Welcome to this episode of the eCommerce Podcast where we explore omnichannel success looks like with special guest Vikram Saxena of Better Commerce. Our conversation navigates how technology, innovation, and customer-focused strategies win in eCommerce, as well as how the Fragrance Shop turned challenges into opportunities, revolutionising the way we think about retail and customer engagement.

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• The Power of Mini Warehouses: Discover how the Fragrance Shop transformed each of its stores into mini warehouses during the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring business continuity and growth.
• Membership Models for Customer Retention: Uncover the strategic implementation of membership models that not only foster customer loyalty but also introduce a new revenue stream. See how making customers feel exclusive and valued can drive retention.
• Balancing Personalisation: Vikram Saxena shares insights on achieving the right balance in personalisation efforts—engaging customers without overstepping boundaries. Learn how to use data wisely for a customised shopping experience.
• Omnichannel Strategies for Success: Dive into the essentials of omnichannel marketing, ensuring seamless customer experiences across all platforms. Understand why it's crucial to treat customer journeys as a web of interactions rather than a linear path.
• Leveraging Technology and Innovation: From headless commerce to innovative business models, explore how technology serves as the backbone of omnichannel success, enabling flexibility and scalability in eCommerce operations.

Subscribe to our podcast to stay updated on the latest trends and strategies in eCommerce. Connect with us in the comments or on social media to share your thoughts and experiences.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Podcast

with me, your host, Matt Edmundson.

The eCommerce Podcast is all about helping you deliver eCommerce wow.

And to help us do just that, today we are chatting with

Vikram Saxena from BetterCommerce about all things Omnichannel.

We're going to get into what Omnichannel eCommerce is.

As things currently stand in 2024 with the maestro himself, Vikram.

So don't go anywhere, grab your notebooks, grab your pens,

because you're going to want them.

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Let's talk about today's guest, Mr.

Vikram.

Yes, from teaching Microsoft Office, remember those days,

to pioneering in eCommerce.

Vikram turned a coding hobby into BetterCommerce, revolutionising retail

with customisable, budget friendly tech.

His journey from a self taught coder to a CEO showcases a leap

from corporate life Two filling a critical gap with an API first Lego.

I love this Lego like approach for mid market retailers.

Now he's not just an entrepreneur.

Oh no, he's a visionary making eCommerce accessible advocating

for growth without growing pains.

Love, love, love that.

We are all advocating for eCommerce, which I think is why we're here, Vikram, but

it's great to have you on the show, man.

Thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much, Matt.

It's a pleasure being here.

I've been hearing a few of the podcasts and it's absolutely amazing

what you've got, what you're doing.

It's just phenomenal.

Oh, bless you.

We enjoy it.

We enjoy doing it.

We get to meet awesome people like yourself.

What I liked about your bio what I, what made me smile when I was reading

it is you are a self taught coder and it started out as a hobby and

has now ended up as your business.

And if I'm honest with you, that is exactly my story.

I just started doing something for a hobby and it turns out it's now my career.

Only I didn't build an eCommerce platform like you did with BetterCommerce.

I just built my eCommerce empire, but it's good to,

brilliant.

yeah, it's good to share that, isn't it?

It's good to have that in common.

How did you get started in coding?

Did you just have a go one day or was it more intentional?

No, actually, I was quite disillusioned when I

was at the college stage and I had no idea what I was going to do.

So a friend of mine suggested, there's this opportunity of getting a job

to train people on Microsoft Office.

I said, I've never seen it.

He said, no worries.

I've never even seen Microsoft Office and that was Microsoft Office 97.

Wow.

he said, no worries, you can talk really well.

Why don't you just go and give an interview?

Maybe they select you and train you for it.

I just went for the interview and they just selected me and

three months I taught office.

I still remember my first day I was standing there and I was teaching them

things that I had never seen myself.

I was opening a menu, I was opening a menu, clicked on File New, it

created a new file and I just repeated whatever it did on the screen.

Wow.

but within three months, I literally burned the midnight oil

and somehow it just took my fancy that this is what I want to do in my life.

Computers, that's what I wanted to do.

And then within three months, I got bored of Office, then next three months,

I focused completely on the networking, hardware, assembling PCs, myself, Windows

95, installing, uninstalling, doing all of that networking bit as well.

And then I got bored of that as well.

And then I said, I want to become a programmer.

That was the next logical evolution.

But everybody said, you don't have educational background, you don't have

a degree in technology, you can't be.

So I said, fine, I picked up a book, which read Learn ASP in 24 hours and you may not

believe, but I actually sat with that book for 48 hours from page one to page last.

And those two days were the enlightening part for my life.

And I said, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.

And that was the beginning.

That's it.

Fantastic.

I love that.

