Breaking the Silo, or: Is Omnichannel dead? #LTM142

Each of these channels has a purpose.

D2C shop is typically way stronger in loyalty because you can apply, for example, loyalty programs.

So if a customer wants to have fun with the brand, that's the more likely channel that they pick.

If they go to Amazon, they want convenience, they want speed, they want price, while TikTok brings a lot of entertainment with the purchase.

Let's Talk Marketplace the Marketplace Podcast with Ingrid Lommer and Vana Vridichter.

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of let's Talk Marketplace.

I'm Ingrid, your host, as always, and today I'd like to talk about something that I think every one of you knows and everyone tells you it's not good and everyone's doing it anyway.

And that is silo thinking.

And yes, on this show, I think we are guilty of it, just as anyone else, because usually we obsess over the excellence of the Marketplace channel and talk a lot about how marketplaces should perform and how Amazon ads are doing and all these kinds of topics.

But, well, let's be honest, it doesn't really help you if your Amazon is really doing good on the Amazon channel and it's a Ferrari there.

But the rest of the e commerce engine is stuck in traffic, so to speak.

So today I'd like to open the view a bit more, which all of us has to do, really, because channel options are exploding from social commerce to, I don't know, AI agents.

So I think we need to think a bit bigger today, maybe a bit more networked, or as my guests of today like to put it, connected.

So we're talking about the idea of connected commerce today.

And to help us break out of our marketplace bubble and understand how connected commerce truly works, I'm really happy to welcome my two guests today on the show, and that is Janine Hummel, Senior Director, CRM and D2C Commerce at Front Row, and her colleague Daniel Zemich, director of E Commerce Consulting.

Welcome, the two of you.

It's great to have you on the show.

Yeah.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you so much.

Jael.

Hi, Janine.

Hi, Daniel.

So maybe before we get into it, let's first explain to our listeners why I'm talking to you when it comes to breaking out of our Amazon bubble, because Front Row is an agency that has a very strong foundation in the Amazon area, but is also breaking out of that at the moment.

So maybe give us an insight at first.

Where are you coming from and where are you going to?

Maybe.

Daniel, why don't you start?

Yeah, sure.

So first of all, thank you so much for having us.

I've been a listener of the podcast for quite a while, so it's a great pleasure jumping from the audience direct in front of the microphone.

To give you some more background who I am.

What are we doing here at Fronto?

I think it's important to understand that I would say I have kind of a hybrid approach on the one end.

I have the like great pressure pleasure to build better commerce with the team here at front Row for our clients.

But I also spend several hours on actually several years building up my own private label brands.

So on the one hand, I can really understand the corporate language and speak about strategy.

What kind of products are you having?

Different ones.

So in the end was like three brands.

One for LED supplies, like lamps.

When you renovate your home, that's like the go to brand and.

Or hopefully the go to brand.

And then I had a brand for baking products.

So I think it was a big thing.

Especially during COVID everyone stayed home, start baking their own bread and I was the one selling the bread lids.

So all these cast iron products.

And then was like also smaller brand in the coffee and tea category.

But in the end it was like more yeah, these typical white label FBA products ordering in China, put like a brand on it, start selling it in Germany or like all Europe in the end.

So that's kind of my approach.

Super strategic with the clients, super operational and like knowing all these pains.

And I know because like I said, I'm an active listener of the podcast.

You always ask for a fun fact of everyone.

So I bought my own.

And then thinking about it, I come to the conclusion.

My fun thing is I start humming when I eat food.

But like not every food, especially the really good food.

So whenever I eat like really, really proper good food food, I start humming.

I don't know where it's come from, but yeah, at the moment it's lot of.

It's a lot of Rocky Balboa.

So yeah, I don't know why, but that's the fun fact.

That's an interesting choice for experiencing your food.

Going for occupied boa.

But that's interesting, right?

Thank you for this introduction and your background, which we will definitely come back to, I think.

So Janine, what about you?

Where are you coming from?

What are you doing inside of front row?

And why am I talking about connected commerce to you today?

Thank you.

It's actually kind of funny because I've been your typical you will love content and design fan.

So when I first started out I actually was in a completely different sector of digital marketing, but fell in love really early on with everything that has to do with retention, marketing, CRM, the technology behind it, and found my way to Hamburg and back then to think three, which was the former front row and what, 10 years ago, actually kind of a dinosaur, agency wise.

