E59: William Christensen

Richard Hill:
Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 59th episode. In this episode, I speak with Will Christensen. For the last five years, Will has been the CEO of Data Automation. Will and his team create innovative solutions to common and also very unusual eCommerce problems. When you think about the dozens of repetitive tasks you do every day running an eCommerce store, what could you automate?

Richard Hill:
I'm personally a massive fan of automation and delegation. And we go into the specifics around why should an eCommerce store automate, so they can specifically scale? We go deep into his 15, 1, 1, 5 methodology, which, if you listen to and implement, will make a huge difference to your business. We'll share innovative ways to automate your support system, improve customer service and sales, using automation. We go very specific on things that an eCommerce store must automate.

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

Richard Hill:
How you doing, Will?

Will Christensen:
Doing really well. Excited to be here.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Great to have you on now. Now, I think this is actually a first on the podcast, talk about automation, something I'm a massive fan of, a massive believer in. So I think let's start at the basics, and then we'll get into it. So what is data automation?

Will Christensen:
So my favourite thing about data automation is going to a trade show, when that was a thing. There was a time, one day, a long time ago, when we went to these things called trade shows. And we've all forgotten what those are. For those of you listening, and it's been 10 years, we're in the middle of COVID, or on the post end of COVID, and those seem to be a thing of the past. Maybe they're coming back now.

Will Christensen:
But I'd go to this trade show, and somebody would walk up and say, "So I see on your shirt it says Data Automation. What do you guys do?" And I'd just smile. We automate data. And that's really what we do. We've focused down on eCommerce now. So we do help other people in other industries, but we found that eCommerce is a space ripe for help in the world of automation. And so that's what we do. We automate manual processes inside eCommerce businesses.

Richard Hill:
So I'm always intrigued how my guests get into their fields and how that started. So what led you into automation? How did it all start?

Will Christensen:
Well, I have always been someone who ... And it's funny, because it's taken me a while to come up with this term, but it's extreme laziness. I tend to be the type of individual who I'm like, "Okay, how can I make it so that this process is more efficient?" And it's funny, because there's this idea that just I need to save time. I need to save time. I need to figure out how to do more, and kind of lean into that.

Will Christensen:
And that's relaxed a little bit over the years. I've realized that there's enough time in the world do what we want to do with our lives. But that drive to make things more efficient caused me to start to look at everything I was doing. And I worked at an agency. This is several years ago. And I was the low man on the totem pole. And my job was to do 16 hours of copying and pasting to create reports for our clients. And so every week, 16 hours. And I was like in the middle of this, ready to literally pull my hair out. And I thought, "There has got to be a better way than this."

Will Christensen:
I remember sitting down with my supervisor at the time, and he was like, "This is a VLOOKUP." He showed me in Excel. "Here's how you connect this spreadsheet to that spreadsheet." And I was like, "Okay, if there's something out there that can do that, what else is possible?" And that began my journey. So, really, this all started with VLOOKUPs in Excel. And, very quickly, I started to dive into coding, and automating the backend with macros, and watching how all the world worked in terms of connecting things.

Will Christensen:
And I spent somewhere around 300 hours that first year, just teaching myself how to code, how to automate. And I automated that 16 hour process down to a four or five hour thing, where my computer actually woke up in the morning, did an hour or two's worth of work before I got into the office. And then I had two to three hours of spot checking the automation and making it all work. So that's how I got started.

Richard Hill:
Love it, love it. It's always nice to find ... I can very much relate to the 16 hours of doing X, Y, Z. And I think we've all been there. A lot of listeners will relate to that. I think that's why it's so fascinating. Gone are the times where I really need to spend too much time on repetition. If we're realistic, I think people can get a bit attached to attach to routine.

Richard Hill:
But if we step back and go, "Hang on a minute, actually spending four hours doing that, three hours doing that, there is something out there, or there could be something out there, that could be built to save that time." I think it's a whole new world when you sort of dip your toe, and start to really go into it. So why should an eCommerce company use automation to scale specifically?

