Composing the Next Wave of Contextual Shopping Experiences, with James Semple, Product Management Director at Salesforce

Transcript

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Peter Crosby (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. For our listeners who sell direct to their consumer or buyers, a composable tech stack is pretty much a necessity these days to keep up with the buying experiences your customers expect. And in the next era, it will be essential to achieve the kind of more niche and personalized experiences that will be necessary to drive growth and win market share. James Semple, product management director at Salesforce and self-proclaimed evangelist of the composable ecosystem. Join Lauren Livak Gilbert and me to discuss the current and future states of contextual omnichannel commerce. James, welcome to the podcast. We're so excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us.

James Semple (01:00):

Absolute pleasure, Peter. Thank you so much for inviting me. This is great.

Peter Crosby (01:04):

Yeah, I mean, today we're going to talk about composable commerce, which has been going on for a while, and I think many retailers have explored that so that they can introduce the capabilities they need kind of at speed and scale and incorporate them into their tech stack. So I think we just wanted to catch up with you on where Composability sits in the tech stack of retailers today, and is it driving the kind of impact and results that they expect? Is it working?

James Semple (01:34):

Wow, that's a great question. So I would say that where it sits, so composability really is that ability to not tie yourself to a single product vendor's roadmap. So that ability to pick and choose between that. So the benefits that it can provide from that I think are working. I think there's a lot of companies out there doing really well, selling smaller parts of the tech stack. So by which I mean custom just CMS or just search or just payment, stuff like that. So fulfilling part of that commerce journey, even personalization, things like that all by itself. So I think from that point of view, it is definitely working and I think you could talk to many different companies who've seen great business results because of moving to a composable architecture. Definitely, frankly, I think at the moment, macroeconomic conditions are driving certain trends across the market, so it's really interesting. If I talk to companies who are on a real just growth pattern right now, they're heavily investing in this. So I do think that it definitely, definitely works. I think we've seen a slight slowdown just because of macroeconomic conditions, but if the investment's available, then yeah, absolutely. It's certainly paying off in a whole number of different areas.

Peter Crosby (02:44):

So how do you think that, if you can describe where the composable, the history of composable and where we've gotten and how it's evolved over time? I think some people are sort of locked into maybe an earlier way of thinking about composability. I'm just wondering if you can take us on a little modernization journey.

James Semple (03:06):

Yeah, no, actually that's a great point. And again, a lot of these things, composability is it's not a all on all thing kind of thing. So yeah, that's a great point. So if we look back about, say 15 years ago, there were certain companies, certain retailers and similar commerce companies were building either completely from scratch in-house building their own commerce engines, or they were ripping apart existing products and using 'em in the ways they weren't intended because there was certain functionality that were unable to access that wasn't available off the shelf or because they wanted multiple different systems to work together in ways that they weren't currently built for. So that early approach to composability, what I've called wave one in an article I wrote that was kind of cool in the sense that people knew what they were doing, but they also realized they were doing a lot of heavy lifting and they were effectively breaking the warranties of a lot of these products they were using.

(04:00):

So what they ended up doing in what I would consider to be my wave two is that you saw a bunch of companies come forward with products specifically built to be used in this way, so much more toolkits, less high level functionality, and generally here's a bunch of APIs that you can use to do your commerce functionality, so build what you want with them, which kind of worked out okay except for the fact that this was a fairly small percentage of the overall retail market, overall commerce market in general. So it wasn't big enough to get market share for these smaller companies building these products. So basically through what I call wave three, we get an amplification of that message through the Mac Alliance and then also covid where there was a lot of, let's just throw money at our website and see if it works. Let's be honest, oh, the good old days, what are we going to do? Here's a shotgun full of money, I'm going to fire up my website.

(04:53):

Look, actually I don't mind that because in a way I think it was more of an exciting time, but what came up as a result of that, it was a bit of a backlash because frankly, I think to get composable out to the mainstream, maybe the message was simplified and certainly a lot of the ramifications that those guys back in wave one were completely aware of were being lost. And if you imagine you've just got a single product and you now have a complex architect with many, many different vendors, this is a complicated step up in terms of how much complexity you've got to manage, how much complexity involved, and it really is complex at every level, contractual, organizational, commercial, everything becomes complex. Imagine if you have 15 products and one of 'em is GMV based and one of 'em is API cost based, and another one, I mean hosting, who even knows?

