 All right. Well, thanks everybody. I see a lot of coffee. So hopefully we're all recovering from the sponsor parties effectively last night I'd like to start telling you a little bit more about my background and why this is a topic that I became really interested in when I joined GoDaddy so I joined about two years ago as part of the Skybridge acquisition and we had worked primarily with WooCommerce but a number of Online e-commerce platforms like Shopify and others and I do still work on Skybridge and WooCommerce extensions really heavily I also spend a lot of time working on our commerce platform and the online stores We host that are powered by WooCommerce, but as part of joining this much bigger team I also got involved with a lot of different Kinds of selling that I hadn't really been exposed to and so for many of us who come from the WordPress world We're probably familiar with online stores, but I've learned a lot about in-person retail As well as multi-channel selling as a result of the work I'm doing and I found a lot of really fascinating things that I think Helped me learn a lot coming from that online first perspective that I think it'd be really cool to walk through and share today So we'll take a look at what single and multi and omni channel actually means How do you identify the right channels to sell in for either you or if you're working with merchants as as your clients or partners and What criteria you should be paying attention to and how you get set up and get started so I was a Former high school teacher. I like to start with definitions to make sure that we're all talking about the same thing So when we talk about single and multi and omni channel, what does that actually mean a lot of the time? We hear these in a marketing context Right, we talk about omni channel marketing in terms of having a marketing strategy that covers multiple different channels And that is not how I'm referring to them here We're talking about retail and sales strategy through different channels So single channel commerce is probably what a lot of us think about when we think about getting up and running and selling You know in a single place like an online store or a brick-and-mortar shop Multi-channel selling is often Conflated or interchangeable with omni-channel selling. They're slightly different multi-channel means I'm selling in multiple platforms But I might not have them connected or all synced together Whereas omni-channel selling is a situation in which you sell in multiple surfaces But all of those channels are interconnected together sharing data and Making sure that your customer experience is unified So we'll talk about both multi-channel and omni-channel selling in this conversation Your capability to do both really depends on the tooling that you're using and the channels that you want to use to sell to your customers So with single channel retail This is where I started and probably where many of us started right especially if we're coming from a WordPress background You think about selling via an online store. So a single place where you reach all customers And as a retailer This is really simple and that's a huge benefit all of your sales are in one place all the data is Stored in one place and if you're using WooCommerce for example, you even own that data. It's accessible to you and you only It also gives you a single conversion funnel to track and to optimize So I know when I get new customers where they're landing What their path or journey looks like with my brand and how they're purchasing from me? So it's a lot simpler to streamline and optimize your marketing efforts You can even use this as like a sales tactic to create You know exclusivity or scarcity like you can't buy this on Amazon or Target. It's only sold here So single channel retail even though we're going to focus a lot on multi-channel here It's not a bad thing and depending on where you are your clients are in their journey The simplicity can be very attractive, but there are trade-offs You are definitely missing sales and customer acquisition opportunities if you're only selling in a single channel And you're not optimizing for the way your customers expect to Discover your content and how they discover your brand So in a multi-channel scenario We sell not in one channel, but in a bunch of channels So that might mean you that you add like social selling or marketplace selling into your tool belt This almost always increases revenue for the business who does this and it increases discoverability in different channels It tends to increase your conversion rates as well because you're supporting customer choice And we have some really cool data that kind of illustrates that pretty well that we'll take a look at shortly and Buyers tend to trust you a lot more. So for example, you know, we're all most of us in a new city Let's say looking for a restaurant to find right if I search for a restaurant They don't have a listing on Google. They don't have an owned listing on Yelp I am definitely not eating there, right? Your presence where your customers expect you to be matters a lot in terms of their willingness to buy from you But there are trade-offs, obviously, right? I can be more discoverable But I've got to find and nurture the right channels and right relationships with customers That takes time if I just syndicate out my business to like ten different channels with no other effort. I'm not gonna have great results Maintaining your data in these multiple locations like having Amazon inventory and online store inventory. It can also be challenging And you're sharing data with potential competitors who could create a private label for example Now Amazon in particular takes a lot of flak for this with Amazon basics, but this is a practice. This is all his time Right, that's what