How the ”Digital Shelf” Shapes New Consumer Experiences w/ Mert Damlapinar

Mert, what are the three most important things that you need to bear in mind for the digital shelf?

The three most important things for Digital Shelf today are traffic, product detail page, and the conversion.

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell. I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. This week we're going to look at the concept of the digital shelf and contrast it with the old school way of doing things in stores. Now, digital shelf is a term that, frankly, was new to me, even though I've been in and out of retail for around 30 years. And my guest today is going to be the guide to tell us how technology is shaping retail and what this means for vendors and especially CPG companies. Now, if you're a regular at the Account Experience podcast, you'll know that in every episode, I like to catch up with inspiring industry leaders or thinkers, people who can share best practices and tips to help you develop your B2B account experience program. And if you think of enterprise client management as a kind of a planogram, we are merchandising customer experience on the siteline, you know, and at that focal point is Account Experience. I'm also a father of four, I'm a founder, and I'm fantastically interested in humans. I love anything that furthers the quality of business relationships. Today, I'm delighted to welcome an expert in the digital shelf and digital analytics. His name, Mert Damla Pinar, has been in direct, of course, for E commerce, digital marketing and sales in brands that you know and love, like l', Oreal, Mondelez, and Sabra. He's currently the principal of CPG Digital Commerce Acceleration at epam, Continuum. More on that later. But get this. He holds multiple degrees in Applied Business analytics from Boston University. He's got an integrated digital marketing degree from Cornell, and Applied Data Science Digital Transformation from mit. I mean, if there's not a rocket scientist in digital analytics, this is the guy. And he's just published his second book, well, about six months ago, Agile analytics for Startups. It's got to be a great read. And he's currently working on his third book on E commerce. I cannot. I'm so excited to speak about the Digital Shelf. I'd love to welcome you. Hello, Mert, how are you doing?

I'm doing great, Adam. Thank you very much for having me. And thanks everyone who's listening to us today.

Oh, it's great to hear you. Now, listen, Mert, why don't you tell us about your journey because, well, you know, you've got one of the most interesting resumes I've ever seen. So how did you get to where you are today?

Oh, thank you very much. Thanks for your kind words Adam. As you mentioned today, I'm the principal of CPG Digital Commerce Acceleration Practice and the Business advisory division at EPAM and I live in New York for the last 14 years. But of course the journey started somewhere else across the pond and I completed the college with molecular biology degree and I worked on DNA repair and oncology diagnostics for four years in biotech. Then I've decided to change industries and I moved into food and Beverage CPG FMCG with my own first startup back in 2007. Since then I've been working in CPG FMCG companies. So I had a couple of startups in the way and I moved to the United States in 2009 and since 2009 I've been working at companies like CBO Vita, Sabra, Pepsico, Mondelez International and l' Oreal at different roles at Director of E Commerce, Director of Sales and managing the sales operation and online sales revenues. In 2016, while I was the VP of Sales at CBO Vita, I realized digital marketing is a very important component of our day to day as a sales team and operating P and L. And I've decided to improve my knowledge, educate myself in digital marketing. That's why I joined Cornell University to complete my second corner of the triangle and 2017 I realized data analytics has become a very imperative part of our day to day and all these dashboards, all these reporting, performance monitoring become a very, very important part of our daily job. So I completed a master's degree with Applied Business Analytics. Today I call this Bermuda Triangle between the sales digital marketing and data analytics which is essential for any digital commerce team in any industry. And now we're in the brink of a new wave of acceleration where the data analytics and AI are converging and becoming a day to day of many different functions in the organizations from sales to marketing, from from supply chain to finance. And we're also seeing a lot of interest in internal product development in house, product building versus acquiring those services and products from the market. And my team, my practice is focused on this need in the market. Right now we're building digital capabilities for our CPG clients and we're helping them to build those tools, build those capabilities in house when they need to enhance their accelerate their teams. That's where I am today and I'm looking forward to the next 10 years of this fast journey ahead.