What I found really intriguing about Thing three and Front Row is that from the get go, we were always open to figuring out what the next step is in ecom.

So it wasn't that there was initially a target to become an Amazon agency or Amazon expert, but it was very much a what will be needed in the coming years, months, century, I don't know.

And the team then went ahead and started building a thesis around it, a hypothesis, and then started applying this to the market and this thinking of what's next in terms of commerce.

That is what was the red line that pulled through my last 10 years here at Front Row.

I'm currently responsible for D2C as a whole, so everything that's actually happening off Amazon.

So I'm your, I'm your joker for today for this conversation.

But I think what we are seeing for us internally and in the market is very much this rethinking of what need, what needs to come next.

So we figured out what the different channels the market are for themselves.

And now the question is now that we are at a point where we develop them so far next to each other, when do we actually manage to bridge them into one cohesive experience, one cohesive system for the customer?

And I think that is what's happening right now, putting the question out and trying to find an answer.

Okay, right then I guess let's start into the discussion in a minute.

But first, you also have a fun fact for us.

I wasn't prepared, actually.

You can imagine I'm outing myself.

I'm obviously as D2C.

I'm not hearing marketplace podcasts so often.

No, I think one fun fact that a lot of people never really believe when I tell them is I kind of look like you're.

I don't want to go into like cliches, but I don't look like it.

I'm a really heavy gamer.

So everything that comes in mind, from World of Warcraft to mobile games, Nintendo Switch, you will never beat me in a game of Super Nintendo Mario Kart.

Maybe that's my fun fact.

Because if you meet me, if you see me, you would never guess that that's hiding in there.

That's nice.

I always welcome fellow gamers and nerds on this show.

So be welcome.

Right, okay.

So yeah, let's talk about how to break out of our, in this case, marketplace silo and look at commerce in a bit more connected way.

And we'll get into this after a very short advertising break.

If you are a seller or a brand planning to expand into the Netherlands, then there here is one uncomfortable truth that you need to Next day delivery is not a competitive advantage here, it's the entry ticket.

The Dutch market, with Boel as its largest marketplace, operates by a bit of a different logic than many other EU markets due to its size and its more demanding customers.

Order today, delivery tomorrow isn't the premium promise here, it's the baseline expectation.

And apart from that, speed alone doesn't really cut it.

What really matters is delivering reliably every single time.

And if sellers can't consistently keep these delivery promises, they will sooner or later be pushed out of the Dutch market.

That's because delivery quality is no longer assessed by gut feeling.

Platforms like Wool measure it very precisely and translate it into strict requirements that sellers must meet.

And these requirements directly affect visibility and performance.

What this means in practice for you as sellers and brands, why next day delivery alone isn't sufficient, and which mistakes international players keep making in the Dutch market is what we've broken down in our blog post.

You'll find the link, as always, in the show notes.

Okay, right, let's dive in.

So maybe to understand the concept of connected commerce a bit more, maybe the two of you could give me an example of what it looks like today.

So what is the not connected commerce version?

What is normal for most brands, especially at the moment, how they deal with their different e commerce and online channels and what in comparison the connected version of this could look like?

Maybe.

Daniel, could you give us an update?

Like how it's.

How it's today?

Yeah, sure.

So maybe let me start with the gold standard.

So that's the North Star we want to create with like all our brands.

And I think it's important to really understand what we mean with these connected approach.

And I always try to explain it.

Think of how you listen to Spotify, for example.

You wake up in the morning, put on your favorite jam, go to the shower, next speaker, you're still in the flow.

You go to the car, don't have to switch, don't have to like re loop or get back to the, to the, to the song you listened at.

And then you're at work, put on your headphones and it's still the same flow.

And this is how a customer journey should look like.

What?

Right?

It shouldn't be like paused, play again, played paused, look back.

It should be like flow.

And in my opinion, nowadays customers, or let's start from the brand sides, brand don't think like that.

They always look at silos on a channel, so they always look at pipes.

Speaking about omnichannel, Omnichannel, I think it was the biggest buzzword over the last years.

But to be honest and to be realistic, I think we should bury that.

So omnichannel, for me it's kind of a dead thesis because in the end, just coming from the name Omnichannel, that implies that they are different channels.

But in the end it's one ecosystem because there's only one customer experience.

And also customer don't have different departments as for example, brands have.

So why should brands have different departments?

