E71: Keval Baxi

Richard Hill:
Hi there. I'm Richard Hill the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 71st episode. In this episode, I speak with Keval Baxi, CEO of Codal, a global company managing a portfolio of eCommerce stores from fortune 100 companies to innovative startups. With a team of over 200 developers, digital designers, and UX specialists, Keval and his team deliver and scale eCommerce development with a transparent approach. Working with the likes of QuickBooks, Pepsi and Motorola, Keval and his team's approach to UX and change is very refreshing.

Richard Hill:
In this episode, of course, we talk UX, where to start and where to scale, the value of UX and how small incremental change and projects can impact the business, some of the biggest mistakes Keval sees and what to look out for, and how to get in the minds of the customers and how to use data to build better. We also discuss managing remote team and Keval shares the tools and systems that keep everyone connected. And finally, we discuss the future of UX and how to get ahead of the curve.

Richard Hill:
If you enjoy this episode, please make sure you subscribe so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now, let's head over to this fantastic episode.

Richard Hill:
Welcome to the podcast, Keval. How are you doing?

Keval Baxi:
I'm doing well. Happy to be on.

Richard Hill:
Thank you for agreeing to this. Really excited to jump into all things dev, particularly UX. I think it will be good for the listeners to get a real feel for a little bit about Codal and very much about your passion for eCommerce. Where did that come from?

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely. We started Codal about 12 years ago, really focusing on experience, so enterprise applications, mobile apps. About five years ago, we saw this huge influx in brands going into eCommerce that have never touched it before. These are multi billion dollar brands that just really sold to the distributor model, so we really got excited about how we can take that experience of in-store shopping and make it digital, start building out all sorts of experiences, journeys, micro-sites.

Keval Baxi:
That's really where we got involved in building out experience that people will convert. Our sweet spot is 10 million dollar plus store, really focused on specific branded products that are competitive or hard to find. You're competing against new brands, old brands, et cetera.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, so a hard mix there. Working potentially with, especially back in the day, with a lot of maybe retailers who are successful that may be starting their eCom journey, but they're maybe already doing $100 mil on the retail through various stores.

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely.

Richard Hill:
But then, setting them up with their eCom offering, but then also taking eCom stores that are already doing maybe five mil, 10 mil, and then obviously, look at investing.

Richard Hill:
It's interesting wasn't it? I think when we speak to a lot of retailers, they think nothing of spending $500,000 grand on a new location. But then when we talk about a new website ...

Keval Baxi:
It's a hard journey.

Richard Hill:
And then we start to talk ... It's an interesting comparison I think. We start talking about costs and investment into whatever it may be, a half a million, a million, two million, into a location, into a store, into everything that goes into the fixtures, and fixings, and the marketing of a store to launch. And then we go, "Right, we're going to build a new website."

Richard Hill:
I think there was a time where it was unheard of where you would think, wow, we're going to spend $100,000 on a new website, $200,000 on a website, $500,000 on a new website. Whereas now, obviously, things have moved a little bit since the good old days if you think when things started out. But I think now, a typical listener of our podcast, they are very much more than up and running. They're doing pretty well. But I think a lot of the time, they're trying to get from five to 10, 10 to 20 mil. When we look at that, I think UX is a real hot topic.

Richard Hill:
I know that's one of your focuses. I think it would be good for you to give us your insight into UX and the role of UX that you feel UX has, in terms of helping stores grow.

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely. I look at UX when consulting with customers in three lenses. First is the customer. Second would be the service agent or the CSR. And then third, is marketing targeted personas that aren't your typical buyer. Each of those can have a different experience.

Keval Baxi:
To start with the customer standpoint, what we want to look at is what users are buying, how they're buying. Are they doing comparisons, are they trying to figure out their size, are they looking and searching and they don't really know what to buy so they want to see a product recommendation, a filter system?

Richard Hill:
Yep.

Keval Baxi:
Really determining and researching out what that user wants, and what they're looking for, and then reversing that into a proper design.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I think quite often what we see, there's a lot of sites that they really don't see the value as much when they're starting out, especially when they're getting to that first million or two. And then, obviously, certain simple tweaks ... Tweaks is the wrong thing, but certain simple changes on a site can have, honestly, such a huge impact to conversions and things.

Richard Hill:
When you're talking to potential clients, how do you get across the value of investing in UX? If someone is listening to this episode and thinking, "Well, do you know what? We're doing four million a year." How, what, why would I spend another $100,000-$200,000 on re-developing the site and focused on the UX? What's the real value of the return on the investment?

