E68: Roland Gossage

Richard Hill:
Hi there I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 68th episode. In this episode, I speak with Roland Gossage, CEO of GroupBy. Roland runs a 70 strong team of conversion specialists who work purely with eCommerce sites to improve sales using their suite of eCommerce tools. We talk about all things SaaS, data, search navigation, personalization, and how to scale using tech. We go deep on personalization and how to improve the eCommerce experience. We do a quick hit round to implement these straight after you've listened to the episode. Creating a seamless omni-channel experience is more and more important than ever. Hear Roland's advice from working with literally thousands of stores directly. And of course we cover specifics on what's coming down the line with eCommerce and tech. 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 are you doing Roland?

Roland Gossage:
Good. How about yourself?

Richard Hill:
I am very well. I am very well. I'm looking forward to this, really looking forward to this. Thanks for joining us on the eCom@One Podcast. Now, I think let's get straight into it. Tell us about GroupBy and your love for eCommerce.

Roland Gossage:
Well, I've been in the retail sector for the last 20 years, eCommerce for the last 15. So I really saw it grow up and we've all been going along that journey as well. So one of the nice things that we like and why we are passionate about it is we all are shoppers. So we all have both good, bad and indifferent experiences. And it's nice to take that personal experience and then apply some of the latest technologies to create that frictionless experiences for the retailers, distributors, and manufacturers that we deal with.

Roland Gossage:
So GroupBy has been in business since 2013. We do have some of the largest retailers in the world on our platform, CVS Pharmacy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Crate and Barrel across sort of the board, even in distribution and things like genuine parts. So we really have a wide breadth of some of the best retailers and distributors in the planet. We are a product discovery platform with a very, very strong search offering, which is what people best know us for. We'd like to be sort of the Amazon relevance killer. But broader discovery obviously is every interaction that the user has from search to search engine type, mega now, right down to the PDP cross-sell up-sell. And we do this and it's powered with our partner Google and the retail AI suite that we use in conjunction.

Richard Hill:
Wow, sounds fantastic. I think what's that term? Site search using that tech I think gives you obviously a massive and a real advantage over those that aren't. And obviously ultimately when you're getting users to your site and you're getting customers, potential customers to your site, that user experience, that speed, finding the thing that you're looking for, the correct thing, the options is so, so important. What would you say are some things that companies can do specifically around that user experience on an e-com store to help improve that process and to improve that journey? I think that's something quite often that does get left. We talk a lot about SEO. We talk a lot about PPC, but that user experience piece, what sort of things would you say about that?

Roland Gossage:
So I think that what we encourage our customers to do is look at holistically. I always say look, cradle-to-grave, right? Attract, get them to your site, paid organic SEO. Once they're there, engage them. How do you create a user experience that delights your users? That's the word that we like to use, delighting your customers? And then how do you convert? How do you create that frictionless checkout process, but also in the way that the user want to interact with your brand? And so things like same-day delivery. Really beating Amazon at its own game. We've been pushing this for a long time, we now got our retailers there. Shop by store, so I can say, "Hey, I'm coming home from work. I'm going to shop the one on the way home," or "No, I'm going to do the one that's closer to my home. It's a Sunday. I'm going to be able to do curbside pickup," what we call BOPIS, Buy Online Pick Up In Store.

Roland Gossage:
And so really creating the omni-channel experience, which again as you know we've been talking about this for a decade. I think we're finally kind of getting to the first stage of the promise land in creating that in COVID of course the retailers that were prepped for this, and a lot of our retailers do support those features, they were able to shift the focus of the omni-channel instantly to that contactless experience. And then as stores reopened, rebalance that user experience. So we always say is that you need to take sort of that 30,000 foot view before you delve into features and functions. So we try not to start with "We've got great features and functions by the way," but let's look at it where really your users are seeing friction and would be the highest bang for our buck and solving that. So not a big bang approach. We really deconstruct that user journey and find out really where your issues are and use data to drive those decisions. So database or data-driven decisions so that we can really drive top line and bottom line profitability both at the same time.