So our approach is here really to connect everything.

Not only the data, not only different channels.

In the end it's all about the touch point where the customer can interact with the brand.

So you see, I'm super bad in giving short answers, but this is kind of the how we look and how we see connected commerce.

So like put everything not in the line because to be honest, these like old Aida sales funnel also this is linear, it's so dead because customers tend to like jump from a review page to the checkout, back to social, seeing the product offline.

And in the end it's like connecting online offline, old data, kind of everything.

Janine, maybe you can help me get this a bit more tangible.

So what would a journey of a customer who is buying, I don't know, new sports shoes.

Let's make this really concrete look like in a connected commerce scenario.

I think the main difference is that prior to thinking about this approach, what happened is that each channel for themselves were kind of fighting a single battle.

And the brand, the company behind it, had a very specific goal about where certain products were to be placed.

Talking access control.

Like if we go back 10 years, 20 years, the brand itself, the company itself had full control over where to place the product, to what price.

And the customer was kind of going with the brand to these different checkouts.

And what switched now heavily is that this is not the case anymore because we do have this via a variety of Amazon, other retailers, D2C shops, TikTok shop.

And so what happened is that the brand now needs to follow the customer instead of the other way around.

What does this mean for a customer journey and for different channels?

The Way that we think it is, that user could start the journey on TikTok.

See a video, gets content shared by a friend or a family member, gets to Amazon, has a first look at, for example, reviews, doesn't really make a purchase decision, but goes back to, for example, two days later, ChatGPT asks for a recommendation, product comparisons, thinks about it a bit longer, goes to the webshop, compares the price to Amazon, and then days later decides that, for example, this person goes back to TikTok shop and buys there or goes to Amazon.

So it's really not the brand deciding what the user journey and the purchase journey looks like anymore, but it's very much the customer who decides what that very individual journey is.

And then what our task is is really make sure that no matter where the journey happens, we are there, we are showing up, and we're doing it in a way that is proper for the customer, for the brand and for the channel.

I'd like to go back to something you just said, which was the brand should follow the customer, not the other way around.

This is not a new concept in a way, but up to now that meant you have to be present in all the channels that your customer might use.

But what I'm hearing here is a more personal approach.

So how do you think that brands should actually follow through?

How could they follow the customer?

I mean, they can't really follow them across different platforms, can they?

I think that's actually two questions.

I'm not sure if I would call it more personalized, but what I believe is that brands need to think how they show up on a specific channel way more intentional than they did before.

Because if you look at what the customer does with certain channels that are in the journey is each of these channels has a purpose.

D2C shop is typically way stronger in loyalty because you can apply, for example, loyalty programs.

So if a customer wants to have fun with the brand, that's the more likely channel that they pick.

If they go to Amazon, they want convenience, they want speed, they want price, while TikTok brings a lot of entertainment with the purchase.

And so I think it's not a question of personalization in that sense primarily, but showing up on the channel in the way that's proper for the specific channel.

And then going to the second question of how do we actually follow them through?

This is what we are figuring out at the moment.

More and more brands that we are talking to are heavily investing, not in BI and the whole bus that we had years ago, but they are going more into figuring out what identity actually looks like in the digital frame.

So how can we apply an identity through a customer that then actually moves through the different channels?

How can we identify the user on the different channels and map this back so that we have this cohesive look?

And I think a few channels are really close to that.

And maybe not the marketplace expert here as the SD2C Joker, but obviously for Shop, that's super easy because we have the capabilities to go into data warehouses.

We can do ID stitching and actually start building this journey.

And looking at Daniel, I think Amazon is interestingly, and I applaud them for it, moving in a similar direction, that they have more CLV based features, more retention based features, more personalization, segmentation, which for me, looking at an outsider into this kind of looks like, okay, we're actually trying to do the same thing, which is something that I'm positive about and that I applaud.

The question is how can we move this closer together so that we do not have a data warehouse and an Amazon data warehouse?

But yes, this is, I think, something that we struggle with and that we all need to figure out in the coming months.

Yeah, definitely.

And maybe let me add something here because I think that was a lot.

Let's try to unpack that first of all.

Ingrid, are you familiar with the ROPO effect?

Yeah.

But do explain it for our listeners, please.

Yeah, definitely.

So research online purchase offline that also shows that like offline online is getting connected.

So you might think maybe you don't care about like your online presence, then you're just losing online sales.

