E74: Robert Tarabcak

Richard Hill:
Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One, welcome to our 74th episode. I'm officially back after two weeks away in the Lake District, trekking, walking, wild swimming, and genuinely eating my body weight in the local pubs and restaurant and I'm raring to go. And boy are things hotting up already. Busy time a year ahead for the agencies and some amazing guests lined up for the coming episodes. In this episode, I speak with Robert Tarabcak CEO and founder of Korkuma, a live streaming platform for online stores. Rob is at the forefront of live streaming in the eCommerce space and his unique experience in video and live streaming and eCommerce is very insightful.

Richard Hill:
In this episode, we talk specifically about live streaming and eCommerce and how simple and cost effective it can be to get started. Why you should look testing live streaming now and become an early adopter of what we both think will be a big growth area for stores. We step through some of the challenges that you should avoid and where to focus your live streaming. Rob talks niche specific live streaming case studies and which ones can really benefit you. 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. How you doing Rob?

Robert Tarabcak:
Hi Richard. Thanks for having me.

Richard Hill:
No problem at all. Looking forward to this one, something I am very interested in and we're going to be talking all things live streaming. And when my colleague Carrianne who organizes a lot of the podcasts mentioned you guys and yourself and the company, I was like, "Right. I'm looking forward to this one." So live streaming, obviously, we do a little bit of live streaming in the business, but when it comes to eCommerce live streaming I think it is quite a unique and new, fairly new topic that's not talked about a lot, so I'm really looking forward to getting into things. So I think before we start, tell us a bit about yourself and how Korkuma came about.

Robert Tarabcak:
I'm 29, I'm married and I wanted to be entrepreneur my entire life. And in 2019, we started our entrepreneurial journey with B2C product and addition to Korkuma that we started working on just at the end of last year.

Richard Hill:
So tell me a bit more about how the idea came about, obviously, eCommerce been around forever, well, forever in the digital space that is. But live streaming, obviously quite a new, newer thing for eCommerce obviously live streaming and streaming has been out for it for many, many years but for eCommerce. How did the idea come about to put the two together?

Robert Tarabcak:
This is an exciting story to be honest. So it all began last year when our country was ravaged by the second phase or wave of pandemics. During that time many businesses have been struggling to open their offline shops. But at the same their traditional offline customers were shifting towards digital world. And so we challenged ourselves and asked the question, how can we blur the line between offline and online shopping? Can we do it? Has ever anyone thought about this? And we've seen that there are, especially in Europe and in the US many companies playing out with that idea.

Robert Tarabcak:
But the trend started in Asia four years ago and went up from zero to 180, more than $180 billion in revenues coming just from the live stream and shopping on top of the live stream. And it's now more than 20% of the share of eCommerce revenue in Asia, which is a huge number. So based on all of those facts, we started doing much more research, we started interviewing businesses, how they struggle while having eCommerce experience on their business websites and we decided to come up with Korkuma to help businesses grow.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. So obviously a fairly new industry specific when you get straight in there and obviously quite a new venture for yourself, but how does it work exactly? So you're any eComm store you're listening to this podcast, "You're thinking this sounds quite exciting." But how exactly does it work? So you've got your Shopify, your Magento, your WooCommerce, you think, "Let's do some live streaming." Obviously, where do we start? How does it work?

Robert Tarabcak:
So to make it super simple for listeners, today all of the eCommerce sites are mostly static. And we've seen some improvements when those eCommerce sites started implementing video or product oriented videos, but mostly they are static. So what end customers see is a huge list of items, nothing is moving, there's no story behind the product. So what live commerce does is that it brings storytelling behind your product, to your website in a very unique way. It combines a video together with a chat and there are a couple of types of live commerce actually currently two, but we think there's going to be a third one. And I think that's going to be your next question, the types of live commerce. And basically it's bringing live shopping shared experiences to the eCommerce website. So end customers are not only able to browse the website as it is, but they can also engage with someone explaining in unique way the products that they offer.