Will Christensen:
So eCommerce is one of those things that's very interesting, because it's all about volume, right? There are some eCommerce businesses where they sell a high ticket item, and they have an extreme margin, but those are more rare. It's more common to find a business where they have a razor thin margin on top. And the whole idea is sell a crap ton of X, Y, and Z. Let's get this widget to move. And I think that's fascinating, right? It's kind of the SAS world, where you create this widget, and you sell that a thousand times, and that's how you make money.

Will Christensen:
It's the same idea with eCommerce, where you got this widget, and let's sell that widget a thousand times, and that's how we make money. And because there's that repetition, this thing's going to happen a thousand times in that month, if you can take something that takes two minutes and turn it down to 30 seconds, that's not that impressive, until you have to do it a thousand times. So, eCommerce, in a way, is the perfect catalyst for needing automation.

Will Christensen:
And it's funny, because when we opened our doors, when Data Automation began, eCommerce was not our focus. We were like, "Oh, cool, we're going to go get involved in a lot of different places." And one of our founders, Brandon Checketts, is the founder of Feedback Genius, Seller Labs, the company that does a lot of Amazon automation. And so, naturally, we got a lot of introductions to the eCommerce world. We were one of the first development partners at Skubana. And we became a development partner at Zapier.

Will Christensen:
So we naturally sort of went the direction of having a lot of eCommerce routes. And it just became a natural place for us to thrive. Yeah.

Richard Hill:
I like it. Ultimately, I think, to be quite crude, if you're in eCommerce, you're in the business of shipping a lot of stuff. And there's a lot of repetition there, whether it's trying to get going from your 100 orders a day, to your 1,000 orders a day, to your 10,000 orders a day, or whatever your number is listening in. But, ultimately, with each of those orders, let alone all the background stuff, if you're doing 10,000 orders a day, there's 10,000 of this happening, 10,000 of that happening, 10,000 of ... Whether it's pick, pack, warehouse, whatever, we're talking about replenish, whatever it may be, reorder, whatever it may be.

Richard Hill:
I know, in our agencies, we wouldn't be where we are, we'd be a fraction of the size as we are now, without that automation element. When you've got clients with 100,000 SKUs, well, without automation, a lot of those SKUs are going to get no action, if you like, when it comes to bid adjustments and SEO and so forth, where we can automate quite a few things.

Richard Hill:
So to the eCommerce stores listening and thinking, "Okay, sounds great. But where could we start?" Where's sort of an appropriate start point for automation for an eCommerce store, if maybe they're not doing much, or they're not aware of anything they're doing, but there's maybe some things built into some of the systems they're using? But what would be a good ... When would be a good place to start?

Will Christensen:
So what I tell people is ... And this is actually a question that I've come up with many, many times before, is I've been asked, "When should I start automating, or what should I automate?" And we actually developed a formula that we can use to define when we should automate. We call it 15, 1, 1, 5, okay? So it's somewhat easy to remember, 15, 1, 1, 5. And what I tell people, get out a sticky note and write that at the top of it, 15, 1, 1, 5. More than 15 minutes a day, more than an hour per week, more than an hour per month. And I'm going to leave the last five part to the ... We're going to leave some suspense around what that last five minutes.

Will Christensen:
But 15, 1, 1, 5. If it's happening more than 15 minutes a day, more than an hour a week, or more than an hour a month, it's time to start looking into automation, or it's time to start looking into delegation. I run a podcast called Automate, Delegate, Eliminate. There's a pivot point in your business when it becomes a repeatable task that's happening over and over again, automate, delegate, or eliminate. You have to start looking at what that is when it becomes repeatable.

Will Christensen:
Because you may get to that point and look at it, and be like, "Wait a minute. This process is actually sucking the life out of my business." One of my clients, her brand is called Puppy Cakes. She actually makes cakes for puppies. I love it when people are like, "So what do you do?" I make cakes for puppies. Puppy cakes, data automation, like, "What do you guys do?"

Will Christensen:
She was doing this line of potato chips. And she figured out pretty quickly that these potato chips for dogs, although a decent seller, took so long to make, that they were actually a detriment to her overall capacity. She went in and decided to eliminate that product line. So, for her, it was a lot more than an hour per day, or 15 minutes per day. But she discovered eliminate was the right option for her business.