But in the end you also lose offline sales because customers tend to search online, read reviews and then purchase offline or not.

And also this is like super important.

And then the question is how can we really connect and map this kind of customer funnel from someone seeing an ad on Amazon or on Instagram and then having the final buying purchase offline.

And again, yeah, that's the holy grail.

I think this is like why we should think about more how to identify and how to build like dashboards and structures where we can see that instead of like just putting or increasing our media buckets and put more and more media on the lower funnel on Amazon or do matter so like really understand the customer and really understand the customer flows.

And on the topic about how can we track it on Amazon, I think with AMC and I don't want to get too nerdy here, but with amc, so the Amazon marketing cloud we get more and more insights of like also how customers work and jump between platforms.

So with AMC we can for example, identify causalities.

So for example, a customer who's seeing a top of search ad on Amazon then jumps to the T2C page, jumps back to Amazon, has a three times higher conversion incentive, for example.

And we just then build targets out of this.

So for us it's more about like not having these pii.

So like this personal identifying information so that we really get like the email address, the name, we don't care about that.

For us it's important to really build audiences and segments and then target them and then guide these audiences to the whole customer journey.

Starting on social, for example, ending up on D2C and then also try to reach them offline.

I'd like to get into this journey a bit later on, but first, maybe one additional question to you as the marketplace guy here in the room.

For years we have been specializing and optimizing the marketplace channels, especially in those brands and retailers that are really good on in the marketplace business.

They have a highly specialized team working on that with great knowledge on how to excel in their marketplace.

For example, Amazon is one of those marketplaces that many brands have like one specialist, at least one specialist for or employ a whole agency who is only going for the Amazon angle here.

But what I'm hearing from Janine is that we actually now need these kind of expertise for nearly every channel that the customer is touching upon.

Is that even possible within the structures that a typical brand has for their E commerce at the moment?

Because what I'm often hearing is we are focusing on Amazon and maybe our DTC store and that's it.

And the rest, all the other marketplaces and the other channels are just running along because that's all we can give.

Yeah, definitely.

And I think that's always the tough one for the brands because also they have limited resource and they have to put the resource right.

So in the first step it should be like identifying what has the biggest impact and then look at, okay, what needs the kind of lowest resource input.

And based on this you can then identify, okay, what's the focus point?

I think it was Charlie Munger who said, once everyone tries to be smart, I just try not to be stupid.

But it's, well, not just on Amazon in commerce, but it's not, it's not enough.

Because when also here, let's look back maybe like 10 years, I always Try to look at these.

Amazon was super profitable already on the first purchase, you were like, able to scale.

Then we had like these covert time.

The supply was lower as the demands, like everything skyrocket.

And then there was like this big gap after Covid.

And I think this year is the first year.

Last year was the first year we're back on, like the growth levels.

So what I'm saying here is that also all this time, the disciplines you should be able to target as a brand, as an agency, as a freelancer, also heavily changed.

So it's more about being able to adapt and then still making the right decision instead of just doing no decisions.

Because also this is something, what we see with our partners, our brands, sometimes you think that they are afraid of doing decisions, but nowadays it's more about they are afraid of not doing decisions because the competitors will outsmart you.

And it's just the question about, like, are we able to, like, get the data, read the data, understand the customer, and then outpace the competition?

Because if you don't, then they will do it.

Because just let me add here two more sentences.

I think, and this is something I think I heard from Alexander Graf in one of his podcasts.

We are like coming from a growth market.

Everything tied up, everything was like organic growth.

And now we are more of a market of displacements.

And if you want to still grow in the marketplace, you have to take over market share.

And when you win market share, someone else is losing.

And I think the biggest challenge is here, being on the right side and hopefully not like on the loser side.

Janine, how do brands decide on the right side, you know, where to put their money, where to put the expertise, or where to build expertise.

Because as we just discussed, there is a wild variety of channels at the moment, and in north, in most brands, I think it's not possible to concentrate on all of them.

So how do you identify the key points, where you have to be and what you have to do?

I think that's a question that we could do another podcast session for if we would.

If you would want to go into detail, let me try to very, very much simplify this.

I think the one question that we need to answer when deciding which channels to go first is where the reach is and where the customers are and then where the most profitable businesses.

Like, that's the mix.

And now if as a brand we go into the market, what we typically have is a market strategy that Depending on the product, the pricing, the target group has a theory on which channels this product will reach the correct target group.

