Ecommerce Uncovered Podcast

Welcome To The E-commerce Uncovered Podcast

In this episode of the Ecommerce Uncovered Podcast, your host Jeremy discusses the need for barcodes in your eCommerce business and how they can improve speed, efficiency and help your business grow.

Jeremy begins by explaining how introducing barcodes into your business helps to make products easier to be tracked, processed and stored and why you need to think ahead with barcoding when scaling. Learn the technical side of barcoding what barcodes to use and how to implement in your business from the beginning.

Jeremy dives into the benefits of barcoding and how they are essential for growth and system processing, even if you don’t know what product you're going to sell.

Key Takeaways

• A Barcode is an optical machine-readable piece of data. Invented in the 1950’s, based off of morse code, In the 1970’s became commercially successful and was first used on a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum.
• Used in lots of industries, healthcare, car hire, supermarkets, luggage and logistics use.
• GS1 - Maintains global standards for barcoding. Scanned over 1 million times per day.
• Two types of barcodes: Two dimensional QR barcode Traditional barcode

Benefits of Barcoding:

1. Training Staff - As your stock grows and you need to take on staff, barcodes will help your staff identify products and improve speed.
2. Essential for Peak Times - Barcoding your products will allow you to speed up your tracking, processing and storage during peak times.
3. Helps to Stop Stock Shrinkage - Correctly barcoding your products can help you keep track of your products and track stock levels.
4. Returns Handling - Barcoding will allow you process returns, amend stock levels and quickly identify the product being returned.
5. Cheaper Warehousing - If your products are barcoded you will be able to outsource your fulfilment easier, warehouse storage and product fulfilment will be cheaper as you’ll incur admin costs if your products are not barcoded.

BEST MOMENTS

• “The benefits of barcoding are Immense as you scale your business and add more products.”

• “Efficient to have scannable, barcoded products, as you can have different audible sounds to improve speed.”

• “Robust way of identifying that product and essential for peak times."

VALUABLE RESOURCES www.eCommerceUncovered.co.uk

www.Corefulfillemt.com

GS1 Barcodes - https://www.gs1uk.org/

ABOUT THE HOSTS Paul Burns and Jeremy Vernon are Directors of eCommerce fulfilment business Core Fulfilment, with a decade of experience providing fulfilment services to leading brands such as Disney and WWF.

Paul and Jeremy's mission is to make eCommerce fulfillment as simple as possible, to help businesses grow, and to provide the highest level of service, irrelevant of order volumes. For Paul and Jeremy is all about people.

Welcome To The Ecommerce Uncovered Podcast

In this episode of the Ecommerce Uncovered Podcast Jeremy welcomes back co-host Paul to discuss the 15 key things to consider for your online business for peak season. For Jeremy and Paul peak season is Q4 from Cyber Week to Christmas and the season is expanding.

Jeremy and Paul discuss why planning early is essential to success and why speaking to your customers and carriers prior to peak can give you a headstart in the industry. Understand that changes to systems and processes must be tested and inplace before you get into your peak season and that organic growth should be factored in your plan.

Jeremy talks about the need for an organised Carrier pick up, schedule and volume capacity and why managing your staff resources and employee morale has an effect of your business's reputation. Understand the need for inbound and outbound goods forecasting and how to ensure your internal systems work for the volumes you are expecting during peak.

Find out why warehouse space can be crucial to success, when planning for incoming and outgoing stock and why you must always have contingencies in place to make sure any problems you incur during peak season are resolved quickly,

Key Takeaways

• Start To Plan Now - A sufficient plan in place to handle to peak volume
• Carriers - Logistics for your carriers
• Staff Resource - Have you got enough staff to deal with the increase in volume
• Identify The Current Weaknesses In Your Operation
• Inbound Goods - Ensuring you have the goods available for peak
• Outbound Process - Ensure its streamlined, scheduled and forecasted
• Planning Your Space - Prepare enough space to deal with demand
• Problem Solving Channel - An efficient way of solving any issues
• Consumables - Ensuring smaller items such as labels are in stock
• Promotion Planning - The offers your running
• Systems - having the hardware and software in place for a busier period and why you should always stress test the systems
• Disaster Recovery Contingency - Plans for systems failure
• Prior Years - Lessons learned during past peaks
• Weather - Consider how the weather could affect your business
• Returns Policy - Processing returns after peak slows down

