Future of eCommerce with Isaiah Bollinger, CEO of Trellis

Introduction to Isaiah Bollinger, CEO of Trellis

Tim Bucciarelli: 

Welcome back to Shaping eCommerce with IronPlane. I’m Tim Bucciarelli, the Director of Engagement at IronPlane. This is another installment of our future of eCommerce series.

Today, we’re joined by Isaiah Bollinger from Trellis. Thank you for joining us today, Isaiah. If you could just give a quick intro about your background, that would be great.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Yes, like you said, my name is Isaiah, and I’m the founder of Trellis. We’ve been around for over 10 years now doing eCommerce implementations. But really now we’re more full service, so we’ve kind of evolved to be more of a strategic partner for our clients with eCommerce.

We focus mostly at this point now on Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento. And we’re doing quite a bit with headless, which is kind of like a new buzzword. So those are the four technologies we spend most of our time on. But we also work with a ton of other tech partners like Celigo, which is like an integration solution, Yotpo does reviews, Klaviyo for emails. So, we’ve gone pretty full service so we’re dealing with a pretty wide variety. But it generally centers around something like a Shopify or BigCommerce – one of those kind of platforms.

Interview with Isaiah Bollinger

Tim Bucciarelli:

Perfect. So you’ll see why, when we go through these questions, it’s perfect to have you on. You’re in a really good position to provide some insights here.

The first question is really just pretty broad brush strokes here. What do you think we’re looking at in the next five to ten years in eCommerce? You mentioned some of the platforms already, you mentioned headless. But considering merchants who are thinking about their next move, where do you see eCommerce heading in the next five to ten years?

Isaiah Bollinger:

That’s a great question. In regards to headless, since you mentioned it, I think that the larger companies will move in that direction, or probably the more mature companies. I think the more mature companies will see the value of headless – it gives you more flexibility, allows you to tie in lots of different systems on the backend while having one user experience on the front-end. When you say “mature,” that means to me that they’re willing to put the resources there – they’re willing to invest the financial backing of that eCommerce initiative.

So, I don’t think headless is quite there for everybody, and I think it’s going to take a while. Maybe at some point, everybody will go in that direction based on new technology, but I do think in the next five to ten years you’re going to see quite a few of either the larger or more mature companies. I make that distinction because sometimes a large company is not mature in eCommerce, so it’s actually a bad idea for them to headless. But oftentimes, they have the budget or the complexity, so it makes sense.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Isaiah Bollinger:

Yes, or another good example is like it might be a relatively small business, say a $20 million business, but they’ve been doing eCommerce for ten years. It’s like the core of their business – maybe half their sales are online and it’s critical to their business, right? That’s a more mature eCommerce business, and sometimes even very large companies. Those are the kind of companies I see that will be going to headless. I definitely think more and more will be out-of-the-box.

I think we’ll be in kind of this weird place where these eCommerce platforms will have to evolve to be more and more “order management.” They’re already moving in that direction. Shopify has Shopify Payments. They’re going to start taking over more and more of the ecosystem. So, I think you’re going to see more and more that these platforms will try and handle more and more of a tech stack. That can go good and bad. We’ve seen how that can go with other systems.

But I think as people realize how important eCommerce is and they have to put more of their business onto it, they’re going to want the platforms to do more things for them and not have all these disjointed solutions and have to integrate everything.

Tim Bucciarelli:

So, it sounds like that’s two completely opposite ends of the spectrum. One is you get everything in this . . . well, I don’t even know if it’s appropriate to call it a monolith when it’s SaaS, but basically everything that you need is right there. And then the other end of the spectrum is you breaking everything out into the best of breed that you demand and linking those all together. Those are very different visions.

Isaiah Bollinger: 

Yeah, so that’s a good point. I think the headless – the best of breed approach makes sense if you’re mature and you have the money to build this sophisticated infrastructure where you can use the best product information management system to just manage the product data, right? You know, eCommerce almost becomes somewhat irrelevant at that point, from a platform perspective. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

It’s just one piece of the puzzle.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Yes. If you go with order management, if you think about it, you could break up all the functions into their own software that maybe is the right system for that company, and then everything rolls off into the headless front-end. Or, if you’re not really ready for headless, I think you have to go all in on like a Shopify or BigCommerce or Magento, and really kind of get as much out of those platforms as possible. Those platforms will continue to be more and more.

