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[SPEAKER_01]: What surprises me is, people don't shop aside so as much anymore.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Shop your customer, like when I first started to meet commerce, that was every Friday, like that was your after lunch, just the hour, where you all went and shop your sites, etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone from different teams or one in today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know if that's mainly just in the enterprise space, if you don't do that as much anymore.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But, push up a size of custom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, Google understand of what's going on, look at competitors, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_01]: See what's working, or see what they're in a slightly different, and take some ideas and some learnings on that, rinsing tests, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's the e-commerce master plan podcast.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It is a help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Cutting through the hive to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here's your host, Chloe Thomas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's great to have you here.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, we are catching up with one of our most listened to guests of last year.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His episode was one of our five most popular episodes of 2025.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So you know this is going to be great.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Last time we talked about scaling from 7 to 8 million.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This time we are diving into his experience over about the last 18 months being
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[SPEAKER_00]: In charge of product discovery at next, the big UK fashion and home wears retailer, and we will be basically just talking about product discovery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We'll be talking about what to do with your product data, we'll be talking about what tech to implement, how to make it, how to get the most out of it, all how AI feeds into all of this, just lots of stuff.
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[SPEAKER_00]: on a topic.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know a lot of you are trying to wrap your heads around with round and make the right moves on at the moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So have a listen, enjoy, make sure listen to the end for his brilliant top tips.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And now to introduce our special guest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: J.O.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Neal was recently product manager of Product Discovery at next one of UK's most successful high street retailers focused on fashion and homewares.
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[SPEAKER_00]: J.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Specializes in growth through digital marketing, conversion rate optimization and tech stack optimization.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He scaled sock.com from 2 to 80 million, drove digital growth at Holland and Barrett and took Bathroom Mountain from 0 to 40 million in just 18 months.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, J.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hi Chloe, thanks for having me back.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Very cool to have you back on the podcast again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How have things been since the last time we caught up, which was tail end of 24 early 25?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, I think when we recorded our session, I was actually looking for my next role, and then I started it next to, as I say, to the lead product discovery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And a mad time to be leading product discovery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's always a challenging sphere in any decade.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I feel like the last 18 months has been when AI kind of picked up product discovery, shook it around, and then left us all trying to work at what on earth was going on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it kind of felt like there was this promise of AI within politicians recovery that's been, it's been there for a little while, but no one's really capitalised on it, but then it just became, if it came good enough, really, to put to put in front of customers and for people to start utilising.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I mean, the whole search market from vendor perspective is consolidated, lots of movements around different vendors.
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[SPEAKER_01]: merger at Morgan accessions, et cetera, but yeah, I think the tech has moved on quite considerably and a lot of the stuff that maybe we were doing back in the day, it's so can bathroom out and that all that we wanted to do that wasn't quite possible, but now it's the point where it is possible and actually the tech is as good as you need it to be to start testing some of this stuff as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So when we talk product discovery, I think it's another one of those terrible terms in e-commerce, like the word e-commerce itself, that means 20 different things to 20 different people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So for you, what's the remit of product discovery when you think about it?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think you've got a few elements.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there's the traditional side which is on-site search, which covers majority of product discovery, but I think that a lot of retailers now are thinking about it slightly differently.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They know that well, customers don't just discover products via on-site search anymore, and they start to consider other channels.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So digital marketing, it starts to think about as it's across the site.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So things like recommendations, et cetera,
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[SPEAKER_01]: quite a lot now as chat bots, etc as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So there's various different routes and I think what one thing that I applied to to next was let's think about this as product discovery now.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now I wasn't the product manager for digital marketing or for SEO, etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: but I made sure we made connections there and we started to bring the teams together.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we added that a more of a holistic view of follow-up discovery.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So whatever the merchandise and team were doing within dashboard, success trial, within our search platform, making sure that data was then available to our SEO team, available to our PPC teams, et cetera as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it became a more broader role in terms of the channels that touched when I first started really, I guess.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think it's one of those pieces, which especially, I know, I didn't ignore that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was gonna say especially on-site, but that's ridiculous, Chloe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, ignore that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Forget I said that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I think product discoveries, one of those areas where the more layers of the onion you peel back, the more it impacts on every single area of the business, it's like you have
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[SPEAKER_00]: the product data that you're using to power on site search.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That then is also the same, you know, any enhancements to that should be similar to what's powering the chat box should be similar to what's helping with the SEO and the Google ads and all these other areas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then you go, okay, we've now got we've optimized a great helpful chat for the website, but you haven't given access to the customer service team who are dealing with queries on WhatsApp.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it seems like the more the layers you peel back, the more this impacts on
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[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty much every area of the business part from possibly the warehouse?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it could even affect the warehouse at times when you think about attributes, etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, no, completely agree.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think the biggest problem.
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[SPEAKER_01]: the retailers have, and now this isn't just an enterprise retailer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Next problem is actually the same problem for bathroom out and as we grew really quickly, same problem for so-so, same problem with all in the barracks, etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And for my time at Merchdark, where we had various different customers, across different domains, everyone had the same problem.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There was always a data issue, and that data was genuinely siloed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you had merchandise and teams working, their socks after improved product data and
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[SPEAKER_01]: But then the SEO team were over the far corner, not being able to utilize that data and probably doing the same work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's probably more important now that it was a few years ago because
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[SPEAKER_01]: good product data is now driving other channels.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So everyone's talking about A, O, G, etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But essentially, it's all the same for fundamentals.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As long as you've got a foundational database right and you're doing your strong and your attribution of your products is strong.
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[SPEAKER_01]: then that data can get utilized everywhere.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It makes it applicable to everything and it's being utilized by every channel and you're not kind of double count in stuff or one team's calling something that's taken pants and trousers for instance.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you've got different terminology there then it's going to cause confusion and actually as you get it crawled more and more by various
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[SPEAKER_00]: It does seem like we've always had that need for the customer to get a consistent experience from what they see in Google search and elsewhere through to what they experience on the website.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But it feels like that consistency is even more important when we don't know which elements of our identity, the AI is looking at to make decisions on how it recommends us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that consistency through teams, yeah, there's potentially a cost saving because like you said there might be people doing the same work more than once or different people doing the same work.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But there's also that if we can be more consistent, there should be an impact a result bump simply from having that consistency throughout the business.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you can clean right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's two levels to that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The first level is what you say.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So having that consistency, making it available, the same data available to everyone, considering boxes, as more of a customer these days, as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So they're crawling on, you're making sure they're crawling the right data, they've got access to the right data sets, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But also the next level up front that is say in Rockable, we can have thousands, millions of attributes if you want to.
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[SPEAKER_01]: but what really counts is probably 20% of those attributes because they're the ones that really matter.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're the ones that customers are searching for.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And actually, if you concentrate on that rough 20% and you do that really, really well, that's then going to translate into working well for your customers, but also for a lot of these bots as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's going to feed in the data, a bit much better data into chat bots, except you've got on site.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and then because your focus from a customer perspective is the same with SEO as right, right, like we've gone through all these.
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[SPEAKER_01]: different ways of doing SEO and improving SEO the years, but now it's got to the point where as long as you're doing it in the right way for real customers, it genuinely stands well for you overall for SEO.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously there's some technical points to that as well, but but generally, if you've got the customer at heart, then SEO usually works out better for you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You get a lot more growth as long as you've done the technical parts right as well, I guess.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You say about focusing on the 20% most important attributes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How do you work out which those 20 are?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Is that putting yourself in the shoes of the customer and going which ones are the customer care about?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or is there like this 5% of the ones we know Google cares about?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So we'll definitely do those.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How do you work out your key attributes to focus on?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I think some big stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to kind of have that list of Europe cross-channels.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You've also then got to look at it from a customer's perspective, let me say it going through through your site, looking at what customer, looking at filters that customers are using, look at the search terms.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was quite shocked when I first joined next to see that we had this huge search report of search terms, but it wasn't really being mind that much and don't get wrong.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It'd be a big merchandise and team that would go through those reports quite
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[SPEAKER_01]: but they can never get past the first few pages because there's just so many service terms and that's where, again, like I said earlier, the fact that AI is come on so much now, you can start using AI now to to mine that data, start to pull out some of the insights like to, I mean, you can run a report through
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[SPEAKER_01]: millions of lines of data and you'll get something back with you in a few minutes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's good that's a human to do and you're probably, you might get something back this year, maybe, because there's so many data points in there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it starts to add, and you can start to pull those insights out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's, I guess we, we're very eye people trying to maybe be a bit too smart at times and there's just there's the simple little things I use it for efficiency to pull those insights together.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where you then you start to build out that 20% of stuff that you should really go and focus on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It feels more conversation like the heart of getting product discovery right is the product data.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Would that be a fair statement?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's the same as there's only a piece of tech, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like garbage in equals garbage out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So if your product data isn't strong enough, then you are going to see poor results.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I won't name the exact customer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When I was back at
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[SPEAKER_01]: Very big enterprise retailer had very, very poor product data and their search was horrendous.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like you couldn't find half of the products that should have been coming up and they knew they had a problem with their product data.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They just didn't have the resources available to go and fix it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so they just moved along and they had thousands, 1000s of rules within their dashboards with their search they were using.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Same with next, historically,
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[SPEAKER_01]: This slowly started to bring those down as the improved product day, etc, and improved some of the other stuff they were doing within the search platform itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's that evolution of the search platforms as well as now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I remember people getting very excited, like 10, 15 years ago, about the fact they could create a rule that went include plurals.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously we don't have to create a rule about that manually anymore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's part and parcel of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I suppose there is kind of like that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: you know a set an on-site search tool for a while.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably worth going and working at which rules you can get rid of now because they may actually be causing more harm than than good.
