Headless, mobile app, international... we talked e-commerce (with Loïc from Gradiweb)

International business is always quite complex. Internationally, there are a lot of elements to take into account. You're going to have a pricing policy that may differ from one country to another. You're going to have different types of logistics providers to manage, and then you're going to have all the payment methods, which are bound to be quite different. Hello, you're listening to the podcast about e-commerce. Once a month, I host an inspirational figure from the French e-commerce ecosystem for a friendly, unpretentious chat about the subjects they're passionate about. The aim is to decipher e-commerce trends and share practical tips for making your e-shop a success. I'm Joseph Aubry, co-founder of Loyoly, the loyalty and sponsorship platform that lets you engage your customers through over fifty different mechanisms. Sharing, user content, customer friends and much more to increase your LTV and decrease your CAC. If you like Loyoly talks, subscribe and feel free to leave us five stars on Apple podcast or Spotify to support us. Happy listening. Well, it's great to have you on the podcast Loïc. Likewise. Listen, I can't wait to get started. We're going to be able to talk about a lot of subjects, I think. Of course we can. So I've got Shopify of course, Headless International, there's the customer experience app. The goal is for you and I to talk and give lots of tips to the merchants who listen to us. Yeah, it'll be fun. So cool, maybe you can start by introducing yourself for those who don't know you yet. Of course, I'm Loïc, the founder of Grady web. We're an agency specializing in Shopify. We help e-tailers set up their site, create their site and then optimize their site to maximize conversion. So we'll either redesign their site, or really study how people behave on their website and see how they can maximize their profitability and convert a little more. Can you explain why you specialize in Shopify versus Prestashop and WooCommerce? Yes, of course, we have a bit of a history, a rather long one. I set up the agency, which was originally a three hundred and sixty agency. We switched to development. We did a lot of WordPress, a lot of prestashop and pretty soon, we discovered Shopify. We discovered Shopify in two thousand and nine and it's true that we fell in love with it. We went from a situation where we'd put a site online and then deal with frustration, to one where we'd put a site online and then deal with evolutions, and our merchants could really use their website to develop. So from that point on, we began to take a good look at how Shopify worked, to see how we could develop their API a little further, and we switched over to Shopify one hundred percent at the time of Covid. So in two thousand and twenty, when there was a big boom, we just kept on going. Okay, so good, and are there any developments you're particularly looking forward to with Shopify, even though I understand that it's the ideal tool for you today? I think that small merchants, medium-sized businesses, have a lot of things going for them. They set up the b to b fairly recently, it's Shopify plus, but it's something that's very, very versatile and can really adapt to many, many solutions. We do have enough developers. We're very interested in the whole tech and API side of things. It's true that recently, they've developed their API a lot. They allow us to manage a much greater number of variations, product variants. And I'm particularly interested in that. After that, there's a whole host of other things, all their B-to-B issues that are being implemented with Shopify plus. They're rather reserved about modifying the checkout, but they've implemented checkout extensibility, which will enable them to modify the checkout a little more. These are things I particularly appreciate, and they enable us to do some really great things. Ok too well and you're doing a lot of migrations at the moment, so what are the steps you need to watch out for when you migrate from WooCommerce or something else to Shopify? Yeah, I think the first thing, as you say, is to think ahead. You have to understand that Shopify and Bristashop don't necessarily work in the same way, either in terms of data or in terms of the elements they're going to be able to keep, so what we're going to do is already map the data we're going to be able to migrate, which is a very important point, then we're going to have to export the data, recover the customer base, the order base, the product base, we're going to have to transform it and then we're going to integrate it into Shopify. What we're really going to have to do initially is make sure that, well, see what data we want to migrate, what data we want to keep and work on it and migrate it to Shopify. I know you follow a lot of applications on Shopify, do you have any applications to recommend, any favorites on the Shopify store recently? Yeah, of course I think the application is a little master essential for everyone, it's your keyboardo obviously which is going to be very very present and which is extremely useful for managing all the marketing part, sending mail, automation. So that's the application I recommend first and foremost. After that, it depends a little on your objectives and what you want to achieve. We're going to have loyalty applications. Loyoly, of course. Of course we will. So that's very important. We're going to have to work a little on our loyalty strategy. An application that we use a lot, which isn't necessarily for everyone, but it's going to be Recharge Paiement for subscription. That's something very important. There are several applications out there. I discovered Loops Bischion not long ago, which looks really good, and which we're currently testing on a project. I don't really have any feedback on it yet, but I'd recommend it. Matrixify, we were talking about migration, which is a big application for migrating data and then importing it. One that's not very well known, that I think is aimed at very few people, but that I really like, data champ, which lets you send CSV