– The ecommerce space is small and interconnected, with a lot of overlap between companies and teams.
– Many self-proclaimed “experts” in ecommerce offer vague and overarching advice rather than tactical guidance.
– There is a lot of bad advice being circulated in the ecommerce industry, with a focus on quick fixes rather than long-term strategies.Invest in technical marketers or a team that understands data and can formulate bulletproof strategies for long-term success in the ecommerce space.What I’ve learned about the e-commerce space over the last few years of participating on LinkedIn:
1. It’s small. Word travels fast. There is a ton of overlap between companies and teams; we all talk to each other. At the very least, we’re all aware of each other and connected by a degree of separation.
2. Most of the “experts” aren’t actually experts. Most advice isn’t tactical but vague and overarching, think bullet points on a slide.
3. There’s a lot of really bad advice that’s passed around, and it’s 100% reactionary. Everyone is centered around a fix, rather than understanding underlying trends and formulating bulletproof strategies.
4. Most companies in e-commerce aren’t building for the future; they are building for the low-hanging present fruit.
5. Technical marketers are rare and getting rarer by the day. The power they wield is massive, but most brands are sleeping on it. Data is the only thing that matters. You need technical marketers or a team that knows what they are doing with it.
6. Organization is super underrated. It’s very seldom I come across an account that looks very clean and organized. This kind of touches on process and experimentation. There are massive gaps here.
7. Please don’t trust marketers talking about leveraging data from places across a business that they’ve never worked in or been in charge of. There’s too much of this going on.
8. I love a good experiment, but the majority of the ones I’ve seen aren’t run correctly. Any experiment has multiple variables, and you need to account for all of them properly. The bar is really low in the CRO space, as a lot of people have started adding “CRO” to their services without any formal education in experimentation and variable control. I love that CRO is expanding, but just because someone says they do it doesn’t mean they have any experience or a good process to do it.
9. A free gift is a discount, a buy one get one is a discount. This is called unit economics. Stop pretending it isn’t a discount.
10. Brands want a quick fix that’s cost-effective. They hate the idea of investing in long-term outlooks and gains. The only time they look at these things is when things aren’t going well. Again, it’s reactionary.
The cost of doing business is going up, real talent across ecommerce is small and in high demand, most people that are working with existing agencies are happy because something is being done, but most of those agencies aren’t being as efficient as they can be with their resources. This is going to lead to really high turn over and a lot of agencies blaming the platforms. It’s not the platform’s fault, it’s the lack of a process driven strategy that is data backed.#marketing #ecommercehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco