The Tech Tools You Need in Ecommerce, with Derric Haynie

Ecommerce is always changing because of the technology that’s available to us – in sales, marketing, conversions, product reviews, and analytics, or your CRM (and actually many more), we need to know what the best technology apps and services are that are going to give us an advantage over our competitors. So today, we chat with Derric Haynie, Chief Ecommerce Technologist at Ecommerce Tech, which specializes in keeping your tool stack up to speed with the growth of your store.

Deal Closers is hosted by Izach Porter and is produced by Earfluence.

Transcript

Derric: You must stay on top of technology. It is the backbone of your business. You don’t need to know how to code. You need to think about yourself as a, as a part-time technologist.

Izach: All right, you are listening to the Deal Closers Podcast, brought to you by websiteclosers.com. A show about how to build your e-commerce business to be profitable, scalable, and one day even sellable. I’m Izach Porter and on the show today we have the CEO of e-commerce tech, Derric Haynie, coming on for a conversation about the future of e-commerce.

So, as we all know, e-commerce is always changing because of the technology that’s available to us. We always want to know what the best technology apps and services are that are going to give an advantage over our competitors. And maybe even more importantly, what’s not going to waste my time so I can focus on growing the business.

Those tools could be in sales, marketing, conversions, product reviews, and analytics, or your CRM, and many more things actually. So let’s bring on our guest today, Derric Haynie. Hey Derric, how you doing? Thanks for joining us. 

Derric: Yeah, thanks for having me. Talking the future of e-commerce is my jam. I love it.

Izach: Awesome, man. Yeah, totally. So, Let’s just talk about your business. E-commerce tech. You are a tech enabled marketplace, connecting e-commerce teams to e-commerce tech and agency providers. So what, what does that mean exactly?

Derric: Yeah. essentially I, when I was in house in e-commerce, I realized that the landscape is changing faster than any single person can possibly stay on top of. And I was like, there’s got to be a better way to like, for somebody to do this. Like, can we just create a shortcut where, you know, one person stays on top of this for all of us.

Right, and that kind of brought me to doing demos of technology products. I literally, so for the first two years of this business, I consider my job to do demos of e-commerce technology products and post reviews of it on my own site, try and really break down the process and simplify it for other merchants.

Now it’s evolved into having some additional technology so that we can manage the tool stack, understand where we’re spending our money usage levels on certain products and then also recommendations future products. Cause once we can see the entire landscape and we can see you as a merchant, what’s going on in your store, we can start to really understand where the pieces are going to come together and what’s next for you.

Izach: Cool. So you said a tool stack, you know, I hear people use the term tech stack. I run a couple of e-commerce brands, myself. I’ve got a variety of software and services that I use to help with analytics. Explain to me how you think about the tech stack and then what your services will do for e-commerce entrepreneurs. 

Derric: Yeah. The first thing is like, you know, software companies have like true tech stacks. I would say, you know, different like data layer, service layer, where they’re actually, you know, pushing this out, using, you know, react, not JS or whatever it is to and there’s this whole technical development thing. And that’s where tech stack the term originally came from. 

In e-commerce, obviously we don’t have that. We more or less just use different tools to push things out. Most e-commerce businesses don’t require a whole dev team to run things anymore because we have great platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce or whatever, Magento, you need a little bit more dev power, but like, you know, there’s a lot of Wiziwig builders, you know, just drag and drop building the page out with maybe some minor CSS coding.

You don’t need this full-fledged tech stack, but you do absolutely need a tool stack. And the reason you need a tool stack is because there’s so many innovative technologies solving things personalization – you’re not going to build your own AI engine to recommend the next product to the customer based on their browsing behavior.

That’s way too complicated for me as a, as a small business owner to accomplish. So I need a tool for that. Another example would be landed shipping dates. How do we predict when the product’s going to get on the doorstep of my customer? Well, it turns out you have all the data in your backend of Shopify, cause you know, when it was ordered, when it was shipped and when it was delivered across the, let’s say 10,000 customers you’ve already had. So if you plug that data into a smart tool, it can actually predict the landed date. That’s been proven to increase conversion rate, all these things are good for the store and so forth.