Richard Hill:
Okay. So obviously looking at that, what would you say are sort of go-to things that you consistently see wrong or consistently see are barriers or problems that quite often are fairly quick wins potentially for stores? Obviously you've looked at a lot of stores. You mentioned quite a few things there. Like obviously the omni-channel piece no doubt. There's a lot of consistent challenges that you see with stores that they may be doing that five million or 10 million and trying to get to that next step. What are some of the things?

Roland Gossage:
So some big ones that we all see all the time is that you might have a search or predictive search. You have a product listing page or a search page, a navigation page, or a landing page for a product. What we see is often these are disjointed. Sometimes people aren't using the same data structure and learning models in behind the scenes. It's a bit of a smorgasbord of different components. That causes a little bit of junkiness as I sort of refer to where I see a predictive type, that doesn't match my search results.

Roland Gossage:
So right away I have this broken experience. Other things like inventory, not having sort of instant update so that all of a sudden now I get to my checkout and it's like, "Oh, and by the way, that's not in stock." So there's some very easy things in the data model in the way that you can create that flow that really removes a lot of the bounce rates or a client unhappiness. The stats that Google and I have sort of talked about and published is that if people have a bad experience, 80% of them will leave and never come back. That is a very high number to not get that right. So we really focus on linking the user journey completely through so that we're not ending up with those bounce rates, unhappy clients. And then that affects things like call outs and your customer service department, which is a very costly part of the business, whether you're online only, or you're running a click and mortar environment.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally relate. I think a lot of good takeaways there for the listeners. So I think you touched on it at the beginning, but I think something that again, a lot of sites that are maybe trying to do this scale from a certain point to the next step. And they've maybe heard this word personalization, but they're not doing a lot with it. I think now it's quite common. It's quite a common theme I see. That's for sure. So what would you say, where could people that are maybe looking to really implement some personalization into their eCommerce store? Where are some of the areas they should be looking at and how can they do that?

Roland Gossage:
Yeah, so when you look at personalization as you need data for it, that's one of our key focuses we're as much a data company is we're a user experience company. Our partnership with Google also gives us access to some very unique data sets. So this is where I'll talk a little the way we do personalization it's a little bit different than other offerings that you may have there. And there's all scales from your cheap and cheerful solutions and just get the job done to there's enterprise, the big four kind of software companies that you may look to utilize their systems. And what really makes us unique is we take personalization not in sort of a cohort. You can have two males I won't even say our ages, but we're probably of similar age and similar background, but we have completely different tastes.

Roland Gossage:
And to lump us together in personalization, even though we're both wearing blue shirts. So maybe that's not the greatest example, but I may like a certain brand that's very different than yours. I might dress slightly younger than my age, or might have a completely different stuff. So taking these sort of cohort approach this broad brush, we find really doesn't squeeze personalization to where it needs to be. And so we do it at a one-to-one level. So each user comes in, we don't cash results. We actually will provide a unique search experience for that user based on their actual user behaviors. One of the things with our relationship with Google Buy is that we also have all the google.com and Google shopping signals in the data as well, which is very unique to grip on Google-

Richard Hill:
Oh wow. I didn't know that wow.

Roland Gossage:
Which no one else has. So this is our white space between us and others. And there are some good technologies out there, but having access to that data and being part of this program will allow you really to take people's overall internet behavioral data the onsite, and in store data. And we join all that together in the machine learning model. And that's why obviously we say, we give you Google-esque search results because it is Google-esque. It's GroupBy and Google, we're kind of the I refer to it as such chocolate and peanut butter kind of coming together. And it's a perfect fit to really create that what I would call hyper personalization now. We're just sort of the next level in what we're delivering to market with them.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that resonate with the lessons, we talk a lot on the podcast about shopping, Google shopping, shopping ads, product listing ads, whatever you want to call it. It depends on the day of the week, but shopping ads is a huge topic for us. So you're using that data with your personalization.