grocery store generics are you sell the product and they come up with their own version of the product So you are trading off some of your data and some of the information about customer purchasing By moving to multi-channel It also means that you might have channel specific workflows on how I get packages to my customers But I do think the trade-off is totally worth it So if we look at data from 2020 Multi-channel sellers grew a lot faster than their online only counterparts 53% you over year compared to 10% year over year. So there are trade-offs But if you are at a stage where you're like, hey, you know, I want to go from side hustle to a bigger business Or I want to start to scale my business. This is a really important strategy that you should be evaluating And then how's that compared to omni-channel? Well, we have a lot of the same benefits right increase revenue discoverability buyer trust conversion rates But we mitigate one of those big downsides that fragmentation of your business data Omni-channel selling helps you to centralize that in a single place and start to unify the customer experience But we do also still have some of the trade-offs So we have the same effort to find and nurture the right channels and the risks of private label competition Once you start sharing your purchase data with other channels Word of caution is this also makes your sales attribution and marketing ROI a lot harder to track So when someone sees you on a Facebook shop and then we retarget them with Google ads And then they come to your website and then they go purchase from you in person How do you attribute that sale? How do you know that your marketing is working or which campaigns to you know pour gasoline and more dollars on So there are trade-offs to each of these to be aware of but again I think it's really compelling the data shows that those trade-offs are probably worth it if growth is your main goal 73% of shoppers use multiple channels, and this is actually HBR data from 2017 so this has shifted even more towards Omni-channel over time They expect to shop in multiple channels and they spend more money when they do both in-store and online It's what consumers expect from brands and usually it benefits you with greater revenue greater conversions So it's pretty important as a business if you're saying look I want to grow. What's the best way to do that? But how do you know which channels are going to be impactful for you or for your business? There are several out there some of which we probably know some of which if you don't work with a lot of merchants You may not be aware of We're all probably aware of online store as a channel right we work with WordPress We probably think of WooCommerce for this right with over three million WooCommerce websites out there Obviously, it's one of the most popular ways to do this and it even has 26 percent share of the top one million e-commerce sites So there are a lot of very serious sellers using WooCommerce to grow and scale their business It's also great for almost any industry right? It's not just people who ship things to customers but people who sell digital goods or memberships right an online store is universally a great channel for most brands Coming from online world we may not always think of in person as a channel But retail and brick-and-mortar is something I would not discard out of hand and we'll take a look at some data. Why? But selling directly to consumers in person, you know using an in-person point of sale is still the most popular way to do business Especially in the United States, but of course it depends on what kind of things you're selling right obviously I'm not going to open up a retail store front for digital goods for example And when we think of channels a lot of us probably think of social channels, okay? Well, I want to go multi-channel. I'm going to go list things on Facebook or on Instagram, right? So we think of and Google as well The nice thing about social is we can use it both for discovery so often just like product listings as Well as in context purchasing actually purchasing through like Facebook checkout or Instagram checkout for example So we'll talk a little bit about social and why it can be a good place to start for most brands But why I think you should pay attention To your performance in those channels to make sure it's actually right for you and also be mindful of what kind of product You're selling so for example Digital good sellers or subscription sellers can't often use Facebook shops against their terms So even if you think it might be the right channel for you or you have an audience there You should be mindful of it's actually the right place for you to build a retail strategy And then we all probably think of online marketplaces as well, right? Okay multi-channel means I'm going to go sell on Amazon or I'm going to go sell on Etsy Walmart eBay, etc Right. These are great because it's a captive audience. It's where your customers already expect to shop So it gives it gives you eyeballs, right? But it depends on what you sell and who you sell it to as to which marketplace is going to be right for you So we'll show you a little bit of industry data that might support your decision making But ultimately it depends on what your product is and who your target customer is Now we'll focus a lot more on all of those channels when we take a look at some data behind this But I do want to call out a couple other things that are maybe not as obvious for a multi-channel selling strategy So one would be distributor relationships, and this is actually probably a much older Multi-channel strategy one of the first brands that I worked with in WooCommerce Did about a million dollars a year direct to consumer through their WooCommerce store But their supplier contract with Target was worth