Will Christensen:
So don't discount automate, delegate or eliminate, right? But that's why that 15 minutes per day, an hour per week, or an hour per month. Draw that line across the top and start writing down these processes that are taking that time. And now for the five part, 15, 1, 1, 5. Do it five times manually before you automate. And the reason I say that is if you try to automate ... So I find a lot of people who get excited about automation, and they're like, "Oh, I found this new tool, and we really want to use it. So we want you to automate this part of the data, so it goes into this new tool."

Will Christensen:
And I say, "Well, wait a minute, have you ever used this new tool? Have you tried to use it manually by doing ... You want to automate this data source, or force it to work for you? Have you tried to force it to work for you manually yet?" And they'd be like, "No, well, we thought we would just auto ... I mean, you guys are data automation. That's what you do, right?" We're like, "Whoa, stop, stop, stop. We should figure out what data imports actually need to go in there, to make this work for you manually."

Will Christensen:
We do a process called systems design, where we go in and actually figure out what the manual inputs look like, and then we can automate. So do it five times manually, so you know whether to turn left or right, or go straight or stop. Otherwise, you begin to automate things. And then you'll get in, and the process will happen the second time. You're like, "Oh crap. I have to re-automate that. Or I have to add a new if then in there, because the whole thing's broken." So 15, 1, 1, 5. That's the magic formula, so to speak, into when you should automate.

Richard Hill:
You're singing to the converted here. I mean, I'm a massive fan of automation. And then that word delegation. But, unfortunately, I probably still hang on to too many things. So I do need to eliminate or delegate or automate more. I think a lot of our listeners will relate to that. And I love that 15, 1, 1, 5. Yeah. That's a really, really good way to think through that thing we are spending that time doing. Obviously, get used to doing it manually so many times, or five times in your instance first, and then write, "How are we going to automate it, or not, or get rid of?" Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Hill:
So let's just jump back over. I touched on the marketing sort of automation out there. What would you say to someone who'd say, "Marketing needs to be human? I don't want to automate. I don't think we can automate this. There's humans at the end of our marketing. And they need to be worked with individually and marketed to individually." What would you say to those people, that are already sort of anti-automation?

Will Christensen:
My favourite thing to tell those individuals is, "You're not thinking of this process in a granular enough way." There are pieces of your business, of the world, that should not, I just said should not, should not be automated. The number of those tasks that actually need human intuition is a lot less than you think.

Will Christensen:
So the first word of advice that I would give that individual is break it apart. Do you have a diagram describing exactly what that marketing process looks like? Well, first I find the people through a retargeting pixel, and then I follow them around, and then they come back to a landing page. And then they put in their email address. And then I send them an email with more information about what's going on, and then I go through ... If you break it down, you will find a piece of that process where you do the same dang thing for every single person. And, literally, the only dang thing that changes about that email is the name.

Will Christensen:
Well, guess what? There's automation tools out there that can help you put in the name, so it can be just as familiar and customized for that individual as it was for everybody. So that would be my first word of advice is break it down. There are pieces of this automation, or, excuse me, pieces of this process, which can be extracted and handed to a robot. And you can keep all of the human touch element of what you're trying to do to, to kind of get it in there.

Will Christensen:
And blatantly call it out. An example, our website has an inquiry form, where you come and say, "Contact us." We figured out that there were five questions in our onboarding discussion that happened in every single situation. We asked the same five questions, and those five questions allowed us to get a lot more detail, and kind of skip some of the nitty gritty.

Will Christensen:
So when you fill out a contact form on Data Automation's website, we immediately reply with an email that says, "Hey, we believe in automation. Guess what? This is an automated email. If you'll take five minutes and fill out this form, we're going to ask you a couple of questions, and then we're going to give you a link to our calendar, which is what you wanted anyway. I'm going to give you what you wanted anyway. And I'm going to ask you some questions while I give you what you wanted anyway. And then when we get on our first call, we can skip the first 30 minutes of hem and haw, because I've already asked you those five questions."

Will Christensen:
And the thing I just described to you is extremely human touch, right? I need to know these five questions, and I need you to feel like you are important. And so me eliminating that half hour of time that you and I both had to spend, my customers actually thank me for it. Oh, thank you for eliminating a half an hour for both of us.