Well, what an interesting career you've Got right from doing DNA to this stuff, we maybe dive in and find out what's more significant later on. But taking the Bermuda Triangle concept, let's get lost in that right now and why don't you expand a little bit Because I think for many people listening, they think of digital commerce as an easy word to bandy around. But let's get more detailed in it. What does it mean for most people and when we just need to buy groceries or when we need to shop for essentials? I don't normally think of it digital commerce. So how would it affect me as a consumer?

You hit the nail on the head, Adam, with that. Because when we look at the any commerce, when we look at any channel activity, the best way to start is always looking at from the consumer's perspective. And you're totally right about this. Today's digital commerce or any digital activity from a consumer behavior standpoint is being dictated to the manufacturers, brands and advertisers because this is the consumer behavior change happening in the last decade or so. You can tie this to the generational shift. One more Gen X and the fancy generation and the land. Now we have millennials, we have Generation Z and of course we have our Gen Alpha coming on the side. And the pandemic accelerated this consumer behavior shift as well. And our lives becoming more and more faster and faster digitized. So our habits, so our interactions with the media we consume, with the product we purchase, with the engagement we have with our peers or brands we follow. That's why online activities on the digital journey also dictating the sales of products, whether it's sold online and fulfilled online or whether it's sold in a physical domains or in store. So we call this omnichannel conversion where online sales and offline sales are converging at a very fast pace. Therefore traditional advertising methods hundred years old tactics on the media marketing has becoming digitized as fast as those capabilities evolve and as fast as consumer behavior shifts. So when we look at digital commerce today, it's not only food and beverage, it's only apprehension. It's end to end on every industry, every category. But of course some categories are more prone, more advantageous for digital commerce activities like personal care, like operate and fashion like shoes than the others which might be lagging or which might be developing slower than the other categories like food and beverage because which is very saturated, which is very crowded and profitability, profit margins are not as supportive as personal care or opera. That's why we see different paces. But conversion of offline and Online channels are the reality of today and every digital touchpoint. Consumers engage with our brands, with our media content, with our messaging. We try to turn it into a commerce opportunity. It could be social commerce, it could be shoppable media, it could be brand website, or it could be traditional omnichannel retailers and marketplaces we love and shop from. So that's why all the landscape has becoming a playground for each brand where they can increase their digital commerce activities and grow their online share.

Wow. Okay, so let me play that back to you. So what you're saying is that digital is such a part of our lives now that even when we search on Google or if we're on a social site or something like that, we're being presented with products the whole time. And the skill for the vendors is to make sure that the right product is merchandised at the right time in front of us to maximize sales. Am I correct in saying that?

Exactly. We call it contextual commerce or contextual engagement. So brands are trying very hard to make those instances. Whenever consumer engage with their content, product information or advertising, it fits into the daily context of the consumer, wherever they may be. Whatever time of the day like so should be meaningful. It should be a decent and pleasant experience. Therefore, the likelihood of conversion will go higher.

And so let me take one step back because if I think about the usual retail experience, if I'm going into, you know, I pick a destination, I'm going to go to the supermarket to buy pasta. Okay, let's think of something.

All right.

And my choice of pasta, there's a shelf there. You know, there might be a special offer that my eyes are drawn to, but there might be 20 different types of pasta on there. And you know, I'm looking at price. I can make a very quick decision about that. So that's the real world thing. How does it contrast with the digital world?

