Future of eCommerce with Kuba Zwolinski, CEO of Snowdog

Introduction to Kuba Zwoliński, CEO of Snowdog

Tim Bucciarelli: 

Welcome back to Shaping eCommerce with IronPlane. I’m Tim Bucciarelli, the Director of Engagement at IronPlane. 

Today, we’re starting off a new series, and it’s really about the future of eCommerce. I’ve tried to pull together some experts in the field who I think would be interested in sharing their points of view about eCommerce now and in the future. 

The goal of this is to present information to merchants who might be struggling to figure out what they should be doing in their digital business operations. Which eCommerce platform should they be considering? What type of architecture? So, with these Q&A sessions, hopefully, we’ll be answering some of those questions.

We're kicking off this series with Kuba Zwoliński, CEO of Snowdog. Snowdog and IronPlane have partnered over the years to develop and design websites for our clients, and so we’re very pleased to have Kuba with us today to talk about the future of eCommerce.

Kuba, if you could give a quick intro of your background and your role at Snowdog, that would be great.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Hi Tim. Thank you for your introduction and thank you for inviting me to the show. It’s really nice to be here and have the chance to talk about the future of eCommerce.

Actually, I was always very passionate about innovation in eCommerce – for the last 14 years building various solutions for merchants all over the world. That was the part that was always bringing the most fun from our work.

And definitely there was a lot of changes in the last couple of years, blending more and more online and offline experiences. So, definitely, all those innovations are interesting to watch, to follow, and to choose the best for everybody. 

Interview with Kuba Zwoliński

Tim Bucciarelli:

Could you just give folks who may not know Snowdog just a quick snapshot of what Snowdog is and – I mean, to me it’s a cool company – it’s a cool team of people over there, so if you could give a quick intro to folks who may not have heard of it.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Yeah, sure. For many years already, Snowdog is a system integrator for eCommerce. We started back in 2008 with very early versions of Magento, and since the very start we really followed it off with Magento – it was our main technology for years. It was not only about building stores, but also about creating and enhancing the whole community around the platform.

So, for years we were organizing Meet Magento Poland, one of the biggest eCommerce events in Central Eastern Europe related to Magento. And we always tried to combine traditional eCommerce technologies with something less obvious, like robotics, digital signage, different types of internet of things, so it was always – maybe not the core of our business, but an important element.

I think that’s the whole story. During those years, we were awarded for the Most Innovative Customer Experience – we were creating a lot of different experiences for our clients. So, I think that right now, after 14 years, we have a very broad look at the eCommerce ecosystem – as a company, as a team. So, it’s really interesting to look back at our solutions, to look at other solutions, and see how it’s all evolved.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Kuba Zwoliński:

I think they will all go just to remove the “e” from eCommerce, so we will be talking again about commerce. Because, with all the internet of things, unified commerce concepts, composable, or previously omnichannel – we try to blend all the experiences together.

So, it’s not really about technology, because I don’t want to talk about metaverse commerce because it doesn’t make any sense.

I think it’s all about business, about creating experiences. And that should be a unified shopping experience wherever people are shopping – if it’s online, offline, on-the-go, wherever. Because we don’t know what will be the next big technology innovation in – I don’t know – one, two, three, four years.

Definitely, there will be more impact brought by artificial intelligence, machine learning technologies. I think it should also go towards no-code solutions where more and more businesses will be looking at. But we don’t know. We don’t know. Definitely, it’s all about experience, and everything else is just a tool to get there.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yeah. Perfect. And currently, in the world of eCommerce, there are many different platforms that offer many different flavors of that experience, let’s say. And when we think about the kind of options that merchants have today – they have the type of platform, whether it’s SaaS or whether it’s on-prem, whether it’s going to be architected in a composable manner or in a monolithic manner.

Can you touch on maybe just a few of the platforms that you see and maybe some of the decisions that merchants might need to make in order to choose the right platform for their needs?

Kuba Zwoliński: 

There are so many platforms right now. When we started back 12-14 years ago, the eCommerce landscape was completely different. There was Magento, and then nothing else. The technology difference was huge.