Your little Damascus road experience ASP in 24 hours.

I started in I started creating coding websites in 1997.

So as you're teaching office, and in my head, Vikram, I'm showing my age slightly.

I think we both are by talking about Office 97.

Was that the one with the little paper clip in the

Yes.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

That's the one.

Yeah.

Indeed it was.

It was.

Yeah, my, my first, yeah, my first rendezvous with the computers.

Yeah.

I was still using PCs back then as well.

It wasn't until later I became, a Mac fanboy, but yeah, it's fascinating.

Yeah, so I started coding websites in 1997.

Got married in 98, one of the first websites I did was our wedding

website, and it's funny I, like you, I got bored with a few things

along the way and yet here I am.

I didn't learn ASP I learnt PHP because it felt like it was slightly easier to get

Yeah.

I took the easy road, Vikram, I took the easy road.

Yeah,

of us survived and both the technologies have still

survived, in some form or shape.

you do much coding now?

I do

I still do.

I, yeah, I know I'm completely hands on actually.

I still spend my weekends learning new stuff, practicing new technologies,

writing codes for some new solutions.

I've built a solution over the weekends over the last six months,

which basically automates the process across all software organization.

And it's not just project management, it's across team, project, infrastructure,

assignment, allocation, everything.

And all of that I've done over the weekends all by myself.

Wow.

Keeps you busy then.

I, unlike you I, we took on some a young chap called Mark Jackson.

He came to us fresh out of university.

He's still with us, Mark.

This is years ago.

I don't quite remember how many years ago now, a long time ago.

Mark came and joined us fresh out of university.

He had a degree in electronic engineering and I taught him

everything I knew about coding.

It took about 20 minutes and then and then he took it over really.

And so now he's a director of all things technical and the.

Brilliant.

The skill level now in coding is just something else.

Compared to what it was when I was writing, when I wrote the first

eCommerce website, it's chalk and cheese.

So I still get the basics.

I still get the fundamentals, but yeah it's way beyond my, I'd have

to, I'd probably have to spend six months trying to catch up now.

My son, my eldest son is actually a much better programmer than I am.

And

very good.

Yeah.

yeah I, unlike, so unlike you I, I do miss it.

The coding aspect of it.

So how come you decided to write BetterCommerce then?

What was the story behind that?

So basically, in 98, I started off one year was primarily

into corporate trainings, and then I moved on into the programming world.

So about 10 years, I stayed in the corporate world, working for companies

across Europe, and I lived in Germany for about three years, worked for

a very large enterprise business.

And then I learned a lot of new things, how to build platforms at scale, when

you are, and at the time when we built that platform back in 2004, it was

much bigger than Amazon at the time.

It was a B2B web store, but it was much more in terms of revenue and volume that

than Amazon that was doing at the time.

Yeah.

And then when I quit back in 2007, I started my own IT

services business, and I was very happy doing it because I wanted freedom.

I wanted freedom.

I'm not cut out for corporate bureaucracy and, all of that repetitivism around.

So I wanted to build something of my own and have a much more

friendly culture and environment.

So 2007 is when I quit and I started on my own.

So I had been doing a lot of IT services business and we did a huge project.

We built a platform for a company called Tech Data back in 2011- 2012.

Which basically brought all the software giants of the world in one place.

So if you remember back in the day, if you wanted to buy a software,

you would probably walk to PC World, pick up a box, and that box

would have a CD and a license key.

So we built a platform which would eliminate all of that.

Now, if you think about the logistics behind that box, what you were

doing, what the behind the box was happening, was basically PC World was

buying that box as a proper goods.

from the distributor.

Distributor was sourcing it from the manufacturers, which

is the software vendors.

And it was all being shipped, right?

So we built a platform to eliminate all of that and make it completely

digital and just in time.

And at the time it was called Electronic Software Delivery.

So we built a digital vault, which would store software license keys

from hundreds of vendors in the world.

Across Europe, U.

S.

and everywhere and even today that platform is very much in use.

So if you go to Curry's website and you buy an Xbox or Office or Adobe

or Symantec, you're basically using the platform that we built because

even Curry's uses our platform in the

Oh wow.

Yeah, so like Curry's across Europe, you pick up any giant

retailer, if you're buying software, chances are you're probably using

the platform that we built for them.

So that gave us the confidence of, doing something at a very large scale and we

were doing some eCommerce websites and what we found was, that the eCommerce

websites or the platforms available around the time, they were either, Shopify is

of course brilliant and to get started off, my exposure has primarily been into

mid to large scale businesses rather than people who are just starting off

eCommerce or starting off their business.

So we realized that the options available were either Magento or,

Salesforce or Demandware back in the day, which became Salesforce later

on, or, Hybris probably started off.

