Transcript
Peter Crosby:
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
Peter Crosby:
Hey, everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. With budgets tighter and pressure on profitability increasing, the decision on if, when, and how to execute a direct-to-consumer strategy is ever more challenging and fraught. Lauren Livak and I invited Carina McLeod, CEO and Founder of eCommerce Nurse Limited, on the podcast to give us a health check on D2C and how brands are adjusting their strategies in this next decade of the digital shelf.
Carina, thank you so much for joining us today. We are really excited to do a health check on e-commerce with the eCommerce Nurse. Thank you so much.
Carina McLeod:
Oh, and thank you so much for having me today. It's great to be able to come here and talk to your listeners and share my experience working with numerous brands over the past couple of decades.
Peter Crosby:
Well, and certainly as we enter the next decade of the digital shelf, a lot is changing. Particularly when we think about something that might need a health check, it's probably D2C for brand manufacturers today. Retailers are creating more and more pay gates for data and retail media, and then they're pushing brands toward marketplaces. But it's now in an environment where both brands and retailers are trying to figure out how to make all of this profitable. So we see some larger brands are to turning D2C in marketplace as Amazon continues to squeeze on price. And so there's just a lot going on, and I thought this was a great opportunity when you were here to dig into how you're seeing this space with your clients and what's your view on how to make it all work.
Carina McLeod:
Yeah, sure. So there's a bit of a split. There's a split of manufacturers that are intrigued by the marketplace like for example becoming a seller on Amazon, because of the points that you mentioned in that it is becoming a squeeze, margins are getting tighter, costs are going up. But Amazon aren't necessarily accepting those cost increases for them to then increase the retail prices, and it becomes very much a challenge. So you've got the manufacturers that are then like, "Well, actually, could I be more profitable if I decided to start selling direct to consumer?" But some of these manufacturers don't have that setup. They're used to that wholesale setup. They're used to sending in inventory in purchase orders in pallet quantities. And so sending all of that and dealing with that direct to consumer requires a whole new infrastructure. And so a lot of brands are seeing almost Amazon as that launchpad, as a place to test and learn to learn about direct to consumer and really to get everything in place in terms of their infrastructure so if they do go full on D2C, own website, they've got some of that experience. That's one side.
Other manufacturers almost still want to try and make working direct, for example, through a wholesale relationship work could it be with Amazon or other retailers, partly because they're not wanting to be seen as competing with other retailers. Because effectively if they become, for example, a seller on Amazon, they're competing with their customers. And so that can cause a lot of conflict. So you have other brands that are like, "Well, D2C isn't where we want to be, but we need to make platforms like Amazon and other retailers profitable." And that's when they start being creative, creative around multipacks, creative around exclusives, and just thinking out the box in terms of how can they be profitable in the current economic stage that we're at in retail.
Lauren Livak:
When you think about D2C, Carina, I feel like there's two paths for a brand manufacturer. It's like, "We want to work through additional sales. We want it to affect our P&L. We want to be more profitable" or "We want to get the data. We want to talk to our customers. We want to gain some insight." But those are two very different mindsets to think about because one might be profitable, one might be not, one might give you insight, the other might not. So do you see brands struggling with getting alignment from executives and the entire organization in which path they want to go down?
Carina McLeod:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, there's the part, as we mentioned, the profitability part, and there's the part where it's almost having that control. But there's a huge bit, as you mentioned, on the data side of things where actually data comes at a cost, really. Many of businesses will pay for market research, will pay for data. So it's about balancing that as in, yeah, there might be a cost of having to build up your own infrastructure to be D2C, but that comes with all that wealth of data.
Now, I think also retailers are starting to see that happen. And so we're starting to see retailers share a bit more as well. Because years ago it was very much where if you were selling, for example, to Amazon, and I give a lot of examples about Amazon because that's been in the space for almost 20 years with Amazon, so we sort of live and breathe it, but very much vendors were kind of completely blind to the fact that there was any data, amazon wouldn't share anything. But all these sellers were getting all this data, knowing about their conversions, knowing about the traffic. That helps sellers almost have an advantage on brands that were selling direct to Amazon. Amazon have realized that, so they are sharing a bit more data to almost make that not necessarily an incentive for a brand to jump ship from vendor to seller.
But definitely you get a wealth of data on Amazon. But also, if you then decide to have your own direct-to-consumer website, you are bringing in a lot more different data as well through Google Analytics and just really starting to understand the consumer. No more guesswork, the data says it all, really.