Right now, there are actually a lot of great tools on the market, and it’s really hard to say that one of them is the best, in a sense, the rest is useless. Each of them has its own advantages and each of them can be used to create amazing experience for shoppers. Its more about skills and experience of the company who is actually setting it up and building the whole eCommerce ecosystem for the business.

It’s not about the tool. Of course, some of them are requiring a little bit more maturity in business; some of them are making everything easier from the first step. But all of them are buildt this way that they can somehow evolve together with the store.

So, this way, I think it’s important to learn as much as possible about every platform. But, it’s also about choosing the right partner who will help implement the platform. Because if you take the best tool but it’s misused, it will make no sense. But if you have really skilled craftsmen, even with a not-so-great tool you can build amazing things.

So, we are coming back to the situation when people are important – someone who will bring the creativity and skills and experience to build something unique. Again, it’s also a lot of work on the merchant side to try to understand what is really important in each of those platforms. We are working with only some of them. It’s impossible to know everything about every platform. So, besides Magento Adobe Commerce, by choice we work with Commercetools, we work with BigCommerce, and we try to really align each of those platforms with business needs.

There’s no simple scenario – I don’t know if we’ll always need this platform or for marketplace we always use something else – no, because even if we take three businesses from the same industry, they all have a different approach. They may have different integrations, they may different resources internally, and they even have a different approach on how to handle technology – you know, outsource it or maybe keep everything inside, how to manage data.

That’s why it’s not about just building a ranking – what platform is good for what. It’s more about doing your homework and really learning what are the strong parts of the platform. Or even more important – trying to understand what are the weaknesses of each platform because that’s really important. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

And what I’ve seen as kind of a standard requirement is the level of willingness to invest in their technology. Because the challenge for some businesses is to see this type of technology as really an asset for their growth over the long term. And if they truly believe that it is an asset for their growth over the long term, they must invest in it not just for the first initial launch of their website, let’s say, but for the ongoing maintenance and optimization of that website.

Not in all cases, because some of the tools that we’re talking about – the SaaS tools like the Shopifys and the BigCommerce maybe, let’s say – there’s less care and feeding over the long term or at least that’s the way that it’s marketed.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Definitely. The cost is a very real thing right now because if we want to build something very, very custom and we choose free open source Magento or Mage-OS, but it still can be very expensive because there will be so much work involved and so many additional licenses involved. It will be more expensive than a commercial license for any of the other systems.

So, I would say that the cost is a secondary thing because first it has to be evaluated which platform really does the job and solve the problem, and the second is how to calculate cost. Or, maybe most other projects should be approached from the other side – choose what’s your budget, and try to select tools that can fit into this budget.

And then, keep evaluating further, because after all, every business should have a business plan, and if you have a budget of this size it doesn’t matter if there will be a super awesome tool that is more expensive – you will not get it because you have no budget for it. And after all, it’s just a tool. Even the best tool will not magically bring in revenue – it’s just a tool.

So, coming to the project with a budget simplifies a lot of things because it narrows the decision to the platforms that can actually fit there, just with the license. And then, the next decision may be okay, so how much should we invest in the custom stuff.

And then we are coming to a very interesting question – how long is the investment and how should we calculate the return on investment. Because, when choosing a platform, everyone would like to have “yeah, we’ll choose this platform – it will be with us for years.” But almost no one really realizes there is a very specific lifetime of technology, of the software. If we are talking about the software, after four or five years if the software is not really evolving, the technology debt is becoming a problem – a serious problem and a blocker for the growth.

So, even if we choose the best platform today and it looks like it’s very promising, if it will be not really developed to reduce this technology debt, it will become a problem in four or five years. So when thinking about investments, it just makes everything more complicated – when choosing Saas, on-prem, open source, closed source, whatever. It all needs a very detailed analysis of needs and futures of the platform, and then costs – to choose what will be the best, what will not create this technology debt and bring some visible results from implementation. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

To add to that complexity, some businesses are wondering whether – let’s say they may not even have an eCommerce website today and maybe one of the questions on their minds is, “I’ve got this strong retail business – brick and mortar, or distribution, or I’m a manufacturer, whatever – and maybe I don’t even need my own eCommerce, and I can just go into a marketplace, and I can just let all these affiliates or partners dropship and I’ll just ship it out.”