Yes, the convergence of course, has advantages and positive consequences as well as challenges and difficulties. The example we're talking about right now of shopping for any food product like pasta and a traditional store, let's compare this to the online channel and offline channel. An offline channel, when the consumer goes into a traditional market and they walk into the aisle for the product they're looking for, they usually exposed to anywhere between 500 to 1,000 single products, depending on the size, depending on the volume, and they can choose from 20 different brands like you mentioned. So in order to get that point, brands were used to pay slotting fees. They used to have strong engagements and agreements with their Retailer partners to secure this spot on the shelf and their physical planogram. The online world when the online e commerce become a thing in the late 90s and when every brand started exploring the e commerce domain and online commerce capabilities, they thought that oh wow, we can upload all these 14,000 SKUs we have in our portfolio, we can list all the different products and brands we have and we can reach 10 times, 20 times different consumers in the online commerce domain. Technically that was a right and it was a probable approach. But in today's reality we need to look at the product engagement for the consumer from a digital shelf concept because the physical store and physical aisle is not exactly the same. With the digital shelf consumers are shopping today on online channel. When we look at digital shelf and how we should describe it, basically digital shelf is digital display of any brand and any products on any digital domain, any store with much more robust product information, much more detailed decision making capabilities like ratings and reviews, product availability, promotions and technical information. But space is not as vast like the physical store because when you're engaging with digital commerce and when you're looking for any product on your mobile phone or smart app device like tablet, you have limited space because your boundaries are set by the search results on page one search, which is only 10 products. Or if you're shopping on a mobile phone, your search results are limited up to four products, sometimes two products depending on your screen size. Yeah, so let's stick to the same analogy. Digital shelf is not infinite and it wasn't endless as many people were thinking of when the e commerce emerged in the early times. Because digital shelf is a much more challenging, much more difficult domain to make. Your products listed on the early Page 1 search results or your product availability, your bestseller ranking, your price levels and your ratings and review scores help you to get elevated in those organic search results. So digital shelf is like a funnel and from physical store where you have 500 to 1,000 products on the typical category page you have up to 16 to 20 products listed for you. And when you look at your mobile phone search results on Amazon or Tesco or Carrefour, you can see only six to eight products. And if you're shopping from a voice assisted device, Echo or any other Google Nest devices, you have only one product listed for your search results. So digital shelf is much more challenging, much more brutal environment compared to the physical offline shelf.

Yeah, that's really. This is a really interesting thing, I didn't think about that because, you know, I guess my head was still stuck in the concept of like the long tail, you remember the concept that Chris Anderson came up with, like, you know, 20 years ago you could put everything on the web. But of course it doesn't work like that. And I'm even thinking from my own experience. So for example, if I'm shopping on Amazon, I might click through on a product knowing it's not exactly the one I want, but I might scroll down the page and it says customers also bought these ones as well. So it's a really different experience, isn't it? You're using a lot of metadata and customer data to really guide that. I mean, already my mind is blown. How does this happen? I mean, it seems like magic to me, to be honest.

It was magic. It has been magic. That's right. But we're adapting to the honesty as individuals, as consumers, we're adapting the pace of the technology and digital exploration. But to answer your question, how does it happen? Number one answer to that is the robust and rich data available not only from and to retailers, but now this data is also available to advertisers, red CPG brands as well as consumers. So our decision making process during online engagement is not impulsive or behavioral like in the store in the past. Now we're being bombarded with so much information, with the reviews from our peers and our social network, with some other product information, with enriched media, enhanced videos or 360 product information and all the details we can see in just one page of details we cannot. We were not able to consume that much data before in our interaction with those products in offline domain. Second, online shopping is more impulsive. We are not always shopping for what we need and how much we want to spend. Sometimes we're shopping because of an impulsive moment. Sometimes we're getting excited with a song or a content or just another friend is recommending us this product, so we're taking advantage of a discount, et cetera. So online shopping is much more broader in terms of instance experience, in terms of interaction with the brand we like and also defining our identity. All this data richness, online shopping behavior is becoming more of our identity and who we are, how we want to present ourselves and also those impulsive moments. FOMO's fear of missing out a promotion, fear of missing out a brand trend, all these are combined in a span of five seconds. That's where we make a decision. Most of the time, unless we leave products in the cart and come back to shop for it three days later in the store experience, we make a list hours in advance. We get in our car, we go to the store, we walk with our cart happily and listening to the radio in the store and we make our choices, we give many products up and we want to spend only what we want to budget it for. So these are two different experiences now. And the share of digital influence sales as well as the online revenue is growing in a rapid pace today. Based on The Forrester data, 56% of total revenue offline retail sales are digital influenced, meaning consumers started their interaction with the product or content somewhere in their social media, somewhere in their Amazon search results, somewhere on their brand site, and then making a decision to buy it, whether online or offline. This distribution today is 56% and it's gonna be 70% by 2028, showing that even though most of the sales are still happening offline, the decision process and conversion activity starts online domain. So that's why it's so important for brands having those capabilities, advertising capabilities and the budget required to invest those capabilities are so important to them.