And so tool stack, slightly different than tech stack, but very similar concept of you know, the base layer is our e-commerce platform, then we have our channel marketing tools, our sales and conversion tools, our analytics tools that all kind of layer on top of this so that we can really grow the business by using tech.

Izach: Awesome. Okay, yeah. So I got that. So just in like simple layman terms for somebody who’s got, you know, low familiarity with e-commerce tech, or maybe even not broadly aware of all of the tools that are available, what is your software do? What does your business do for your clients?

Derric: Yeah. So the first thing is you can go to this site today and we’ve reviewed, I think it’s like 170 different technology products, tried to make our own very brief writeup of what they do and when to use them. I think that’s always something that people overlook because you can see a giant personalization software that sells at 40,000 a year and be like, oh, that’s great.

But I make, you know, 200,000 a year, there’s no way that that’s applicable to my current business and state. So really that, trying to discern technology products, come to us to discover technology products and things like that. And then we are in beta testing for our, what we call a vendor management platform, which is a, or maybe call it a toolbox, where you can actually for the first time ever see all of the tools that you’re spending money on.

And then in the near future, you’ll be able to see usage levels on them. And we’ll from there be able to recommend other tools that you should be using based on the stage of your business, the integrations with your existing tools and really all of the things that, that make it kind of viable to, to make a tool profitable for you.

Izach: Awesome. Okay, so let’s, let’s dig into that a little more because this is something that I’ve struggled with. I know a lot of the clients that we work with are preparing to sell their businesses struggle with this too, right? Because each one of these tools has a cost associated, and so the ultimate goal of any business owner is driving profitability to the bottom line.

And one of the things that I have struggled with, and I know a lot of people struggle with is like, is this software, is this tool worth it over what timeframe, how do I think about my ROI? Like, you know, can, can E-commerce tech simplify that for me and helped me think about it in clear terms of return on investment?

Derric: Yeah, absolutely. That, that is the ultimate goal, and I think within a few years, it’s going to take a while to build all of our technology, we’ll actually be able to predict like, okay, it’ll take two and a half months to start recouping your investment, and then in five months you’ll be making an extra $150,000.

We’ll actually be able to make certain baseline predictions on that using this sort of big data play that we’re going for. In the short term, it’s about us manually analyzing the tool and going, okay, it’s going to take like your head of email, like a month to really get up to speed with this. They’re going to spend 40 hours working on it.

You’re going to spend $200 on the tool, but it will make 5% in revenue increase, so probably within three months or so, that tool is profitable for you, but we have to assume your head of email executes on this vision and strategy for you.

Izach: That is such a game changer. That’s awesome because, we talk about with people getting ready to sell their businesses, like what can you do over the next six to 12 months to improve your valuation, to kind of optimize your position before you go to market. And it’s always about how do you grow the business profitably during that time, but if they were able to use your software to show that, you know what their anticipated return on these different triggers or levers that they could pull would be, you know, now you’ve created extra value through not only for extra cashflow in the business, but additional value before they go to the exit, their company. 

Derric: Yeah, I get a higher multiple.

Izach: Absolutely, yeah. Better, multiple on, on more cashflow and but more importantly have knowledge and some analytics about what you’re doing. So it’s not, it’s not taking, you know, you’re taking the guesswork out of it. 

Derric: Yeah, and there is still a sort of, let’s say probabilistic outcome because of the nature of every business is a little bit different. I would honestly say that the number one reason a tool fails is the execution from the team. That’s probably the number one reason where a team’s like, oh, this is going to be great.

And then they just don’t actually follow through on their own. Maybe you don’t have the right resource for this. Maybe you’re not a, I don’t know, a Tik Tok ad centric organization. You bought a Tik Tok tool or something like that, right? So like there’s all sorts of bells and whistles that, um e-commerce entrepreneurs will go after that aren’t necessarily truly aligned with like straightforward profitability sometimes it’s great, and you want to have a budget for, you know, testing things out and failing and all that stuff. 

