How to Move Products and Services in an Omnichannel World

The world of e-commerce and digital marketing is facing a significant shift. Technology allows business owners to go from selling in-person or through one channel to reaching out to their customers anywhere and at any time they are ready to buy. This approach is called omnichannel selling.

You may wonder how your business сan be adjusted to the omnichannel model. Jesse Ness and Erik Suhonen from Ecwid sat with Richard Otey, a marketing strategist and host of the “Rich E-commerce” show, to talk about just that. In this episode, they discuss omnichannel e-commerce trends that are going on in the world right now, and the easiest ways to implement them in your business.

Transcript

Richard: Hi! I’m Richard Otey. The other day I was talking to a couple of guys from Ecwid who are helping businesses sell their products in an omnichannel world. We have Erik and Jesse from Ecwid in the house, how are you guys doing?

Erik: Doing great, thanks, Richard!

Jesse: Thanks, Richard! Yeah, great!

Richard: You guys are up to some pretty interesting things. First of all, what’s going on in the world of Ecwid these days? Erik, let’s start with you. What’s this magic sauce I’m hearing about you guys have?

Erik: Well, first of all, for all of you who don’t know what Ecwid is — Ecwid is an e-commerce platform for small businesses. The way that we think about it is there’s some really interesting trends going on in the world right now, and if you think about it, a couple of years back, a lot of the products and services were being purchased offline. and When the internet came around the trend of being able to purchase online started. Companies like Amazon and others have done a fantastic job.

Now, in the past, a lot of online-purchases have been web-based and so a lot of consumers have really focused on buying online as something you can only do from a computer. But as we see, there’s been lots of interesting changing trends happening on the consumer side. So, for instance, mobile. We all know that mobile is massive, it continues to grow. Everybody’s got a mobile phone in their pocket, and the ability to buy products and services online continues to grow.

So, we are focusing on these emerging e-commerce sales channels.. We see lots of consumers that are purchasing across more and more sales channels, not just web and mobile, but also social is a huge one. If you look at Facebook for instance, they have two billion monthly active users, so how do you take advantage of that? There are consumers buying on Facebook, there are consumers buying on Amazon, and eBay, and across all these different channels, and not only are they buying on different channels, they are also using multiple channels at once.

So these consumer trends are continuing to grow: more and more channels, there’s some interesting things going on around social commerce and what Amazon’s Alexa is doing and and all these other channels.

The way we think about it at Ecwid is that it is a trend that is going to continue to grow and we want to empower small businesses to be able to take advantage of that opportunity. In fact, we believe that the 200 million small businesses around the world have an opportunity to not only survive in a way that consumers are changing but to really thrive. We believe that if small businesses really can take advantage of this and also think about how to use technology to do this, which is an important enabler for a small business, we think there’s an opportunity.

Richard: So what is it you’re doing to to help people with that kind of omnichannel (multi-sales channel) experience that you’re describing?

Erik: Well, we know that small businesses think about a couple things and we’ve heard this over and over from our customers, (we have hundreds of thousands customers around the world in over 175 countries) and regardless of company size, country and what they’re selling, we hear the same things over and over. They need a way to continue to grow their business and they need to do it while saving time and saving money. They don’t always have huge budgets but they want to continue to grow. So we’ve built a software that makes it so easy to manage and sell your products and services online across all these different channels for very inexpensive price. In fact, we are one of the few e-commerce platforms that have a freemium model. You can use Ecwid for free, forever and we think that’s a great opportunity for small businesses.

Richard: So you can come in on a freemium [plan], you’re a business at some point you are gonna charge, you probably have some tiers (we don’t need to necessarily get into it because that’s individual to the business and their needs at the time) but let’s go back that secret sauce question. What’s going on and what are you really doing? Is it almost like a “set it and forget it”? Because you say there’s an entry level, right? It sounds as if they [merchants] can get some enterprise features out of that. It sounds like you know one of the things I’ve heard about a lot, is what you guys are rolling out here. But what are you doing as of now minus this other thing we’re going to talk about that ties it together? Do they just put into a CSV file and their products magically goes to all these other channels? Like what do they need to know how far into the path do they need to be?

Erik: Well, going back to what I said earlier that what small and mid-sized businesses  really care about is being able to grow and not to spend a lot of time. We focus a lot on making a software that allows them to sell across all these different sales channels in a very easy way.

So you don’t have to have a big budget, you don’t have to have a lot of knowledge. You can get up and running really quickly. You don’t have to have a developer to do custom development on a shopping cart or an e-commerce platform.

That’s really our secret sauce: how do you make software so powerful for people who really just want to focus on their craft? They want to focus on their business and on their products and services. They don’t always want to focus on configuring software, so we make it so easy and intuitive and simple to manage their store, that is the power behind Ecwid.

Richard: So it’s kind of like (and I’m going to be really quick because I know you Jesse have something to say) it’s one of the things I was talking about here on Rich E-Commerce: it’s still a traditional business behind it, and it just happens that we live in a day in age like you described, where we can sell online and through all these various channels, but there is still an underlying business that needs to be run there. It’s really more that you’re taking the headache of all the connecting pieces of the technology out of it and almost taking people up to enterprise level features, for a small to medium-sized business price.

