Frank Nesse: The way it started was like many old technologies with a glass of red wine in a boardroom. I guess Omnichannel is no longer about how you purchase, it's following the customer journey. I'd say that's a loaded question.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game. And of course, keep your customers. Adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at e commerce talent agency E Suite. Can you believe it? This is episode number 200. It's crept up on me like a salesperson at an after party.
Nathan Bush: I just want to thank you all
Nathan Bush: for listening for 200 episodes. It's phenomenal as what started as a silly little idea has grown into what I think is a fabulous community and a great resource for those wanting to know more about the world of e commerce in Australia. And it's all because of you guys who listen and give me feedback and suggest it to your friends as a way to get that inside information. So thank you all for sticking with me for 200 episodes. It's been a wild ride and again, I love hearing from you, meeting you and getting your views on it. So please keep that coming. Always let me know what you think. So thank you for hanging in there with me. I also want to thank all our guests. Every day. I kind of pinch myself that I'm lucky enough to talk and that these people want to talk and share their incredible support stories that we can all learn from. And I think that's one thing about the Australian e commerce industry is that it's so incredibly open and generous. And the guests that we have on Add to Cart are great examples of that and without them, you wouldn't want to listen to me. Trust me, without them we wouldn't have a show. So thank you all to our guests who have so generously shared and those who have said they're going to come on to share. So we have some exciting guests in the pipeline. I also want to thank Shopify plus and Paclio. They have been sponsors from the start and without them, this podcast couldn't happen. We don't take a dollar out of Add to Cart. Everything that gets invested in we use to grow the show. So thank you for Shopify plus and Paclio for Their continued support and unwavering dedication to helping us deliver Add to Cart. It means a lot. And lastly, a huge, huge shout out to our Add to Cart team, Our producer Amy, our editor Gil, AKA the podcast boss, and the team at Expressway Studio. You guys are the best. I get a lot of people contacting me and saying I don't know how you do it all. I don't know how you record and mix and edit and publish. The truth is I have the really easy job of having the conversations and the team there do the most amazing job at bringing it to life. Without them, this show would never happen. So thank you Amy Gill and the Expressway Studio team. You guys are phenomenal. All right, let's get into it before I start crying. Episode 200 Red Wine in the Boardroom It's a disaster for many you would think. But according to my guest today, it's the recipe for success and how he came up with the idea for his digital technology company. Frank Nesse is the co founder of Commistry, a central e commerce hub that integrates, enriches and synchronizes data from multiple business systems for retailers. Now wait to hear from Frank. All that will make sense. They currently manage over 150 brands, close to 10 million SKUs and process more than 20 million order transactions every year for clients like General Pants, the Iconic and Amazon. Some nice names there. In this chat we discuss the importance of understanding business processes first and foremost when designing tech solutions. We also navigate real time inventory and what that really means. And Frank shares his learnings from scaling commissary and going international. Lots of lessons in there. So thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Paclio. Here's our conversation with Frank Nesse from Commistry.
Nathan Bush: Frank, thanks for joining us on Add to cart.
Frank Nesse: Nathan, thanks for having us. I'm really excited to be here today with you.
Nathan Bush: So am I. It feels like this has been a long time coming because when I first got into E commerce you were one of the people, one of the first people I think I spoke to and helped introduce me to the world of Australian e commerce. So it's great to be here and dive deeper.
Frank Nesse: Yeah, memory serves me right. It was back in the days of automotive spare parts and fitment related data which is not for the faint hearted.
Nathan Bush: That's right. And I would have come from the advertising and marketing world so I would have had no idea what you were talking about at the time. So thanks for bearing with me.
Frank Nesse: Yeah, I think you did a good job because you had me convinced you Knew what you're talking about.
Nathan Bush: All right, so we are here to talk about Commistry and we were lucky enough to have Abby from Ocular join us a few weeks ago. And he mentioned Commistry in passing. And I'm sure a lot of our listeners would have heard of Commistry if not used commissary. But can you explain what Commistry is and how you help retailers?