So, I think it’s worth just touching on this concept of the marketplace and their role in this commerce market for these merchants. And maybe touch on some of the tradeoffs that are to be considered whether you have an eCommerce platform existing or not.

Kuba Zwoliński:

I think it’s less about technology – it’s more about how strong is your brand identity and your user experience or the user experience that your brand is creating, because when going to the marketplace – and we are talking about marketplaces like Amazon or some other big players who are just offering a place to sell your products – you somehow give up your brand identity. You’re using the user experience offered by the platform.

So, if you are selling on Amazon, you have to accept Amazon’s user experience, not your brand user experience. That, of course, can bring a lot of volume because especially if a brand is starting or wants to go to a different market that is unknown for the brand, marketplace may be a great start. But if we have a brand with a very strong identity and very unique user experience, it makes much more sense to show this user experience and show this uniqueness instead of being compared with other similar, cheaper, whatever, solutions in the marketplace.

For me, it’s not about the size of the business, it’s not about the technology – it’s about the brand and the user experience. That’s the main factor to decide. Of course, it’s more complicated. There is room for many hybrid models. Like, you can have a strong identity in one country, but then you are totally unknown in other countries. So instead of creating everything from scratch, it’s better to go with marketplace and start researching the market.

So again, it all depends on the brand. Some brands are experimenting with marketplaces, leaving marketplaces, coming back, building something on their own, and it’s a neverending road with experiments.

Tim Bucciarelli:

I like that idea of the hybrid model of maybe getting into a new country or a market that’s unfamiliar through a marketplace. That strikes me as a very smart move. The other potential hybrid is where you’ve got maybe a segment of your products that are less centric to your brand maybe, and could be sold through marketplaces while you maintain your, I don’t know, your specialty brand items in your own eCommerce – there’s another hybrid model there that might work.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Of course, like selling some old stock – that’s always good – you don’t want to make big discounts in your main shop, so you can just throw it to the marketplace and pretend, “okay – somebody else’s.” But again, it’s about creating different experiences. Business-wise, it can make sense, but it’s creating something else – those products in the marketplace will be perceived in a slightly different way than products offered on the main brand website.

It’s interesting to watch. There’s also another aspect that marketplaces are very useful and very powerful, but they are also – very often, they are very aggressive business. So, every marketplace, if they notice a huge success – a very successful product, sooner or later they will try to create their own brand or something similar, and that’s normal. Like, we cannot expect anything else because they are all involved in increasing their revenue and, you know, bringing more volume to their shareholders. So, that’s something that has to be taken into account when talking about marketplaces.

Tim Bucciarelli:

And this is not a new problem. I mean, this has been happening in grocery for many, many years, for example. You go into a store and you choose this favorite product, and 10 weeks later you see it branded generically from the supermarket. So, it’s just a little bit of a change in perspective, but it’s a very similar situation, I’d say.

Kuba Zwoliński:

But I would say that’s a very normal business situation – like, if you see that someone is offering a service and you think that you can offer this service better, cheaper, faster, you do it. And this is exactly the same. If marketplace is like, “Wow, they are selling a nice product and this is pretty expensive. I think we can build it for cheaper and sell it cheaper. So, why not?”

But that creates a risk for the brand who was originally selling those products – it might be a business problem. And then we are talking to the other side of marketplaces where strong brands can create their own mini marketplaces and help others go to the market – maybe not with huge marketplaces like Amazon, but with smaller marketplaces – and they can share their user experience with other brands.

So, that’s an interesting concept. It looks like it’s more and more popular. A lot of well-known brands are building their marketplaces. I think recently in the U.S. Macy’s just launched a marketplace. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yes.