And what we found was that these were very complicated to set up.

These were very difficult to, configure, and you needed pretty much an army

to get them up and running on the life cycles of implementation was

around 24 months, 18 months, and the budgets ran into a couple of millions.

Coming from that enterprise background, but having that agile approach to

everything and simplifying things, we said, we want to build a midway

between Shopify and Demandware, which basically offers your enterprise

grade capabilities and scale.

without burning a hole in your pocket and without burning

a couple of million dollars.

So that was the reasoning behind it.

Plus, when we started to build it, what we also found was

that, people had to go through.

So for example, if you are building an eCommerce business,

you would probably need something to manage your product data.

That's where your PIM comes into play.

And then you need something from an order management perspective.

And then there are these OMS providers and then you have WMS

providers and then you have analytics.

And before you realize, you probably, from a primary stack perspective, you

need 10 different softwares to build them together, to build an end to end stack.

Yeah.

Forget about 50 or 70 plugins that you drop on your Shopify

website for just getting the basic run.

Forget about those.

And what is the trade off behind that?

I don't even want to go there because it just slows down your website, in a

difficult ways that you can resolve.

So we said, we started building with PIM then gradually built an OMS for the

businesses who did not want to, go for a full large scale, which didn't have a very

large scale ERP budgets and all of that.

So we said, we'll build a smaller OMS, a smaller WMS with

some WMS capabilities as well.

And we will offer them the analytics.

So the idea was that we will build these as Lego blocks.

And that's where this comes from, that when we offer a solution, we

don't just say, you take the whole thing or just, do something else.

We say, start your own journey.

And if your problem is product data management, I'm Try to use

our PIM and then see how it goes.

And our PIM will potentially work with whatever platform that you today are on.

So that's how we started off.

And that was the thesis and philosophy behind building this platform

and being hands on and being very business savvy as well from the

perspective of business processes.

I knew where can we cut down a lot of flab, where can we make this simple.

And I've always believed, complexity is very easy to do.

the simplicity.

true yeah.

It's the simplicity which takes a lot of time to

build and create something.

No, I totally agree.

The, you totally was it, Steve Jobs said something about that, didn't he?

About simplicity being the hardest thing in the world to do or something like that.

But it's I totally agree with you.

Complexity is so easy to do.

So you've got this platform, then you've got BetterCommerce which is

if you've never come across it it's like you say, it's a sort of a.

A step up in a lot of ways from Shopify as a platform.

You've got some big name clients, we were talking about this

before we hit the record button.

You've got Fragrance Shop, which is a large retail chain of

fragrance stores here in the UK.

So the client that I immediately recognized when I was looking at your

website So you're obviously, Fragrance Shop own bricks and mortar stores.

They've got their online stuff.

So you've obviously got a great deal of experience then trying to get the

omni channel thing to work, which is, what we're talking about here.

So.

How do, with what you know about Omnichannel and where it's come from

the last, five years or so, and probably accelerated slightly with COVID,

but what's the state of Omnichannel as things currently lie in 2024?

I think to be honest, a lot of businesses are

still struggling with the basics.

Today there's so much of hype and buzz around the AI, but I think

people have forgotten that a lot of basics are still missing.

A lot of businesses still struggle to get their basics in terms of, they

have different systems which have the store related customer data and

they have different systems where their online customers are sitting.

Getting them together, they have a pipeline which runs probably once

a day or once a week or different frequency and that also breaks often,

Yeah.

which I think Is a much bigger problem

than bringing new buzzwords.

Of course, every CEO and every CTO wants to add those buzzwords to their

profile, to their business, from a market perception perspective, but from

offering value to the customer, a lot of businesses are still struggling with that.

And the primary reason behind that is.

Every technology provider, their solutions sold in that name

without much substance behind it.

And no offense to anybody, but a lot of solutions are driven

value delivered to the business.

Sorry, Vikram, you just broke up slightly

and your camera's frozen.

Just repeat that last part again.

Yeah.

So what I meant was, a lot of solutions are driven more by the sales

oriented numbers and presentations.

I think the actual business value delivered by them in the proof.

Yeah.

And I think there is still a lot of work to be done by a lot of

businesses in the area of omnichannel, to actually become properly omnichannel.

what do you mean what kind of work needs to be done, do you think?

I think bringing it all together is still a bit of a challenge

for a lot of businesses because they tend to have a lot of departments

and then I'll give you a small you know a narrative we are only so as

a consumer when you are shopping you know when you are in the tube or when

you're walking, you're probably looking at a website on your mobile, right?

Then you happen to get to your office, you will probably open

up your laptop and probably open up the website there as well.

Maybe, if you were willing to buy, I still struggle to put

in my card details in my phone.

Of course, today's generation is different, but sometimes I'm still

more comfortable of entering my card details into the laptop rather than

on my mobile phone a lot of times, especially when I'm moving or I'm

on mobile or somewhere outside.

And then, you will potentially go to the store as well.

And you will know at the end of it, you're probably going through all these three

different channels of the same brand.

But you may be just buying it from the store.

Now a lot of businesses, what they do is they treat each of these as

a separate channel and there are different people responsible for each

channel and a lot of times there's a competition set between these channels.

Okay, my store revenue is this much, 10 percent more or my

online revenue is this much or my mobile app revenue is this much.

Instead of competing with each other, they need to start feeding and nurturing

the customer journey across the board.

So there's a bit of a paradigm shift more than technology solutions are

of course one part of it, but I think there's a significant element of

mindset and a paradigm that has to be brought in that consumer does not

differentiate between channels when they are interacting with your brand.

Why should you?

right, it's a very good question, isn't it?

So why do why do companies still do that?

Why do we differentiate across channels like that?

I think a lot of times we're looking for people.

So we make people accountable to drive business for one channel.

And of course.

And there's a lot of pressure that comes from the top, but they don't realize that

there's always going to be an overlap.

The journey may have, and this again goes back to the same problem

that has been there for ages.

Where do you give the attribution for the sale?

Did that attribution.

Now this is where, you potentially, your omni channel, if you do

the omni channel right, you can get a little bit of sense of it.

Now it is still quite vast, but you can still make a little bit of sense of it.

Now, how would you make sense of it is, for example, if you implement

the right level of CDP, which is basically your customer data platform,

capturing their event history from.

Web, mobile app.

And then if they make the eventual purchase from the store, and if you're

capturing their mobile number, you can basically merge it all together

into one single customer and single order, bring it all together.

And that data at an aggregate level gives you a much better picture of how many

people are interacting with your brand in which channels and which channels are.

generating more sales and how are they actually driving to that?

Now, they may have looked at a different product on the web, but

they may have bought something else when they went to the store,

It's an

idea is

Yeah, sorry, you just froze there for a little second, but it's

interesting, isn't it, that consumers, and this was something actually, we

talked about this with Neil Hoynes, the chief data strategist from Google.

He was on the show recently talking about a similar thing, Vikram, is in the

sense that people are not linear, right?

Your customer's not linear.

They don't go from A to B, from B to C, from C to D.

As much as we'd like to think that's the customer journey and we can.

We can draw that out on a whiteboard, it's not actually the case, right?

It's like a jumbled ball of wire where everything's all a mash of things, right?

Is that what you're finding?

yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Now, I think the secret lies somewhere in trying to get a

little bit of patterns out of it.

The amount of interactions that they have had with your brand,

irrespective of the touch point.

And if you start bringing that together and tying them into the sales, that

helps you build that connection with them better and add a little

bit of stickiness to your business.

For example, what we've done with Fragrance Shop and I'm, I'm, they're

absolutely a phenomenal brand.

Now, if you imagine they have about 250 stores across the country and

despite all the COVID and everything, their year on year was just Minus

1% through the whole period.

And how did that happen?

What we did was we built a solution for them that would enable their

stores to become mini fulfillment centers during the COVID period.

And that solution was developed and delivered to

them within two to three weeks

yeah,

So that unlocked a huge amount of inventory for them.

Because eventually, the online sales are all driven by inventory.

If you are king, if you have the inventory, now typically your

online businesses would only reflect the inventory that is

sitting in your big warehouses.

Whereas you have those mini stores and a lot of times you would

say click and collect is fine.

But what about using them as your fulfillment centers?

And they thought about it right and well done, good time.

We built a solution, really a quick one.

And the beauty of this is where the beauty of headless comes into play

when your solution is all API driven.

You can just build anything as a front end on top of it

Yeah,

without trying to reinvent any logic or anything around that.

We just built that.

And they unlocked a huge amount of inventory.

They increased their sales volumes and they came out of COVID

pretty much almost unaffected.

And if you look at the results that they've declared last year,

their sales have grown 28%.

yeah,

It's all in public domain.

Yeah,

People say high street is dying and fragrance shop

is constantly thriving, which I mean, makes me immensely proud.

And the guy who drives it, I know him personally as well.

It's he's absolutely a dynamo from that perspective.

His sense of business is absolutely phenomenal.

And he catches the pulse.

If you look at it, if you wanted to buy a perfume, you would probably

go any website and these are, this is such a commoditized product

You could buy it anywhere.

You will do a price comparison and you can buy it anywhere.

But despite all of that, their sales are constantly growing.

28 percent in this day and age, year on year growth is absolutely phenomenal.

it is when you're already as big as they are, right?

And that's the, that's a phenomenal thing.

