Why Ecommerce Re-platforming Fails

Speaker A: The biggest one and probably the most common source for our clients is a failed implementation. Maybe 60, 70% of our clients have come from other folks where they launched on the platform, they did a huge project and it just failed. And in fact, we've gone in to take over. We have some of our folks that are on Shopify and we continue to do the work that we, we do day to day, but on somebody else's platform because they had a challenge, they couldn't manage it themselves. There was a lot of things that were left incomplete or didn't work properly. Integr weren't done well, or apps that they purchased and didn't like.

Speaker B: If you've been part of an e commerce replatforming project, you already know the feeling. Six months of your life disappear, your team can't think about anything else, and at the end of it, you're not even sure the new platform is meaningfully better than the one you left. Steve Deller has watched this story play out for 25 years. As CEO of Viridian, an e commerce platform and agency that has been building and running enterprise retail sites since the late 1990s, he's seen what works, what fails, and why brands keep making the same mistakes when they re platform.

Speaker C: Dee Deller from Virod. Welcome to Inside the Blurb. How are you doing today, huh?

Speaker A: Doing great, thank you.

Speaker C: Great. I'm looking forward to this conversation. You've been around a long time with you and Virid. Give us the background on Virid. Uh, you know, got a long history there. You've been in the business since like the beginning of the commercial Internet. Yeah, give us that, give us that background on you.

Speaker A: Yeah, we, uh, were founded back in the late 90s when the Internet was becoming a thing and companies were trying to figure out what they were supposed to do with it. And there was a lot of confusion on how to do online sales and things like that. There were a lot of platforms emerging and so we cut our teeth with some of these early platforms and figuring out what is necessary to take retailers online. Along the way, we kind of learned what features customers want, what features they don't want, and then decided that it was better if we built our own platform that addressed those things that the customers, uh, were looking for and kind of got rid of a lot of the fluff and, and that's what we've been doing for the last 25 plus years.

Speaker C: So, so this category has completely transformed, obviously over the last 25 years, but I would say even over the last 10 years from like those monolithic platforms to headless to composable. So you seem to have doubled down on something called Unified Commerce. Help us understand why you doubled down on it and what it actually means.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, you hit on a great point. You know, when E commerce platforms were first coming out, everything was monolithic. You went to one provider, they did everything for you and you were kind of stuck there. It was very difficult to move from platform to platform. Um, and if it didn't do everything, you just kind of sucked it up and stuck with them as long as you could take it. Later on, folks started looking at Headless as a potential fix for that then. Composable Commerce is in the more recent days where instead of using a single monolithic platform, you know, you get best of breed from a bunch of different places and combine them all together in your website. That solves some of the challenges, but it creates a lot of integration debt in that you have to make sure that those things all talk to each other or you end up with a bunch of different pieces to your solution that just are not working well together. So Unified Commerce really is a philosophy more than a feature per se, such that our platform acts as kind of the broker, the single version of Truth, and works on integrating all of those best of read components, both the ones you have now and the ones you may come up with in the future just to get the data talking to each other so that the customer has a unified experience so that you know, they're not finding this thing over here and it doesn't work over here. Um, and that's really where we've hurt our customers having the most pain and wanting a solution.

Speaker C: So I hear about. I've never had to actually build a major E commerce site or even have one built for me, but I have a lot of clients that uh, that, that have and I uh, constantly hear, I think I have like three or four clients right now going through a rebuild. Right. We're re platforming and it, everyone makes it sound like it is the most painful experience of their careers. They can't think about anything else for six months. This is where they're putting all their time. Why, why is an integration, why does it feel that way? Is it over exaggerated? Is that over exaggerated? Exaggerated? What's going on with the integration that makes it so painful?