Sometimes it was just more tried and true optimizations that you can make. Sometimes it’s going to cost a lot in resources, sometimes it’s going to cost a lot in tool costs and little in resources. There’s a few, like, I don’t know, page speed optimization tools that you plug in once. And it’s like all of a sudden, you know, conversion rate increases because your page speed load time went down by two seconds or whatever it is. 

So all sorts of weird ways to slice and dice it. And the most important thing really is personally and w what we’re trying to enable is you as a merchant seeing the technology landscape and all of these opportunities, or at least a lot of them, and then kind of road mapping it out based on your own internal resources, obligations, profitability goals. Do I need to increase average order value today? Profit margin, conversion rate? You know, what is it that like really should be, retention? Focused on in the business?

Izach: Awesome. Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense and kind of lays out a logical framework for kind of implementing some of these solutions. So you mentioned in one of your videos that I saw online, I think the guy was Gary V, he was able to grow his wine business? with 5 cents per click ad words, and he was ahead of the market and use that inefficiency to his advantage. So, you know, how do I get ahead of the market? What what’s the low hanging fruit right now for someone with a small to medium size e-commerce business?

Derric: Yeah. You know, everybody’s there’s more efficiency in the market now than there was 20 years ago. Right? I think that’s when Google first launched AdWords is like 15, 20 years ago. It feels like forever. Right? Can you imagine a world without ads at the top of your search results? But you know, the next best thing is not necessarily the best thing to, to be predicting. Obviously there’s a swing into tick-tock and opportunities over there on the channel marketing side. 

There’s a lot of, I would say innovation in AI driven tools where if you have enough data, let’s just say, you know, if you’re doing a thousand orders a month, 10,000 orders a month, like that’s enough data to really start processing who your customers are, segmenting them and creating better flow sequences, follow-ups, timing offers expanding product line. Like there’s, there’s a lot of things hidden in the data. So when I think about the, you know, the, the next innovation for e-commerce merchants, it’s going to be around data and utilizing that data better. 

The second thing I’m seeing is that with that, we’re moving from a world of business intelligence where you basically look at the graph and then have to figure out what that means to a world where the graph is going to tell you what it means. So it’s saying, hey, like your profit margins went down 3% and it’s because of the XYZ thing. And then the next kind of stage is that the AI will eventually be doing a lot of these actions. As an example, there’s a tool called prescient.ai, it’ll create a segment for you and say, if you target this segment with a unique type of ad, you will increase your return on ad spend by like 87%. Let’s just say, or something along those. 

And of course we all want that. Right? So, so it’s, it’s telling you what to do. Now, there’s another tool that can actually build video creative ads for you based on your existing assets and put those into Facebook ads, test them and improve the video content over time, based on the results of that. So we need to tie these things together, you’re almost not even doing anything yourself anymore. It’s like, maybe you’re just approving some ads to go live and, and your whole system is working in this, let’s say harmonious way. 

Now this isn’t going to solve things like product market fit for starting founders and things like that. But again, when you have data and approve, and let’s say system there’s ways to improve that using, you know, the AI is the buzzword. It’s just like basic machine learning and, and, and the aggregative of large data.

Izach: It’s fantastic. Let’s talk about some, some pain points. So when you’re working with your clients, what’s their biggest pain point typically, or their biggest point pain point, at least from their perspective?

Derric: Yeah. From, especially from the merchant perspective. and I hinted at it earlier, every merchant talks about page speed load time. This is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine because page speed load time isn’t the problem, conversion rate is, is what the derivative of page speed load time is. If you lower your page speed load time, you increase conversion rate.

First thing merchants typically don’t understand what page speed load time is that you care about the moment of first interaction, not when the page is fully loaded. What that means is I need to be able to see the landing page and scroll down. It’s okay if a bell widget or small thing hasn’t loaded, like the chat button hasn’t loaded on that page.

Now there are certain types of user experience where let’s say you have your review widget loading, like 15 seconds later. And many customers are seeing a loading bar instead of the final product that can affect overall conversion rate. But again, at the end of the day, loading your site faster is a direct result of conversion rates.