Richard Hill:
It's exciting isn't it. As you're saying now I'm thinking of all the different in our business obviously we used to have stores, now we have two agencies, but if you think of a typical maybe customer service inquiry comes in or a query comes in about a product, an individual is speaking to you on the phone or via email or via whatever method one-on-one. Whereas what you've got here is a one on many which is very much... in our business it's very much if we have an opportunity to speak one on many, if we're speaking at an event, that's fantastic. If we're speaking on a webinar to 500 people, 1, 000 people, 5,000 people, I think about five and a half thousand people we've had on webinars before, that's amazing. Now this is basically a very similar thing if not very, very similar thing. So I think it's so, so exciting. Why would you say companies should invest in live eCommerce or live streaming with eCommerce?

Robert Tarabcak:
I think you said it right that it's not about the cost, but it's about the investment that a company I think needs to do in order to bring live sales events to their website. The term live commerce is a new term as you said. Many people or many companies that we compete with are saying that it's live shopping, some people say it's live sales, some people say it's live commerce. We stick with live sales because we focus on sales and there's a learning curve for all of the market. So it's not about the investment only to a campaign, to marketing materials before the event, to production of the content. But it's also about the education that business needs to do in order to leverage from live commerce. And the investment can be tiny and we especially focus on small and medium businesses because one of our values is value for money.

Robert Tarabcak:
And actually Korkuma is a sales tool, that is an investment, not a cost, lowest starting prices on the market for all the businesses. Actually we are 14 times less expensive than competitors because we have that intellectual property, we've been there, we focus on bringing the values for the lowest price. But the benefits of live commerce are there's a variety of them, we split them into five categories, there's performance and in performance there is increased traffic, higher conversion, bigger basket value, then there's easiness to use. So we have very, very simple setup, in five minutes, you can go live on your website.

Robert Tarabcak:
We are also working on training materials, we want to provide a library of both written and video tutorials to guide you through the setup of the sales events, so the sales analysis that we also offer, we also want a care customer service. And one of the biggest benefits is obviously less returns because once you are able to educate your customers about the products they are going to make a purchase decision about, there is a much higher chance that they will not be returning their products.

Richard Hill:
That's a huge one, isn't it? Certain, obviously, industries as well it's such a huge element the returns aspect, if you're in fashion, for example, big, big problems there or big, big hurdles, big, big cost centers potentially. Now obviously, you can go on a live with a member of the merchants team that's going to reduce things. I think all sorts of ideas start to spring to mind to me of what can be done, it's a really exciting development. And I know it's been around a little while, but for me it's quite new to be completely honest. Obviously, we do live streaming ourselves but live streaming and eCom together, it's sort of blowing my mind thinking the sort of different things you could do. You could potentially do things like auctions as well, could you not? You can have a live auction on your site, something like that is that a possibility?

Robert Tarabcak:
Yep. That's one of the use cases that we aim for as well.

Richard Hill:
You could have a weekly, monthly auction or various auctions, obviously you're doing customer service style product reviews. When you think about the TV buying channels, they're quite often on in our house, not that I ever buy anything, I just like to listen to the... There's a few people we've had on here, who've been on them. And I just like to listen to the salesmanship of them and the way they structured, but you could do a same sort of thing, I guess.

Robert Tarabcak:
Yep. One of my ambitions is for larger eCommerce businesses is to as you said have TV channels on your website where every single customer knows that, "Okay, for me, I'm a hardware buyer, so I can hear news and I can see new products coming out every let's say work day at 10:00 AM." So whenever I will join at 10:00 AM I'll have a guy expert telling me and others what's new, is it the CPU, is it a graphic card? And then for, I don't know, pregnant women, you can have sessions every Wednesday at 5:00, for example.

Richard Hill:
And then they get used to it, they know that every week, every day, whatever their slot is that that-

Robert Tarabcak:
Exactly.

Richard Hill:
... matches their requirements and then you're building. I love it. I love it. So obviously you're working with a lot of different merchants, you've been in the game for a while now. What challenges have eCommerce stores faced with live and eCommerce and have they overcome them? What are some of the things you could tell our listeners to avoid that you've seen over the year or so?