Lauren Livak:
For brands that are thinking of moving more towards the 3P marketplace side and not the D2C channel, what are they thinking about? How are they going about doing it? Do you have any examples of anybody who's really done that well?
Carina McLeod:
Many examples of brands that we work with, they're trying to figure it all out. So it is a bit of, "Let's dip our toe in the water. Let's understand it." And so a lot of these brands have got these established relationships as a vendor or as a wholesale working with, for example, Amazon. And so they're not just going to all of a sudden jump ship and become a marketplace seller or go and get their own website. They're doing it gradually. Some brands that we work with are actually starting to take a bit of a hybrid approach, and this is that creative part that I was talking about, is really looking at different products that they could then sell. So it's not about competing with their own products that they're selling to retailers and then having exactly the same products direct to consumer, starting to have a bit of a point of differentiation.
That comes down to that big concern that I mentioned at the start of manufacturers not wanting to necessarily be seen to be competing with their retailers. By adding that point of difference, it creates less conflict as well. So we definitely are seeing that. We're seeing that with brands like CPG brands that are selling more in multipacks. We work with a dog food brand that's doing that, and they're bundling products together on marketplace as opposed to selling in packets of single products via the wholesale route. And so they're really almost looking at a different portfolio for direct to consumer as they are for wholesale.
Peter Crosby:
For larger brands, we talked about earlier, Carina, at the top that larger brands are getting into it. One, because we've heard from a lot of places that the marketplaces are becoming kind of the gating factor to even get into the store and to get into brick and mortar. So marketplaces and their owners are very interested in pushing brands to do that because it gets them some proof with the performance online, earn their way into the bigger revenue potential in stores. With that, I think you're seeing more and more brands doing this. When you see a larger brand take on the fullness of trying to manage marketplaces, it's a very minute to minute... You have to really, really pay attention.
I mean, I was searching around, Marketplace Pulse is a tremendous source of data and just published a listing of all of the tech that's now available for Amazon sellers, and there's hundreds of tech products that are available to help manage the different components of a website. So anyway, long way of saying, what the heck are the things that you're seeing larger brands get good at and how in order to be able to drive the results that they want?
Carina McLeod:
You raised a really good point there in the fact that there is so much out there. There's so much data now almost available. We actually see a bit of data paralysis with a lot of brands, as in they've got access to all of this, but they don't know what they're necessarily doing with it or, "Okay, great, how should we be using this to look at our range going forward, to know what products are giving us the right return, and so forth?" And a lot of retailers, the experience is more bricks and mortar, it isn't necessarily dealing with all the amount of data available. And so that's when we see a lot of brands bringing in agencies or consultants. We see very much a mix here.
We work with very large global brands that you would think have a very strong D2C setup or have really got an Amazon team, for example, that understand all the data, that know how to really make the product pages pop on Amazon and convert well. But actually, that's not the case. There are large brands that are seeking support from agencies in two ways. It can be very short term in that they want to develop those best practices, because long term they want to be able to manage direct to consumer and everything in-house. But actually, there's a huge learning curve, and it's quicker to actually bring in an agency that can train... We've trained large companies best practice on how to create really great product pages, best practice on how to be looking at your data, all of these things, different training, for them to then take it in-house. Or some brands actually, their first intent is to learn, and then they realize there's so much, and it's constantly evolving. So it's great to have a training session, but six months later, it's almost like what they've learned needs to continue to grow. And so a lot of brands are now working directly with agencies when it comes to dealing with the data. When it comes to dealing with managing their product listings on different marketplaces, when it just comes to advertising and so forth, brands are taking that route.
We've even seen it with a couple of CPG brands that we know that are actually hiring consultants on temporary contracts that come at a cost, a consultant bringing them in for a year contract, that can bring in that knowledge, help train the team, and then they can then start cross-skilling and start passing on that knowledge to the wider team. But there's so much information and knowledge that needs to be taught, and there's not enough supply out there in general. I know that we as an agency are trying to find demand... Not trying to find demand, trying to find the right resources out there that have all that knowledge. A lot of these skills are new, the knowledge is new. And so it is definitely a big challenge for brands, especially larger brands, to really get set up for success there.
Peter Crosby:
When brands are starting to get going and you're meeting with them for the first time, the project planning, the what are your business objectives, what's the fear in the room, and what's the hope in the room? What is the thing that scares them the most about doing this, and what is the thing that they're really looking for from a business perspective to achieve?
