The Weekly - June 16, 2020 - 14

Resources and Education
Kelly
Ramirez

Demystifying
E-Commerce

Feel as if you are missing the building blocks for
digital success? Don't fret. You are closer than
you think. Prismatic's Kelly Ramirez and Talkoot's
Brian Hennessy will give you the tools and put
you in the driver's seat.
IT TOOK 18 YEARS FOR ECOMMERCE

to reach 18% of sales. Thanks to
COVID-19, it took another eight
weeks for it to hit 28%. And it
won't be going back anytime soon.
Data-driven growth expert Kelly
Ramirez and inbound-content
expert Brian Hennessy are here to
break down the art and science behind high-converting e-commerce
sites. They will join us on The
Weekly Chat this Thursday to dis-

cuss the core building blocks of successful online retail and leave you
with a handful of actions you can
take right now to kickstart growth
in your own digital channel. In the
meantime, here's what they have to
offer to start the conversation.
Why is e-commerce
intimidating? And how
do you demystify it?
BRIAN HENNESSY: Digital

14 THE WEEKLY / OUTDOOR RETAILER SUMMER 2020

KELLY RAMIREZ: To companies

that didn't grow up in a digital-first
era, this ecosystem and its requirements can feel like trying to speak
a new language. It doesn't help that
for an everyday business owner,
early e-commerce was in a black box
and driven by extremely large entities or corporations that benefited
by holding the keys to the kingdom.
The old model of digital marketing
and digital agencies that were first
to the table also benefited by keeping things a little confusing. It's an
industry with lots of acronyms and,
like many things that grow rapidly,
there's some grey area. But just, like
a new language, it's about getting
the foundational building blocks
down and evolving in sophistication
from there.
"Digital Transformation" is a term
often used to describe the upleveling and evolution of companies that
are reorganizing to be competitive

in the modern customer landscape.
I love the term because it indicates
the dynamic changes for companies
that are committed to evolving.
How do smaller brands actually have an advantage over
big brands when it comes to
e-commerce?
BH: The future will be owned by
smaller and smaller brands. Think
about the beer or wine industry.
They used to be dominated by a few
large brands. Now they're dominated by thousands of small craft
breweries and wineries. The same
will happen to the outdoor industry.
KR: We've just moved through an

incredible case study for this as we
weathered the impacts of COVID-19.
The brands that will have an advantage on digital and e-commerce are
those that deeply understand their
customers, and deeply care about
their customers' experience. In the
rapid acceleration to e-commerce,
we saw the fallout of companies that
were teetering on the edge (JC Penny
as a retail example), that aren't able
to differentiate the value they add
to customers who are inundated
by choice and couldn't move their
systems quickly enough to meet
their customers where they want to
Brian
Hennessy

CO U R T E SY K E L LY R A M I R E Z , CO U R T E SY B R I A N H E N N E S SY

technology can be intimidating.
The myth of the creative genius
founding a unicorn tech company
sells lots of magazines. The problem
is, it's the exception not the rule.
Most successful digital companies
were started by relatively normal,
non-technical people who simply
wanted to solve a problem for other
people. This is especially true when
it comes to e-commerce. There are
so many off-the-shelf solutions that
plug and play together, you don't
need much technical sophistication
to get an e-commerce site up and
running. With Shopify, for instance,
you could launch a store in one day
with little or no money. I think the
myth of the overnight, billion-dollar
company hides the reality that there
are thousands of smaller companies building very successful and
profitable online businesses.
The Weekly - June 16, 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Weekly - June 16, 2020