Richard Hill:
You're having a better call for both sides. You're sort of skipping a lot of basics, if you like. That way, they're this type of client, potentially. They are this, this, this. This is the problem. This is the potential discussion avenue, rather than still trying to ... You've got that time. Yeah. Very, very smart.

Will Christensen:
The fun part is sometimes the form actually will go to a point where it'll say, "You know what? We really appreciate your interest. We're not a good fit." And then we save both of us an hour. Right? We didn't jump on the phone and BS for an hour. We skipped it. And how kind is it ... So, Brene Brown, clarity, kindness, they equal each other. How kind is it to be like, "You know what? You're just not the right size yet. We've dealt with enough clients to know that you're not going to be able to afford what we can do."

Richard Hill:
I think that's great. I mean, we use in our business quizzes. Somebody comes in. Are you an eCommerce store? Yes. Okay. That's great, because we're an eCommerce agency. No. Well, then we'll refer you to a resource, because we probably can't help you. So it's saving your time and ours, to be brutally honest. But we probably do know somebody that can, or there's some resources on another one of our businesses sites that could help you.

Richard Hill:
But if you're on our e-com agency site, we've got a very specific type of client that we work with. And if you don't fit that mould and that model, then we probably can point you in the right direction with a resource, with a webinar, with a partner, whoever that may be.

Richard Hill:
So, yeah, no, that's great. So going back to the very specific eCommerce, obviously, a lot of our listeners are working on Magento, Shopify, Woo, and all various others. But they are sort of the main ones, I think, where we've got a lot of listeners on. What would you say the main that those stores should be thinking about automating? What are some of the things that they should be doing? It's a bit of a no brainer. What should they be thinking about, and what should they be going away and doing?

Will Christensen:
So the thing that I would say to them is, "Ask yourself what are the highest touch points?" Remember, go back to 15, 1, 1, 5. I'm going to give you some examples of, over the years, things that eCommerce sellers have come to me and said, "Oh my gosh, this is way more than 15, 1, 1, 5. I've now done this a hundred times, and it is taking five hours per week."

Will Christensen:
So the places I would start looking are look for places where you do massive amounts of calculation, using spreadsheets to get at data. So if you're spending two or three hours a week doing an inventory analysis, and you've got pivot tables or Excel formulas, or even just data that you're uploading into another system, and it's taking a long time to mash that data together, those are not immediately, "Wow, that was easy to automate," but they should be looked at by an automation professional.

Will Christensen:
So that would be the first place that I would look for, is look for places where you're taking three or four different data sources, mashing them together in a pivot table to get analysis, and ask yourself, "If I had access to a real-time dashboard, that had this data available, how much better could I be at my business for what's there?"

Will Christensen:
And then reach out to someone like Richard or me and ask them, "Hey, have you ever seen somebody who has automated this?" And the answer is usually yes. We know a dashboard. We've built software like that before. We know someone who's connected that. You're not the only person who's done that. It's very common in an eCommerce business. So that's the first place I would go.

Richard Hill:
[crosstalk 00:19:29] with different systems, one system that maybe traditionally doesn't connect. Well, it does, I think is what we're saying, obviously. But you might not think it can. You might think that you're unique. Or we use this warehouse system, and this account system, and this product image system, and this inventory system and this Shopify, Magento. That doesn't work with that, that, and that. Or they might not think it will. And then this is where you're saying, "Automation can then come in and work with two or three different platforms."

Will Christensen:
So I'm more specifically talking about analysing data, in the first use case that I'm talking about. When you mentioned, "Well, I'm taking this data from over here and I'm pushing over here," let's talk about inventory. So there are three main objects inside an eCommerce business, that I tell people, "If you are manually transferring any of these three objects from point A to point B, from two different software systems, stop and get it automated." Orders, tracking, and inventory. And they're like, "Wait, well, that makes up my entire eCommerce business." Yep. You're right. It does.

Will Christensen:
So if you're transferring that to another 3PL system, if you're using an eCommerce system to aggregate your multi-channel stuff where you're bringing stuff in, there are entire inventory management systems built to go up and sync that inventory in different places. Oh, and then you have a 3PL using some archaic piece of software. And so they can't sync what's going on. As you grow, 3PL is a common, natural step that comes into the growth.