BEST MOMENTS

"If you get behind you might never catch up"

"During peak season every little things helps"

"Have a really slick, easy to learn process so you can drop in extra resources"

"Everything will be put under pressure and strain during a peak season and it's the weak areas that will break first"

"There's a chain reaction when you start to move stock, all those things have to be harmonious in order to succeed"

VALUABLE RESOURCES

www.ecommerceuncovered.co.uk

www.corefulfilemt.com

ABOUT THE HOSTS Paul Burns and Jeremy Vernon are Directors of eCommerce fulfilment business Core Fulfilment, with a decade of experience providing fulfilment services to leading brands such as Disney and WWF.

Paul and Jeremy's mission is to make eCommerce fulfillment as simple as possible, to help businesses grow, and to provide the highest level of service, irrelevant of order volumes. For Paul and Jeremy is all about people.

Just how exactly did Neville Wright manage to build his business up from nothing to employing over 120 people and turning over around £40million per year? Find out in Part 2 of the interview!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Kiddicare’s customer-centric approach was achieved face to face and needed to be transferred to the internet. The first Kiddicare website took 2.5 years to get up and running and was launched on Christmas day in the late 90’s. Dealing with people's objections to putting credit card details online and also wrong items being delivered due to the colour difference between PC monitors. In 1999 people’s screens would often show different colours.

Re-configuring packaging due to products being handled eight different times before reaching the customer. Suppliers wouldn’t want to provide alternate packaging so Kiddicare put cardboard sleeves on the products with the logo printed on, so not only was it on the box, it was also in front of the courier, the customer, anybody in the depot would see it.

We scrutinised other online companies, which wasn’t many at the time. Nothing would go on the website without a photo. A lot of companies wouldn’t even have a price! We would have prices for multiple buys. Stock level information, delivery information was provided by Kiddicare, putting them well ahead of the curve.

What would the customer want? When the cot arrives, they’re going to need a mattress. The cot needs to have a choice of mattresses on the same page. It needs blankets, sheets, each of these products needs six items, each of those six items have a further six items associated with it so people would buy more. They’d buy a cot, go on to the mattress section, then they’d go on the sheets page, then duvets, then blankets! Then there would be toys and further associated products like changing mats. On the changing mats there would be nappies, a never-ending circle…

We used to make a daily list of faults, for example on the website. It would only take 20 minutes and we would rectify them straight away.

We used to go to technology shows in London. There we would look for the companies who could do what we wanted, for example, build a website. Through this we built several websites, one after another, it scaled and maximised our business.

Did you develop your warehouse management system in-house? We employed sub-contractors and then used IBM. We actually did most of it ourselves, then integrated it. We used lots of outside contractors in the last 2 years when I was there. The system became one of the best in class! We were one of the first people to use SMS notifications. We were passionate about getting it right.

Despite your massive growth and being an independent retailer, it wasn’t without it’s challenges, was it? We were DPD’s largest customer and the only customer bigger than us at Christmas was the phone companies. During the 2008 recession, business hit a brick wall. It affected every business. Too much day left at the end of your money! 

I took £2.8million out of my pension pot and put it back into the business. It’s very rare you can do something like that, but we did it!

We reached a turnover of £40million. If we’d sat back and relaxed, we never would have achieved that. Maybe you’ll find between 2-4 teams during your lifetime who will gel and take your company to the next level.

If you reject somebody who wants to buy your business, you need to be careful. They could buy your competitors business and price you out of the market.