multiple millions of dollars in comparison So distributor relationships can be a huge lift if you get a supplier contract with you know a Logo grocery store right like Publix or something or like a big box seller like Target Typically then you're selling like wholesale at cost plus pricing to them The reason this can be interesting for a lot of merchants is because even though you do Still have private label competition risk If you can produce inventory at scale and leverage operational efficiency for the business This can be a simple way to drastically expand So if I'm gonna make a lot more money if I can like 10x my inventory production This is something that you should be considering or thinking about with your clients Say hey maybe instead of trying to do more direct to consumer channels. We think about a wholesale channel It does often mean that you might have to change some things about your business Like I know Costco for example always requires you to create things in like weird sizes So it's you know like the mega size whatever the biggest you can possibly get is So that's something to be mindful of when you think about optimization But it's a really great strategy and tried and true for obviously, you know decades and mobile apps are also another great way to Use channels in kind of like non-obvious way So a lot of folks will create their own mobile app for a shopping experience like the Amazon You know iOS or Android app Or use the mobile app to embed purchasing. So maybe you have like a learning game that has like digital goods products in it I'm not gonna focus too much on this one because I don't think it's great for like newer brands More focused on brands that are actively growing But there is a great tool for that called apppressor And they can create a mobile version of your website for you using WordPress pretty easily So these are a couple of other channels. There are plenty of other ways to do multi-channel selling We're gonna focus primarily on in-person online marketplaces As the ones that tend to be best for multiple different kinds of businesses Across multiple parts of your journey whether you're newer or growing and established So of all of these channels How do I decide like should I do this in the first place and which one is right for me and my brand The obvious thing is that marketplaces drive eyeballs, right? There's a captive audience here people who want to buy something come here to buy it And if you look at these numbers, it's actually pretty crazy just how many people Want to buy something through these channels? So Amazon eBay and Walmart together the top three over here I know it's probably a little harder to see Drive about four billion visits Every month it's like half the world visits through these three channels every single month It's an insane amount of volume. So if you're like, hey, where should I sell? Oh, Amazon is the top one I'm gonna go sell there. That's certainly one way to think about this strategy, but I would also pay attention to seller density So Walmart for example has more strict guidelines You can't just go sell on Walmart if you're brand new you have to have some track record of an online store or Marketplace selling Walmart is third in terms of traffic and it looks a lot less but because it's so Much smaller of a seller density Every Walmart retailer actually gets 13 times the monthly views than an Amazon seller does So sheer volume is certainly a decent way to look at this problem But also think about like seller density and how many people are selling something similar to you to understand if you can Actually leverage that volume for the business or not So what about if we talk about this in terms of sheer dollars? We have really good data on US retail From the census department and so if we look at US retail alone It's expected to exceed seven trillion dollars this year with e-commerce finally in 2020 projected to top one trillion dollars of online website sales But if we take a look at this middle area, right? So the top is in-person retail the blue is e-commerce and these middle sections in black and teal our marketplace and social selling So even though the whole pie keeps growing year after year Marketplace and social selling are starting to expand how big of a share they take So we can see that the trend is very clearly that retail is Diversifying into multiple different channels and if you're a brand trying to succeed and grow you should be trying to ride that wave So if we take a little bit more of a granular look at that data in that chart We're like right here in 2021 And I know that marketplace and social selling still looks like it's a small part of that chart But I want to show you the actual numbers for comparison in 2019 E-commerce sales which remember will be a trillion dollars this year. We're about 10% of total retail in 2014 that was 6% So there's been astronomical growth in e-commerce sales It started pretty small about ten years ago And it scaled up pretty quickly and we're seeing a similar trend with social selling and marketplace selling So even though it doesn't look like it's a huge piece of the pie, right? It's pretty critical to understand that growth trend and how important that's going to be for like the next five to ten years of commerce Now with that said there's a big elephant here in this graph, which is this bottom line is Absolutely astronomical so in-person retail is still by far and away Where all the business is done right now about eight out of ten purchases happen in a physical store And even if we look at 2025 projections Seven out of ten purchases still happen in a retail store So a lot of us who come from online first world I think like sleep on this a little bit and we shouldn't in-person retail is a tremendous opportunity So even if you or merchants that you work