So the question is if I lower my page speed load time by one second, how much more money will I make because of the increase in conversion rate. And that sets you up with a very simple risk reward calculator. So if you know that you’ll make 10,000 a month in perpetuity off of lowering your page speed load time by one second, then you know you’re willing to spend basically up to $10,000 to get that done. So it’s a very straightforward calculation. 

Now we don’t know exactly how much we’re going to lower page speed load time for, and sometimes you don’t even know how much it’s going to cost to get it lower. And so those, those variables I’ll go into it, but there’s a whole bunch of other things we can do to increase conversion rate that don’t involve speeding up page speed, load time. So is there a bigger opportunity somewhere else is now the other question that I think merchants should be asking. So that’s my first pet peeve.

Izach: Yeah. That’s really interesting, right? It’s like, you know, is it the cause and effect, and what’s, what’s the symptom or the, you know, how do we, how do we kind of diagnose the problem correctly? Are there any quick wins that you, you can kind of high-level give clients like a specific technology you’re really hot on that nobody knows about yet. 

Derric: There’s I think a few things in the, in the split testing space, assuming you’re doing nine on a 30, 40,000 website visitors a month. So I think everybody should be split testing and you can also roll out your tools in a true split test. So that 50% of your audience is getting, if it’s a tool that is forward facing, so MarTech product, that’s like conversion rate optimization on a website or something, roll it out in a split test to really figure out how it impacts overall revenue, margin, profitability, things like that because obviously every tool is kind of over-reporting on its own results. 

As an example, like an SMS tool takes credit for all the sales if you, if some of them are even like, if we sent a text message and then they converted within seven days, that’s a sale we count. And it’s like, well, you know, how did that person come into us? They came in through a Facebook ad. So Facebook ad is also taking credit for the full sale. And then we sent them an email and so that they’re taking credit for the sale. And so long story short, everyone’s trying to take credit for a little bit too much. And if you have that problem, attribution tools like Rockerbox is an AI driven attribution tool that can drive transparency for all those omni-channel marketers. 

On the split testing side, a couple of tools, I really like one’s called getbloom.ai. I believe it optimizes your product detail page images automatically, which is really cool because most people put that, the front image is just like product with white background. Turns out product with white background is one of the lowest converting images that you can put as your front image.

Now on Amazon, there’s a, some sort of requirements there, right? So you have to have a product with like white background is your first image, and then you move into like infographics and other things. But when you own the D2C channel, you actually should be testing out which image is going to go first, often lifestyle and action shots showing the value proposition of the product is going to win.

Even with like supplements, they’re showing a bottle when you want to show, I don’t know a fit person like taking a supplement or, or being rewarded for what they’re doing, right? Whatever the case may be. And dresses, they’re showing just a dress on a white background, when you show the, a woman happy out dancing, you know, in public, there’s more action there and people tend to convert more, but how would I know which image to put first, you use a tool to test it and it’ll prove over time, you know what, which image goes first, which images should go second? Which image should go third? How many images there should be on that product detail page and so forth and so on.

So that one that I really like. I mentioned landed dates, so I’m an advisor to a company called Phoenix commerce. So I’ll give a quick plug for them for the larger merchants, the brands like Levi’s are using them to predict when the product’s going to arrive on the doorstep, they put that on the product detail page when it’s on the product detail page and the cart page and the checkout page, it increases conversion rate practically universally by a 15 to 17% something along those lines. They’ve never actually, they always rolled this out in a split test for all their customers.

They’ve never lost a split test. They’ve always increased conversion rate by predicting this, and then of course, when you make a promise to a customer, you need to fulfill on that promise. So you need to track whether the product is going to make it to the doorstep on the promise date. And if not, you need to do some proactive customer service or, or make amends for your, for your, for your shortcoming, for your lie or something. 

Izach: Man just that one alone is so key for any of the kind of D2C drop shippers out there. You know, the, the ship time is, is highly correlated to return rates. So if you can, I know I love it as a consumer, when I can see with a lot of transparency, okay, this is going to be here in three days or five days or seven days.

It’s not always so much that I care how fast it gets there. I don’t need everything in two days, but I want to know when it’s going to be there, when to expect it so I can plan around it. I might not need it for two weeks, but I want to know that it’s going to be here in 11 days. 