Kiddicare sold in 2011 for £70m to Morrisons. We prepared to business to be able to scale to £200m turnover, and we didn't have the energy to do it. So we wanted to sell to someone who could support and fund this growth.

Kiddicare is now owned by Dunelm. Do you se that as a good fit Neville? Well I actually thought The Range would buy it, it was more of an obvious fit. They’ve now got a small department for a nursery. You’ve got to have the right staff in a nursery. They have to be trained and passionate everybody was responsible!

Do you think there’s a hole in the market since you left Neville? A huge hole! I don’t know why any big player hasn’t expanded and filled the void. Maybe they lack that personal touch… It’s a hard job, scaling. It’s in our genes to push the boundaries!

BEST MOMENTS

Neville overcame customers’ objections to buying additional products because they were too expensive by breaking down the price per month, per day. He would say, “This works out to 14p per day… Is that worth the price for a happy wife?!”

We made 10,000 videos of our products. They would show customers, for example, how to fold travel cots. It would save so many customers returning items they believed to be faulty.

In 2010, we would have around 3,000 customers per day ordering items. They would order about 10 items at a time too. We were only really interested in shifting large quantities of products.

Living in a caravan with my wife and a three-year old child in the early days was difficult but it meant that everything else was just gravy. If it all went wrong we knew we could survive in a temporary caravan, although we didn’t want to! A lot of people go bankrupt and keep hold of their possessions, if you’re going to loose your possessions, you might as well lose them quick!

We used to employ 120 people, we would look at it as 120 families. Most people who worked for us didn’t want to be in business, they wanted a job, and they enjoyed that job. Many people joined us straight after leaving school, met people at the company, got married, that’s what they wanted! They didn’t want to be like us.

In every business there’s a cycle. Your business starts off worth nothing, then you get it up to being worth something, then maybe you can enhance it and it’d be worth a great deal of money. If you keep it, then somewhere along the line, that circle will keep going and then start to go down and you’re back to square one. Realising all the circumstances around the economy, what’s going on with all the other businesses? What’s going on with you? What’s going on with your management team? What’s going on with the industry as a whole?

I treated my business like a foal. If you take great care of that foal, feed it the right stuff then one day it’ll become a racehorse, win the cup and make you a fortune! Still, the horse will die one day. You can keep it, or sell it on for enormous amounts of money!

Either you stand still going backwards, or you grow!

VALUABLE RESOURCES 

Core Fulfilment

The Answer Is Yes - Now What’s The Question? (Paperback)

The Answer Is Yes - Now What’s The Question? (Audible)

 ABOUT THE HOST

Brought to you by the Co-Founders of Core Fulfilment, one of the UK’s leading E-Commerce providers, Paul Burns & Jeremy Vernon.

Jeremy’s Linkedin

Uncover the secrets behind e-Commerce success! A Behind the scenes look at what makes e-Commerce a success in today's ever-growing and continually changing online world. Learn and apply these lessons, techniques and strategies to your own online business.

An interview with businessman Neville Wright. Neville sold Kiddicare business to Morrison’s in 2011 after building it up to be the largest independent nursery business in Europe!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Neville left mainstream employment at the age of 24 in 1974. After a few days of going into business he found himself saying yes to every job before even being briefed as to what the job was. That started with property maintenance - window cleaning, painting and decorating, etc.

Hard work isn’t something you were afraid of Neville? Do you get a choice? If you want things in life, really want security, money for 40-50 years time and to reach your goals then there really is no other choice. The normal person will work around 8 hours a day to survive, so you’ve only got to do a little bit more. An extra hour in the morning, an extra hour at night. When they have a day off, if they work 5 days then you work 6.

What’s your attitude on failure Neville? Failure is never classified as failure, only as a way of learning. In fact, I quite like failure because it gets the adrenaline going. You’ve learned something, then you get back up and succeed. It makes the success taste so much better. I embrace failure!

