Welcome back.
It’s time for our fourth exclusive interview with experts at the forefront of eCommerce.
We sat down with James Gurd, eCommerce Strategy and Technology Consultant, to talk about the huge shifts online shopping has seen in recent years, what this means for retailers’ platforms and websites, and how brands can more intelligently serve the shoppers landing on their site.
Dig into our Q&A and find out how new tools are reshaping eCommerce, how to better understand customer intent and create unique, customised journeys to sale – and how to avoid digitally ”shouting in the face” of your customer.
About James
James is an eCommerce strategy and tech consultant with over 20 years’ experience working with the biggest B2C and B2B brands including Samsung, Mars, FatFace, House of Fraser and Sage. Brands call on him to help fix their eCommerce issues, from drawing up roadmaps and maximising budgets to replatforming projects and strategically building out their tech stacks.
He’s also one of the hosts of Inside Commerce – a weekly eCommerce podcast, launched in 2019, that shares strategy insights and practical CX advice, as well as interviews with industry leaders and tips on making better tech decisions.
1. How have you seen eCommerce evolve over the past five years?
One of the main things that’s changed is that the path to purchase has become a lot more complex and harder to measure. There’s a lot of channel proliferation – if you look at the social media space, for example, you’ve got more social channels, like TikTok, and regional and local options too. This makes it harder for retailers to know exactly how to execute their content strategies and how to adapt offerings and promotions to specific audiences.
The demographics of those channels are also shifting. There’s a misconception that TikTok is for the younger generations but we can see there’s decent growth among older users too. Prescriptive ideas about demographics won’t work – retailers need to think a little bit smarter about how and who they’re targeting.
Then there’s the changes around privacy and cookie blocking. This shift has made measuring harder and it means retailers are being pushed further into areas like first-party data collection and cookie-less tracking. They’re having to spend more time and effort finding partners who understand data measurement and tracking correctly. But this is absolutely crucial because if you’ve got inaccurate measurements, you’re making inaccurate business decisions. You’ll be optimising your media spend based on incorrect data and you’ll end up driving poor-performing traffic. But you’ll only find out later on, when your Customer Lifetime Value starts to drop.
On top of all this, the landscape is hyper-competitive. Everyone’s scrambling with traffic, acquisition costs are going up, and it’s more challenging than ever to be profitable.
2. How are shoppers’ interactions with a website changing?
We’ve seen a huge shift in customer behaviour in recent years. Purchases are increasingly happening away from websites and now, with the growth of AI, we’re seeing more traffic coming in from LLMs and Agentic AI. Tech companies are developing tools that reinforce this behaviour: Google’s AI Overview function does the searching for the shopper and PayPal’s new Storefront Ads feature collapses the journey from advert to checkout.
All this means that the role of the website has to change. It’s now not just about getting conversions but also about ensuring the data and information that’s provided is accurate.
In this context, eCommerce teams need to think deeply about the purpose of their website – how their site and its content serves the new channels shoppers are using and, ultimately, how they serve the customer.
3. You’ve touched on some of the new tools that are impacting eCommerce. Can you talk a little more about how eCommerce’s approach to technology has changed?
A decade ago, eCommerce teams followed a ‘rip and replace’ model. If their platform was no longer fit for purpose, or they wanted a more modern one, or their cost model wasn’t right, they’d just rip up and replace everything. So this would happen every three to five years and it was incredibly disruptive.
Now we’re seeing the shift to composable commerce. You create a platform that’s open, from an API and connectivity point of view, that you can plug other specialist tools into. It’s much easier, then, if you buy into the right platform, to expand your capabilities and customer offering and you don’t have to rip everything up to move forward.
For instance, one of the key features you might want to add is an order editing feature. A big frustration for customer service teams is when a customer places an order and then they want to change it – maybe they order an item in the wrong size, or want to add an extra pair of socks, or amend their address. Often a retailer will say it’s too late and the customer will have to cancel their order, get a refund, place an entire new order…and it’s very frustrating. But if there was a 30 minute window to edit an order before it was finalised, this would be completely avoided. There are now specialist apps like Order Editing that enable this, initially focused on Shopify, but with a roadmap to extend into other vendor ecosystems. The app-based approach means the data integration work is done with the platform, speeding up implementation and reducing integration costs.
Overall, there’s been a massive shift in the market away from expecting a single vendor to provide all your ecommerce functionality towards flexibility. Flexibility has become a key priority for eCommerce teams.
And AI tooling is helping teams build out their platforms and greatly speed up their work. It can be used to generate foundational code – that’s then refined by an experienced engineer – as well as quickly spot any errors or gaps in lines of code, and it can be used to automate things like SEO content for website pages, for example.
4. So retailers can more easily adapt their platforms to market shifts and changes in customer behaviour - what can they do to build websites that better cater to customer intent?
The number one thing is not having a standardised user journey for every session. That’s your starting point. There’ll be people coming to your site who are in research mode – they’re not yet committed to your brand or the product – and then there’ll be those who know exactly what they want and they need a frictionless shopping experience.
How do you detect that intent? There are platforms that specialise in providing intent measurement but retailers can also look at analytics events to get a sense of a customer’s mission. For instance, you could examine the number of visits to a specific product page. If you know that it takes, on average, four to five visits before a conversion event, then the last thing you want to do on someone’s first visit is slap a ‘10% off your first order’ across their screen.
That’s basically like a customer walking into a store and you jumping in front of them and shouting in their face.
What you want to do instead is look at that particular journey and think, “well, maybe on the first page visit we don’t want to do anything because a shopper is just in research mode. Maybe we want to rely on our remarketing campaigns to drive return visits. On the second visit, instead of focusing on selling tactics, maybe it’s better to nudge them to speak to the customer service team, or download a guide, or share customer testimonials. All these tactics engender greater buy-in to that brand or product journey. It’s all about anticipating what a customer wants, and understanding their intent.
Intent starts with the analytics of understanding a user journey – working out where people are coming from and which traffic sources are an indication of a purchase intent versus the research stage. It’s that intelligence to know what is genuinely a new user arriving on your site, compared to a shopper that’s returning. And it’s the ability to adapt your approach to each shopper, depending on how much they know about you and whether they’re ready to commit to a purchase.
There are specialist tools like Made With Intent & FoundIt! that track intent signals to help ecommerce brands push intent data into onsite merchandising and content management tools to differentiate the customer experience.
I sometimes find that eCommerce teams can get distracted by the shiny and new and lose focus on what’s fundamental to their work. Success comes from keeping up to date with your analytics, tracking, and continuously measuring while things keep changing.
Data is absolutely crucial: if your data is compromised, so is your decision-making.
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5. Creating a meaningful site experience
As more and more factors pull shoppers away from retailers’ sites, brands need to change their tactics. There’s a world of new tools available to make customers’ lives easier but they’ll still bounce away if businesses don’t grasp each customer’s intent. This begins with the data – continuously and intelligently analysing user behaviour so their mission can become yours too. This is how you grow revenue without torching ad spend.
Are you ready to get intent-led with your approach to commerce? Join our intent-led community and receive the latest updates by following FoundIt! on LinkedIn – and for regular tips and insight delivered straight into your inbox, you can subscribe to our newsletter too.
