Salena Knight: Somewhere in your store's catalog right now, there is revenue that you have already earned, but you just can't see. Most owners have never had a way to find it. But my guest today spent his career inside of Amazon and NBC Universal, watching how the biggest company in the world track every product right down to the size and color. Then he went and built some software that can do that for you. By the end of this episode, you are going to know so many places where you can make your business more profitable. Leon Bart Williams, welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast, where we love to talk about tools and strategies that make more money in your retail or e-commerce business.

Leon Bart-Williams: Thank you so much for having me, Sal. Really enjoying meeting you and and talking about what we have today.

Salena Knight: Leon, you have spent years recruiting brands onto Amazon's marketplace and you helped build Comcast's NBC Universal's first social commerce shopping experience on TV. Try saying that fast three times.

Leon Bart-Williams: If you say it fast three times, a a genie will pop out somewhere.

Salena Knight: But wait, there's more. Then came you becoming the top Amazon sales leader, helping brands of all sizes grow on that platform. Leon, that must have been a wild ride. Can you share some stories with us about it?

Leon Bart-Williams: It was. I've I've had a very interesting career. Yeah. So I you know, I started my career in in business development and partnerships. So I've been working with brands very closely for a very long time and knew that I wanted to try to help them in different ways. And so when I was recruited to Amazon, I was there to help brands introduce them to new audiences, introduce them to new potential customers. And that was a wild ride. I got a front row seat of watching brands. you know, selling maybe hundreds or thousands of dollars maybe every other month to going to sell millions overnight. So I got to see people, one or two people, retailers turn into multimillionaires overnight. And it was quite a wild ride. So Amazon was a a true education in how to use data to make smarter decisions around how to sell products, right? Surfacing the right product at the right time with the right price. I had the the good fortune of sitting next to world-class product managers and engineers and designers who all use data in a way to make decisions. So understanding down to the variant level what size, what color, what style of product would convert a sale was all that Amazon optimized for. And I was fortunate to take those learnings and share that with retailers so they could be successful in their store. So Amazon was was quite an experience.

Salena Knight: Tell me about social commerce though. Like the reality is if we think back in the day, even you know, even when I was a kid, the whole T V SN thing has been going for years. I remember back when I first started my retail business in I started in 2007, but I remember in 2008 doing Facebook Lives where we would sell product like so ghetto. You just you you were writing people's names down on a piece of paper. Then came in things like comments sold and now Yeah, there are whole live streaming channels. There's for secondhand goods, there's whatnot. That's a great big thing. TikTok. All the kids are doing it these days. But you, my friend, were there right back at the beginning. Tell us about that. And I would love to hear how you think social commerce has evolved over that period of time.

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah, that was an amazing experience. So I spent, you know, a few years at at Amazon and was then contacted by the chief marketing officer with the crazy idea to launch a social commerce, which it wasn't coined social commerce at the time, in in 2017. It was it was more just shopping online, shopping live for for NBC Universal. And that truly was groundbreaking in that a major broadcaster in NBC Universal wanted to make Shopping at the moment of inspiration truly happened. And as you said, you know, this has been the dream of brands and marketers and television networks to where if you watch a show that you really love and you see an actor or an actress wearing that dress or that suit to be able to take out your phone, scan it, and then be able to shop immediately has has always been a dream. So I was pa part of the founding team to build that technology and that go to market. And and I think it was really transformational at the time. You know, no one had really been doing it from a sort of a major broadcaster standpoint. So we had to think through the customer journey. You know, how does the customer discover that product? How do we get that product sourced from the manufacturer, from the brand? Where does it show up? And where does it make sense to show up? You know, you can't show a product in the middle of a show where where it's not relevant and it has to make sense in the context of the show. And then how to take that person from that moment of inspiration through a checkout experience that isn't fraught with friction, right? You don't want to have too many barriers to to check out. So you can't have them sign up with their name and their email. They're they're gonna they're gonna check out. So how do we implement some quick pay options? So as soon as you see that product you like, you can select the actual variant, the size and the color, add it to your card and checkout. So those were all very, very interesting things. And We built that in entire workflow from the ground up, which was very interesting, working with brands and trying to educate them on this new opportunity to to find customers. And we also had to educate the viewers on what they could expect. Cause this was a new shopping experience in the middle of their favorite program. You know, why is there a shirt that just popped up that I can purchase? So there were a lot of business questions that we had to answer, workflow questions that we had to answer. And at the time it was pioneering.