Kuba Zwoliński: 

I think they used one of the most popular enterprise engines right now, Miracle – it’s also very popular in Europe. We have a couple marketplaces using it even in Poland. It just shows that strong brands – they also want to use the strength of their brand and increase their stock, the number of products or services they can bring to the client.

So, it’s interesting. Like we have those gigantic – huge marketplaces offering everything, then you have more smaller marketplaces offering something more specialized, and then we have brands who are just doing a lot of things on their own. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

So, different flavors of the marketplace can apply to different levels of business and business need. It’s going to be interesting to see, from my perspective, the bigger players trying to kind of compete and figure out who owns what space and that. That’s very interesting to me.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Yeah, of course – like, the old war between Amazon and Walmart over who will offer better service. It’s interesting – it’s also driving a lot of innovation, that’s for sure. Because even if they are not so agile in creating innovations because they are just too big, they need to do it because they have to compete not only with price or scale, but they also need to bring attention – to be more innovative in many different aspects.

Tim Bucciarelli:

I’d like to shift gears a little bit to talk about the platform that Snowdog has focused on over the past years and the platform that IronPlane has focused on for the past years, as well, and that is Magento and Adobe Commerce.

Just from my understanding remains called “Magento Open Source,” that is, you don’t pay a license fee, it’s on-prem so it’s on a server or in a cloud server environment somewhere that you own – your code, your instance, you manage it, you’re responsible for it.

And then there’s Adobe Commerce, which is the same idea, but it’s kind of the premier version where Adobe is releasing their most recent functionality to it, and the latest and greatest, and security patches and all that, you pay a licensing fee for it.

And then there’s Adobe Commerce Cloud, which is Adobe Commerce hosted by Adobe. So, it’s like you’re all in with Adobe, it’s actually on an AWS environment that is managed by Adobe Professional Services, I believe, and they are kind of taking care of the nuts and bolts of your Adobe Commerce and your hosting environment.

Is that the correct way to paint that picture?

Kuba Zwoliński:

I think more or less it’s correct. The only difference maybe with Adobe Commerce Cloud is that it’s not really related to the platform underneath – it doesn’t matter if it’s AWS, GCP, or Azure – it’s just a platform as a service, so-called PaaS. It’s a great solution for someone who needs enterprise level tools but don’t want to worry about infrastructure, which is actually very challenging.

But it’s important to understand that right now Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source are different products, and that’s how it should be approached. Magento Open Source is free, it’s open as it was. Adobe Commerce is a strong system that works very closely with the rest of the Adobe ecosystem – with Adobe Sensei, with Adobe Experience Manager, the Adobe Experience Cloud, Digital Assets Management – so, it’s just like a part of the whole suite.

And again, it creates an interesting offer to anyone who’d like to use that Magento-based technology, but have different needs or different skills. If there is a company who just wants to start selling, using enterprise tools, and they don’t want to really get all the knowledge how to run the infrastructure for open source software, they can go with BigCommerce.

And why it’s important to just give it to Adobe – because if you work with open source, you have to take care about the security, about the updates – it’s a lot of work. And if you don’t have it provided by an eCommerce platform vendor, you need to take care about it by yourself or have a trusted partner who will do it. And that’s not easy. Having the skills inside or having a trusted partner – those are both challenges. We all know it.

Tim Bucciarelli:

For sure. And what’s interesting is we find – and it’s actually a little surprising to me – when prospect companies come and speak to us and they tell us about their prior experience with other agencies, I’m always a little bit surprised. So I agree with you – it is not so easy to find – and the key words here are – a “trusted partner” as IronPlane, and I know Snowdog, both strive to be to all of our clients.

The difference with Adobe Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud, though – I think there’s still a question about needing a trusted partner in that environment because, from what I understand, Adobe and Adobe Professional Services don’t typically get their hands dirty with third party modules or custom code that was developed.

Kuba Zwoliński: 

Yeah, of course. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

And so, is it true that you will still need a trusted partner a trusted partner to be able to manage those aspects?

