Southern Fried eCommerce Podcast Episode 19

Southern Fried eCommerce Episode 19 Recap

Hey, y’all, and thanks for joining us for episode 19 of the Southern Fried eCommerce podcast from EYStudios. Cohosts Jay Brimberry and Emily Faulkner join us to discuss this week’s eCommerce news despite having a Garfield-esque case of the Mondays. They’re joined this week by Michael Potters from our partner Gorgias, an eCommerce helpdesk software.


Michael starts the conversation today by discussing the issues he faced as a merchant himself for six years and he highlights the need for customer service solutions like Gorgias. Customers, he says, are now trying to reach the merchant from all sorts of avenues — whether that’s email, SMS, live chat, direct social media message, or phone call — and it’s no longer feasible for business owners to try and answer questions in the time that customers are becoming accustomed to. Small business owners are needing to compete with large enterprise businesses with customer service and that’s where technology like Gorgias comes in. 

Jay then asks Michael to introduce himself a little more personally by answering these five questions:

What is your least favorite business jargon?

Circling back
Bumping this to the top of your inbox

Are you a gamer? What games are you playing right now?

Yes; Far Cry 5 and Worms

What emerging technology interests you right now?

Artificial Intelligence à la Westworld

What books are you reading?

Just finished Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Have you seen the 1988’s hit Willow?

I have not…

Jay attempts to kick him off the podcast over the last answer but relents when he realizes his favorite movie may not be the most widely watched of Geoge Lucas/Ron Howard’s films. Though, Emily does agree with kicking Michael off the podcast when he admits he doesn’t know who Val Kilmer is. However, no one can come up with Val Kilmer’s call sign in Top Gun when it comes up, which is obviously Iceman. 

eCommerce News From EY

After shaming ourselves and Michael on the pop culture front, we started with an update on EYStudios’ latest blog posts, which can be found here:

Metaverse Slump

We then jumped into the top topic of the week about one of the internet kings: Meta (formerly Facebook): Meta just suffered the largest one-day wipeout in US corporate history. Its valuation slumped by nearly $240 billion. Michael thinks Facebook made a big bet with Meta and that this is kind of to be expected until they get the buy-in from customers. In addition, he thinks the biggest obstacle will be the integration of a headset into daily life. He believes it will take a cultural moment like Pokemon Go to shift perceptions but even then, like Pokemon Go, it might not last. 

Emily agrees customers are the ones making decisions about what is popular and even if Facebook is popular it doesn’t mean everything they come up with will be. Jay simply asks if anyone has read or watched Ready Player One, alluding to the virtual world within the series that takes over people’s lives. He thinks it’s a possibility that Meta could become that virtual world for us. Emily thinks that something else will come along in the next few years outside of Facebook the same way that Facebook overtook Myspace in the past. “You can’t make people want to do something,” Emily says. “It’s just never worked. Ever.”

Jay points out the figure in the article that says the daily active userbase on Facebook has shrunk for the first time ever and asks Michael how much longer he thinks Facebook will be part of the eCommerce strategy.

MICHAEL: It depends on who your target audience is. As a merchant in 2022, you have to be testing all channels. And there are so many now. You should be testing ad performance on TikTok, testing on YouTube, testing all the different channels. You’re going to find, eventually, through rapid testing iteration, which channel is going to be the highest performing. Where is your dollar going to the furthest? 

We know in 2021 that a lot of merchants were suffering on Facebook. Their cost per click and return on ad spend were affected by all of the changes on iOS. But, yeah as a merchant you have to be careful about where you’re spending your ad dollars…there’s a lot to choose from in 2022. But I don’t know if Facebook is going away but I expect that there are other channels now where you would see your dollar go further. 

Emily agrees. She doesn’t think that Facebook will be disappearing overnight so there’s no reason for merchants to pack up their bags or panic. However, she thinks now is the time to be testing other avenues because one day Facebook will disappear and it’s important to know your next move when that does happen. 

Jay then asked Michael if he thinks he could see Gorgias stepping into the world of virtual reality with a virtual helpdesk.

MICHAEL: We go where our customers are. So if our customers are asking for that then we will explore that. If merchants are succeeding in VR or AR then we will be there to support them. Until that point, we’ll be focusing on the channels where our merchants expect us to be. And that still includes Facebook. 