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely, Richard! Can an individual set up their own Facebook profile? Can they upload pictures, can they upload video, do daily updates? Of course. I think we’ve simplified e-commerce to about that level, where, at some point you have to take pictures of your products, and you have to upload them to your control panel, you do have to know the price… but you have to know that for a Facebook profile, too. There is some sort of interaction. Once that’s done, which isn’t that big of a deal, we allow people to sell on Google Shopping, on marketplaces, on their own website. We allow them to sell — it works on all mobile phones across the world, it takes care of all the shipping, all the collecting all the money (through PayPal or whatever) and then it even goes as far as maybe you want your own mobile app. Maybe if you want a store, and you want to sell on Facebook and Google Shopping, maybe you guys should do the mobile app as well. So we allow that, and we don’t make our customers build it. They don’t need to know any code. We just allow that. We give them the ability to accept money with their business without being a developer.

Richard: Nice! That’s awesome. What are some of the features that you have? Or let’s pick a feature that one of your clients is using, maybe they have an interesting product and they’re using an interesting way, or maybe it’s just an interesting story that they flip the switch that allowed the CSV file to go to eBay — and, all of a sudden, they realize 60% of their sales came from eBay? Is anyone of your customers that’s currently using a feature in a way that someone that listens to e-commerce podcast might not know of? Or is there something going?

Erik: Oh yeah, I can probably give you a couple examples. An interesting thing about Ecwid is — I just go back to what I mentioned before — we have customers in over 175 countries we are kind of very horizontal in terms of we service a lot of different verticals, a lot of different industries, and so we do see a lot of creativity in how businesses use Ecwid. One of the things that that I’m personally very excited about that we’ve launched is called Order Pickup. When you think about traditional e-commerce, you think: “Okay, well, I’m selling T-shirts online.” Or:  “I’m selling jewelry online”.  And those are all very common items for businesses using Ecwid to sell online. But there’s also examples of restaurants. So we’ve launched a feature called “Order Pickup” and it’s perfect for restaurants that want enable their customers to order ahead of time and pick up in their restaurant. We know hat it’s a massive and growing trend around the world. People are busy and people have a very short window of time for their lunch break and I don’t want to stand in line for 30 minutes waiting for my deli sandwich or waiting for my burrito. I want to order ahead, I want to purchase ahead, and I want to walk up and pick it up and walk away.

Order Pickup for restaurants is an example of where a lot of people don’t think about traditional e-commerce, but it’s been a really great feature for us, and I think the second piece of that is we integrate directly with a lot of POS providers — in fact, I think more POS providers than anybody else out there — this allows for the online-offline piece of the multi-channel sales trend, where not only can I sell online, but I’m allowing my business, my consumers to order ahead and pick up in my restaurant. Now I’m enabling it doing omnichannel online-offline, so that my POS and my e-commerce are both synced up. And I don’t have to manage them separately: all those orders and inventory are synced up and really easy for me to manage as a small business.

Richard: Wow, that’s awesome. It sounds as if you’re helping people stay focused on the business and they can do it in different various ways. So it sounds as if they would they just flip this switch and now they have this restaurant store. Give me a little bit, because I want to get on to this new feature thing — we got like 3 minutes left so I’ll leave it up to you. Is there something else you guys got going and something you can describe and we’ll go deeper into it later?

Jesse: Yeah, let’s talk about that. You know, we talked about omnichannel and of course, you  need to be everywhere online and offline, but with the growth of Facebook, being on Facebook and being able to sell on Facebook is very important these days. So we have a couple of things we are working on, one we’ve already released, it called the Facebook pixel —  so that means that you don’t have to know what a pixel is, you don’t have to know code, but when you sign up with Facebook for advertising, you get what’s called the pixel and you can take that little number, your pixel, and add it to your Ecwid store. And that’s now tracked through your whole store, whether a consumer has been to your store, where they have bought something, and then the products they visited as well. So that’s super important for the the new program we released that Erik can talk more about.

Erik: Yeah, the overall solution is called “Sell on Facebook” — it’s the ability not only to sell natively on Facebook, but also being able to do check out, be able to do advertising, be able to track [performance] — there’s a lot of insights that the small business can use in the data of Facebook to be able to manage their business. All of this is powerful and sophisticated technology on the backend, but incredibly simple on the frontend to allow anybody with very little knowledge and very little money to be able to really sell a lot of products and services on Facebook.

Richard: Nice, and is that like a setting? I mean there’s nothing we’re going to cover in the next 30 seconds but pretty easy setup it sounds like.

Erik: It’s very easy and we are a SaaS platform so literally you go to my.ecwid.com and you click a button, and you’re ready [to sell on Facebook].

Richard: So right out of the gate, does the freemium version get to test that too? I can easily imagine that being in one of the paid versions? That’s a pretty cool feature.

Erik: Yeah it’s it’s a powerful feature and we typically do load up our free plans with lots and lots of great features. Sell on Facebook in  in particular is a paid feature.

Richard: Thanks again to Erik and Jessie of Ecwid at ecwid.com. So, what did we learn:

1. Your customers are shopping on many devices, on many channels, in many ways.
2. Business owners want and need to work on their business, not in their business — keep it simple, so we don’t get tied up in the technology.
3. Even though we don’t want to get tied up in the tech, with limited budgets, we need to leverage tech. So, the secret of how to sell products and services in an omnichannel market is to recognize that sales, marketing, and IT have to all work together whether it’s people on your staff, or technology like Ecwid’s — putting these processes in place is required to win today’s e-commerce market.

Learn more: How to Make Ecwid’s Omnichannel Potential Work For You