(05:39):

But hosting has a complex, complex costing system. So it's hard enough to work out how much the cost of doing business last year was, let alone predict what next year's is going to be. So my point being was there's a lot of complexity that was suddenly taken on it in a big, big hit. A lot of companies bizarrely went from one single product, 15 different products, and it became a very, very difficult thing to run. So where I would say we've swung back to is a little bit more of a kind of slightly more sober middle ground where I feel that a lot of companies ideas of composable lease days is one single product doing let's say 75% of their architecture with multiple products around it. So if I think about why we go headless, why we'd go composable, headless, breaking off your user experience away from your backend, one of the biggest reasons to do that right now is omnichannel, which we can talk about in a second, but the idea of exposing all of that business data and functionality, particularly personalized data, but also that same functionality across all of any kind of channel that you want to, the composable aspect is I'm not going to tie my roadmap to a single product vendor's roadmap, and I think that's the benefit, but often people, if they're going to go with a platform, they already like 90% of what the platform already does.

(06:53):

So it does become, but I don't like this one thing, I don't like these two things. This is where I'm going to really choose my battles and do that. So I would say to your exact point, Peter, the modern state of composable for the most part in the market is looking like this. Now it doesn't mean there's still people using complete single platforms, and there are still people completely 15 to 20 different vendors. So it is horses for courses, but I do feel that the majority right in the middle, that's the kind of version of composable they're using, which again does mitigate a lot of those heavy operational challenges that we just outlined.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:28):

So why have we really kind of seen that, I'm going to call it a peak and valley kind of approach to composable because it was a really hot topic then I feel like it went away. And then I feel like a lot of, if I'm talking about on the brand side, decided to in-house a lot of things and decided to build it, and now they're going back and they're thinking more composable and they're don't want to build in-house. Why was it a hot topic and now it's coming back and why are there really those peaks and valleys that you've seen throughout these different waves?

James Semple (07:56):

Great question, Lauren, and good to see you as well. But I guess the way I would look at this would be, I mean, you're absolutely right. Firstly that that's exactly what's happened, and I definitely get into conversations where people are like, the previous CTO hired 30 developers, we need to get rid of those 30 developers. Can you help us do that? And so I definitely get into those kind of conversations. So you are right. I think there was, again, I think I would put a lot of this down to macroeconomic conditions. So covid, lots and lots of money thrown at the website because the stores obviously weren't making money and it just hit at the same time as the Mac Alliance was really, really getting a lot of great publicity. And so I feel that the message really resonated. Everyone wanted that. How do we stand out from the crowd?

(08:38):

I think, I'm just trying to think of the right way of putting it. I think a couple of things here I really will not underestimate, and I overuse this phrase already, but macro and economic conditions are driving so many decisions right now. I think certain products are on the rise at the moment that in a more buoyant market, people wouldn't even be looking at. And I think, as I say, talking to companies who are still managing to do well and still year on your growth, they're still really looking at those kind of Mac projects. So I think that's been one of the things. I think perhaps some people went into some of these projects a little bit naively maybe let's say, and we're kind of shocked at some of the consequences. I think speaking from my own point of view, from the start of the Mac Alliance, I just assumed that companies were going to get more technical.

(09:23):

Frankly, I just assumed that was the only way that retailers could survive in the upcoming market was to get more technical. Now they haven't done that, so that makes the appeal of that to a large set of companies a bit different. It's less appealing if you haven't got that internal technical team. Nevertheless, I think the other reason about this is I just think it's become table stakes. Maybe we've moved through the period of composable being the new exciting thing to what can we do now? We have a composable architecture, seamless omnichannel isn't really going to exist without a composable architecture. Just on that very point, I was at a car manufacturers and they were saying to me, they were looking at their architecture saying, how is headless composable helping in this? And I was saying, well, you have an app and you have a website and you have a kiosk for self-service in store and you have a clienteling solution, you have an in-car solution.