Like I said, we saw with Shopify Payments – they just added a company account, they added some B2B functionality – they’re constantly adding functionality, right? BigCommerce added multi-store and they’re adding a bunch of B2B stuff. So I think you’ll see more stuff being done in eCommerce as opposed to other systems.

Tim Bucciarelli:

So, you’re already touching on this, but the next question was when you think about these platforms or this architecture of headless composable, do you see one use case or one user group being most served by the Shopify, the BigCommerce – and we can go through them – there are several different platforms to talk about.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Yeah, definitely. I think we can start with Shopify. I think Shopify has dominated the B2C retail experience. I think if you have a relatively simple business or you’re focused on mostly retail, Shopify’s probably a good fit. Where you might struggle is if you have really complex international, multi-site, multi-brand. But even then, I still think we’re seeing quite large businesses do that on Shopify – I think Allbirds and some of the larger customers are successfully doing it on Shopify.

So, I think if you’re a direct consumer and you have a relatively straightforward business model that’s, “Hey, I sell products to consumers,” Shopify is probably the right fit. But obviously, there are nuances to that – that’s not always the case.

Then – you go one level up – is BigCommerce where if you have more complexity, say checkout complexity, or large volume of buy online / pick up in store which can create checkout complexity, or this complex multi-store because they launched the native multi-store, or B2B functionality – BigCommerce is definitely the step up in terms of a little more enterprise, as well as more B2B and just more complex use cases. So we’re seeing that kind of work in the favor of we’ll call it the mid-market – those more complex mid-market solutions.

Tim Bucciarelli:

And those are both Saas, so there are some benefits that are shared in that environment where if you want to not have to worry too much about hosting or performance or site security. There are things you can do to screw things up as a merchant, but generally speaking a lot of those things are off your plate and are in the hands of the Shopifys or BigCommerce teams.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Yeah – I don’t want to derail us because I know we have a lot to get to, but I want to go back to that point because there’s a lot that – I think that it’s actually a challenge for agencies because in some ways it can be so successful, but then it’s like why do I need to pay for development.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Totally!

Isaiah Bollinger:

So, let’s come back to that because I want to go through other things. Then, you have the Magentos and the Salesforce Commerce Clouds. I think Magento is becoming a more niche product in that because Shopify and BigCommerce can handle a wider use case, it doesn’t really make sense to go with Magento unless you really benefit from this open-source, flexible ecosystem. You really have to justify that because you’re going to have to spend a lot more money on, like you said, hosting, security, patches, updates. So your overall development overhead is going to be quite a bit higher.

It’s sort of similar to Salesforce Commerce Cloud – I think it’s kind of like a SaaS, but it’s a little confusing to me. They’re like a SaaS, but I know they do some upgrades, and I know there are some fairly enterprise costs that come with it. So I think the Adobe / Salesforce world – those are really more enterprise solutions. Typically, what we’re seeing – especially with Salesforce – is if you’re not willing to spend half a million plus – I think I was talking to someone that sold a pretty successful agency that focused heavily on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. He told me that their average deal was like $850,000 or $900,000.

So that’s the level of magnitude that you’re dealing with and I think companies need to understand that. I could see companies getting bought into Salesforce and being like “Oh yeah, great – we got Salesforce” and not realizing that the agencies that do this kind of work are very expensive and there’s a very limited set of agencies that focus on that market because the people that can afford that market are massive companies. So you have this limited talent pool in the Salesforce community that drives up the price, as well as licensing cost and the complexity. It seems fairly expensive from what I’ve seen. 

I think Adobe is probably a little bit cheaper. You can probably get away with getting it done definitely for less money, and obviously, they have the open-source version so that can be quite a bit cheaper with no license cost. But it’s suddenly moving more and more up-market, especially the Cloud – Adobe version – that they’re focused on. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yes, and this is the next area – if you would like to talk about your own impressions about what is going on with Adobe because one of the areas we focus on is working with Magento Open-Source and Adobe Commerce. We see some of the kind of shift over the past years where Adobe is moving much more into the enterprise realm. As you said, the smaller players are now eating up a lot of the market because they offer really great solutions.

Do you have a sense of what we’re looking at for Adobe Commerce, Adobe Commerce Cloud, and Magento Open-Source?