Kuba Zwoliński: 

Yes, of course, because with platform-as-a-service, Adobe is taking care of the platform and the core code. If you want to build something custom around it or customize your Adobe Commerce implementation, it needs some skills because when we are talking about eCommerce, it’s not SaaS – it’s not something that we can just build with some bricks and it will work out of the box.

So, it’s very flexible, it gives a lot of freedom and possibilities, but it needs some work and skills. So that’s important to understand – the difference between platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service. Platform-as-a-service removes most of the limitations, but also creates a lot of challenges. If you have the freedom of doing whatever you want, that’s also a curse because you have to be responsible for everything you build. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

With great power comes great responsibility, of course. That’s a phrase that I hear.

Kuba Zwoliński: 

Exactly. That’s very accurate when we talk about open source. It’s so tempting that, okay we can build anything we want with that, so let’s do it. And then, sooner or later, someone will come with a bill – a bill, the maintenance, about how to manage all that complexity.

Tim Bucciarelli:

That’s right, yes. We live it every day, yeah, very much. So, one kind of brand or name that I’ve heard recently, and I just thought we could touch on it briefly, is Mage-OS. What is Mage-OS, how is it different than Magento Open Source? What is Mage-OS, basically?

Kuba Zwoliński: 

Okay. So let’s start with Magento Open Source. Magento Open Source is an open source code managed and maintained by Adobe. So it’s open, it’s free, but still it’s managed not by the Community, it’s managed by a corporation. And because of that – there are a couple facts related to that.

The roadmap is somehow tied to also other business products of Adobe, so it doesn’t always reflect the Community expectations because if it’s a large company, all the decisions take longer – it’s not easy to make a quick change in the code or change direction. There are a lot of discussions about that.
Magento was always about a very strong community around it – that was the biggest asset of Magento, that there were like hundreds of thousands of developers, merchants, professionals, or just people passionate about open source creating and enhancing Magento.

Because of that, the Mage-OS Association was created. It was created by very core members of the Community – developers or people who are contributing to Magento for years – and they decided that it’s a good moment to create a fork that will be compatible with the main Magento but will have absolutely zero restrictions created by the vendor who is responsible for the main Magento Open Source.

So, if we want to build something more lightweight, something easier to implement, it can be done with Mage-OS because it doesn’t have to look at many relations with other products. So it’s just a Community initiative – it has a pretty solid base, an interesting batch of people behind it, and it’s doing something – there is strong progress; you can actually start working already using Mage-OS fork and the roadmap is very promising, that instead of adding features it will be just making working with Magento fun again. 
And, why it’s Mage-OS, it’s not Magento Open Source – it’s just very easy. Magento is a trademark, and to have total freedom and total responsibility for this open source fork, it has to have a different name and that’s why we are talking about Mage-OS Association, not anything else.

It’s worth to mention that there is also a Magento Association existing that is taking care of the Magento Open Source. But it’s also related to Adobe, so we are coming back to the first point that it just creates interesting cooperation and competition on the market. I think it may be only good for Magento and all the open source part of this platform. When we have Magento Association and Mage-OS Association creating a lot of forward force for the system, and contributing to both systems and thinking how to make it more useful, easier to implement.

Because when you are talking about Magento Open Source, I think the biggest challenge right now is it’s pretty complex to implement, and when you are talking about free open source software, it would be good to simplify everything to make it easy to install it again by an average developer – that’s how everything started with Magento 1. It was complex, but not too complex to build a store with an average specialist.

With Magento 2, it’s more complicated, so I think this is a big challenge to simplify everything and make this open source easy and fun to work for smaller projects. 

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yeah, and philosophically, this feels like a very good initiative to me because Magento was built by the Community and it was built by developers who loved working in that platform. And if you lose that excitement and that energy and that community, then it goes the corporate path, which is fine – there’s no judgment one way or the other.

