Southern Fried eCommerce Ep. 34

Southern Fried eCommerce Episode 34 Recap

Hey y’all and welcome back to the Southern Fried eCommerce podcast! We start off episode 34 with a brief discussion of the possibility of a multiverse, as all business-oriented podcasts do. Then we jumped into introducing our guest of the episode, Roddy Smith from Rewind. He just may be our first Canadian on the podcast so we welcome our neighbor to the north who is joining us from Toronto. 

Before really talking about Rewind, Jay felt it was important that Emily share her very important 30th birthday plans with the audience. Previously, she was deciding between the following choice: A) a cruise, B) a trip to New Orleans (with the possibility of bumping into Jay), C) VIP tickets to see My Chemical Romance, or, D) vegging out on the couch. And as a podcast, we celebrate her decision of B, a trip to New Orleans, and the possibility of stalking Jay while there. After a brief foray into possible dining options, we turn back to Roddy for a bit to let him share a little bit more about Rewind. 

RODDY: Rewind is the leading backup and restoration app for Shopify and BigCommerce. I focus on our eCommerce space but we do backup a lot of other stuff like GitHub, Jira, we have Confluence coming, Microsoft 365, QuickBooks Online, Trello… So there’s kind of two branches of the business one the eCommerce side and two all these sorts of new platforms that we’re rolling out. We started out on Shopify and we’ve been in that space for about seven years now and we realized that all of the cloud-based software programs have exactly the same problem — where they don’t back up any of that user-level data. So for BigCommerce, for example, let’s say you have a new hire and you ask them to update some products or something and they accidentally delete one. Sadly, that product is gone. Unless you have Rewind. So with Rewind, we listen to all the webhooks, and every time a change is made to the site we know about it and we allow you to backup and roll back any changes. The three bad actors we see in this space are:

  1. CSV imports, if you’re doing a bulk update on your products, your pricing, whatever it may be, often those .csv files can be corrupted or maybe you moved a decimal point over or added a new column, you can delete your entire catalog of SKUs.
  2. Installing an app that maybe throws some code in that breaks something else on the site. With us, you’re able to uninstall the app or roll it back to where it was working previously. 
  3. And I kind of already mentioned this one, but, human error. We’ve all made mistakes. I sometimes wish I had Rewind for life but sadly that does not exist but Rewind for your Shopify or BigCommerce site does and it allows you to sort of avoid those human errors.

Effectively, we’re like an insurance policy for your store. I’m willing to bet that most of us have insurance for our car, our home, etc. and with a lot of the merchants we’re dealing with their online stores are worth more than all of my things combined. So with Rewind, we really give you that sort of protection. Allow you to iterate in peace, maybe try some new things, without having to worry about breaking changes and all of those things. 

He continues on to tell a story about how much of a “no-brainer” it is to have Rewind installed on your website. A recent client had hired their best friend’s daughter’s best friend (or something) to run their site’s social media. And that person took it upon themselves to delete all of the company’s blogs because “it didn’t match the vibe.” Emily cries out “not the vibe!” Roddy laughs and says that regardless of “the vibe”, deleting the entirety of a website’s blog history is going to have some SEO implications. Luckily, the site had Rewind installed and they were able to roll back to the previous site iteration prior to the deletion. Roddy adds the family friend is no longer doing the social media for said company. Jay remarks that Rewind not only saved that company thousands of hours of work but the history is irreplaceable in Google’s eyes and could lead to such a detrimental hit on search results that you’re done as a business completely. 

After discussing the “no-brainer” aspects of Rewind, we jumped into our standard lightning round of questions for our guest:

    1. What is your least favorite business jargon?
      Thankfully I’ve been hearing this one less and less but I couldn’t stand “these unprecedented times” in messaging at the beginning of COVID. Because I mean, when were there precedented times? It was just overused. 
    2. Are you a reader? If so, what books are you reading?
      I am a big reader. I will admit I gave up on business books for a while and I am a huge sci-fi/fantasy nerd. Unashamedly. I am just finishing up a book called Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. It’s fascinating because it’s somewhat plausible. So the closed notes of it are: World War III happened on planet Earth and we basically wiped out all healthy adults from the age of like 15 to 35, humanity almost died, but what’s left of the Earth banded together against an alien invasion. So now the way they fight the war is with geriatric soldiers so you have to be like 80 years old and you leave planet Earth and you’re not allowed to come back and no one knows what happens to them when they leave but they go off to fight these intergalactic wars.
    3. Are you a gamer? Playing any video games?
      I used to be. I must say I haven’t kept up to date. If anything I’m more of a retro gamer now. I’ve got the rerelease of Nintendo and Super Nintendo games. So if I’m going to play a game I’ll bust those out and play like Mega Man or something. To relive my misbegotten youth.
    4. Have you ever seen the 1980s sci-fi/fantasy classic, Willow?
      I have. Because I knew this question was coming. So instead of reading all of the eCommerce news you sent me, I decided to watch Willow.
      (This secures Roddy as Jay’s all-time favorite guest.)

New From EYStudios

With that wonderful Willow news, we move on to news from EYStudios. 

In addition, Rewind has a blog on a deeper explanation of SaaS: The Shared Responsibility Model and SaaS, Explained

Also, make sure you tune in to see Jay during the Nasdaq-sponsored BigCommerce webinar: How to Modernize Your B2B Digital Commerce Experience on July 19 at 1 p.m. EST.