Leon Bart-Williams: We you know, we were using QR code technology to drive that sales experience. But I but it's since changed. I think even now you mentioned TikTok shop and and whatnot, two amazing platforms that are that are doing sales. You know, I'm not deep into whatnot, but I I have used the technology and seen the technology. It's it's quite extraordinary. their checkout experience is is quite strong. The personalities and the influencers that they use to sell products is truly groundbreaking from where we were even just five, six, seven years ago. So I I expect live shopping to continue to grow over the years and and I'm sure more and more platforms and and customers will get used to it. I think live shopping is very popular in other parts of the world. in the US, I think it's still growing, but what what not is doing f very well from what I see from the outside.

Salena Knight: Yeah, from the outside, I'm getting absolutely spammed with their ads all through this, all through my social feed. And I haven't it's one of those things, I don't know about you. I am such a nerd when it comes to like first party data. I if I need to go shopping, I will literally go to a brand I know has cookies and I will look for something and then I will wait. I will just wait in my social media feeds for you guys to show me the things I need to buy. And my daughter is listing a whole like she's doing a the the the kid clean out and she's listing a whole bunch of stuff on Depop. And of course, because she's on Depop, now we're getting all the ads for whatnot. And I haven't been through there only because I know that the marketer in me will want to buy things, like you said, just to go through that customer journey.

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah. And you mentioned first party data. I think that was really the impetus of wanting to create a a shopping platform is is really the customer data is very important. You know, I think at the time NBC Universal saw the value in owning that first party customer data, owning that that consumer, because you know, people find out about products through television. They discover new products through television. So rather than, you know, NBC sort of creating that moment of inspiration and then having Amazon, my other employer. get the sale, they said, Well, why can't why can't we do that? Why can't we play in in the in the backyard of Amazon as well? So it was an interesting thesis and and something that I think continues to prove itself out as as we go along and live stream shopping becomes bigger and bigger every single year.

Salena Knight: You mentioned earlier quick pay. And if if anyone if I happen to be on the screen when people are watching, my smile gets so big when people have, let's just call it quick pay. I am the person, I'm the Apple Pay person. Log in with shop, do the double click, you take my money. And I think that that is one of the places where I mentioned right back at the beginning, you and I are going to jump in in all these places where we can become more profitable. But I think something so simple as having shop pay is great because all I have to do is enter the code it's going to text me, or even the Apple and Google Pays, because who has time to go and find a card? I mean, I personally don't even carry a wallet anymore. It sits in a cupboard for when I have to go on holidays and you need the ID and the physical cards. My phone is my lifeline. And so I would love to know from you. What do you see in the I guess in the checkout experience? You mentioned friction. I would love to know what do you see or what do you feel even as a consumer friction looks like? Because I think that that is one of those areas where it's such a simple fix and you can become so more profitable.

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah, I I think friction is is definitely something that retailers don't think too much about. And I think they don't think too much about it because they're very anxious to capture all the information. First party data is like gold. And so whenever you get a customer willing to key in some information, you want that. So when I think about friction, I just think about the steps that it takes to to check out. I don't know the ideal number for for that those steps, but I know with quick pay method, you know, you just Double tap and and that's it. One step is is probably the most ideal. But when I think about friction, I think about retailers who want to capture, you know, details like first and last name, want to capture obviously their credit card for payment, want to capture their address, want to capture some demographic information. Are you a male? Are you a female? What's your age? But with every layer and with every ask, I think you add friction to the process. I think one of the biggest points of friction, which I think everybody knows. Is when you're checking out of a retailer and they ask you to create an account. I think that is probably the one thing that will turn off a customer very quickly is asking them to create an account. And I I know purposely when we launched our commerce business, then BC Universal, we specifically said to our designers that our workflow cannot have an account creation as part of the checkout process. Now, If you want to include account creation later on, once they're a customer, if there's some incentives to do so, then absolutely. But please, please, please don't make that part of the checkout experience.

Salena Knight: Think that's why as a consumer, but also as a marketer, I love ShopPay because the retailer gets that information. But once I'm in that ecosystem, I never have to fill it out again. I literally just have to put the code in and it pre-fills everything. In fact, it will even like I can choose my addresses. Like I can just choose the drop down box. And there have been times for me, if I have two choices, and like you just said, I have to create account on one or I can shop pay on the other. I will just choose the other one simply for that convenience.