Robert Tarabcak:
So the very first struggle or challenge is to grasp the idea of live commerce, to understand the difference between one-to-one customer care and one to many live sales event. The other ones are in the investment and how they are going to calculate the budget for upcoming months, how they are going to integrate this new kind of unique way that you can sell products to your customers. They think that it's going to cost them huge amount of money and they have to hire salesmen or influencers or build up a studio with great camera and stuff. But what we've seen is that the opposite works best. Even if you are individual single owner of your business and you have your own brand, your own product, you yourself can go live using your phone in many ways.

Robert Tarabcak:
And the more authentic the content is, the better it performs. And we usually see numbers like 50% add to cart ratio. So then it all depends on marketing, how are you going to create a campaign? How are you going to bring customers to your live sales event? Because once you install our plug into your website, it doesn't mean that something will pop up on the website. It's all private, it's all exclusive on this specific link. We put a suffix at the end of your URL that will initiate the stream. And then obviously the entire education about how all of these things work.

Richard Hill:
I think there's quite a few things there. I think with any type of video, people get a bit wrapped up in the tech, but you're saying as I would agree, you just need a mobile phone and hit live stream or record and you're live. Whereas I think people go, "Okay, I need the camera. I need the lights. I need the mic." Obviously, we've invested in that over the years, but we started with a mobile phone saying, "Hey, we're doing a webinar on Wednesday do you want to join us? It's going to be about X, Y, Z." And this is whatever 10 years ago, whatever and obviously I think people can just stall and get caught in the headlights a little bit because they over think the tech. Whereas, obviously, any mobile phone that's been bought in the last five years is going to be good enough literally I think.

Robert Tarabcak:
Exactly.

Richard Hill:
And then I think it's like you say, just potentially the owner or somebody with a bit personality I think behind the camera, it can help with just that authentic piece. Rather than a big stage thing that maybe might come across a little bit unauthentic, especially to start with, obviously I think you've got to start that journey haven't you?

Robert Tarabcak:
Yep.

Richard Hill:
If you're starting live streaming, you're not really expecting or expected to have a full studio and this, that and the other. I'm not saying you don't have to have that, but you don't have to wait to get that before you start I don't think.

Robert Tarabcak:
No.

Richard Hill:
So one of the problem potentially then you're saying and things that people got to think about, that your technology and technology like yours will create the ability to live stream from your store and from a URL on your store, but obviously you still got to get people on that live stream. So what would you say about getting people on the live stream? What have you seen some of your successful clients do to get people on their live streams?

Robert Tarabcak:
So what's super important, obviously, is to do direct mails to your existing customers and then to do some promotions and paid posts on social media, definitely. And I just want to say that we decided to make Korkuma six months ago and we launched in private mode and we're testing it out with a couple of first customers. We're going to launch publicly soon and for us it's very important to be listed in marketplaces like Shopify, Shopware, WooCommerce and stuff like that so that's our primary focus.

Richard Hill:
I think obviously most companies have got their email lists like you say, they've got their social platforms, obviously we've got different episodes on driving traffic via there, but obviously email is usually the quickest route and the cheapest route, because sending an email is very, very cheap, if not negligible. Fantastic. So you've touched on it a little bit, but user experience, I think is so key with eCommerce now. Obviously, trying to win that customer, making sure that the site... We've done many, many episodes on user experience, but how will live stream affect user experience? How will it potentially improve user experience?

Robert Tarabcak:
So it will not affect in any way to be honest. We've been very thoughtful about this, I'm ex user experience designer, and we've seen competitors putting the live stream full screen, and then they even overlap your shopping experience, your basket and everything with their product. And it's about connecting the IRPs and stocks and all of that, we don't do it. We wanted to make the experience as simple as possible. So if business already has its own experience, we don't alter it, we put the live stream on top of it together with the chat. And it's like when you FaceTime with somebody, you have the guy in full screen that's our website and then yourself is somewhere in the corner minimized and that's what people see on the eCommerce site, when they want they can go full screen in order to see details of the product but they can browse the website. There are so many upsell opportunities because you can add to basket what people sell to you. But at the same time you can go wherever you want on the website and search for another product.

Richard Hill:
So it doesn't interfere with that user experience at all.

