Day one of Online Retailer: Going global and keeping the customer happy

Elevating the customer experience, going global and tapping into marketplaces were the common threads connecting the keynotes on day one of Online Retailer, Australia’s largest e-commerce conference and expo in Sydney.

Over two days from July 24-25, the retail community has congregated to hear from some of the world’s leading retailers and retail suppliers – from online fashion retailer Revolve to Shopify.

Topics at this year’s event include future proofing, optimising functionality and international expansion.

Retail executives shared their approaches to elevating the customer experience, with tech integration and value-adds other than price as well as localisation.

Going global

Gary Starr, executive general manager for parcel, post and e-commerce service at Australia Post commenced the conference with an opening keynote on future-proofing across the omnichannel and pureplay e-commerce space and providing a seamless customer experience.

This seamlessly flowed to a keynote from Kai Li, SVP of international at Revolve Group, on his playbook for going global and the importance of identifying ideal customers.

Li emphasised how Revolve used data to identify the market opportunities in Mexico, and shared that customers with a purchasing frequency of 3-5 times a year were Revolve’s sweet spot.

“We worked on retention and it’s not to say the person who bought 177 times is not an ideal customer – we love her, she’s the best customer we got. But at the same time she’s also probably the most recognised celebrity,” Li said.

“We’re looking for a segment of customer now we can acquire in the mass.

“It’s showing that the potential for us in Mexico is millions [of dollars] even though the income [of consumers there] is substantially lower income than [in the US],” Li said.

Influencer marketing

Revolve works with a network of over 40,000 influencers globally, so influencer marketing is a major driver of brand awareness, Li said.

“I was in Italy just a few weeks ago and everybody mentioned Coachella because they associate Coachella with Revolve,” he said.

Li went on to explain the importance of localisation: “We always start working locally,” he said.

Answering questions from the audience, Li detailed the importance of the “few things you do that really stick in people’s minds”.

For Revolve, one is doing a lot of smaller activations that build up brand awareness and the second is doing major activations like the Revolve Festival at Coachella. Simultaneously weaving these in with smaller activations, such as influencer collaborations, is key.

A query on post-sales support led Li to share Revolve’s approach to localisation and the importance of operating in each market’s native language.

“For example in Germany, 89 per cent of customers that shop on Revolve choose German as a checkout language. If you’re sending an order confirmation or shipping confirmation in a different language, the customer will be confused.

“So absolutely tracking and confirmation emails need to be in foreign languages,” Li said. 

“We often forget [to do this]. You want to also to localise content onto different apps – for example, WhatsApp translates the content itself – and also try to localise the delivery mechanism flows of content,” Li said.

He emphasised how first-party data unlocks opportunities tooptimise the business and said that retailers should think about switching from a third-party solution to exploring ways to collect, collate and use it themselves.

Li’s keynote highlighted how loyalty has changed and a points system won’t build it anymore, and that sometimes loyalty is service, price and customer service.

Marketplaces

In a fireside chat, Mark Mansour, chief development and strategy officer at Woolworths Market Plus, and Paul Greenberg, founder of NORA and an independent director at MyDeal and Woolworths Market Plus, discussed how retailers can capitalise on the opportunities around online marketplaces.

“We’re a traditional bricks-and-clicks retailer and a part of our growth strategy is enabling better experiences for customers. How we do that is by bringing on sellers and partners to extend the range on Woolworths online, across our destination marketplace with MyDeal, and also our new and emerging marketplace which is Big W Market,” Mansour said.

“So customers who shop on Big W Market can buy the products they wouldn’t find in a Big W store,” Mansour added.

Mansour said that Woolworths has opened up the platform to sell hundreds of thousands of products that it doesn’t stock in stores. 

“I’m really passionate about the marketplace model, I love working with sellers and helping businesses growl,” he said.

“As a retailer, you’ve got a fish where the fish are. You’ve got to have lots of rods in lots of different ponds.

“I think that as an underlying philosophy in terms of how you think about growing through marketplaces is an important philosophy to anchor on.” 

However, with more than 30 local marketplaces in Australia now competing with a growing number of global ones, the competition in this space is intensifying.

Mansour and Greenberg discussed the importance of forming the right kind of marketplace partnership and said that retailers should approach marketpalces as a digital extension of a mall.

“The marketplace removes barriers, we sell everything from air fyers to trampolines,” Greenberg said in reference to MyDeal, which offers a much wider range of products compared to Woolworths Market Plus and Big W Market, which are more targeted and niche.

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