feeds to servers and in particular connect with your entire logistics system, and then there are the slightly classic Shopify applications Shopify flow and that sort of thing, which are apps we use a lot. Okay, okay, interesting, and you know, a while back we were talking a lot about headless. Could you explain again what headless is and who it's designed for? Of course I can. Headless is pretty technical. I'm going to try and make it a little easier to understand, but basically, it's using Shopify or Shopify's product management engine and having a front end, the visible part of the site, which is completely outsourced and allows you to use technologies that are potentially faster for developing your site or even for optimizing its loading time. It's not for everyone, it's something that's going to be very technical, and in a way it's going to take away the whole advantage of Shopify, which is that you're no longer going to have to manage the server part, which can be a bit cumbersome. So the LS, we're going back to the old method in brackets, because Shopify has developed its own LS, its own technology. But it's going to allow us to have this front end that's going to be completely uncoupled and to be able to use technologies that are much more powerful, much faster, so that we can have a site that loads, that never loads. All right. Another advantage is that we'll be able to have a clean mobile version and a PC version. Right. And we're going to have these two versions and work on them individually, because obviously a person isn't going to use his phone the same way he uses his PC, and we'll have a site that's much more optimized on both types of device. Yeah, okay, and so yeah, that's more, I imagine it would be more for brands with complex buying paths, who need to do very custom things in the end, or you'd recommend acquiring it, like this kind of brand No, it's not going to be for everyone. I'm more likely to recommend it to brands that already have a certain sales figure of five or ten million or more. What you have to bear in mind is that ads are still going to be dependent on developers, so it's more likely to be brands with in-house developers who can react fairly quickly. The cost of servers is going to be higher, so Shopify has its own technique and technology, but it's not necessarily for everyone. I've seen quite a few brands in the last two years, there's been a big boom in headless, so a lot of people have started to go headless, and I've seen quite a few brands. I've seen quite a few brands. Some of them have been incredibly successful, for example nine hundred and k have switched to headless, and I know it's been a great taste, but there are other brands that I know are going back to pure Shopify technology and all that. It still requires a lot of maintenance, but you have to really get to grips with it. Exactly. Okay, interesting, and to talk a little about the international market, how do you recommend proceeding? Is Shopify market a good solution? What do you recommend to brands looking to launch internationally who don't know where to start, or who are wondering about the technical side? Internationally, there are a lot of elements to take into account. You're going to have a different pricing policy in different countries. You're going to have different types of logistics providers to manage, and then you're going to have all the payment methods, which are bound to be quite different. An element that is perhaps not often taken into account is the fact that each country has its own culture, its own way of approaching problems, its own way of speaking and therefore its own way of communicating. And depending on all these elements, we'll either recommend Shopify Market, which may be very well suited to a smaller brand with a slightly less developed international strategy. Or maybe a multi-site, multi-shop solution, with its own site for each country. Okay. Shopify is in the process of setting up a technology with Shopify market, which will be coming soon, which should sell for two-thousand-twenty-four, two-thousand-twenty-five, precisely to have this side where in fact via Shopify market, you can have different content management depending on the country you're in, and that's something I'm really looking forward to, it's really interesting. Oh yes, it's also something brands are really looking forward to, to avoid having to connect to your store by paying each time you visit something. Yeah, it's a thing. Yeah, I'd imagine so, yeah, yeah, when you start having five 6 sites, it's starting to look a bit like that. So would you have any advice on brands you've seen on the international scene, I don't know, maybe mistakes you've seen or, on the contrary, winning strategies that have worked well for them beyond what we've just talked about? I was talking to an e-commerce director quite recently, and they were actually looking at launching in Belgium. Belgium is right next door, it's a very close country, and in fact, the complexity depends on whether you have your stocks in Belgium or France, whether you have entities in Belgium or France, the customs and tax rules are going to be quite different. So that's something you're really going to have to anticipate and look at carefully. Of course, it's quite easy to just ship a product to Belgium, or anywhere in the world, which can be very, very simple. But I think you have to think about your strategy beforehand and see where you want to go. It's not a trivial matter. An internationalization strategy isn't simple, and you launch it and it's what. To sum up, the thing you're going to have to do is really look at where your stocks are managed. Is it local? Is it international? Is it shipping to France or not? Look at the payment methods that exist for each country. There's always a tendency to think that Shopify pays, that you can use PayPal, but that's not the case at all. Right now, we're working with customers in Poland, and in Poland, I don't remember the name, but there are some very specific payment methods that are very, very well developed. If you look at Belgium too, I'm talking about Belgium again, but in Belgium, you hardly have PayPal. Everything goes through much more local payment methods. So that's something to watch out for. And always this question of do I want to have a policy specific to the country or a policy a little more local where I just translate the site into French. Ok ok very clear. And now I'd like to talk a bit about AI, which we've been hearing a lot about for some time now. Have you seen any brands using it on their e-commerce sites or on in-house processes? I'd be interested to hear your feedback. I see a little bit of everything that's being created, and it's something that's extremely interesting and exciting. There are lots and lots of things being created, but perhaps I don't have enough perspective on it yet. I've seen some really great applications. I think there are a lot of possibilities in e-commerce in particular. You'll be able to optimize your co-products, for example, which is pretty obvious. You're going to have semantic search, so it could be it's liable to go into your search, retrieve much more interesting products based on, maybe based on your history, based on that sort of thing. You could also have AI in a slightly more basic way for translation and content creation. Obviously, I think that behind that we can have applications that could be much more evolved or advanced that I haven't seen yet, but something that could be interesting in terms of logistics, AI to optimize your supply chain and look at how you can optimize your exhibitions, your shipping routes or that sort of thing. So for the time being, I may not have enough feedback on AI yet, but it's something I'm paying attention to. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there for customer support and things like that, so I'll keep an eye on it. And you were saying at the beginning of the call, at the beginning of the podcast, that you also develop applications beyond e-commerce sites, the part you mentioned for Shopify merchants. I know you also have a section on Grady web, that's how it works Can you tell us about it Yeah, so we develop, we've developed quite a few applications. Often it's big companies that want to develop their application. We've also been asked if we've developed an application for Octopia, and we've developed one for Aception. So it's going to be, it's going to be companies that really want to integrate into the whole Shopify ecosystem. And what kind of applications did they want to make, without necessarily giving names, but it's going to be what kind of uses on. In fact, I've mentioned two applications that are perhaps a little well known, where we're going to have some obvious uses, aseptio to be able to put, to be able to very easily integrate your code on the site. After that, we're going to develop quite a few applications, and we have a customer who has a very interesting problem. In fact, he's delivering water and he's delivering water, so it's original. Yes, that's true. In fact, he delivers water and water is extremely complicated to deliver because it's very heavy and voluminous. So we developed an application to enable people, when they order, to order according to different time slots and to be able to automate their delivery route themselves. So there really is an application which, when the order is placed, displays a calendar, give certain time slot options and allow users to choose when they're going to be delivered, and what's more, what they're doing is subscribing, so the whole thing needs to be fully integrated into reachard-type applications and so on, so we're going to develop this kind of interesting application, and to talk a little about conversion, so if I go down all the subjects a little, I think it's really questions that all brands are asking themselves. Can you think of things you could do to help with conversion, like quick queen tips, like centrix? There are lots of tips, lots of things you could do to help with conversion. I'll think about it a little before I come. And it's true that I don't necessarily have any specific tips, but I think that what's important for conversion is to really work on understanding who your audience is. How do they behave on your site? What do they come to do? What do they come to look for? We work for a brand that sells fairly high-end cameras. So, it's a product that you're not necessarily going to buy on a whim or that you're not necessarily going to buy on a whim anymore. Yeah, that's clear. So, these are products that cost quite a lot of money, one thousand, one thousand five hundred euros, and in fact, when we analyzed their data a little bit, we realized that users came and had a great need to understand the technical documents of the cameras before being able to buy. They had their own page which had been designed in a certain way, or in fact, if there was a lot of information, it wasn't clear at all. People would come, get a bit lost on the site and never come back. So what we did was really analyze the way the page was structured and how people were behaving. We really, really focused on the most important information, the most important information that users needed. And you looked at things like Hotjar, things like that, so that it clicked, the heat zones. Exactly, we're going to look at Hotjar, we also looked a little bit at the feedback we had on the after-sales service, the main questions that were asked about the after-sales service, everything that people were asking. And in fact, we identified that there was a great need to understand the tool before buying. So we put in place several things, but at the moment, at the level of the, at the level of the purchase button, we have a little link that will take you a little further down to the technical documentation. What it does, in fact, is that we've placed it a little lower down on the page. There are examples of photos taken with these cameras, and all this helped to ensure that users could come in, understand the technical nature of the camera, have quite a few examples, look at the comments, navigate very easily around the page, come back to the top, put the camera in their shopping cart and buy. And another thing