E22: Jonathan Oldhams

Richard Hill:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of eCom@One, and today's guest is Jonathan Oldhams. Now, Jonathan is the founder of Webstraxt, a Magento Solution Partner and cutting-edge e-commerce development agency. How are you doing, Jonathan?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Hi, Richard. Yeah, good, thanks. Thanks for having me.
Richard Hill:
No problem at all. Now Jonathan I've known for a couple of years, in industry life and industry world. Our agency, eComOne, Jonathan is one of our partners, and when we have development requirements for e-commerce, and we have clients that are looking for development support, Jonathan is one of the chaps that I call, and he takes over. One of our trusted partners. So I think it'd be good, Jonathan, to kick off and give the listeners a bit of background on Webstraxt, and on yourself as well, your own background in the e-commerce space.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah, sure. So we're an e-commerce agency based in Newark. We are an e-commerce agency that specialize in Magento and integration, so we predominantly integrate systems, build e-commerce platforms, and we're a Magento Solution Partner. We're a very technical agency, we're not a full service agency, we're very much focused on system integration. We've been around for about five, six years now, on the go, growing at a nice steady pace, working across quite a few industry verticals. So we're not really specialized or niche in any way. We do have a couple of specialties, but we are a very technical bunch of nerdy people, I think is probably the best way to describe it.
Richard Hill:
Yes. You are that. That is a fact. You've had the agency for about five, six years, working off a lot of more of the technical side of Magento development, but obviously not just Magento, and we'll have a chat about that further on. I know you work on other platforms as well, I believe. That's true, isn't it?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Great.
Jonathan Oldhams:
That's right. No, that's true. Magento's just our preferred one. It just tends to tick the boxes for most of the projects we work on.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Busy time, I think, in the Magento space at the moment. Obviously lots of things going on, in terms of COVID-19 and pandemic, but also the end of life of support of Magento 1, Magento 2, which we can touch on as well. Obviously the listeners to the podcast, a lot of different people at different stages in their e-commerce journey, their website requirements, whether that's guys that are just starting out, and obviously a lot of people have just started out on their e-commerce journey, and especially in this last six months, with the different platforms giving away free subscriptions to get going. And obviously those that are doing really, really well already have seen some huge spikes and huge growth over those three, four, five months really, since lockdown. But what would you to say to the guys that are listening are the most essential features of a successful e-commerce store?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Okay. Cool. So I think speed has been climbing as an essential feature of e-commerce for a long time, and the introduction of Web Vitals, the constant changes in the Google algorithm for speed... Speed's a hot topic, So I think in terms of essentials, speed is there, right at the very topic. Make sure it's fast and it's quick, and that will help, not just SEO, but user experience, conversions, the faster the time the better.
Richard Hill:
So when you say speed, obviously that's definitely our language. When we're talking SEO, we've been banging the drum on speed for probably five years. There's not many presentations we've done as an agency where we don't mention, top five tips, speed. But let's for a second when we say Magento, Magento 2 now I guess is where everyone will be, or should be. What specific things can we do on Magento 2 Store, and maybe some other platforms as well, to work on the speed? What are some quick wins, or things the listeners can implement to help the speed?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Amazingly, and you wouldn't believe it, but just compressing assets is a really quick win that a lot of people don't do. So compress the assets, make sure they're all minified, defer JavaScript. But most only used tool is probably the Google's PageSpeed Insights. Rather than just saying your site is slow, if you actually run it and read into it, it will tell you exactly what you need to do. And you can cherry-pick the quick wins out of there, most of them make sense, and where they are complex, you can click and Google gives more guidance on them. But they are probably the quick wins, just compress and deliver compressed assets…
Richard Hill:
So run your site through the Google PageSpeed test tool, and then it literally gives you an A to Z of things, and then you might, depending on what skills you have in-house, or obviously what people you've got in-house, you might... Obviously resizing images is potentially quite a straightforward one, whereas things on a server, like deferring JavaScript and things like that, are of a more technical nature, you may need then to get support from your development partner person, et cetera. Yeah?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Potentially. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Use that tool.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. So, speed. What else after speed then, for other essential features for e-com store?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Easy-to-use checkout I think is probably the next one. Give it as fewer steps as possible, make it look secure. Again, make sure it's fast. And add as many payment methods as you can as possible. A lot of times, payment method in checkout is decided on what's available, what the rate is, and a lot of merchants tend to pick payment solutions based on what works best for them. But I think the reality is, the more payment offering you can get, the less friction you put between the customer and checking out. So as many payment options, simple-to-use checkout, really fast. I'd say if I was to pick three, they would be the three. If you can just focus on those, it will help conversions.