Roland Gossage:
And one of the interesting things is to go to that point, there's the idea of one Google, which is a program that Google has a really bringing the different elements that they support from the Google marketing cloud, Google ads the retail group, right? So Google cloud and bringing them all together and kind of using partners like us to bring that into one point of contact. But the nice thing is, is the way that we partner is that actually you actually buy our software through Google. So you actually contract with them in this instance, but we're able to pull in all those different groups. When we look at the problem like kind of see the cradle-to-grave thing. And we actually pull in the right groups to make sure that Google or GroupBy are solving all of those systems. So you're getting a full bear of the power and size of Google and capabilities with the intimate knowledge that GroupBy has on how to create that fundamentally better user experience.

Richard Hill:
Wow. That sounds incredible. Fantastic. Fantastic. So guys that are listening, I know we'll link everything up at the end Roland, but I think obviously some amazing functionality there is that was a very unique angle to that functionality using the Google data as well. So let's try and do a quick fire round in terms of, right, I want to, after this question or these questions, question questions, I want to be able to pause the podcast and the guys that are listening can go away and go, "Yeah, I'm going to check that. I'm going to do that, I'm going to implement that." So maybe a quick list of things that store owners could go away and implement now. If you've got any sort of quick things that could be done.

Roland Gossage:
Yeah, so one of the interesting things which have high return on investment in searches and tight predictive search. It's very fast to implement. We've done it in a day of development and had it released. And we put a little beacon code. So very similar to the Google pixel on there, we capture the data and we really do use a very simple machine learning model. And we can see sometimes up to one, to one and a half percent increase in conversion, just off implementing them. And it's a short period of time. It's a quick bang. I call it the sugar hit, you get the sugar hit, you get that solved. And that sort of paves the way to then look at other components as I said, deconstructing where they're falling off.

Roland Gossage:
But a lot of people funny enough, don't do it all that well. The suggestions aren't very relevant, they're not, user-driven, it's not a machine learning like this is a highly converting term. So let's put this at the top. So you might do COF and you're getting coffee pods versus coffee makers at the top, right? When really what you make your most money off is the coffee maker, and then you cross all the pods in that order. So you're getting the small order for 10 pounds when really you should be selling the 150 pound coffee maker and then co-selling the pods. So that's easy ways to quick fix on that sort of thing.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I love it. I love it. I think I can definitely remember times when I've looked for things and it's like, why am I seeing this 15 pounds thing when I'm looking for the 200 pound thing? And how many other people are actually looking for the 200 pound thing? I'm getting the completely wrong. I think quite often you see maybe a third party search installed, but it's just not being configured. It's a straight away out of the box quite often is just delivering potentially the wrong, or just slightly off piece if you like category sets or products or similar products. But obviously there's a big difference and obviously why would you recommend something that's a 10 pound thing when you could be recommending a 200 pound thing, if that search sort of requires it? Yeah. Okay. So we touched on omni channel and obviously that's a huge part of improving that user experience. But how would you say a company can step forward to create a seamless experience around omni-channel?

Roland Gossage:
So one of the things we do, if you do have the click and mortar environment, so you have physical locations, you have your online. We actually created a story PI so we can actually take your point of sale data because there's a lot of behavioral stuff in the store that we want to capture and we do this for a lot of customers. We can do other things like easy reorder that we've done for companies like CVS, where we have all your transactions, all your shopping bags for 18 months, and you can reorder any of them or pieces of them and build your cart from that. Now, the nice thing is, is that frequently bought together as a recommendation, having just online because their behavior is slightly different than online. But we want to mimic in store, right? That's really the true promise of the omni-channel digital experiences.

Roland Gossage:
Can I create that in store like experience online? So that whether I'm in the store, whatever it represents our brand and how we're operating, but you need to bring that data together. We have that as sort of a standard practice in how we link these things together. It also informs the machine learning models. A lot of people will talk about ML and AI. I think it's a little bit of a sort of buzzwordy soundbite type things, but for us that you need to have a large data set to be able to make sort of the accuracy of the models are high. And by pulling all your in-store POS transaction data is you'll actually create a better online experience. And so we do that out of the box and something that we want to look at. The other is we actually don't let any data hide anywhere. And so what we'll do is we look at all your metrics, your gross margin, because we want to optimize for all these things.

