IMRG’s Andy Mulcahy recently hosted Comestri’s Stuart Barker (General Manager – Europe) for their Quick-fire Q&A Series. Check out the video on LinkedIn for insights on:

• How are retailers addressing these barriers, and what opportunities are they missing if they don’t?
• Why do retailers need to make their data work harder?
• What trends do you think will be the biggest over the next 3-5 years

Click through to watch the video on LinkedIn, or see the transcript below. Like to know more? Let’s chat.

STUART BARKER

General Manager – Europe

ANDY:

Hello thank you for joining us for this latest IMRG Linkedin live. We are IMRG. We’re a trade body for online retail in the UK. So the main thing that we do is we take the data from lots of retailers and we measure the market to understand how performance is going, and identifying trends and things like that.

One thing that is most certainly a trend at the moment is that we’ve had the pandemic boom online – lots and lots of volume moved online, but we seem to now be coming out of that and moving into a phase which is basically all the stuff that you hear in the news all the time; so the big increases in the cost of living… what we’re hearing from a lot of people is they see very sort of frenetic patterns of trade – so if you balance it our overall, it’s kind of OK, but it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen when they launch some activity, whether people are going to respond to it or not. Things are getting a bit tougher, people tightening up their belts, taking a bit longer to make purchase decisions… conversions are dropping away abit as well. So a very difficult situation basically the the moment. But what we’re going to talk about today is some of the barriers to scale and how retailers might be able to overcome that stuff, so given all that stuff that ‘ve just talked about, you‘ve still got to try and do well – so how can we do this?

Who I’ve got with me today is Stuart from Comestri, and we’re going to have a bit of a chat about that. So Stuart – introduce yourself.

STUART:

Hey there Andy, thanks for having me here today. My name is Stuart Barker, I’m the General Manager for Comestri here in Europe. Comestri is a software as a service company. We’re actually pioneering a really interesting piece of technology combining the benefits of PIM, channel connectivity and order management and by doing so, we create this wonderful thing like commerce flow; goods in and goods out, managing that whole process and helping retailers extract maximum value from that journey.

ANDY:

Excellent. Ok. So I mentioned in the beginning there – barriers to scale, what the barriers are retailing are facing. Might be useful for you to just define actually what you mean by barriers to scale and what they are?

STUART:

I think the vast majority of retailers have had a real rock and roll couple of years, and I think there’s been a mentality of kind of make-do and mend, so a lot of organic growth has happened in the stack, they’ve been adding in new components, they’ve been gearing up and scaling up. But it’s all happened without a great deal of planning because they’ve been doing it in the moment and have been extremely responsive to the market conditions. I think now what that’s leading to is a period of consolidation and a requirement for these people to basically get organised; to create that flow that I’ve just discussed – goods-in to goods-out, managing every stage of that and maximising their opportunity. What we’re seeing now is a huge amount of retailers really making the effort now to consolidate, to make sure that the stack they’re holding today is one that will look after them for the next 4 or 5 years, and that overarching desire just to get organised around commerce execution and activity.

ANDY:

I’m just thinking about how they might overcome those barriers, and the sort of opportunities that they are not necessarily going to take advantage of if they don’t address them?

STUART:

We’re seeing a lot happening at the moment in the industry, and one of the big trends we’re seeing is the emergence of headless. Right now headless in my mind is the ability to create great clarity and great control around the stack and your commerce capability, and we’re seeing huge amounts of innovation and huge amounts of money flowing into this sort of headless capability. I think people are realising that if they can get better structure, if they can make their data available in more places, that’s allowing them to put more products in front of more consumers, and of course that’s the essence of great scale. If we can be displaying out products to consumers in new places and new territories, we can drive additional revenue. But to do that, we have to be really good at our foundational retail capabilities; we’ve got to be really good at bringing products into the organisation, getting it prepared and ready for discovery, publishing it where the consumers are (where they can shop) and then of course there’s no point publishing a product if you can’t distribute it and fulfil it. Then again you’ve got that downstream requirement to make sure that your delivery promise is maintained, and the consumer actually receives the goods they’re hoping to and they’ve paid money for.

ANDY:

So the key to all that then, as with so many things I suppose, is getting the most out of the data that you’ve got?

STUART:

Yeh – exactly that. This is really where the effort that we’re seeing is going in now for retailers, and I think what’s interesting for me and if I look at my own personal background, I spent a lot of time working in the email and CRM space. What’s always astounded me actually is that the vast majority of retailers have got more information on the customers that shop with them, than they have on the products on their own shelves. A typical CRM system, with the postcode and the delivery address and all the rest of it – they know who you are, right, with their click history and purchase history, they can have a really good understanding of who you are. What I’m finding a lot of is that retailers don’t have the same understanding of the products that they’re selling; often it’s skeletal a best, and really – when you’re looking to scale – you’ve got to make sure you’re talking about the right products to the right people, and you can’t do that unless you’ve got a really good understanding of the products that you’re selling. And this is something we’re seeing all the time now, which is people looking to make investments in product data, they’re looking to make that product data easy to surface no matter where it is, because really, that’s the foundation stone of scaling a business. You’ve got to have inventory to sell where our consumers can buy it. You’ve got to describe that inventory, you’ve got to make it discoverable, you’ve got to make sure the consumer clearly understand what it is they’re buying, and we’re seeing a lot of effort now going into that product data, completing that product data set, and making it highly available.