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[SPEAKER_01]: 100% low will be often, it was always on a Friday, late on a Friday where some people was going wrong with search, we'd have a couple of engineers running through stuff, we're working with the third party, the owns at all as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then nine times out of ten there was some historical rule that had been there for three years, it was caught in something not to work correctly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So everyone talks about that spring cleaning, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It definitely
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[SPEAKER_01]: just knock a few off, let's go through those historic ones, start oldist to newest, most of the time, especially in enterprise retail, the people that created those rules aren't even working there anymore.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, most people don't even know about them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, I think it's definitely definitely important to go through and do that keynote, but especially as the tech's advanced quite a lot as well within that space of time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So if someone's listening, who's got great product data, but they haven't yet really explored onsite search, onsite merchandise, you know, auto merchandising, AI chat bots, all those things that are on the go at the moment, what would be the first tech solution you put in place if the data's good?
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[SPEAKER_01]: If the date is good, I feel like if you can get a good search tool, I would focus on that first, get a right partner and really focus on that and improve your search.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The reason for that is because then it unlocks other stuff as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, a really good search provider, most likely now, will have some sort of product discovery chatbot that you can utilize.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's no point in doing it the other way around getting a chatbot first and then going over search because that chatbot is probably likely going to use the search API or what you optimize for on your own site search, get other than utilize that data within the chatbot itself as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Would it be fair to say it's a lot harder to build a good on-site search tool than it is to build a good search good chatbot?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, definitely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think there is so much more to search that most people don't realize.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'll just definitely talk a few things for granted.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I would.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I would say search, unless you have a very, very technical engineering team of people that have experienced a building search, I would never advocate for building your own search.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's coming from someone next where we had a huge engineering resource, but even then I wouldn't want to build my own search.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'd rather bring in a third party solution and then build on top of it if we can.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so, as you said about, we do the site search first and then if they've got the AI chat, but we go with that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, in this space, are you a by the best of breed tech person or a by the all-in-one tech person when it comes to product discovery?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Um, just just spinning you the big questions today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I would say best of breed normally,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I wouldn't, I still say better breed because you are going to get some chat box solutions that come out of the box that are very focused sound fashion or very focused on the homes, I'm current, etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're in that set domain and that works well for you, if you're in a multi-domain retailer where you go across home fashion, etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: next it, then that's a little bit different.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now there are some suppliers out there that
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[SPEAKER_01]: happen to be best of breed at a few of those areas as well, so that kind of helps.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I would suggest best of breed, I think that's probably the best route of going.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You then start to you to look, because you're not just bought from a good supplier, you're not just buying their tech, you're buying their expertise, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Probably discovery, for instance.
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[SPEAKER_01]: if you want someone that knows the tech well, and that is a trip, but also knows the markets well, and they're gonna give you those insights.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're not getting value out of, say your QBR or your customer success manager, every month, then you've probably not got the right partner, because that's exactly what it should be.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It should be a partner.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You should be back and forth.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You go into them, saying, can you help me do this, can you help me do that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: But then I want them to come back to you with insight and saying, I'll, you should be looking at this or we've noticed this, etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: or here's something new you should maybe go and try as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Got you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if tech wasn't the next steps take after getting good product data, what's the other things you do?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's about utilizing that product data, making sure you capitalize on it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So simple things like, if you've got a decent amount of authority, starting to utilize that data to build out your taxonomy, for instance, capitalise on specialist, a sub-categories, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Rather than having just a dress is paid and hoping that ranks, you should be looking at a black dresses,
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[SPEAKER_01]: etc.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And those are more long, there's more long-tailed queries.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's the same then for if you can bring in those trending attributes as well, maybe this year, well this year, it started this year.
18:41.665 --> 18:44.127
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was buttermilk, yellow, was big.
18:44.327 --> 18:46.668
[SPEAKER_01]: So starting to build out pages around that as well.
18:46.688 --> 18:48.810
[SPEAKER_01]: And the long loss of building campaigns around it as well.
18:49.990 --> 18:59.557
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that data should be is if you have a peer, or you have somewhere where this activity is set in a good product data, but it makes sure it's utilized and pushed out to all channels.
19:00.758 --> 19:04.380
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're building things around that and campaigns around that as well.
19:04.400 --> 19:06.602
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're really utilizing especially the trend in data.
19:07.378 --> 19:25.481
[SPEAKER_00]: presumably all of this is, you know, you say about bottom up yellow took off rather so therefore, you know, we have to spin out the pages and all the rest of it, presumably there's there's quite a big reporting feedback loop going on with what's being seen on each of these product discovery channels to then impact different areas of the business as well.
19:26.184 --> 19:27.105
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, definitely.
19:27.125 --> 19:36.331
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's, it's how, how do you get through them quick, quick enough to make it an opportunity or to, I really add the value next, how to use the main authority.
19:36.371 --> 19:44.236
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if we created a page, it was linked to, correctly, set up correctly today, then it'd be ranking within a couple of days because it's a crawl, but it was so high.
19:44.856 --> 19:48.679
[SPEAKER_01]: the main authority and yeah you get to pay it on very, very quickly just by putting something live.
19:49.940 --> 19:59.086
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's been able to capitalize on that and it's quickly as possible if you let's say buttermilk could only just start a trend in now and it's a couple of days here and you can start seeing it jumping up.
19:59.387 --> 20:13.057
[SPEAKER_01]: Well if we jump on that now before anyone else else then perfect we're going to pretty much own that space of NCO but then also the social media teams can jump on it as well on those trends and it's built in that trend in kind of database.
20:13.717 --> 20:26.922
[SPEAKER_01]: easier said than done, obviously, as I said before, tools are now available that, again, some it's simple like Claude or Tati Retriever and those reports, again, they'll pull out trends much, much quicker than any, any human's going to pull them out.
20:27.491 --> 20:27.731
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
20:27.931 --> 20:32.855
[SPEAKER_00]: And going back a step, because I took us into what you do once your product data is good.
20:33.495 --> 20:36.377
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course product data being good is quite an important thing too.
20:37.378 --> 20:45.564
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm reading lots of kind of cases people are getting, oh, we got Claude doing all of the site and Tesla was bad and we then we used AI to fill it all in.
20:46.184 --> 20:54.070
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that the approach you take for improving product content or would you go a different way to improve that product database?
20:54.855 --> 21:04.600
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I think a multiple reviews kind of what surprises me is speaking to other retailers at events and stuff and I'm going into that.
21:04.640 --> 21:07.241
[SPEAKER_01]: It's people don't shop a site so it's much anymore.
21:07.441 --> 21:13.164
[SPEAKER_01]: Shopping a site like a customer like when I first started me commerce, that was every Friday.
21:13.224 --> 21:17.566
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that was your after lunch, just the hour where you all went and shop your site.
21:17.666 --> 21:20.268
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such an everyone from different teams all wanted to do it.
21:20.951 --> 21:25.821
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know if that's mainly just in the enterprise space, if we don't do that as much anymore.
21:26.723 --> 21:29.107
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe smaller retailers are growing quite quickly.
21:29.127 --> 21:30.711
[SPEAKER_01]: They still found their led etc.
21:30.771 --> 21:31.813
[SPEAKER_01]: so they're kind of pushing that.
21:32.514 --> 21:32.695
[SPEAKER_01]: But
21:33.715 --> 21:38.519
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, go, go, go shop a size of customer, get a good understanding of what's going on, look at competitors, et cetera.
21:38.539 --> 21:49.709
[SPEAKER_01]: See what's working, or see what they're in slightly different and see I'm not saying copy every single competitor because never that never works, but take some ideas and some learnings on that rinsing test, et cetera.
21:50.289 --> 21:51.130
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I think it's
21:52.537 --> 22:10.026
[SPEAKER_01]: If you can kind of get a view of what those attributes, or those key attributes are, there's 20%, then yeah, you can start utilizing Claude or something, start using a bit of computer vision, et cetera, to look at images, look at the data you already have, see what the caps are, start to fill those gaps.
