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Hey, y’all! Welcome back to episode 13 of the Southern Fried Ecommerce Podcast from EYStudios. We hope y’all enjoyed the Thanksgiving break, we’re back this week with Jay Brimberry, our Director of Operations, Emily Faulkner, our Digital Marketing Load, and Alex Thompson, one of our lovely Digital Account Managers.
We started out this week by introducing Alex Thompson who is located in Hickory, NC, and is a proud Appalachian State alumna. She has officially been with EYStudios for two months now and says she loves her new job. She also loves that she’s not the only one in the virtual office with an accent.
Speaking of remote work, Emily then announced that the remote employees will be coming down to Kennesaw, GA next week for EYCON21. This will be the first time that remote employees will be meeting the office team and we’re all really excited to have them. We’ll be having our company Christmas party and finding out how tall everyone is when they’re not sitting down in front of their webcams.
In terms of Christmas plans, Emily will be bringing her boyfriend home for Christmas while fending off questions about proposals. If she comes back in the New Year engaged, Hallmark will be making a Christmas movie in winter 2022. Alex will be participating in a dirty Santa (white elephant or Yankee swap) exchange and missing out on decorating for a second year due to renovations on her “new to her” house. She said beware the inevitable Christmas explosion next year after all the build-up. Jay will be having a true Christmas though and watching Polar Express on repeat with his daughter Charlotte. Raise a glass of cocoa to him as we wish him luck with that.
With discussions of ever-approaching Christmas behind us, we dove into the eCommerce news of the week. This week we started with our biweekly segment called Kingmaker where we review the eCommerce product releases of the week with a Yay or Nay based on our excitement about the product (listen to the podcast for our new awesome intro to Kingmaker). Please note these judgments are based on initial gut reactions without research into the product.
The first product we discussed is Twitter’s new live shopping platform. Twitter kicked off the new platform during Cyber Week collaborating with Walmart and Jason Derulo. Jay decided Jason Derulo is so “seven years ago” but he’s glad the man is staying busy.
EMILY: Yay, for both the platform and Jason Derulo.
ALEX: Yay. I follow a lot of boutiques and they have had enormous success doing live sales. So if it’s going to be anything like that I think it could be fantastic.
Jay then asked if this is going to change social media strategies for our clients. Both Emily and Alex agreed that currently the engagement on Twitter just isn’t where it needs to be for it to be a focus of theirs for their clients. Alex said, “I’m welcome to letting them change my mind.”
The next product launch we discussed was, “Bolt acquires Tipser and launches Remote Checkout.” Bolt is a shopper network provider for online checkout and is a partner of EYStudios.
EMILY: Yay, maybe I’m biased because Bolt is a partner of ours but I really like Bolt’s ability to do one-click check-out. I love how speedy it is, it really benefits the merchant, because going through all those extra steps really can take more time and conversions do drop because of that. I think Bolt is taking the initiative to make this even better, even faster anywhere that you’re shopping.
ALEX: Yay. I concur with all the things that Emily said. Hopefully, it’s a simple integration but I think it really opens the doors. I get questions all the time about where to start with eCommerce and I think this could be a great solution especially for checkout. So I’m really excited about this.
The last article for Kingmaker this week is “Walmart and Droneup announce drone delivery options.” The drone delivery service will start around Walmart’s headquarters in Northwest Arkansas. Jay is worried about the drones flying into mountains given the terrain and also the possibility of drone takeover with no Spider-Man to stop it. He asked Emily though what she thought about it given her motto of “instant gratification above all.”
EMILY: Yay. 30 minutes? You gotta be kidding me. I love it. They used to have Amazon Prime Now which I was a very big utilizer of and I could get things to my house in as little as an hour. And man, if I had a drone at my door? I would be very tickled. Then again, I’m with you. I watch Black Mirror. I know the dangers of technology and where we can go but I like 30 minutes.
ALEX: Nay. They can’t even get my standard deliveries right so how is a drone going to make things better? I also live near an airport. So I don’t even know if this would work for me. There are certain restrictions for drones near an airport so for me, this doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a complete yay. Maybe for folks in other areas? But for me, it’s a no.
Jay pointed out that he worries about this taking jobs away from even more individuals and jokingly accuses Emily of being selfish. He admits though that this is the way things are going with current Walmarts usually only have one or two regular registers open in a huge store with the rest of the checkout process being handled by automation. Emily admitted that she is too bougie to enter an actual Walmart and with that Jay ended the Kingmaker segment and thanked Emily for gracing us with her presence.
After our discussion of recent product releases, we dove further into some news from the week beginning with the article, “Why Page Load Time Matters” from Elastic Path. This blog post delves into user shopping experience and how it relates to page load times. Jay begins by asking Alex about what kind of conversations she’s having with her clients about page load speed.
ALEX: I think they hit the nail on the head with the opening of the article, who hasn’t been frustrated when going to a website and you land on the website… all right now maybe your first image loads… okay what the heck’s going on… and now you’re already on to something else. I think something interesting about the society that we live in right now is it’s really a ‘want it, get it now’ society, very very fast-paced. So if your page isn’t loading appropriately of course you’re losing your engagement from your user.
This article just resonates so well. Some of our clients have brick and mortar and some are online but you have to think about your website as your showroom. And someone greeting you when you come through the door is kind of how I look at page load. Images coming up on the site and things loading appropriately is really someone saying ‘hey’ and I think that is so important…I talk to customers about their page load concerns and you know a lot of times there are very specific things that cause it to slow down. Maybe, the images weren’t optimized 100% and the article touches base on that.
This is what I’m living every day with clients. One of the things I do here at EYStudios is I work with our merchants to help make recommendations and suggestions for optimizing their site. And Google is looking at page speed, so if it’s important to Google you gotta do it. I mean this is a conversation that’s just here every single day: what can we do to make it better.