Carina McLeod:
Yeah, I think at first they're looking to be able to develop that knowledge that's external internal. It actually quickly converts into a fear as in, "Wow, there's a lot here. There's a lot that we don't know. There's a lot that we need to know. And there's a lot that's changing." So I think at the first stage it isn't necessarily there is the fear, it's when they start trying to understand it a lot more and seeing that there's so many different paths out there, so many different cogs that need to be turned to really get the best out of working D2C, to get the best out of e-commerce and just listing your products, that that's when I think the fear kicks in. Because it's almost like, "Okay, great, we get the team on board, we get this knowledge and we start learning, but then what? What's the next stage? How do we keep that going?" And I think that's the biggest challenge out there, is that constant evolution.
Lauren Livak:
If you're thinking about 3P marketplace versus D2C, are there a series of, let's say, the top two or three questions that you ask a brand to help them decide which path makes the most sense to start with? Is there a rubric that you use to be like, "Okay, let's think through these to see what the right direction is."?
Carina McLeod:
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of that key question of, do we stay wholesale or do we go to marketplace? A lot boils down to infrastructure and resource. Because it's all well and good brands saying, "We want to go... " And we have these conversations as in, "Okay, if you are interested in going to start selling on a marketplace, what resource and what infrastructure do you have in place?" If we then talk to brands that don't have the infrastructure, don't have the budget to invest in marketplace and almost want to use the resource and everything that they already have for wholesale, then that's when we'll have a discussion and make them very aware that actually D2C requires a lot more hands-on resource and a lot more knowledge and everything. And so there is an investment there.
Some of the brands that we know, for example in the electronics, that manage all their, for example, Amazon business in-house, they have a whole team, one team who's a data analyst, one team person that's just managing content, another person that's managing those negotiations and conversations with Amazon. So it requires that team in itself, and sometimes that team is just for the vendor. Then if you start going to seller, you are dealing with customer service, you're dealing with orders, you're dealing with so much more. And so those are always the questions that we try to understand with brands first is, what is their setup and how is their setup going to change?
We worked with a brand a number of years ago where they were trying to decide how they managed Amazon from an EU perspective because EU has so many different marketplaces, and questioning whether or not it would be easier for them to bring it all together and just be able to sell from one place and be able to move over from vendor to marketplace. But when we started to go into the project and they were able to see how much resource and infrastructure it really required, almost that decision to go to marketplace was off the table in the end, and they decided to stay wholesale. So I think that's the biggest thing that we have to investigate first.
Lauren Livak:
I like the point you make about you can't use the existing resources and add an additional channel or element. You need to add more team members, more resources to be able to support it. I guess my question around that, for any client that you've worked with that maybe already had a D2C presence, do you find that they are disconnected from the broader e-commerce or sales team and they kind of live in their own pocket over on the side? Or do you see that the D2C team or the marketplace team is interconnected with the existing e-commerce channels for the Amazons of the world and so forth?
Carina McLeod:
Yeah, we've seen a mix, really. We've seen some businesses set up their own almost digital side of the business that runs completely separate. Because if we look at the sales team, it's different. The sales team for digital is more focused on the marketing, is focused on the content in terms of the product pages and how to make those product pages get the traffic and convert to ultimately get the sales. Whereas a lot of brands that are used to wholesale are used to managing those more B2B relationships, and more on the road. We've actually seen this though where we've had brands where they have pulled the resource, pulled it over to marketplace, but individuals can't manage that because they're on the road. They're on the road going to see their B2B customers. And that's often when we see the real turning point of success, is when the teams then realize that it requires different resource or a different mindset to manage the digital side than it does to manage, for example, that wholesale side of the relationship where actually you may be having those conversations with the retailers, you may be out on the road. That's definitely the difference there.
Peter Crosby:
The firm you were talking about earlier, the customer who once they understood the fullness of what it takes to do a marketplace or D2C they said, "Nope, we're not doing that," did you think that was the right choice for them? Do you feel like that's a choice even brands can get away with making these days? I don't even want to do a leading question, I'm really curious. What is your feeling about you must play in some way in this environment?
Carina McLeod:
I think long term it is becoming an area that most brands need to understand and play in, but I think it's almost a gradual stage going direct to consumer because a lot of brands that we speak with are still going through basic digital transformation. To all of a sudden go digital transformation just to be able to work with online retailers that they're selling wholesale to all of a sudden then go, "Okay, we are going direct to consumer where we need to manage single orders. We're going to have a lot more data to understand how our customers are shopping and behaving," it's almost like they're trying to... It's that overwhelm as well. I think overall it will happen. I think there's just still so many brands that are still going through transformation and understanding, right, okay, well, making sure they've got the right photography, making sure they've got the right product images, they're having video and it's not taking the videos that they've already got. No, they need to make those videos shorter for advertising for example. They need to start changing their images, and it's not about an image of your pack shop from the back, it's about creating a specific infographic for your product page.