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely. The way that we work with brands is we want them to look at not the top line I need to go spend $250,000 to see what's going to be impactful. Instead, what we want to do is micro-experiments. We'll list out in a quick audit of three to five weeks for a brand site, list out experience we can test. Big things are around search, homepage repositioning, products results page, the branding and the colour selections of certain elements to the site, the heuristic journey of how the user operates.

Keval Baxi:
The goal is to build out micro-tasks that go across. And then, put a presented or forecasted ROI against it. Let's say we re-do search, make it artificial intelligence powered, we monitor what everyone is doing, we do an audit period of six weeks, and then implement, and change, and interact over the next six weeks after that.

Keval Baxi:
We start to see patterns. Those patterns directly either correlate with sales. Or let's say the goal is to get more distributors to sign up, or the goal is to get more drop shippers to sign up. Whatever that end goal is, we wrap it to that. That's the way that we want to look at investing in UX. It's not a, let's redesign the whole site. I wouldn't recommend that. I think that ends up costing a lot of money. Sometimes you stock things that are already working well moving forward.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's an interesting standpoint. I like that. I think, obviously, reinventing everything from scratch if it doesn't work, it's a big jump isn't it? What we're saying is taking one thing at a time, one project, whether that's site search, the homepage, the journey, et cetera. With our test space, we've got about six to eight weeks tracking with obviously the change before, during and after.

Richard Hill:
With your experience in the last six, 12 months, what are a couple of the key tests? You touched on a few there, but would it be those? Would it be specifically sites? When you say search, do you mean site search?

Keval Baxi:
No, site search, syndication search. To give you an example, a lot of customers ... Let's say you're looking for a jacket, you may have a brand of a jacket that you're already familiar with, so you'll Google that. The really well experienced sites, other competitors will start to come up. Oh, you're looking for A, B, C brand jacket. We have something better. We have something similar. Of course, you can do that with ads, as you know. However, let's do it on site, so when I search in my filters, when I'm on the site and I type in A, B, C, it comes up with, "Oh, here are some competitive ones." Or, "Here are some elements that you may like."

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Keval Baxi:
Another area is upsells. If I go on the site and I'm looking for model 100 and there's model 200 and 300, I want to make that experience really simple for the customer to say, "You know what? For an extra $75, I'm going to buy the higher model."

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Keval Baxi:
Really just using psychological search elements to increase ROI.

Richard Hill:
Anything ... Something springs to mind. I know the other day I was looking at shoes. I'm always looking at shoes and shirts. I'm a big guy with certain sizes. And size in eCommerce, obviously, that's always a thing fashion retailers, clothing retailers. You jump on a site as a client, you go to the particular product, and there's only the XL. There's no small, medium, large, double or triple XL.

Keval Baxi:
Exactly.

Richard Hill:
I logged onto a site the other day, the first shirt I looked at I liked, I went to XXL, which is my size normally, XXL. And then, whenever I go back to that site now, I only see when I go to the product pages, it's already jumped from where it's normally when you go and hovers over the medium and the large, it always defaults now to the XXL when I go to the products. When I go to search shirts, for example.

Richard Hill:
Same with shoes. When I jump on to look at shoes, on the same site, I think it was Gant, actually. Mention names, but Gant. I like that brand. I jumped on the other day, saw a size 12, and I thought that's probably something that's quite common, but it's not something I was that familiar with, to be honest.

Richard Hill:
Have you got any other, from your experience maybe, we get a lot of fashion retailers that listen to the podcast I know we do, any specific UX projects that they could look at doing to test that works? I think that was a really great example because it got me thinking, oh every time I go back now, I'm not seeing all these other shirts. I'm never going to be a small, doesn't matter how many times I go to the gym, that is never going to happen. I am always going to be a XXL pretty much.

Keval Baxi:
No, that's excellent. They're using dynamic targeting and knowing your device, your account, your log in, whichever way they're targeting it, and making sure that they present you the most relevant.

Keval Baxi:
One other way that we've helped some fashion retailers recently, is put in two things. One is a size selector. Instead of you figuring out you're an XL by reading numbers and saying these centimetres and this inches that means XL, what they've done is they've put in all competitor brands. You can say I wear this brand and my size is medium. Okay, so that medium correlates to my large.