Right. That's fantastic. So I'm just gonna summarize this again. So it's all about this. This is so fast moving that in the next five years it's gonna go from 56 to get the numbers right to 75%. So there's a huge shift of purchase decisions are driven online. And this is something that CPG vendors really need to grasp now. They need to really think about digitizing it.

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So if you can again just let's just make sure that we summarize the key components of the digital shelf for those who weren't paying attention like me earlier on. So the digital shelf as I understand it, it's like photos obviously, but what else make is the makeup of it.

So we can divide digital shelf into three pillars and I will break down each pillar with the what components are consisting those pillars? Number one, the investment. All these brands and advertisers making into their digital product portfolio or digital assortment so they can track that online penetration, online share and online ad spend. How much investment being made into supporting these digital commerce activities. This is also a component of digital shelf from a reporting and performance measurement perspective. Second pillar would be overall performance. Okay, what's my share today compared to right competitors? And what is the breakdown between offline and online share and what is my channel profitability? This is also another pillar of digital shelf where businesses can track with their investment and the business impact on these investment. And third, I think this is more geared towards your question what are the actual components of digital shelf facing the consumer? So number one would be online in stock availability.

Yeah.

So online in stock availability would be any given time, any given date of the day. What's my percentage of availability in store which should be above 96% technically. And also search page one share of search page one share of share how many of my SKUs in this category are listed in each retailer From Amazon to Tesco, from Carrefour to Walmart, et cetera. Another component would be keywords. What about the trending keywords when the consumer is searching for these products? And the share of voice. What is the shadow voice of my brands in terms of those keyword and social coverage? How much of this available content my brands are encompassing? Another one would be content compliance. When you look at product detail page you want to see that product title, product information, image count in the carousel, enhanced level of images, all the ratings and reviews. Everything is tip top shape. So you have content compliance and good score for your product content increasing the conversion likelihood. Another one would be price and promotion so your price should be competitive as well. But many retailers are doing it for you. Amazon is matching Walmart and Target prices any given millisecond. So retailers are forcing brands to cut on prices without even letting them know or without. It's important to track your price levels in those price matching retailers to adjust your profitability in the product architecture and price spec levels. Another one would be of course ratings and reviews. What's our average score on the ratings and how many reviews we've generated organically. So those are the components of digital shelf where today we've been tracking and CPGs are also investing capabilities in those accuracy and the data coverage of these reporting tools of the digital shelf. And of course these are all consumer facing aspects of digital shelf. So there is no room for error.

There's a lot of stuff that people need to keep track of and who's. Well actually I'm going to save that question for a little bit later on. But let's really talk about performance measurement on this because I think in the old days CPG manufacturers would rely on POS data would come later. They get it from, I don't know, IRI or Nielsen like that. They'd understand the share of the wallet or their share, maybe do it through sampling techniques. My dad used to do this in the 70s. I used to help him do this stuff. It would take a long time to get the data in. I'm guessing and I'm just going to go out on a limb here that the vendors have now in their hands really good digital signals early on to look at trends that might help them impact their supply chain decisions. Is that true or you know, talk me through about how having better information can help you get ahead.

