Episode 154 / Roy Wentzel / PUMA Group / Head of Ecommerce Middle East (Interim)
Podcast: Why Headless Ecommerce Is the Future of Marketing
As Head of Ecommerce Middle East (Interim) at the PUMA Group, Roy Wentzel oversees the brand’s development in the Middle East. He has worked for PUMA for 7 years after moving across from creating Ecommerce platforms for hipster cycle shops in London. His Shiny New Object looks at a different way to create online shopping platforms: headless Ecommerce.
The difference between traditional and new, headless Ecommerce is huge. Whereas traditional Ecommerce requires brands to create a front end – that consumers interact with – and a back end – that runs the entire website – linked together by lots of code, headless Ecommerce is a lot less rigid and structured. It separates the consumers front end from the back end, allowing for a lot more customisation.
Moreover, headless Ecommerce offers brands incredible freedom to have a completely unique consumer experience. Unconstrained by a specific structure for the front end, this means that brands can build their own consumer journey. This has its downsides, however, as there is nothing to potentially stop a developer from creating a journey that is in no way anchored into what consumers really need or want!
Other benefits of headless Ecommerce include quicker loading times, which in turn will lead to websites ranking better on Google. So, not only would consumers get a unique experience, linked with AI recommendation models that personalise suggestions for them, they would also access the website quicker and come across it more often.
I asked Roy how, given all this exciting and intense development work, he ever switches off and combats overwhelm. His secret is to actually go completely offline and “old school,” using a pen and paper to draw up a to-do list and prioritising ruthlessly. Roy thinks that “everything is important until you actually look at what needs to get done.” This is why, no matter what, there should always be a sliding scale of priorities.
To hear more about headless Ecommerce, Roy’s top marketing tips and his career history, head to the full episode here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 0:00
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Hello, and welcome to the Shiny New Object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative. And this is a weekly podcast where I interview the leaders of this industry, about their vision for the future of that industry. And it's my pleasure and privilege to welcome Roy Wentzel, who is head of Ecommerce Middle East, interim, at Puma group. Roy, thanks so much for joining the call. Could you give the audience a bit of an overview about who you are and what you do?
Roy Wentzel 1:21
Hi Tom. Sure. So my current position is sort of the head of Ecommerce for the Middle East. But I'll sort of take you a little bit further back. I've been in sort of Ecommerce for over 17 years. It started out for me, and I was working part time in a bicycle shop in London. And the owner wanted to kind of get into this whole web thing. And he said, You look like a smart guy. He helped me out. And that's how I fell into Ecommerce a while a long time ago, and just kind of started figuring stuff out for myself and kind of building that sort of knowledge. We built a website that was well known in and around London, especially the bike shops in London. And then I kind of went off and did a sort of project management. For startups for new businesses, they wanted to kind of move to ecommerce platforms, if you didn't have anything before, might have just been mom and pop stores where they wanted a website for the first time. So I did that for a bit. And then I fell I got a call one day from Cycle Surgery bike shop in London. They wanted me to sort of interview in take them for ecom because they knew I worked for the the previous bike shop. I ended up working for them for a long period of time. In those days, we did everything from the marketing to the content to the Google AdWords to everything they had to kind of do everything yourself. So a lot of my ecom knowledge sort of comes from, you know, hands on. I worked with him for a bit of time that I went to a very niche bicycle shop in London that was sort of your hipster fixie kind of fixed gear trend. And after that, I moved into b2b e commerce where I was sort of content merchandising manager for one of the bigger groups out there as I was trying to progress my career to kind of expand upon those horizons. And all of that sort of brought me to Puma. That's about seven years ago, my role for the Puma group has been the DTC e commerce, starting up new e commerce regions and countries for Puma, where the brand would actually then fulfill to the end consumer that's sort of taken me everywhere from Latin America, which is Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, over anemia, and then all the way sort of Far East, to Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, rebuilt India. So I think I've got a good global footprint sort of behind me, which also brought me then to the Middle East and Dubai were sort of acting head of ecommerce, we spool that region up for Puma, starting in the UAE, and then sort of expanding into Saudi early next year.
Tom Ollerton 4:07
And we were introduced by the FUTR Conference, of course.