JAY: One thing to keep in mind with page speed especially as ranked by Google is that you have to understand how Google does things and take the results with a grain of salt. When they’re ranking page speed, they’re using an old 3G network, it’s grading your page speed based on what somebody in the middle of a field in Siberia might get. You know, they’re giving you the worst possible connection and ranking your page speed based on that.
So clients and customers can freak out a little bit when looking at Google page speed but you have to look at it with technological eyes and with practical eyes. If your page is looking at a relatively fast time, at 1 to 3 seconds, (maybe under 1 to 3 seconds, we’re always trying to get it down) then you’re doing fine for the most part. It’s when it starts getting over that 3 seconds as they mentioned in the article that it’s a problem. Again you wanted to be quicker than 3 seconds, I’m not saying it’s good if you’re at 3 seconds but you’re doing okay. Because everybody has a different connection, you can’t just say ‘how is my website doing to everybody’, everybody has you know 5G, 4G, 3G, different cell phones just out of the box are going to load things a little bit slower than a desktop will as they mention here. And Google is taking the slowest of the slow into account when they’re trying to grade these things. So there has to be a little bit of skepticism when looking at Google page speed.
And you also have to factor in when you are on platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify, or any SAS platform, there are many ways to optimize like as they mention in here lessening the big imagery. Although, you know, retailers and especially high-end retailers love humongous imagery, they just love it, that’s what they want to do and then they want their page to go faster. You can’t have it both ways. Either your images can be huge and beautiful and high-resolution or you can have a faster page.
Progressive web apps are something that really pushes that faster site. And that’s because progressive web apps at their core really strip down a lot of this high res imagery, a lot of this extra imagery, and brings websites back to a basic level so they can go a little bit faster. So you have to have that discussion internally: do we want a more curated customer experience or do we want this website to be faster? Here’s the Catch-22 though, Google’s looking at both of those metrics. And you can have both of those things but you can’t go all the way to one side or all the way to the other side. There has to be a happy medium there when you’re thinking about it.
EMILY: You guys stole all my good ones because my big one is always image loading. Big images just really weigh that sucker down. I was thinking while you were talking about PWAs though, that it’s important to think about that 360 strategy because alternatively on social media places like Facebook and Instagram. You have those one-shop experiences now where people have the ability to look at the product they want, click, buy, and move on. So there are all these opportunities that are being created across the internet to make it so much easier for people to purchase so then your website I guess can have those big, hefty images because you have so many different options for people to do their one-click get-in get-out purchases and then your website, as you said is more like your showroom: these are all the options you can have, you get those retargeting ads, people get enticed and people buy.
Jay then mentioned that if you do have any questions about speed or need help improving yours EYStudios helps lots of clients improve their site speeds. Reach out and we can start a consultation.
Our second article we jumped into this week was, “Cyber Week Online Sales Down 1.4% Physical Store Visits Up” from Forbes. The article points out that a lot of shopping was finished prior to Cyber Week this week because of supply chain issues being at the forefront of people’s minds.
Emily has had her shopping done for a while but still bought some stuff for herself on Black Friday. Alex prefers to shop year-round and not spend all at one time but she did buy peel and stick tile for Black Friday pickup for her home renovation. She also mentioned that her clients focused specifically on Black Friday deals more so than Cyber Monday and Cyber Week. After a brief diatribe about Jay getting a leopard print purse for Christmas last year in a Dirty Santa/White Elephant/Yankee Swap gone awry, all three agreed that Christmas shopping is no longer relegated to a specific day or week.
The last article we took a deeper look at was “Poll Reveals Cannabis Shopping Trends for the Holiday Season” again from Forbes. The article discusses that 91% out of 1000 people surveyed in states where recreational cannabis is legal plan on using marijuana during holiday celebrations. Both Georgia (where Jay and Emily are located) and North Carolina (where Alex is located) are not one of the 36 states where either recreational or medical marijuana has been legalized.
EMILY: I find this genuinely interesting. Although we are not a state that sells legal recreational marijuana, CBD has been very popular in Georgia. Just in the past six months everyone I speak with has tried it or is regularly using it. It’s actually been a topic for Christmas this year. I personally have CBD gummies that I take because I have anxiety. So it’s something that I was curious about what other people were doing and it looks like that is in fact the case with this. It makes people feel good and they want to share that feeling for Christmas.
Jay pointed out that we never would have seen an article like this ten years ago and now marijuana has just become a normal gift to give. He also noted that it’s interesting that convenience is becoming a thing with legal cannabis usage now where delivery to your door is an option.
Emily said that when it comes to CBD she prefers to buy in-store because the staff is more knowledgeable about the product like they would be at a dispensary. She wouldn’t trust herself to buy online with her knowledge about this type of product. Alex agrees with needing expertise in this new product area and points out the similarities between brewery expansions with the expansion of dispensaries in legal states.
Jay thinks that in general, this is going to become more and more popular as states legalize marijuana and that online shopping for this will become normal. He pointed out that having alcohol delivered to your door used to sound ludicrous but now it’s happening. And said that his teenage self’s mind would have been blown by that prospect. He does think that marijuana eCommerce will need to be adapted for novice’s as the need for dispensary expertise grows allowing for anyone to purchase online not just experts.
As always, Jay ended the podcast by asking Alex if she’s seen Willow to which she said no and apologized for not being a movie chick. Jay responded with “that’s like saying I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa, I’m not much of an art person.” And then Emily told him to stop accosting the guests and that no, we are not forcing all of the employees to watch Willow when they come into the office.
We hope you liked this episode of the Southern Fried eCommerce podcast, make sure you subscribe to get a glimpse into eCommerce news every week served Southern Fried style.