I love this idea of the mini, warehouse, like each store becomes

a sort of a mini warehouse.

One of the things that I was that I saw some companies doing well and other

companies not doing so well during COVID, like I said to, the corner

shop down the bottom of the road.

He obviously has his, he has his shelves full of goods, not as much as, say,

the big supermarkets like Asda or Tesco here in the UK, but he had some stock

and he had a captive audience, in a lot of ways because people were around, and

it was like, the ones I saw do really well were like, actually what I can do

is I can put all of our stuff that's in the shop online, people can order their

shopping, they can click and collect.

Or, we can do a free delivery if they live within 500 metres of the shop,

and the guy would just literally walk around, with a trolley and the bags,

dropping them off for different customers.

And it's very different for him now in a lot of ways, but having

that small warehouse mindset, and actually we are a store.

We can do click and collect and we can do local delivery.

I saw that unlock a lot of things for people over COVID.

It was one of the things that sort of came out of it, which no one was, I didn't,

I, it's not something that we were all expecting or thinking about, in eCommerce.

And actually when you looked at it, you're like, restaurants who did the

same thing, here's our menu, come click and collect, or doing local delivery.

It, just merging their business with the online world in a way that, and

I think here's the success thing for me is when it comes to Omnichannel,

you've got to do it in a way that makes sense for the customer, right?

Absolutely.

and if you can do that, which is what the fragrance store has

done, I think you can win every time.

What are some of the other things that you've seen work well with Omnichannel?

I'm really curious because obviously you've been dealing with this a lot.

Yeah.

So I think one more thing that has worked really wonders for the

business, especially in last few years.

So we had built a capability called membership.

Everybody knows Prime membership, Amazon Prime is the biggest example

of a membership model, where you basically pay for that membership.

And you get, free shipping next day or things, so many elements.

And there's of course the video content is another.

Side benefit of it.

But their primary goal is not the video content, its primary goal is

to get you to the store and shop

Yep.

and more.

And I think fragrance shop, again, innovated in that area.

So we built a membership model capability in the platform,

which they used to the hilt.

And they offer three levels of membership and they sell these

memberships, not just online.

They sell these memberships when people walk into the stores

Okay.

and all of this is done through our platform.

And the beauty of this is now they have a store infrastructure, which

is probably quite, nobody would want to change the store infrastructure,

which is across 250 stores.

That's a huge project in itself.

You don't know just the hardware itself.

So we didn't want to touch any of those elements.

And now this is where, again, the beauty of the headless or the API

first approach comes into play.

Because we built it in a way that their store, so what they did was they, their

store software then it essentially uses our membership module and starts

to sell those membership capability to the customers who are walking in.

And the beauty is the moment you buy that membership, you

instantly get 20 percent discount.

So you are buying a fragrance, let's say Chanel for 70 quid.

And now you, somebody tells you, if you pay just another 10 quid, 20 quid

are automatically going to come off.

Yep.

20 percent is automatically going to go off.

Plus you will get additional 20 percent vouchers for your next two sales.

for your next two purchases.

Yeah, absolutely.

Good.

So customer buys it and that then brings in a huge amount of

cascading effect, a domino's effect.

So you have unlocked a revenue stream, a recurring revenue

stream, which never existed, right?

It's a brand new revenue stream in a business model, which you, not a lot

of people would have thought about.

Secondly, you built the customer loyalty.

Customer's not going anywhere now.

Yep.

And this model,

yeah, sorry.

Go ahead.

and this model, I think has shown phenomenal

success in just last two years.

The volume of paid members, and these are all paid members, so

people buy these memberships.

Yeah.

And they sell it, I think it's on their website.

They sell it for 15 quid, 25 quid and 35 quid or 45 quid.

So there are three tiers of it.

And what we've also seen is a lot of times people buy the first time 15 quid.

And then they eventually upgrade to 45 quid and it's an annual thing.

it's powerful, isn't it?

We've had Chris George on the show and a few others talking about

subscriptions, talking about memberships.

There's a big show in Dallas in June called SubSummit, a big show

all to do with subscriptions and memberships, which actually I'm yeah,

to small plug, I'm going to be there.

We're going to be doing a live eCommerce podcast stuff there on

parts and panels and stuff over there.

And I really like Subsummit and I'm really curious by what they're now

calling subscription commerce and how that has morphed into now membership

commerce and how memberships.

like levels.

So I've just done a workshop for eCommerce Cohort a sort of mastermind group.

And we talked about the three levels of retention, the sort of the basic level,

which most people do level one, which is a sort of a more advanced level, I supposed.

Is when you move, you transition your business from a straightforward

eCommerce business into a subscription based eCommerce business.

And then there's another level of, again, another, another place to go deeper,

which is membership commerce, which is really exciting, I think at the moment.

And there aren't that many companies who are doing the membership eCommerce model.

I think it's still less than like a few percent, less than

5%, I think last time I heard.

And there's some insane opportunities here because like you say, you look at Amazon

Prime and you, the, one of the key reasons Amazon has been so successful is because

we all buy Amazon Prime membership.

Incredible business model that works off something called the sunk cost

fallacy, which is something you should actually get your head around.

If you don't know about that, go and research sunk cost fallacy because

it's how members, why memberships work.

And in terms of, bringing around that loyalty, I think it's really clever.

So the fact that the fragrance shop are doing this now I think is really

fascinating and making that work in an omnichannel approach is blindingly clever.

I think, and it's, I can see why they're now getting that growth because their

membership structure, I imagine, is going to catapult them further and further.

I'd love to talk to the guys that decided to do this.

I wonder whether they listening to you talk about it, whether they've

actually priced it slightly too cheaply.

I wonder if they wanted to maybe be a bit braver at the start.

I don't know.

I'd be really curious,

yeah.

And of course, and I was on the board of Fragrance Shop as well at

some point, when we started off.

So at the time in the discussions as well.

That we were talking about where should we price it and the idea was to, because

this was a completely unheard concept at the time when we started off and

especially in such a commoditized space, if there's nothing unique, they're

a multi brand retailer, they're not even producing that product, right?

So they're just trading into that product.

So the idea was how do we differentiate and why do we charge?

What is the value proposition?

How should we start?

So there were different surveys that were done around that as

well to get to this pricing.

And of course, I can.

Pass on your message and see if they are interested and they

can, of course, come back to you.

on that front.

But yeah, it's been fascinating.

Yeah.

to know.

The thing that I've, the thing that I've learned about all of this, Vikram,

with the membership commerce, because we're about to launch a new eCommerce

site, a new brand of beauty product, which is going to be a membership.

Driven sites.

I don't know.

We're not the first beauty brands to do this.

We're going to, the main sale in effect is the membership.

And we've priced it quite high, so it's gonna be like a hundred bucks

a year to be a member of the site.

And what I've learned is and time will tell.

When we launch it, I'll let you know.

I'll keep everyone updated.

But the thing that I've learned in all of this is.

You've got to offer at least three times the value of the membership, and if

you do that, it becomes a no brainer.

I can charge 100 membership if I offer 300 worth of value for signing up.

And as long as you do that I think you'll do quite well.

Because like you say, once you, once somebody is a member You then lose all

the competition, don't you, because they're paying their membership.

They're gonna keep coming back to you.

It has a very huge domino effect, if you may call it

because they're just going to come and a repeat value that it brings to your

business is just absolutely phenomenal.

Yeah.

And if you can start, capitalizing on that data, it just

becomes even much more richer.

Then you can see how many people are upgrading their membership at

what juncture are they upgrading it.

And one huge, another element that you would have seen, if you

I'm sure Black Friday is huge.

Now, if you remember Black Friday used to be pretty much

one day Black Friday, right?

And then the boxing day.

So ever since this membership has come into play, Black Friday has almost

become like a two month season for them.

It's not just one day anymore because they don't do flash sales anymore.

Those flash sales are now restricted to members.

Yeah.

So that's another way.

And if you look at it, it's a very interesting way you get

discounts when you become a member.

To become a member, you spend money.

So it's a very interesting.

Circle that goes in and you just get hooked onto it.

Yeah, you do.

Yeah.

And you somehow manage to break free from that discount oriented

business because discount oriented business is good to get your customers

on board, but sustainability becomes a bit of a challenge in the long run.

Yeah.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, you're totally right.

Totally it's a, it is brilliant and I Vikram, I've really

enjoyed talking about this.

So you omnichannel, right?

If I'm just starting out in e-commerce, I get how, if I am the fragrance shop and

I've got 250 stores around the UK I need to be thinking about omnichannel, right?

And I get that.

If I'm just starting out but I have a brick and mortar store, and I'm

not just being online only, but I've got a brick and mortar store

how does it make sense for me to start thinking about this, if that makes sense,

what about the, can I call them the little guy in a non disparaging way, but do you

know what I mean the person where it's

I understand.

Yeah, it's been, it's just one or two stores, potentially.

And we come across quite a few of them as well, who have got just one or two

stores, but they are still decent size.

They're not, you know very small, but now they're competing with

the likes of the online world.

So they struggle from that perspective.

And I can really get that.

So for them also, I think, you can say whether it makes sense for me

or not is not the right question.

The right question is when should I really go for it?

Because it makes sense for everybody.

Okay.

So when should I go for it?

I love that

The moment, you want to start building customer loyalty

and add that, personalization element to it as well without getting creepy.