Leon Bart-Williams: And think about this also. When you're when you're on a mobile device, you know, and you're looking at a product, if if the the site is built mobile responsive, which it should be, every every retailer should have a mobile responsive site. If you're checking out, do you wanna be clicking on your on your phone every single box and trying to click every single box? Or can you on one hand just double click your quick pay method and check out once you once you add all your products to the cart? If you can check out on your site one-handed, I think you're doing a great job. Maybe that should be something we we push all retailers to do. Be able to check out on your site with one hand. Yeah.

Salena Knight: one hand you also have now built a some software that can help retailers become more profitable. So can I pick your brain on I guess that low hanging fruit. We just talked about checkout, but what is the other low hanging fruit where retailers could be making a lot more money if they just made a few changes?

Leon Bart-Williams: Yes, I will say this. My CTO Jared usually says this, and he he actually brought this up recently, that ninety to ninety-five percent of what goes wrong in e-commerce are all human errors, not technology errors. And if we focus on those human errors and just not getting in our own way, we'd be a whole lot more successful. So I I tend to always lean on that piece of advice. So there I think there are three very, very low-hanging fruit, easy things that retailers that operate e-commerce businesses. can do to increase their sales conversion and ultimately their profitability. This is directly tied to things that you can do right now today manually that you don't need any technology to do. You just need to make sure that you're doing it every single day and making sure that you that you're just staying on top of on top of your store because it's important. So the first thing that comes to my mind is the the collection. Collection is very important. more retailers are building collections in their store to brand storytell. Collections, as I'm sure everybody knows, are the best sellers or the new arrivals or the items that you might put on sale, even though we don't like sales here, but are those items that not only tell your story, but also give the the shopper an opportunity to really find those treasures that you're that you're pushing to the to the forefront. The one thing that we notice quite a bit That retailers do is they leave money in the table through their collections. The first two to three rows in every collection, whether it's bestsellers or new arrivals, are your most important and specifically the first 10 slots. And what we found whenever we do an inventory audit of top retailers are broken size runs and broken color runs of those products. Now, sometimes the the retailer doesn't know this is happening. Sometimes they do, but most times they don't. And this can cause a lot of issues because broken size runs and broken color runs are the number one way to turn off a customer and upset them if they can't find a product. So we recommend every single day going in to your Shopify store and analyzing down to the variant level all of the variants that you have and making sure you have stock in each one. If you don't have stock in those products,

Leon Bart-Williams: You need to move them out of those top 10 positions and move them further down on the page. Now you don't need to move them to page three or page four. and you don't even need to move them all the way to the bottom as fully stocked out, but you need to to move them down. If you do have fully stocked out products, definitely move those off. You don't want to have out of stock product because your store looks broken, but that is the easiest thing that that you can do.

Salena Knight: When you say broken size runs, you basically mean you have stock outs in certain sizes. So you may That is correct, yes. You may have smalls and larges, but you don't have mediums. That is correct, yes. I've not heard this before. So I want to just dig in a little bit. So you're saying that if I have small, medium, and large in something and I don't have medium in stock at the moment, I should be moving that out of my top ten.

Leon Bart-Williams: You should be. And the reason why is you need to understand what variants are driving your sales forward. And what I mean by that is a lot of retailers may see top line that a specific product is selling a lot, but they don't look a level deeper and see exactly well, what variant is driving maybe eighty, ninety percent of my sales, right? It could be that variant that's in blue, in size small. That's driving that's driving a the the sale of the entire product. So you need to understand that. And then you need to make a decision. Is it worth keeping this specific product in this prime position? Or can I replace it with a different product that's fully stocked? Right. You have to think of of your your digital shelf just like you would think of your shelf in your store. You want to make sure that you're you're stocked in the right product that's actually moving. the sales needle. So you have to to look one layer deeper. Now that gets challenging because depending on how many SKUs you have, may take time to dig through every single one and to do that analysis. But understanding at the variant level what's driving your sales is ultimately going to drive higher sales conversion and is going to mean more profitability.

