Building an eCommerce Team - Do it for reaching your business objectives

"How big should our eCommerce team be?"

I had this question earlier and it surprised me. This was from a leader at a very well known brand but it had limited geographical reach. At first, I wondered if the person asking had really understood what they were asking. Why were they capping their growth? Was there a reluctance to tap into broader markets and engage with a global audience?

We got into a fairly deep discussion about business and company objectives based off of my response. As we spent more time talking about those goals, it became clear to that leader that an in-house eCommerce (business and team) was not only about selling to existing customers, but it was the single greatest business expansion and growth opportunity available to them.

Indeed, in today's environment, not only is eCommerce a growth channel, but it is also perhaps the only universally available growth channel for most companies and brands.

The size of an eCommerce team is a crucial but only one consideration for any business looking to expand its online presence and reach a wider audience. Embracing eCommerce as a strategic cornerstone can unlock unparalleled opportunities for sustainable growth and enhanced market presence.

Go forward and build your eCommerce teams and business. You'll realize the business objectives in the near-term and set yourself up for long-term success.

Authenticity, with respect, is key to professional communication

'Be professional'. 'Sound and seem credible'. 'Proofread. Don't make silly typo or grammatical mistakes'.

We've all been given or have given such advise to someone at some point in our career. Well, take a look at the email below. Do you think the copywriter at this company ever got such advise?

Or is this company out to destroy Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, New York Times Manual of Style and Usage etc?

Well, this company, operating in a highly regulated space, has seemingly differentiated itself with its authenticity. From the name to mascot. Typos? Meh. Not grammatically correct? Double Meh.

Many of us agonize over how to say something and not just say it. We edit and rewrite over and over, to the point where the message gets sanded down so much that no one can discern your objectives. Go ahead and state what you have to...the world doesn't have time for the sugar-coated sh*t sandwich. Be genuine, be respectful and dive right to the point.

The world needs more of it, not less.

Hire talent to fit your culture...not someone else's ideal

There is a tendency among Technology Engineering leadership to find a star engineer, aka 10x developer, to have on their team. This leads to inordinate amount of time spent hunting for that diamond. You can absolutely find such engineers, however, you should ask yourself whether the challenge you're putting in front of them is going to excite them.

Another way to build your team is to look for a team you can coach and grow organically. Its far easier to find such coachable talent. They're out there, and are willing to put in the time and effort when they see they're being mentored and are shown a direction. In time, you might find that you've developed one of those rockstar 10x engineer with this approach.

When recruiting for talent in a tight market, look for non-traditional places. It goes a long way to show up and be there for folks who don't have access, networks or connections.

Have a Hiring Thesis...and stick to it

Once I was hiring for a hard-to-fill position in a competitive environment. After interviewing multiple candidates didn't impress, one candidate stood out. Resume matched up with what I was hearing in the interview.

The candidate went through our interview process. The interview panel expressed a concern - which would need to be addressed before I made an offer. I didn't think it was much of an issue. I picked up the phone and called the candidate, intent on making an offer.

After letting the candidate know how the process was going, I asked about the concern the panel had raised. The candidate lost it, started yelling and hung up, without giving me a chance to make the offer. I was shocked, and our pipeline was empty.

The next day a better candidate showed up in our pipeline. I ended up hiring this new candidate. I've never regretted walking away from a red flag from the interview panels since. When your team that you trust says they've got a concern, it almost never works out, and its best to cut your losses and move on.

2018 Shows Immaturity of US eCommerce Sites to Global Competition

Retailers and online sites in the US take the holiday shopping season seriously. There is strong demand for promotions and marketing usually is centered around bringing in as many shoppers to stores and eCommerce sites as possible. In some cases, marketers have invented days such as Amazon's Prime Day. However, the total traffic volume in the US pales when compared with larger Asian markets. Global eCommerce giant Alibaba invented a similar promotional day in China for November 11th as Singles Day. In 2018, Alibaba reported its Singles Day sales surpassed US$30 Billion. To put that number in context, Amazon's Prime Day in 2018 was expected to account for US$4 Billion in sales while the biggest eCommerce shopping day in the US so far has been Cyber Monday 2017 with sales of US$6.6 Billion. Even the largest US site wouldn't be able to handle the traffic and sales volumes of Alibaba.

In 2018, major US eCommerce sites, including Amazon, and Wal-Mart, experienced outages of several hours. For Amazon, the major outage was during the much hyped, much publicized, and self-created mid-summer shopping event of Prime Day. For Wal-Mart, the major outage was on Thanksgiving Day, just as it was kicking off many of its Black Friday promotions early.

That these outages came during their busiest times of promotional period indicates that there is still a challenge they need to overcome. All of the marketing and hype-building are wasted time and money if customers aren't able to take advantage of those promotions and offers.

These frequent and recurring outages indicate a lack of insight into expected traffic volumes, burst capacity planning and pre-event testing to those expected numbers. Most eCommerce sites utilize either their production environment during overnight hours or a separate scaled-down performance testing environment. Typically, such scaled-down environments are 50% or 33% of production sizing. Testing on such scaled-down environments will require similar downward adjustments to traffic volumes. Rather than test the resiliency of the production environment and multiples of expected traffic and transaction rates, these sites end up testing a fraction of the volume and certifying the production environment using ratios.

With cloud computing rapidly becoming a viable alternative to on-premises hosting, there is value in moving the performance testing environment to the cloud. This can also function as a disaster recovery environment if necessary in a pinch. Planning and proper execution will be necessary to deliver such an environment. With the elastic nature of cloud computing, and billing based on usage, such cloud-based environments can cost a small fraction of the on-premises environment of similar size and scale. Code optimization will be required in order take advantage of cloud features. While some of the optimization may arise from code changes to adapt to cloud, most optimizations are within the realm of the operations team that typically manage the environments.

More on the cloud computing advantages in future posts...