Robert Tarabcak:
Exactly.

Richard Hill:
But I would say enhances the user experience because obviously your journey around the store is not hindered, but you've got somebody there talking through something you may well be looking at specifically, or they're talking about a certain range you're on the website and you're getting a commentary in the background or a discussion to help that sale.

Robert Tarabcak:
And you can also ask questions if you want and we also have moderator features. So during the live stream the streamer can answer your questions, but also moderators can do the same on the background.

Richard Hill:
That's great. So obviously it's fairly new tech would you say you're in beta or you're almost out of beta now and obviously you've worked with a few test clients and whatnot. Tell us about a test case or an actual client that you're working with that uses software and how it's impacted sales just give our listeners a bit of an insight into some actuals.

Robert Tarabcak:
So we have a couple of unique clients of ours that I would like to tell you about. We had a rock band selling merchandise on their website and a Q&A way when they discounted their merchandise by 30%. And they've seen a huge growth in sales and you can check out our case studies they are very early, but surprisingly everything went beyond our expectations. Then we are to consult with the... and they already tested it out with the biggest grocery site in Czech Republic, they specialize on the delivery. The idea is to put chefs in front of the eCommerce site to give people recipes and ideas on what they can cook and at the same time buy those items and the recipes. We also have cosmetics, automotive, beauty, fashion, that's getting super popular. And we also are partnering with marketing agencies because the season is just starting and we want businesses to prepare for Black Friday and Christmas, because the sooner they start the better.

Richard Hill:
I think a switch has definitely... We're sitting here and it is the right at the beginning of September and I think a switch has been flicked in the last 24 hours. It literally seems that everybody is coming back up holiday or approaching return it's like, "We need to get sorted out and we need to-"

Robert Tarabcak:
And they need to have a unique way to grab their customers attention and that's exactly what we did.

Richard Hill:
So maybe tell me a bit more about fashion, a bit more specifics around what you could do with the fashion side of things. We have a lot of listeners from fashion brands, from fashion retailers, eCommerce stores, what's some of your experience using live eCommerce with fashion?

Robert Tarabcak:
So the best thing is to drop new collections always. And the second scenario or use case is when you have a full stock of one item and you're not able to sell it out. For that consumer live sales is the best way, because then you can bring influencers or celebrities or whoever you work with to showcase that item and we recommend to connect it with discounts. So only during the event you should make a discount for your product that will be very important to your customers.

Richard Hill:
That really resonates. I know that will resonate with a lot of listeners. So you could have on your live stream yourself representing your store, a influencer, that is one of your influences that... one of the episodes we just did was with an influencer agency. And then talking specifically about our brand new range that the influencer and you are obviously promoting. And you're doing a partnership there with the influencer, you're live streaming and it's just like that, you're getting out of there. No, I like that, I think that's fantastic.

Richard Hill:
So I think it all sounds quite straightforward, but I think in reality is it this easy? So I think some of our some of our merchants will be like, "Right, okay, we'll go to your store and we'll hook up your website, et cetera, in the show notes and whatnot and we'll talk about that a little bit more at the end as well." Okay. We've signed up, we've installed but it all sounds a little bit too easy. Do you think there's any from a technical point of view, it probably is for them, no doubt it is easy to set up.

Richard Hill:
But in terms of getting people on the live stream and getting our technophobe buyers, I think especially this last 18 months, I think that a lot of industries they've got obviously a lot busier, a lot of different demographics of clients. A lot of the older population are buying more online, thinking they might be a bit more reticent listening to live streams, or they might struggle with your technology to watch live streams. Do you think there's anything there or is it just straightforward? It's just a case of, "Right. Click. Watch." Or is there anything else there-

Robert Tarabcak:
It's like that to be honest so we've been there. We made our YouTube competitor before and we had our own app that you have to as an end consumer download to your mobile phone and all of those are barriers for end customers. And so we got rid of all of them. So whenever you are on your popular social media that you use frequently, let's say Instagram and you will see a story with a link to event happening live, you will just swipe up and you'll end up in the browser of the Instagram, at the same time, the live stream will initiate. And then you can do whatever you want as you've done before on that eCommerce site and engage with the content at the same time, it is that easy. The barriers businesses can see are in the production of planning of that content and making it all happen. So that's why it's very important for us and for the competitors to educate the market about this new category.