Keval Baxi:
It really helps that customer not even think about what size they are. It reduces returns. When a fashion retailer put this on, they do about $40 million in sales a month, their return rate was about 28-29%, which is somewhat normal for fashion because people will typically buy a size bigger or a size smaller and return the rest. We saw that return rate drop by about seven/eight percent after the size selector. What we did is every time they would add multiple of the same SKUs in the cart, we would say, "Would you like to try our new size selector?" It started working. We started rewarding them by five dollars off or three dollars off-

Richard Hill:
The size selector, just to clarify, you're going in and I'm saying we're going from a XXL. With Boss, I'm a XXL. The selector, the configurator tool, software, knows that certain sizes are bigger/smaller. For example, Boss I think is a very small size.

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely.

Richard Hill:
A XXL is never going to fit me in Boss. It knows and then it knows then that their XXL is equal to a XXXL there, or a XL there, and then works out. Yeah.

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely. And it works really well. We saw the largest use case was around women's clothing, brands that they purchased in the past, but new brands that they're purchasing again. It really worked well. The return rate reduction basically increases the bottom line, so we have better ROI, better sell through rate. It worked out.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, you do see more and more of that stand. Not seeing that exact thing, but you see more and more of the spoke where you're putting in specific measurements. A slightly different thing, but you're putting in specific measurements. I think they're actually tailoring for you and a lot more of the spoke type services seem to be more around on the ... I've seen more as a male, I know that, so I'm sure ladies are in the same boat.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, honestly a lot of things happening there. You're getting a better customer experience, which is what it's all about. You're reducing the returns, which is that huge ... Your stat saying, is is it 29 plus percent? Which is obviously-

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, about 25-29 in fashion is pretty common, especially women's fashion targeted there. A lot of different sizes are purchased and most of the others are returned.

Keval Baxi:
One other are that we saw a huge impact of this UX experiment that we ran, was around the ability to social shop. It would give you a questionnaire based on Instagram photos, Twitter pictures of different either celebrities or outfits. This worked well, more for the targeted men population, where they said, "Oh, this outfit looks good. He's a full look. Let me add all to cart." They're buying the full bundle, top, bottom, shoes, hat at once, and not having to figure out mix and match or any of that-

Richard Hill:
You're buying a look aren't you, rather than just an item?

Keval Baxi:
Exactly, yeah. So now, you're increasing sales by bundling. And typically, lower value items can be marked up. The socks, if you buy them elsewhere, might be $15 bucks. Now, the socks are $30 because they're buying them in the bundle and saying, "Look, this bundle is $150 outfit." You get everything top down and it's a good selling point and they come back to buy those experiences again and again. It's also been another targeted approach-

Richard Hill:
I feel like we should move on, but I actually think that those two are great, so I'm not going to move on. I'm going to try and see if I can squeeze one more out of you. I think there's a couple of great ones there, that I know are quite rare really. I think, obviously, more so in fashion they're not as rare. What's one more? Let's go away from fashion. Put fashion away for a minute. We may be in something that's a bit more tied to our margin, maybe technology products, that type of industry. What is one other UX functionality piece there that they should look at, or test, or you've seen you've got some good insight into maybe improving basket values, or reducing returns, or whatever it may be?

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, absolutely. On the tech side, we have products like drones, the computers, electronics that individuals may be familiar with a portion of the specs. I need this much memory or I need this much battery time, but they're not necessarily familiar with the broader specs of the product, how new it is, how old it is.

Keval Baxi:
We started to build a quiz recommendation engine that's worked really well, where users would say, "Okay, I want to buy a new computer. Here's my use case. Here's the goal. Here's by budget." And then, it starts to recommend products in those areas. And then, there's a value added service: Warranties, other products that they will add in that configuration. I need product set up support, I need a video call with an expert, all those things.

Keval Baxi:
And at the end, what we found is that the average user will add those increases cart value, increases insurance. And then, we rolled in pay now, or pay in four instalments, 10 instalments. It really starts to increase those basket values and loyalty of that customer coming back.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. That's great. I love it. We do a lot in the tech space. Obviously, those margins can be really tight there, so if we're improving the basket side, if we're getting the stick on the side, we're getting people to stay, or improving the SEO, or it compounds, then that's great.

Richard Hill:
I don't think we can do an episode about UX without talking about Apple's latest update. It's not that new now, but what are your thoughts on how that's affected UX?