And now that could be a TikTok as a starting point for one of the younger brands.

So if I were putting out a lip balm today that has glitter in it, is transparent and is called Unicorn glue, I would probably put this out on TikTok and let the channel do its magic and then develop from there.

If I have a product that is very heavy on education, I would use channels and platforms that allow the target group, the customer, to go more into detail.

Is that TikTok depends on the age group.

Honestly, if we go into our millennials, I can ensure you that would be either the D2C shop, where we go for videos, for blog posts, for content, or even Amazon as the Discovery Channel.

But that leads back to the question of when you first start out as a brand, as a company with a product, what your initial theory is, what your customers will do with the product on the different channels, like what will be your reach channel, what will be the education channel, what will be the transaction, what will be the loyalty channel?

Is there a mathematic construct that we can immediately apply to it?

It's very hard to tell.

But where do we get the figures from that we need to inform this decision?

Correct.

The thing is, this issue was there from the start.

This is not something that develops.

Now with Connected Commerce, the question of where do you put the product first?

Started with the very first product that went out anywhere.

It doesn't really matter if that was Amazon, Erica, Reva or any other retailer that we had online.

The question is always where do you think your customers are?

And then go with a product there.

And that can be hit and miss.

And I mean, Daniel, as the one here with the private label experience, he has probably done a few experiments in deciding where to go first.

I would be cautious to say this is the golden rule and this is how you need to put this out.

But if you think Connected Commerce, you very much think of where your target group is, what the channel is that you're considering applying, and then what the customer will do with the product on that specific channel.

And then the answer could be that you start out with Amazon and develop from there.

It could be that you're starting with Social and D2C and then go into Amazon once you have a target group that's more intended on convenience.

But there's.

Well, I mean, if someone listens today and thinks that he or she has the golden rule to this, I Would be super interested to see it.

Well, maybe.

Daniel, isn't the AMC the Amazon marketing cloud here a possibility to gain data that you can also use outside of Amazon?

It is, but to be honest also here there will be definitely more work over the next month and years.

For now I think what we do with AMC it's more about like better understanding our cohorts.

For example, when we work with beauty brands, I would say most of the beauty brands are less than 20 bucks on Amazon, but you pay very high ACPCs like average cost per click.

So you have a customer acquisition cost CAC of sometimes of a higher less than 1.

So in the end the first purchase of customer isn't profitable.

So we always then argue with the customer lifetime value.

Because this is for example then something we can calculate with Amazon identifying customer lifetime value, then identifying the total rewards, not total worth based on sales, total worth based on last 12 months sales for these customer.

And then we can for example leverage deal events to generate and gain more new to brand customers.

When talking about amc, everyone is talking about like oh that's the holy grail we can do now everything with amc and when talking with brands or with partners, they are also then waiting for us to like unlock this holy grade for them.

Yes, we can do.

But also here with AMC following customers from one side to another site it's also possible.

But again here they are like anonymized.

So we don't see the IPs we just generate, let's call it audiences and segments and then we can like retarget on them and then we can identify, for example we call it kind of half of conversion.

So we see a customer seeing first a sponsored brand ad on Amazon and then seeing a sponsored product ad has for example a 1.5 times higher conversion rate than just a customer seeing a sponsored product ad.

So of course we shift more budget to sponsored brand ads and then target audio customers seeing a sponsored brand ad showing them a sponsored product ad.

But then in the next step you can also identify okay, what's the average customer lifetime value of a customer and how can we increase this customer lifetime value.

For example identifying a gate in product.

So a first product showing a new to brand customer and we see on the data that this product tends to generate a customer lifetime value of 100 versus product B generating a customer lifetime value of 200.

And then I would say it's quite clear, right?

We push all the budget on the product b to unlock YouTube brand customers.

But to be honest also this isn't like the full answer because then you have to go further, further, further.

And everyone is saying about AMC, that's solving and like answering and like all the answers, answering all the questions.

That makes sense.

But for me, AMC unlocks the potential of asking more and more and more and more questions.

So in the end, there is no end.

With Amazon, AMC's like the marketing cloud.

We get just the ability to like start raising more and more questions and then getting more data.

And based on the data we can make better decisions.

It's the brand that has the best like overview of the whole picture, like taking all the decisions, all the factors, all the kpas into account and then define the best answer.

But also this is like also something what we see more and more often.