Will Christensen:
Most large eCommerce sellers that I work with, they have brought a 3PL in at some point, third-party logistics company, to begin fulfilling their orders. Because they just straight up don't have enough time to do it in their garage. Right? And there's all sorts of other pieces. There's dropshippers that you can bring in, where you have somebody else who's making it. And not only they're making it, but they're sending it to FBA.

Will Christensen:
We just got finished building a piece of software, where literally all it does is they prepare the shipment to go off to Amazon. And they scan the FBA label, and it pops up on an iPad and says, "This is exactly how this should be packed. This is exactly how many are left in the shipment." And we built this piece of software for another eCommerce seller.

Will Christensen:
So look at your processes. Look at what's going on in there. Use 15, 1, 1, 5. So the transfer of any of those three objects, orders, inventory, or tracking information, back and forth between different ... Out of ship station, into ship station, up to Skubana, down from Skubana, out to some third party system that you're using a store that's very new, but has a lot of traction. And so nobody's importing those orders automatically. It can be done. Even if there's no API, it can be done, in terms of getting what's going on. So those would be the four main places: analyzation of data, orders, tracking, inventory.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Obviously, four core areas. But you've obviously worked with a lot of eCommerce stores, a lot of Shopify, Magento, and others. If we were to go a layer in further, what would be some real things that you maybe don't give out too often, real actionable tips, that are just go away and maybe action, or quite low cost could action.

Will Christensen:
Yep. Yep. So here's a low cost action. If you do not currently have a form around returns or customer inquiries, stop, get rid of that open-ended, "If you have a question, send us an email at support@yourbrand.com." Get rid of that support email. Just take it off the website. And create a form where you ask people the questions that every ... I mean, every single one of them, what's their inquiry going to be about? Oh, it's going to be about, "Is this in stock? I have a problem with my order. I want to start a return." What are the seven different categories of common things that are in there, eliminate the support@email, and create a form. That'd be the first place.

Will Christensen:
And the reason that eliminate ... The time savings alone for your support team, or for you, when you're having to answer those support inquiries, it's mind-blowing. Use a software like Gravity Forms, or Typeform, or one of these others, to put people through the quiz that we were talking about earlier with Richard, where we ask the right questions. That would be the first place I would go.

Will Christensen:
The second place I would go is I would start to figure out the automation steps that come after those customer support inquiries. So let's say that they're asking about, "Is this item still in stock?" If you ask them to actually put in the link, or you create a drop down where they can choose the item they want to know is in stock, you can automatically reply to that email by checking the inventory number, as long as the inventory number's right inside Shopify or Magento or WooCommerce, and come back to them and say, "Guess what? It is in stock." Or let's create a listener that automatically notifies people when that is in stock, right? So you start to create canned responses, and sometimes automated responses for what's there.

Will Christensen:
Another common one that I've seen is order comes in, something went wrong, and now it's actually out of stock. Now there's a whole conversation you have to have between you and the client about, "Hey, oops, the thing you ordered is actually out of stock." That entire conversation, the first five emails can be automated. Order comes in, identify it's out of stock, send an email out. "Oops, sorry. This is actually out of stock. We're going to watch this daily and notify you, if it does come in stock in the next five days."

Will Christensen:
You can send five automated emails. This is still out of stock. This is still out of stock. This is still out of stock. This is still out of stock. And then a fifth email that says, "You know what? We're really sorry. This is still out of stock. We're not sure when it's coming back in. Why don't you click this link to schedule a 15 minute call with us? And we'll talk about what we can do for you." You get up on the call, sell them a different product, or let them know when it's actually coming in. And they're like, "Okay. Yeah, I'm okay to wait." So that entire process of the tick-tock customer, because it's not happening, automatable.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, I love it. It's a bit like when you look at a product page, and there's a Q&A section on the product page. We're Q&A-ing the potential questions on email. But rather than manually replying, we've got an automation in place. I love it. And, obviously, if you've got a busy store, that potentially is thousands of emails every week, every month, that are automated.