Isaiah Bollinger: 

I think Adobe Commerce Cloud is going to go 100% headless. I think they’re going to go down the path of Commercetools – because it’s not just Adobe Commerce – it’s the Adobe stack, right?

They’re moving towards this like cloud architecture and I think the goal they’re going to try and achieve is everything is going to be microservices and then maybe they have some front-end stuff you can play with, but it’s like “Use your own React” front-ends and build everything in the front-end headless, and just tie in everything with microservices. I’m not sure how that’s going to play out long term. It’s going to be interesting, right? Is it going to be like Magento 3? It almost feels like it’s going to be Magento 3 without them calling it Magento 3.

It’s just going to be Adobe Commerce and it’s going to essentially be headless, and you’re going to be like, “Oh crap. I have to rebuild my front-ends because I need to be headless.”

So, I think eventually they’re going to force the hand of people to move headless, especially since their front-end has not been that great for a long time. It’s been probably one of the weakest parts of their platform since Magento 2 and even Magento 1, where they’ve never had a very easy-to-work-with front-end. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

PageBuilder didn’t do it for you?

Isaiah Bollinger:

No. I think headless is really a much more theoretically simple front-end for them to work with. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

And where does that leave Magento Open-Source, then?

Isaiah Bollinger:

I have no idea. I think there will be people using it. There are still people on Magento 1. We just launched a site for someone on Magento 1 a month ago. They finally got off Magento 1. Magento 1 was end-of-life years ago, and there are still people on it. I think there will be people on Magento Open-Source for probably another decade, right?

Like I said, I think it will just become a smaller community. A lot of that community will move to Shopify and BigCommerce, or they’ll move to Adobe Commerce and upgrade that way. And then maybe there’s the small handful of folks that somehow can afford Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Commercetools.

We can talk about Commercetools, but what I’ve seen from Commercetools is probably a little bit more innovative than an Adobe and Salesforce, but also seems very expensive. I know they’re trying to come down-market, but I haven’t quite seen anything that resembles down-market to me/

Tim Bucciarelli:

So it’s really going to be interesting. It feels like there’s this space in the middle where you can’t necessarily fit into the box of Shopify or BigCommerce – and maybe BigCommerce fills this.

Isaiah Bollinger: 

I actually think BigCommerce is going to be the one that fills that gap.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Okay, yes.

Isaiah Bollinger: 

They’re doing the best job in filling that gap. They’ve got open checkout. Like I said, they launched multi-store, they bought Quote Ninja and BundleB2B to bring more B2B inherently into the platform. They recently started beta-ing StagingPro, basically a full staging solution which is one of the limitations you have with SaaS.

Tim Bucciarelli:

SaaS - totally. That’s great to hear.

Isaiah Bollinger: 

They’re moving in that direction. They’re doing well with headless, as well. They’re definitely doing all the right things. They certainly still have their cons, just like any platform. They’re moving really fast into “buy online, pick up in-store,” so pretty soon you’ll have multi-location inventory natively in the platform. You can do it now, but you have to do it a little bit custom, where it’ll be pretty much native in the platform – put in your stores, scale that up as much as you want.

So, I think they’re going to fill in the middle gaps. I think Shopify’s going to go . . . they’re going up-market, as well. I think they’ve marketed themselves better for up-market than actually solving for up-market solutions.

But they did recently just add company accounts and price lists; I was actually pretty surprised that it was all of a sudden in the software. I logged in, and it was like, “Oh, this actually is here.” It’s kind of crazy with Saas, where you just log in to a trial account or a test store, and it’s there instantly.

I think between Shopify and BigCommerce they’re going to just eat into a big chunk of that middle market.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Okay. So, you mentioned Adobe Commerce – you think that’s kind of heading in the SaaS direction. You’ve got Shopify, BigCommerce – those are already SaaS. 

Isaiah Bollinger: 

Is Commercetools SaaS? I guess that they’re SaaS, right?

Tim Bucciarelli:

I think they are - yes. So where does that leave “on-prem” – the concept? I mean, nobody’s actually doing it physically on their premises. Very few people are.

Isaiah Bollinger:

I think on-premise still has some value, right? We still have quite a few Magento clients that are on prem. I think in a headless world, I actually am very bullish on the “on-prem” concept of headless. I think if you’re going to go headless, you should seriously consider going open source and “best-of-breed,” and actually not having a traditional eCommerce platform.