ANDY:

We talk about data; what is it actually recognised? For a lot of people, it’s kind of stuff in Excel documents and stuff like that, isn’t it? So you’re saying that there’s a better way to do this stuff?

STUART:

This goes right up to the top of the conversation, and it’s about getting organised. Now look, Comestri, within our platform, we have a PIM – we have a Product Information Management platform which allows a retailer to consolidate and manage their product data in a single place. It is frightening how many retailers are still operating off Excel spreadsheets – frightening! It’s impossible to scale on that basis; you can’t syndicate products, you can’t manage product, you can’t publish product, you don’t know what your available to sell is and you’ve got no control over your organisation if you’re not creating live data sets to provide your product. That’s one of the key things that we’re solving for our retail partners and customers; it’s just helping them to get an understanding of what inventory they have, where it is and how it’s available. We’re seeing now a huge amount of budget from the market moving into product information management platform just like Comestri’s and that’s certainly something that we’re very excited to see because it’s the foundation stone of growth and scale. If you can understand what it is you have to sell, where it is – physically where it is located so those delivery promises can really be surfaced, then you’ve got a really good chance of actually making something important happen and growing the retail basis.

ANDY:

And so with the sort of reason that you would use a PIM; having all your information, it enables you to go out into different areas, right? So it isn’t just your website, it’s the fact that there’s all these channels and marketplaces… it’s the sort of central part of that play.

STUART:

Yes. There’s two things a PIM does for an organisation – the first thing that’s really important is it allows you to properly describe your product, and that allows your product to be properly discovered. So here is a search engine and performance marketing payoff. The better able you are to talk about your product, the better someone is able to find it, and that’s the first thing. The second thing that PIM’s are really unlocking for retailers is what I call ‘product syndication’ – the ability to publish your product where consumers are and one of the big things we’re seeing happening is obviously marketplaces, they’re increasing now in number, and they’re presenting really good opportunities for retailers to try new territories, to try new ranges, maybe they can think about different stock categories and maybe distressed or discounted stock can be pushed into these environments, but you can only do this if you’re organised. You can only do this if the product is available, if it can be easily syndicated and if it can be well described. Even on a marketplace, you’ve got a discovery challenge – consumers still need to find the product that they want to buy, and that means you have to be responding to their search terms, you have to be making sure that they can find what they want in the easiest possible way. And that is really what the PIM is doing for organisation; it’s creating both the enriched data structure that helps consumers discover and it’s enabling really, this easy syndication into websites, marketplaces and different channels.

ANDY:

By definition – if you get your stuff onto a marketplace, there’s loads more stuff on there – that’s kind of a lot of places?

STUART:

Yeh and look – that’s a battle that retailers are going to have to fight and win. It’s one thing to have a really good understanding of what people are searching for on your own website, and using that information. It’s another thing to have the same capability and the same advantage when you’re dealing with eBay or Amazon or Farfetch, or whatever it may be. So again, enriching that product, giving that search engine on that marketplace the best possible opportunity to discover your product over one of your competitors is the difference between good and bad retail.

ANDY:

There’s a sort of closing through really. I just wanted to get an idea from you as to what you think the trends would be in the next 3 – 5 years. I mentioned at the beginning – you had the pandemic boom, you now seem to be in a difficult phase that will probably last at least this year – who knows what the future holds – but take a slightly longer view then that. What do you think are going to be the trends?

STUART:

The first thing is – we just touched on it now – marketplaces. They’re not going anywhere so increasingly now I think retailers are looking to participate. In fact, own the marketplace economy, and we’re going to see more and more of that. And that creates two opportunities, but two imperatives. The first one is if you’re going to be a marketplace, you have to do that well. There are technology providers that are helping retailers to go on that journey. If you are a retailer, you now need to understand where your marketplaces are; who is it you should be selling to, where should you be engaging… and that turns into a technology challenge. It’s an integration challenge. It’s about presenting your data and being successful in that environment. That’s definitely one trend. The second trend I think is really interesting is this notion of personalisation of the commerce layer which is being unlocked by headless. We’ve had personalisation in commerce but it hasn’t got much further really than product recommendation and people that bought this also bought that. What we’re starting to see now with the emergence of the headless stacks is the genuine opportunity to integrate customer data and customer sentiment into the ecommerce personalisation layer. This is much more than just the products, it’s about how we display the store, what kind of environment we want a consumer to land on from a home page and landing page perspective. I’m expecting to see a lot more personalisation, a lot more content requirements being driven into that ecommerce layer, and that’s something certainly we can see budget moving towards; the emergence of the MACH alliance, and the technologies that are participating in that space is clearly leading the way in driving those personalisation outcomes in the ecommerce layer.

ANDY:

There’s a whole lot of terms there that you could spend quite a lot of time talking about, but we’re out of time. Thanks very much Stuart.