We welcomed the new Cartologie network steering group with a roundtable discussion in June and since then, we’ve been planning a series of events for the network, the first of which took place on Tuesday evening at BNY Mellon’s offices in Piccadilly Gardens.
The event took the form of a panel discussion and panellists included Tom New, marketing director at Formisimo; Adam Barwick, ecommerce manager at Ralawise and Mark Leach, head of ecommerce at Graham & Brown. Rob Smith, managing director of Blueleaf chaired the session.
The discussion kicked off by getting right to the heart of the matter: Is there a danger that ecommerce businesses can get too reliant on technology? Mark was adamant that this can be the case: “The danger is that if you choose to no longer use a service, the data becomes lost. There must be a balance between knowing what’s important to your business and what you allow the technology to own.”
Rob then asked a somewhat controversial question; “If ecommerce professionals stop using technology, do they become more stupid?”
Tom flipped this question around and asked if it was best use of a developer’s time for them build a new tool from the ground up. Would it make them better at their job? Quoting Aristotle, Tom said “the function of a knife is to cut – the same goes for an ecommerce professional”.
However, he did go on to say that whilst some technology is useful, it may end up being like crack: hard to give up, even though you know it’s bad for you, which caused a ripple of laughter through the audience!
Adam went on to say there is a balance that you must find. You can use tools to create insight and if you use savvy developers, you can redevelop a service or software for your site that already exists by tweaking it to fit the requirements of your business. Although he stressed that this does depend on the size of your business; a large business may have the resource to do this whereas a small business may need to buy in tools and software.
Rob wrapped up the discussion by asking how important is it to lead the customer into a buying decision versus letting the customer lead you via tech?
Mark said that he’d toyed with the idea of putting a merchandising app on the Graham & Brown website but “we’ve never quite gotten to the point of saying yes we’ll do it because it takes all the insight away from you. If you rely on tech too much, you miss the fundamentals”. Mark went on to say that all the customer recommendations they do are done manually by stylists working for Graham & Brown: “If we use tech and make the wrong recommendation because of a dodgy algorithm, we’re screwed. ASOS do it this way too”.
Both Mark and Adam agreed that going down the technology route can be a good thing but only if you know what you want to get out of it and how it can be implemented into your business strategy otherwise you might end up with something you don’t want or need.
The Cartologie network is sponsored by MIDAS.