Richard Hill:
And ultimately more sales coming through, because those blockages, gaps, things that are stopping those owners coming through, because they want to ask a simple question, or check on stock availability or something, it's usually just quite simple. And you're just sitting writing the same thing out again and again and again. Yeah. I love that. Quite a simple -

Will Christensen:
Look at your canned responses. That brings up another idea here, the canned responses that you're sending to your ... Maybe you're like, "Well, I've already got canned responses." Look at those canned responses and start to look at the keywords that are going there. And there are many different pieces of software that automate support tickets, to the point where someone types the subject line ...

Will Christensen:
And you've seen this on other sites. They type the subject line that they want to send to you, and it immediately pops up six different support articles to answer the person's question. You can eliminate the inquiry before it even comes in. And there is software, it's very affordable, in terms of making a knowledge basis that's searchable like that.

Richard Hill:
Just like when you go to Google, and it auto starts to type in what is ... How to bake a cake, before you've even typed in bake a cake, or whatever it may be. Yeah. Fantastic. So that's great. A lot of actionable takeaways there for our listeners.

Richard Hill:
Now, let's just maybe go a little bit deeper and think about ... If you could maybe give me an example of a project that you've worked on where you've implemented automation, some of the things that you've done that have really improved results, in a real world example of something that you've implemented.

Will Christensen:
And we've done hundreds of different automations. And so that's like asking a car mechanic, "What's the most effective thing you've done to a car to make it work better." And he's going to be like, "Whoa, there's a lot of cars I've worked on over the years."

Will Christensen:
One thing I tell people is, honestly, an actionable tip that I think every eCommerce seller should have on their computer right now. Ask yourself if you have what's called a clipboard manager. This is one of my favourite tips to give to eCommerce sellers. Because eCommerce sellers often have to copy multiple things like email addresses, from orders that are late, or order numbers that are late, or order numbers that have an issue. Because X, Y, Z Shopify something, or plugin didn't work, and you need to give three order number examples.

Will Christensen:
Clipboard managers make it so you don't have to flip back and forth between two different screens. You copy, copy, copy, paste, paste, paste. So it's a history manager. The one that I like, I'm on a Windows machine, is called ClipClip. It's free. It's one that I really like. And then there's another one on Mac. I think it's called Clip Help or Clip History. And if you Google clipboard manager for Mac, clipboard manager for PC, you're going to find hundreds of them. Mine is even searchable.

Will Christensen:
So let's say that three days ago I copied something, and I was like, "Oh, the response I gave to so-and-so would be perfect for this person." As long as you've copied it and put it in your clipboard, you can keyword search for that exact response and give it back to them. So clipboard managers. And you asked for a specific automation project, and I gave you an automation tool that I think every eCommerce seller on the planet should have installed. Clipboard managers are the bomb.com.

Will Christensen:
If we're talking about a specific ... Well, let's talk about an automation project, that we want to get into the weeds, nitty gritty. Let's talk about one of my clients, who basically he needed to take data sources from three different places, to understand where his inventory was at any time, to do some forecasting, essentially. So he had his inventory management solution. He had his Shopify, or big commerce stores, and he had these different places where the inventory was. We needed to bring that inventory all into one spreadsheet, so that he could then go back and order from his suppliers.

Will Christensen:
So he had this spreadsheet where he was kind of figuring out where it was. And actually I lied. He wasn't even using a spreadsheet. They were going product by product. And they were looking up the inventory on Amazon. And they were like, "Okay, I think I need another 50 of these. Now who's got those?" And he was going to the individual supplier stores, to figure out who had them, to figure out how to order, and line by line. So it was taking 15 to 30 minutes per product, to figure out what he needed to order.

Will Christensen:
And, I mean, it was mind blowing how much time he was spending, like 15 minutes per product. And we were like, "Okay, well, let's just figure out all the data sources, put them into one place, and put them all next to each other." So he could take three minutes, two minutes per product, like, "Okay, 10 of those, 15 of those, 16 of those, 16 of those, send off a PO. 10 of those, 16 of those, send off a PO." And so that was a big part for him, was forecasting. And putting all of that data into the right place, the same place, that they go in and take on that process.

Richard Hill:
Love it. Love it. Love it. I think, yeah, some great stuff there. So I always like to ask a question around what you think is coming down the pipeline. In terms of the next probably one to three years, what would you say the future of automation is going to be? Is there any standout things, that we'll look back in a couple of years and say, "Will mentioned that. We should have implemented that." What's the things, or the thing, that we need to be looking out for as an eCommerce store?