Also taking or making the wrong decision isn't bad because then you just need to pivot, have more data and can then also speed up again and use this data.

I think I need to back up to the question of brands under pressure, both when it comes to manpower and cost efficiency and also because we are still in the crisis situation.

Of course, because you have been talking a lot about customer lifetime value, but this is a KPI that pays off in the long run but is not very good for, I don't know, your monthly or half yearly reports that you have to hand over to your boss as a marketplace manager, for example.

And also this whole connected commerce idea has, from the point of view of the teams that are now working, the problem of, okay, who is actually responsible for the sale, who is actually bringing the brand forward and who can argue as soon as, you know, the edit, the shortenings come along and the CFO comes along and says, okay, we have to kick out a few people who can be safe from that because they have contributed the most to the brand's success.

So how do you work with this very human component of someone's got to be responsible, maybe Janine.

Yeah, I think I want to take that one because I had this thought a few minutes ago when you guys talked about how are we actually supposed to do this?

How are brands supposed to make that stretch to cover more channels, go into more customized content for the different channels, but for me is important is to take the daunting factor a bit out of it because yes, it's more channels, but what we are aiming for at the moment is something that is super simple and yet seems to be One of the biggest issues when trying to put the resources to work, and that is indeed the silo thinking because a lot of teams produce a lot of content, work, marketing material for these different channels.

What we often see, and we are guilty for that ourselves, it's one of the main points that we are working on for us and for our clients is there's so much work that's been done double, there's so much miscommunication and non communication between the different departments.

So one thing that urgently needs to happen is this thinking of, well, I'm not just responsible for putting everything out here on my channel, but there needs to be a central view on what the actual material is, what the positioning is, what the messaging is, the creatives are.

And those need to be distributed way, way better and more efficient.

And communication in between teams can absolutely do that.

So for me it's not a question of do I need to hire five more people?

No, the people that are already in there and responsible for the different channels need to start talking to each other and communicating and not just thinking in this is where I live and everything else is not my responsibility.

And then what needs to happen, and I think this is something that's super interesting and parallel is yes, figuring out the question of if these teams work together more, if they align more, if the resources are being stretched so that we can cover more, how do we then measure success on these channels?

And what a lot of brands are trying to answer at the moment is how can they move away from a last click or last touch attribution model, which is the death of cooperation, to a revenue share reporting.

So if TikTok, Amazon and D2C and Google were involved in a specific purchase and in that decision, how can we actually attribute this so that I don't know.

We have a €100 order, Amazon gets abstributed €50, D2C, shop 20, TikTok 5 and so forth.

Being able to generate that kind of reporting so that we are not just going by who was the last one to touch this customer, but having a view on which channel was actually contributing.

I think that will be one of the key elements to make this work because then people are incentivized not on the I need to get this conversion and if it doesn't come on my channel, I just throw media budget on it.

But to a common understanding of we are producing revenue for the company, we are producing conversions and we are tied to not only the one that's last attributed to us, but we have a hand on in every single one of these conversions.

But that's going to be a tough one.

And I mean we are talking, I think this is also important to put there.

We're talking about this super early.

Yes, there has been this approach of Omni Channel and I couldn't agree more with Daniel there, that that was a nice try.

But what this generated was just silos that lived next to each other and it took a while to even build out that.

So getting to a really connected approach here so that resources are shared, strategies are shared, journey touch points, channels are covered and then at the end of the day we can actually report on contribution instead of last touch.

That's the task that we have before us for the coming months.

I needed to look a bit at the time, but I would like to open a topic that has been, I don't know, the elephant in the room that we haven't been talking about so far.

But everything that you said up to now boils down to that.

And that is agent E commerce, of course.

I mean, the use of an AI agent to help me shop absolutely removes all these nice little silos that we have built up because, well, they don't care about that.

So do you think that connected commerce is the answer to agentic commerce for brands to be still visible in an agentic world?

Janine.

The question of agentic commerce is in the first sense a question of is your data done properly?

Agentic commerce as it lives today is a visibility channel.

It's another channel for reach for recommendations.

So for sure a bit of the traffic and the reach that was formerly on Amazon on The shop on TikTok is moving again.

I would and this is kind of funny because I'm typically not the positive person in the group, but I think it's really easy to take the fear out of it and the concern out of it if you remind yourself that this is again just another channel that comes into the mix.

And the question then is, what will looking into the future, the customer do with this channel?