Jay mentioned that he was just invited to his first virtual meeting the other day and unfortunately didn’t have a headset to join but he thinks that may be a way that virtual reality moves forward. Michael agrees and thinks that virtual workspaces will be one of the main ways that virtual reality becomes more mainstream simply due to its current need. 

iOS 15 Makes An Impact On Marketing Data

We then moved on to the next article, “iOS 15: Impact on Email Marketing to Date” from Practical Ecommerce. This article covers a new issue for email marketing due to the latest iOS update. iOS 15 automatically loads all images from emails which will now cause all emails sent to users to be marked as open regardless of whether the user opened the marketing email or not. This leads to an inflated open rate from Apple devices and due to the prevalence of Apple users in the United States, this will skew the data used for marketing strategy drastically. Jay asks Emily her thoughts on the subject as the Digital Marketing Lead at EYStudios. 

EMILY: One thing that I took away from this is that yes, it’s cause for concern that the inaccuracies of data can skew results, which then can skew what you’re sending, blah blah blah. But the thing that kind of captivated me was the part about inaccuracies comparing year-over-year with before and after iOS 15. The thing is I’ve been feeling that way constantly over the past few years, since the pandemic, it’s really hard to do a lot of year-over-year because there are so many environmental factors, there are so many changes like this that are just coming into play constantly. So it’s really just making sure that you have a large view of metrics that you can consider. And I think what is great is looking at overall transactions: did this email generate more transactions than another one? Okay, what were the things that were purchased? Okay, we can backtrack from there. There’s lots of additional data outside of open rates that can help you determine the success of different pieces of pieces of content and things like that. There are going to be workarounds, there are always workarounds. 

Jay then asks Michael and Emily if they think agencies are using these inflated open rates to their advantage to lie to their customers and apologizes for a “no duh question.”

EMILY: HA! 100%

MICHAEL: 100%. We’ve known for a while that there are agencies that use black hat tactics to impress their clients. I honestly believe though that the proof is in the pudding. You can only inflate or manipulate the data for so long before it doesn’t translate into real dollars. These places don’t last very long, they’re fly-by-night black hats. The ones that build a reputation, the ones like EYStudios, that do consistently good work, have a reputation to uphold, and they have built systems over the years that don’t require any black hat techniques to succeed. Those are the real winners.

Augmented Reality and Social Shopping

The last article we discussed during the episode is, “Pinterest adds augmented reality feature for home decor” from Retail Dive. The article delves into Pinterest’s newest tool, Try On for Home Decor, which allows users to preview furnishings in their homes. Pinterest’s data suggests that users are five times more likely to buy items with Try On capabilities over standard pins. 

Jay mentions that social shopping is a topic we’ve explored before in previous podcasts and asks Michael if he’s participated in any shopping via social media. Michael has not but he’s definitely interested to see where this takes us as a shopping community and if we’re going to be rehashing old tricks as a society (i.e. sales tactics from television shopping networks migrating to social media). Emily agrees and says she’s more of a social browser than a social shopper but definitely sees the advantages of this new feature for Pinterest.

EMILY: When I was moving from different apartments and things like that I would actually take pictures of the space and then draw out where I would want my furniture to go to see what orientation fits best. So I think this is just the natural progression of those kinds of things. Which is awesome, I love that. I think what’s going to be great is eventually we’re going to be able to build this up to go even further. So like the company I worked with prior to EYStudios, one of the products we sold was bachelorette kits and things like that. You might be able to create AR for party decor and see how all of that looks together. Figuring out how you want to augment your reality. But you know, all of that, outside of the Metaverse. 

Jay thinks this tool comes down to left-brain and right-brained individuals because he feels like this kind of thing doesn’t appeal to him because he doesn’t want to plan or organize his purchases beforehand. His wife, however, is a planner and he believes that she will love this new feature. Jay then points out that the article really only mentions big brands utilizing this feature on Pinterest like Walmart, West Elm, and Wayfair. He asks Michael if he thinks there will be a place for small businesses in this new AR eCommerce world. 

MICHAEL: My instinct is to let the big brands spend the money figuring it out and once there’s a low barrier to entry for smaller brands then consider investing. But right now, to build your own VR or AR feature for your website I think it would be very expensive. The barrier to entry is very, very high. Let Wayfair and Walmart and the other guys duke it out, spend all kinds of money getting this technology to a point where it’s able to be commercialized and available for everyone. Doing it on your own? It’s going to be a lot of money. 

Jay and Emily agree. And with that, we thank Michael for joining us on this week’s episode of Southern Fried eCommerce and hope that he’ll come back to visit us soon. We hope you enjoyed our discussion of eCommerce news and hope you’ll join us again next week!

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