage with Siri, and more, all without ever taking your phone out of your pocket. Smart glasses are not a new concept, so you may be wondering what makes Lucyd different. Harrison is developing an app to pair with the glasses that uses blockchain to create a social community where people can utilize tokens, buy and sell NFTS, and engage with people and brands -- all from their eyewear. It’s a whole new kind of commerce, and I’m excited to bring you today’s conversation with Harrison Gross!Main Takeaways:The Will of the People: Crowdfunding is not just a way to raise capital, it’s a proven method to build a community of people who are willing to help your company succeed. Backers from a crowdfunding campaign can become a pool of beta testers and product development focus groups that can help a company get to a MVP much sooner than otherwise possible.Meet the Market: Although the market might not be in place to adopt your original idea, you can always pivot to deliver something that people need right now. But don’t let the original idea die — find a new way to introduce that idea that is suitable to how people live and operate right now, the same way Lucyd is doing with blockchain technology, which you can tune in to hear more about!Make it Easy: If you have a product that will solve a problem or make someone’s life easier, you might think it will sell itself, but it won’t. You have to fully explain how the product works and where they will see improvement in their life through using the product. You also have to train those who sell the product to build education into their sales speak, and every piece of content you create should illustrate how you are making life better, because when the consumer sees that, you make their purchase decision easy.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.