Speaker A: Yeah, it can be very painful. Uh, uh, you know the biggest piece of it is getting data out of one silo, uh, and into another. So if you're with a particular platform company, all of your product information all your order history, all your customer information tends to be in that E commerce database, uh, whatever format it's in. And when you decide to move to another E commerce platform, you have to get it out and then you have to get it into the other one. And all while trying to keep your website up and running till the last possible second. So it's a very complex orchestration of events, you know, getting copies of data into the new system, testing everything out, making sure you're all happy about it, and then figuring out the delta. So while we've been working on this six months now, we have six months worth of data we don't have in the new system. That can be pretty challenging. And especially if you're shifting from one platform to another because of some feature or functionality that was missing in the old platform, the legacy platform, that's very costly. It's a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of potential for losing data. And that's sort of why we took the approach we did is that we know that our customers are going to change their loyalty providers, their tax providers, their fulfillment folks. So we wanted to build something that you could just swap them all out. We have that single database. You don't have to move the database. In fact you don't even have to move any of the E commerce pieces. We act as kind of that the owner of the integration layer. So we make sure that everything's talking to each other as real time as possible and you can swap out whatever pieces that, that you find a better solution for.

Speaker C: So, so to a listener and to me, novice in this space sounds like Shopify, right? It sounds like I can go to Shopify and plug in. I know you've been around a lot longer so and I know maybe you target different types of different types of customers, but take us through that comparison. I think, I think people are very familiar with Shopify.

Speaker A: Yeah, Shopify is a great platform if you have a very standard direct to consumer implementation. So they've got a very robust suite of apps you can add into your store to do all kinds of functionality. They have a very, very, uh, decent system for maintaining your products and inventory and things like that. It's a great solution for some folks where it really starts to become a challenge is when you're not a standard direct to consumer brand. So you know, a perfect examp example is one of our clients is Journeys who has hundreds of bricks and mortar stores and they want to do buy online, pick up in store. When you add in all of those other Hundred stores that aren't on Shopify and they need to talk to the website so that people on your website are talking real time to see the inventory of the stores, place orders, have them be ready for pickup. Because I'll be there in 10 minutes. That becomes really challenging. And Shopify, uh, you know, for all of its, its apps really doesn't support that out of the box. You're going to have to build something for it, some way of communicating something that is Shopify Aware or any of the other solutions. You're going to have to build some sort of integration to it. And that's the approach and that's really what our platform's strengths are, is that that ability to handle these kind of omnichannel experiences, making sure that inventory is real time, making sure that we're talking directly with loyalty providers so that when the customer goes in store and uses their loyalty card, they can go to the website on the ride home and take a look and see all of their credits showing up on the, on the website.

Speaker C: What is, what does that implementation look like? If you're thinking about the journeys to Bopis one I imagine is that complex because they have so many stores. What does that look like?

Speaker A: It can be, um, so you know, a lot of folks approach that, um, you know, especially in the early days of an integration is hey, we'll just get this roll up feed of all the inventory from all the stores in one big file every morning we'll load it into the website and then we'll have it. And the problem is, you know, as you can aware, uh, be aware in the stores, things are being bought and restocked all day long. So we get those kinds of long. We often clean up feeds every day, but then we get them in the case of journeys, for example, every five minutes we get updates from all of the stores. So hey, we've got this many products just sold and so update your inventory counts. So we maintain in our system inventory counts for every single one of those stores for every sku and it's updated every five minutes. So there's a bit of orchestration that has to handle there. Uh, obviously the merchant is doing some of that too because they have to get those stores to talk to us and we have to be able to ingest all of that information, organize it in such a way, make it available to the website. So there are a lot of moving pieces there.

Speaker C: Is there, is there an ideal type of client for you? Uh, you describe journeys, obviously, big E commerce and lots of, lots of stores. But do, do you, do you. Yeah. What would be your, your, your icp?

Speaker A: You know, I, I think the Omnichannel Merchant is the one that really excels on our platform. As we mentioned, some of the other platforms out there are really great for a direct to consumer brand that doesn't have some of these complex challenges. They don't have a lot of different data sources coming in to, that have to be managed and, and, and kept accurate. So you know, our, our ideal client is someone who's doing, you know, 10 million up to, you know, even a billion online, who has these kind of, you know, varied sources of information, whether it's loyalty programs, whether it's, you know, product information, inventory feeds, brick and mortar stores that need to really keep a as near as real time as possible communication flow going between these things and needs the flexibility to be able to change things out and sometimes doesn't have a very deep technical pool to pull from. So the way we work is in addition to the E Comm platform, we're not really competing with the platforms per se. We have a whole agency team here. So we have software engineers, we have UX experts, we have uh, you know, business analysts and all of that that we bring that whole team to bear. So that in addition to having the platform that makes it all work, you have the people with the expertise to just implement those things.