(10:14):

If you didn't have a headless solution to this, how would you do it? You'd have five or six different points of record that you'd have to synchronize somehow and full stack solutions for everything. You don't want that at all. You want the same functionality written in one place, exposed to APIs, to all of these different user interfaces. They're all basically accessing the same system with different interfaces. So I just think it's becoming part of the system, or at this point now, I think it's becoming so integral. I think just about every company now has a composable offering really in that sense. So maybe that's the reason it's sort of not, people aren't so excited about it nowadays. It's kind of just everywhere.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (10:50):

To your point about companies getting more technical though, if a retailer or a brand is moving towards more of a composable kind of architecture, what do they need internally from a support perspective? Technically from it, or they're just technology function in general?

James Semple (11:08):

Okay, so this is an area that at Salesforce we've really, really tried to drill into specifically that point. Our composable storefront was specifically designed to solve that specific challenge. It can be a lot of people, frankly, you don't have to take my word for a lot of companies talk about technical maturity, and that really works into the idea of having a fairly highly skilled, reasonable sized skilled team of people running your architecture. If you think you now have to deal with things like hosting, you have to deal with, you are responsible for your architecture. You might have an architecture that literally is unique. Nobody else has this exact architecture. So you might be also coming up against problems that nobody else is facing because nobody else is integrating these products the same way.

(11:53):

One of the things probably I would say that people underestimated in that initial look at composability was glue code, I guess is the phrase for it, which is the custom code you write to tie these multiple different products together. That can be a lot more than people expect, especially if you're used to using products where a lot of it's kind of built into the product as you just have to configure it. So I think that's the area where it can come in. We have tried very hard at Salesforce with our offering specifically to solve that exact problem. So having third parties pre-built connectors, having systems integrators, pre-build accelerators that have these connectors already built into it, and then having, if you think about a typical headless commerce architecture, the headless commerce engine itself, their responsibility stops at the back end. They can guarantee fast, good uptime APIs, performance APIs that are staying up all the time that are scalable, stuff like that.

(12:45):

Whereas we are actually taking our hosting to the front end, and I believe we were the first people in the composable space to have built that and to included that kind of hosting and storefront in our full commerce offering like that. So yeah, we tried to take all of those things that you typically expect from a product vendor to the front end as well. So scalability, uptime, security, performance, the whole thing like that. But yeah, to your point, typically if you haven't got that, you would need a fairly large team to go ahead and build that. And as I said, with customers not getting more technical, this is an extra expense that they have to take on that they maybe didn't. Yeah, right. The biggest hidden expense, frankly.

Peter Crosby (13:21):

So you were talking earlier about omnichannel. I think with all of those, all of this technology, it's easy to just get into a technology discussion, but the reason why, and I think you were referring to it, why it's so table stakes requirement now is simply because the consumer expects everything everywhere, and that has to be fueled by technology across in-store, online and then the merger between the two. And so I was wondering if you could dig into that a little bit for us and talk about what are the scenarios or what is it that Omnichannel is driving that that is making composable be so effective to help deliver that business value?

James Semple (14:08):

Yeah, that's a really, really great question. And actually I just want to quickly go back to the start of that point a hundred percent. That's another reason actually that composable had a problem was for some people buying it was a solution in search of a problem. They didn't really know what they were lining it up against. And something I always really, really try very hard to talk to people about is why are you going to go composable? What is the business value behind this? And I generally try and talk to people into putting KPIs in place. Let's measure something, let's look so that next year we can say in black and white, we have had a success and we can be very clear about it and we know what we're measuring. So yeah, a hundred percent in the omnichannel space, I think the biggest difference between omnichannel now and what people considered to be something like omnichannel or multichannel retail previously was the previous requirement was like, I want to be able to see a catalog across multiple things.

(14:57):

I want to see the same catalog in store. I want to be able to see the same catalog on a website that was considered enough. I want to be able to do similar functionality in different places. I want to be able to buy online, I want to be able to buy here. And I think that frankly, that's just not what people expect now. People expect them. If I'm shopping, I expect every channel that I interact with, say a brand to know it's me and to be able to cater to my taste and know my sizes and all of these kind of things like that. And so I think frankly, I mean, I feel I hate to be the last in a long line of profits saying omnichannel is just around the corner because let's face it, the online offline integrations being just around the corner for about 30 years now.