So, I think if you go headless, you could have a React front-end or whatever – the modern front-end, and then architect out the key systems you have, right? You probably want product management, so you’re probably going to want a PIM system. You’re probably going to want order management system; you get some sort of order management system. Maybe that is your ERP system; I don’t know. But you have four or five core systems, and then you have CRM. You have those systems that manage the core master records for customer accounts, order management – all those traditional things that eCommerce does.

Then I think you just maybe fill in the gap with an open source. We actually work with two no-jazz packages – one’s called Reaction Commerce and then one’s called Vendure – just a no-jazz package, open source. That fills in the gaps, it’s a lot lighter weight than like a Magento, and you just fill in the gaps of whatever your other systems in the backend maybe aren’t best for. Maybe cart and checkout – just a couple little things when you really think about it – maybe it’s a promotions engine or something like that. But even that maybe could be run through your ERP or order management; I’m not sure.

So, I think that it depends. If you go headless, you have to seriously consider the best-of-breed architecture, which is a very different thought process than like “Okay, we’re going to try and do as much as possible in one of these existing eCommerce platforms.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yes, and previously, you would have all of those systems, but they would be synchronized with your eCommerce, which also has some of those systems. Like you might have your CRMs synchronizing with your customer data in your eCommerce platform, and instead of having two systems then, you have eCommerce doing solely the transactional processing you that need, and you’ve got this centralized. So it cuts down a little bit on the redundancy.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Well, we’re already seeing that redundancy is a huge mess with companies. I bet you . . . give me any mid-market company – I do this all the time – give me their tech stack and tell me how it all works together – it’s a mess. No one’s thought through the integrations, there are a lot of redundant systems. Oftentimes, if you actually did the proper integrations and really thought through what everything does, you can probably get rid of 30% of the software.

I’ve been joking around like, “Man, we need to stop being an eCommerce agency and just be the outsourced CTO,” because these companies need a massive digital overhaul and they’re like, “Oh, do eCommerce.” Well, what is eCommerce? It’s order management, it’s ERP. We’re already dealing with all their systems anyways – we might as well think about how they should all work together in a smarter way. We’re doing some of that, but I think there’s this mistrust in the market – I don’t know what it is – where they kind of just put us in the box of “eCommerce” and they don’t really trust us to do that for whatever reason. We’re trying to solve that problem.

You’re already seeing that problem – people don’t have integrations properly set up, or they’re doing a lot of manual processes, or they’ll have like a CRM – the common problem I’ll see especially is like they have a Salesforce or something like Salesforce. Salesforce is the most common enterprise CRM, right? So, Salesforce, they’ll have NetSuite, a common ERP, and then they’ll have Magento – let’s use that.  Okay, so what is your master customer record? What is the source of truth for your customers? It probably should be Salesforce, right?

Tim Bucciarelli:

That's right.

Isaiah Bollinger:

But Salesforce doesn’t have the order data, so now you have to integrate NetSuite with Salesforce. But, if you don’t integrate Magento down to NetSuite, NetSuite won’t have all the orders, so you have to play this . . . that’s where Celigo comes in – you have to architect this and integrate this in a way that everything has the right information.

Tim Bucciarelli:

And it depends on the immediacy of your needs. Like, do you need it to be real-time or can you schedule that via cron jobs every 3-4 hours?

Isaiah Bollinger:

Great question – yes – can you live with it day by day? Like, maybe you’re off by a day or something, and you can say “Hey, we’re going to look at the data from the previous week or something like that, which theoretically could be okay, right? But you’re right – sometimes they need real-time data and that gets tricky because when you get into volume and trying to send orders from one system to the other in real-time and it’s a lot of orders, you can run into bottlenecks. Some of these systems weren’t designed to import via APIs 100 orders a second – there are just limitations on some of these APIs. It’s a huge problem, for sure. 
And what I see is people have already bought all this software and no one has actually thought about how it’s all going to work.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yep, that’s very consistent with what we’re experiencing, as well. 

Isaiah Bollinger: 

Clients are like, "Why aren’t we making more money, Tim? It’s all your fault, Tim. Magento’s not … we’re down 10%.”

Well, yeah, we’re kind of in a recession and your systems are a mess, and you only want to pay us to work on Magento while you have underlying fundamental business issues – which is a big part of what we’re seeing.