Richard Hill:
Very simple, but you can see straight away. Speed, obviously. Checkout, so on the payment methods, have you seen much uptake on the cryptocurrency side of things? That's something I'm curious about.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Not in our line of work, no. Not yet. I think there's a barrier there of trust, and it's ironic, because at the checkout stage you want to breed trust, and showing cryptocurrency badges in accepted payments perhaps wouldn't send the right trust signals at that time. And maybe that's just exceptional understanding as it is now, and that will change in time, but personally I'd probably say that a small barrier across a lot of industries.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, it's a very, very small... Yeah. Okay. I think it was obviously big news, it had been a couple of years ago, and obviously definitely. But I think it's not for everybody at this stage. But it'd be interesting to keep an eye on that one, I think. So as many payment options as possible.
Jonathan Oldhams:
I think so.
Richard Hill:
Obviously you've got the payments by Amazon, you've got the usual Mastercard, Visa, et cetera. Yeah.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Apple Pay, Google Pay. Sage Pay. As many as you can possibly build in, get them in, because for every one person that really likes one payment method, there's somebody else who doesn't like it. So the more you can get in, the better.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Okay. So I think there's three great things there, and when you layer those together, that's where you can take the store from X to... Obviously if you're speeding the experience up, your checkout is very clean, clear, and quick, and then you've got all those different payment methods where you might lose a few people along the way if you haven't got them all. It's a great start. Right, okay. So when merchants are looking to potentially re-platform or choose a platform, what should merchants looking for in a platform? There's a lot of different platforms out there, I know we touched on Magento and that's one of your big specialisms, but obviously there's other platforms out there. For the people that are listening to the podcast, what things should a merchant be looking at when choosing a platform?
Jonathan Oldhams:
I mean, that's the golden egg, isn't it? If there was a single answer to answer that for everybody, it'd be really easy, wouldn't it? I think cost is a key to a lot of start-ups and choosing the right platform and understanding the long term costs of the product is really important. We see people who choose a platform based on cost, and they can't afford the investment needed over the next 12 to 36 months. The platform declines, and all of a sudden it's the platform's fault. And it really isn't, it's about picking something that will deliver the business model you have now, over the next two to three years. If you can a five year of it, then amazing, but I'd be surprised. So yeah, something that meets the cost that you've got to start out, and then the cost that you can set aside and invest over the next 36 months. So yeah, cost is definitely key, followed by functionality. Make sure it can deliver the functionality you need.
Jonathan Oldhams:
And weighing those up, I try not to take too much influence from other people. Go and do the research. Because everybody's got their recommended favourite, and it's really, genuinely hard to get an impartial, "This platform works best for you." And we see it all the time. So we'll often talk to people about all the different platform features, the LTB of the ongoing cost of them, and try and match those to a business's objectives.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Quite often we have partners and clients together, where they might have come to us, where they've got Magento but in reality they are not the business that maybe wants to invest the amount that's needed for a three, four, five year plan to keep developing and building on the Magento build. So possibly... I know you're working on a project now where we were moving that combined client to... I think it's WordPress, isn't it? As an example. So depending on what their roadmap is with their digital, their investment in their business, it's not always the bigger investment. Or if you haven't got that bigger investment, or it's not... In some instances, a lot of business, their core is their retail still, believe it or not, and their e-com is definitely growing, they might not necessarily need a bigger, tens and tens of thousands build.