Will Christensen:
I would say that the number one thing you should be keeping your eyes on is probably no-code, and the movement that's happening there. eCommerce and no-code are a place that they haven't really joined worlds yet. So I don't know if you knew it, but there's people out there who have made plug and play ... So most of you are aware of WordPress now has themes, like Divi and Theme Builder, and these places where you can drag and drop the front end UX, UI. They've automated the design part of a website, to the point where most anybody can just plug and play a lot of that sort of stuff.

Will Christensen:
That's been taken to another level, where there are websites out there ... Bubble.io is an example, where Bubble will allow you to create an entire marketplace. You can recreate eBay for a couple of thousand dollars. Think about it. If you were to go and be like, "I want to make an E-bay," if you wanted to go out and make an eBay 10 years ago, you would have spent 150 to 350 grand to get the guts built for something like that. Because eBay was is so sophisticated. It's got a ticket system, it's got the idea of vendors and sellers, and all of this crazy stuff.

Will Christensen:
There's people out there now who have basically built a Lego set, and they hand you the Lego set and say, "Now you can build eBay." And the Lego set cost $1,500. And then you spend 20 to 80 hours assembling the Lego set. And when you're done, "It's like, wow, I have eBay. I can be eBay or TripAdvisor." Or think of all of the major, big people, you can make a niche version of those for 1,500 to $2,000. That is coming to eCommerce. In the next three years, I foresee make your own version.

Will Christensen:
And they already have some of them out there that are open source. But open source means there's still coding involved. So Oberlo is one, if you haven't heard of Oberlo. They're kind of making ... For a couple thousand dollars, you can customize your own version of a Shopify store, and do something totally crazy. It's not no-code yet, but it will be.

Will Christensen:
So, in the next three years, I foresee no-code hitting eCommerce in a way that makes the checkout experience amazing. There's a several companies who basically have their own ... And there similar to Oberlo, where they have a checkout cart process that can be customized to the point where you have your own Amazon. Imagine if you wanted to run your own marketplace full of ... Everyone's like, "Man, I should build Amazon." It's not as easy ... Or, excuse me, it's not as hard as it sounds. Because people have built out of the box tools, that have all of those bells and whistles into it, for a couple thousand dollars.

Will Christensen:
So that, I believe, is one of the things that I would keep your eyes open for what's going to replace ... And/or is Shopify going to roll out more of a plug and play interface, where you can be like, "I just wish Shopify did this." And they're like, "Well, oh, it's right here. There's a plugin for that." Or there's a drag and drop interface that changes the workflow and the logic. That's what I think is coming in the next two to three years.

Richard Hill:
I think we'll put in the diary a date for two years time, and we'll see what's what.

Will Christensen:
Yep. Yep. And it's hitting a lot of the other spaces for technology. It's hitting them right now. Like I said, you can already create eBay. You can already create Amazon. I believe that the Shopifys of the world, and some of those pieces, you can create them, but the level of complexity and what's available is not quite there yet. And it's coming. It's going to become more mainstream, I think.

Richard Hill:
On that sort of semi topic, tools, is there any tools that you think that the guys listening in, the Shopify, the Magento, these platforms, that are going to help our guys to expedite their automation journey? What tools would you recommend?

Will Christensen:
So I go back to the first one I mentioned already, a tool, clipboard manager. If you do not have a clipboard manager, and your team is using clipboard managers, you're missing out on 15 minutes of automation every single day. Add that up, gets real awesome, real fast. So clipboard managers is the number one personal tool that I would install.

Will Christensen:
The second place that I would go and look out at different places ... And most people are using this already, but I'm going to mention it, password managers. LastPass, OnePass, these tools that allow you to save those passwords and securely distribute them around your team, that's another place I would go. Another tool I would put out there is Loom or Screencastify. If you are not currently using ...