Tim Bucciarelli:

For me, it feels like a great opportunity, but I think the underpinning of what you talk about, which is the agency trust, is so critical. Speaking as an agency, a little bit off topic here, it feels like if you can find that trust and that relationship with a client, there’s so much opportunity that a company like Trellis or IronPlane can do to help those businesses with all of those systems like you were talking about, and it’s only going to become more integrated over the years. So I like the approach that you’re suggesting. 

Isaiah Bollinger: 

Yeah, and that’s where I think things like Celigo – we’ve had a lot of success with Celigo. This isn’t a pitch for Celigo, but we’ve worked with some of the other iPaaS solutions, and we’ve just had a good partnership with them and they’ve been very generous to invest in us and vice versa. You need something like that, because otherwise what you custom build everything; it gets kind of expensive. With something like Celigo, it’s a SaaS solution that sits in the middle and you can hook everything up to it.

But, once again, it has some limitations, so there’s some downside to using a SaaS solution for anything, right?

Going back to that trust issue, it’s been challenging to earn the trust and I think that part of it is that clients are scared to open up the doors to all their “stuff” and all their problems and maybe let someone in to everything. And then they feel like, “Oh, now we’ve become so reliant on this agency.” But by not doing that, they’re also shooting themselves in the foot because we’re only able to solve a third of the problem, which never really solves the underlying core issue sometimes, right?

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yes. So, I wanted to just circle back – and this is just a personal goal of mine – is to make sure that people understand when we talk about “headless” – what that traditionally means and how it’s different from composable. Can you talk about that at all?

Isaiah Bollinger: 

I disagree with the fact that they’re different – I kind of lump it all together. I look at it as like you’re either headless or composable, or you’re not. So, the traditional model is your BigCommerce, your Wordpress, your Shopify, whatever. Your data lives in there, your front-end is the same tech stack as the data and the platform. So your Shopify front-end – you’re managing all the code in this one system.

Whereas, once you go headless or composable, your front-end is now its own separate thing, right? It’s React code that lives … we usually use Vercel for hosting headless. (You don’t have to, but that’s just the one that we started to work with the most. But there are other ones that we’ve worked with – we host our own website in AWS. You can really host it anywhere, theoretically.

Now, you basically have an independent front-end layer, which is like the user experience layer, and then we look at it like, basically everything is pulled in via GraphQL and APIs. And once you go, whether headless or composable, it could be one system on the backend or it could be 100 systems on the backend.

Tim Bucciarelli:

And regardless, it’s still pretty fast in terms of user experience.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Not necessarily, actually, because if the GraphQL and API layer is slow, that could pose some issues. So there could be some things that make speed an issue. Just because you’re headless, I wouldn’t assume that it’s automatically going to be fast. That’s where I think you still need to put engineering thought and manpower into the architecture of how it’s going to be fast.

Theoretically, it could be fast and you might be able to cache in some of the data and do certain fancy things. But if the APIs are slow for whatever reason, that could pose a problem or you might not be able to use that system.

So, one of the problems with headless is that a lot of the systems are not ready to be headless.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Right.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Like an ERP system, if that’s where all your data is, you probably can’t use it in real-time. You’re probably going to have to extract the data and store it somewhere, almost like a middleware layer, and then make it go headless.

Tim Bucciarelli:

It seems like right now it’s not super clear that it’s a comprehensive solution that replaces the monolith. You can see, theoretically, how you could get there, but those connections – you can only have a microservice where there’s something that can work with that. And if it’s not real-time, how is that improving?

Isaiah Bollinger:

I think our smallest headless project right now is $300,000. So, that’s the level of magnitude that you’re talking, right? We say internally, if you don’t have $2-300,000 to spend at least, then headless is probably not for you.

One interesting solution that we’ve been exploring is Shogun front-end – I  don’t know if you’ve heard of them?

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yes.

Isaiah Bollinger:

I think there’s a path there, where they’re bundling a lot of the things and you could do some of the front-end. Let’s say you’re just on Shopify and you want to go headless and you kept it pretty simple – that’s maybe a path where you could probably get the price down significantly below that price I mentioned.

But then, you’re also like a SaaS headless solution, so is it really headless or kind of headless but it’s SaaS.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Right.