It is true in a sense, but not 100%. Let me give you an analogy again. Let's compare offline and online for performance measurements. To your point, in the traditional offline performance measurement where we're accustomed to the data from Nielsen and iri, we have a very mature, very established and mostly accurate data coming from our POS data provider, which is when we have household penetration, when we have the buy rate breaking down between purchase frequency and the purchase size, we have a pretty good information about our sales and household penetration. All the performance different categories. So this is offline performance measurement when it comes to online tied to the digital shelf components. I walked you through a minute ago. We need to look at it differently because now we're looking at in stock availability because not always the products manufactured for those retailers are secured for online channels. It's prioritized for offline channels. So online channels and E commerce teams are sometimes trained with the product availability before even shipped to the store. So we're looking at in stock availability, traffic conversion rate and average selling price. This is a basic formula being adopted in the industry universally. So online and stock availability by traffic by conversion rate and by average selling price. This is how we measure online sales performance and a figure. But to your point, data is not as accurate, robust and available as the traditional offline pos. Data and data providers are very fragmented. There are many different providers in the market today. So we don't have two, three gold standard providers that we can go and rely on data. We have more than 30, 40 different providers of this type of data in the market and not all of them are covering markets globally. So some emerging markets have white spaces or spotty areas like Southeast Asia, Latin America. So the basic idea is challenge to calculate those four components across stock availability, traffic conversion, average and selling price. Then tie it to a digital shelf performance to calculate breakdown between online and offline channels, calculate your online share and make sure your product detail pages are increasing your conversion ratio. So it's in its nascent state. I'll be honest with you, we still have another five to 10 years to cover those accuracy gaps, market coverage gaps. And there will be some consolidation down the road of course as the providers of the services and data grow and get more accurate, more satisfactory for the CPGs. But it's a fast moving train. It's very fun. And as consumer behavior shift rapidly compared to two decades ago, as new trends come along every three, four years, brands and data providers are trying to adapt and we're building those capabilities altogether.

Fantastic. Now what are the levers that a vendor can pull to get more visibility on the digital shelf? So we spoke a little bit more. The old way of doing it was to do slotting fees or maybe to buy an island or something like that. What are the new levers that can be pulled to affect position or space in the digital shelf?

When you say levers, I think of the digital capabilities those omnichannel teams use at their disposal today. And if we speak of a hub and spoke model and if you put the consumer at the center, there are some levers geared towards consumer like we can always talk about our consumers facing price back architecture. What is our price level? What are our strategy? But let's talk more about the spokes rather than the hub because consumer will always be at the center and there will be similar capabilities gearing for consumer. But first digital capability set because those are going to include at least four or five, six different capabilities or five, six different levers will be product assortment. So product assortment wouldn't be the same from one retailer to another on the online channel because again your profitability in E commerce is different than 200 years old. Offline supply chain and the fulfillment model. The price matching model of each retailers are different so doesn't mean that you have to sell every product assortment across Tesco, Carreford, leclerc, Ocean, Rev or Amazon and Best Buy. So you should look at different product assortments with different product price points for different retailers. Assortment is one lever and then you're looking at product availability. So again you need to be dedicating this online inventory photos, retailers which require different fulfillment time, different supply chain dynamics. Third lever would be display and search. Display and search meaning media investment with the problematic and DSP traditional channels from online to tv, from radio to other online domains. And this is a big advertising bucket for many brands. And then fourth lever we can talk about the product content because in the traditional offline channel your product content is basically your product packaging and the ancap flyers or shelf displays online domain you're looking at thousands and thousands different product pages across 100 different retailers. So product content is a very rich all media environment for the brands. Fifth spoke we can speak of both in store shelf and the digital shelf. As we walk through a digital shelf difference between offline shelves. These are very robust levers and capabilities. Brands can invest, activate and get returns in the and and also 5th sorry 6th lever would be the activation. All the promotions, all the digital coupons, all the samplings available would be the activating product on the domain and engaging with the consumer. So all these six levers bring up to 20, 30, 40 different capabilities according to the product availability data and service availability in different markets. These are all the levers brands today investing money, their brand teams, marketing teams and e commerce account teams are executing and monitoring day to day and it's a very very fast moving cross functional activity. So if you were managing your Walmart or Tesco account with the four or five people in the past, now you need minimum two times more people to be able to track because of the sheer volume growing in those retailers because of the demands they're coming back every year with their retail media investment, with their other capability investments and because of the nature of the agencies involved with it, because most of these services sometimes provided by agencies to the CPG brands and they don't have resources or enough number of team members to execute those. So the dynamics between internal teams and external teams, dynamic between the account management relationship with the retailer and the brand, those are evolving very fast and many companies are learning as they grow. We are helping them to cover the distance and develop those capabilities faster as fast as we can.