Now, for example, you know what we've done now, personalization, this is a very

important clause that I always add, please ensure that you're not getting to the

Yeah.

Because that puts people off,

yep,

a lot of times when you're talking about something and you

see an ad, something similar to that on Facebook, it's just unbelievably creepy

and you just hate it at that moment.

Yeah, you do.

So coming back to the topic, basically what we did with

Fragrance Shop right at the beginning when we started off their omni

channel solution, so we were capturing significant amount of data from what,

just like Google Analytics, we had built a event hub system, which basically

captures the complete event stream of what customer does on your website.

Yep.

Now, that event stream, when we start putting together in

conjunction with, now whenever the customer comes and buys from them,

they capture their phone number.

Now when you do e receipts, typically customer will give

you their email or phone number.

So we tie up that information from a customer identity perspective.

And whether it's mobile, web, or store.

Now we've got the customer identity sorted out more or less.

Yep.

And we can also do it from a retrospective perspective.

Let's say, somebody came onto the website seven times before

they actually made a purchase.

So we could actually tie it back to the first time that they came in because

we log everything on that perspective.

And all of that goes against the customer history.

Now customer may have created a ticket in let's say Zendesk or whatever

ticketing system that you may be using.

All of that also comes in there.

They may have posted a review for you on Trustpilot or FIFO.

That also we pull and bring it all together in that one

single customer profile.

Now the moment, now if you look at it, the amount of data that is sitting

across the globe and across the internet of your brand, it's just phenomenal.

The moment you bring it all together, it starts to make sense and it gives

you a little bit of sense of customers.

Now the way Fragrance Shop utilizes, and I think every store should

potentially do that, is Basically, what they did the moment customer gave

their phone numbers, I can see that you've been buying from us quite a lot.

We are happy to offer you a 5 percent discount.

So they started schemes initially when the membership wasn't there, or,

there's this new launch of product Chanel that you bought last time.

We've now got a new version of that.

So these things, and when you get accessibility of that data right in

there, at, in the hands of the people.

Who are interacting with the customer face to face that just makes a huge difference.

Yeah.

course that requires a little bit of training as to, what

level of conversation you should be having in terms of what level of

information you should be sharing with the customer that you know about them.

Yeah.

But yeah.

Yeah.

, that's a whole other episode right there.

Vikram.

I'm not gonna lie.

Yes.

Yeah.

A whole other episode.

When should I go for it?

It's a great question and I love how this applies to folks who are just starting out

I love how this applies to the fragrance shop and I love how this applies to

everybody in between Vikram, listen, I've loved talking to you, man, and people

watching the video, I'm sorry, your video froze for quite a lot of it, but we could

hear you just fine, which has been great.

If people want to reach out, if they want to find out more about BetterCommerce,

about some of the stuff that you do, what's a good way to do that?

So they can reach out to us on Twitter.

That's BetterCommerce_ they can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

I'm searchable very easily on LinkedIn by vikramsaxena.

They can also reach out on my email.

That's vikram@bettercommerce.io

very good.

Very good.

We will, of course, put all of those links in the show notes.

Now, Vikram, I have two more questions before we wrap this up.

Question number one, you've used this, you've used the

phrase a lot, and I'm curious.

I wonder if you could just explain it a little bit, what you mean,

just for those that might not know.

And that's the phrase Headless Commerce or Headless eCommerce.

What do you mean by that phrase?

So headless commerce, what it means in a very layman term.

So today, a few years ago, if you ask me In simpler terms, from a

technology perspective itself, let's say earlier, the way we were building

our solutions, they were more like there's a server and there's a client.

Now client is typically, and then there is a browser, which is basically

accessing that client as well.

Now, sorry, client is your browser.

Now, if you look at it, how the devices and the form factors have

evolved over a period of time, right?

Earlier, the only channel was website.

So people just build solutions, which were sitting on a server, and they

would be rendered on the browser itself.

Now, over a period of time, what has happened is you've got mobile

devices, you've got Apple TVs and fire stakes and all of that.

So your form factors have just multiplied in the forms and shapes that

we had, none of us had ever imagined.

And it's almost like living through a sci fi film like we used to see

in the likes of Minority Report.

True.

So true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So now what has happened is now if I wanted to incorporate the similar

elements, now I was offering I had a promotion in them, hypothetically.

And I was offering 10 percent and all the logic for promotion

engine was built into my website.

Now if I wanted to do the same thing on my mobile app, I would have to

incorporate almost similar stuff into my mobile app technology as

Now if I was building an app for my Apple TV or Fire Stick,

I would have to build it again.

Now instead of doing all of that, what Headless did was took all the

complication and all the logic.

On the server side and created another lightweight layer, which

became your presentation layer and presentation layer pretty much is

dependent upon the form factor.