22:10.206 --> 22:17.350
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely recommend automate as much that as possible, as long the view is set it up correctly, and you've got a taxonomy, you can feed into it, et cetera.
22:17.985 --> 22:23.270
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think it's always an important point to make is that this is not a once and done job.
22:23.650 --> 22:28.635
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like, this is at every time a new product comes on, every time a new piece of insight comes through.
22:29.315 --> 22:34.120
[SPEAKER_00]: This has to become business issues, it doesn't it product data quality, and then all those feedback loops.
22:34.940 --> 22:36.020
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, definitely, I think.
22:36.601 --> 22:49.186
[SPEAKER_01]: And those feedback loop, and those, yeah, those work flows stuff you've got to set up now, I'd like you to change, because it raises me how much customer language changes in the short space of time when I talk about the same thing.
22:50.426 --> 22:51.167
[SPEAKER_01]: And we could
22:51.987 --> 23:17.343
[SPEAKER_01]: There's great being at next because there's so many customers coming on to the site using search that you could see the change is very quickly and yeah astounded me how how much same terminology around dresses would change so quickly when you start moving for the seasons but also just a trending word will start popping up all of a sudden then it just becomes the norm so yeah whatever you've got set up now definitely need to review it in the next quarter that's for sure.
23:20.814 --> 23:25.617
[SPEAKER_02]: Ecommerce Masterplan is supported by some of the greatest companies in the Ecommerce sector.
23:25.737 --> 23:33.861
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's a reminder of who they are.
23:34.041 --> 23:35.922
[SPEAKER_02]: It's time for the top tips round.
23:38.484 --> 23:43.707
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I love this section because it gives me and our listeners some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
23:44.287 --> 23:45.768
[SPEAKER_00]: Jay, are you ready for the top tips?
23:46.774 --> 23:47.034
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
23:47.074 --> 23:47.654
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go for it.
23:47.874 --> 23:48.195
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
23:48.235 --> 23:49.055
[SPEAKER_00]: The book top tip.
23:49.495 --> 23:56.298
[SPEAKER_00]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
23:57.778 --> 24:03.780
[SPEAKER_01]: Probably the e-miss revisited by Michael Goodberg.
24:03.800 --> 24:04.541
[SPEAKER_01]: Michael Goodberg.
24:04.581 --> 24:05.141
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the one.
24:05.161 --> 24:05.481
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
24:05.721 --> 24:06.021
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
24:07.022 --> 24:07.682
[SPEAKER_00]: A classic.
24:08.563 --> 24:16.504
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I, for me, my time of bathroom out in, I kind of went in, set the business, we're ruining it, we'll grow them very, very quickly.
24:16.524 --> 24:25.406
[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously it talks about the three different people and their, or three different roles, the technician, the manager, and Donchpona.
24:25.706 --> 24:33.107
[SPEAKER_01]: And as the business grows, I feel like you spend too much time being the technician, trying to get you hands dirty against, okay, and I definitely did.
24:33.167 --> 24:33.587
[SPEAKER_01]: I was doing
24:38.567 --> 24:47.791
[SPEAKER_01]: If you need to focus a bit more on that manager, setting up processes of such a but then you should be setting your early founders should be setting ourselves up that they aren't needed.
24:48.191 --> 24:53.714
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if all of a sudden you want to take a day off without telling anyone the business still runs smoothly.
24:54.034 --> 25:03.458
[SPEAKER_01]: But then it also means that you actually genuinely have time then to focus on the opportunity it's how you can grow that business and really sort of really work out what the direction should be.
25:04.433 --> 25:13.880
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's such a classic book because it's got such key core lessons in it and we did have Michael on the show as a guest a while back.
25:13.900 --> 25:23.768
[SPEAKER_00]: So every one this thing I if you're a Michael Gerbert Emyth fan I will before I finish recording this I will find out the number and of which episode is not let you know before we end this episode.
25:24.568 --> 25:26.010
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, back to the top tips.
25:26.290 --> 25:31.634
[SPEAKER_00]: Traffic top tip J, which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn't get the press
25:34.076 --> 25:50.635
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're in a founder-led business, I actually think that his or her brand, that that personal LinkedIn that Instagram makes such a short, there's so many founder businesses now that are really building their own brands and really pushing.
25:51.591 --> 26:14.359
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like it's kind of a missed opportunity because it's free a lot of the time I being back at a retailer like next just a couple of posts on LinkedIn because I was at a retailer all of a sudden the impressions which shoot up because it's not I'm not trying to sell anything and I think that actually it kind of helped me build a little bit of a
26:15.108 --> 26:25.371
[SPEAKER_01]: a brand around us, a brand product discovery that I'm on LinkedIn and I'd caught a few really good conversations that led a few different, down a few different rabbit holes, but I feel like yeah, focus on that, that found that.
26:25.611 --> 26:39.196
[SPEAKER_01]: If I had my time again with battery mount in, 100% that's what I do, I would have been, would have forced myself to put my face out there, which I don't often do, so yeah, I think that would have been one I would have really focused on and draw down on.
26:39.775 --> 26:57.535
[SPEAKER_00]: It's such a prouver of trust and builder of trust with the customers as well, which has always been, in the other way, our consumer psychology functions, we love, we're motivated by things we trust, but in this world of increasing AI content.
26:58.335 --> 27:02.317
[SPEAKER_00]: to have that kind of unfaicable content.
27:02.737 --> 27:07.200
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone, please do not now send me 20 founders who are producing AI Slopper Cross social media.
27:07.460 --> 27:08.340
[SPEAKER_00]: I know they're out there too.
27:09.081 --> 27:12.282
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need them in my inbox, but it's got,
27:13.603 --> 27:16.186
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that that trust signal becomes even more powerful.
27:16.246 --> 27:18.328
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love that as a traffic top tip.
27:18.868 --> 27:28.797
[SPEAKER_00]: A tall top tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug-in, a phone app, or just a way of working, is the record little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
27:28.817 --> 27:33.802
[SPEAKER_01]: Or a bit of a cop-out of an answer, but clawed or checked you B2.
27:34.182 --> 27:38.687
[SPEAKER_01]: And now I know everyone's using it, but are they using it to it's
27:39.531 --> 27:40.971
[SPEAKER_01]: four capabilities, definitely not.
27:40.992 --> 27:41.972
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't think I am.
27:42.012 --> 27:49.214
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to sit here setting, but having it actually connected in to pretty much everything, I think is important.
27:49.434 --> 27:51.335
[SPEAKER_01]: And the now, the integrations are much easier.
27:51.355 --> 27:54.936
[SPEAKER_01]: The SMTPs out there for pretty much anything these days.
27:54.996 --> 28:01.278
[SPEAKER_01]: So having it connected into, I think most people go into the e-miles properly in their calendars etc.
28:01.338 --> 28:06.820
[SPEAKER_01]: but literally everything that if you could pour stuff together, we used to have this huge
28:07.607 --> 28:13.322
[SPEAKER_01]: a bathroom mine is used sweeter tools that we created ourselves within the back end of magento.
28:14.080 --> 28:24.403
[SPEAKER_01]: If I could have had that all connected in and in the morning, I could have wrote a few lines of getting an update, such as, you know, where things are and run a few different workflows that would tell me at 12 o'clock.
28:24.943 --> 28:30.705
[SPEAKER_01]: If we were actually going to hit, getting all the products shipped that day, it would, yeah, it would have been my last so much easier.
28:30.845 --> 28:38.707
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I think just trying to be curious as well, like if you're using it, what else could I, how else could I utilize?
28:38.727 --> 28:41.487
[SPEAKER_01]: How could I tap it into this, tap it into that, it's such and the more information you give
28:43.688 --> 28:50.009
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but probably a bit of a standard answer these days, but one I would definitely have to take more thought.
28:50.029 --> 28:51.110
[SPEAKER_00]: I like it.
28:51.510 --> 28:55.531
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes up not as often as you think as an answer to this question at the moment.
28:55.611 --> 29:01.312
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we're about a 50-50 at the moment, so definitely still valuable on that basis.
29:01.332 --> 29:04.392
[SPEAKER_00]: If it gets to 100, I might have to start 100% I might have to start banning it.
29:05.953 --> 29:11.434
[SPEAKER_00]: The carbon-top tip, what's your favourite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
29:12.500 --> 29:16.804
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a bit of a boring tactic like that.
29:16.824 --> 29:25.791
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if people have come here hoping to get some quick wins, except during, and some magic wand kind of formulas, but it's the boring stuff.
29:25.831 --> 29:30.796
[SPEAKER_01]: Like every week, a battery mountain, we would have a meeting of,
29:31.356 --> 29:40.967
[SPEAKER_01]: these are all our damages, these are all our returns and start to review that data and the damages in the early days we would review every single report of damage.