Roland Gossage:
So the machine learning models, we can say listen, we know gross margin. We know percent contribution, things like sales ranking. We can pull all that stuff in like store sales ranking and use that to inform the model, right? So the machine will get smarter over time. And so then it's a really a combination of man and machine where merchants are working with the models, but we democratize them. So you don't have to have, you're a mid-sized retailer, you don't have to have a team of machine learning people. Google and GroupBy handle all that for you. So we really democratize the machine learning and AI function and then give you all the tools to run your business.

Richard Hill:
So I think if you're listening, if you just take a step back for a second. So what we're saying, or what Roland is saying is your customers are coming into your store now once, twice over time, maybe 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 times, they go online and they're seeing products and they're being serviced in a way that completely relates to the experiences of what we're walking in the store and buying from the store. So then they're seeing products that are related to things you've already bought, but physically you've gone and fetched them from the store. And then you're then also seeing products that are driven by revenue that are driven by a margin, driven by a category.

Richard Hill:
So you're not just showing any old product, which is the bottom line. You're seeing products that are very specific to you, but even more so, you as a customer should I say, even more importantly, you can drive it and tweak it, I think is what Roland is saying based on, right we want to promote the products with the better margin or the products the way we've actually got an absolute ton of those in the warehouse. We need to ship them. So let's get them out the door sort of thing. Yeah, yeah.

Roland Gossage:
The other thing too is what people don't think about is things like end cap, right? So, that's the end of the aisle. Right? It's something that people don't really mimic online. And so what we try to do is you can actually feed us end cap information and we even use that something people don't think about is that you're having an endless aisle, but you still have to have a face to it. You have to have the end cap because there are brands and stuff that want to be at the front. And then you can actually create new revenue streams actually from that data online. So a lot of the things that you pay extra, you wrigley's gum, and you're at that checkout and you get the last little shelf, well, they pay for that. You want to take that same revenue stream and put it online. So there's also revenue opportunities for your vendors by really treating it as click and mortar.

Richard Hill:
I think if we've got manufacturers vendors that have got marketing budget, marketing support which I know when I was doing it, that was a massive part. We were probably doing I don't know, a couple of 100 pound a year in just marketing support when I was running stores, but that was slightly different. But yeah. And sort of selling the whether that's the category to sub category or the checkout, up-sell or whatever it may be. Yeah. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. So in terms of obviously you've got stores, as a retailer and eCommerce store, would you say there's a sort of a if somebody's got one or two stores or a small amount of stores, does that still work well for a company like that? Or do you think there's really, if you're thinking of investing in this type of tech, do you think it's something that you should really be at a certain size? Or where would you think that's a good start point to do that?

Roland Gossage:
No, I think at any point even if you had a single store, you do thousands or hundreds of thousands of transactions and that's enough definitely to inform the model. And then of course you want to have that endless aisle online. So you have a much broader reach than your physical stores. So you can still with a single store, you can still have all the same value. And then the whole idea is well you want to drive your growth, right? So hold on hopefully we help fund the expansion of the business by driving more customers, more brand awareness, having that Google less experience. And then you reinvest that money in your growth, which is what every retailer wants to do. Whether they increase it online and now we want to go from national to multi-national across the pond U.S to the UK and things of that nature. Hopefully we're part of that overall strategy to basically the land and expand as we call it.

Richard Hill:
Love it. So who would you say is doing a good job at this in terms of the actual retailers? I mean, obviously we've got a bit of a split audience here, UK U.S. and a lot of other places. But who would you say is doing a really good job of this, of the omni-channel?

Roland Gossage:
Yeah. So I'm obviously going to be a little bit biased and use some of our clients. We've got Bed Bath & Beyond, a huge brand they've even in the animal sandler movie click was sort around the concept. So, that shows you how powerful that brand is. They've revamped the entire management team over there and brought people from pretty much every major retailer that does significant business and built sort of the dream team, the proverbial dream team. They also realized they needed to do digital, not necessarily digital first, but be a digitally oriented company. Revamped how they were doing things added very quickly same day delivery BOPIS. This was all pre pandemic, by the way. So you see the foresight there, they've done that. So as they got into the pandemic, they were able actually to capitalize on that and that shows and obviously their numbers to the street as they fared it off.