Speaker C: Gotcha. That's a, that's an interesting model because you have a lot of, you have a lot of agencies out there that call themselves resellers, systems integrators and they, they claim to be, I don't know, maybe they are unbiased. Like they don't, they don't have a preferred partner. They'll work with whoever you want them to work for. They probably have a preferred partner that they get paid more on or that they, they just preferred on, uh, ease of integration. But you, you've kind of flipped that a little bit. So you're, you're your own agency. Nobody. There's not agencies out there that are selling virid.

Speaker A: No, no. You know, we, we danced around with that a while ago and it, it, it was a little challenging to get somebody to just resell our stuff because you know, part of our secret sauce is the people. And we started out, you know, in that very way of being. We were building on other people's platforms. Um, back in the day. Broad Vision one to one was one of the first E commerce platforms out there and we did a lot of work with them, but we found that we hate to Say no to a client, you know, when they say, hey, we'd love to do this. And so we found that we were going to these platforms and realizing they couldn't do what our clients wanted to and we had no control over it. We either had to go back to the vendor and say, hey, can you add this feature? And that, you know, that's not very likely. That's one of the reasons we built our own platform is because we can, we can say, you know what, A lot of customers are asking for this feature, let's just do it now. We have quarterly releases, the platform we build in features as the market demands them and then we can move much more rapidly to, and you know, reduce cost quicker time to market all of those, those cute buzzwords. Just because we, we like to please our clients, we want to keep them happy because when they're happy, we're happy.

Speaker C: What is it? What does the team look like? Not just on your side, but on the brand side when they're doing a migration. Right. Who's involved?

Speaker A: It varies. You know, we've had some folks that, you know, it's mostly the marketing team and then we've had some others that are, you know, dedicated e commerce managers, uh, that have typically experience on other platforms. Shopify is a very common one. They've kind of moved from a company where they did Shopify. They're now in this new elevated role where they've got to run this team. Sometimes they have, you know, deep merchandising teams. You know, they got lots of people that can add product photos and, and, and data points and descriptions and all that kind of stuff. And then some are just like, hey, all of our stuff's in this product information management system. So the beginning of every engagement we kind of do a map of, of who do you have? Where do you need us to fill in? Uh, because we can bring, you know, any kind of those resources to bear. In fact, we've, we've even done some online management of the websites because they didn't have someone to merchandise the product. So we kind of lay that map of who are the players, both client and virid side, who's going to be involved and then lay out the process. Where's the data coming from, how are we going to get it, how are we going to get it loaded? What's the order of things that we're going to do and who's going to be doing them? And we go from there.

Speaker C: It seems like a brilliant service because given how much the people that I work with have basically stopped doing their jobs while they focus on the integration. If they had a team like yours, they could just say do it and then let us know when it's done and really keep doing their job.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, one of our, our early on clients had just said, look, I just want to write one check. So they wanted to have one person to yell at one person to pay the bills and just let, whenever there was an issue, we got the phone call. And we've kind of worked that way for now decades. It's, we like having that, that visibility so that somebody calls us up, says, look, somebody's reporting a problem. What do you see? And we can look at all the different vendors from our various dashboards of all the different integrations and see where the problem is and get them that answer without having to play email tag with vendors and wait for them to respond. We really like to embed deeply. Everybody says we're creating a partnership, but we actually believe that we do uh, quarterly reviews, we do weekly status meetings so that we're talking about the roadmap of what is it that we've done, what are we going to do next? What do you need from your organizational's KPIs, how can we help get you there? It just makes it easier for us to do our job when we know what our clients are doing.