Keval Baxi:
It definitely is still in process of impacting given the update is recent. The brands are still adapting and figuring out how to interact with that. What we've found is the least impact is around messaging, really telling the customer why they should allow what the goal is, what we're going to do as a brand to help the customer out. And then, the Apple pop up comes up, and they hit allow, and go. It's really pre-educating eight second video, three slider images, something to really inform that user so they're really just clicking yes, I agree, instead of them looking at it for the first time and saying, "They're going to collect all my data. What are they going to do with this?"

Richard Hill:
What is this? Yeah.

Keval Baxi:
Exactly. That's worked out well for larger retailers and brands-

Richard Hill:
Have you got any good example sites that any of the listeners could go and look at, that have got that implemented? I have not seen that myself, to be honest. Is there any sites you could recommend off the top of your head, so my listeners can go and have a look at, that's got a good site implementation there?

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, absolutely. I know Fashion Nova on Shopify is doing that, pretty big fashion retailer. They've experimented a couple different layers. We've been monitoring and watching the AB test, and the multi-variant test going through.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Keval Baxi:
There are ... I think fashion typically hits first around the traffic volumes and users of implementations. Some of the conservative brands will leave it as is, see how it goes, and then implement. Even some technology sites Best Buy of Canada and then Staples of Canada, both of them are this implementations, and they've done similar journeys for the user. Yeah, definitely some are more creative, where they'll give you a video and a couple questions before. And then, some are just informing you with a banner ad and then saying, "Click it off."

Richard Hill:
Yeah. No, I would recommend obviously the sites you've mentioned there. We'll tack them all up, but go and check those out guys and see how those guys are doing it. But I think yeah, it sounds great. I mean, just having a little bit of that pre-education, obviously keeping it quite tight at the same time. We don't want a 30 second video in there, just that little snippet.

Keval Baxi:
Yeah.

Richard Hill:
Obviously, you've been doing this a while. We were talking before. You've got about 220 on the team at the moment, give or take. Obviously, it's rising literally daily. Obviously, a lot of projects you've worked on, your team works on. What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes that you see that our listeners should avoid when they're looking at the UX side of things? I think there's, obviously, a lot of different things. A lot of people take certain things for granted I think when they're looking at the UX side, but what are some of the things that the listeners should look to avoid that you see a lot of?

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, the number one thing is blueprinting and researching. I would say a lot of brands want to jump right into design, build and execute. What we do, is if they're a retail brand, we compare it saying, "Look, before you pick a store location and you're doing an analysis of who is going to come to that store, where the location is, where the market cap is, what the blue print looks like, what the layout looks like."

Keval Baxi:
We want that same element to translate into the website. A lot of brands want to go directly into let's buy a theme, let's jump in, let's see if it works, and we'll learn down the road.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Keval Baxi:
Instead, what we're trying to do is we at Codal have compiled 35,000 data points of what works, what doesn't work, colour theme logic, and we use a couple third party solutions that also provide us that data. One of them is called Baymard Institute, excellent eCommerce data source, gives you a lot of user testing data, research data. And that's the first thing that we really want to push customers for, is do not skip this step.

Keval Baxi:
It seems like a business step, not really technical, but when you dive deeper into it, it is technical. It's understanding what you're using, what your page load time should be, what user is hitting your home page, versus your PDP pages directly. All of these questions and research we want to map out before we put code down, and start designing, and programming the site.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, so biggest mistake, people just jump in, obviously that's a certain level of merchant. Or they see the first draft, "Oh, yeah that's fine." And then, six months later, "Oh, actually, we didn't think through about the size configuration. We didn't think about the fact that we've got the roadmap of X, Y, Z manufacturer now bringing in this type of range. We haven't a category for that. And now, we put an extra category and that's going to roll over the top now and it doesn't fit." That's some basic stuff.

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely.

Richard Hill:
Think of it a it like ... Your suggestion is if you're to roll out a store, you don't just go and build a store, an actual physical store. This whole lay out, the flow, the customers.

Richard Hill:
I think that sounds great, but in reality, I think eCom is still sitting here listening to that. They're tight on time, maybe tight on resource. They want to do a bit of that themselves before they maybe speak to a development team. What advice would you give them to really first steps? Okay, we know we need a new site. It's a similar question, but you've got a budget and a time constraint more so because you've not got the hundreds of millions of pounds to spend, dollars/pounds. You're on a budget, potentially or smaller budget. What would be your thoughts on that?