Roland Gossage:
And the nice thing there is that they actually power a huge part of their system with us, even the things like the gift registry, right? So you won't even you'd start thinking about that and being able to find the person that's done the registry instantly through search, find what products they've done, check them out. And then I'll also have programs would have left over offering deals to them, convert that for the actual shopper. So we power everything from basically the homepage to now all the way right to the shopping cart all the way through that.

Roland Gossage:
But the nice thing is, is that you look there it's all user driven. So they heavily use their data to inform that, it dynamically changes things based on this college student versus, a dad at home shopping for something for the kitchen because he likes to cook and changing that environment there. So they've really created a fully digital omni-channel that now even that slightly the sort of tide has receded a little bit, but the numbers are still very, very high. So they're not back to pre pandemic. They're actually probably one of the first ones to be a fully I would say click and mortar omni-channel environment.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah. I think it's interesting when you talk about same day delivery. Obviously they're different in the UK. I think same day hasn't quite got made over here yet in terms of obviously depends on the city and the town, et cetera. But how prevalent is it in the U.S. could you say?

Roland Gossage:
Yeah, it's definitely catching on. I think that obviously Amazon's capability and reach and that's the 800, well more 1200 pound [inaudible 00:22:29] now that everybody's fighting with. They've now got Amazon Business. So now the people that thought they were kind of safe before are not, and that's one of their big value propositions. So, that's beating them at their own game. The nice thing with same day delivery is utilizing if you do have stores as basically depots, right? So you can ship from there. There's a lot of partners, so you don't have to do it all yourself. There are sort of same day delivery as a service companies that will help enable it, that you don't have to make this sort of massive investment in that, and really utilizing the new SaaS environment and cloud capabilities that are out there and services to do fulfillment for you.

Roland Gossage:
So we've worked with some really good ones and whether that's a BJ's Wholesales or Bed Bath & Beyond, or CVS, we're all doing that. They're utilizing some vendors there, so it's worth an investigation to see if you can do it without actually outlaying a large amount of capital.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. We probably should get on the podcast some of the suppliers of the same day. I don't know that you could spare too well in the UK, but something I think we should explore.

Roland Gossage:
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. I can make some recommendations on ones that we've seen that are prevalent. Yeah, it'd be a great followup because people off from this is well, do I do with this now? Right? So hopefully a little buying guide maybe as another podcast for you.

Richard Hill:
So you talk about was it Bath Bed & Beyond as a really bad case study for you guys. But is there any other projects specifically that generate results for clients that you would sort of certain, very specific things that you did that had a real impact, sort of before they were doing X, Y, Z, and now or then they are doing now doing this based on some of the things that you implemented?

Roland Gossage:
Yeah. So I guess because ours is a unified sort of solution and we do customize it each retailer likes to, as I said sort of pick the big things. But really it's about the idea of creating that personalized experience based on the data that you already have. Most clients already have it, they're just not utilizing it. So most of it is just telling them what we find. And then it usually gives them the uh-huh moment, like "Wow, I didn't know that about the business." And so analytics is an important part of that and doing your due diligence upfront. The other thing that we actually do is data enrichment. And so a lot of retailers, whether they're producing their own product or whatever, the copy can be a bit missing, incorrect, not uniform. So for instance we've got maybe something that we've got a metric, right?

Roland Gossage:
So it's in inches, right? So one supplier is giving me with two quotes, one's IN one's INZE. It's all different spelling or incorrect completely or missing. And what we do is and where we've had big successes is we take that data and we put it through our global taxonomy and enrichment process. And we also put the voice of the customer on it. And this is what people sometimes miss is that you have the proverbial search term problem, like you say black dress, and it brings you black shorts back because short black dress and shorts matches. Things like that but at the same time is that if someone types into Google "Little black dress good for a first date," well most of the time people haven't thought to put occasion on their product record.