Failure quick is the best thing: It’s better to sell a pram to a couple who are going to go on holiday and use it straight away rather than sell to a couple who are going to store the pram and not use it for a few months. This is because in case the pram is faulty, you can get the feedback sooner and recall the product quicker, saving yourself a lot of time, effort, money and credibility in the long run.

Don’t mix your stock up!

Goal Setting, how has it helped you achieve what you have achieved, Neville? I say no goals, no life. Easy as that. I wouldn’t know what to say to somebody if they had no goals. I compete against myself, not other people. People thought Kiddicare was in competition with Tesco, Mothercare, John Lewis, etc, but we were actually in competition with ourselves.

If I was a customer, what would I want? Every time I would visit a shop, service station, whatever, I would think, “I’m the customer, how are they treating me?” If it wasn’t in a good way, I’d wonder if we did that with our customers. Is my experience in this shop, service station or restaurant the same experience as what customers receive in mine?

BEST MOMENTS

You can’t be a failure if you’ve got 50 year goals. A lot of people will trip up, fail in the first 6 months and they’ll use that as a crutch for the rest of their lives. With a 50 year goal you don't make mistakes, you learn what not to do in the future!

Falling over and getting wet is part of life! If your business hasn’t changed when you come out of it at night to what it was in the morning then somebody is stealing your business and you’re going backwards.

We started Kiddicare with second-hand prams. People would also give us second hand clothes, toys, then gradually we had new toys and clothes. We reinvested everything back into the business due to our 50 year goal of being financially secure.

If you go into a restaurant and try something, if it’s not brilliant, you say, “Oh, it’s the first week.” You leave it for a few weeks and we’ll go back again. If it’s not brilliant then you could say, “Oh, it’s only a few weeks, they’ve had staff leave..” You give it another go and you decide that it’s shit and you won’t visit again. When a business isn’t customer-centric, that business will go downhill quick!

If anyone goes into business thinking they’re going to make a shedload of money, they aint! If anybody goes into business thinking they’re going to take care of their customer, they’ll make millions!

VALUABLE RESOURCES

Core Fulfilment

The Answer Is Yes - Now What’s The Question?

ABOUT THE HOST

Brought to you by the Co-Founders of Core Fulfilment, one of the UK’s leading E-Commerce providers, Paul Burns & Jeremy Vernon.

CONTACTS

Jeremy’s Linkedin

What makes E-Commerce a success in this ever growing and ever-changing online world? In this episode Jeremy Vernon interviews Chloe Thomas, the founder of E-Commerce Masterplan. Chloe is a best-selling author, keynote speaker and host of the E-Commerce Masterplan Podcast, all of which are built on her expertise and experience in E-Commerce strategy and marketing.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Why Podcast? Getting your message out, being organised, booking interviewees, generate traffic, generate customers, help E-Commerce business owners achieve their point of success sooner.

How has your podcast helped you grow your business? Content, industry awareness, perception, there’s a strong correlation between people who spend money with my business and who listen to the podcast.

E-Commerce Customer Journey: How to get people to your website, visitors, enquirers, first-time buyers, repeat buyers and regular buyers.

If someone comes to you as a potential customer and says, “Here’s my business, this is what I’m achieving so far, where do I even begin?” How do you even start that process? Trying to find out more about their business, to get an idea of the size of the business, turnover, profit and cashflow. Also, more importantly, about the team. Once I understand those things I can start offering solutions for their problems. For bigger retailers that tends to be project analysis, getting to the numbers because they’ve got the data there. For smaller businesses it’s often a case of having a series of having a series of calls, where they’ve got work to do in between times, or of course important calls.

Let’s talk Influencers. What’s your take on the meteoric growth of Gymshark? The story of Gymshark is a great one to drive us forward but it’s difficult to replicate. Being in the right time at the right place, and doing the right thing. Making the right decisions at the right time. Influencer Marketing is not something to be turned on and then forgotten about, it’s something you’re constantly working on and building relationships. It’s more like B2B sales, than Consumer E-Commerce Marketing. The influencer needs to be honest with the right skills and credibility.