Roy Wentzel 4:11
Yes, we were. I'll be speaking at the Future Conference in Abu Dhabi, as well representing sort of what it's like to spool up e commerce in the region.
Tom Ollerton 4:22
So yeah, if you guys go to FUTR.today, you'll be able to see more details about Roy's talk. So Roy, let's get to it. You have got a very demanding job making ecommerce happen in all of these different markets. The tech stack that you must deal with must be intense, and there must be 1000s of players looking to disrupt that constantly. So I figure that you want to stay ahead and not get left behind but there's only so many hours in the day. So what happens when you get overwhelmed? How do you recenter yourself?
Roy Wentzel 4:56
I switch everything off. I've got multiple channels who sort of reach out to me. So you've got the traditional email, we use Slack for any externals at Puma. And then for internal, we use Teams. Some of the teams also reach out to me on WhatsApp, I switch everything off, close all of the applications and go all school by taking a pen and paper, and sitting down and creating a list. With that list, I sort of then look at it and go, what's actually important, what can I live without, and then reprioritize the list and just keep working on it to like, Okay, this is my first step, this is what I need to do next, this is the following, and, and so forth. That's how I tend to recenter myself.
Tom Ollerton 5:39
And what about all of the important stuff that didn't make it into the top of the list that still needs to get done? And you know, you're going to get heat a little bit further down the line? If you haven't done those things? How would you deal with the other stuff that wouldn't have been on your long list anyway, if it weren't important?
Roy Wentzel 5:55
It's truly about prioritization. Everything is important until you actually look at what needs to get done. So for me, it's truly what is urgent, what is important, and what can I not go on about, what is noise that can exist for another day or two or another hour? I'm not saying forget about those items, they still on the list, but they further down. But it's always about prioritization, what needs addressing now, what can wait, or what can follow. And that, to me becomes super important is that prioritization, because if everything's important, nothing gets done, and you continue to kind of spin and overwhelm yourself, you don't actually have that first step to kind of take that first step in any direction to just get items done. So I'm a big fan, and and preacher of you need to prioritize and identify what is immediately what is, what can wait, and then what is a few long term plan. But again, keep the list going and never, never forget about it, you know, else you won't actually get items done. And of course, again, that continual reprioritization of the list to make sure that you are addressing as things become more critical, if you've ignored them for a little bit.
Tom Ollerton 7:15
So what is your top marketing tip? So fascinating background in the hipster cycle shops of London, and moving across the Puma, but what what have you kept with you in terms of marketing advice, or what have you heard recently, that really struck a chord with you that your share with your teams and colleagues?
Roy Wentzel 7:36
it isn't something that I've kept, it's something that I've learnt over time, as it becomes more and more important is data driven decisions. And for me, it's it's actually data driven attribution for your return on adspend. It's, this is a, you know, my top marketing tip or something that I didn't think of until it was actually pointed out to me that you can't just count on the first click and attribute all your costs there. And looking at it, within the industry, you know, on average, consumers interact with your your adverts, you know, somewhere between seven to 13 clicks before they actually come to your website, and then actually purchase, how are you making sure that your marketing spend is truly effective. If you're only counting, you know, the first or the last click, you need to attribute the cost evenly across there to have a very good overview of exactly what is driving your marketing. And that's why I'm a big fan of data driven attribution when it comes to marketing, or it's what I preach the most about to the teams.
Tom Ollerton 8:42
So that makes total logical sense. But how do you do that?
Roy Wentzel 8:45
Google Analytics helps you, Google Ads helps you. And you have to just look at it almost on a daily, weekly, break it down that way. See what is driving and using the data to then make that decision and see if it is truly a brand campaign, a unique advertising campaign that is driving the traffic? Or is it a mixture of the two, you know, don't just turn one off with maybe feeding more the top of the funnel, maybe feeding mid funnel? And then see how they are actually relating and what the true cost is before trying to switch one off?
Tom Ollerton 9:26
And are there any other technologies outside of Google that you use? Is there anything in the startup space that you think adding a addendum to that kind of technology? Or is it just pure Google through and through that's all you need?