Isaiah Bollinger:

But if you’re going what I consider the true custom headless route, from our perspective based on how we run projects and we’re not the cheapest option in the world – there’s someone else out there that I’m sure can do it cheaper – we’re seeing our costs – like we couldn’t justify it for less than $2-300,000. That includes some design process and discovery and the full project process. But oftentimes, it goes way out from there.

We have one where I was actually kind of a little mad at our own team for going so far into the headless route because it was so complicated. They had like a 100 multisite – 100 sites, and I think that ultimately to solve their problems they need to go headless, but our ballpark pricing we knew was going to be over a million bucks to do it right because it’s a custom headless solution. It’s one of those things where you should tell them that in the first week and if they’re not willing to spend the million bucks, why are we even doing this – we need to go back to the monolithic strategy, you know?

Tim Bucciarelli:

That’s always a little bit of a question when you’re trying to convince a company, like this is a good thing for you to do. But there’s a lot of work to kind of lay the groundwork for them to understand the value of that dollar figure. That’s the challenge.

Isaiah Bollinger:

100%. It’s a big company; it’s not crazy for a company that is this big. But not every big company is ready – it’s part of their company, it’s not necessarily their whole business so they just haven’t maybe budgeted for that. And also, it could be a year-long project to do it well, right? So, now you’re talking a million bucks or over a million bucks over a year to do it well.

So, you’re not going to get any ROI until year 2 or 3, which we’re happy to be transparent about that. That’s why I try to be almost kind of aggressive in the sales process of being like, “I think this is going to be hard. This is what I think it’s going to be. I could be wrong. If you’re not ready for this, should we stop talking or go a different route?” Do you know what I mean?

Most people come to us with these grandiose ideas and it’s like, “Well, how much money do you really have and can you sustain the cost of this and invest in this over the next 3 years?” 

Tim Bucciarelli:

And it’s also usually just not a one-and-done. It’s not like you’re done and the money stops flowing. You’ve got to maintain it, you’ve got to optimize it, you’ve got bugs, you know?

Isaiah Bollinger:

Definitely. Especially if you’re not going – going back to the Shopify/BigCommerce problem that we were talking about with agencies – the one problem that we’ve run into with Shopify and BigCommerce is that if you do it well and the company is, I’d say, complacent because you do get a lot of complacent companies that just don’t necessarily want to improve things that quickly, they can kind of leave it as “fee”, right?

You could have a Shopify or BigCommerce site that is stagnant; it self-updates, little bugs here and there. At that point, maybe you just need a freelancer to fix bugs that come in. Because as agencies, we don’t want to just be on call waiting for the bugs to pop out.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Right, right.

Isaiah Bollinger:

We need some level of consistent work. So, to that original point before, because we see the market moving in that direction and we think it’s the right move for most clients, we’ve been trying to become more and more full service.

It’s interesting - we have really strong capabilities in creative and marketing, but we’re having a perception issue where clients don’t want to pay us for marketing, even if I’m 99% sure I can do it better than their current marketing, they see us as developers or they’re scared to give us the marketing because they – it’s like this weird perception issue that’s been hard to overcome because we’re not the “marketing agency” by default.

Do you know what I mean?

Tim Bucciarelli:

It’s a challenge. But also, the value there is that you probably already know their better than any marketing agency does.

Isaiah Bollinger:

100%!

Tim Bucciarelli:

And you know their technology.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Yep, we know their problems. We know the roadmap of like, “Hey, let’s do a little bit of this.” But it’s all holistic. You can’t just throw ads at it. Your ads might need to be coupled with a promo that is run on the website or maybe some new feature.

There are things that can go hand-in-hand between the design and development and the marketing – we can do all that better than this siloed marketing agency that doesn’t understand the business or the fundamental issues that sometimes are impacted by back office – maybe their shipping is too slow. We need to fix the shipping before we can run more ads, right?

So, 100%, I think we can definitely be a better strategic partner in that way, but it’s still going to struggle. We actually are in the process of doing a minor brand refresh to present ourselves a little more full-service better.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Well, certainly the logo – I don’t know if you’ve changed the logo, but the Trellis concept of those interweaving things - that supports the idea.

Isaiah Bollinger:

We’re not changing the logo a whole lot. It’s more the colors and the overall feel and tone because we’ve been very development-heavy as a business for a long time. I think sometimes that comes across a little too strong with clients that maybe are leaning more into the other aspects of what we can do.