25% of Sales on E-Commerce websites are driven by email, so ignore it at your peril!

Create a community feel without it being too hard to manage: For example, treat your top 5% customers a bit differently, for example give away special free VIP weekends, get them involved in the decision-making process of the business, asking them which colour to do the next range in, send them samples and so forth.

Tell your customers you have a time-limited offer ending at midnight, but don’t let it expire until a few hours after, allowing for customers in other time-zones to take advantage.

BEST MOMENTS

How has selling and writing books helped you build your business? They have a more practical impact. Each book has a free chapter to trial and additional material which requires people to sign up for, so they have a direct impact on the growth of the business and also the financial growth too.

Analysing Your Marketing Strategy (Maths Alternate): Take a sheet of paper, divide it by five and write down which marketing you’re using for each stage of the customer journey.

Where do you start on Data and Analytics, what would you recommend? There’s a lot of bright shiny objects out there which land in your inbox and distract you immediately from what you’re supposed to be doing. My favourite report is the Source & Medium Report which is in Google Analytics. It’s cold, hard data of where your traffic comes from and what it does when it comes to your website. There I can see you’ve got a great click-through rate from your emails but a terrible conversion rate off your direct traffic.

What is the Number 1 thing you could be doing right now to improving your business? Looking at your numbers, looking at what you know, what you can see your competitors doing and analysing. For example analysing whether to build an email campaign or whether to install i-Chat because you have lots of people asking questions.

How do you stay on top in the ever-changing E-Commerce world? This may be heresy to say this, but I don’t think it changes that much! At the moment everybody wants to talk about bots, now I don’t mind them, there’s some really clever ones out there. It’s not a one size fits all, it’s not something every business should have in place, not every business that should have it in place is even ready to put it in place. New tools come along, but the fundamentals don’t actually change. The key is getting your business in front of people who want your product and building a relationship with them in order to keep them buying from you.

VALUABLE RESOURCES

Customer Persuasion

E-Commerce Marketing

E-Commerce Masterplan 1.8

E-Commerce Delivery

B2B E-Commerce Masterplan

All Marketers Are Liars]

Chloe’s Next Talk

ABOUT THE HOST

Brought to you by the Co-Founders of Core-Fulfilment, one of the UK’s leading E-Commerce providers, Paul Burns & Jeremy Vernon.

CONTACT METHOD

Chloe’s Next Talk

E-Commerce MasterPlan

Product returns obviously, is that part of the customer’s experience. Jeremy brings to online retailers, a quick tip and a great way in using the Royal Mail Tracked Returns, which will improve the return process and make the return process easier and more convenient for the customers. However, there are also some restraints to using the Royal Mail Tracked Returns, whcih includes it being  confined only for UK base returns, not international 

Andrew Wisedale gives an expert overview on the General Data Protection Regulation detailing what is coming, its implications for businesses, the misunderstanding that arises concerning this regulation and what is embedded in it.

Esther and Julius Malik, Co-Founders of Lusty Chic shares how they got started in the business of women’s street style fashion with a shop in the London High Street and successfully transit that onto online business, that is able to stand toe to toe with some of the most well-known online fashion retailers. They share some useful tips on how to stay niche in the fashion and online retail business

Jeremy Vernon continues to share in detail on the final part of the delivery component in ecommerce, which affects customer services, looking into the packaging, where it plays an important role for brands to make the transition from the past retail relationship into this new world of e-commerce; the integrations with the couriers for best delivery service for your customers and your business, innovations in delivery that drives your ecommerce performance to serve your customers and gorw your business.

Jeremy Vernon shares on the vital essential delivery component in ecommerce, which affects customer services. He goes through the various delivery courier options offering speed and standard of delivery, the different elements of delivery, what you should look for, who the couriers are and other elements in setting up a business, changing courier for the existing business or just looking at other options out there for your customers that will result in a great job done with absolute minimum complaints.