29:41.568 --> 29:50.217
[SPEAKER_01]: But that meant that we improved that packaging, we improved our pallets that the bathrooms are going out on, not about bathrooms are very breakable, a lot of the
29:51.138 --> 29:54.421
[SPEAKER_01]: So it meant that it saved as money at the end of the day.
29:54.441 --> 29:59.545
[SPEAKER_01]: It saved us having to send out more goods, which meant that we were actually much more efficient on our common footprint.
29:59.565 --> 30:03.528
[SPEAKER_01]: We went down because a lot of the stuff that you get's broken, it gets for our own skip.
30:03.728 --> 30:05.730
[SPEAKER_01]: So not a lot you can do with it unfortunately.
30:06.371 --> 30:11.635
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, reducing that, reduce our current footprint, but also it made the business much more efficient as well.
30:12.322 --> 30:33.874
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it's one of those fundamentals that's easy to forget in e-commerce that if we can sell every product, we manufacture to someone who will love it and make use of it, that is a much lower carbon footprint than if 5% gets smashed, 5% gets returned and just sits in the warehouse for 20 years and 50% of the rest of it sits in someone's shed.
30:34.274 --> 30:35.134
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, it's,
30:36.455 --> 30:56.273
[SPEAKER_00]: it's not actually that complicated and of course then if you get that right then your business grows because people love your product they tell other people there's you're not spending so much money on waste of stock because I think that's a really good answer and Jay before we say goodbye could you please let this know where they can find you but also tell us a little bit about your new exciting role
30:57.030 --> 30:57.431
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, sure.
30:57.451 --> 31:06.702
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've all before me on LinkedIn, it's J. O'Neill, and so yeah, my new role is at a product discovery SaaS business called constructor.
31:07.431 --> 31:11.173
[SPEAKER_01]: And actually, I'm now focused heavily on actually enrichment.
31:11.193 --> 31:31.761
[SPEAKER_01]: So build that actually enrichment tools, pretty much everyone talks about today, it's actually lined up quite nicely as my new role, but it's, I guess, the last few years I've been focused on that and it's been an area of interest of mine, so it's kind of worked out quite well that, yeah, this new role is around that script enrichment, and then, yeah, utilising that across all of the constructs of tools.
31:32.417 --> 31:32.918
[SPEAKER_00]: very cool.
31:32.938 --> 31:35.080
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I wish you all the best in the new role.
31:35.241 --> 31:37.403
[SPEAKER_00]: And hopefully we'll get the catch up again soon.
31:37.423 --> 31:37.904
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's day.
31:38.204 --> 31:41.629
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much being on the podcast and giving us a deep dive into product discovery.
31:41.669 --> 31:42.810
[SPEAKER_00]: We really appreciate it.
31:43.471 --> 31:44.332
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll have me again, Chloe.
31:50.253 --> 31:57.523
[SPEAKER_00]: So is it wrong to say that my biggest takeaway from that is that there is no quick fix for good product discoverability?
31:58.224 --> 32:00.387
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about doing all the things well.
32:00.867 --> 32:03.832
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about getting your product information right.
32:03.932 --> 32:04.933
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about getting
32:05.774 --> 32:07.816
[SPEAKER_00]: You're product information right constantly.
32:07.896 --> 32:09.998
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about watching those trends as they come in.
32:10.038 --> 32:24.732
[SPEAKER_00]: It's then about setting up and optimizing those text acts and working with your partners at those text acts to make sure you are delivering the best possible experience for the customers as things change and how they refer to things and how they expect things and how they want to interact with you.
32:25.432 --> 32:27.453
[SPEAKER_00]: So lots for you all to get stuck into there.
32:27.473 --> 32:33.375
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully that's given you all some clarity, because I'm sure many of you are working on product data and product discoverability at the moment.
32:33.835 --> 32:41.038
[SPEAKER_00]: You get your hands on our notes from this episode, including those top tips and the things we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplanned.com.
32:41.578 --> 32:49.683
[SPEAKER_00]: You can also use redirected episode short links, that's ECMP.info for such the number of the episode and that will take you straight to the right page of the site.
32:50.203 --> 32:57.327
[SPEAKER_00]: When you get there you can also add yourself to our email list so you don't miss out on any of the other things I share to help you improve your business.
32:58.127 --> 33:12.366
[SPEAKER_00]: If you like this episode, then make sure you check out our previous chat with Jay, which is episode 527, which is all about his past experience scaling businesses from 7 to 8 figures, and it was one of our top five most listened to episodes in 2025.
33:13.748 --> 33:35.565
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you're sure of good insight in that one, and if you are a Michael Gerber, Emyth Fan, then you can hear me and him chatting in episode number 89, so a long time ago, and we come quite close to disagreeing, so it's quite an interesting lesson from that perspective, if none of us, that's episode 89 where I'm chatting to Michael Gerber of the Emyth.
33:36.279 --> 33:40.683
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for tuning into this and every episode that you do of the e-commerce master plan podcast.
33:41.103 --> 33:50.852
[SPEAKER_00]: I bring you a new interview every week to help it inspire you to succeed and thrive with your business, including encouraging businesses and consumers to make more sustainable buying decisions.
33:51.352 --> 33:56.657
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast.
33:57.197 --> 33:59.960
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you have a great week and don't forget to keep optimizing.
34:03.586 --> 34:06.910
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
34:07.351 --> 34:12.237
[SPEAKER_02]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com slash podcast.
00:00.583 --> 00:04.008
[SPEAKER_01]: What surprises me is, people don't shop aside so as much anymore.
00:04.209 --> 00:13.382
[SPEAKER_01]: Shop your customer, like when I first started to meet commerce, that was every Friday, like that was your after lunch, just the hour, where you all went and shop your sites, etc.
00:13.703 --> 00:15.465
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone from different teams or one in today.
00:16.136 --> 00:20.658
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know if that's mainly just in the enterprise space, if you don't do that as much anymore.
00:21.118 --> 00:22.699
[SPEAKER_01]: But, push up a size of custom.
00:22.719 --> 00:25.500
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, Google understand of what's going on, look at competitors, et cetera.
00:25.520 --> 00:31.123
[SPEAKER_01]: See what's working, or see what they're in a slightly different, and take some ideas and some learnings on that, rinsing tests, et cetera.
00:33.847 --> 00:36.250
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:36.791 --> 00:40.856
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:41.377 --> 00:49.188
[SPEAKER_02]: Cutting through the hive to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here's your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:52.508 --> 00:53.609
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome.
00:53.629 --> 00:54.769
[SPEAKER_00]: It's great to have you here.
00:54.829 --> 00:58.791
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:59.332 --> 01:05.415
[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, we are catching up with one of our most listened to guests of last year.
01:05.715 --> 01:10.297
[SPEAKER_00]: His episode was one of our five most popular episodes of 2025.
01:10.617 --> 01:12.178
[SPEAKER_00]: So you know this is going to be great.
01:12.678 --> 01:15.540
[SPEAKER_00]: Last time we talked about scaling from 7 to 8 million.
01:16.000 --> 01:20.943
[SPEAKER_00]: This time we are diving into his experience over about the last 18 months being
01:21.603 --> 01:30.886
[SPEAKER_00]: In charge of product discovery at next, the big UK fashion and home wears retailer, and we will be basically just talking about product discovery.
01:30.926 --> 01:41.410
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll be talking about what to do with your product data, we'll be talking about what tech to implement, how to make it, how to get the most out of it, all how AI feeds into all of this, just lots of stuff.
01:41.890 --> 01:42.391
[SPEAKER_00]: on a topic.
01:42.471 --> 01:47.018
[SPEAKER_00]: I know a lot of you are trying to wrap your heads around with round and make the right moves on at the moment.
01:47.499 --> 01:52.768
[SPEAKER_00]: So have a listen, enjoy, make sure listen to the end for his brilliant top tips.
01:58.840 --> 02:00.700
[SPEAKER_00]: And now to introduce our special guest.
02:00.920 --> 02:01.300
[SPEAKER_00]: J.O.
02:01.340 --> 02:09.582
[SPEAKER_00]: Neal was recently product manager of Product Discovery at next one of UK's most successful high street retailers focused on fashion and homewares.
02:10.002 --> 02:10.262
[SPEAKER_00]: J.
02:10.322 --> 02:15.303
[SPEAKER_00]: Specializes in growth through digital marketing, conversion rate optimization and tech stack optimization.
02:15.803 --> 02:25.025
[SPEAKER_00]: He scaled sock.com from 2 to 80 million, drove digital growth at Holland and Barrett and took Bathroom Mountain from 0 to 40 million in just 18 months.
02:25.505 --> 02:26.265
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, J.
02:27.015 --> 02:28.796
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi Chloe, thanks for having me back.
02:29.616 --> 02:32.017
[SPEAKER_00]: Very cool to have you back on the podcast again.