But I really philosophically love the idea of the Community and the developers thinking just, “What else could we do to make it more efficient, more lightweight, more accessible to other developers, easier to implement for agencies, more successful in delivering what users want in their experience?” Like, these are questions that sometimes are very different than what a corporation might be asking. I like that community idea – that energy – very much, so I’m glad to hear that it’s there and I hope that it can continue to grow.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Yeah, I also keep my fingers crossed for this initiative. We support this initiative as much as we can. I agree – it’s all about Community, and it would be really a pity to lose that Community that was created over years around Magento because only a different and health community can contribute to the whole ecosystem – not only to Magento Open Source, but also to other eCommerce – it still uses a lot of solutions from Magento Open Source.

So I think that maintaining the Community and making it stronger will be also a huge benefit for Adobe itself.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yeah, I also keep my fingers crossed for this initiative. We support this initiative as much as we can. I agree – it’s all about Community, and it would be really a pity to lose that Community that was created over years around Magento because only a different and health community can contribute to the whole ecosystem – not only to Magento Open Source, but also to other eCommerce – it still uses a lot of solutions from Magento Open Source.

So I think that maintaining the Community and making it stronger will be also a huge benefit for Adobe itself.

Kuba Zwoliński:

I don’t like the latest opinions that monolith is dead and everything has to be composable in the future because composable is all about using completely different bricks to build one solution, and it makes sense for many businesses, but it’s also way over-complicated for others.

So, back to your question – headless was a first attempt to remove the limitations of the platform and create a web store the way we create, for example, mobile apps – it can be a totally separate application talking over API with some other system, but that system could be still a monolithic system.

When we are talking about composable, we are talking about splitting this monolithic system into smaller chunks. So, the cart may be one service, the order management may be another service, user management may be another service. So instead of having everything like a huge eCommerce system, we can have small, powerful components that we can use, and when it makes sense.
It makes sense for really complex businesses because there were cases that you take a monolith and you have to completely rebuild it to make it work for not-a-traditional eCommerce. And then it makes sense to use those bricks.

But why it’s not good for everyone – because having all those different services talking to each other in composable architecture is pretty complex to maintain. It needs very, very high skills in creating the architecture first, but then maintaining everything. In theory, it looks great, like “We take just different pieces, collect them together, and it just works.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t, because different technologies are still different technologies and even if they are using common interfaces, there’s a lot of work synchronizing everything.

Tim Bucciarelli:

We know from experience – when we integrate an ERP into Magento, that’s not a simple integration even if it’s API. I mean, does the ERP have the function that this merchant requires, is that an exposed function via API? No, it’s not. Well then, what do you do then, you know? You do an export/import to try and get the data over or something like that.

And then, just think of that complexity with one integration and then multiply it by however many components you want to have, and you can see the complexity. There’s of course benefit, potentially, but this is, to your point, potentially quite complex.

Kuba Zwoliński:

So we are coming back to the start of the discussion that every platform has to be carefully evaluated and matched with the business needs – it’s exactly the same with the architecture. Like, there may be a huge business, but selling online in the traditional way, so it doesn’t really mean that they need a composable architecture because they may have a simple system that would work just perfectly fine with a monolith and it will be much easier to maintain. And there may be also a small business, but so complex, so customized, that it needs a composable approach from the very beginning.

So I think it’s very good advice for everyone at every stage that it’s important to look behind all the buzzwords. There are some trends – there was always something – it can be responsive, it can headless, it can be omnichannel, multichannel.

Tim Bucciarelli:

PWA.

Kuba Zwoliński:

PWA – yeah – PWA was an amazing example of an absolutely meaningless buzzword because you could put everything behind PWA. So, it’s important to really think what are the problems that we need to solve and what tools will solve them in the easiest and quickest way.

So, composable – it’s definitely a lot of challenges and fun for a technology company. We love working with composable architecture because of the challenges. We all like to be challenged. But it needs a very strong partnership with a client – both sides have to understand all the challenges – both benefits and challenges coming together with composable architecture.

Tim Bucciarelli:

And the cost and time.

Kuba Zwoliński: 

Exactly. So, that’s why we are also offering not only Magento and Adobe Commerce but also Commercetools or BigCommerce – because they fit somewhere – for some clients, Adobe will be perfect.