So then you build something specific to that form factor without hard coding

or without putting any logic in there.

Yeah.

Now this form of technology or this approach has always existed.

Basically, what you're sitting on the backend is primarily

API, which would just take plain data and return data structures.

This has always been there, I've been writing code with APIs.

We built a system back in 2003 with API first approach, but it

wasn't called headless at the time.

And then gradually, of course, there is a lot of engine that went behind it.

And then gradually this word was coined, I think back in 2013, 2014, when it

became quite a bit of a buzzword.

Driven by marketing, but essentially I think it's primarily

just API driven architectures.

And all the logic and complications sitting in the APIs, then your front end

or your front end of presentation layer is a lightweight presentation designed

for the specific form factor that you're targeting or your consumers are using.

I hope I have not got too technical and it's a simple enough.

No, I get it.

It's, in effect, what you're saying is the server does the work and it will, it's

a lightweight display mechanism, whether you're using a mobile, whether you're

using a laptop, whether you're using Apple TV, it just seamlessly works now.

And it's a, it's much, the other thing about headless commerce is

actually, it's in some respects, it's much faster and lightweight

to, to develop in as well, isn't it?

Which enables you to.

Do things like, in a matter of weeks, create a system whereby

all of your shops become mini warehouses and stuff like that.

There's a lot of advantages to it, right?

A lot of advantages.

Yeah.

No, thank you for that.

My second question, my final question, we are starting this brand new feature.

Okay, so Vikram, you're actually the first person, you're the

guinea pig in this whole thing.

You get to be the first.

I don't know if that's a good thing or whether that's a bad thing, but

I love being a guinea pig.

Yeah.

we are doing this thing where I live stream I'm going

to start live streaming on the eCommerce Podcast Instagram channel.

And one of the things that I will be live streaming is Matt's Q& A.

So I get to answer, so I need from you a question that I can

answer on that live stream.

And I'm going to record you, I'll play the recording of you asking the

question and then I'm going to answer it.

So I need it, what's one question from you for me that I can answer on that, does

that make sense if I worded that well?

I hope I have.

Okay, good.

I need to ask you a question that you want to answer on.

Instagram

Exactly.

And don't, be kind.

did you mean don't be kind or

No be kind.

Yeah.

Don't ask me, don't ask me like how do you, I don't know.

I've got to answer it in 60 seconds in a lot of ways, but yeah, be kind.

No worries.

I'm gonna ask you the most talked about subject that is today.

What do you think is gonna happen to the AI and how do you think

that is gonna shape the world of e-commerce in the coming years?

Very good.

Okay, so if you want to listen to me rabbit on about AI and eCommerce, make

sure you follow us on our Instagram channel, our brand new, we're slow to

put the party here, we've been doing the eCommerce Podcast five years, we

have literally just launched or started to launch our Instagram channel, a

little bit behind, but do follow us on Instagram at eCommerce Podcast and yeah,

I'll be answering the question on there.

Vikram, listen.

Absolute legend man, really appreciate you coming on to the show and and talking

about what you guys are doing, talking about Headless Commerce and and just

some of the ideas that you guys have been playing with the with the fragrance shop

has just been absolutely brilliant and yeah, I've got pages of notes which is

always a good sign, so super huge thanks my friend, it's been an absolute blessed.

Thank you so much, Matt.

It's been absolute pleasure and delight to talk to you.

Fantastic.

Just a reminder again we will of course link to Vikram's info in

the show notes, which you can get for free along with the transcript

on our website ecommercepodcast.

net and of course if you sign up to the newsletter which I talked

about at the start, you will have that coming straight to your inbox.

Totally free, totally no dramas whatsoever.

It's going to be coming straight to you.

So there you go, a huge thanks to Vikram for joining me today.

If you haven't done so already, do check out The eCommerce cohort, the sponsors

of this show because I am sure they would it's, they me we're part of it.

I'm sure they would love to hear from you.

And if you haven't done so already, make sure you follow the eCommerce

podcast wherever you get your podcast from because we've got yet

more great conversations lined up.

And I don't want you to miss.

And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first.

You are awesome.

Yes, you are created awesome.

It's just a burden you've got to bear.

Vikram has to bear it.

I've got to bear it.

You've got to bear it as well.

It's just the way it is.

Now the eCommerce Podcast is produced by PodJunction, the

new name for Aurion Media.

You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favourite podcast app.

The wonderful team that makes this show possible is the fabulous

Sadaf Beynon and Tanya Hutsuliak.

Our theme music was written by Josh Edmundson, and as I said, you can

find the transcript and show notes on the website at eCommercePodcast.

net.

But that's it from me, that's it from Vikram.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world.

I'll see you next time.

Bye for now.