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, so smaller budget, common. Even if you're a really large enterprise, you may have a specific budget to run an eCom site. Typically, on smaller budget sides, what we want to do is we look at what is already invented and push that to one side. Let's not reinvent the cart page, let's not reinvent a working filters pixotomy for your industry. We can pick all those up based on templates, purchasing, third party data sources.

Keval Baxi:
We want to run through that really quick, and then we want to take the larger portion of your budget and put that into differentiations. What can we do different on your site that is going to attract more customers for your target? Whether it be a micro-quiz that the user takes, or sizing chart for fashion, or a different type of home page because you have two big personas, a retailer purchaser and a wholesaler purchaser. Looking at those elements.

Keval Baxi:
Then what we would do is we have a list of really well built infrastructure templates, pre-built plug ins, apps that we can start to put in. We backlog that and say, "Look, these things should be replaced with custom work at x milestone." Rather it's the ROI, or timeframe, or sales because we can make the return even higher.

Keval Baxi:
And then, really take the budget that you have to focus on the differentiations, the brand specific, UI, UX is really important. We want to make sure the customer can navigate correctly, the branding is unified, the experience is perfect, as much as it can be with that budget.

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, that's the area I'd look, versus trying to go build out a custom platform, or [inaudible 00:25:58] when you don't have the right amount of budget, and things like that.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, no. I mean, that really makes sense. I think that would resonate. Obviously, there's a lot of platforms out there, but ultimately if you're a certain size, what you're trying to do will have been done-ish normal ways.

Keval Baxi:
Exactly.

Richard Hill:
There will be things are out there that you can use as a temporary. And then, that may still work, but then you can then go actually we learned X, Y, Z what we need to do for the new build, so when we engage the dev team or new agency et cetera, we need to talk about this.

Keval Baxi:
I was going to say one other thing is using the Wayback Machine.

Richard Hill:
Yes.

Keval Baxi:
It's a great site that you can type in pretty much any of your competitors URL and see how they progressed over time. Let's say you take a big retailer, you type their name in, type their URL in and you can see what the progression is. That gives you a little bit of free research because you can see they have this home page, and they changed it, and then they made eight more changes, but it stayed very similar, but definitely converting more, and what they've done with their product page, and their search pages.

Keval Baxi:
That's another way of researching. You just have to be very careful with that, just because those brands are also researching and they don't know if it works or not, but you can draw some consistencies and patterns as you scale.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's good. That's a good resource actually, archived or old I think, isn't it?

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. It's always quite good to look at your own progression as well. You think, did we really look like that even two, three, five, 10 years ago? Your own internalization. But yeah, obviously looking at companies, looking at people. If you're at that 10 million trying to get to that 50 million, there will always be somebody out there that's done that, in most industries, in most cases, so what were their changes? They might be very slight. You might have to literally two screens up, oh actually yeah. Or even outsource that piece, potentially get somebody on the team. What I want you to do is have a look at specifically around each year, put a presentation together, finish the year.

Richard Hill:
I think coming to you, you've very much got this design development focused as an agency. And obviously, you've got big teams in both. And I think from my experience, I've got a lot of experience working with designers and developers. They're a very different breed, a very, very different breed normally. They know. How have you brought your teams together? That seems like it's so key getting everybody working together. Obviously, great for the culture of the business, but also making sure the output is both teams are ticking their boxes and they're happy. What sort of things are you doing to bring your teams close together?

Keval Baxi:
At Codal we've merged both teams together from day one. Our goal is to operate as a spunk team two week increments. Everyone is involved in every step of the way. As the research team and design side of the house is conducting what needs to be designed, what needs to be built out in the future if they're going to test out the experiments that we're running, the development team is interjecting. They're commenting on the design mock ups before they go to the clients. They're saying feasibility. They're saying, "Look these assets are pretty strong. Load time is going to be impacted." Or we're spending too much data and there's some issues with performance.

Keval Baxi:
They're going through these mock ups as the clients go through from a different lens. Typically, clients are more involved on the design side. That's what they understand: look and feel of the experience, but they stay away from the developmental. They've hired an agency to run that side for them, so we want to educate the client as well. It's a joint approach. It's not a waterfall approach where you design then build-

Richard Hill:
They're very much digital designers, in that they understand obviously, they put that design on, but they understand there are some limitations on what the impact could be if we do X, Y, Z on the development, whether that's site speed or ...