Yeah, that’s awesome, man. Love all that, and I think the coolest thing that stands out to me about what you’ve done here is you’ve created a, a technology platform to help me understand the technology that I need to run my business, because there are so many apps, so many tools 

Derric: Over 15,000 tools. 

Izach: It’s just, it’s totally daunting. You can’t keep up with it as an individual. and sometimes you get lucky and stumble on something. That’s great, but phenomenal to have a resource, to just be able to assimilate all that information, look at maybe my business specifically, and then help me pick out the stuff that really matters that I’m going to get a return on. 

 I want to talk a little bit about how this all plays into exit strategy, exit process, and mergers and acquisitions. That’s, you know, that’s my focus. My clients are always trying to, and I think it’s true with all business owners, but maximize and optimize their cashflow.

But in particular, as you go into planning for your exit, the ability to show growth in your free cashflow, right? So growth in net income drives value in the sale process. So how does e-commerce tech help business owners, you know, drive their bottom line? 

Derric: There’s actually a filter in our search bar that says increased profitability. And then you can see all the tools that specialize directly in that. so that’s a, that’s an easy way to sort by them. Obviously the way that we increase profitability, there’s, there’s a few direct ways, right? We can always work on lowering our cost of goods sold or landed shipping dates or something like that.

So operational efficiency can, can be part of it. But, when we think about tool usage, there’s a little bit that helps with operational efficiency, but a lot of it is actually going to be an increasing something like average order value with high margin products, merchandising better merchandising our products and things like that.

And then increasing retention and repeat purchase rate, right? So that might bring us to loyalty, customer service, triggered email flows or special tools that kind of bring people back into the whether it’s top of funnel including like recurring subscription billing and things like that.

So all of all of those things are kind of the, the opportunity there. The one thing I would say that I think is, is the often-overlooked focus of a merchant is this merchandising component and how personalization software fit into it. So there’s a tool called advanced commerce.com, which is like a really focused merchandising personalization tool.

So if you look at there, there are a lot of other personalization tools out there. And what a personalization tool is essentially doing is using some brief aspects of your browsing behavior to say, oh, you’re you searched black dress, you’ve visited three black dresses. Let’s give you all the black dresses we can right over here, as well as all the accessories that fit well with black dresses.

So like maybe red heels or a nice necklace, all those things. So personalization software is kind of predict what product to put in front of you, but what it’s not doing necessarily is understanding the margins of those products or how their shelf life might expire. If they’re like, you know, a consumable goods or maybe they’re costing a lot on the shelves or things like that.

So a full-fledged merchandising platform that uses AI and logic plus understanding inventory on hand, as an example, if you know, you’re going to sell out of this product, this let’s say it’s a, it’s a perfect upsell product, I don’t know. It’s like a necklace add on to the, to the dress, right. You know, you’re going to sell out of that by the end of the month.

You don’t need to put it into the upsell campaign. You need another product to go in there because that’ll just sell out naturally on its own. You and you don’t want to, you know, then it’s not like really optimizing. Actual sales over the course of the month or anything like that. And so, so I think there’s, there’s layers of profitability that it’s combining conversion rate optimization and operations at the same time. When you sell out of a product, it doesn’t cost anything to sit on the warehouse that your 3PL you know, there’s, there’s some added benefits there.

On the loyalty side. I think that there’s a, there’s a lot of things that merchants should be doing to increase, repeat purchases, increase referrals things like instilling vitality into the product, adjusting your product packaging can actually have the big impact on your overall lifetime value, which increases the profitability. And it’s one of those unsexy things, right? Like it’s like I, I’m going to spend more on my, on my packaging and the, you know, the buyer’s like, no, no, no, don’t do that. But it’s like, well, it actually, it gets people to take more pictures of the product posts on social.

It drove net revenue up 5% and our cost of acquisition for those customers zero right, or very low. so, so all sorts of cool things that happen when you I don’t know, think outside the box is what it is when you change your packaging, change your box and, and, and incentivizing the customer to really care about the brand.