Speaker C: I bet. So I'm curious, where is AI sliding in to your everything from the way you design these uh, migrations to the workflows?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's huge. Not only are we looking at ways uh, to implement it, you know, we've got the chatbots in there to help explain what things are in our admin tools, but also providing the capabilities to allow our clients, uh, to use AIs to interact with the ecosystem. So we've already got, you know, our entire API suite for managing content and products and inventory and all of that is all registered in, in the various AI ecosystems. So that you can now go ask Claude, you know, to connect to uh, to our market platform and say go find me all the products that have this and add this badge. And I want you to deactivate anything that hasn't sold in 30 days, that type of thing. We're trying to get even more embedded with Anthropic so that it's just one of the stock connectors that you just go, hey, I want to add my, my uh, platform to you know, my, my cowork. And then it can, you know, do summary reports and, and spit out a uh, briefing every morning. Of what, what's moving and what's selling. So we're pushing heavily in that direction. We've already made some pretty big steps there. And, and we know our clients are using it because, uh, you know, we, we see things coming out of, out of chatgpt in our tickets. When they, they want something, we can tell that it's, it's AI generated, but they're also looking at ways to, to, to use Cowork and some of those other things, or even creating landing pages using, uh, some of the AI generation tools and then injecting them into the website. So we're, we're constantly talking with our clients that are using it to see how we can do better for them to leverage those tools and speed up their time to market and reduce their, the amount of effort that they do spend working on their websites.

Speaker C: I've got a question for you, and this is more of a curiosity, uh, I think a lot about SaaS. I mean, that's just the nature of my business and what that looks like in the future. And I was listening to another podcast a couple days ago, a CEO of a company talking about how he believes that SaaS will ultimately be integrated. The surviving SaaS companies will ultimately be integrated into the models. Right? Or not in the models, but like Claude. Right, the clockwork. So that, so that a, a marketer, an analyst, an E commerce person can just log into their cloud cowork and say, well, you just said, right, tell me which skus are selling, which skus aren't. Let's move skus around. Or, um, maybe they're, maybe they go into their cloud cowork and they click on their analytics partner. That's a SaaS solution and they're able to pull all the reports they want right there in cloud. So in other words, they don't have to go access every single dashboard. Everything's pulled into them. What are your thoughts around that whole topic in general?

Speaker A: I, I agree completely too. There's something to be said though, about where the pricing model is going to go. You know, everything, it's, it's kind of like the first one's free. Everything's been nice and cheap and everybody's on board with it now. And we're starting to see the AI pricing go up. So I'm not sure where it's going to end, but absolutely, you know, uh, I think a lot of SaaS companies have spent a lot of time adding features to admin tools, uh, creating user experiences so that they can go in and find what they need and make the changes that they want. And all of that's kind of going away now because rather than building this user experience for someone to go in, just build the capabilities and allow Claude to go in because, or, you know, any of the others, Gemini or ChatGPT, as long as you've surfaced those, those mechanisms so that the, the AIs can go do it for them, then the, uh, customers can go interact with their AI and they don't need a user experience. The AI is sort of building it there and in many cases through voice, they can just talk to it. So that's what we're really focusing on rather than trying to, you know, hey, quick, we got to slap a bunch of new features into our admin tools. We're thinking of it holistically of how do we craft these new capabilities in such a way that an AI can go in and leverage them so that our clients can use the tools that they're already using to interact with things instead of having to learn a new.

Speaker C: Now. Ah, you're thinking ahead. We're trying to think as much as you can. It changes every day. Right. It's interesting with that model because I think one of the problems with, I think there's two huge challenges with the cost. Right. One is managing tokens. Right. And I think if you put everything into the, say if you're the SaaS company and you don't have to worry about that, it's all going to be on anthropic and they'll build a client and set, and then SaaS company just gets paid for their SaaS and all the computes coming through anthropic. Awesome. But then there's the compute. Right. And how much does that cost? And it always reminds me of back when I was growing up. I remember it was the Kennedys. I think it was Ted Kennedy. And, you know, he was always like, you know, wind power, wind power, wind power. Just not in the Cape. Right. He just doesn't want to see him. So.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Not my back, not the not in my backyard kind of mentality. And I think we're seeing that with these data centers. Right. People don't want it in their backyard, but they want cheaper computer. So something's got to give at some point.

Speaker A: Sure. And I, you know, now there's, there's some of the arguments about all the water that it's using to cool these things, you know, and is it, is it taking away from our aquifers and, and all that. So there's, there's definitely, um, an opposition growing to some of it. But I mean in, in, in terms of a time savings and an effort savings, it's, it's huge for our clients and for our own folks.