Jonathan Oldhams:
It is a hard one, but I would just say, try and get some impartial advice. If it's a build where you] want to self-manage it, and you want to launch your platform, and it's not BigCommerce or Shopify, and you want to work with an agency, pick one agency that you don't want to work with, rule them out straight away, and then have a conversation with them for 10 minutes, just to get an impartial bit of advice. Because they're not going to win the job, and they know it. And that's really what you need, is that impartial advice from somebody knowledgeable. And that's hard to get.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. So you've got... In our space, in our agency space, and most of our clients, it's really, for us, platform-wise, you've got... I mean, there's a lot, I know. But the main ones that we're working with are Magento 2, obviously Magento 1, Magento 2, Shopify, WooCommerce. They are the three. And then there's of course we do stuff with Drupal, we do stuff with the different carts and whatnot. But out of those three, what would you say people that are listening in... What are the benefits of one over another? So WordPress, Shopify, Magento 2. What are some of the strengths or some of the fits for different e-com sizes, would you say? Is there any little snippets you can give us? Well, Magento 2's great for this, this, and this, Shopify's great if you're doing this type of business, or this level of business. If you're very hands-off, don't use a developer too much, you want to do more... What would your] of these snippets there be?
Jonathan Oldhams:
I would say, there was a time where you would talk about order volumes. But the reality is, high order volumes can be done on all three platforms. Ownership is usually a big thing, we say. Shopify's really good if you want to run at something really quickly, and you want to have control over it, but you're not investing a lot of money where you need to see some ownership back, because you wouldn't get it on the platform. If you were going to invest in money, you'd want to move away to the self-hosted products, so WooCommerce or Magento 2. And Magento 2, the big differentiator there for us, in terms of Magento and WooCommerce, is just from the point of integration. Magento will integrate into anything a lot better, it has a slightly better framework to build integration, so we'll always move integration projects onto Magento if we can.
Jonathan Oldhams:
And the other point really is, if you were weighing up side by side WooCommerce and Magento, WooCommerce is an add-on to WordPress that adds shopping functionality onto the existing platform, and Magento is a platform designed entirely for the purpose of delivering e-commerce. It's almost like buying a car and then turning it into a truck, which you wouldn't do, you would go and buy a truck. Worst analogy ever. Yeah. So I'd say those differentiate... But Shopify is great, and there are big brands out there who are running Shopify Plus, who are doing amazing things on there. So a platform is just the start of the process, and it's what you do and the time you invest beyond that, as you know, really is the difference.
Richard Hill:
Okay. Great. I think there's some great takeaways there. So just coming out of the e-commerce piece for a minute, what would be the one piece of advice you wish you knew before you started out as a business owner?
Jonathan Oldhams:
You sent me these over before, and I really racked my brain], because being a business owner, there are lots of ups and there are lots of downs. And picking which bit would be the right bit to share is tough. But I think the one thing I would say, if I knew it, is everything takes time. And just be mindful that nothing's going to come instantly. Don't be disheartened by it, build on it slowly, nurture it, stick with it. Take the rough with the smooth. But it will come with time. And I wish I knew that a long time ago. Everything takes a little bit of time. Sometimes longer than you think, and sometimes not as long as you think.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, great bit of advice, I think. the different sort of things you see on social, is that you always overestimate what you can do in a week or a month, but you underestimate what you can do in five years. I think it's so easy to get frustrated, when you look back at a day, a week, a month, which is just a minuscule piece of time, and beat yourself up out there. step back, take I think is always good. One of my favourite books is by a chap called Eckhart Tolle, which is The Power Of Now. It's basically focusing on now, rather than spending too much time thinking about what's happened and what's... There's a lot more to it than that, but... Yeah. Great bit of advice. Okay. So what would you say is the value of UX design in e-commerce? I think quite often now, there's a lot of templates, I hate to use that dirty word I think in e-commerce, but there's a lot of nice templates out there. And I think work with a lot of very high-end designers and developers like yourself, and obviously it's... I'm from an SEO perspective, we work on SEO campaigns and frameworks with huge brands, but from your perspective, what do you believe is the value of UX in design?
Jonathan Oldhams:
So I think from our side... You mentioned there about templates. Templates, again, can be really good, depending on who you are and the point that you're at, and they can be fantastic. But when we go back, and we look at the things you think may be essential, like speed, taking a template full of code that you won't use, that's not optimized for what you want to do, it will counterbalance it. We also find, because as I said, we don't focus on industries... We're not entirely fashion based, or we don't predominantly work with builders merchants, we have a wide spread. So not one design or layout or type will work across every industry. There are loads of conventions across them all, but different industries have different user experience expectations. So spending the time to craft those and understand the customer and the journey they would take, or the several different routes they would usually take across their journey, is really important.
