Digital channels continue to evolve rapidly and with them consumer expectations. To keep up with the fast pace of change, businesses need ecommerce agility that can help them adapt and flex at speed in a cost-effective manner. Partners Monstarlab and Contentful brought together Ben Pounsett, Senior Product Manager at digital experience consultancy Monstarlab, and David Baldry, Senior Solutions Engineer at digital content platform Contentful, to discuss the benefits, challenges and future of agile ecommerce.
Firstly, thank you Ben and David for taking time out of your busy schedules to share your expert insights. For those who may be unfamiliar with the term agile ecommerce, how would you describe it? Is it a reality today and how is it different to legacy ecommerce?
David Baldry: The old-school legacy commerce systems are very inflexible. They were implemented many years ago and they delivered the use that they were meant to deliver. But they’re now rigid and the world around them is changing. Businesses are selling in different ways and a lot of these legacy technologies just can’t react quickly enough to new use cases and the changing demands that are being put on them. Agile solutions work natively across multiple channels. They integrate with other technologies much easier than legacy tools and they allow new use cases to be delivered much more easily and more quickly than in the past. Would you agree, Ben?
Ben Pounsett: Definitely. Agile ecommerce makes transformation and transition much easier for retailers. We’ve made huge leaps forward in our ability to produce visual prototypes and technical prototypes for ecommerce. It’s so much easier to test concepts with real users.
DB: In recent years there has been a shift in thinking. People are willing to try something and if it doesn’t work, just iterate on it or scrap the idea altogether. That is perfectly acceptable now, whereas in the old days you’d spend a lot of money on an ecommerce solution, and you were scared of failure.
BP: Absolutely, and not only can you test one idea, but a variety of ideas. Companies now have the opportunity to explore their prospective niche with a much lower cost of running the experiment. What these technologies allow now is an easy and consistent method to maintain your back office giving you more scope to iterate on your customer-facing interfaces focused on testing different user experiences. The headless technology model accelerates and frees the frontend by offering a consistent backend contract and allowing us to focus on the value-creating moment for the end user.
That willingness to experiment, to iterate and to fail is interesting. When you’re talking to potential customers or clients, is that something in reality that businesses support?
DB: Some modern-day tools allow you to try new things. When working in an agile way, you can do this within a sprint or two sprints, which means that within about a two- to four-week interval you can get there. This may not lead to a totally viable product straightaway, but you can get close to that. Then you can get user involvement very quickly, get their reactions to it, and work out whether it’s something to progress or not progress.
There’s a mentality change. You’re allowed to do that testing and failing because there’s an understanding that you can iterate quickly, you can try something else and move much more quickly than you could do.
BP: When I talk to clients about failure, I make sure we talk about failure within context. Experiencing failure in a context that doesn’t allow us the opportunity to learn is objective failure. Experiencing failure in a context where we have understood the assumptions made that the failure provides data for is often the gold-dust moment that leads to discovery. Learning that comes as a consequence of failure is really valuable. It’s much more palatable for a client if failure is recognised as having a quid pro quo about it, that there is value derived from it, but in exchange we must adapt and accept it.
Read the rest of the interview in our blog here.