Frank Nesse: Commistry is a digital commerce experience platform bringing together in one central location, product data, pricing, and more importantly, inventory to allow you to promote your products to the digital world. Whether it be your e commerce website, your marketplaces, or any social media platform or any other platform that requires product feeds which are in sync with your website. And then to round that all off, it has the ability to help retailers determine where is the best place to fill those orders from. Whether it's click and collect or ship from store, where the main intention is to utilize and turn over your inventory as much as possible. Because that's the name of the game in retail.
Nathan Bush: Yes. Okay. So totally product focused, totally channel agnostic.
Frank Nesse: Channel agnostic with a key focus on e commerce platforms. First and foremost, our clients are most successful. The brands we work with on their own e commerce websites, marketplace as a secondary, mainly to either protect their brand or bring another level of discovery to the product and the brand. And then the bonus on that, hopefully selling these marketplaces generate more sales revenue and acquire more customers.
Nathan Bush: And have you seen, where do you normally see people come into the commissary world? Is it that they are typically storing product details on their own e commerce platform like a Shopify or a BigCommerce and then realize or the world is the opportunity is much larger. We need to start integrating with other channels, selling through other channels and we need a centralized place to store our product data. Is that the entry point? Normally, yeah.
Frank Nesse: There's not one right answer there, Nathan. We're quite fortunate that we have three or four entry points. One entry point could be people need a platform to centralize and manage their product information and enrich it for their different requirements. The other entry point could be around order management to offer, click and collect or to utilize their stores as fulfillment centers and so looking for a distributor or management system. And then the third entry point could be people that want to go to marketplaces or have a tool to better manage their product feeds. And you bring that all together and that's commissary.
Nathan Bush: Right. So you hit on three points there, which are obviously very hot topics over the last couple of years we've got being able to track inventory, we've obviously had all the supply issues and people being able to get inventory to customers, click and collect obviously exploded during COVID and marketplaces. We've seen the rise of and continual rise and divergence of marketplace in Australia. You must have had the craziest last couple of years.
Frank Nesse: We've had a crazy couple of last years. Our technology, it's not something you turn on today for tomorrow, so it does take time. But where we've seen the craziness was our existing clients, their dependency on online, the dependency on commissary and the high expectations of consumers to get their product at the right time in the right place.
Nathan Bush: And are you finding your customers are coming to you with problems that you go, great, we've got something off the shelf or ready to go. Or are you constantly being hit with new feature requests, things that you haven't developed yet?
Frank Nesse: Yeah, I think it's the latter is the more truthful thing. I think retailers and e commerce specialists are becoming smarter and looking around the world what people are doing and what different technologies do and they collate them all together and hope to get the one size fits all from one vendor. And so we're learning a lot from our customers, intern or our clients, I should say, in terms of what their requirements are, what the expectations are. And sometimes you need to sort of bring them back down to earth and say, well that's not practical or it's nice to have, but is it really going to bring that return on investment? Because it all costs money both from their side, but from our side also.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I've noticed having worked with you and the team on a few projects with Commistry, is that there is that ability to be a bit flexible. It's not like it's an out of the box system that you go, here it is, use the parameters. Do you have a team on the ground here to consult with and to work through those individual problems? Are there any kind of areas where you are constantly seeing retailers trying to push the boundaries?
Frank Nesse: At the moment, I would say the boundaries will be that the new trend I've seen now is around returns and refunds and how they want to automate that and manage that. In terms of going back to product data, which is our core foundation, we're seeing more and more people interested in marketplaces again. But I think a lot of them somewhat get disappointed when they don't see the return investment on their efforts or they think just by turning a marketplace channel that it's automatically going to generate sales. Just like your own physical store, just like your own e commerce website. You need to invest in these marketplaces. They are a different beast and they need to have specialist resources that are just working the platform but also working with the vendor of that platform.
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Nathan Bush: now this might be a loaded question but is there a marketplace that you love working and integrating with and one that you just throws up problems every time?
