According to Fred

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The MarTech 5000, eCommerce and Evolving Tech Landscape, a Discussion with Ryan Lunka

I was excited to reconnect with an old colleague for this episode. Ryan Lunka is the COO at nChannel, a SaaS software that empowers retailers, wholesalers, and technologists with integration tools to sync data and automate processes among eCommerce, ERP, POS and 3PL systems.

In this episode Ryan and I get on the hot mic to talk about eCommerce, where his company plays a key role connecting systems together more seamlessly. We also talk about the latest rendition of the MarTech 5000 landscape infographic. It’s a crowded space. Will it look that way next year? Finally, we dive into the non-profits that he works with, Guitars not Guns and Can’t Stop Columbus.

Links to the sites discussed in the episode. 

nChannel

MarTech 5000 Landscape Infographic

Non-Profits Ryan is involved in: 

Ryan’s Band – Local Tourists

Music provided by Epidemic Sound.

unsplash-logofabio

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Welcome to Retail’s New Holimonth – November

Well, it was bound to happen.  First, we had Black Friday, the day in which retailers would traditionally go “in the black” in revenue for the year as they lead up to the holiday spending season.  Then it became a shoppers holiday when marketers found a way to capitalize on it to kick off the spending season.  Next came Cyber Monday when e-commerce exploded and places like Amazon became a “go-to” place for holiday shopping.  Let’s face it, two days a year isn’t enough.  

In 2018, welcome to the new retail holiday which I’m deeming the “holimonth” (holiday month) of November.  While I’m sure we can probably argue the holimonth is really between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, I feel this year it is now the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.  In the last two weeks alone I’ve been seeing headlines about retailer’s Black Friday deals starting to leak.  Get your credit cards paid off folks–spending is about to kick into high gear.  However, today’s mail brought me the Costco Holiday ad.  Big and bold on the cover “Holiday Savings starting November 6, 2018.” Wait, what?!  Sure enough, as I flipped through the ad, looking at the TVs, game systems, mozzarella sticks (I mean, who doesn’t need 5 lbs of mozzarella sticks for the holidays…if they even last that long!), and deals on 4 tires, it struck me that these deals were spread across the next four weeks leading up to Black Friday.

Share of Wallet Means Starting Earlier

As marketers, we need to be more creative to get the coveted “share of wallet.”  At some point creativity isn’t about a gimmick or cool ad or experience, it is just flat out offering deals sooner than the competition. 

Remember when you can get together for Thanksgiving and not worry about running home to get the kids to bed and pre-game your shopping binge run?  When Black Friday started to get traction, it was all about who was open at Midnight to get the deals.  How many of you have sat in line, in the cold, hours before a retailer opened to be one of the few who got the “hot deal” before they ran out?   That game system that little Johnny wanted.  Or the doll that little Suzy had to have.  I see you’re hand raised (and your “no not me” shaking of head).  We’ve all either done it or put serious thought towards it. 

Retail shopping mall.
Let’s go shopping!

However, Midnight wasn’t enough.  It didn’t take long before the stores started opening up on Thursday at 11:00 pm, then 9:00 pm, and now 6:00 pm!  It’s gotten so bad that stores are now saying “Nope, we’re closed on Thanksgiving…spend time with your family. We’ll be open tomorrow.” It is the anti-holiday as a sign of “good faith” for your shopping behavior.  The irony of that list is that Costco is closed on Thanksgiving.  Maybe that’s why the deals are rolling out weeks ahead of time.  However, even if you aren’t shopping in their stores, you’re online buying gifts from them.  E-commerce never sleeps.  

The Disease We All Exploit…Getting the Deal

Marketers and companies are no fools.  They know how the game is played,  especially retailers.  The game is this, human behavior loves a good deal.  The emotional feeling, the dopamine rush of getting the deal.  It is literally a legal drug that retailers, game makers, and marketers all exploit.  Do what you can to let a hit of dopamine to be released in your brain.  The “feel good” drug that everyone has in their body.  Get the deal.  This week only.  Only this time, don’t wait for the Black Friday deals to happen on Black Friday, get them weeks earlier.  

In light of all of this, I firmly believe that retailers will now use the entire month to grease the wheels for the mad dash run of sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.  It’s going to be the new trend. Welcome to November, the “Holimonth.”  

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Adobe Buys Magento: A Good Fit or the Best of What’s Left?

Disclosure: I work for a company that is a Premier partner of Adobe and have partnerships with other vendors mentioned in this article. I do not have access to technical or product roadmaps or have any insights into M&A for any of them. The following is purely my thoughts and opinions and do not represent my employer’s opinion.

Last week Adobe announced that they were purchasing Magento, an eCommerce platform for $1.67Bn. The company has been bought and sold twice previously. eBay bought Magento for $180M, then sold it as part of their enterprise commerce platform to private equity firm Primera. We’ve had a week to digest what this acquisition means for Adobe and their overall Experience Cloud Solutions and what it means for Magento customers, who are primarily not enterprise. Let’s dig in.