I’ll be honest – I’m going to bash marketing agencies for a little bit right now – I think that there are three kinds of marketing agencies. There are the huge ones, which is a lot of them, or the big ones, or the mid ones that are bought by big ones. Oftentimes, they’re all owned by the big guys, right? You know how it goes. I’m sure you see friends, or friends of friends, that got bought up and they pretend they’re “like Trellis” but really they’re owned by McCann Erickson.

If you’re a mid-size or smaller customer, you’re going to get their C team – you’re going to get a guy out of college. We’ve seen accounts where they haven’t even done anything useful in three months on Adwords or the Facebook account. I don’t think people realize that unless you’re like Coca-Cola, you’re getting some pretty low-level service and you’re probably paying a lot. So, you have those marketing agencies.

Then, you have the mid-size ones that I think are still probably doing well. But, even then, I think they get in over their heads sometimes. I think that they can be really, really good but I think sometimes they over-promise. We saw one where they came in to do Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The client had bought into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. But, it wasn’t integrated with anything. And I got on the call and, once again, this is a good example of like, “We’re not the marketing agency because they see us as developers.

I got on the call with them and I said, “So, okay, how do you guys plan to integrate?” This is low on the priority list of this client, to integrate, right? They had so many fundamental issues and that integration was far down on the list. And they’re like, “Oh, we’ll just install this extension and it’ll do everything we need.” And it’s not even close. You’re talking about 200 price systems. You can’t just install some app built by a guy overseas and expect it to do all these . . . they had this giant list of all these things they wanted it to integrate and do.

So, the client ended up calling me and he’d be saying “Yeah, you were right. We’re paying them a bunch of money and we can’t even get the fundamentals working. So, I think there’s some of that going on with these mid-market agencies. They may be a little bit more talented – you’d probably get some better talent because they’re not bloated like the big guys, but I think they’re getting in over their heads sometimes by trying to do too much.

And then, you have the small guys, who are kind of hit or miss. They’re probably really good at Facebook, or really good at Google, but they’re really not going to be able to do all of the marketing well. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

And there’s also some opportunities if they’ve got – even if it’s in-house. If they’ve got some people who are particularly skilled in those areas, there may be a nice synergy between your team that can do both the technical and the digital marketing side of things paired with their support, whether it’s a smaller agency or their in-house team. As long as the conversation is open and they’re paying you for services in that realm, that can often work very well.

Isaiah Bollinger:

I think companies should bring content in house, right? I think they should bring content creation in house because it’s your brand, you should be controlling the messaging and the cost.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yes – your products.

Isaiah Bollinger:

It’s your products. It’s hard to outsource the knowledge of your business, so it’s going to be really hard to have someone create content better than you should be able to do it by building your own infrastructure to create content.

So, I think companies should build their own “media agency” and then outsource the expertise of – maybe it’s the complexities of managing Google Adwords and Facebook Ads because that can get actually somewhat technical and highly sophisticated from almost like a data scientist perspective. You can outsource parts of that – maybe they’re running the messaging of the ads. To your point, I think there’s this marriage that should be happening and I think if you try and outsource all of it you’re going to just expect way too much and not get that much back. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

 So, we added that whole segment to this conversation that wasn’t intended to be there, but it’s really important and, I think, really worthwhile for people to understand that those interplays are so important that you’re investing in these enterprise-level systems and you have to make sure that you’ve got a team who can help you let them talk to each other so that you get the biggest bang for your investment. So, that’s great – great points there.

So, we’re going to wrap it up here, and this is really just a question – again, pretty open-ended – about any businesses, technology, platforms that you see either today or down the road that you think are going to have a pretty big impact in the world of eCommerce – whether it’s just “pie in the sky” that you know of that’s coming, or something that you work with day in and day out.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Great question. Well, I definitely think Figma’s already doing that. We saw they just got acquired by Adobe. Although, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But I think Figma’s obviously one on the design side.

That’s a tough question, but a good question. I think Celigo has a lot of room to grow. I think there are two problems – one, people don’t know what they are and what they can do, and then there’s people that buy them and only use it for one little piece, like they do one integration with it. But really what they should be doing is a more holistic Celigo in the middle, intertwining all your systems. Maybe not all, but the key systems – more the enterprise ones, where you need that kind of solution.

So, I think there’s a giant opportunity in iPaaS, and it doesn’t have to be Celigo – there’s Boomi and Jitterbit, and there are all these other ones. I think the iPaaS market is still very early stages in terms of sophistication. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

How does play within the headless world, then? 