Frank Nesse: I'd say that's a loaded question. I mean I wouldn't say there's one that we specifically like working with. I think it's fair to say because 60% of our client base is in the fashion, footwear and apparel space. The Iconic is the one that we do a lot of work with. However, we're seeing a number of marketplaces like Amazon now is really pushing hard on the fashion, footwear and apparel and there's a lot more people interested in Amazon. Australia or some of our clients are now venturing offshore into the US and the UK are also using Amazon as a test bed to see whether their products would do well in that market. But yeah, every marketplace has its purpose and has. I think it's more importantly a category of products and a category of consumers that it's well designed for.
Nathan Bush: Any common traits of retailers that you've seen take marketplaces on and really succeed. Any factors from your perspective that really make them successful in those marketplaces. Whether it is the Iconic or it's
Frank Nesse: Amazon, I think it comes down to the brand and the product and also like the Iconic does their own marketing and merchandising is how well they push their brand and product. When you look at the generic marketplaces like Amazon and catch again it comes down to your own Brand recognition and your own product recognition, which comes back to discovery. If you're not putting the efforts in the beginning to make people aware of your product, whether it's on social media, Google, Facebook, Instagram, I think you've got not so good chances of succeeding in those marketplaces.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. So take us back, Frank, to when you started commissary. How did you come up with the idea? Because I'm assuming it looked very different back then to what it is today.
Frank Nesse: You know, Nathan, it doesn't look too much different. Just recently we had a client who basically needed chemistry for what it was actually designed for, I mean, years ago. And that was multiple brands in multiple websites, in multiple geographies with multiple inventory sources. And that's what we designed. It was probably one of the most complex requirements and well suited for chemistry. But the way it started was like many old technologies was a glass of red wine in a boardroom, I guess, and literally it was red wine in a boardroom with one of our Magento partners. We just finished a very complex Magento and ebay project and complex data requirements. The client then wanted to do Google and Facebook and product data was all over the place, wasn't centralized, and we sat there saying and drew a few boxes on a whiteboard and saying, what would the world be like if we had a cloud based application that would first allow you to centralize the product data, enrich it for different sales channels, but then also be able to synchronize it and integrate it with those different sales channels together with pricing, inventory, images, and then harmonize the orders on the way back so that a retailer wouldn't have to worry about how do I integrate with that channel for orders and how do I integrate that channel with orders? And it was just simple as that.
Nathan Bush: And what year are we talking here, Frank?
Frank Nesse: Sorry, we're talking back in about 2014. And then it's about sharing that idea with your stakeholders, in my case, my co founder, and trying to shift the mindset from being a services based organization to now becoming a product development company. And we've never had experience in developing a product and selling our own product and then managing a development team. So that's how it all came about, the good old red wine and a problem that we were facing that we saw the industry going to face more and more as time went on.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. And in terms of the time since 2014, are there any standout clients or case studies that you've worked with in commissary that you've like. I'm just so proud of this one because it's really hit our vision of what we were setting out to achieve from the start.
Frank Nesse: I love to say there's one specific client, but I think it's fair to say there's a number. You know, when I think about multi brand retailers like Retail Apparel Group, APG Monroe, they really utilize the power of commistry, managing product data for multiple brands, but then each brand having their own web store, website and having its own Google feed not just for the Australian currency but a separate feed for the New Zealand currency and then the US currency, Facebook. And you know, we're talking about clients who've got tens of thousands of SKUs but also 50 plus channels to manage all that data and synchronize all that information harmoniously.
Nathan Bush: And is there any limits with Commistry around how many channels you can have, how many SKUs, how many variants?
Frank Nesse: We haven't seen any limits yet. It's all about how much money you want to spend on your hosting to make sure that the application can perform to the customer's expectations. So we are multi tenant now. We've got one application, one infrastructure source. You know, we've got managing over 150 brands, close to 10 million SKUs and processing over 20 million order transactions a year and I think over a thousand channels being managed at the moment in live production.