Roland Gossage:
So what we do is we look at the voice of the customer and we imprint it and that does two things. One is it allows Google to crawl your site and realize that these dresses are great for a first date and they're little black dresses. But also when you're on site, that same search natural language processing and stuff will also work on the site. So data is really, really important on the product catalog as well, not just the quantitative metrics, but the qualitative terms that are on there. And we've seen some very big results from that. Sometimes like a 30% increase in conversion after we processed all the data.

Richard Hill:
This just made me think of Google shopping again, with Google shopping you've got customer variables. And occasion could be that's one straight away, especially in the sort of very much so in the clothing industry I think if you're thinking formal dates, school, work, whatever it may be there-

Roland Gossage:
Absolutely.

Richard Hill:
That's got huge potential for tying that into Google shopping as well yeah.

Roland Gossage:
And also your win rates get affected. So the more complete the record is, so if you have a bad record, things like title and price find but they have a very strict piece of it. And if you submit a better record than your competitors in the bidding process, you might win just because you have better data besides the bid. So it's not just the bid price. It's also how good is that record because they don't want to put a poor recommendations up-

Richard Hill:
We see that already a 100% with shopping yeah. And that's just a whole another sort of variable there. That's what I'm going to be discussing that with the team tomorrow occasion. I think that's for us really, that's really smart. Yeah. I love it. So crystal ball time Roland, we are sitting here I mean I don't know, 12, 18 months. What are some of the things coming down the pipeline you think in your side of the e-com?

Roland Gossage:
Yeah. I think we're going to see the behaviors changing. And also the leading retailers are really leading the charge. Right? So it's kind of a you need to catch up and do it quickly or run the risk of not being successful. So I think we're going to see a lot of investment in digital. I think you're going to see customers also looking to do slight vendor simplification and that's on the right partner. Sometimes with these eCommerce sites and as you grow, I'm sure even though the smaller shops, oh there's a new thing that does this value in this. And it's just by a 1,000 paper cuts, right. To run an eCommerce website, you might have a 100 or upwards of hundreds of contracts that actually takes to run that experience. And so I think you're going to see a simplification.

Roland Gossage:
There's been a lot of acquisitions going on as well. So that market is really, there's consolidation happening. So picking the right partner to win the digital gain is going to be really, really key. But people are going to have to invest, right? Some people have been sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how it festers out. I think this is a full contact sport. You really have to get right in this, make some really smart decisions on your partner and bet on the right ones and simplify your stack and take all the friction out of the buying process.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Simplify your stack and take out the friction. Yeah. I think there's a headline right there definitely. Definitely. So I always like to end every episode on a book recommendation Roland. What would the book be that you'd recommend to our listeners? You've got a few there.

Roland Gossage:
Well, I don't like books. Actually I'm going to pull that out a real actual one. So hold on. So I'd recommend this one. It's called Good to Great by Jim Collins. We had the privilege, he talked at an event for us when this book first came out-

Richard Hill:
Oh wow.

Roland Gossage:
And I had a chance to sort of corner him after and have a little five minute a bit of banter with him. And yeah, no, I built GroupBy around the concepts in that book. But I think that it doesn't matter what industry you're in, but I think it's extremely relevant because it talks about what's the white space between a good retailer and a great retailer, and how do you create that white space? And it's usually the little things as we say that have the biggest impact. But then it wouldn't be my book recommendation for anybody in business. But specifically I think there's somethings about what's your hedgehog as a retailer or your differentiator? Some really good concepts in that book and sort of who's on the bus and sector organization.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's a fantastic recommendation is one I read about five years ago and yeah a 100%. we'll link that up in the show notes as well. So if the guys that are listening in want to find out more about you Roland, and more about GroupBy, what's the best way to do that?

Roland Gossage:
Www.groupbyinc.com best place to go. And there's both phone numbers as well as you can digitally contact us in there as well. And if you just generally search in Google, you'll find a bunch of great articles and great podcasts like this one hopefully soon that you can review some of the great things we're doing.

Richard Hill:
Lovely. Well. Thanks for being on the eCom@One Podcast and I look forward to speaking to you again. Thanks Roland.

Roland Gossage:
All right. Thanks for the invite. And it's been a pleasure.

Richard Hill:
Thank you. 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.