02:32.197 --> 02:38.019
[SPEAKER_00]: How have things been since the last time we caught up, which was tail end of 24 early 25?
02:38.039 --> 02:49.083
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, I think when we recorded our session, I was actually looking for my next role, and then I started it next to, as I say, to the lead product discovery.
02:50.160 --> 02:53.121
[SPEAKER_00]: And a mad time to be leading product discovery.
02:53.141 --> 02:57.584
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's always a challenging sphere in any decade.
02:58.344 --> 03:09.029
[SPEAKER_00]: But I feel like the last 18 months has been when AI kind of picked up product discovery, shook it around, and then left us all trying to work at what on earth was going on.
03:09.783 --> 03:23.767
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it kind of felt like there was this promise of AI within politicians recovery that's been, it's been there for a little while, but no one's really capitalised on it, but then it just became, if it came good enough, really, to put to put in front of customers and for people to start utilising.
03:24.027 --> 03:31.009
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I mean, the whole search market from vendor perspective is consolidated, lots of movements around different vendors.
03:31.895 --> 03:53.965
[SPEAKER_01]: merger at Morgan accessions, et cetera, but yeah, I think the tech has moved on quite considerably and a lot of the stuff that maybe we were doing back in the day, it's so can bathroom out and that all that we wanted to do that wasn't quite possible, but now it's the point where it is possible and actually the tech is as good as you need it to be to start testing some of this stuff as well.
03:54.957 --> 04:05.661
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we talk product discovery, I think it's another one of those terrible terms in e-commerce, like the word e-commerce itself, that means 20 different things to 20 different people.
04:06.121 --> 04:09.882
[SPEAKER_00]: So for you, what's the remit of product discovery when you think about it?
04:10.505 --> 04:12.186
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think you've got a few elements.
04:12.206 --> 04:22.411
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there's the traditional side which is on-site search, which covers majority of product discovery, but I think that a lot of retailers now are thinking about it slightly differently.
04:23.732 --> 04:30.736
[SPEAKER_01]: They know that well, customers don't just discover products via on-site search anymore, and they start to consider other channels.
04:30.756 --> 04:34.778
[SPEAKER_01]: So digital marketing, it starts to think about as it's across the site.
04:34.798 --> 04:37.159
[SPEAKER_01]: So things like recommendations, et cetera,
04:37.759 --> 04:41.081
[SPEAKER_01]: quite a lot now as chat bots, etc as well.
04:41.161 --> 04:51.805
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's various different routes and I think what one thing that I applied to to next was let's think about this as product discovery now.
04:51.965 --> 04:57.808
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I wasn't the product manager for digital marketing or for SEO, etc.
04:59.099 --> 05:02.281
[SPEAKER_01]: but I made sure we made connections there and we started to bring the teams together.
05:02.321 --> 05:05.502
[SPEAKER_01]: So we added that a more of a holistic view of follow-up discovery.
05:05.562 --> 05:17.649
[SPEAKER_01]: So whatever the merchandise and team were doing within dashboard, success trial, within our search platform, making sure that data was then available to our SEO team, available to our PPC teams, et cetera as well.
05:17.689 --> 05:24.132
[SPEAKER_01]: So it became a more broader role in terms of the channels that touched when I first started really, I guess.
05:24.757 --> 05:30.223
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think it's one of those pieces, which especially, I know, I didn't ignore that.
05:30.243 --> 05:33.486
[SPEAKER_00]: I was gonna say especially on-site, but that's ridiculous, Chloe.
05:33.566 --> 05:34.107
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, ignore that.
05:34.427 --> 05:35.008
[SPEAKER_00]: Forget I said that.
05:35.308 --> 05:43.797
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think product discoveries, one of those areas where the more layers of the onion you peel back, the more it impacts on every single area of the business, it's like you have
05:45.378 --> 05:49.080
[SPEAKER_00]: the product data that you're using to power on site search.
05:49.320 --> 05:57.884
[SPEAKER_00]: That then is also the same, you know, any enhancements to that should be similar to what's powering the chat box should be similar to what's helping with the SEO and the Google ads and all these other areas.
05:57.904 --> 06:07.408
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you go, okay, we've now got we've optimized a great helpful chat for the website, but you haven't given access to the customer service team who are dealing with queries on WhatsApp.
06:07.768 --> 06:11.730
[SPEAKER_00]: And it seems like the more the layers you peel back, the more this impacts on
06:12.650 --> 06:15.472
[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty much every area of the business part from possibly the warehouse?
06:16.473 --> 06:21.576
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it could even affect the warehouse at times when you think about attributes, etc.
06:21.977 --> 06:23.538
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, no, completely agree.
06:23.638 --> 06:23.798
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
06:23.818 --> 06:25.259
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the biggest problem.
06:26.406 --> 06:30.267
[SPEAKER_01]: the retailers have, and now this isn't just an enterprise retailer.
06:30.287 --> 06:37.469
[SPEAKER_01]: Next problem is actually the same problem for bathroom out and as we grew really quickly, same problem for so-so, same problem with all in the barracks, etc.
06:38.029 --> 06:44.910
[SPEAKER_01]: And for my time at Merchdark, where we had various different customers, across different domains, everyone had the same problem.
06:45.070 --> 06:48.311
[SPEAKER_01]: There was always a data issue, and that data was genuinely siloed.
06:48.871 --> 06:54.293
[SPEAKER_01]: So you had merchandise and teams working, their socks after improved product data and
06:56.954 --> 07:03.202
[SPEAKER_01]: But then the SEO team were over the far corner, not being able to utilize that data and probably doing the same work.
07:03.783 --> 07:09.771
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's probably more important now that it was a few years ago because
07:10.750 --> 07:13.991
[SPEAKER_01]: good product data is now driving other channels.
07:14.192 --> 07:18.193
[SPEAKER_01]: So everyone's talking about A, O, G, etc.
07:19.234 --> 07:21.795
[SPEAKER_01]: But essentially, it's all the same for fundamentals.
07:21.855 --> 07:28.558
[SPEAKER_01]: As long as you've got a foundational database right and you're doing your strong and your attribution of your products is strong.
07:29.222 --> 07:31.183
[SPEAKER_01]: then that data can get utilized everywhere.
07:31.403 --> 07:47.010
[SPEAKER_01]: It makes it applicable to everything and it's being utilized by every channel and you're not kind of double count in stuff or one team's calling something that's taken pants and trousers for instance.
07:47.370 --> 07:54.233
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've got different terminology there then it's going to cause confusion and actually as you get it crawled more and more by various
07:58.190 --> 08:12.294
[SPEAKER_00]: It does seem like we've always had that need for the customer to get a consistent experience from what they see in Google search and elsewhere through to what they experience on the website.
08:12.714 --> 08:24.897
[SPEAKER_00]: But it feels like that consistency is even more important when we don't know which elements of our identity, the AI is looking at to make decisions on how it recommends us.
08:26.277 --> 08:33.681
[SPEAKER_00]: that consistency through teams, yeah, there's potentially a cost saving because like you said there might be people doing the same work more than once or different people doing the same work.
08:34.142 --> 08:43.527
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's also that if we can be more consistent, there should be an impact a result bump simply from having that consistency throughout the business.
08:44.153 --> 08:45.413
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you can clean right.
08:45.433 --> 08:47.514
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's two levels to that.
08:47.534 --> 08:48.574
[SPEAKER_01]: The first level is what you say.
08:48.634 --> 08:57.695
[SPEAKER_01]: So having that consistency, making it available, the same data available to everyone, considering boxes, as more of a customer these days, as well.
08:58.035 --> 09:03.816
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're crawling on, you're making sure they're crawling the right data, they've got access to the right data sets, et cetera.
09:04.477 --> 09:12.658
[SPEAKER_01]: But also the next level up front that is say in Rockable, we can have thousands, millions of attributes if you want to.
09:13.686 --> 09:19.309
[SPEAKER_01]: but what really counts is probably 20% of those attributes because they're the ones that really matter.
09:19.329 --> 09:21.571
[SPEAKER_01]: They're the ones that customers are searching for.
09:22.151 --> 09:35.619
[SPEAKER_01]: And actually, if you concentrate on that rough 20% and you do that really, really well, that's then going to translate into working well for your customers, but also for a lot of these bots as well.
09:36.119 --> 09:41.022
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's going to feed in the data, a bit much better data into chat bots, except you've got on site.
09:42.033 --> 09:49.642
[SPEAKER_01]: and then because your focus from a customer perspective is the same with SEO as right, right, like we've gone through all these.
09:50.537 --> 10:02.685
[SPEAKER_01]: different ways of doing SEO and improving SEO the years, but now it's got to the point where as long as you're doing it in the right way for real customers, it genuinely stands well for you overall for SEO.
10:02.705 --> 10:10.971
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously there's some technical points to that as well, but but generally, if you've got the customer at heart, then SEO usually works out better for you.