Nathan Bush: That's incredible. That's huge. You don't want to get those phone calls of any servers going down on a weekend, do you?
Frank Nesse: We don't, we don't. Unfortunately I've got a great team behind me where I'm not getting those midnight calls anymore. So I recently had a client ring me up just before Easter and saying, frank, your team's doing great, but I just wanted your permission that if something happens over east, I can give you a call. And I'm sitting there going sure you can. And all weekend I was worried that I might get that call. But fortunately the application did its job and the team was on standby so I didn't have to lose any sleep.
Nathan Bush: That's brilliant. Brilliant. And from a retailer's perspective, if you're implementing commissary and obviously there's a fair bit of mapping and architecture that needs to be considered, what kind of resources do you like a retailer to have internally to be able to not only implement but get the most out of commissary long term?
Frank Nesse: That's a great question, Nathan. And you know we've had some very successful clients and some very challenging clients. And I think it comes down to, like you mentioned, resources. And the two key resources I see is, number one is support from the IT department because commissary doesn't live in isolation. It actually works together with back end systems, the point of sale or the ERP or the warehouse management. So that integration is very important and we need support from the it. The other, I think resource criticality would be people understanding business processes and how data impacts that business process and IT doesn't live one without the other. So you may have good data, but if you don't understand the business process within the business or the way the application that we're talking to works, then you can certainly say we'll have some challenges. So people with some data experience, business process experience and then support from it.
Nathan Bush: I love that you've brought up business processes there because I think it's so important because you've got great people in your organization who can, even if you've got your IT, people who don't speak E commerce fluently all day, every day can make sense of the data requirements and the technical requirements. But if you've got the wrong process from a business perspective, you can't undo that once it started to build.
Frank Nesse: And it's quite interesting, just recently I was speaking to one of our clients who implement a new system and typically a retailer doesn't want to change their processes and expects the vendor of the platform to change their system to accommodate their process that they've been doing for 10, 20, 30 years plus. This retailer, good friend of ours, has actually gone the other way and saying no, we're not going to customize the application, we're not going to ask the vendor to develop new functions and features. We're going to change our process to adopt Modern world, which is not very common. And you know, there was a bit of resistance from the people in the business, but they pulled it through.
Nathan Bush: Bet that was music to your ears when you got that phone call.
Frank Nesse: Yes, it was, it was.
Nathan Bush: And so from a business process perspective, one thing that constantly comes up I find is real time inventory. So I always talk about inventory being the backbone of a retail business. Even though we want to be customer focused and customer first, if we don't have the product or we don't know where the product is, then there's going to be a bad customer experience. Regardless, from your point of view, what are the most common real time product inventory updates? How often is it being done, what do you think is expected and what do you see as being good in terms of updating that inventory.
Frank Nesse: So I think the first question to answer is what's real time? Some people expect real time to be milliseconds, microseconds and other people saying within minutes. I think the true answer that is how does the merchant or retailer manager inventory? For example, if you're a retailer does both wholesale and direct to consumer, are you using the same inventory? If not, then you can be confident to say updates less frequent will be okay. If you now go into retailers offering click and collect, then that's going to become more critical. And again, it depends on the brand and the product. If you're a luxury brand where in store you're only selling one an hour, one every two hours, then less frequent updates is acceptable and okay to manage that customer experience and not disappoint the consumer. However, if you've got products which are frequently selling in store, then we're talking about real time. And the way we help our clients overcome that is don't do full inventory updates every five seconds, every minute, just do deltas and that's easier to process and faster process. So I think the answer is more importantly, how do you operate your business and what type of product and what type of retailer are you in terms of velocity of sales in your physical store? Mainly around click and click. If you're doing ship from store, the consumer doesn't see what's happening in the background. And so inventory updates is not so critical. And we see a lot of clients who want to venture out using store inventory first and foremost by doing ship from store because it doesn't impact the consumer experience.
Nathan Bush: For those not familiar with the concept of delta updates, can you explain that a little bit more?