Some of those basics there need to be done yet for direct to consumer, but it's almost like we see that as stage one, of just actually being able to really sell your products. Then it's starting to think about, okay, once we know how are we going to get those sales, do we then start wanting to go direct to the customer? So then we need to add this other layer of being able to manage customer orders, manage that customer service part. Because customer service online, Amazon's created such high expectations of what customers want and expect and how quick delivery is. We've worked with some brands who have moved from being a vendor from that wholesale relationship, and they've gone direct to consumer, but they almost did that too quick that they couldn't fulfill the customer orders quick enough.
And so then there's risk of a poor customer experience, customers get upset, you get those negative reviews and everything. And so you just got to do it almost in stages. But long term, definitely you want to be able to get to that point of direct to consumer just because of, as you say, the wealth of data that you get, but it's that control as well. Because we always say you don't want to have all your eggs in one basket, you do want to start spreading. And you can see many a-brands out there are all testing the water, so you don't want to be the last one either.
Lauren Livak:
Carina, what would your advice be for someone who maybe is towards the end of their transformation, kind of getting it together from the digital side on their existing channels, what's the first step into trying something like this?
Carina McLeod:
We always say it is that test and learn. So if you are a brand that's already selling, you might be a large vendor on Amazon for example, it's trying a marketplace. It's not going full on creating your own website if direct to consumer is a big step for you. It's just seeing going direct to consumer and just trying to get a bit of an understanding of the infrastructure, being able to respond to customer questions, being able to respond to those messages that customers have, being able to send an inventory. With Amazon, you can send in larger shipments, and Amazon can do that on your behalf. So it's almost like a middle ground before you are having to send orders directly to the customer, you can do it fulfillment by Amazon where you're still sending pallet quantities to Amazon and Amazon then ship on your behalf.
So you can do that in stages, but you're still getting used to then managing your own inventory and being able to forecast, because a lot of that becomes forecasting. As opposed to retailers giving you their order, you are having to start forecasting and managing your inventory levels and so forth. So that's where that stage can work quite well for brands. But also, it's a testing ground for different products as well. You might want to see actually multipacks. We know a number of CPG brands are finding it hard to be profitable online because a lot of the products are low retail items. And so testing more multipacks and bundles. Let's go for a cereal company. What cereal pack goes well as a bundle with another one? Should we be selling these in three packs and so forth?
A lot of the time, if you are working wholesale, and wholesale meaning you might be working directly with Walmart, you might be working directly with Amazon, you've already got very much set products that have already got the momentum. And so trying to test and learn a new product and launch a new product in that way isn't so easy. But with a marketplace you can easily just set up your own product, send in inventory, and you're testing it straight away. So it enables you to really play. And that's when a data piece comes in as well. You can start seeing how the customers are reacting to that. Is that bundle converting well? And then if it becomes quite a good line, is that then a line that you do want to just have marketplace only or actually you're thinking, "Actually, I think we can start selling this to the retailers now because we've got data that supports that these bundles are doing really well."
That's why I say hybrid is always good as opposed to going fully over to direct to consumer because you're always going to have retailers out there, you're going to have the large retailers, but you can play around with the two. Especially with accelerating new products, that whole test and learn, you can do so much more when you are controlling that rather than relying on a retailer's data to be able to understand that.
Peter Crosby:
Carina, do you find that the muscle for creating these multipacks, for creating special SKUs that are exclusive to the marketplace, do you find that the brands you're working with already have those muscles and are able to do that pretty readily? It's always people, process, technology, so is that an area where you're having to educate a lot or create or break down silos, or is that because they're product companies that it's a fairly simple thing for them to come up with?
Carina McLeod:
It is actually for the larger brands quite difficult because they've already got their SKU set up. Having to break down, for example, and create bundles, we deal with one brand that actually their manufacturer is not used to dealing with singles. So if you start saying, "Right, we're going to bundle two items, and we want you to put that cereal pack with another cereal pack, and already these cereal packs are only to be ordered in pallets by retailers," it becomes quite difficult. So it's starting to almost change the whole logistics as well and how products are managed.