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely. And then as the journey goes on, let's say we finish designing the site, engineering teams have reviewed it, clients have said thumbs up, let's really start to build this and launch it, as that's going on page by page, the designers are actually going back after it's built, and looking, and giving an evaluation of design and Q&A, issues that they see that they didn't forecast. A lot of times there's content differences that make the page breaks different or the scroll is different on a new iPhone versus the older iPhone, and really looking at that side.

Keval Baxi:
The design team re-engages in development. Now, they take a smaller role. The development team is taking a larger role. The whole product, once the site is ready to go live, we do a launch day, launch week depending on the size of the site run through. So, designers, quality assurance, developers, product managers, eCommerce engineers that all go through the site from their alliance, put their feedback in, and then maybe one last iteration to make sure that site is ready to go for their customers.

Richard Hill:
That's great. That gives us a lot of things to think about there. One thing I'm really interested about, although, just thinking about the size of your organization. It's 200 or 200 plus people on the team. I know you're across United States, and UK, and other countries. What insights would you give to the listeners that are growing a company, obviously in size, 200 plus people, 300 people, 400 people? At the moment, it's obviously a bit more challenging than it was 18 months ago. In terms of keeping those teams connected when you've got the distance. Obviously, normally you would be flying over, and meeting. You've probably got about X amount of new staff you've never met, et cetera, et cetera.

Richard Hill:
What are some of the things you would say that have kept you really, obviously you've doing exceptionally well in this 18 months, but what things in terms of building the firm, in terms of the culture, retention, just making the company do well? What are the tips you would give to our listeners?

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, absolutely. Really, communication. Rather it be virtual or physical now that things are reopening back up, events retrospectives. We do a lot of team, used to be bars and happy hours, and events, and team building activities, but with the whole pandemic situation, we've done virtual. Teams will share their learning lessons from one project. They'll explore ideas. We've created and utilized multiple approaches. We have Slack to set up engagement with folks that probably don't engage, like a developer with a design strategized. They may interact every day, but a quality assurance engineer may not really interact with a design strategy.

Keval Baxi:
We try to connect these links of one-to-one. We use an app called Donut. It gives a random assigned individual to a random assigned individual every day-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, like a [inaudible 00:33:37]. They jump on another little chat.

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, 15 minute video, 10 minute video, whatever the time allows. Some time zones are different and individuals are busy et cetera. Whatever it allows, five to 20 minutes. Learn something, post it, learn something else. We found that it really helps people connect even further than just an assigned element. You may get along with everyone on your team because you work with them for 10 weeks on a project, but you don't know the other individuals that are working in legal, or operations, or sales. This was our approach to bridging that gap together.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Anything else on Slack? I'm a massive fan of Slack. Do you have separate channels for each project, each part of the project? Did you say Donut? Was it called Donut?

Keval Baxi:
It's an app on the Slack Marketplace.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Any other sort of app recommendations for Slack? I'm personally ... I live on Slack. We found some similar ones for bring the team together on Slack. I've not heard of Donut. Actually, we'll have a look at that. Yeah.

Keval Baxi:
Any experiments we're running, we do hooks with all the eCommerce platforms, so they're custom apps, but the idea is that we want to have a Slack or teams channel with our clients, depending on what the customer use is. That brings the teams to work together and really closely. You're not waiting for the next invite. If you have a question, you're posting it.

Richard Hill:
You've got client channel, as well as internal.

Keval Baxi:
We share almost every client out there, teams or Slack that is connected with us, in there we populate automatic metric, so sales if we're looking at that, or traffic, performance load times, et cetera, just to keep everyone informed.

Richard Hill:
Pushing in from experiments like sale stats are getting pushed in every Monday at 9:00 pushing whatever it may be, either internal or client and team can see. Yeah, great. Okay, that's fantastic. That gives us a real insight there.

Richard Hill:
Crystal ball time. Future of UX. We sat here. We won't go too far because it's like cat years, I think, isn't it, eCommerce? So much is happening. 18 months from now we're sat here, we're on episode 200 of the eCom@One podcast, and we're talking about the latest, and greatest, and what's happened in the last couple of months UX wise and what's working, what do you see? What area is there going to be a lot of focus where people are going to be able to get potentially a head start at the moment, if they were to look at this now? A couple of things.