Richard Hill:
No. I like it. I like it. I think obviously if the users are used to watching things on Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram Live, it's a seamless transition between that and your store that's going to make things a lot more easier for that transition piece if you like, from a well-known branded social media platform to maybe quite an unknown really, relatively eCom store if they're on those channels and they can just ultimately swipe up and watch a live. That's fantastic. I think obviously it's relatively new-ish the live and the eCom together and I'd like to think that there's probably not too many listeners actually doing this now. And I would love for some of our listeners to be some of the first to try and the first to engage with this type of service.

Richard Hill:
I would really encourage people to try this. I don't normally say that without trying stuff ourself, but I just know that the amount of lives we're doing as a business and live content and content has really been transformational for us. So it's an area that I would be strongly looking to back and back and hopefully I won't be eating my words in 12 months time. But in 12 months time if we were to do this again, what would you say, where do you think live commerce will be? What's the future of live commerce? What's coming down the pipe? Our listeners really want to get ahead of the curve now especially now we've got this Q4, but then going into next year to really squeeze as much out of live streaming what are the things they should be looking out for?

Robert Tarabcak:
So obviously we are going to add more and more features that businesses will definitely appreciate and one of them is restream. So on your eCommerce the live stream will be used for sales, on social media you can have the live stream happening at the same time from the same source for marketing purposes, driving people to your store. So that's very exciting for us to connect the eCommerce live stream with social media live stream in real time. So you're not grabbing the attention of your potential customers using only a classy social media marketing with static banners, let's say, but you are restreaming the live experience on social media as well.

Robert Tarabcak:
The other thing that we have in our pipeline is to start working on the marketplace where businesses can meet people willing to go live on their behalf. When they struggle with the production of the content, we have now feature of prerecorded videos, so you can make the live sales video beforehand, upload it and then make it looking like live. But sometimes you don't even have resources to make that video. So our goal is to grab video makers like TikTokers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers that are already familiar with production of content and are successful in conversion rate.

Robert Tarabcak:
And we want to give them place where they can create an offer by business and then hire those influencers and have a very easy conversation with them about how they can create and plan for a live sales event. So we want to make it easy for businesses to use this because we see so many advantages of this. Conversion rates are mindblowing. So it's all about making the production much easier for businesses.

Richard Hill:
I love it. I love that sort of I think you've mentioned the word restream and obviously taking videos and almost simulating lives, which is something we've done in the past and do. But that marketplace ability to be able to then work with other people maybe in your niche that compliment you to share lives, I think that's genius to be fair, I think that really is a good idea so I look forward to that. I look forward to seeing this whole industry develop, so we'll be keeping a close eye on you Rob-

Robert Tarabcak:
Thank you.

Richard Hill:
... seeing what you're up to. So I like to finish every episode with a book recommendation, Rob, what would you recommend to our listeners?

Robert Tarabcak:
So I will recommend something that I read recently and it's from Daniel Pink To Sell is Human.

Richard Hill:
And why is that? What was so good about that?

Robert Tarabcak:
Because it will tell the reader that every single person on earth is a salesman. And every conversation even in this podcast, we sell the information to each other, to listeners. So like the traditional way of thinking about sales is wrong, because we think about pushy salesman and car rental and it's not like that anymore. There's a difference between the old world with information asymmetry and with the new world with information parody, so it's a very nice book and I recommend it to all of you.

Richard Hill:
That's great. Right. Well, we'll link that up in the show notes as well. So the guys that are listening want to find out more about your Rob, what's the best way to do that best place to go to find out more?

Robert Tarabcak:
So you guys can visit korkuma.com or you can follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being a guest on eCom@One. I look forward to no doubt catching up with you again in maybe 12 months time and we'll see what's happening with live eCommerce streaming.

Robert Tarabcak:
Thank you very much.

Richard Hill:
Thanks so much. Bye-bye.

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 and leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eCom@One, the eCommerce marketing agency.