(15:37):

But yeah, I do feel that there's a big driver. So I guess actually there's two points. One is I feel there's a demand for it. One thing I did notice with interacting with a lot of people who had stores closed through covid, and then when it reopened was that when it reopened first we were like, yes, we're back in our stores. But then second, three months later, they're like, no, actual in-store experience is quite primitive compared to a lot of what we get online. We know a lot about customers when they turn up online and we don't know necessarily in store. So I think there's a desire that certainly kind of hit home. And then frankly, one of the problems that's always been there with the offline mode is how do we identify people, but we're all carrying around phones all the time, we've all got our phones there that we can use as a way of identifying ourselves.

(16:19):

So if I went into a store and I just scanned a QR code and it's doing two things, it's identifying me and it's also opting in. So if I say, I can think of a great example of where this would be would be because I spent way too much time at airports, would be at an airport store where there's a massive amount of footfall and largely 99% plus of anonymous customers. It's not like the local store for most people. Well, I dunno, they might recognize me, but I guess the point is that, so every time I go in there, I go into a clothing store with a brand I really like and they just completely ignore me and they totally shouldn't. They should see me as a high value customer, apply me with champagne and not let me leave until I spend a thousand pounds or something.

(16:58):

You know what I mean? Adding it, right. But the, I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I say they should know who I am, the thing that's driven this to start off with firstly is the high take up of social commerce. That is something that definitely should not be underestimated. We have some customers with large brands, particularly in luxury and fashion and so on, that they're making 30% of their online revenue through this alone. And this is tens of millions. This is a huge amount of money. This is not just something we'll have a look at. And you have whole generations, and this might come as a shock to some people listening to this, but you have whole generations or large suede of generations now, particularly like Gen Z, gen Alpha even is coming into the buying range right now. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and at this point, a lot of them are not going to Google.

(17:46):

So you might've optimized your SEO and everything. So what we're not looking there, we're looking at influencers, we're looking at TikTok, we're looking at Instagram and so on like that. So you have to be there. You have to be present in those kinds of areas if that's your market. And so again, how do you expose personalized offers? How do you expose all of that buying functionality through that? So I would say that that's actually been one of the biggest drivers of omnichannel because a lot of companies like it's a nice idea, but actually I really do only have one channel. I really just have my website and we're not so worried about joining up online and offline. So I think that's driven a lot of it. To my point about the experience, one thing that I talk about a lot with retailers these days is highly contextual engagement.

(18:27):

I think the one thing about your consumer is I think everyone could agree with this. Your consumer is start for time and absolutely inundated with information all the time. And so how do you grab their attention? How do you make sure that every interaction you have with them is a compelling and engaging engagement? How do you make sure that it's something that is just not an incredibly impersonal, incredibly bland thing that will not get people's attention these days? So an example would be imagine I did opt into a store and I just tapped on my phone as I came in or whatever. Instead of coming up and saying, hello, Mr. Sample, how can we help you today? Oh, sorry, actually, hello sir, how can I help you today? I don't walk around with a badge with my name on, I'm not that famous yet. But they don't come up and say, how can we help you today?

(19:13):

If they came up and said, hello, Mr. Sample, we actually have some of the stuff we noticed recently. You've been looking for this product, you haven't bought it yet. We have it in size in some of the colors you've been looking at, literally walk towards me holding a sweat row or whatever like that. That would be an engaging, compelling experience that's much more likely to grab your attention. And again, it's not just the use of the consumer's time, it's also the use of your store associates time. So it's that ability to deliver something that's much more relevant, much more compelling and engaging with your consumers, and you're reaching out to them and making them feel, particularly in the anonymous online world, making them feel respected and treasured as a customer and so on like that. So I think that's one and much more likely to convert.

(19:58):

Look, when you get it down to that level. Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's not even just that, it's also customer loyalty because that is becoming harder and harder, and the cost of acquiring new customers is really high. So when you can do things like this, you just make a logic. I often go back to one of the best experiences is if there's somebody who just owns his own shop and he knows all his products and he knows he's customer, that's a really beautiful way to talk to somebody. Somebody just walk around the corner, go to the store and do that. Right? And we're talking about huge companies dealing with millions of consumers here. How do you try and get something as close to that one-to-one engagement of the kind of corner kind of thing to this kind of scale? How do you do it? And it's through high amounts of personalization and really maximizing the way that you speak to your customers and so on that. So this is where I would say composable and headless plays an integral part of that.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (20:44):

How do you think about that from the perspective of a challenger? So speaking of loyalty and speaking of going to your corner store and buying a product and knowing the person, what if there's a new and upcoming brand that is trying to get the attention of a consumer and they have a personalized message, but they can't figure out a way to break in. Do you have any thoughts or have you seen any examples of Challenger brands who've won that business or brought that loyalty over to them?