Frank Nesse: Yeah. So as an example, if you've got 25,000 SKUs and in that update or inventory, only 10 items have changed their inventory position. Just send those 10 changes to the website, which only takes milliseconds update. But if you're trying to send every five minutes the 25,000 SKU updates, the system's not going to keep up with that. And as an example, we had a client who had a point of sale which couldn't give deltas. It only give you full feeds. I can't remember the number of SKUs, but the client wanted to do updates every 15 minutes, but the point of sale would take 14 minutes to process every inventory for every SKU. And if it was deltas, it only takes seconds. But that's a practical example which didn't work.
Nathan Bush: Now it's a Great example. So if we're really talking getting as close as we can to real time, we need to just be processing data that has been impacted, not the whole data set. Even in today's world, it may not be the chemistry system that can't handle it. You've got to think about what it's connected to and all the other systems that got to have to accept it and interpret it and the load that it's going to put throughout the whole system.
Frank Nesse: Yeah, and like you said, sometimes chemistry can process the data pretty quickly, but the destination system, whether it's a website or a marketplace, it takes time to process. So you always got to consider what is the slowest system in the chain. And then I think also we need to go back to practicality. Even if you have real time inventory update, there could be situations where you still can disappoint the consumer. Because the point itself, for example, will say, this is my inventory position, but it doesn't know that somebody's just taken the clothes off the rack, gone to the change room to try it out and potentially in that point of time, also processing a purchase and somebody's online buying it. Or another great example would be you go to pick up the product from the shelf, the rack, and it's damaged, but the point of sale doesn't know that's a damaged item. So there's still those practical issues where it doesn't matter how frequently you do updates, you may have those disappointments come your way.
Nathan Bush: Do you find a lot of retailers in the omnichannel world are using product thresholds? So hey, if there's only one product available, if we're showing a SKU count of one being available, actually don't make it available online because to your point, could be damaged, could be in the change room, could be stolen, we're just not sure on it.
Frank Nesse: Yeah, so we're seeing people use buffers and thresholds, as you mentioned, but the challenge with that is you end up with all these onesie twosies in your network and what do you do with them? What we're seeing is people just experimenting, trying out and sort of first put buffers, protect themselves and then they may remove the buffers and see what's happening in their network. And it's more of a trial and error type of situation. And you know, of course if they have disappointments, they manage customer expectations through some good customer service and maybe some loyalty promotion points and things like that to make sure the consumer doesn't leave that brain or have a bad taste. In their mouth.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, it's a good point. You don't want to be left with all those ones and twos of bits and pieces lying around. From a data perspective, product and inventory data, when you get a new client, typically and you open up the box and you have a look at the structure and the maturity of the data that you're looking at. For Australian retailers, how do you rate data capabilities in the product and inventory world and where do you often see the areas of neglect?
Frank Nesse: I think as Australians, we always like to think that we're not up there with the best. I think we are doing a very good job with, in recent years, ventured off to the UK to build the commissary over there and you know, a lot of people say, well, you know, there's such a mature market, why would you go to a mature market? You know. And what my take was, and it's actually been proven, is yes, they're leading the way in what I call third generation of website deployment, but still, lo and behold, their management of data. And these are sizable retailers, normally two, four times bigger than what the Australians are. They're still using spreadsheets, it's still manually done, or they've got this what I call spaghetti integration of different code, whether it's custom developed code or middleware and plugins doing the integration. And they don't know if they're Martha or Arthur. So I think Australians should see themselves as actually punching above the weight. Where we see surprises is the way the back end systems manage data. Whether it's is it at a style level or is it a color level or is it a SKU level? And that brings complexities in when you're trying to centralize and manage data effectively and efficiently in a system like commistry because it's not about the way the data is currently stored in the back end system or the way the website of the marketplace wants to see it is how do you manage your data effectively so that you use your resources efficiently. So that's our first look at. And then too many people are caught up going, well, that's the way our backing system does it, or that's the way we do on our website. It's trying to get people to think differently around how you structure and manage data in a tool like commistry or for that matter, any PIM application.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, great. That's really good insight.