And this is where your organization comes in, isn't it? Epam.

Exactly.

So you're able to. Because I can imagine it's incredibly difficult to scale up with these things. So to get moving fast, maybe you can also talk a little bit about how you're helping companies do this.

That's exactly right. It is complicated and difficult to be able to provide these services in every market and also keeping those relationships at an effective level between the brands and enterprises. My practice today what we call CPG Digital commerce acceleration. Our services revolving around five core areas. Number one, we're looking at the cross channel strategy of those brands and CPG companies whether it's business to customer where 80% of the revenue is generated from and then D2C direct to consumer. And we're also looking at B2B distribution and wholesale platforms. Once we understand the cross channel strategy, goals and objectives and how we can take advantage of those levers and capabilities where brands have different levels of controls and the second level will be digital capabilities. We talked about six spokes of the hub and we're helping them identifying those gaps with a maturity level analysis and seeing where they can end or enhance those capabilities in different markets. Third would be digital shelf. Digital shelf maintenance and reporting is very important today to measure the performance. Fourth is a retail media optimization and performance measurement because a very fast growing bucket. Just to give you an idea about the importance of retail media between all these digital mediums available to brands today. Search is number one, social is number three. Linear TV is number four and retail media is right behind. In three years time retail media investment span will be more than linear and connected TV span. That's how fast it is growing. That's why retail media is a fourth pillar of our service offering is very crucial for brands and of course fifth we call it actionable insights data analytics because when you look at all these cross functional teams operating on online commerce you have sales and ops teams, you have media and marketing teams, you have digital shelf and content teams with agency partnerships and you have supply chain. Those four teams are so interconnected it's a team sport. Nobody can operate individually, nobody can rely on each other's performance without working together. So bringing them together and an actionable insights data analytics platform is crucial to be able to provide them a similar set of data and similar data models and similar dashboards. So for those five service areas are where we focus today to help the clients for their digital acceleration journey.

If you look into your the landscape at the moment, who's in the lead? Is it retailers or Is it the traditional brand vendors or is it somebody else, Maybe the social media companies or something? Who's who do you think is going.

To be the upper hand? Answer is very clear. Retailers ahead on this journey.

Wow.

Because even though COVID Pandemic hit us in an unprecedented way and we were not ready for it, they managed to capitalize on the consumer data they already have and they managed to generate a very, very lucrative new revenue stream in terms of retail media networks within a time of one or two years. Now we have a plethora of retail media networks today across every category, across every industry. Four years ago, five years ago you were only talking about Amazon and some Instacart and maybe Target round out a little bit for the retail media. Now Walmart, Kroger, Best Buy, Home Depot and everybody has their retail Networks because it's 70 to 80% gross profit margin for the retailers compared to the physical product sold on the shelf which is 25 to 40% max. So because it's lucrative nature because it's so high demand and brands need this information because of the cookie deprecation coming along next year. So third party data will not be available. They will need more and more first party data which they can acquire in aggregated formats from retailer media networks. Second, transparent performance measurement of their media investment. Retailers are providing this reporting to the brands today and third, privacy rights. That's why we call it acceleration, digital commerce acceleration. Because now CPG brands need to accelerate to catch up in the game with their retailer. That's the nature of where we are today.