Jonathan Oldhams:
If you delivered a fashion theme or layout to a builders merchant, and a builder who's seeing lovely pictures on his device on site, but just wants to get to an eight by ten bit of timber as quickly as possible, it's not going to work. So really understanding the user and their journey is so essential for conversion, for brands, everything. And I think from a brand perspective, especially now as we make the bigger shift online, user experience represents your brand and your first impression. So getting it right is really key.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. I mean, everybody I know that is in the web design space at the moment is absolutely flat out, in terms of the rebranding that's going on, the user experience, the journey mapping, et cetera, that maybe was quite template-focused quite a lot, in a lot of times, it's really come into its own now. Because when you look at a store, and you're looking at conversion rates and trying to tweak those conversion rates, and improving that user experience, taking out a store from a typical maybe 1.5% conversion rate to a 2%, that's a 33% increase in turnover. Well, that's quite hard to do quite quickly with maybe paid media or whatever it may be, but if you can get that user experience right, have a nice experience on the site, find what you're looking for, depending on the industry like you say, you don't need a 16-picture carousel if you're buying an eight by four bit of wood. Whereas if it's a pair of shoes, maybe you need... Or a dress or whatnot. So for the guys listening in, what would say is a good start point for tackling UX on their side? What would be a good start point?
Jonathan Oldhams:
We said when we were looking at PageSpeed that there's no magical gun, but you could use Google PageSpeed, it tells you a lot of information, they guide you. On the same scale, there's loads of tools you can get. Absolutely loads of tools. Crazy Egg, Hotjar. Hotjar's a really popular one. There are loads of tells you can help get to understand user experience. But if you're just starting out, just get to know Google Analytics. It will tell you everything you need to know, just trying to understand how to understand it and navigate it is probably the biggest barrier. But there are free courses, Google has its own Academy for learning it, just dig in there, because you can find everything you want about your user journey, and your visitor behaviour, and your conversion rate optimization, just from a free tool. You don't need to pay £30 a month when you can just spend a bit of time digging and find that data out.
Jonathan Oldhams:
And typically, we tend just to start... It has all the data you need in its rawest format.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. So you mentioned Hotjar, I know that's what we use in our agency, amongst others, and they've got quite a low price point at entry level. You can do so many visits, I guess 2,000 I think, at I think it's the free level, so that's quite a good start point as well. And there's obviously different tools within that tool, around heatmap and the user journey and feedback forms and things like that. So what do you think will be the next big thing with user experience? I know I'm harping on about user experience, but I think it's such a key area when it comes to web design and making sure that ultimately... I know from Google's perspective this is our thing with the SEO side, we know that if people stay on the site, and they have a good user experience, from an SEO perspective but really from a user experience perspective, they are going to hang around, they're going to stay. You are the expert, because they've found the thing they were looking for, they navigated nice and easy, so the user experience is nice. It looks nice, so we've got that brand element. We've invested in our look, feel, brand, design, but also we're finding things we want.
Richard Hill:
Such important, but is there any insights you can give us into what's coming up, in terms of what things people maybe a bit further down their e-com, they may be already doing £1 million a month, £5 million a month, bigger companies that are looking to push the boundaries on user experience. What do you think would be the next thing they should be looking at, or things that are coming?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah. I think AR was a big thing on its way, and I think AR has always been on the roadmap for a lot of people. I don't think it's really found its feet yet, but it is nurturing as a product to blur that boundary between online and in-store. I think that will take a bit of a setback over the next 24 months because of what we're seeing with COVID, and I think what we may see is a bit of a rise in PWA, so progressive web app. It blurs the boundary between web and app, and delivers a fast user experience. So it ticks that speed box, and gets people direct to brand quicker.
Richard Hill:
That in practice, then. Just go into a bit more detail, and maybe...
Jonathan Oldhams:
So literally, you're delivering... Sorry, you cut out there. Sorry.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, just maybe give the listeners an example of PWA in practice.