Keval Baxi:
Yeah. I think one of the big areas that I see a big push towards is channels, so the omni channel experience for users. You see a lot of acquisitions in those spaces. You see a lot of new market places pop up. It's to get your product SKUs onto other marketplaces. You look at just a platform like Wish or Walmart, people underestimate how much that increases sales. Linking your taxonomy data, your brand data, your product data and putting it onto multiple channels, is really the future. If you look at it from a business standpoint, having a store standalone on a street, is much more difficult to get foot traffic than your store being in a very busy mall.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Keval Baxi:
That's the approach that we are looking at, is where there are so many marketplaces that are popping up all over the world. How can we get products that are already sold, let's say in the UK, into America, or only in America into Australia?

Richard Hill:
So channels, getting on multiple channels, multiple channels in your country and obviously more importantly, the tell all, the holy revenue streams potentially in additionally countries. There's literally hundreds, isn't there, if not several hundred of different channels?

Keval Baxi:
You've got it. I think that's the next gen is everyone has their own ecosystem and platform, and now they're expanding farther.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. That's the thing I think everyone talks about. The Amazon's, the Ebay's, the Google Shop, the Facebook DPAs. And then there's a second tier. And then, there's about 10 to 15 names that get mentioned, but hang on there is literally hundreds and hundreds.

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, and those added together are more than potentially ... We talk a lot about Google shopping on the podcast. We have, obviously at eCom@One, we're a Google shopping agency. But in terms of channel, that's a massive focus for us.

Richard Hill:
One other future crystal ball thing. What would you say? Channels is a big one, focusing on channels and different marketplaces. What would be one other?

Keval Baxi:
I think one other area is alternative shopping methods, so voice, text message based shopping. It's already really big in some Asian countries, where you're texting, and you're finding the products that you need, and then ordering, and then voice. As we see the whole AI side of here's what you need today, can I place that order for you? The answer is yes and then you get your new set of products that you need every week, or every month, or some sort of recurring.

Keval Baxi:
I think those areas are pretty large. And then within that, just augmented reality. You're buying furniture, you're buying a showpiece, how can you see it in your house before? You already see brands exploring into this, but it becomes RFPs that we're receiving, and documents, all the phase threes, the phase fours are all getting into these areas.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I'm completely with you on that. Will Amazon take Bitcoin by then?

Keval Baxi:
That's the magic question.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. What do you think about crypto-payments? Obviously, eCommerce still is 18 months from now. Do you think pretty much 50% of eCom will take crypto-payment? What are your thoughts on it?

Keval Baxi:
Yeah, so there are a couple platforms that are already introducing it. You can add in gateway that take crypto. We've actually built a product for a client of ours that converts it. You can go to any eCom right now, pay with crypto, and it basically gives you a gift card back so you can use it, like Amazon or Best Buy-

Richard Hill:
They're buying the crypto from you in a sense?

Keval Baxi:
Exactly. And then, using a gift card. I definitely think it's a big move ahead. I think the process of taxation and reporting on that is probably a deterrent for a lot of bigger organizations. I'm sure those regulatory things will get solved. That's the next journey, for sure.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, there's a lot of specialist that are taking that on as well. I know a couple quite well.

Richard Hill:
Okay, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Now, we always like to end every episode with a book recommendation. If you had to recommend one book to our listeners what would that be?

Keval Baxi:
Let's base it off the UX side. I would recommend a book called Designing Search. It's by Greg Nudelman. It's an excellent book that really shows you what people are missing in search. The search isn't just type in some text and see what comes up. Let's really look at auto complete, faceted searches, display more like this really never have a no results page. We always want a brand display, give the user something to purchase.

Keval Baxi:
I think it's an excellent way to think about the value and the power of search, where I think a lot of brands, even larger brand we work with, that's the secondary thought. As we Google everything, as we look at everything, search is probably very highly used by a consumer more than the brand thinks.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's great. We'll get that one on order. Thank you so much for being on the show. For the guys that are listening and want to find out more about you, more about Codal, what's the best way to do that?

Keval Baxi:
Our website, Codal.com. Any questions they have, feel free to send us a message, Go@Codal.com. We're Twitter, Facebook, Instagram as well. We publish a lot on the eCommerce world every couple weeks.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Keval for being on the show. We'll see probably in 18 months if any of your predictions come true. We'll get you back on the show. We'll probably share face-to-face at some point, so I look forward to sharing you again.

Keval Baxi:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Richard Hill:
Thank you for listening to the eCom@One eCommerce podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter that leaves a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eComOne, the eCommerce marketing agency.