That's fascinating. And so that gives us a glimpse into the future. The retailers are in front and the probably the balance needs to perhaps shift back to the CPG vendors. And so one of the ways they're going to do it is to invest in digital media acceleration.

I talked about this collaboration or relationship and last year at MIT we will talk about platform strategy. We're almost talking about the future of retail experience and the platform Strategy Summit. Now CPG brands are not only vendors, are not only suppliers to their retailer partners, they're also customer of their data. This relationship is evolving and it requires more and more collaboration to generate those meaningful experiences for the consumer. Because at the end both retailers and the CPG manufacturers are serving the consumers. And consumers now have more options than before to switch from one platform or one retailer to another, to choose from one brand to a private label any given time. That's why if brands and retailers enhance this collaboration in terms of data partnership, in terms of experiences in terms of more mutual and commonly used platforms building together, then consumers will be delighted with the experience and they'll be more and more loyal. Otherwise, during the COVID I'm sure you saw this. We saw it as well. The rate of switching platforms from one to another was three times higher. So consumers want weight until the product is available or until the data is available. Consumer will choose because they're looking for convenience, speedy delivery, best price and largest assortment. Whoever provide those four in a meaningful instance, they will win. And this requires collaboration between retailer and CPGs.

So in the end, the consumers showing us the way and following the data will get you there as always.

And they're getting stronger and stronger in this equation.

Now, before we go, I just want to, instead of talking about the future, I want to go back to the past a little bit and I want to find out if you know something called Butt Brush. Right. So let me, let me set the scene. I, I got a great book back in 1999. It's a fantastic author, if you've not read it by Paco Underhill. And I put a link in the show notes. He wrote a fantastic book called why we Buy the Science of Shopping. And if you think about it, but the 1999 the digital revolution had not started. So he was working with the data used by observing shoppers in stores with cameras. So an earlier version of what you did, call it version one of digital shopping. I'm going to run down this list of things that he spoke about and then let's contrast the old world with the new world for a bit of fun sound. Okay, so the first concept is something called but brush. What is that? That's okay. I'm going to try and describe it. They observed that if you had items on the lower shelf of a supermarket on both sides of a narrow aisle, when people bent down and there was another one the other side, if it was too narrow, their bottoms would. Would touch. Hence the word butt brush. And apparently it's so embarrassing, people just, if that happens, they just drop their shopping bag and rush out the store. So the number one learning was that make your aisles wider and don't try not to merchandise the most common stuff at the bottom of the shelf. You follow? So, okay, if that is the concept, if that's analog concept, no, Butt Brush makes people walk out the store. What's the digital equivalent of that?

The digital equivalent of the same analogy would be page two results of your products. If you're not listed on page one, probably you'll be forgotten.

Really Good. Okay, next one concept. The next concept you talk about, people walk to the right. So in a supermarket, they put the best stuff on the right hand side on a planogram. Most important stuff is dead center. But the brand you want to build a little bit to the right of it. You follow? Yeah. Is there, is there an equivalent in the digital world?

In the digital world would be probably your past purchases would be listed on top of your organic search results. So the platform will force you or direct you towards your past purchase products.

Oh, brilliant. All right, I'm just, I'm going to throw you a couple more of this. You're really good at this. Okay, so, so then, okay, this next one is a concept that Paco spoke about. He said, what price manhood now? Incredibly sexist. We moved on from this. But he discovered that women, again, I'm sorry about the stereotypical women are very focused on prices. Men are almost the opposite. They don't like to be seen to be cheap. If anything, they want to be seen to be spending more. Underhill's conclusion was that men could be more easily upgraded. Is that. That you can easily upsell. What's the equivalent in the digital world?

Equivalent would be price conscious consumers, where we call them bargain hunters versus easy cross sell opportunities right before the checkout. So men would be. Men would be inclined to do more upsells right before the checkout if they were present the right offer.