James Semple (21:11):

No, that's a really, really great question. I feel if I had a bulletproof answer to that, I would be incredibly rich right now. But

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:18):

You would be famous and you'd have a name tag walking around. There you go, if want to be.

James Semple (21:22):

Yeah, well that is the goal. So I think one of the obvious, maybe not obvious, but one of the things that I've seen that's been successful is obviously, I dunno, let me think. If you're a clothing brand, you might be. So, okay, so an example I would say I have some knowledge of and I worked with early on is Fatface the clothing brand. That

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:42):

Was, I love that face

James Semple (21:44):

And I met the CEO O and he's a really cool guy, and he literally just started on the slopes. They were on the slopes, they wanted to stay skiing. So they worked out how can we generate money still living on the slopes and skiing all. And so five face is named after a specific slope or piece or something like that. So anyway, they did that by appealing very much to the people that they were engaged with. They were the kind of people that they were trying to sell to. So I think a huge part of that became they were very real. And I think that's actually, sorry. That's the thing that I think definitely comes across particularly with the younger buyers, is that sincerity. And so I was at an event recently and everything felt very staged and rehearsed, and I was like, it obviously put a lot of work in, but I was like, does this actually still connect or does everyone sit there looking at it thinking this is clearly staged and rehearsed?

(22:33):

So I feel that that sincerity coming across and looking in that way is definitely one of the ways that you can build up brand. I mean, I do think there's a huge amount of luck in all of these things. Suddenly some famous person decides they like your brand and that takes off. But I guess the other thing on that is if it does, are you ready? I mean, one of the things that I've adopted from somebody, I watched an interview recently was is it luck? And he goes, well, it's preparedness. And I thought that was a nice way of looking at it, was like everyone gets a couple of lucky breaks in the lifetime more or less, but are you ready to take that break? So I guess the point is, if the next day you did get that viral thing, is your site just going to collapse?

(23:16):

Is everything, are you going to look like you built an amateur as it were, because you're just not expecting that? So I think that would be something like that. Are you able to scale up If it does happen? Are you able to get to that point? But yeah, I mean the Challenger brand thing, I think frankly, you've probably got more successes, a challenge of brand in this day and age, frankly, I think that would be a thing. But I do think that omnichannel is a huge part of that because the way that you deal with, are you putting your products into marketplaces? Are you putting them into social commerce? Are you selling 'em in China through their apps, ecosystem and stuff like that. I think you have to be aware of that because that could be a place that you could break and you could suddenly break in China and be huge in China, and that could be a crazy hockey stick overnight kind of thing. So I think just making sure you have the infrastructure behind you to be able to support it if you do break would be a big part of that. But yeah, if I really had a bulletproof answer to that, I think that, yeah, I'd be very rich at this point. So yeah,

Peter Crosby (24:13):

You

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:13):

Let us know when you do.

Peter Crosby (24:14):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll know. I mean, you won't even need, don't

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:18):

Forget

Peter Crosby (24:18):

About

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:18):

Us.

Peter Crosby (24:20):

So I mean, I think for me, as you think about whether it's a challenger brand, which often starts out in niches, they start out with a very, very clear consumer focus and who their shopper is. And like you said, where it comes from, it does feel to me like this next era is going to be growth through the amassing of niches that the consumer market broadly isn't growing all that much. So you need to steal market share or convert and or convert it a higher rate in order to be able to drive your growth. And so that goes back to, I think your talking about personalization or personization or whatever it might be, where you understand more and more of your customers, identify them when they appear to you, whether it's online or in store, and thereby in the moment deliver a more personal experience. So what is the role of composable that you're describing? Do you have any examples that you could share with us of where you've seen that working really well?