Speaker C: Yeah. The, uh, last thing I'll say on the, on the water piece is that I'm pretty sure that it's, it just circles, it cycles through. Like it's not. Yes. It's the same water over and over again. So I don't think, I don't think it's using up our water. Okay. I want to wrap up one thing around sort of the partnership that you create with your clients. What does that look like after implementation sites launch? What does that look like?

Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, using Journeys as an example, they've been with us over 20 years. It's one of those things that we love to set these long term plans for things because a lot of times when you're launching on a new platform, you go hire an agency, they come in, they build this beautiful looking site, they drop it on Shopify. Shopify Al is great. And then they go away. And now six months, 12 months from now, you're like, well, who's paying attention to it? So that's one of the things that we wanted to do. We signed typically multi year contracts. We have weekly status calls with most of our clients to talk about what's coming up, what's going next. We were working with their teams directly to get things live and to QA things and test things and answer questions along the way. So, and then we do quarterly reviews and then typically annual site visits where we bring the whole team down and we do a presentation of, you know, what was accomplished in the last year, what our plans are, what the platform's gonna have next year, you know, what are the directions of the company, all of that kind of stuff. So that we're making sure that we're in lockstep with our clients and hearing what they say. So we are definitely a company that's in it for the long haul. Uh, you know, once, once you sign with us and I think that's what sets us apart. You know, we're not competing with platforms on features and functionality. It's this, this person that you can turn to when you have questions about a technology or you're vetting a new vendor or you're, you know, something came up in a board meeting and you want to know whether it's possible or whether we should spend time on doing it. It's that kind of interaction that, that, that we do that we think Sets, sets us apart from most others.

Speaker C: So we often hear that the, the agents, whether it's Perplexity or Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini Copilot, that people will do their shopping inside these platforms at some point in the future. Right. Uh, they'll go in there like, I need a, you know, a black dress for a wedding and she'll get dozens of black dresses and then she'll be able to buy it right through Claude. How does that change the way you think about architecting a E commerce platform for a brand?

Speaker A: Well, you know, from a mechanic standpoint, there isn't that much that has to be done to make all of that work. There are some, definitely some, some quick ways to get it up and running fast. There's a couple platform credit card providers that are already fully ready to go. Uh, there are feeds of product information that you can communicate to the, you know, the AIs to get all your products listed. And then there's already a couple standards that have been defined on how to do things like collect a credit card, uh, collect a shipping address, present the order. And those things are pretty quick to implement. You know, we look at it as just another channel. Back in the day, uh, you know, Amazon was, oh my God, what about Amazon? It's just another channel you sell on the E commerce site. People that want to shop on Amazon, you get the same product data coming in, you get the orders flowing through again. It's an integration point. This is another great channel. I don't know that everybody's going to switch to AIs. There's still quite a few folks that, that you know, are not comfortable with, with giving credit card numbers to the bots and, and all that. But, you know, it definitely is something that many people are using and wanting to use. So it's just another channel. We already know how to do it and we can, we can take, uh, our customers there when they're ready for it. There's a handful of things you have to do, but it's, it's not, not daunting.

Speaker C: I think it's a little different, uh, than Amazon and just in the sense that you can manage everything from the website as opposed to Amazon. It's like, okay, my Amazon inventory is over here. It's not being, it's not totally connected. Agree, disagree. I wasn't.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, no, no, not at all. Uh, there are different ways to do in the case of fulfillment. So most of these things shopify our platforms. You know, you're feeding your product data into Amazon So that it's, it's there and the product images are consistent. And then typically you're, if you're doing fulfillment by Amazon, absolutely. You're sending a box of product and it's sitting on their shelves and they're maintaining it. If you're not doing that, then we do real time integrations with, with inventory. But you're right, it's a little different because they're not buying directly from the web store, but it is another channel of just like headless or someone who's got a mobile app versus the E Comm mobile experience.

Speaker C: Fair enough. Yeah. No, and I agree with you on the way people are using it today. Like even I'll do a lot of, we'll call it shopping on, you know, chatgpt, but then I'm not buying through chat. I'm going to go to the brand's website or Amazon and I'm going to buy based on what I learned. Right. So I think that's just something else for brands to think about. It's like what is the purpose of the website? Is it just a transaction or is it to educate? And it's going to be both. But you have to think, you have to be thinking about the people that are like me that do all their research and then come by how do I streamline that process so I can check out faster? What's the typical trigger? I mean we're 25 years into this. I mean I imagine most of the companies you're talking to are uh, migrating from an old system to a new system, not starting fresh.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: So what is a typical trigger point for a brand? To say I need a new platform and then ultimately they talk to you. What does that look like?