10:11.211 --> 10:14.593
[SPEAKER_01]: You get a lot more growth as long as you've done the technical parts right as well, I guess.
10:15.303 --> 10:19.226
[SPEAKER_00]: You say about focusing on the 20% most important attributes.
10:19.286 --> 10:21.528
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you work out which those 20 are?
10:21.568 --> 10:25.751
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that putting yourself in the shoes of the customer and going which ones are the customer care about?
10:25.811 --> 10:30.434
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is there like this 5% of the ones we know Google cares about?
10:30.454 --> 10:31.415
[SPEAKER_00]: So we'll definitely do those.
10:31.455 --> 10:34.077
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you work out your key attributes to focus on?
10:34.677 --> 10:36.078
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I think some big stuff.
10:36.098 --> 10:38.840
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to kind of have that list of Europe cross-channels.
10:39.020 --> 10:48.167
[SPEAKER_01]: You've also then got to look at it from a customer's perspective, let me say it going through through your site, looking at what customer, looking at filters that customers are using, look at the search terms.
10:48.727 --> 10:57.673
[SPEAKER_01]: I was quite shocked when I first joined next to see that we had this huge search report of search terms, but it wasn't really being mind that much and don't get wrong.
10:58.194 --> 11:02.336
[SPEAKER_01]: It'd be a big merchandise and team that would go through those reports quite
11:03.487 --> 11:22.781
[SPEAKER_01]: but they can never get past the first few pages because there's just so many service terms and that's where, again, like I said earlier, the fact that AI is come on so much now, you can start using AI now to to mine that data, start to pull out some of the insights like to, I mean, you can run a report through
11:28.019 --> 11:32.122
[SPEAKER_01]: millions of lines of data and you'll get something back with you in a few minutes.
11:32.602 --> 11:38.366
[SPEAKER_01]: It's good that's a human to do and you're probably, you might get something back this year, maybe, because there's so many data points in there.
11:38.766 --> 11:41.488
[SPEAKER_01]: And it starts to add, and you can start to pull those insights out.
11:41.528 --> 11:52.195
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's, I guess we, we're very eye people trying to maybe be a bit too smart at times and there's just there's the simple little things I use it for efficiency to pull those insights together.
11:52.215 --> 11:55.877
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where you then you start to build out that 20% of stuff that you should really go and focus on.
11:56.734 --> 12:03.358
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels more conversation like the heart of getting product discovery right is the product data.
12:04.479 --> 12:06.160
[SPEAKER_00]: Would that be a fair statement?
12:06.701 --> 12:06.921
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
12:07.901 --> 12:08.602
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think so.
12:08.662 --> 12:11.844
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's the same as there's only a piece of tech, right?
12:11.864 --> 12:13.825
[SPEAKER_01]: Like garbage in equals garbage out.
12:13.885 --> 12:19.989
[SPEAKER_01]: So if your product data isn't strong enough, then you are going to see poor results.
12:20.630 --> 12:22.131
[SPEAKER_01]: I won't name the exact customer.
12:22.151 --> 12:23.051
[SPEAKER_01]: When I was back at
12:24.788 --> 12:30.953
[SPEAKER_01]: Very big enterprise retailer had very, very poor product data and their search was horrendous.
12:31.554 --> 12:38.760
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you couldn't find half of the products that should have been coming up and they knew they had a problem with their product data.
12:38.880 --> 12:42.523
[SPEAKER_01]: They just didn't have the resources available to go and fix it.
12:43.063 --> 12:48.828
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they just moved along and they had thousands, 1000s of rules within their dashboards with their search they were using.
12:49.388 --> 12:50.669
[SPEAKER_01]: Same with next, historically,
12:54.012 --> 13:01.075
[SPEAKER_01]: This slowly started to bring those down as the improved product day, etc, and improved some of the other stuff they were doing within the search platform itself.
13:01.776 --> 13:05.237
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's that evolution of the search platforms as well as now.
13:05.257 --> 13:13.561
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember people getting very excited, like 10, 15 years ago, about the fact they could create a rule that went include plurals.
13:14.242 --> 13:18.124
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously we don't have to create a rule about that manually anymore.
13:18.164 --> 13:19.604
[SPEAKER_00]: That's part and parcel of it.
13:19.624 --> 13:21.105
[SPEAKER_00]: So I suppose there is kind of like that.
13:23.748 --> 13:26.214
[SPEAKER_00]: you know a set an on-site search tool for a while.
13:26.595 --> 13:32.169
[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably worth going and working at which rules you can get rid of now because they may actually be causing more harm than than good.
13:32.865 --> 13:46.576
[SPEAKER_01]: 100% low will be often, it was always on a Friday, late on a Friday where some people was going wrong with search, we'd have a couple of engineers running through stuff, we're working with the third party, the owns at all as well.
13:47.156 --> 13:54.142
[SPEAKER_01]: And then nine times out of ten there was some historical rule that had been there for three years, it was caught in something not to work correctly.
13:54.162 --> 13:57.304
[SPEAKER_01]: So everyone talks about that spring cleaning, right?
13:57.405 --> 13:58.085
[SPEAKER_01]: It definitely
14:00.567 --> 14:09.232
[SPEAKER_01]: just knock a few off, let's go through those historic ones, start oldist to newest, most of the time, especially in enterprise retail, the people that created those rules aren't even working there anymore.
14:10.333 --> 14:11.614
[SPEAKER_01]: So, most people don't even know about them.
14:12.194 --> 14:19.359
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, I think it's definitely definitely important to go through and do that keynote, but especially as the tech's advanced quite a lot as well within that space of time.
14:19.906 --> 14:41.382
[SPEAKER_00]: So if someone's listening, who's got great product data, but they haven't yet really explored onsite search, onsite merchandise, you know, auto merchandising, AI chat bots, all those things that are on the go at the moment, what would be the first tech solution you put in place if the data's good?
14:42.616 --> 14:53.579
[SPEAKER_01]: If the date is good, I feel like if you can get a good search tool, I would focus on that first, get a right partner and really focus on that and improve your search.
14:54.220 --> 14:57.101
[SPEAKER_01]: The reason for that is because then it unlocks other stuff as well.
14:57.381 --> 15:04.683
[SPEAKER_01]: So, a really good search provider, most likely now, will have some sort of product discovery chatbot that you can utilize.
15:05.412 --> 15:20.262
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no point in doing it the other way around getting a chatbot first and then going over search because that chatbot is probably likely going to use the search API or what you optimize for on your own site search, get other than utilize that data within the chatbot itself as well.
15:20.903 --> 15:26.967
[SPEAKER_00]: Would it be fair to say it's a lot harder to build a good on-site search tool than it is to build a good search good chatbot?
15:27.811 --> 15:29.093
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, definitely.
15:29.133 --> 15:33.240
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there is so much more to search that most people don't realize.
15:33.360 --> 15:35.403
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'll just definitely talk a few things for granted.
15:36.024 --> 15:36.886
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I would.
15:37.666 --> 15:48.773
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say search, unless you have a very, very technical engineering team of people that have experienced a building search, I would never advocate for building your own search.
15:49.414 --> 15:59.080
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's coming from someone next where we had a huge engineering resource, but even then I wouldn't want to build my own search.
15:59.160 --> 16:03.483
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd rather bring in a third party solution and then build on top of it if we can.
16:04.335 --> 16:11.219
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, as you said about, we do the site search first and then if they've got the AI chat, but we go with that.
16:11.279 --> 16:22.886
[SPEAKER_00]: So, in this space, are you a by the best of breed tech person or a by the all-in-one tech person when it comes to product discovery?
16:24.347 --> 16:27.729
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, just just spinning you the big questions today.
16:27.809 --> 16:31.992
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I would say best of breed normally,
16:33.444 --> 16:45.814
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I wouldn't, I still say better breed because you are going to get some chat box solutions that come out of the box that are very focused sound fashion or very focused on the homes, I'm current, etc.
16:46.555 --> 16:56.082
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're in that set domain and that works well for you, if you're in a multi-domain retailer where you go across home fashion, etc.
16:56.103 --> 16:58.284
[SPEAKER_01]: next it, then that's a little bit different.
16:59.065 --> 17:00.946
[SPEAKER_01]: Now there are some suppliers out there that
17:02.213 --> 17:06.497
[SPEAKER_01]: happen to be best of breed at a few of those areas as well, so that kind of helps.
17:06.577 --> 17:10.041
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I would suggest best of breed, I think that's probably the best route of going.
17:10.521 --> 17:18.769
[SPEAKER_01]: You then start to you to look, because you're not just bought from a good supplier, you're not just buying their tech, you're buying their expertise, right?
17:18.909 --> 17:20.211
[SPEAKER_01]: Probably discovery, for instance.