James Semple (25:35):

Yeah, I want to be a little bit cagey on that. I'm not sure what I got sign off to talk about. But yeah, so there's two things I actually want to address on your point here. So firstly, composable is almost essential in a situation like that because

(25:48):

Firstly, you have to be headless to deliver omnichannel unless you really want to do a ton of work and not only a ton of work to build, but also a ton of work to maintain it, you now have to maintain the same functionality and data in multiple different places. So basically everyone's going to go headless to deliver that. So I tend to think of headless and composable as a tree. So headless is like, it's like the trunk in the middle of it, and headless is delivering the branches, which is all the different channels. So native app, website, social commerce, all of these different things. And then the composable side is the roots, which is all the various services fulfilling this. So there's a couple of things. You mentioned niche for a start, so you're probably not going to find a major platform. It's going to build a very specific, vertically aligned niche product that you may want to use.

(26:29):

So that's an area where composability really comes in. So an example I think from quite a while ago was working with Lancome, and I think they actually bought the technology company that did this. They had the virtual try-on, so you could try on lipstick, try on makeup and stuff like that inside the app. So that's a great example of why you would go composable. You would buy that product to go in there and you'd buy that specific niche functionality. You wouldn't expect a major homeless vendor to supply that. The same as things like car configurators and stuff like that. So in all those different kind of areas you would put that in. And so this is the way that Composability is really supplying this kind of functionality into that. And many people think of composability largely in the sense of the main website, but obviously the kind of stuff you're doing, things like clientelling solutions, kiosk solutions, there's a lot of functionality you can add there.

(27:17):

But to address your larger point here, one of the things that's great about my role is it's a global role and frankly no one's going to like me for this comment, but one of the things that I think is standing a little bit against the West, you talk about the challenger thing, and one of the ways that I think the Challenger can come up and do a really good job here is I think the thing that's standing against innovation in the west right now is legacy. And I get it, legacy is so hard to move past, but legacy in the sense of the internal processes, the internal systems, the internal everything. And one of the things, I've been doing a lot of work in the far east. I've been doing a lot of work in latam, and every time I go to those places, there are often, you could deal with a company that in latam that is a household name, that is a national company that is doing their first website right now.

(28:03):

So huge existing audience already and you're still building. So this gives you an opportunity to innovate really truly because you're not tied to existing practice models. One thing I feel that always surprises me is that if you think about it, we talked back to that wonderful experience of buying from the corner shop, something like that. But if you take it out to what is a website, it's really sort of trying to emulate a catalog, which in itself wasn't exactly a great buying situation. So what I'm getting at is there are lots and lots of better ways to do this thing. So it's like the more you can innovate in that sense, the more you can change that buying experience. I think you can really differentiate yourself. And this is where I feel that in those countries where they don't have that existing, we bought this and built this, it's so hard to break away from that because even if you change your system, even if you completely replatform, other systems are sort of expecting you to behave a certain way and stuff like that.

(28:56):

So I'm seeing that some of these companies that have done that have started from scratch and have started with a different area and just have a different expectation, they're doing more innovative things. I would say partly because a lot of those countries don't have a big desktop, laptop, computer infrastructure in there that most of the consumers, like 99% of the consumers are coming in on phones. I think that's been a more innovative area, frankly, just because of the way that phones have all of these cool kind of things like the ability to know your location and take photographs and all of these things that have just been built into them since day one.

(29:30):

I think that's the kind of area that I'm seeing a lot of innovation in. But of course, you do see some companies, this is where the incubator idea starts up, and I think obviously huge companies do this, but I think sometimes that's where the challenge I think can come from is that kind of start with an incubator and don't rely on your existing architecture and go after that kind of thing and do something new because frankly, why should shopping be looking through a catalog when it could be, say, watching a movie? Wouldn't that be more interesting? I, so I feel that there's, oh, playing a game. Imagine if your shopping experience is more like playing a video game or something like that. I feel that we still, there's a lot of different things like that where we could really do this. I mean, the one thing I've said for ages, and I really will have no money if this happens, is if I stop, say if I'm watching Amazon Prime on TV and I stop, there's an x-ray feature which shows me all the names of the actors in the scene, which is really, really good for me.

(30:20):

I am that annoying guy who's like, where do I know that person from? But imagine if it had all the products there. Imagine you could just, and I'm not talking about where was or the fashion trying to find it, everything, anything in that scene right now, you could literally press buy, not go find it or try and search on Google for what they were wearing immediate buy. But I will never have money again if that.