The Need for Owning a Commerce Solution

It’s no secret that Adobe needed to do something around a commerce solution. While they have been filling out the other parts of their Experience Cloud with solutions such as voice with Sayspring, video advertising with TubeMogul and user-generated content with LiveFyre, commerce was a place they have flirted with in the past, but never got over the finish line. With a focus on the enterprise market, Adobe over the last decade only had a few options to really pursue — DemandWare, and Hybris. I can only assume Adobe did explore those options but as we know, Salesforce nabbed DemandWare two years ago and Hybris went to SAP five years ago. With those two companies off the market, a big hole was left in the marketplace from an M&A perspective.

Since then, Adobe seemed to focus on the remaining commerce platforms with what appeared to be more integration partnerships while they figured out their next steps. ElasticPath had a run at it, but have now appeared to be strategically aligned to BloomReach. If you look at the Adobe Exchange for their Experience Cloud, you will see there are plenty of commerce vendors that integrate with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) such as Digital River, Elastic Path, IBM WebSphere Commerce, SAP Hybris, CloudCraze, Agility Multichannel (a PIM system), commercetools, and yes, Magento. So to say that creating commerce experiences within the Adobe Experience Cloud couldn’t be done before is clearly not the case. In fact, companies had options one way or another.

With all of those solutions out there already integrating with the Experience Cloud, why did they need to purchase one? I think there are a few reasons.

  1. It is always better to be in the driver’s seat of any major component of an ecosystem you are either building out or supporting. Many of Adobe’s customers have a commerce component to their Marketing Technology stacks and integration at times only goes so far.
  2. Products and commerce complement each other but are indeed different. While many companies can put product information into AEM and use taxonomies and other metadata to manage the assets, it’s not really built for commerce. It’s meant for content. But when you have product pages and search results, AEM shines. So like peanut butter and jelly, they need to go together.
  3. Their customers were asking for it. There are plenty of Adobe customers who own the entire Experience Cloud, but when it came to this part of their needs, customers had to go elsewhere. While that isn’t always the case and not everyone needs commerce, at the enterprise level which is where they play the most, many do.
  4. More revenue. At the end of the day, it is a missing piece of revenue from a subscription model for their software. So grab that last piece of the pie.

Looking at these tools above who are already integrating into the Experience Cloud, really only one tool could have been viable for an acquisition, and that was Magento. The acquisition does still raise a few eyebrows for a few reasons, but none that haven’t already been overcome by Adobe in the past.

PHP or Java or Cloud or What?

When we first heard about the acquisition in our office some of the first reactions were, “well isn’t Magento PHP based?” And it is. Even Forrester analyst Ted Schadler raised the question on Twitter.

Adobe finally found a commerce platform to buy. I like that it’s plugging a hole, particularly for manufacturers just starting out in commerce. But tell me how PHP/cloud Magento and Java/to-the-datacenter-born AEM are going to integrate? – @TedSchadler

So the short answer that I think all of us are responding with is clearly it will be API based….for now. There is a precedence at Adobe to purchase non-Java based solutions and spend the time and energy to rebuild them in Java and the most recent and still dual code-based solution is Adobe Campaign. When Adobe bought Neolane years ago it was a .NET solution and a fat client even. What is now Adobe Campaign “Classic” is still this .NET solution. The new Adobe Campaign Standard is the rebuilt Java/cloud-based solution that is working towards seamless integration with the rest of the Experience Cloud. (Also, again one of those situations where Adobe didn’t have a lot of choices after other email campaign tools such as ExactTarget and SilverPop were picked up by other companies). Whether Adobe decides to rebuild Magento into a Java/Cloud solution is yet to be seen. It could if it wanted to.

Headless is the New Black

Notice I didn’t say eCommerce above, but just commerce. That’s because as we look at the future of experiences, it’s not always going to be about the traditional “e” solutions. In fact, we are hearing more and more about the headless experience. That actually is more of where Adobe is now headed when you think of AEM anyway, as a headless content management system. So to purchase a commerce solution that can power any experience from web to mobile to in-store to voice to AR and VR, it’s not going to be about just one channel. So be on the lookout for where this goes. I expect to hear more about “commerce” as the integration discussion, not eCommerce.

Taking Advantage of Sensei

AI be damned that it isn’t the biggest buzzword and probably misunderstood in the industry right now. That being said, Adobe sure has a gem on their hands with Sensei. Content, commerce, and data are the three biggest assets in building out smart AI and Machine Learning to build personalized experiences. It won’t just be about upselling/cross-selling. This is about delivering personalization at scale down to the individual. The “segment of one.” Sensei is already doing a lot in the Cloud for Adobe. Adding commerce data (products, pricing, attributes, etc) will just empower marketers and merchandisers to do more.

So…Good Buy or Best of the Rest?

Missing out on the larger, enterprise platforms like DemandWare and Hybris were stingers, for sure. However, those were big, hairy platforms and integrating enterprise to enterprise is no walk in the park. Going for something smaller, in a different market segment like mid-market might not be all that bad. There are only so many enterprise clients out there and three major experience platforms all vying for their attention. So maybe mid-market won’t be a bad move.