Roy Wentzel 9:38
No. What does help me is the visualization. So a few tools like Trello or something else? In terms of the startup space, big enterprise corporations don't like those very much. They like the oh, what's the company next door using let's use the same, right, that's how the procurement normally happens, you have to argue a lot. I do feel that over the years, it's become easier to argue startup technology. And there are so many out there. I actually like a few different startups more about customer journey then. So we're going off the off the topic here, where you can actually see the data and how consumers actually interact with your main website more so than the journey to the website. I personally don't have any experience in any third party tools that we could use, in addition to Google myself today.
Tom Ollerton 10:37
Today's episode is brought to you by Media for All, which was set up to help encourage more black, Asian and other ethnic talented to media, and to provide a support and mentoring network to ensure talent flourishes in the media industry that we all love. If you're looking for a mentor, or would like to mentor young ethnic talent, check them out at mediaforall.org.uk and it is all 100% free.
So we're at the halfway stage loosely. So we're gonna start talking about your shiny new object, which is headless ecommerce. So I'm ashamed to say that we discussed this the other day. So please, could you introduce what headless ecommerce is? For people like me who should know more?
Roy Wentzel 11:36
Tom, you don't have to be ashamed. It's it's just something new. It's it's very interesting. And I think you raise a good question the startup space. So headless e commerce is actually let me rewind a little bit. And traditional ecommerce or what they call monolithic is you choose a platform, whether that's Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, big commerce, you choose a web platform to then list your products on and sell, you have what's called a front end. And that's the main section that your consumers usually interact with. And then you have a back end, which is kind of the framework and the running of the entire site. And you've got a lot of code between the two. What headless ecommerce is, is you separate that consumer front end, the main part that the consumers interact with, from the back end. And you do this for a couple of different reasons, you know, think of it this way, every time one person comes to your your website, it pulls all of the code front and back end. And traditionally, this is what made websites slower. As one person came in, you know, one becomes 100, or 1000. On there, your every single one of those is pulling the code from the server, and it's exposing the code to them, whether the code from the back end has been used or not. But that then causes your websites to be slower and clunkier. By removing that, you then sort of improve the speed of your website, and you know, the performance of it. But also, you, you break away that tradition, and the boundaries that the platform then put down as to what you can do with the front end. Because it kind of just limits you you know, and again, I'll refer to this sort of traditional ecommerce platform would dictate that your homepage has a banner at the top of the above that sort of a menu. But separating the two you can totally customize the experience and the consumers have on your website. Completely different and how they interact. And you can build a a unique consumer customer journey. You know, if you go with traditional what it what it tends to look like is homepage. consumers interact with that if they land on your homepage, then they go to a customer, a product detail page or listing page from that, then go to a quick view or to a product detail page. And you know, it's a structured journey of how the consumer then interacts with your website, which you could do with headless ecommerce, because you're not bound to that framework anymore of the platform. You can build a unique customer journey as consumers load or come to your website. And they can interact with any way they see fit. Not only you get that personalization or you know, you sort of going into some of the perks of headless now is where you can then build that personalization and unique customer journey for your different user groups. But it also then looks at the performance of your website and with Google lighthouse, Google now doesn't only just rate your website anymore on the content and the SEO and the items you have it but they actually rate your website on performance, they give it a lighthouse score of 100. Most websites in the world today sort of hit anywhere between 20 to 40 out of 100, on their Amazon is up to sort of your 80s and up almost the 90s on any given day, as they look at this number quite frequently. But as consumers search or use Google, Google now actually add heavier weights to the performance and how your, your consumers actually going to interact with that website. So again, the more speed you can give your website or the more you can alleviate some of the heavy code pull, Google's gonna rank you better. And your website will actually then be found through search engines a lot easier, as well.
Tom Ollerton 15:44
So you've said a unique customer journey a few times. So what are the options? What's available, are we talking about like, old school kind of flash experiences with videos and many microsites built in or you just talking about, hey, we know you like yoga, so therefore, you're going to see yoga pictures?
Roy Wentzel 16:00
You could serve up both of those experiences, depending on your user profile. So let's, let's go back a little bit. So normally, it sort of, you know, websites have the Category Management at the top, you know, men's, women's, sports, kids, whatever, there may be clothing versus shoes. And traditionally, you had to set that up as the framework of your platform is. But now with headless, you can actually service different tool sets. So whether that's your video content, and your or your yoga content, and use the best tool, therefore it because with with headless and sorry, maybe forgotten to mention this, you can actually service and use multiple applications, and connect that by API to the core of the system. So why use one tool when you can use multiple tools for different experiences, and you can use the best tool and that's some of the uniqueness or interesting in headless is that you can then...