17:20.921 --> 17:27.225
[SPEAKER_01]: if you want someone that knows the tech well, and that is a trip, but also knows the markets well, and they're gonna give you those insights.
17:27.245 --> 17:37.190
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're not getting value out of, say your QBR or your customer success manager, every month, then you've probably not got the right partner, because that's exactly what it should be.
17:37.210 --> 17:38.091
[SPEAKER_01]: It should be a partner.
17:38.271 --> 17:39.632
[SPEAKER_01]: You should be back and forth.
17:40.172 --> 17:42.595
[SPEAKER_01]: You go into them, saying, can you help me do this, can you help me do that?
17:43.015 --> 17:48.220
[SPEAKER_01]: But then I want them to come back to you with insight and saying, I'll, you should be looking at this or we've noticed this, etc.
17:48.320 --> 17:51.463
[SPEAKER_01]: or here's something new you should maybe go and try as well.
17:52.464 --> 17:52.864
[SPEAKER_00]: Got you.
17:53.084 --> 17:59.130
[SPEAKER_00]: And if tech wasn't the next steps take after getting good product data, what's the other things you do?
18:00.138 --> 18:07.703
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's about utilizing that product data, making sure you capitalize on it.
18:07.723 --> 18:21.093
[SPEAKER_01]: So simple things like, if you've got a decent amount of authority, starting to utilize that data to build out your taxonomy, for instance, capitalise on specialist, a sub-categories, et cetera.
18:21.393 --> 18:27.017
[SPEAKER_01]: Rather than having just a dress is paid and hoping that ranks, you should be looking at a black dresses,
18:29.038 --> 18:29.458
[SPEAKER_01]: etc.
18:29.478 --> 18:32.060
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are more long, there's more long-tailed queries.
18:32.760 --> 18:41.645
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's the same then for if you can bring in those trending attributes as well, maybe this year, well this year, it started this year.
18:41.665 --> 18:44.127
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was buttermilk, yellow, was big.
18:44.327 --> 18:46.668
[SPEAKER_01]: So starting to build out pages around that as well.
18:46.688 --> 18:48.810
[SPEAKER_01]: And the long loss of building campaigns around it as well.
18:49.990 --> 18:59.557
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that data should be is if you have a peer, or you have somewhere where this activity is set in a good product data, but it makes sure it's utilized and pushed out to all channels.
19:00.758 --> 19:04.380
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're building things around that and campaigns around that as well.
19:04.400 --> 19:06.602
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're really utilizing especially the trend in data.
19:07.378 --> 19:25.481
[SPEAKER_00]: presumably all of this is, you know, you say about bottom up yellow took off rather so therefore, you know, we have to spin out the pages and all the rest of it, presumably there's there's quite a big reporting feedback loop going on with what's being seen on each of these product discovery channels to then impact different areas of the business as well.
19:26.184 --> 19:27.105
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, definitely.
19:27.125 --> 19:36.331
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's, it's how, how do you get through them quick, quick enough to make it an opportunity or to, I really add the value next, how to use the main authority.
19:36.371 --> 19:44.236
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if we created a page, it was linked to, correctly, set up correctly today, then it'd be ranking within a couple of days because it's a crawl, but it was so high.
19:44.856 --> 19:48.679
[SPEAKER_01]: the main authority and yeah you get to pay it on very, very quickly just by putting something live.
19:49.940 --> 19:59.086
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's been able to capitalize on that and it's quickly as possible if you let's say buttermilk could only just start a trend in now and it's a couple of days here and you can start seeing it jumping up.
19:59.387 --> 20:13.057
[SPEAKER_01]: Well if we jump on that now before anyone else else then perfect we're going to pretty much own that space of NCO but then also the social media teams can jump on it as well on those trends and it's built in that trend in kind of database.
20:13.717 --> 20:26.922
[SPEAKER_01]: easier said than done, obviously, as I said before, tools are now available that, again, some it's simple like Claude or Tati Retriever and those reports, again, they'll pull out trends much, much quicker than any, any human's going to pull them out.
20:27.491 --> 20:27.731
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
20:27.931 --> 20:32.855
[SPEAKER_00]: And going back a step, because I took us into what you do once your product data is good.
20:33.495 --> 20:36.377
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course product data being good is quite an important thing too.
20:37.378 --> 20:45.564
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm reading lots of kind of cases people are getting, oh, we got Claude doing all of the site and Tesla was bad and we then we used AI to fill it all in.
20:46.184 --> 20:54.070
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that the approach you take for improving product content or would you go a different way to improve that product database?
20:54.855 --> 21:04.600
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I think a multiple reviews kind of what surprises me is speaking to other retailers at events and stuff and I'm going into that.
21:04.640 --> 21:07.241
[SPEAKER_01]: It's people don't shop a site so it's much anymore.
21:07.441 --> 21:13.164
[SPEAKER_01]: Shopping a site like a customer like when I first started me commerce, that was every Friday.
21:13.224 --> 21:17.566
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that was your after lunch, just the hour where you all went and shop your site.
21:17.666 --> 21:20.268
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such an everyone from different teams all wanted to do it.
21:20.951 --> 21:25.821
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know if that's mainly just in the enterprise space, if we don't do that as much anymore.
21:26.723 --> 21:29.107
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe smaller retailers are growing quite quickly.
21:29.127 --> 21:30.711
[SPEAKER_01]: They still found their led etc.
21:30.771 --> 21:31.813
[SPEAKER_01]: so they're kind of pushing that.
21:32.514 --> 21:32.695
[SPEAKER_01]: But
21:33.715 --> 21:38.519
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, go, go, go shop a size of customer, get a good understanding of what's going on, look at competitors, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_01]: See what's working, or see what they're in slightly different and see I'm not saying copy every single competitor because never that never works, but take some ideas and some learnings on that rinsing test, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I think it's
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you can kind of get a view of what those attributes, or those key attributes are, there's 20%, then yeah, you can start utilizing Claude or something, start using a bit of computer vision, et cetera, to look at images, look at the data you already have, see what the caps are, start to fill those gaps.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely recommend automate as much that as possible, as long the view is set it up correctly, and you've got a taxonomy, you can feed into it, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think it's always an important point to make is that this is not a once and done job.
22:23.650 --> 22:28.635
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like, this is at every time a new product comes on, every time a new piece of insight comes through.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This has to become business issues, it doesn't it product data quality, and then all those feedback loops.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, definitely, I think.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And those feedback loop, and those, yeah, those work flows stuff you've got to set up now, I'd like you to change, because it raises me how much customer language changes in the short space of time when I talk about the same thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we could
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's great being at next because there's so many customers coming on to the site using search that you could see the change is very quickly and yeah astounded me how how much same terminology around dresses would change so quickly when you start moving for the seasons but also just a trending word will start popping up all of a sudden then it just becomes the norm so yeah whatever you've got set up now definitely need to review it in the next quarter that's for sure.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Ecommerce Masterplan is supported by some of the greatest companies in the Ecommerce sector.
23:25.737 --> 23:33.861
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's a reminder of who they are.
23:34.041 --> 23:35.922
[SPEAKER_02]: It's time for the top tips round.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I love this section because it gives me and our listeners some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jay, are you ready for the top tips?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go for it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The book top tip.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Probably the e-miss revisited by Michael Goodberg.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Michael Goodberg.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's the one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A classic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I, for me, my time of bathroom out in, I kind of went in, set the business, we're ruining it, we'll grow them very, very quickly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously it talks about the three different people and their, or three different roles, the technician, the manager, and Donchpona.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And as the business grows, I feel like you spend too much time being the technician, trying to get you hands dirty against, okay, and I definitely did.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was doing
24:38.567 --> 24:47.791
[SPEAKER_01]: If you need to focus a bit more on that manager, setting up processes of such a but then you should be setting your early founders should be setting ourselves up that they aren't needed.
24:48.191 --> 24:53.714
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if all of a sudden you want to take a day off without telling anyone the business still runs smoothly.
24:54.034 --> 25:03.458
[SPEAKER_01]: But then it also means that you actually genuinely have time then to focus on the opportunity it's how you can grow that business and really sort of really work out what the direction should be.
25:04.433 --> 25:13.880
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's such a classic book because it's got such key core lessons in it and we did have Michael on the show as a guest a while back.
25:13.900 --> 25:23.768
[SPEAKER_00]: So every one this thing I if you're a Michael Gerbert Emyth fan I will before I finish recording this I will find out the number and of which episode is not let you know before we end this episode.
25:24.568 --> 25:26.010
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, back to the top tips.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Traffic top tip J, which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn't get the press
25:34.076 --> 25:50.635
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're in a founder-led business, I actually think that his or her brand, that that personal LinkedIn that Instagram makes such a short, there's so many founder businesses now that are really building their own brands and really pushing.