Jonathan Oldhams:
I couldn't give you one in practice. We can add one in after this, sorry. There aren't many people doing it, and that's one of the issues. It is a brand new piece of tech that people are slowly transitioning to, and it's not a really cheap product to work with, because effectively you're stripping out the front end of a website and making it headless, and then delivering it as a web application. So it has all the features of native, but the benefit of web, so you on the same back end feature. It's not for everybody, and it is very new, and it's not really a cheap solution to import at the moment, but we are seeing a lot of traction gaining up on it, to a point where I think you'll see it become the norm.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Okay. So have you seen quite an uplift in merchants and customers with... Click & Collect seems to be a big thing at the moment, doesn't it? Obviously a lot of people can't or haven't been able to stores, or don't want to go to stores, but have been able to obviously order and then just rock up to the store and have it put in your boot, and things like that. It's a huge uplift there, isn't there, I think?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah. We've got a lot of clients who pre-COVID were Click & Collect, but we're seeing a lot more traditional companies, like builders merchants who hadn't considered it before, now desperately moving over to Click & Collect to help streamline people through and all new projects now, when we take them on, Click & Collect's an essential feature that people want. So yes, definitely, hugely important, and I think that will be a new norm.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's definitely... Click & Collect, with supermarkets. I know my wife has pretty much... Everything's been Click & Collect, we just rock up to the supermarket and the truck that comes to the house is just parked and he just puts it in the boot of the car. We haven't done that for a little while now, but that first three months of lockdown, it was the norm. We were trying to book a slot to have it delivered, and then we'd book a slot for delivery, but then we might not get one for three weeks, so then we'd slot in a Click & Collect It was like, alternate Click & Collect and a delivery, and just trying to find slots and that type of thing. Restaurants and takeaways, I know that's not so much e-com in a big... Well it is, in a way, isn't it? But restaurants have been doing a lot of Click & Collect, haven't they, as well, I think, is what I've been seeing, definitely.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yes. Yeah.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. And I think obviously that will be here to stay, in that they've now got a whole new revenue stream that they can obviously get orders in, and still a lot of people who are not as keen to go out... And I know obviously right now you've got the discounts on food and things in restaurants for the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of August, but still I think a lot of people will want to stay at home. There's still that uncertainty.
Jonathan Oldhams:
I think so. I think so, yeah. And we're definitely in that camp. I don't think I'm ready to go out to have dinner with someone yet. But that idea of having it delivered, now we've speeded up the availability of that service across almost every industry, I think that is definitely here to stay as a behavioral change.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. I totally agree. Totally agree. It's obviously a very, very interesting time for e-commerce. Obviously nobody could have predicted the last six months. I think normally we have this crazy spike, if you like, November, December... And I know obviously you get spikes in all different industries, but I think it's a pretty solid pattern there, that Black Friday weekend, and the week before, week after, and then the various Christmas weekends and whatnot. But obviously this last four months, five months, ridiculously unprecedented stats in most industries, really. Obviously there's some exceptions, but not too many, really. I know maybe fashion's been an interesting one, or had some ups and downs, because not a lot people have been going out, but now that's getting again, everyone needs to go out and buy a size bigger so they can fit into their clothes and whatnot. But is there any stories you can tell us about this last four or five months, some of the industries that were a surprise to you maybe? Some of the things that... Any sort of real big spikes you've seen, or any interesting industries, any little stories there around the last four or five months?
Jonathan Oldhams:
I'd say the most interesting thing we've probably seen, and you may be able to back me up on this because you deal with the SEO side, but at the height of the pandemic in the UK, we saw major brands implement queuing systems, which is the complete opposite of user experience. And at the same time we saw DIY and home DIY soar upwards, because everybody's at home, they've got the time, and they're investing in home projects. And then around that time, when we're heading towards the peak, places like B&Q and Homebase shoved on their queuing system, and made people sat to see if they could get shed paint for about an hour and a half, only to be really disappointed when they were eventually let in. So what we saw is a lot of people in that industry sector, who probably were page four, five, and six, or not very high up in Google Shopping ads, finally start to receive that traffic trickle down, because people were trying to look for stock availability...
Richard Hill:
Frustrated with the bigger players that have not got the technology in place to cope with the demand, type of thing. Yeah.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah. So we saw a lot of those people getting more traffic, and seeing huge uplifts in sales. And where that's stuck with the long-term visibility post-COVID, I don't know, but receive a bit of a long term boost. We saw a lot of people with an increase in sales, just because they had stock, and people were going past page one, because those people were making you queue or they didn't have stock. And we saw that across a lot of industries.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's a great thing to highlight, and I think what that's given merchants that have been in that position, to grab some of those, like you say, page one, two, three even, which is usually unheard of, they've now built huge databases of new customers. Depending on the scale of their business, they've maybe... Most businesses a lot of clients have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled their business in the last four months. But what that means is they've now got potentially tens and tens of thousands of new customers. I think the key now is just making sure that that experience that they have with your brand and their brand, people that are listening to the podcast, is so smooth. So what can they now do to follow up and engage those customers, and get their culture, their brand, in front of their customers again? Because they've now built these big customer...