For others, it will be Commercetools in a full composable setup. And somewhere there between, there may be a client perfectly okay with BigCommerce.

In all of those solutions, we can create a great experience, but because of the client technology maturity, business complexity, or sometimes just requirements of the infrastructure, we can choose a different tool. I think it’s important just not to follow a trend – just think what are the real problems we want to solve and choose the right tools.

Because, like, we are using just those three platforms, but there are others, like you mentioned Shopify, which is very popular and, even if it’s less customizable, it’s still powerful and it can really support most of the businesses around the world.

Tim Bucciarelli:

it’s meeting the needs of many, many merchants just fine.

Kuba Zwoliński: 

Exactly. We have Shop-Ware. It’s just very dynamically growing and offering interesting open-source solutions. There’s Elastic Path. There are some local solutions like Silios in Europe and all of them are okay – it all depends if the partner or the company who is integrating and building a solution using those tools has enough skills and creativity to use them the right way.

So, it’s the same, like architecture, tools – everything has to be decided case-by-case – don’t just follow – it’s even tempting to follow just the competition, but even the very close competition may have completely different stuff behind the scenes, so it may have a different requirement even if you’re not selling the same product, the same market, but with something different in the backend, and then it may need completely different tools.

Tim Bucciarelli:

And I’m not sure – I haven’t thought this through fully, but – because some of the platforms can be matched so well to a specific business need, multiple platforms could sufficiently meet those needs, I almost feel like some businesses should go with the agency that they trust the most and the platform that that agency they trust has the most expertise in.

So I agree – you definitely want to make the decision between your platforms or at least know what could solve your problems effectively, but if you come down to two or three different platforms and you have a very good relationship with a strong agency that you trust and they work with one of those three, I think it might be wise to go with that one platform and that one agency because I think the results depend so heavily on, to your point, the trusted partner who implements it for you.

Kuba Zwoliński: 

I fully agree because, after all, it will be the partner who is responsible for the implementation, and when we are talking about technology, right now it’s so advanced that it’s impossible on the client’s side to know everything about it. So there will be always some black magic that only the implementation partner knows about. I cannot really imagine building any solution right now without trust.

Of course, it’s not easy. Like, it would be good to be able to put everything in the agreement and have everything described from A to Z and 0/1. But it’s definitely much more complicated. A lot of things have to be based on trust, and this trust – it’s not about like one week of cooperation – this trust has to be built up over months of working together and understanding each other because it’s not like a one-sided communication. Every business, every merchant, has to understand the technology they are using and understand the processes – how this technology has to be implemented.

But, on the other hand, the technology provider should understand the client business because if the technology provider will just follow the requests without thinking if it makes sense, or without being proactive and suggesting new or better solutions, it doesn’t make sense. It’s like, I think, neverending learning. The technology provider should learn about the client’s business and all the needs and what’s specific in this business.

But it also has to work the other way – that every business should try and do all their best to understand the technologies so they know the limitations, challenges, and then it’s much easier. It’s not like just following, “Yeah, our marketing wants to have this feature.” It doesn’t matter how complex it is and how it will ruin the whole system. So, it’s important to understand that every change has some consequences in technology.

Tim Bucciarelli:

I like that idea. That’s something that I really enjoy doing is talking with merchants and helping them understand kind of just directionally where they might look to get the information they need to make the best decision. We’re not always the right people for them to talk to about this, that, or the other platform. We know two platforms quite well. We hope we can direct them to other teams or agencies who have experience in other platforms.

But it’s so important that that’s kind of a starting point for us – is having that conversation – just seeing if we can help at all direct them generally toward the right platform. That’s a big part of what I enjoy doing in my job.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Actually, I feel the most comfortable talking to the clients who already spent some time talking to different agencies, talking to different service providers, and trying to understand – because then, we can talk not about marketing and sales – I don’t want to sell just an idea – I want to talk about how we can deliver something that actually works, not sell the promise of a huge success. No, I like to talk about the real effects we can achieve together.