25:51.591 --> 26:14.359
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like it's kind of a missed opportunity because it's free a lot of the time I being back at a retailer like next just a couple of posts on LinkedIn because I was at a retailer all of a sudden the impressions which shoot up because it's not I'm not trying to sell anything and I think that actually it kind of helped me build a little bit of a
26:15.108 --> 26:25.371
[SPEAKER_01]: a brand around us, a brand product discovery that I'm on LinkedIn and I'd caught a few really good conversations that led a few different, down a few different rabbit holes, but I feel like yeah, focus on that, that found that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If I had my time again with battery mount in, 100% that's what I do, I would have been, would have forced myself to put my face out there, which I don't often do, so yeah, I think that would have been one I would have really focused on and draw down on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's such a prouver of trust and builder of trust with the customers as well, which has always been, in the other way, our consumer psychology functions, we love, we're motivated by things we trust, but in this world of increasing AI content.
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[SPEAKER_00]: to have that kind of unfaicable content.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone, please do not now send me 20 founders who are producing AI Slopper Cross social media.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know they're out there too.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need them in my inbox, but it's got,
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think that that trust signal becomes even more powerful.
27:16.246 --> 27:18.328
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love that as a traffic top tip.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A tall top tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug-in, a phone app, or just a way of working, is the record little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Or a bit of a cop-out of an answer, but clawed or checked you B2.
27:34.182 --> 27:38.687
[SPEAKER_01]: And now I know everyone's using it, but are they using it to it's
27:39.531 --> 27:40.971
[SPEAKER_01]: four capabilities, definitely not.
27:40.992 --> 27:41.972
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't think I am.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to sit here setting, but having it actually connected in to pretty much everything, I think is important.
27:49.434 --> 27:51.335
[SPEAKER_01]: And the now, the integrations are much easier.
27:51.355 --> 27:54.936
[SPEAKER_01]: The SMTPs out there for pretty much anything these days.
27:54.996 --> 28:01.278
[SPEAKER_01]: So having it connected into, I think most people go into the e-miles properly in their calendars etc.
28:01.338 --> 28:06.820
[SPEAKER_01]: but literally everything that if you could pour stuff together, we used to have this huge
28:07.607 --> 28:13.322
[SPEAKER_01]: a bathroom mine is used sweeter tools that we created ourselves within the back end of magento.
28:14.080 --> 28:24.403
[SPEAKER_01]: If I could have had that all connected in and in the morning, I could have wrote a few lines of getting an update, such as, you know, where things are and run a few different workflows that would tell me at 12 o'clock.
28:24.943 --> 28:30.705
[SPEAKER_01]: If we were actually going to hit, getting all the products shipped that day, it would, yeah, it would have been my last so much easier.
28:30.845 --> 28:38.707
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I think just trying to be curious as well, like if you're using it, what else could I, how else could I utilize?
28:38.727 --> 28:41.487
[SPEAKER_01]: How could I tap it into this, tap it into that, it's such and the more information you give
28:43.688 --> 28:50.009
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but probably a bit of a standard answer these days, but one I would definitely have to take more thought.
28:50.029 --> 28:51.110
[SPEAKER_00]: I like it.
28:51.510 --> 28:55.531
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes up not as often as you think as an answer to this question at the moment.
28:55.611 --> 29:01.312
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we're about a 50-50 at the moment, so definitely still valuable on that basis.
29:01.332 --> 29:04.392
[SPEAKER_00]: If it gets to 100, I might have to start 100% I might have to start banning it.
29:05.953 --> 29:11.434
[SPEAKER_00]: The carbon-top tip, what's your favourite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a bit of a boring tactic like that.
29:16.824 --> 29:25.791
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if people have come here hoping to get some quick wins, except during, and some magic wand kind of formulas, but it's the boring stuff.
29:25.831 --> 29:30.796
[SPEAKER_01]: Like every week, a battery mountain, we would have a meeting of,
29:31.356 --> 29:40.967
[SPEAKER_01]: these are all our damages, these are all our returns and start to review that data and the damages in the early days we would review every single report of damage.
29:41.568 --> 29:50.217
[SPEAKER_01]: But that meant that we improved that packaging, we improved our pallets that the bathrooms are going out on, not about bathrooms are very breakable, a lot of the
29:51.138 --> 29:54.421
[SPEAKER_01]: So it meant that it saved as money at the end of the day.
29:54.441 --> 29:59.545
[SPEAKER_01]: It saved us having to send out more goods, which meant that we were actually much more efficient on our common footprint.
29:59.565 --> 30:03.528
[SPEAKER_01]: We went down because a lot of the stuff that you get's broken, it gets for our own skip.
30:03.728 --> 30:05.730
[SPEAKER_01]: So not a lot you can do with it unfortunately.
30:06.371 --> 30:11.635
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, reducing that, reduce our current footprint, but also it made the business much more efficient as well.
30:12.322 --> 30:33.874
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it's one of those fundamentals that's easy to forget in e-commerce that if we can sell every product, we manufacture to someone who will love it and make use of it, that is a much lower carbon footprint than if 5% gets smashed, 5% gets returned and just sits in the warehouse for 20 years and 50% of the rest of it sits in someone's shed.
30:34.274 --> 30:35.134
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, it's,
30:36.455 --> 30:56.273
[SPEAKER_00]: it's not actually that complicated and of course then if you get that right then your business grows because people love your product they tell other people there's you're not spending so much money on waste of stock because I think that's a really good answer and Jay before we say goodbye could you please let this know where they can find you but also tell us a little bit about your new exciting role
30:57.030 --> 30:57.431
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, sure.
30:57.451 --> 31:06.702
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've all before me on LinkedIn, it's J. O'Neill, and so yeah, my new role is at a product discovery SaaS business called constructor.
31:07.431 --> 31:11.173
[SPEAKER_01]: And actually, I'm now focused heavily on actually enrichment.
31:11.193 --> 31:31.761
[SPEAKER_01]: So build that actually enrichment tools, pretty much everyone talks about today, it's actually lined up quite nicely as my new role, but it's, I guess, the last few years I've been focused on that and it's been an area of interest of mine, so it's kind of worked out quite well that, yeah, this new role is around that script enrichment, and then, yeah, utilising that across all of the constructs of tools.
31:32.417 --> 31:32.918
[SPEAKER_00]: very cool.
31:32.938 --> 31:35.080
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I wish you all the best in the new role.
31:35.241 --> 31:37.403
[SPEAKER_00]: And hopefully we'll get the catch up again soon.
31:37.423 --> 31:37.904
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's day.
31:38.204 --> 31:41.629
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much being on the podcast and giving us a deep dive into product discovery.
31:41.669 --> 31:42.810
[SPEAKER_00]: We really appreciate it.
31:43.471 --> 31:44.332
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll have me again, Chloe.
31:50.253 --> 31:57.523
[SPEAKER_00]: So is it wrong to say that my biggest takeaway from that is that there is no quick fix for good product discoverability?
31:58.224 --> 32:00.387
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about doing all the things well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's about getting your product information right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's about getting
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[SPEAKER_00]: You're product information right constantly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's about watching those trends as they come in.
32:10.038 --> 32:24.732
[SPEAKER_00]: It's then about setting up and optimizing those text acts and working with your partners at those text acts to make sure you are delivering the best possible experience for the customers as things change and how they refer to things and how they expect things and how they want to interact with you.
32:25.432 --> 32:27.453
[SPEAKER_00]: So lots for you all to get stuck into there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully that's given you all some clarity, because I'm sure many of you are working on product data and product discoverability at the moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You get your hands on our notes from this episode, including those top tips and the things we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplanned.com.
32:41.578 --> 32:49.683
[SPEAKER_00]: You can also use redirected episode short links, that's ECMP.info for such the number of the episode and that will take you straight to the right page of the site.
32:50.203 --> 32:57.327
[SPEAKER_00]: When you get there you can also add yourself to our email list so you don't miss out on any of the other things I share to help you improve your business.
32:58.127 --> 33:12.366
[SPEAKER_00]: If you like this episode, then make sure you check out our previous chat with Jay, which is episode 527, which is all about his past experience scaling businesses from 7 to 8 figures, and it was one of our top five most listened to episodes in 2025.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, you're sure of good insight in that one, and if you are a Michael Gerber, Emyth Fan, then you can hear me and him chatting in episode number 89, so a long time ago, and we come quite close to disagreeing, so it's quite an interesting lesson from that perspective, if none of us, that's episode 89 where I'm chatting to Michael Gerber of the Emyth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for tuning into this and every episode that you do of the e-commerce master plan podcast.
33:41.103 --> 33:50.852
[SPEAKER_00]: I bring you a new interview every week to help it inspire you to succeed and thrive with your business, including encouraging businesses and consumers to make more sustainable buying decisions.
33:51.352 --> 33:56.657
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast.
33:57.197 --> 33:59.960
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you have a great week and don't forget to keep optimizing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com slash podcast.
