Storm: the do's and don't of ecommerce
We sat down to chat with Marc van der Putten, Business Development Manager at STORM. Join us for this four-part series as we learn about successful E-commerce strategy and platform. As STORM’s chosen content partner, we are proud to have helped the team elevate their online digital presence.
Part one of four:
Following a 22-year career in digital design, consultancy and management roles you could just about call Marc a digital pioneer in the local market. He has built his career on getting his hands dirty and constantly reinventing himself as digital has evolved.
STORM is a very well-established brand in the NZ market with over 13 years of operational history and a loyal and diverse customer base. Marc’s role encompasses operational activities including digital and marketing communications, contributing to the development of new business and emerging markets.
Transcript:
My names Marc van der Putten and I work for STORM clothing as their development manager. Ive been with STORM since May 2018. My role does see some general management, but the business development is a good descriptor of the effectiveness my role needs to take in the business. That’s production, digital and a retail component.
There are distinct challenges for retail and online. The challenge for a lot of people is to see them as one, not two distinct parts. That is a challenge because we have this engrained thought that web does one thing and store does another. In fact, they work together to compliment each other.
When you have frequency of product, customers aren’t going to walk into a store and see that. You need web to show the frequency to build that relationship with the customer. With the side of things, that can do things that web can’t. It allows customers to try things on, touch the fabric and build human relationships with people in the store. For us as a business, the challenge has been taking these two seperate parts and really joining them as one.
Do’s and don’t of an ecommerce strategy. The biggest constant to any business is yourself. Usually those road blocks are us. A lot of businesses like to think they are customer-centric, but unless you are actually thinking like the customer, if you’re not role-playing as the customer, when you set marketing and coms strategies. Say, “I’m the customer, what do I want. Is it meaningful to me and would I engage with that?” That is something in the business, I am very adamant about.
I think one of the key things is to not stop developing. We have a really strong customer support team. I am always listening to those calls because that is where the gold is.
Customers are smart. They surf all the websites and they have, sometimes, more experience than we do. They have an expectation and its our job to meet that. Usually that means developing. A good example of this is abandoned carts. If you have a strategy to ask those customers “hey, are you sure…” You can crawl back about 13% of those sales. So, that’s a good example. I have a saying, “rinse and repeat”. Rinse out the stuff that doesn’t work and repeat the stuff that does. Go to analytics and go “is that qualified”. Just keep doing that.