Um, so I guess there’s something in the story that you tell as well. I don’t know. So I could go on you know, return on ad spend again, tools that are actually building video ads for you, copywriting for you, and then testing the sentiment and analyzing that things like that can increase return on ad spend, but you need to be spending probably at least 30,000 a month on Facebook, Instagram for some of these tools to work. And then of course they kind of are more valuable as you scale out to a hundred thousand month, $200,000 a month and spending on ad spend.

Izach: Sure, got it. So how do you keep up with all this stuff? How do you, how do you follow…

Derric: I have to build an entire technology in order to do it. I can’t just as an example, like, I mean, there’s, there’s 40 other tools that I could be talking about right now that I’m just, you know, kind of there, there are not top of mind for me. So I have a database that I look at when I’m talking to merchants, try and scroll through and make sure that I’m hitting all the important things that I think are needed, but they’re, yeah. Technology is the only way to solve this problem. There’s no way a human can keep all this in their head.

Izach: Totally. It’s like, if you try to do this, you know, one off it’s totally daunting. 

Derric: Well think about it like this. as we’re speaking, five apps are launching in the Shopify app store. 60 apps will launch this week. That’s 240 apps a month. We’re I’m only talking to two or three new technology providers a week. So I’m, I’m falling behind every month understanding the ecosystem.

Now, of course, I think we S we actually, at this point are pretty much the largest place to that understands e-commerce technology. But you know, knowing 200 of the 15,000 and fast-growing tools is an ever getting, going to get us to full, you know, you want to see as much as you can see, right? The more clarity we have, the better we can make decisions. So it’s a challenge.

Izach: So what, what’s the future? You mentioned that the market continues to get more efficient. You know, I’ve seen that my clients have seen that. What, where does that go and how do we kind of stay at the front end of that curve? 

Derric: Yeah, well, in order to predict the future, you want to let’s start in the past. The boom of, of Facebook ads and the ease of use of products like Shopify, created a boom for e-commerce entrepreneurs. there was also a boom of drop shipping with Alibaba and a few other, uh Oberlo and all those things.

And those were able to work because you are able to buy the product low, find a low cost of acquisition on an untapped ad platform and sell high. As we know, like Facebook right now to add inventory ad prices are skyrocketing after iOS 14 and 15 updates or whatever it is. And so, so acquisition as a key component for e-commerce entrepreneurs is shrinking significantly.

Meanwhile, the gen Z movement, Tik TOK, and a few other kinds of brand and story components of people really caring about the businesses they work with cause-oriented Millennials and Gen Z-ers are driving a shift towards wanting to have a relationship with the brand. I want to see you on Tik TOK. I want you to help out with the causes I believe in, you know, right now. topically, a lot of brands are supporting like Ukraine and trying to put that into their, their story because they believe their audience is going to do it, or maybe they just want to do it for good. 

But anyways, long story short, you know, the, the consumer buying behavior is changing. The blue ocean has essentially disappeared in acquisition. This means now we’re right at this stage where switched, swinging over to retention is going to be absolutely important for most brands. If you’ve acquired customers, but can increase lifetime value on them. You don’t have to pay the rising ad costs essentially, but you’re getting more out of each cause.

And this is, you know, business fundamentals, as I’m sure you have to go into the books with every single merchant you talk to. I think the last few years have, have seen that swing into retention. Bringing out, kind of extrapolating with the proliferation of e-commerce technology, 15,000 tools entering the market.

You also see a lot of these tools expanding into other areas. So there’s no longer the siloed, a single email service provider. Email service providers, now your CRM, it’s your SMS provider, web push notification. They have a pop-up tool. They might even have a Wiziwig builder and some personalization components like all built into your email service provider.

So, so we’re having more all in ones that are actually really good at a lot of different things at the same time, because we’ve had 15 years to build out the product or something like that. And so, so the conglomeration of e-commerce technology is also happening. I don’t believe 10 years from now, you’ll be able to launch an SMS marketing tool and have any sort of grasp on the ecosystem because the players in this space will really have kind of beat you out with the, the flexibility of their technology and all those things. 

Now, there will still be innovations in other places, but a lot of these established industries will be harder to break into. Where does this head over the next few years? Well all of these larger providers, especially on the email SMS personalization side and the platform side, investing again in AI and data-oriented components.