We are actually seeing it with vendors where they're actually having to work with sometimes 3P logistics partners that have then the ability to break down packs and do all the bundling and manage all of that because some of them don't have that set up as well. Now that, of course, comes at an extra cost, but we are seeing that where some brands have their own facilities to manage inventory and pallets and send that direct to retailers. But as soon as it comes to that direct to consumer, they work with third party providers that manage all of that on their behalf.
Going back to Amazon, they do make it easy for brands to do virtual bundles. And you can start doing that as a vendor as well as a seller, you can start testing in that way as well and start really understanding to really see which ones work. So there's other ways that you can try and make it easier as well than having to pre-bundle products together because that obviously requires a lot of resource.
Peter Crosby:
Lauren, when you think about the digital shelf maturity curve that you've created through the institute, it feels like this is sort of stage three maybe. I don't know, I wanted your opinion on that and how you think about that readiness. Because there's times I'm seeing customers wanting to go into marketplaces maybe earlier than they're ready broadly for serving every other channel, but can they get to that stage by focusing on one particular marketplace to start or something like that? What is your viewpoint on that?
Lauren Livak:
Well, I think that Carina made a really good point when she was saying that digital transformation is the core before getting to this point. So Peter, I do agree with you that it's kind of the middle stage because from the top down you need to be very clear that you want to invest in digital and you want to invest in e-commerce. Because an element of a successful transformation is also thinking about e-commerce-ready packaging and how to set up your existing products that you're selling to retailers successfully through e-commerce. If you don't have that element, it's very hard to then shift to a marketplace model because all of those elements can't be overlooked, right? You can't have a package that explodes because it doesn't have e-commerce-ready packaging, or you can't have it bundled incorrectly and so it doesn't get to the customer the right way.
So you have to have all the right fundamental building blocks, and you have to have commitment and understanding from the broader organization that this is where you're going and you're investing in digital before you move to the marketplace or even the conversation of having D2C, because it really does, to Carina's point, take so much infrastructure, so many resources, and so much commitment from the organization. So from a maturity curve perspective, I really do agree with where you're headed, Peter, that it's kind of in that middle stage. You have to have the people, process, and technology, you have to have the alignment in the organization, and it's that next step when we're thinking about enhance, what else can we do once we have the fundamentals to try and either increase profitability or get more insight about the consumer? But there just needs to be a very clear direction about what this decision means for the broader digital transformation.
Peter Crosby:
Carina, when you think about that, the new people that are coming to you now in this era... We went through all the supply chain issues and all that, but now we're at a place where profitability is really important, money's no longer free, so throwing money at marketplaces is difficult. You maybe can do it in a small way as a test and learn, but that's not going to go on, well, forever, so how are you seeing people figure out the finances of doing this in a way that the business can stand in this tighter economic moment?
Carina McLeod:
Yeah, this is where a lot of brands are becoming more savvy with the data and wanting to understand the data, to be focusing what's going to give them the right return. Because I think before it was very much, okay, let's go. We can try everything. We can list all our products on marketplaces, or just in general, we can list so many different lines and see what works. We can advertise all these different items. What we are now seeing is brands say, "No, we're just focusing on these three SKUs. These three SKUs are our biggest SKUs. We're seeing the most traffic come to these, so let's focus on these three first and then we can move on to the next and see how much we can improve by making changes to our product images, by making changes, and that's photography, creating those infographics, really working on our content. If we can make our pages as great as they can be, they can add 10% conversion to their current listings. They're already generating that traffic that's coming in, they're just making that traffic convert more."
And so yes, there's a cost in creating, in improving your content, and doing all the imagery and that. But before we were seeing brands just throwing money at advertising, for example, getting all this traffic in, but the product pages weren't great. So they're just sort of almost throwing a bit of money down the drain because if the customers aren't going to click on their ads and come to the product pages but the product pages don't do the product justice, the customer doesn't buy it. They're just spending money for customers to click and not convert. What we're seeing now brands is just getting more of a handful of SKUs, focusing on those SKUs, really making them hot, focusing the ads on those, getting the conversion to almost as optimal as it can be, and then starting moving on to other listings rather than just spreading themselves so thinly.
I think that also comes with, yes, it comes where brands are being more cautious about where they're spending, but I think there's this data piece, is that it says it there in the data, really. A lot of brands are starting to A/B test as well and really seeing, okay, fine-tuning those product pages as well, as in really trying to... We had it where we were doing a project for a brand as in we helped them design all their infographics, large appliance brand. They were like, "Well, what image is going to do best for us online?" And we're like, "Well, that's the beauty. We are an agency, we have experience, but we can't tell you." That's the whole point of testing, for example, whether a product with.... You've got a food processor with food in it or a food processor without food in it, what one's going to convert better?