Isaiah Bollinger:

So, that’ll be interesting. It’s not 100% clear to me yet, to be honest, because these iPaaS solutions are not entirely designed for headless. But they may move in that direction. So, we haven’t been using them for headless. But there is something called Azure API Management layer, and I think it’ll be less, so I think you’re going to have stuff like that, which may tap into the Celigo-type market.

So I think you’re going to have, even maybe in the AWS and Azure market, some of this middleware-type stuff coming out and that becomes the middleware layer and they can control the APIs fast enough that it can be headless, or Celigo solves that too.

So yes, I do think that something will happen there and people will realize okay – you have all these systems and we need to centralize the data somewhere, and that may go to like a data lake like a Snowflake or something like that, and then obviously headless is the unified front-end experience.

So I definitely think headless is a very broad technology. I don’t think it’s one company that will solve headless right now, at least that I’ve seen. But I do think headless will make a big difference in eCommerce.

But we’re also seeing some of the opposite, where some people have gone headless where maybe they shouldn’t have and gone back because they couldn’t handle it. It’s like buying a Ferrari when you can only drive a Toyota – do you know what I mean?

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yeah. And then you go to the mechanic with your Ferrari when you’re hearing some weird sound, and then...

Isaiah Bollinger:

Yeah – they’re like “It’s twenty grand” and you’re like “twenty grand to fix this muffler? I thought it should be like 150 bucks!” and it’s like “You bought the premium product, so you’re going to pay premium prices.” And they’re just not ready for that.

You asked a really good question. I do think BigCommerce is a big one. I think that Shopify has dominated. I think we can safely say that Shopify has been the most successful eCommerce company, let’s say, outside of Amazon – leave Amazon, because Amazon is kind of like “Amazon” – right? But as a platform, I think Shopify is the most successful eCommerce platform in the last ten years. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

Certainly within the US – yes.

Isaiah Bollinger:

Yeah, Certainly within the US – yes. Maybe in other markets, it’s different.  I think they’re still – they’ve dominated and I think will continue to dominate. But I think BigCommerce is this really tiny player relative to them that’s kind of undervalued in the eCommerce ecosystem because of Adobe and Salesforce and Commercetools – the other big players – being just so expensive.

To your point, not everyone that’s on Magento can just go onto Shopify – that could be really difficult for a lot of people. They might be able to go to BigCommerce. So there’s that middle ground there that I think will expand and I think BigCommerce is the one we really feel has a strong chance to be one of the bigger players in that space.

I’m sure there are others. There are so many other cool startups and interesting technologies, but some of them are really small so it’s hard to say, right? Maybe they’ll be the next big thing.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Well, we’ll certainly keep tabs on what’s upcoming new technologies. I agree with you about Figma – that’s an interesting one. We’ll see where that goes.  And Celigo kind of emphasizes this idea of the importance of the integrations between your systems and the value that you can get out of that. So, I think those are good technologies to mention.

So, just in wrapping up, if you could give folks a quick shoutout to where they can find you and any more information that you’d like to share with them about Trellis?

Isaiah Bollinger:

Our website’s pretty simple – it’s trellis.co (not .com) and I’m pretty heavily on LinkedIn – you can just search my name, Isaiah Bollinger – same thing with Twitter. I pretty much try and stay focused on LinkedIn and Twitter. I’ve actually deleted a lot of my other social media because I found that it was just not very productive and I already waste enough time in my life in certain ways, so I figured that was one way to reduce that.

I’m big on LinkedIn and Twitter, and obviously on our website. Definitely reach out and, like I said, I’m happy to be that kind of sounding board as the CTO mindset and probably can come up with ways for you to reduce 30% of your software [laughter] – that’s the trend I’m seeing. You look at people’s software and you’re like “Do you really need all this stuff? Probably you can cut down on 30%.”

Tim Bucciarelli:

Thank you so much for joining us today on Shaping eCommerce. It was a great conversation and hopefully a lot of insights that merchants leave and maybe reach out to Trellis or IronPlane and get some help in their eCommerce adventure. Thanks very much, Isaiah. I appreciate it.

Isaiah Bollinger:

You’re welcome. Thank you.

For more insights on the future of eCommerce, check out our series on YouTube. For a free consultation, contact our sales team.