with are using an online store They should really be considering can I leverage in-person in some way? It's the top sales channel out there in-person retailers tend to do over $400,000 annually in comparison to maybe a hundred hundred twenty thousand on average for online stores Which you know makes sense in-person retail costs more you have to pay rent, you know, etc, etc But there are still ways that you can incorporate in-person retail because a lot of people still like to buy that way So this example is a good example right here This is a brand with an online store that I had purchased things from they've like really cool office supplies and really well-designed stuff And then I found out that this brand is in Downingtown, Pennsylvania 10 minutes away from me and So that was kind of like mind-blowing and really cool And what I imagined that they did is looked at all of their purchasing data and said hey We got a lot of billing addresses in Pennsylvania You know should we think about a retail location? Maybe let's take this data and see could we get those people to come out in-person? So they decided to do a pop-up shop and emailed everybody in Pennsylvania and said hey We're gonna do this holiday pop-up shop And so why don't you come in person you can buy stuff, you know We'll have discounts for in-person sales and you know, we'll also have like Second quality goods that we can't sell online, but you know you can pick up at a steep discount if you want to So up shops trade shows other ways of assessing in-person retail Even if it would not be your gut instinct is really really important to evaluate as an online brand It also drives a lot more loyalty right people who pay in-person and visit you in-person Tend to stick with your brand a lot more than people who only engage with you online So there are some you know benefits and do's and don'ts of in-person But it's something that I don't think online stores consider enough and they should be even if it's not obvious So then how about online channels? Right, why would we add online channels in-person is obviously where a lot of the money still is and will be for a foreseeable amount of time Evens providing a global pandemic, right? It's here to stay Industry data has already showed us multi-channel sellers are gonna see more revenue growth They're gonna grow faster year-over-year. They're gonna grow just by enabling multi-channel selling But we took a look at data that we had at GoDaddy from 45,000 sellers Who created the website over the past year and they were eligible for our marketplaces product This is a product that lets you do what we're talking about and enables multi-channel and marketplace selling and for the people who are eligible for this product The ones who enable it earn 72 percent more on average than the people who just sell web only They derive 60 percent of their total revenue from channels not just their website So even if your website sales decreased slightly, which would be the black thing here your total sales drastically increased just by enabling multi-channel selling Now is it really important does consumer choice like really matter here? I think the data that we have from Facebook and Instagram does It's a little hard to separate this data because you connect to both of those channels like through the same method So we kind of have to look at like meta properties together, but when I look at people who use Facebook or Instagram The median revenue if they enable it Roughly doubles. It's great for discoverability But interestingly enough and the reason I wanted to call this one out first is that when we look at This black bar, which is website only and this teal bar, which is just enabling Facebook and Instagram 95% of sellers use that just for discovery So you can create like a Facebook shop with just like listing your products out there for free and When people do that their median revenue does increase so we have like smaller sellers We're shifting that midpoint up higher because more of them start to generate revenue But the average revenue is you know kind of neutral or or actually might even be slightly negatively affected Probably because a lot of people are using this who haven't really developed the marketing strategy yet and just kind of pouring products into there But here's what's cool Five percent of people do use Facebook or Instagram checkout, which is like I can actually buy it in that surface without ever going to the website And when people enable that average revenue doubles median revenue grows by five times So it shows you the power of discoverability But really the power of in context checkout and being where your customers want you to be Drastically changes the conversation about your revenue So for me, this was a really interesting case study of this is why customers care about buying where they are And less about where your brand wants them to be and if you want to be successful you should be facilitating that Now I think a lot of people do find Facebook and Instagram kind of hard to navigate Like you can put up a shop, but then you've got to do extra stuff to enable checkout So the other social option would be Google and we do have really great data on Google Like before and after snapshots of the same merchants So a few months of revenue before they enable it a few months of revenue after they enable it and what happens And when merchants enable Google shopping Their non-website sales and their website sales both increase So going back to what we said earlier about restaurants, you know being on Yelp, etc. That presence Matters a lot and just by being on Google shopping. It tends to like increase buyer trust and their willingness to buy from you Overall revenue then for every business that enables Google shopping is positively impacted We get a hundred and eighty