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29 articles in Tips
AI does not only make development faster, it moves the capability out into the whole organisation. Suddenly anyone can build and change things in the systems. It is enormously powerful, but combined with old ways of working it leads to either chaos or no effect at all. Here is how you lead the shift from tree-tender to forest ranger before entropy runs away from you.
Technical debt is more than a technical concept, it is a business-critical reality that affects everything from time-to-market to customer experience. In e-commerce, where every millisecond and every click counts, the choices you make in your technical platform can have far-reaching consequences. When quick fixes are prioritised over long-term durability, an invisible but growing debt is built up. It affects not only development speed and stability, but at worst can slow the company's ability to innovate and compete. To face the future the right way, technical debt has to be understood, quantified and managed as the strategic investment it actually is.
For Swedish retailers there are plenty of ways to meet this threat by building on what the Chinese giants cannot offer: strong local brand stories, product safety and sustainability as competitive advantages, and a presence that ties digital and physical commerce together. Temu has no stores. Yet.
Price changes in e-commerce are often planned in advance and scheduled: either a change to the list price or a campaign price that takes effect on a specific date. Getting every system to show the new price at the right moment is a harder challenge than you might think, and in this article we walk through how to solve it with Nexus.
Syncing data between your e-commerce system and your search engine is something every e-commerce operator faces when they want an external search engine like Algolia, Voyado Elevate, Loop 54 or similar. In this article we walk through how to build that sync using Commerce Mind's tool Nexus.
Communicating with others is harder than you might think. It is also one of the most important success factors in any project, because if we can understand each other, we can also work together. I have collected a few things that I think make a real difference day to day. It may sound obvious, but I have seen more than one project fail because of poor communication. With small means you can influence more than you think.
Can you sell a house with e-commerce logic? To us in the e-commerce world, the question sounds almost absurd. 'Of course you can!' we all shout, fire a confetti cannon and laugh happily.
Commerce Mind Nexus is a free framework we have built to help our clients improve their background processes and data flows, but above all to give visibility and control over them to non-technical people.
Tobias Bergström at Commerce Mind was recently interviewed by the e-commerce company Litium for their newsletter. As a fully independent e-commerce expert, he was asked how he sees the development of B2B e-commerce over the slightly unreal horizon of 5 to 10 years. We thought we would share his thoughts here.
Choosing an e-commerce platform is not simple. At Commerce Mind we try to keep track of the market and have a process for choosing well and for the long term. It is not easy, but we are here for you if you need support. There are no perfect choices.
'Go headless, and the hard part is solved.' A claim I have heard many times in recent years. The freedom to pick isolated systems that fit your specific needs, that can be swapped out, that can scale, where you pay only for what you use. It sounds like a dream. But if it really is that simple, why is not everyone doing it?
When you are looking for a new e-commerce solution or platform, there are terms often used as arguments for why you should pick that particular vendor. The labels are many: accelerator, framework, boilerplate, starter site, storefront, kick-off code base and so on. Let us try to untangle what they are and why they exist.
There are many KPIs, and sometimes you may wonder which one is the most important. But maybe there are other things that matter more, or how should you think about it?
Many factors move customers further down the funnel and, hopefully, all the way to the transaction. The customer journey you mapped out in PowerPoint at that workshop a few years ago was logical and sound, but it has very little to do with your customers' reality today. Your customers now have a wealth of information at their fingertips thanks to an abundance of digital devices and information and transaction channels. Today's customer journey is largely omnichannel and involves plenty of activity that has nothing to do with you as a company. So how do you drive your e-commerce conversions and optimise your buyer's journey?
Keeping accurate stock levels for your items across all systems is a harder problem than it might first appear. How much revenue are you losing because you do not dare trust your own stock levels and always keep a buffer to be on the safe side?