B2B Marketplaces Boom Over Pandemic, Overtake Traditional Sales Channels

The first article we jumped into during the episode is, Why B2B Marketplaces Are Now A Mainstream Digital Commerce Sales Channel from Digital Commerce 360. The article reports that B2B marketplaces rose 131% to $56.5 billion in 2021 and are projected to increase to $130 billion in 2022. The author notes that three years ago Digital Commerce 360 was only keeping track of data and news from 75 to 100 B2B marketplaces and now they include 400 on their yearly report. 

The discussion begins by debating what they exactly mean by marketplaces in this article. Jay and Emily agree when they think of marketplaces they’re thinking of omnichannel marketplaces like Amazon. However, they’re shocked at the number of marketplaces by this article’s definition. In addition, they point out that they feel like a lot of merchants’ hesitation toward digitizing or modernizing their B2B stores is psychological and Emily, in particular, would really love to dive deeper into the mindset behind it. 

Roddy does a quick Google search (genius) and discovers some of the top B2B marketplaces currently available:

  • eWorldTrade
  • Amazon Business
  • Global Sources
  • DH Gate
  • HKTDC
  • EC21
  • See Biz
  • Alibaba
  • EC Plaza

Jay comments that it seems as though Asia has jumped on this trend a lot faster than Europe or North America has. He says that people need to get on this before they’re left behind. Emily looks at a few of the marketplaces and comments that they look very dated in terms of design (lots of pop-ups, flashing ads, limited navigation, etc.). However, she thinks this may be exactly what a lot of these B2B businesses are looking for because it’s “what they are used to” which seems to be their M.O. 

Clothing Retailers PacSun and American Eagle Differ Majorly on Cryptocurrency Strategy

The next article we dove into is, How Retailers Are Approaching Cryptocurrency Payments from RetailDive. The article delves into how different retailers are handling cryptocurrency payments with PacSun embracing it and American Eagle not. Both clothing companies though have dipped their toes into the NFT world and are both exploring virtual shopping and gaming experiences via Roblox and other avenues. The article theorizes that American Eagle is looking at the volatile nature of cryptocurrency in the last few years while Pac Sun is looking at the long-term potential for cryptocurrency adoption. 

While he hasn’t been invested in cryptocurrency, Roddy has some experience in the crypto world when he played around with a data mining network called Helium. He said it’s interesting for an individual to play around with but for a business that’s a lot riskier. He gives the example of a Tag watch, a fairly expensive watch brand costing anywhere from $1,500 to $7,000. Now let’s say you’re selling someone this watch and they pay you in cryptocurrency and during the processing time, shipping time, etc. the value of that currency crashes, “you’re now left with a payment that means nothing”. Roddy wonders how companies plan to mitigate that risk given the volatility of this type of currency. 

Jay agrees and says that he just doesn’t understand how retailers would be able to be constantly managing the price they need to be charging customers in order to make a profit. He points out that businesses don’t like uncertainty especially when it comes to things like pricing and profit. 

Roddy agrees and says that he thinks cryptocurrency is currently too unstable for widespread adoption amongst retailers. He does say though that he thinks NFTs do have a stronger chance at having a place in eCommerce retail. He proposes that the NFTs could be utilized well in terms of loyalty and rewards. He gives the example of the long-awaited final book of the Patrick Rothfuss Kingkiller Chronicles as a product that could be released in slow waves via NFT. For fans that have been waiting over a decade, he theorizes, they would buy an NFT that would give them early access to the book. In that instance, he could see himself buying an NFT as well. 

Jay says that he’s never really thought about NFTs being utilized for loyalty purposes like that but overall he’s just not sold on the idea in general, especially with people spending outrageous amounts of money on them and not getting any reward out of it. 

He asks the question to the group if they think that 18-year-olds should be spending their money on cryptocurrency. Emily answers with a swift no. She doesn’t think anyone should because “it’s fake, NFTs are fake, it’s all fake.” He then asks if they think that companies should accept cryptocurrency as payment. Roddy says currently, no but had you asked him a few months ago he may have said yes. Emily again just says a straight-up, no with hate in her heart. Jay asks if she’ll ever come around. She says no. 

Pinterest Introduces New Shopping Features

The last article we discussed during this episode is Pinterest API for Shopping Highlights Host of New Commerce Features from AdWeek. The article discusses Pinterest’s recent API for shopping that will add the following features for Pinterest users: the Pinterest API (application-programming interface) for Shopping, product tagging for Pins, video in catalogs, and a Shop tab on business profiles. While no one of the podcast is a huge Pinterest user themself, they all admit this is a great step for the company as it’s being used more and more as a commerce destination. Emily points out that while it’s a whole host of great new features none of them are super innovative and this is more of a ‘keeping up with the times’ move than anything. “It’s what has been needed for a very long time and I’m glad they finally got around to it,” she says. 

Roddy says he thinks this would have been useful for his wife when they were planning their wedding because she did use Pinterest so heavily but then had to hunt down the actual products to buy. Jay asks Emily what industries she thinks this would be best suited for and she says besides the obvious wedding category, basically anything with a visual component so furniture, clothing, house paint, nursery decor, outdoor furnishings, etc. 

With that, we say goodbye for now. We hope you’ll join us again next week for another helping of Southern Fried eCommerce! 

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