But, that’s impossible if we are talking only one-to-one. For example, if clients come to us and they don’t want to talk with anyone else, it’s not the best scenario. I think the best one is if “we look a little bit wider – we try to talk to different people, different businesses, and we find the one we really share some values with, or approach to the project.”

And it works both ways. It’s really difficult to work with a client who has completely different values.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yes.

Kuba Zwoliński:

So, right now the IT world is pretty challenging and I think it works both ways – both companies have to build the trust, and have to have a deep understanding that they have the same goals and the same values – we know where are going together.

It’s interesting. It’s something more than just a simple service provided. It’s more like a partnership right now – to build a good, successful eCommerce and not only build it but maintain it and plan the future for it – it just needs a partnership, not just a service.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yep. Okay, so we touched on a lot of different areas in eCommerce and I started with a very general question about the future of eCommerce and I’ll finish with a similarly general question, and that is – Are there any particular areas of innovation that you see right now or coming down the pike in eCommerce?

Kuba Zwoliński:

We were talking about many various platforms already, and I think we agree that they are all pretty good, so it’s less about technology – it’s more about focusing on building a better user experience, and learning how to really make good use of data science because right now we have a lot of data – we collect data everywhere. And only with those data and the right usage of data, we can build a great user experience.

So, for me, the most interesting direction is unified commerce, where we don’t talk about eCommerce or retail – we just talk about commerce, about selling something, selling, buying, making transactions. And, it’s not important at all where the transaction happens – this experience is unified. So, if you start your experience online and finish it offline, or do it a completely different way, or there may be a lot of different ways to do it, but in general we don’t talk about eCommerce or something separate.

And I think this is the most important trend – that is, less marketing, more a good direction that’s – even the most successful eCommerce pure online business should think about some kind of offline presence. Even the more traditional, local brick-and-mortar business should think about some online presence. Actually, the whole pandemic showed us that even if there’s a local bakery without some kind of online presence, they might be in deep trouble.

So, this kind of unified commerce concept and blending experiences across different channels or different fields is the main important innovation to watch.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Okay, and it sounds like we’re on our way there and that the pandemic maybe helped accelerate it a little bit, opening some eyes to the opportunities in both of those areas – the brick and mortar as well as the online.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Yeah, yeah – I think so. It challenged a lot of businesses, but it also created a lot of opportunities. Difficult times are always a strong incentive to think about innovations, to think how to build something better, more flexible. And for us as buyers, that’s a good direction – if we like a brand, if we like shopping with one company, we don’t have to always go to one place – we can just follow this brand wherever it is in different places offline.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Maybe even in the Metaverse! 

Kuba Zwoliński:

Ah, yeah, Metaverse is – after recent presentations of the Metaverse, I think we are still not there yet. Or, maybe I don't want to be there.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yeah, I agree.

Kuba Zwoliński:

The Metaverse – maybe one day it will be something. For example, I don’t know, we’ll be traveling to Mars or some other parts of the galaxy and I would like to meet with my friends and Metaverse would be the only way. But right now, I think it’s still much better to just keep our more traditional relations. 

It’s also with eCommerce – we still need a point of contact with the brand that is more realistic. But who knows – maybe in like two or three years, even, there will be some huge innovation in technology and the Metaverse will surprise us with something totally new and unexpected.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Yep. And I think that for many businesses it’s easy to get distracted by trends, as you mentioned, and not focus on the core. So I think it’s always good advice to focus on your core, keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on pay attention as trends move, but never lose sight of your core and don’t make big changes to try to embrace something that’s, you know, five to ten years out in the future. That’s just how I feel about it. 

Kuba Zwoliński:

Yeah, I agree – that’s always good. That’s always good advice.

Tim Bucciarelli:

Well, Kuba, thank you so much for joining us today on Shaping eCommerce. This was a great conversation. We’ll put this together with some of our other “Future of eCommerce” conversations, maybe have a mash-up of different points of view. But I’m hearing a lot of similar themes, so it’ll be fun to get a chance to look at them. So, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Kuba Zwoliński:

Thank you. Thank you very much, Tim. It was great talking to you and I can’t wait to see the final version.

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