Answering my own interview question

I’ve been interviewing for an Ecommerce Executive and along with questions about the candidates skills and experience we had questions that tried to find out more about things like their interest in the area of work.

How do you stay up to date with what’s going on in the ecommerce industry?

This is a pretty standard interview question, I’ve been asked it in interviews, and if our candidates had answered, “I’m subscribed to Internet Retailing and Charity Digital News emails”, we’d probably have been pretty impressed. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that this question isn’t the real question, it’s one of those tricky inferred questions. And the inference here is not just to say how you stay up-to-date with your industry, but also what you do with that information, what processes do you have in place for being innovative and suggesting changes in your current role that keep the business moving forward.

My answer, having had a bit of time to think about it rather than having it sprung on me in an interview would not be a list of websites I look at or email newsletters I’m subscribed to. My answer would be about looking at what’s going on in the ecommerce industry as three horizons at different timescales.

The first horizon is “Now: What are the leading companies doing that we aren’t?” This might include things that we need to respond to as soon as possible like a Google search algorithm updates and things that we can’t do anything about like Content Marketing (because we don’t have the budget). The second horizon is “Next couple of years or so: What technology, methods and ideas are leading edge right now, might become mainstream, and might apply to us in the next five years or so?” This might include things like changes in consumer behaviour and the increasing growth of marketplaces, and how our company might respond. The third horizon is “Sometime in the future: What could happen and how might it affect things for us?”. These are the big maybes. They would include things like driverless delivery vans. They would affect the entire ecommerce industry (potentially making fulfilment much more cost-effective) but there isn’t really anything we as a company can do about it.

An answer like this shows that you are currently keeping up to date with what’s going on by dropping in examples of innovation, but more importantly it shows that you can create an approach to staying up to date rather than just making it up as you go along, and it shows that you think about how to convert what you learn into benefits for the business.

At Ecommerce Expo 16

I went to Ecommerce Expo 16, and although I only had a short amount of time to watch a couple of presentations and talk to a few companies about their services, I got a lot out of going.

I got stats:

  • The average adult uses 2.3 devices a day; tablets and mobiles in the morning, desktops during the day, and mobiles in the evening.
  • 87% of customers in the UK shop online.
  • 50% of customers won’t go back to a retailer if they have a poor fulfilment experience.

I got insights:

  • Customers have unlimited choice. They can get pretty much whatever they want and in lots of different ways.
  • Customers have accepted that change, retailers must too. The question is, how do we do it?
  • Ecommerce must be effortless and it must reward the customer. (I thought the idea that ecommerce needs to reward the customer is really interesting, and right, the more extra benefits and value (not just monetary) a customer gets the more likely they are

I got to meet:

  • Freshdesk, to talk about customer contact and how we can improve our customer services. (And I got a keyring).
  • Amazon Payments, to talk about using Amazon as a payment option.
  • Amazon Sponsored Products, to talk about pushing Heartfelt

Commerce Futures Marketplaces event

I went the a Commerce Futures event about Marketplace selling which included speakers from Boden, Dune, Baker Ross, and Style.com.

Commerce Futures Marketplaces event

Here are some of the things I learned about selling on Marketplaces:

  • Lots of ecommerce people don’t like Amazon
  • Companies like Dr. Marten, Brompton and Selfridges won’t sell on Amazon because they lose brand control
  • Companies that do sell on Amazon see it as adding incremental sales to their main business
  • Companies like Dune use Amazon to clear last season’s stock
  • Logistics infrastructure is the main challenge for companies selling on Amazon
  • Ensure availability of stock is another big challenge
  • Customers have greater trust for marketplaces than individual brands
  • Brands need to be where consumers expect to see them
  • Amazon UK may introduce Tracked Delivery Service as mandatory for marketplace sellers
  • Amazon has very strict thresholds for dealing with order issues and these put your account in jeopardy
  • Global marketplaces will own 40% of Ecommerce by 2020

Recruiting an Ecommerce Executive

Today, the job advert for an Ecommerce Executive at the BHF was posted.

It feels like a big step for the Ecommerce business, and for me. It’s a new role, and quite a broad one to enable us to tailor the work and responsibilities to the skills of the best candidate.

The creation of this new role shows some commitment from the organisation to support the growth of the Ecommerce business, and there’s certainly plenty of work to be done.

It is also a new thing for me. This will be the first time I’ve recruited a direct report and line managed someone in this way.

Another person on the team seems like it should reduce my workload but I know in fact it will increase it. The benefits come from us being able to achieve more quickly our plans for growing the business and delivering projects. It also gives me a lot to do in designing the induction programme, deciding on the approach to managing this person (1-2-1’s Objectives, etc.), and how I integrate them into Ecommerce at the BHF.

It’s going to be an interesting few months.