(30:43):

But no, I mean, all joking aside, that would be an amazing thing because from every aspect to it, it's an engaging way of shopping in a way. And that's the thing I feel, sorry, this has kind of come up on the periphery as a question already. This is where I feel the future of shopping is shopping when you don't realize you're shopping. So shopping is what I call contextual shopping, but shopping as a side effect of other things you're doing. And I feel apart from the consumer experience, look at it from every other part of that. This is a very, very easy way of powering funding of media, but it's also a way of, instead of people putting in money upfront for this and just saying, well, we hope it works, you could just simply get a percentage of sales through that. So anyway, there's a whole bunch of different ways that could work, but you could see what I'm getting at, right? This is

Peter Crosby (31:30):

No, I mean's one of the richest environments to be inspired in. When you're watching characters in a show that you are into and then they show up wearing something, then you can instantly find that you don't have to switch to your phone. You don't, you can just go, yes, please send me to you in color. I love that. And so do you feel like that not necessarily TV show buying in particular, but is this that we're talking about this sort of contextual shopping wave five of composable commerce or what, what's next?

James Semple (32:09):

Yeah, I think in the sense that it comes into the proper omnichannel, which I think must be wave five, which is average businesses selling through four or five channels at least simultaneously. And like I say, that could be a couple of social commerce channels, it could be marketplaces, obviously a website, maybe a native app, obviously potentially some kind of physical store, even if you're a pure place, sometimes they have popup stores, just these different ways of selling with it. And I think that's got to be wave five. And so the way I envision something like contextual, I often think about things, I always use photography as a fairly sort of mainstream example, but imagine you are looking to do something. I don't want to take a photograph of a sunrise and you go to an article that's effectively telling you how to do it. And the guy in the article is an expert photographer says, I use these lenses, and you don't even have to leave the site.

(33:01):

You can literally, as you hover over it, it pops up, you click on it, you buy it, you're done because the browser knows who you are and that's it. And then there's some form of attribution between the two things. But I mean, I feel like why, I feel like the sense of a traditional website that we have right now might be starting to go away in the sense of this, you keep saying the catalog experience. I do quite a lot of work in B2B as well, and I find that sometimes, again, I guess my frustration in all of these things is like this is the potential for the future, and everyone does fairly mainstream, straightforward, same as everything else, but there's a potential for loads of exciting things in terms of interfaces. Because if you think about a B2B buying experience, a lot of people only have the right to make a suggestion.

(33:46):

I would like more of those things and somebody else approves it and stuff like that. So you get the idea of very limited use interfaces, the most obvious example everyone can, do you everyone remember the dash button thing where you could just basically press that button and it would reorder stuff for you? Yeah, well, there's a good example of an incredibly single use interface, right? So I think that kind of stuff, the idea, and if you think about, I mean obviously I have to say this, but if you think about the agent approach that Salesforce is taking right now, the idea of interacting, again, going back to that man in the shop, single one-to-one kind of thing, having a kind of one-to-one conversation through some kind of messaging channel with an agent that's actually able to take action on your behalf, I think you're just going to see a huge, so that could be the biggest change of UX for online buying that we've really seen since online buying started, because that ability to not really go through a website as we know it, but simply message a website or message an agent at a website and just ask a question or ask a couple of questions.

(34:46):

And this idea of going into contextual conversations. So, hey, okay, I've got a big Thanksgiving dinner, I've got a big Christmas dinner, I've got a deal like that. I've got 20 guests, three of them are vegetarian, this one can't eat nuts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Got, this is my budget. Sorry, should I have clap? You can all fat me later podcast listeners. But no, I was going to say, this is my budget, boom, and I have to make this many meals, do it for me. And I think that is already starting to turn up. I mean, people are asking those kind of questions to chat GPT, but imagine you just do that and it's like, here's your buy button. You can customize it. So I think that idea of taking a lot of that, and again, going back to the comments you made, we talked about earlier on like, Hey, what sports shoes does this runner wear?