Is your company also chipping away at an RFP or RFI with a hefty Excel list of requirements attached? Then you are far from alone, and this article is for you. After reading and answering a great many procurement documents, I have a good sense of what the process looks like and how little it has changed over time. Today the process is set up so the platform and vendor can build their answers based on your requirement list and wishes, which you have been kind enough to share with a selection of platforms and partners.
One thing I have been told over the years is that I often manage to put together good teams, teams that are efficient, that deliver, and that enjoy working together. What is the secret to building a team like that, and how do you do it?
The vendor of a new e-commerce system will hopefully ask you a few fundamental questions, and here are some tips on what you can prepare answers for to make the conversation better and give everyone a good chance to be relevant. Who knows, you might gain a few insights yourself along the way.
If you run both e-commerce and physical stores, there are a few relatively simple things you can do to connect the stores with your online business. It creates an omnichannel experience for the end customer, and promoting e-commerce in stores or the other way around creates synergies that can lift overall revenue.
Choosing an e-commerce system is something you end up doing surprisingly often as a successful e-commerce operator. You start with a simple system that you outgrow. You switch, some things get better, some get worse. A few years later it is time again. But how do you choose the right one? How do you avoid buying a pig in a poke?
You need to be on top of performance and technology today. Andrew Golrang is a well-known figure in the industry who helped take Cervera to new omnichannel heights and sales records. He has just changed jobs and is now Product Director at Voyado, but he remembers a Black Friday from long ago.
We had a chat with André Ihlar, Online Sales Manager at Lyko, about how he approaches Black Friday after all these years. Both ahead of and during the campaign, you have to factor in that impressions, clicks and conversion rates rise sharply during these days, and you should monitor both spend and results actively to a much greater extent. Lyko runs hard campaigns throughout the week every year, so they must have taken some hits and learned along the way.
When most people hear about Black Week, they think about selling as much as possible in a limited time. Let's hope many have also thought about how all of it will actually be delivered. We gathered a few tips from the independent logistics company Proflow that we are happy to share. You have thought about everything, right?
If you follow the security conversation, you know it is not only the buyers who look forward to this period. Those with a different sort of intent are also rubbing their hands right now. Phishing emails, ransomware operators and outright DDoS attacks tend to increase during Black Week, when focus is on other things and traffic is high.
At Commerce Mind we have talked to a few industry figures, and every day this week we will share their thoughts and ours on Black Friday. Follow along as we bring you takes and tips from Alexandra Dornérus (Head of Business Development, Ellos), Anders Halvarsson (CEO, Scandinavian Photo), André Ihlar (Online Sales Manager, Lyko), Andrew Golrang (Product Director, Voyado), Johanna Linder, Charlotte Elmquist and Anders Urhed (Proflow), and Victor Melander (Head of Communications, Instabox).
If we view e-commerce as core business, why are we so inclined to hand the entire responsibility for developing it over to external vendors? We very rarely do that for other sales-critical or operationally critical activities. Taking control over your own e-commerce destiny and starting to lead development yourself, with employees or hired-in expertise, is a clear trend in the market today. The alternative can be too embarrassing for those who understand what it means. Here I try to give some background on the phenomenon of 'insourcing e-commerce development' and offer a few concrete tips and tricks to take with you if you are thinking along those lines.
Time and again I have seen e-commerce companies enter a platform replacement project completely unprepared for the most fundamental questions, which leads to problems in kick-off, execution and end result: time, quality and cost. Here are a few tips based on many years of experience running e-commerce platform migrations.
Getting a really high Google PageSpeed score on an e-commerce site is hard. Personalisation, plenty of content, detailed design, large images, custom fonts and third-party scripts all push the score down. So what can you do to raise your PageSpeed score anyway?
Getting a high Google PageSpeed score is enormously important for an e-commerce site, but it is also very hard to achieve. Personalisation, modern frontends, Google Tag Manager, tempting images and lots of content are all things that drive sales but can hurt your PageSpeed score. Just how important is a high score, really?