I suppose you, you'd say, hey, hey guy, you. Frankly, the people that buy this are cheap skates. If you want to look good, you need to upgrade to this one.

In many marketplaces today, when you're purchasing a product, when you're searching for your desired item, you always offer them two or three items, which most of the shoppers are shopping for three together. So Matt would be shopping for those upscale, upscale opportunities more frequently than women in this instance.

All right, I've got. Are you okay for a couple more? It's really good. It talks about the big, the big three in retail. This is circa 1999, so nearly 25 years ago. Retailing 101, he says, starts with the store. That has three aspects. One is design, the second is merchandising, and then the third is operations. By the way, operations is, you know, what your employees do. The lessons is that if you can strengthen one of those aspects, it takes the pressure off the other two. But on the other hand, if you weaken one, you have to compensate for design, merchandising and operations. He goes, it's just geometry. It rules the Universe. Have you, you know, is there a sense that there are three things in.

Your world that you need to do in online commerce? If you want to pick three essential components, then it will be traffic, product detail page performance, and conversion.

There you go. So those are the ones you need to maximize.

We can relate to traffic, relate to this demand. And product detail page could be related to design and how desirable your product will be on the display page. And the conversion would be the operation, how successful you will sell and complete the conversion.

All right, I got one last one for you. You're going to love this. You're interested in merchandising. So this is this concept Paco Wanda Hill hit at the end of the book, and he called it how high is up? And he describes his concepts here. He says he once heard the talk of a vice president of merchandising from a chain of apparel, women's apparel, and they deconstructed a display of T shirts, you know, like women's T shirts. And he goes, tells us, we buy them in Sri Lanka for three bucks each and we bring them over to the US and then we sew in the washing instructions in English and French. Okay, now notice they don't say that the shirts are made in France. You can infer that if you like. And then they merchandise the hell out of them. We fold them on a real sort of tasteful tabletop display. The wall behind it, there's a picture of a gorgeous women, you know, an exotic locale, wearing the T shirt. They shoot it like it looks like a million bucks. And then they call it the Expedition T shirt. And then they sell it for 37 bucks. All right, so it's a $3 T shirt that they merchandise at $37. And because we sell a lot of them too, I don't know who that was, Gap maybe or something like that. But is there a concept that you've got in the digital world where you can take something, you know, how do you merchandise the hell out of something on the digital channel?

Yes, there is. And the most close example would be direct to consumer channel, where you have your own brand sites versus the retailer and marketplaces. Because on the direct to consumer channel, consumers are not buying the same values of a mainstream omnichannel retailer store, but they're buying for the instance and experience and the customization of the product. So in one example would be customize Oreo cookies. When I was working at Mondelez, Oreo cookie is one of the world known, most famous and best selling cookie in the world. But if you go Oreo.com website you can customize your cookie, which I did for my anniversary with my wife, so you can add your photo on it, you can choose the color of your sprinkle, you can choose the flavor of your filling. In between they can put in a fancy box and suddenly four Oreo cookies customized to your wife anniversary is costing you $36, which is $3.99 in Walmart. So this will be the experience and customization power which we can offer to consumers on a B2C direct to consumer channel. And I think it's an analogy to your example.

Fantastic. And on that bombshell, we're going to leave a man whose wife is happier with Oreo cookies and jewelry on the wedding. No, seriously, I didn't mean to say that, but it's been fantastic hosting you today. How can people get hold of you if they want to dig in more to the story.

I appreciate it. It's been a great time. I enjoy the conversation and I'm posting on LinkedIn almost daily and people can follow me with my name and surname or they can track my hashtag e Commerce and being with my first name. So E Commerce is my newsletter and personal handle on LinkedIn. I'm looking forward to engaging with them.

Thanks so much. M. I really appreciate the the time you spent with us today and certainly take care.

So did I. Thanks for having me, Adam and thanks for everyone listening to us.

Sam.