(35:33):

Or does this football player wear or so on and so forth like that, just being able to pull those contextual questions in and have an agent help you with that. And the agent can obviously do all of the other things as well. So just taking you to a personalized effectively checkout, and that's it. So I think this is going to break down the concept of the full website, I think a lot more. I think the website journey that we have right now is a fairly straightforward funnel. So I guess anyone who's got a fantastic way of tracking this is going to make a fortune, that's going to be the most difficult thing. How do we work out where people went through their journeys? I guess

Peter Crosby (36:07):

We're recording this right after Thanksgiving holiday, and my husband and I were driving to see his family in New York, and we were about, I don't know, 20 minutes from the city, and he turned around and looked in the back of the car and turned back to me and said, where's your luggage? I had left. I mean, thankfully I had my toiletries, it was in my backpack, but I had nothing else other than what I was wearing. Oh, no. And I never go shopping. You know this about me, Lauren. I hate

Lauren Livak Gilbert (36:37):

Shopping. Yes, you hate it.

Peter Crosby (36:38):

Yeah, no, I go one place. I'm like, give me things and then I never go back again. So I literally had to spend the entire Wednesday before Thanksgiving going from store to store, trying to put together it was most miserable. And if a bot, I'd been able to say to a bot, okay, I need three days. Find me close. Exactly. So that was my humiliating. I know we had the dog, we had the dog's food, we had everything. We had the pies, we had everything but my clothing. No, that's looking forward. I'm looking forward to Wade five,

James Semple (37:17):

Jane. Yeah, well, I think it's a great example, and I think the thing is, I think, okay, my stupidity

Peter Crosby (37:22):

Is a great example.

James Semple (37:23):

Yes, but I mean we all do, right? I got to the airport the other day to go to the States and I realized I left my wallet behind and you know what? I was like, I don't need it. I can use my phone. And I did. I went to the, we call it Bureau de in the uk, they use the French word, but you know what I mean, the cash exchange. Currency exchange. Right there. I used my phone. I got out a couple of hundred dollars just so I had cash if I needed it. And then I just used my phone, the whole thing, and I didn't use to take my wallet at all. Amazing. But I guess what I was going to say is you're exactly right there, and think about some of the things that are problems, right? Imagine your details, like your feet measurement and your leg measurement, all these kind of stuff like that are properly stored and the agent already knows, well, these guys tend to go big, so this size is going to fit you for this brand and stuff.

(38:08):

I mean, that would solve nearly well, that would solve so many problems because one of the biggest problems in the fashion industry I know right now is high levels of returns. And if companies can say, if you can prioritize this kind of idea of having a really, really accurate measurement of yourself so that you're not likely to get, okay, people are always going to return. They might not like it, they might not like how it looks on them and stuff like that, but at least you're going to cut down returns from things like people ordering the wrong, because people have three sizes.

Peter Crosby (38:35):

If I'm ordering online, don't tell me to go get a measuring tape and try to figure out what the size of,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (38:40):

Just tell me the fit, stretch. No stretch,

Peter Crosby (38:42):

No, I really want, I would go somewhere for a scan, as long as everyone that I wanted to shop with then had the results of that scan, I would totally go somewhere and get scanned so that I don't have to figure it out because it, anyway, sorry, this shows about, well, no,

James Semple (38:58):

To that point though about

Peter Crosby (38:58):

Me.

James Semple (38:59):

No, but you make a really good point there, which is how much data do you want to store on your own phone so that you don't need to pass that data onto the stores? That's the kind of an interesting thing as well, which is again, goes to that contextual payment. I could be in the middle of reading an article and this thing is just buy, and I'm like, click. It knows my address, it knows my payment details. And I mean, already that stuff is kind of stored in things like Apple Pay and stuff like that. Anyway, addresses and payment. But it's an interesting, I think the idea of having, certainly for clothing, some form of profile that's ideally universal would be great. And yeah, there's a lot of different exciting options here.

Peter Crosby (39:35):

Well, James, thank you so much for coming on and not only telling us where things are at today, but prognosticating for the future on this. I totally agree. The way the consumer is behaving now, and it will only get easier for them to behave that way, means we need to solve these things in a much more agile and creative way to be able to get the growth that we deserve out of those efforts. So thank you so much for joining us and sharing all this with us. We appreciate it,

James Semple (40:08):

Peter. Lauren, it's been a huge, huge pleasure. Thank you so much.

Peter Crosby (40:11):

Thanks again to James for sharing the path to the next wave of composable commerce. We'll be digging into all the waves of commerce at our upcoming Digital Shelf Summit in New Orleans in April. Get more info and register at digitalshelfsummit.com. Thanks for being part of our community.