Tom Ollerton 17:10
When you say tools, helped me understand what the breadth of different tools are available, and what that means for the the marketer and the consumer.
Roy Wentzel 17:17
So coming back to images and how they're displayed on the website or video content. Normally, you would have to host that content on your website, or you could use a third party service now, where you could actually have that hosted somewhere else and plugged in and served on your headless front end. And consumers can use and interact with that. And one that I like to think of is also maybe reviews predominantly. In the old days, you would have to make sure that you know, the Review Tool you used, whether it's like Bazaarvoice, or, or power reviews, or anything, any third party Trustpilot, anything like that would, you'd have to first check the compatibility and you'd have to do an integration with your website to host this information and serve it. What you can now do is you could serve that information, how your consumer wants to see it on a personalized experience in this front end, without a touching the backend or slowing your service down. So again, you can use reviews for one, you could use a recommendation tool, like AI recommendation tool like like bloomreach, that's looking at the data that the consumers previously experienced or looked at or maybe interacted with your site with. And you can use that information to service them with recommendations, shop the looks where they could then actually maybe buy a whole outfit if they were just looking at items. And you can also use that information to then personalize that shopping experience. If I know for instance, that a consumer come to our website, three last week or a month ago, and they bought a pair of running shoes, the might not want to see a new pair of running shoes, knowing that they got it but I can use that information to service and show them accessories and upsell and cross sell as part of the recommendations. And again, I'm not tied down to one tool that may that I would have in the past had to enter in integrate with my back end. But I can try multiple different tools and see what the consumer interacts with better or services are better recommendation. And I can actually move a lot faster in headless than I couldn't in a traditional ecommerce platform.
Tom Ollerton 19:37
So all of this sounds lovely. Who wouldn't want to use headless ecomm? Is there a dark side or a downside? What's stopping everyone doing this now?
Roy Wentzel 19:47
Yes, there is. So it's a blank canvas when you come to it. So if you're not structured, you could create a unique experience that nobody Consumer actually wants and needs, you could go, you could go to extreme considering it's a blank canvas, and then consumers still have that muscle memory of interacting with the website in a certain way, you know, and they want that interaction with that ease. The second item that was so when it comes to design costs, because now you've separated your your front end, you could also then have escalating design costs where you keep building something better all the time in your in your function, instead of just working on with what works and servicing that. Second to that is some of your, your traditional marketing items may get lost. Whereas if you call it out your when you start up marketing tools may actually be easier to implement in the have in the past. But some of the more traditional ones that you may want might struggle with headless, as you said, it's the shiny new object. And it's something new that people are still trying to figure out how to use it to the best of its abilities.
Tom Ollerton 21:01
Well, we're gonna have to leave it there. But that sounds like a bright future for brands and consumers. And creatives, to be honest, it feels like the Ecommerce is gonna be a lot more fun, more engaging. So I'm really keen to see how that plays out. But if someone wanted to get in touch with you and talk about this stuff, how would you want them to do that?
Roy Wentzel 21:20
Reach out to me on LinkedIn, as Roy Wentzel on LinkedIn, search for Wentzel or PUMA, think is one of the only results that come up. That's the best way to reach out to me.
Tom Ollerton 21:31
And what makes a killer LinkedIn outreach to you?
Roy Wentzel 21:35
So good question. I never thought about it because everyone uses the standard. I have said, I read your profile. It needs to be more engaging, and more interesting than the rest.
Tom Ollerton 21:51
What makes it more engaging? Come on.
Roy Wentzel 21:55
Now thinking about it, because oh, I'm blank. It needs to be better. It needs to be better than the I have read your profile. I think we should connect it I think it needs to be you know, speed dating eight seconds. 400 characters or whatever you have on the on the LinkedIn profile is just like, I'm interested in these items. This is what I can offer. Or I'm also interested in in some of these items that you've been talking about. Let's connect.
Tom Ollerton 22:26
That's great advice. Well, thanks so much for your time. Thank you very much.
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