Nathan Bush: I want to go back to what
Nathan Bush: you said there around the UK and what you're seeing with the third generation website deployments. What do you mean by third generation.
Frank Nesse: So you know, when you and I met each other many years ago, Nathan, I'd say Australia was just getting on their first generation of websites. You know, in those days we saw a big plethora of Magento, whether it being the paid version or the community version. And since then we've seen many people re platform to another another generation of e commerce and now we're seeing third generation here in Australia where they're going onto their third e commerce re platform. I would say that markets like the UK are probably 12 months ahead of us in doing their third redeployment. And that's what I call third generation.
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Nathan Bush: Any trends that you're seeing during, you know, brands that are doing it now for a third time, what are they changing? What are they putting a focus on?
Frank Nesse: Some of them are trying to simplify and go for out of the box type of applications and namely SaaS is big. As you know in the early days of Magento, typically you host your own version but SaaS based E commerce platforms is really the way to go at the moment. The most retailers and then of course you've got the headless or composable commerce where there are strong tech teams or they've got a strong e commerce partner and they want to deliver that exceptional customer experience not just around servicing the products, but also tying that together with content and videos and blogs. And if you look at the adore beauties of this world who are doing a very good job in bringing all those different parameters together into a common experience for the consumer.
Nathan Bush: And Commistree obviously powers omnichannel businesses to bring all the product and the inventory data together for one experience from a customer experience. When we talk Omnichannel over the next couple of years, what do you foresee the changes in Omnichannel and Nathan, it's.
Frank Nesse: You're getting close to my heart now on a topic I'm really passionate about. You know, if you think years ago we as consumers only had one channel that was everything physical and in store. Whether it was discovering a product through a newspaper in store, whether it was researching the product, whether it was making decision to buy the product and purchasing the product and delivery, everything was in the physical store. And then 10 years ago, the online world or 10 plus years ago, we all come to the online world where there was a great divide where people stayed physical and some people went purely online. If you look today, and I'm probably one of the strongest of this, I'll discover a product online, I'll go install, do research, I'll go home and make a decision. Maybe depending on the product and the brand, I may buy online, but I may get back to the physical store and buy and then I'll get delivered home. So this Omni channel is no longer about how you purchase. It's following the customer journey from discovery to research to decision to buy into delivery and even the return and refund. And I think retailers need to pay attention that you can't look at the two wards separately anymore. You can't say online's just for purchasing because online now is about researching and helping the consumer make that informed decision. And they may walk into your store tomorrow and make that purchase. You know, just yesterday I did that with heaters because it's cold snap. I did all my research online. Yep. And rang around and then we physically went and actually rang around, asked for some more information and then went and did a physical purchase. So online and offline would come together very strongly now.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, and obviously that needs to be a good experience for product and inventory. But from a customer's perspective, they're not looking at it as an online store and then store, store, it's just one brand, one experience. So you better have my past purchases available, I better be able to return in store. You better be able to tell me what stock is where. It doesn't matter.
Frank Nesse: Correct. Exactly right. It's your retailer X. And you know, this was online or this was in the physical store. I expected to be the same experience. And as you said, whether it's price, where it's imagery, whether it's returns, that's what we as consumers expect. And it's going to get more and more demanding, in my opinion.
Nathan Bush: So as it gets more and more demanding, what does that mean for the commissary world? Where do you put your focus for the next few years.
Frank Nesse: So our focus will be on data. It's always been about data, but I think, you know, as you probably heard, data is the new oil. And you know, once you've got good data, you can drive that customer experience, you can make some good predictive analysis for the future. So for us it's just more focusing on helping our clients manage their data more effectively and give them more insights into their data Also now I want
Nathan Bush: to just go back before we close off to a comment that you made a bit earlier in the episode around the challenges of going from a service based business to going into a more product based business. And you've been hugely successful with this. If anyone wants to do some research, have a look at some of the funding and the investment over the last couple of years for commissary. Brilliant Australian story so far. What has been your biggest lessons in moving from that service based model to developing a product that can scale and go international?