Richard Hill:
We've got several clients that sell food, but there's one that resonates. He sells fish, as an example, and at Christmas, most people have a turkey, not everybody obviously, but obviously massive spike. Fish, expensive... And he does crazy million around Christmas. But he's built something like three times the normal Christmas demand, so he's got this database of tens and tens of thousands of people, so now on the run-up to Christmas, when normally you get this million plus turnover piece, he should be gearing up now, and he is gearing up now, to make front and centre. So when they're thinking about, "Do you know what? We will have a bit of salmon..."
Jonathan Oldhams:
For Boxing Day.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Everyone likes a few treats around Christmas. Whereas before, you quite often maybe go to your fishmonger or a supermarket to get that fish, now you think, "Oh, actually, back in April, May we bought the fish from fishman.com, or whatever. It's not that…so this is a real opportunity we're seeing now, where you could use email marketing, your remarketing, some of the wider digital marketing strategies, to re-engage and bring those people back.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah. There's a big opportunity for smaller brands at the moment. And I think, like you said, there's a lot of businesses just starting up. They can get stock and respond quicker, and if there's one thing the pandemic showed, it's that the bigger the company, the slower the response has often been. And I think that was a key highlight, and there'll be a lot of people who win from that. And hopefully there'll be long term, and there's not a lot of data to know where that will go, but fingers crossed, if people make the right decisions, they're talking to the right people, then there'll be a lot of good things that do come out of it.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Okay. So what would you say are the biggest mistakes you've seen in e-commerce? I think obviously you've worked on, I'm guessing but hundreds of e-com stores over however many years you've been in the industry. What are some of the things you see that are usually harming an e-commerce store, that the listeners should be thinking about?
Jonathan Oldhams:
I'd say we tend to see, when we start a project... You've done a couple of e-commerce projects, and you deal with shopping advertising. The biggest issue we find is to always product data. Is it inconsistent, not enough, not a good enough understanding about it, stuck across many systems? Product data is always the biggest issue we see in a project, and is usually the biggest part of moving any company forward, is consolidating, optimizing, and delivering good quality product data. So that's I'd say our reoccurring theme across everybody we work with that takes the most time.
Richard Hill:
Aa soon as somebody says, "Can you re-platform you're like, "Right, what's your data look like, to start with?"
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yes.
Richard Hill:
What state it's going to... What have you got? What bits have you got, where's the gaps, what systems are they in? Where going to? How does that translate from one system to another? And as you say, then that obviously from a development perspective is a better build, or better data set in that build, but that translate to our side, the marketing side, where you can do a lot better SEO job and a lot better merchant job, in terms of Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, et cetera, if that data's in there. Yeah.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah. So that's probably the biggest thing that most people don't address. And again, if you think early days, you're just trying to get... When you go through an expanding period, getting more SKUs on, launching bigger product line, everybody's pressed for time, because just getting products live is the priority. Going back and making sure that data's in good shape is often missed, or pushed back on the priority list. So bringing that... I'd say that's probably the biggest thing we see. But apart from that, I'd say generic themes, which we spoke about, is probably another one. I bought this theme, and I thought it'd win me a million pounds, but...