You can see quite a difference as in you could see conversion be 5% higher on one image than another. But that's where we say to brands, "Okay, get your pages where they need to be, but also do this A/B testing." And then you can start really playing with conversion, and that's where you really find the sweet spot on those product pages and move on to the next. So that's what we are seeing with a lot of brands that are becoming savvy to the fact that they need to really focus their attention on items that actually bring them return and pull away from products that aren't driving those sales.
Peter Crosby:
This is my curiosity taking over on A/B testing, so can I just dig into that for a second?
Carina McLeod:
Yeah.
Peter Crosby:
Is the A/B test actually two different product detail pages or is it I have one SKU and I'm just switching... I mean obviously you must have to be doing one test at a time, like you-
Carina McLeod:
That's it.
Peter Crosby:
... can't switch out five things on the product page and then know, so how does that work? What's the best practice for doing A/B testing on a marketplace?
Carina McLeod:
Yeah. The great thing is if you are working with Amazon, Amazon has tools that allow you to do that. What they do is they'll be a percentage that goes out with one product image and a percentage goes out with another product image, and then Amazon can then show you the data so you can compare, which is great. So then you can see, okay, this one was more impactful than that one. You can do a test over a four-week period. But at the same time, you want to make sure, as you mentioned, it isn't a time when you've got any promotions, your price is changing, you've got no other external activity that's going to influence the sales on those listings. And so that could be on images.
You can also do that on Amazon with titles as well to understand, well... We ran a test for one of our clients, as in everybody is saying long titles, chuck all these keywords in, and we are like, "Well, I personally as a customer don't read a really long title. I can just pick out a few words and that's it." So we ran tests, and actually, for one of our brands, the shorter titles proved to have a greater conversion and greater click-through than the longer titles. Sometimes it changes at category level as well, and it can vary, but that's the great bit.
Now, not all the time will you have the ability to use tools that automatically do it. So in that case, it is more having a period where you go, "Okay, we are going to change this bullet point, and we're going to do it for a two to four-week period. We are not going to do any promotions, any other activity, and we are going to see how many sales were generated and what the conversion rate looked like. Then we are going to then switch over and then we're going to try that with a different bullet point over the same period of time and see what the conversion rate, and then compare the two.
Now, you're not going to get complete accuracy anyway because you might have generated greater ranking on one at the start, and so already you've got ranking juice for when you make that change on the second. But those are the different ways that we would manage A/B testing. But that's really the answer to a lot of the questions that we get from brands when they say, "Well, should we be doing A or B?" It's like, "Well. Try A, but you also want to try B as well."
Lauren Livak:
The one thing I'll call out about A/B testing, and Carina hinted at it a bit, is you cannot run any other promotions.
Carina McLeod:
No.
Lauren Livak:
But that means that you have to have alignment across every team, retail media, shopper marketing, sales, e-commerce. I speak from past experience where we did an A/B testing and we didn't realize there was a promotion for a holiday that was going on. We were like, "Wow, this worked." But it didn't actually work because there was some promotion that was driving to that specific test at that specific time. I say that because test and learn is super valuable but needs clear alignment across the organization when you're working on something. It's never going to be perfect, but you can at least have some directional understanding as long as it's a pure A/B test. And that's why the Amazon tool is the easiest to use because they do a lot of legwork for you, but really important to just have that alignment across the board.
Carina McLeod:
And just to add to that, it's also just during the period that you're running the A/B test just keeping an eye out externally because there might be some activity going on, something's gone viral without you realizing. So it is definitely you might have your internal alignment, but always keeping an eye out as well as to what could be happening externally.
Peter Crosby:
Okay, well, now I have a headache, the complexity of it all, which I think goes back to figuring out what is the team that you need around you to do the test and learn phase of this, and what are the resources that you want to bring to bear to help manage all this complexity, particularly in the early days. So eCommerce Nurse, Carina, thank you so much for joining us and bringing this experience to our audience. We're really grateful.
Carina McLeod:
Thank you so much for the invitation, and thank you, everyone, for listening.
Peter Crosby:
Thanks to the eCommerce Nurse for all her diagnostics and prescriptions for D2C. As always, you can go to digitalshelfinstitute.org for more. Become a member while you're there. Thanks for being part of our community.