percent almost a three times increase in the median store revenue and about a ten percent increase in average revenue So those kind of disparate numbers tell us that Google is probably great for most sellers But especially for like nascent or newer sellers who have less revenue because we're bringing that median that midpoint in the selling up drastically So what about you know by industry you're by other channels like you know Amazon Walmart Etsy eBay, etc If you sell General like retail like a parallel clothing right what you think of like standard commerce You will do well in pretty much any channel And so if you are a merchant or you work with merchants that should be like the first thing you do when you leave here is Okay, I need to start selling in a different channel with my brand But there are a few industries where you especially need to think about this because you get Disproportionate results in comparison and there were a couple that were really surprising to me So if I look at hobby art and design home decor and automotive industries right here towards the middle We see that multi-channel selling in in teal here Gives them a huge boost in both average and median revenue So people tend to maybe be a little bit more brand agnostic when they shop for these things and they're just looking for particular products And it can be a huge boost But the couple things over here on the end were actually super interesting for me So like business and industrial companies Essentially like B2B sellers get a huge lift from starting to sell in different channels so My takeaway from this is that B2B is it's actually probably a lot better for this than we think or People probably also don't know where potential customers are and marketplaces can help you kind of uncover those like things You don't know that you don't know that you probably have a lot more perspective customers out there than you realize and By getting in front of a wider audience you can help uncover that and find even better target customers or adjacencies for the business So we take a look at the few of those in particular And by the way, I do have a link to these slides at the end if you guys want to kind of refer back to these these graphs They're available online But like hobby sellers for example, I just called out when they enable social selling or marketplace selling Media and revenue it gets seven X'd and it's pretty marketplace agnostic Right, you can consider pretty much any marketplace Etsy seems to be slightly better than the others So we can have a huge impact on business revenue by just increasing presence and Increasing the number of places that the customer can find the business and buy from the brand Automotive retailers for example also calling those out right 12x change in marketplace selling through like Amazon You know for example in median sales, so there's huge benefits for a lot of different kinds of industries a lot of different kinds of Benefit from both social and marketplace selling. It's not universal though. I Called out fitness and wellness as one that actually is kind of different from the norm Right fitness and wellness brands tend to do okay on marketplaces like Amazon But they actually have a negative impact from social selling So this industry data can be informative for your clients, but that kind of shows us how important it is to test and How we decide on the right channels by first and always paying attention to your customers So if I'm trying to decide on the right channels first and foremost your customers are absolutely key Where are they? How old are they? What's their income? Where do I find them? Talk to them. Where do you shop? Where do you discover new things? It is critical that you actually pay attention to your customer in your products You can be informed by this data, but this should be your primary driver. So for example, let's take Similar-sized sellers. I have an art and design retailer with you know, two employees $200,000 a year in revenue Should they sell in the same channels? Well, if one retailer is creating like custom one-of-a-kind art pieces You should a hundred percent be on Etsy or eBay If you're creating a piece and then mass producing prints, you should avoid them and be on Amazon Right. It's critical that you pick the right channel So you can be informed by this data, but make sure that you let your customers be your guide as to where you're going to Go in terms of your first channels Also think about your marketing Right, if you're not sure which channels right for you where you're not getting like a consensus from your customers Which is hard, especially if you're early in your retail journey Think about how do I get traffic now? Do I have a social following that I can leverage or influencer? Relationships right we had one brand that you know We were just working with this weekend who had over a million Instagram followers That should absolutely be the first sales channel that you enable right leveraging that marketing audience Even if you think another one might be better Because as a brand if you already heavily use that channel channel for like customer acquisition You know that channel you're gonna be able to use that knowledge more effectively to sell to people than other brands will be able to And if you're not sure and you don't have a super well-defined marketing strategy, you're just getting traction I think that data I showed around Google shows that Google is a pretty good clear first step for a lot of brands Purely because I think it generates a lot of trust when you're in Google shopping and when you have a stronger presence there than other brands Now those are kind of related to you and driving more customers and more revenue I think the third critical consideration is when you look at this holistically Is there a standard