Again show you what the information, tell you what to do, right? Those are the first two steps. The last 20 years have been show you the information just now entering the, tell you what to do with our predictive analytics. And the third step is done for you. So the next 10 years will be a mass migration to a lot of the things that you thought could never be done by AI, will be done. 

Ads, I really think the ad agency is in trouble over the next 10 years. I think the ad agency will transition to small people that know how to run good AI tools essentially. And that’ll be their job as running AI tools, but not, I don’t know, making ad creative or creating their own segments and ad, you know, the way that we’ve I ran a social media marketing agency for many years.

The way that you would, you would do it in the past. So the size of the agency will shrink and the AI will cover more than the individual and then even operations. you know, a lot of operations people, if you’re listening, you’ve probably been in a spreadsheet today. You, you know, the spreadsheet won’t be needed anymore because the data will be there and the AI will make the supply chain purchasing.

You’ll just be the one connecting the suppliers, and eventually the AI will decide to invest in a new product for you. You won’t even know that you’re going to be offering this product on your site. It will have bought it, put it in the warehouse and it’ll be shipped out, you know, all automagically from a probably robot driven warehouse where there’ll be less people.

Izach: Automagically I love that 

Derric: So yeah, the, the future is going to be. there’s a lot of displacement job displacement that’ll be going on. And I think that there’ll be lots of opportunities created from that, but a lot of the rules inside of an e-commerce organization will be scaled out to technology, customer service.

The customer service agent will all but disappear. It will be the service manager who’s managing the AI that can do full response and like answer every single question. When the question can’t be answered, customer service, which will be 1% or less of the time, customer service manager will come in, answer the question, then the AI will know what to do the next time and so forth and so on, right. 

Izach: Wow. 

Derric: So, we’re, we’re getting there. I promise. 

Izach: I want to do it all right now. 

Derric: Yeah. You know, as we think about the future, you, you don’t want to overinvest into it because it will take time incremental build outs of these things. The technology is really in, in, in progress, all of it is, and of course it will be in the next stage, but things that I’m thinking about on the full-fledged automation of the machine, as you know, the e-commerce machine.

It’s going to take a while to get right. There will be some mistakes made along the way. You’ll have tools giving you competing advice or information. You’ll accidentally spend 40,000 on an ad campaign because the AI went haywire, optimizing for the wrong metric, right? It’s not smart enough to do some of the high-level stuff. So you really have to have a good grasp on it. 

So I guess my advice to e-commerce entrepreneurs today would be to make sure and stay on top of the technology side of the market and be comfortable using tools, understand how they work and how they’re going to work in the future.

Because if you lose any track, your whole business is online, right? So you must stay on top of technology. It is the backbone of your business. You don’t need to know how to code. You need to think about yourself as a, as a part-time technologist.

Izach: Really fascinating stuff. So Derek, how can our listeners connect with you and your company? 

Derric: Yeah, come on over to ecommercetech.io. We are going to be bringing in people for a waitlist for beta testing our technology product, which I alluded to see the tools you’re spending money on eventually see their usage and make predictions and recommendations of what tools to use in the.

You can also there. I talk with merchants today. It’s totally free. We just break down what you’re doing today. I give some random advice not to dissimilar from this podcast, but a little bit more specific to each merchant and try and give you a roadmap of the tools that you should be using over the next three, six and 12 months. ecommercetech.io. That’s and you can look me up on LinkedIn. Love, always love connecting there as well. 

Izach: All right. That was Derric Haynie, CEO of ecommercetech.io. When you go to his website, be sure to check out his podcast, watch the videos, read the blog. There’s so much awesome information there. 

Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the Deal Closers Podcast brought to you by websiteclosers.com. If you like the show, be sure to rate us, write a review, press the follow button and share it with your network. Of course, we’re looking if you’re looking for help selling your e-commerce business, be sure to visit websiteclosers.com. This episode was edited and produced by Earfluence. I’m Izach Porter, connect with me on LinkedIn and we’ll see you next time on the Deal Closers Podcast.