too, what we saw was that users were perhaps arriving on this page, on this product sheet. And they weren't necessarily very comfortable with it. So we set up a number of tools to help them continue their flow and go on to other pages, discover other cameras, use a comparison tool, and so on. As a result, conversions are really optimized. There aren't necessarily any specific techniques. There are lots of little things you can do to optimize conversions. I think the main thing, the most important thing, is to really understand how the user behaves on the site. What do they come to do What do they come to find What information do they need and really optimize the content and structure of the information to give them that information. Absolutely, yes. And there's quite a lot, I was talking to a post recently who also has a brand in e-commerce and he was telling me that they'd made some bad figures at one point, it wasn't going very well and in fact they've gone back a bit, you know, they called a lot of customers to really understand why they had chosen them over other brands, all these very important questions to really understand who your customers are, and following this, they reviewed all their ads, focusing much more on their customers than potentially on the fifteen thousand eco-responsible organic products, So they really focused on their real customers and they changed their acquisition strategy thanks to that, and since they've done that, they're making their best figures ever. So yeah, these are really interesting discussions, we were talking to Sébastien too, who was on the Boost conversion podcast, and he gave us a lot of information about this type of thing, it's a real study of the buying path, understanding the audience. So yeah, it's a big subject, and it also reminds me of Quentin, who's also been here, and who was talking about improving conversion, understanding who the customers were who were buying and so on, the arguments you could also use in ads and on the site to read all the customer reviews and in fact pass them on, you know, in GPT chat for example, You can detect trends like that and yeah, it's funny because I'd done it for Shopify applications that were competitors of ours and it worked really well, it gave us a lot of arguments, so we could understand what the weak points of the others were, and what we should focus on. So yeah, I think it can also be useful to really analyze all our customers' data to understand who they are and what's going to be important to them, and then, as you say, the whole custom site experience. I think that's kind of the key. What you need to do is, there's no “I'm going to add a button here” method on every site, it's not like that. What you have to understand is that when someone comes to a site, they don't come directly to buy. It's very rare for someone to arrive and suddenly discover the site and add to the basket. So a person will often arrive once, look around a bit, take note of the product, leave, bookmark it or not, come back via an ad, re-enter, compare with your competitors or with other elements. And in fact, they're going to look for a certain number of elements that will be useful in convincing them to make a purchase. So, as you say, what's needed is for you to get a database from your competitors, from comments or that sort of thing, or even from yourself or your after-sales service, and in fact, you're going to get all this information and see what your customer really wants. In itself, there's no secret: the better your tool, the better your product, the more likely you are to convert. Of course, I could say that putting a little back button, a side card with upsell, of course that's extremely important, but the basis of conversion is understanding my users, seeing how to get the information they need and working my site to be able to dilute this information throughout their buying journey. Do you have any ideas for things you've been able to implement with brands to really personalize the customer experience, to gamify it sometimes? It could be, for example, in the, I'll give you an example that I've seen on several sites, it's typically in your basket, you'll put here if you add such and such a product, you'll have a progress gauge and if you wait for such and such a level then you'll win something extra and so on and so forth, you see. Of course, not to mention the points part and so on, but really more on the buying experience part. Yeah, you've got, you've got, you've got what you were saying, so effectively this progress bar. So either free shipping, reaching time to be able to have free shipping, or something much more advanced. You see like what Mercy Andy does, I don't know if you've seen what they do, Mercy Andy on their site. In fact, they have quite a few points where, basically, you're going to have quite a few steps and you add ten euros, you unlock such-and-such an item, you add twenty, you unlock such-and-such an item. That's something that's going to be really important. Wisepop has come out with something I like, which is pretty good and in terms of gamification, it's pretty interesting, it's little notifications. Yeah. And in fact, as you go through the purchasing process, you get little notifications that come out, and what they'll do is recommend products based on what you've seen on the page, so that can also be another tool. Yeah, yeah, that's nice, he showed me Valerio in a hurry. After that, you've got the whole post-purchase experience, so you've got a sort of loyalty section. How do you bring people back from social networks to your, to your, to your store? And then, of course, we come to the final part, which is a bit of general advice. Basically, what I like to ask is that maybe there are two types of brands listening to us: you've got brands on the one hand that are really going to launch, and then you've got brands that are going to be more at the next stage, that are going to be scaling. Do you have any specific things in mind for these two types of brands? Are you really focused on the site or more globally? I think it's extremely important to calculate your costs