And you will have people that use this for research.

You will have people who use this for convenience.

Will we get to a point where someone buys a €500 laptop of ChatGPT?

I don't know.

But then again, millennial here.

So I still need to open my laptop to book a travel that's more than, I don't know, €100 because I feel that's too dangerous on my mobile phone.

Now it's a question of what's this channel going to be in the bigger scheme of connected commerce.

Is it going to be just another checkout?

Is it going to be education discovery?

Will budgets and revenue shift a bit?

Yes.

Will that hurt us as a brand if we do it proper?

No, because it's just another reach point for us that we can connect with with the customer.

But yes, we won't be able to put in the nice pictures that we would have on the Amazon PDP or on the webshop.

But then again, what would be the intent of the customer in that particular channel?

Information, Convenience.

A quick decision.

Not fun, not engagement, not brand.

That will looking at it from the D2C and the CRM perspective, that will not be the purpose of agentic AI in that sense.

Last question.

Because we have been very strategic and very looking into the future.

And as you said, Janine, this is still early days when it comes to a fully connected commerce sense.

But still, let's get it a bit down to earth in the end.

Daniel.

If a brand is fully siloed today, like on Amazon here, and they have a D2C shop maybe and some socials and the rest of the marketplace is somewhere off to the side, so what could they start or what could they move on?

I don't know.

Next Monday could be towards more connected commerce.

What would be the first step?

So what I always try to do is like put the Amazon responsible person, the D2C responsible person, the person who's like leading influenza in just one room, lock the door, give them just the whiteboard, no laptops, no phones, and like one task.

And they should describe or draw the customer journey, the full customer journey, just one customer.

Like no demographics, just one customer.

How they think the customer will move and interact with the brand.

And most of the cases there's like awkward silence for five to ten minutes.

Then someone starts drawing something and then there's like, yeah, they're seeing ads.

And then from influencers.

I know they don't see the ads.

They come because they saw the product first on, I don't know, influenza X, epsilon Z.

And then the other one is, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I retargeted them.

It's actually, it's from CRM.

And all of a sudden you see there's like a lot of confusion, a lot of no structure.

And once they look at the board and they see that everything is super unstructured, they can't overlook it anymore.

And then they really understand that they need to work close together because otherwise they won't be able to scale.

Let me give you a good example of What I had like over the last weeks.

So we are supporting BUBUENT in the U.S. they are selling toothpaste and actually we're just doing the Amazon part of the scope.

And then all of a sudden we saw a huge spike in sales.

We identify okay, where the sales coming from.

Turns out that the branded search volume increased by over 500% from for four weeks.

So we went back, talked with our contact persons and it came out that they had like a linear TV ad running for I don't know, two weeks or one week in the U.S. so just looking from the D2C site, does these TV ads or does it really drive sales in the D2C shop?

It didn't.

But when taking also these Amazon sales onto account, it was a huge success.

So also this because I think you also touched the point about is it a mindset?

Is it incentivization?

What is the issue here?

And I think it's, it's incentivization because when the Amazon account manager just needs to optimize towards ROAS and the D2C manager has to optimize towards to maximize the sales, they end off cannibalizing each other because ideally they should invest, for example D2C budget very on the upper funnel, top of the funnel and then on Amazon we generate the sales.

So in the end it's not about like channel performance, it's more about like overall brand contribution.

And I think that should be the North Star for the next year.

So like identifying the what's the impact of every asset you're doing on the marketplace or on social or wherever.

So what's the impact and really understand that and then go backwards and try to do more of it or do less of it.

And that's so easy.

Seems to be easy.

It's not.

But I just wanted to say I wouldn't have put it like this is easy actually, but at least it's a very interesting way to go and a new way to think E commerce as well.

Well, let's see, as you put it rightly, Janine, I guess we could talk about this topic for much longer, but for now I think we leave it at this and maybe we'll come back to this again with an example, for example, with a brand who is already doing it or going on the journey of connected commerce.

That might be an interesting next installment for this.

But for now, thanks to you two and for this introduction to connected commerce.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, and thank you everyone out there for joining us and for your patience.

I know it's a bit longer than your usual episode of let's Talk Marketplace, but, well, if there's lots to talk about, you just need to take the time for that.

So thank you for that, and I hope you'll join us again next time.

Bye.

Bye.

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The Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lommer and.

And Baneridichtel.