Speaker A: Yeah, there are, there are a couple reasons at least that folks have, have decided to reach out to us. The biggest one and, and probably the most common source for our clients is a failed implementation. There's some great salesmen out there and uh, you know, they, they will sell the moon. And you know, I think maybe 60, 70% of our clients have come from other folks where they launched on the platform, they did a huge project and it just failed. And in fact we've gone in to take, have some of our folks that are on Shopify and we continue to do the work that we, we do day to day but on somebody else's platform because they had a challenge, they, they couldn't manage it themselves. There was a lot of things that were left incomplete or didn't work properly. Integrations that weren't done well or apps that they purchased and didn't like. So that that big one, a failed implementation where they realized that whatever they chose and the platform that they've selected and the agencies and the combinations of things are not working for them and they're losing competitive market, market share. That's where most of them come and say, oh my God, we can't do what we need to do and we don't know how to get out of it. The second one typically is through mergers or acquisitions sometimes. Uh, in fact, some of our existing clients have bought a new company, a new, uh, online merchant store, and they've got technology that is on a different platform and they want to bring it to a platform or consolidate all of those products into a single entity. Um, it starts to get a bit complex because now we've got multiple different, uh, stores all commingling their product together. We've got inventory feeds, we've got to figure out how to do that kind of thing. That's again, something that we've done, you know, for decades. So it's, it's not new to us. That's usually how they start or they just need help. I remember one just used the old reference. One of our recent clients said we were the Catalina Wine Mixer. Um, that they had been kind of, you know, faking it along the way, dealing with what they could on their own, and they realized that they're finally going to have to spend some money and upgrade to the, the, uh, the, the big, the big system that can do all the things that they were not doing before and spending a lot of time manually doing things. And they just needed to, to move up to something.

Speaker C: So, so going back to a point you made at the beginning of that answer, if, if there's a CMO out there that's just starting to do research in this space, what's a, what's a question that they should be asking that people usually don't ask and that maybe that's what gets them in trouble?

Speaker A: Yeah, there are a couple elements to that. The biggest one is, you know, who am I going to be talking to 18 months after this product has launched? That's kind of where we step in. A lot of agencies build it, they do a great job and you got a warranty for six, eight months and then they're gone. Then what that was originally why we were founded is to answer the. Then what they should be asking that question is what's the ongoing care and feeding looking like? Who's monitoring all of these things that when they break, we, uh, are, we, we hear about it before our customers do. Some of the other things they may ask is, is talk to the, the new platform comforter company and ask for a customer that left and then interview that customer. Why did they leave? Was there, uh, some reason that, you know, this new vendor didn't address or some feature or functionality that they, they didn't like? I think that's, uh, that's a pretty big question that should be asked. And then SLA service level agreements. What do they look like? Not to throw Shopify under the bus, but they have two distinct tiers. They have Shopify plus and then all the others. The only one that has a real SLA is Shopify Plus. And a lot of folks go, well, I'm just gonna go with this cheaper platform, it's great. But there is nothing, they have no skin in the game. If it goes down, it goes down. Sorry. So you need to make sure that you know what that is and what is an impact of an hour down, two hours down, a day down. How's that going to impact your business? For those smaller folks, it probably is. Okay, Things happen. You could suck it up and when you're down, probably so are a hundred other websites and everybody gets it. But for some folks that are doing some pretty significant order volume, that can end up being millions. So knowing what the sla, what's the support sla, how long does it take for a person to answer my trouble request? You know, if it's a ticket system and we'll answer you within 24 to 48 hours, that's usually not good enough. We, we try to do way better than that. You know, we have actual people that you call. Everybody's got our cell phone numbers, we have pagers, pagers and, and all that business to make sure that when there's an issue, we resolve it immediately. And then total cost of ownership is the biggest one, I think. Sorry, sorry to go ahead. TCO is big. Uh, so the platform cost is just the tip of the iceberg. You know, I, I talked on a couple different things is, you know, when you buy into a platform and you go, oh geez, this platform costs. You know, it's, it's nothing. It's, you know, a few hundred bucks a month. But then you got to add apps. How many apps do you have? How, what's that monthly cost? Who's going to maintain those things? How are you going to implement them, how are you going to do your changes and then who's going to support it? With a lot of these larger, larger platforms, there is no real support infrastructure. You have to go hire a partner or an agency or someone to do that for you or to do that. Ah, so add all of those numbers into your big picture before you make a decision on which platform it is because it's cheaper.