Richard Hill:
Yeah, I think like you say, themes and speed... You've got this theme, and it's got all these features, it's got that, it's got this, ticks 27 boxes, but actually it's slow, because you've got nine scripts running in the background on theme, or whatever it may be.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah. So I'd say that, and a third one is probably just bad advice, or misguided information. There's a lot of it, and they are the biggest mistakes you see across the board, where this company told me this would be the best thing, and this company told me this would be the best thing. And we tend to find somebody stuck in the middle, misinformed or misguided, and not really sure where to go. And I think that breeds trust issues. We spend a lot of time correcting trust issues, where so many people say so many different things, to try and educate somebody to understand themselves what is a good decision and a bad decision in e-commerce. It can sometimes be hard to unpick bad advice, so we'd say that was probably one of the biggest ones we see as well.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah, just be careful who you take advice off, because quite often somebody saying X, Y, Z but they might not usually... Or seeing your scenario, so they're giving you a similar advice to maybe something that's just not the same as what you are doing, or where you are in your business. Getting multiple advice, I guess is what you're saying, isn't it? person's advice is that, ultimately. But they work with a lot of similar people, similar industry experience, that vertical experience, because most verticals have got their own... Like you were talking about, timber, we don't need to be too heavy on imagery, whereas if you're a whole different skillset and experience. And when you talk about data, and data feeds fashion, huge variable of variables are in there, styles, colour... So how you show those, how you display those on the site, how you extract that data, is absolutely key for conversion rate. Whereas, like you say, building material, of course there's variables there, but not as many, usually. That's a bit of a broad stroke...
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah, you'd be amazed.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. But having that industry experience is a good one as well.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yeah. Just loads of advice from as many different people as possible, and try and make sure you've got at least one or two impartial ones in there, where somebody doesn't stand to gain from whatever decision you make. And that's hard. That is hard.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. It's interesting to see... I know it's obviously tough times out there, but when I look at agencies for example, and now all of a sudden they were an SEO agency three months ago, and now they're a YouTube agency, and now a LinkedIn agency. It's like, I understand you've got to make a living, but I think you've got to be careful who you take your advice from. The new agency, I see it, I know we've ran ads for agencies, and obviously we partner with a lot of agencies and run ads for agencies, but then I see agencies now that are not ad agencies, that are like, "Oh, we're a YouTube ad agency." I'm thinking, "Well, we were running your ads six months ago, how can you be a... How can you be?" So I think really digging into that experience and who you're taking the advice of, speaking to their customers and get that advice, but then speak to the customers that they've already worked on as well.
Richard Hill:
So, last couple of questions, Jonathan. So we've touched on a few tools on UX and on the customer journey. I think you mentioned Hotjar, you mentioned Google Analytics. Is there any others, or anything specifically, that you would recommend to our listeners?
Jonathan Oldhams:
Just those ones. I think as an agency, because we are very technical led, we tend really just to focus on builds and integrating tools that all agencies that we're working with recommend implementation for. So we only have a small toolbox that we'll recommend. I know we do have a couple of customers who have Adobe Marketing Suite, so there are so many out there. Again, the build, work on the one that meets the price and the functionality requirements from the point in the journey that you're at, but they're just the ones we'd probably recommend.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Cool. Great. Well, final question. We've made it through. I always like to end every episode on a book recommendation. It doesn't have to be to do with customer journey, it can be you think our listeners will get a benefit from, either privately, professionally, whatever it may be.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Okay. Just because you've been banging on about UX all day, we'll go for... Steve Krug has a book called Don't Make Me Think, and it is all about UX, and how customer journeys work. And if you read it and apply that principle to everything you do digitally, it will benefit whatever type of website you have. Nothing should make you think, and you should organically flow through the use of your e-commerce site, website. So it's a good read, and would recommend everybody reads it.
Richard Hill:
Well, thank you for being on the podcast. It's been very enlightening, lots of obviously UX talk, lots of ideas there for e-commerce stores that are listening in. Now, for the guys that are listening that want to maybe find out a bit more or contact you after they listen to the podcast, what's the best way to reach out to you, Jonathan?
Jonathan Oldhams:
On LinkedIn, or visit our website, webstraxt.com. Feel free to get in touch. If you want a bit of a impartial advice, we give it quite a lot, happy to.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. I mean, for those that are listening in, as I said at the beginning, Jonathan is someone we recommend regularly in our agency, works for some of our very large clients on a day-to-day basis on their e-commerce bill, technical integrations, those pieces where you're trying to get this to talk to this, and it sort of works, but it's just not really... Every now and then it's having some problems. Jonathan's the guy that we recommend definitely for that piece Magento, et cetera, et cetera. So thanks for being on the podcast, Jonathan.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Thanks for having me.
Richard Hill:
I look forward to catching up again soon. Thank you.
Jonathan Oldhams:
Yep. No worries. Thanks, Richard. Bye.
Richard Hill:
Bye.