Will Christensen:
So when you're like, "Hey, Shopify plugin guy, my Shopify plugin is broken. Or my Magento plugin is broken." Please do not be the guy that says, "It's broken," just say, "It's broken ..." Because a developer, one, is going to pull his hair out when he gets that message. And, two, he's not going to be able to help you. It just ticks him off. So instead of saying, "It's broken," be like, "It's broken, and I recorded a video showing you how." And you record your screen and show us there. So Loom, Screencastify, those are two tools I've put in.

Will Christensen:
Now let's talk eCommerce specific tools. Get a ticket system. Go implement Zendesk, or Help Scout, or one of those other systems that are out there. Another tool I would recommend ... And don't get me started. We could spend six hours just talking tools. Hotjar.

Richard Hill:
Hotjar. Yeah. Yeah.

Will Christensen:
Hotjar is unreal. Literally, if you were ever like, "Man, I just wish I could sit behind my customers, and watch what they do on the website. You see exactly what they do and where they get stuck. Install Hotjar, then go pee your pants, because you literally have a front row seat. Because you're watching exactly where they get stuck, and you can pop-

Richard Hill:
What are they doing there? What are they doing? Yeah.

Will Christensen:
Exactly.

Will Christensen:
And you can record a hundred visitors for free. It's not like this is expensive. A hundred visitors for free. It will tell you so much more about why people aren't buying. Google analytics is powerful. Don't discount that. But watching the movement on the mouse, you can almost read their minds, like, "Oh, they're stuck on that. Oh, they don't understand what that word means. They're spending way too much time hovering over that. Okay. I got to change the wording there." So Hotjar would be another one that I would say, "Go get that in there."

Richard Hill:
I need to go out there. I mean, Loom is one we use. And all of my front facing team have all got ... We've got an agency, but I think they call that a corporate account, business account. Then we've got probably 10 licenses for Loom. We love it. In our agency, it's just fantastic. A little video, five minute, 10 minute, 15 minute video to a client, or potential customer in an eCommerce store's instance, or to a dev, like you say, there's something not working with something. Yeah. Fantastic.

Richard Hill:
So I like to finish every episode, Will, with a book recommendation. What book would you recommend to our listeners?

Will Christensen:
Oh man. I knew this was coming, and the number of books ... Honestly, the one that I would probably go with ... I can't do one. I'm going to do two. The Lean Startup. And The Lean Startup, I'll be honest, is more about software. They talk more about software.

Richard Hill:
I think that's right behind me, I see, on that shelf somewhere.

Will Christensen:
You got that up there on the shelf? The Lean Startup is applicable to both online and offline eCommerce stores. And the reason it is, is because it challenges you. I lied, I'm going to give you three. The Lean Startup. Okay? It challenges you to think about the assumptions you're making about the business and fail faster. So fail faster is huge.

Will Christensen:
The second one, I would say, if you're just getting new to this idea of business, and how do you create a system, Michael Gerber's The E-Myth, that talks about what does it mean to actually-

Richard Hill:
That's right there as well.

Will Christensen:
You'd think I was actually in your office there, picking out The E-Myth.

Richard Hill:
I just had it.

Will Christensen:
Yep. There you go. There you go. Okay. So The E-Myth, The Lean Startup, and-

Richard Hill:
What is it? Where is it?

Will Christensen:
So the third one that I'm going to throw out there for you is Leadership and Self-deception. Leadership and Self-deception is not a super well-known book. When you get to the point of delegate in your business, you have to learn how to treat people like people, instead of treating people like objects. And it's very natural to treat people like objects, like cogs in the system, cogs in the wheel.

Will Christensen:
But if you treat them like objects, they're going to leave. And that's your most important asset when it comes to delegation. And it's never going to be a party of one. You're going to have to have a party of two, party of three, party of four. And then you insert automation and delegation. Remember, automate, delegate, eliminate. If you don't know how to treat people the right way, you're going to burn it out.

Will Christensen:
And I personally have ... And if any of my prior employees are listening, I've learned a lot. And Leadership and Self-deception is one of the ways that I've learned a lot about how to treat people right.

Richard Hill:
I think we just got our soundbite for this episode, because that is a brilliant, brilliant finish. Absolutely 100% agree. Well, thank you so much for being a guest on the eCom@One podcast. I look forward to catching up with you again in two years time.

Will Christensen:
Looking forward to it.

Richard Hill:
Thanks Will.

Will Christensen:
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.