for your industry that you can use to increase discovery or trust and Can you optimize the business with the scale or things that that channel gives you so even if you're like I don't know if Amazon is gonna be right or can I even handle volume if I am successful on Amazon you should be asking yourself Okay, well, can I optimize my inventory costs if I get a lot more orders? That's a great reason to do it Even if you might have slightly lower margins on the sales you're gonna make that up elsewhere in the business and The discoverability and trust and operational efficiency They can come from adding channels should be something that you consider shouldn't be the only driver But the other like more holistic business benefits, you know going back to what we saw about trust being a big reason for Google for example Are really important to say okay, maybe I should lead into this a bit more So there are a few different things to consider to help you pick the right channels But once you've picked one or two, how do you even get started? How do I decide you know multi-channel omni-channel? How do I even make this happen in the first place? I? Want to call in-person retail as one potential edge case I know I said it's the best channel in terms of like total sales volume, and it is it's totally most popular, but If you are brick-and-mortar right now or your clients a brick-and-mortar, and they're trying to come online It might be harder right a lot of in-person retail because it's been done for God knows how many years Uses a lot of legacy systems right you can't always get the data out of them to share it with the other sales Channels that you're trying to work with so Consider multi-channel and maybe managing your in-person separately from everything online as a stepping stone Or you know reevaluate like a different payment processor or something if you're okay with that usually depends on the sales volume And how many things you have dialed in already? If you're working with clients or you are this merchant and You're not sure which channel to start in you're not getting great data from customers. You're not really sure where to go I would start with an online store When people Google you and they find your online store it is a huge trust benefit You look like a much more legitimate brand, but most importantly if you haven't actually shipped packages to your customers yet You're gonna have the most control over the film in your own store if You're like selling on Amazon as your first go-around and you have like very specific Requirements that you need to hit on Amazon. It's just probably gonna be a harder adjustment for you and then of course Even though your customer interactions are different like talk to them in store So how'd you find us like where do you like to shop usually? You know, where do you find new brands or things that you like? You're gonna get really important insights and data that way Now if you're starting from online you have an advantage You can probably go into a more omnichannel focused strategy save yourself a lot of time and heartache in terms of you know How you manage your data? You should choose your first one to two channels here Based on those previous criteria that we talked about where your customers What are you most familiar with and a lot of online stores as long as you're using like a standard platform? Especially something like WooCommerce you can pretty easily plug into a lot of different channels So think about the fees of these channels as you start to make your shortlist Everyone is different. They're a huge pain to compare So for example Amazon might charge you a dollar per item you sell or you can opt for a plan where you pay $40 a month to sell anything you want to Versus like Walmart or eBay charge you any of her from like 3% to 15% of your sales, right? It is all over the place So I think it's really worth doing the research in this front to make sure that you understand how to protect your profits Like it costs money to get an audience that should cost money But you need to make sure that you're aware of that and you're building that in your margins Create an audience journey then once you have a shortlist once you know you can afford that channel map out How are people going to interact with this? The reason this is key is it's going to make sure that you've chosen the right app or the right way to get integrated with that channel and That you know how your marketing strategy is going to have to change to account for it and actually be successful in nurturing that channel so this is perhaps a More robust audience journey than a lot of us are going to have with our first channel But think about like how are people becoming aware of me? How are they finding out about my brand? How do they start to consider purchasing for me or like start to build that buyer trust and Confidence that they want to buy what I'm selling and where do I expect the purchases to take place? Ideally do I want them checking out in my online store? Do I want to try to optimize the channel that they're in already to buy from that channel given that data shows people like to do that? This is up to you to decide and knowing your customers really well is going to make it a lot easier Once you've done that That checklist should drive your choice and how you get connected to different marketplaces So I mentioned for example, we have an app that does this we embed it in WooCommerce And here are some things that we learned as we built this First is the data being synced by directionally meaning if I get an order from WooCommerce Does it push that inventory update to Amazon so I don't oversell my inventory on Amazon if I get an order on Amazon? Does it deduct that inventory from my online store? All right, do those changes happen in both directions to keep