Frank Nesse: Our biggest learnings and challenges, which theoretically we knew, but practically is difficult to deploy, is to develop a platform that people externally, your organization can use without having to get up from your chair and walk 5 meters and ask the developer, how do you do this? Or this is not working. Is providing the tool that our clients can self manage, self support. Or more importantly, our partners can help their clients become successful in the digital world, but also allow them to successfully generate additional revenue and deliver additional solutions to their clients. And you know, are we there yet? No, we're learning every day. But it's an ongoing learning experience and ongoing challenge to better yourself and become that product and make it standard for anybody to use.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You're doing a phenomenal job of it. So what's next for the next, say the next 12 months for you and
Frank Nesse: the team at Commerce Truth, of course, scale the business further, get more traction within European market, but also look at other markets, whether it be the Asian market or the big elephant, which is the North, North American market. You know, take all of our lessons that we've had within Australia, but also expanded the UK and not try to make the same mistakes that we've done over the past couple of years as we've expanded.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's really exciting. I love it. And if we've got retailers who are listening to this going, I love what Frank's talking about, sounds like it might solve some of my problems, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
Frank Nesse: Well, as we spoke about Omni Channel, we're also multi channeling, having people get in touch with us. There's the website, give us a call, send me a message via LinkedIn or send me a message via my email which is frank.neshiulmistry.com Great stuff Frank.
Nathan Bush: Thank you so much. We'll put all those links in the show notes as well so people can access it easily. But thank you so much for coming on, having a chat. It's been yeah awesome to catch up.
Frank Nesse: Nathan, it's a pleasure and thanks for making me think more about what I enjoy the most and what comment is all about. But have a great day and thanks again for the opportunity.
Nathan Bush: Thanks Frank. Enjoy that heater.
Frank Nesse: Thanks Nathan.
Nathan Bush: As I alluded to in the episode, I remember when I first met Frank when I was fairly new to E commerce and he described what commerce recovery does. I'm pretty sure that I blanked over. I was so new and the the solution was so advanced that I had absolutely no clue what he was talking about. Luckily today I fully appreciate the massive problem they are helping retailers with and I love the way Frank breaks it down so that it is really clear for us, even those of us who aren't particularly techy, I think we all understand the problem that that he sold me. Here are the three lessons I took from this conversation with Frank. Number one the realities of data transfer. Now, even in a world where we can create holograms of dead pop stars and have flying sausage deliveries, bulk updating product counts is still tricky. Blows my mind. Frank shared how using Delta updates and planning near real time not necessarily real time. Near real time updates was key for balancing up to date information for customers and tech stability. This is really important for high SKU and high volume retail. Make sure you've got a clear view of how your product inventory is updated and when. Number two Product buffers. And no, this isn't about slow loading pages, it's the number of in stock items you have available before you mark the product as out of stock. So for example, you might have only one left, but you actually show it
Nathan Bush: as zero on the website.
Nathan Bush: And some retailers will sell until it gets to zero, but some retailers will mark the product as unavailable when they have one or two left and this is to account for stolen, purchased or damaged stock. Buffers can be set across the whole store or for different categories or even individual products. Now it's really important to consider buffers when you're in Omnichannel number three, your problem is often someone else's problem. We heard from Frank that commissary started in a late night boardroom when they tried to solve a customer's problem when they were an agency. Rather than just use the new solution to solve that problem for that customer, they unsold the solution to other retailers who are facing the same challenges. So when you are solving problems that you think are unique to you and you come up against, make sure you keep in the back of your mind this might be a problem that you're solving today for you, but could be a new product or business opportunity for others. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday. We will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, come and visit us at E Suite. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to esweettalent.com where you can download the free E Commerce Salary Guide and sign up to our weekly e Commerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to Cart.