Adobe also has a history of purchasing solutions that have deep open source roots. Day Software, what is now AEM, was built on open source standards like JCR and OSGi. There is still a very deep developer community around AEM and having a deep community supporting Magento could be very good.

I think time will tell, but as we’ve seen with Adobe, there are very few instances where an acquisition doesn’t end up paying off for them. It will take some time to get the Magento platform integrated deeper into the Experience Cloud. It will take time to grow into enterprise clients more holistically. It will take time for the strategy to really come to fruition. In any case, Adobe needed to do something, and Magento is as good of a purchase as any other.

NOTE: A version of this was originally published on LinkedIn.

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Did Google Have a Better Choice Than to Partner with Walmart?

Short answer?  Probably No.

Let’s dig in.  Amazon is the 800lb gorilla in the e-commerce world.  They dropped the bomb of the Echo years before anyone could respond, and Google was the first at-bat with their Google Home.  However, both companies have very different pedigrees and therefore are tackling the same problem – how to command more of their consumer’s wallets and kitchens/living rooms – two very different ways.

Foundations Set the Tone and Challenges

The battle for consumer’s homes is in full force.  Amazon is now on their second version of their Echo in-home speaker, one with a screen, continues the push even more.  Google responded, finally, in the last year with their own speaker.  Both companies have been going head to head with features such as outbound phone calling, access to news and podcasts, and skills/actions galore.  However, the root of the why each company wants to be in your house has to do with their core services – e-commerce and search.

For Amazon, they’ve always been about e-commerce.  Whether it was becoming the marketplace that everyone compared prices to while in-store, to creating physical devices such as tablets and phones, it was always about content and purchasing that content.  The creation of Prime just solidified their presence as a dominant e-commerce vendor.  With the launch of the Echo and putting a direct ordering system in the kitchen of more than 11 million Echos according to Morgan Stanley at the beginning of 2017, it’s no wonder why everyone wants to catch up.

But Google’s history and money making are rooted in search and ads, not commerce.  For Google to make money with their in-home speaker, it needed to have a different approach and needed to go head to head with the e-commerce giant.  An uphill battle to say the least.  Google made some smart choices when it launched to play catch up to Amazon.  It didn’t focus on e-commerce out of the gate.  It focused on its strengths — organizing the world’s information and delivering it via voice.  Ask your Google Home anything related to information and it would beat out an Amazon Echo and Alexa the majority of the time.  But searches don’t’ make money.

 How Do You Beat a Giant?  You Partner With Others

I wrote earlier about my dissatisfaction with Google trying to beat Amazon when they moved their “list building” from Google Keep to Google Express.  While I knew Google had to figure out a way to make money, I didn’t think the time was right to move one of the key functions I found most valuable of the Google Home.  While my list couldn’t order and deliver goods to my door, I really just wanted the convenience of building my grocery list with my family.  It wasn’t until recently that I even tried to order some goods from Costco via Google Express.  The experience wasn’t as nice as I would have liked.  More on that later.

Then Google announced they were partnering with Walmart to take on Amazon.  Amazon had since acquired Whole Foods and again, everyone is fighting for the kitchen and the home.  At first, I will say I wasn’t thrilled.  Walmart?  Really?  Maybe it is personal preference on where I shop, but my initial reaction was why not Target?  It took me about a day and some conversations at work for me to realize it isn’t about any opinions or personal feelings I had about Walmart or shopping there in person because I wasn’t going to be “shopping” there in person.  It is about distribution, access to masses of goods, both grocery and textiles and electronics.  Google doesn’t have the logistics network that Amazon does.  Google doesn’t have the huge inventory of goods that Amazon does.  If Google was going to compete with Amazon at the e-commerce level, it couldn’t rely on all the niche stores in Google Express.  It needed the next best e-commerce retailer in their corner…and Walmart, is it.  Walmart needed Google because they couldn’t innovate fast enough and needed to get direct access to their Google Assistant.  Oops, did I just say Google Assistant vs. Google Home?  Yes, because that’s really what Walmart wanted access to.  The millions of devices that will have the Google Assistant on board which is not just Google Home, but Android devices.

It’s Game On

So it’s game on in the hunt for the voice-driven e-commerce world.  Digital assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa are going to go head-to-head for a long time.  Both Google and Amazon are taking hardware and software routes to get to the most consumers possible.  The reality is that Google is fighting an uphill battle as it relates to e-commerce.  The partnership with Walmart was a smart one.  Amazon is fighting an access battle.  While Google and the Google Assistant is not just in a Google Home, but third-party speakers and millions of cell phones, Amazon’s phone attempts have failed.  It is only with a recent partnership with Motorola that Alexa is getting baked into handsets with the MotoZ2.  It’s going to be an interesting next 18 months as the Walmart/Google relationship gets off the ground.  Did Google have a different choice of who to partner with?  Not really.  Currently, Amazon is #1 according to the National Retail Federation of top e-commerce websites.  Walmart is #4 and Target is #26.  Enough said.