everything in sync that I need to be in sync? What data is actually flowing between the systems, you know Is it only syncing product information like if I change the description? Is that going to be pushed out to all my channels is the syncing inventory is the syncing order data? You especially, you know what order data where like if someone buys from you on Facebook, but they log into your store They can still see that order. That's a super super powerful thing to build that trust with your customers And can you fulfill all your orders in one place? So if I get an order on Amazon, do I have to log into my online store and log into Amazon seller central? Or can I just do that in one area is a pretty important part of making sure that you save yourself a lot of headache in Terms of managing your business once you start to add more channels And then as you set things up, there's going to be some non-obvious things I would say do not commit to a single app right away. Try a couple out. Make sure that it fits your workflow For example We found that a lot of people don't want to sync all inventory to a channel, right? They want to reserve some inventory that's online only or in person only so they don't oversell That's something that you can do with some apps Can you create pricing adjustments, right? Some marketplaces prohibit you from having a different price on your website and in the marketplace But some are like hey it just has to be competitive. So for example, if you're going to list things on eBay Can you let's say automatically add a 3% markup if it's sold through eBay versus your website? something that's not obvious, but it's important to consider and You know can you create your listings in multiple channels? So for example, these are things that we considered when building our marketplace app There are other options if you don't want to use that like you know celebrate trade gecko stitch fix There's a number of them out there. This is why it's important to evaluate if it's the right tool for the job and then make sure you go back to that journey in the beginning and Finish that journey out make sure you have all the data you need Do you need to update any of the other channels? Is the customer discovering about you your business through the channel and take that all the way true to when they have the Packaging in their hand. Do I know how they're going to purchase? Do I know I'm going to add the order tracking information? Do I know how I'm going to get the package to the customer is really critical to make sure that you've planned out this channel strategy And then you actually get that revenue benefit that we're looking for from enabling it You may find gaps. That's okay. That's where I do think you might have to re-evaluate like existing You know point of sale or payment systems or whatnot as you go to make sure that you can actually meet that journey that you're looking for And then update me your marketing plan Right if I want to drive leads to one channel. Do I want to close them in that channel? Or do I want to close them on my website or a different channel? You are going to be better off if you're okay making every touch point shoppable So if I'm going to let's say do paid ads make sure that people can close the sale wherever you're driving them from It's a general rule of thumb. That's pretty good. It doesn't work for every business You should test it But that's usually the best place to start is drive the traffic to the channel You want them to buy in based on that journey you mapped And then set your success criteria right make sure that you have the analytics that can tell you Which channels are being successful? Decide if like okay if I'm going for operational efficiency This may not matter as much But if I want to meet like a specific number of sales through a channel or a specific number of new customers Set that benchmark and then try to measure against that over time And there are a lot of great apps out there, too They give you like a single hub or weight of you all of those sales across channels So you can decide where to invest more of your marketing dollars over time So I know we're getting close to the end of this session here around time friend. Thank you So a few things to just bear in mind is this even right for me Make sure you evaluate the trade-offs of moving to multi-channel And if that revenue benefit is okay for like the data loss or an additional overhead that it incurs Make sure you identify the top channels, especially based on who your customers are I cannot iterate that enough, but you can be informed by the industry and other data Make sure that your integration actually covers the things you need to for a customer journey That's why it's tempting to skip that step, but it's so important And then make sure you're measuring the success of those channels It's harder to know how to optimize your marketing dollars in a multi-channel scenario Just because attribution isn't as clean. So if you set those criteria up front of like, here's what I want to hit Here's how I know I'm successful You know whether to double down this strategy or pivot and try a new channel It's pretty critical to make sure that you plan that up front So with that in mind I include this slide, especially if you're trying to talk to your clients and help them understand What this process is going to look like it's a great way to kind of get an overview of this And as I mentioned, I do have some extra stuff in an appendix here that you know is kind of a little bit more of a granular Look at some of that data But otherwise you can find these on Slideshare.net Slash beka or I see if you'd like to download them refer to them the research is yours and Thank you very much for being here at a very early Saturday session. I appreciate it all waking up for this. Thanks