carefully. I've had quite a few retailers talk to me about gross margins, because in fact they're going to buy a product for x euros, resell it for three times that price and think they're going to make an incredible profit. But in fact, there's after-sales service and logistics involved. It's a mess. It's not clean. So I think that's an extremely important point. Remember that the site is just the beginning. I mean, it happens quite often that I have customers, and particularly new customers, who have never, who have never been too involved in business, who think that you put up an incredible site and that sales will fall off afterwards. And in fact, that's only the first step. You really have to have a real marketing strategy behind it. You really have to work on your acquisition, and that's an extremely important point that people often don't think about right from the start. It happens. So I think that for new e-tailers, these are two key points. Yeah, it's true that you say to yourself, go ahead, yeah, it's the same for us as a business, every time you imagine what it could be, you want to create something great and you say, well, here's the thing that's going to be so good that it's going to work out really well, but in fact, unfortunately, entrepreneurship doesn't work like that, because ninety-nine percent of the things you're going to do in the end won't be the right things, You've got to keep a few cartridges under your elbow, so that once you're sure that the thing is validated, you can afford to spend x amount of money instead of putting everything on your site from the start, only for it to flop. Yeah, exactly, so I sell websites, so of course I want them to have information on their website, but no, no, really think about the fact that this is just the beginning, and that there's a big acquisition part behind it: you really have to make yourself known, you have to develop, and just because I've put a template in place doesn't mean I'm going to be a multi-billionaire tomorrow. That's not how it works. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, but that's reality. Yeah. Okay. And then the biggest e-tailers, if they want to scale, it's really going to depend on the more you work on your product, the more you work on your customer knowledge, the more you're going to offer something that's really close to what they're looking for, the more you're going to be able to grow, yeah, yeah, more customization, yeah, more personalization, really, to get as close as possible to what you were saying earlier, in fact, at the beginning, you start with the basic standards, then you really want to segment your customers a little more, okay these customers come from such and such a channel, from such and such a campaign, so potentially they're going to arrive on a site that's a little different. Yeah, you're going to have a lot of levers, but here's a pretty concrete example. I have a customer who sells eye care products. Okay. Products for people who can't see very well. Okay. And in fact, most of these customers are elderly people who aren't necessarily very comfortable with the Internet, payment systems, credit cards and so on. So what's written in huge letters on the site? No, it's not. It's a little different. In fact, what happens is that it's people who aren't necessarily used to paying by credit card directly on the site and who are very used to bank transfers. Ah yes, yes. In fact, they sell a subscription product, so we set up a SEPA payment system for subscriptions, and the following month they made twenty-five percent more, and it took effect over time, so it was a big step forward because they offered their customers the right payment method. Yeah. So that's and it's a company that's pretty interesting, so it's pretty good. So the more you get to know, I'll say it again, the more you get to know your customer, the more you'll be able to. Go and start working on quite a few, quite a few new elements, set up AB testing, lots and lots of AB testing, test, test. Don't be afraid to test, throw things away and improve, because that's what entrepreneurship is all about. You can't, even if I'm sure I've got lots of good ideas and I tell my team that everything's going to work, it never happens like that. Clearly, you really have to test and and and iterate a lot. And after that, you have to work on your margins, your logistics, your shipping and your entire supplier base to see where you can make up some ground. I have quite a few customers who, especially when they first start out, may find a factory in one place, and then they'll have to increase their production capacity and all sorts of other things. So I think that for retailers who want to get a foothold, it's a bit broader. Loïc, where can we find you? I think you publish quite a bit on LinkedIn. I've started to publish quite a bit on LinkedIn, so we give quite a bit of advice, quite a bit of information, we've launched a newsletter, the Gradi news, because you can sign up directly on our site or on LinkedIn, and then the free web point com site, and then at quite a few events on Paris e-commerce, I try to be quite present. Too well, and I even think that if there are any merchants out there with questions about any of the points we've raised, whether it's international, customizing apps that are a bit specific to their business, why don't you take some time out just to do free audits and things like that, because yeah, of course. Always a pleasure to talk to anyone who wants to optimize their website. Too good and well listen a big thank you Loïc it was very cool as your conversation and then listen thank you thank you for everything. Thank you very much. Very soon. See you soon. Thank you for listening to this episode of Loyoly talk all the way through. I hope you've enjoyed it and found lots of tips to try out for your brand. If so, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Spread the word and leave us a five-star rating on the Apple podcast, it helps us a lot. Finally, if you need to increase your LTV, don't hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn or on our dot I o website. See you soon.