Speaker C: So another question in the same vein, maybe I should have asked it first, is, is there anything a brand should do prior to even engaging in this process of looking for a new platform, like anything they should be doing to help them do a better job in that search? They should learn about what's working, what's not working on their platform already. That kind of stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. Is to kind of document, why are you leaving? What is it about your current, uh, situation that isn't working for you? And because you may end up going to another platform and having the same kind of problems, what is it, Is it that people aren't purchasing, they're not coming to your website? You know, those are not platform problems. Those are external ones that can be solved by, you know, swapping out a new vendor or using a different strategy in your search engines, leveraging, you know, AI for making sure you've got your LLMs, uh, identifying everything. So figure out what it is that you wish you could be doing or you think you could be doing better before you throw out the platform. I think that'll, that'll help figure out what it is you're looking for. And then once you've got it, then you can start doing your research as to who can do these things better. You know, if your platform can't support it and it truly is a platform problem, then what platforms have the thing that I want. If it's, I can't talk to my stores now, you know, you're looking for an omnichannel platform. If it's something where I can't manage my products or my, you know, one of the ones that we've run into is where my mobile experience has different inventory levels than my desktop experience. It still amazes me that that's an issue. But, you know, that could be. The thing is, I need to find a platform that can do mobile and desktop at the same time. So that's, that's what I would advise.

Speaker C: Fair enough. So just looking ahead, I know the future is really hard to predict, especially these days, but what, what's, what's ahead for Virta over the next 12 to 18 months?

Speaker A: Well, you know, I think you hit earlier. You know, we're really focusing on, on how to leverage AI to both help our customers in merchandising and interacting with their site. Reduce the amount of time it takes for them every day to manage, you know, the hundreds and thousands of products that they have to manage to help bubble up and surface those types of things that need to address. Uh, we have these high selling products that are about to run out of stock. We've got these customers that are at risk of leaving for another store. Trying to get us integrated as well as we can with the systems that our clients are using already. That's big for us. Um, you know, we're continuing to add more integrations. Loyalty is a big one right now. We've got a lot of built integrations. We're trying to extend our platform to carry more elements that can be shared with those partners so that you don't have to keep going out to partner X to get your points. It's in our system. We keep that synchronized. Again, we talk about the integration and that single source of truth. What is it that the customer needs to know real time versus what is it that we want to go out and talk to another system to go fetch? So looking at those types of things and how we can be doing a better job there, I think that's pretty much the direction we're going to be doing is AI and just uh, that general keeping costs down, getting functionality accessible, uh, so that you can do more with less time.

Speaker C: As we approach the end of our conversation and anything about your business that we didn't touch on that you think is really important for brands to be

Speaker A: aware of, you know, just to recap the difference that we are, we have over folks like Salesforce and Shopify is that, you know, we like to think of ourselves as a one stop shop that, you know, we have the engineers, we have the strategists, we have the platform and uh, the creative experience to kind of fill teams. We like to work with the team. We used to call it staff augmentation back in the day or staff aug. You know, we roll in with a new customer and identify where their gaps are and we try to fill the gaps so that we have a nice cohesive team both from virid side and our client side. So that's been our strategy for, you know, two decades now. Uh, and I think it really sets us apart. There are agencies that build on someone's platform, there are platform companies that don't have agencies. We try to bridge the gap between all of that.

Speaker C: All right, Steve, this has been enlightening. Learned a lot about e Comm platforms that I did not know. Obviously it's not one of those things you do very often. But thank you for being on the show. Appreciate it. Great. Look forward to having you back soon.

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks very much.