Salena Knight: I think this is something that people overlook. And I'm not sure if your software can help with that, with this. We can get to that in a minute. But if we're doing a collection or a category, we should go in and manually choose those first 10 products, which means we're not just defaulting to default. We're not defaulting to high to low. We're not defaulting to the latest collection. We are manually going in and adjusting what those first 10 are. Are we doing it based on traffic? Are we doing it based on sales? Like how do we choose? Are we doing it by something we really want to push? I would love to know, what do you think we should be putting in those top 10 slots, making sure none of those are stocked out?

Leon Bart-Williams: Well, you said something very interesting. And I think it's it's definitely key that many people understand the defaults that are set into Shopify are very limited. In Shopify, you can manually move things around or rely on their default settings, which is best selling, I think alphabetical order A to B or A to Z or Z to Z to A. And that's really or highest to lowest. And that's really it. And so there are not a lot of Options when it comes to sorting in Shopify. And you have to be constantly sorting your product. You ask, well, what dimensions can you sort on? Well, one of the most popular that that we have seen our retailers sort on are sorting by revenue. So you're sorting how quickly a product sells, and specifically how much of that product sells. Now, we actually built a pretty nice algorithm that kind of takes all of that into in factors all of that in when we're optimizing the site. But there may be other dimensions that you want to sort on. You may want to sort on units sold. You may want to sort on gross profit, which is the most profitable. You may want to sort on net revenue. You may want to sort on average order value of a product. These are all unique dimensions that you should be thinking about. You may want to sort on buy inventory, maybe inventory that you had the most in, maybe you have inventory that you had the least in, that you're the least shallow and you want to burn through. So so there are a lot of dimensions that you you could be looking to. And it really depends on the store and what your strategy is for selling. So those are some of the dimensions that you you could be thinking about. And and I think depending on the strategy and what you think about merchandising and how quickly your inventory is turning, you might want to select one of those one of those sorting strategies.

Salena Knight: As you were talking, I was also thinking about the fact that if you're obviously if you're running a promotion to a particular brand or a particular product, you want those to be at the top of the page as well. You don't want half people to have to be, you know, flicking through, flicking through, flicking through, trying to find that thing that maybe they saw on Instagram two days ago and they finally remembered to go and start looking for it. We want those to be at the top of the page as well.

Leon Bart-Williams: Now, I will also say sometimes there is a strategy where having out of stock product could be a strategy, right? If you're running a marketing campaign and those hero products still give you great brand recognition and brand awareness, you may still want to have those specific products pinned to your page. But you should know why you're sorting the way you're sorting. So even if you do have out of stock product, you're intentional about it. And and I think that's what a lot of retailers need to have is just a little bit of intentionality about what they do and how they go about their sorting strategies and merchandising strategies for their store.

Salena Knight: If that is your strategy, if it's like, I want the traffic that comes, you know, there's a huge amount of search results for this. And so I want the traffic, it is going into the actual product and making sure we optimize that page so it shows us something that is similar or it allows us to add to the wait list or be notified when it comes back in stock. Because if you're driving the traffic, you don't want people to bounce straight away because they're just annoyed that it was out of stock.

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah, well that that annoyance is actually something and and you brought this up about at running ads. So I think one of the the second if you don't mind me going to the second thing that retailers can actually look at is actually looking at their ads and where their ads are pointing. I know Sal, you're you're a big fan of Meta Ads Manager. I think it's a a great website. I think every retailer should if you're running a an ad on Meta, go into Meta Ads Manager and look up all of the live ads that you have. Today.

Salena Knight: I think you mean the ads library.

Leon Bart-Williams: Ads library. I'm sorry about that. The the meta ads library. And the library is a great resource where you can just put in your URL and you can find all of the ads that are are running that you have live. And you can go into each one and you should see where each specific ad is pointing. If an ad and you should click on every single ad, because this is what your customers are doing. And if they're running into products that are out of stock, they're gonna get very upset and bounce. And I don't think a lot of retailers do this. So what I recommend is you click every single ad that you have running, see where it's pointing. If it's pointing to a product that's out of stock, you have a decision to make. You either can stop running the ad, point the ad to another product or another variant. You can point the ad to the collection. If it's a shoe or a hat, you can point to that specific collection, or you can point it to the general. Homepage. And again, maybe running ads, you know, when you have no inventory is part of your strategy, but you want to make sure that you're pointing all out of stock somewhere else that that has available inventory. The second part of that, and I think is is a very important part that not a lot of people understand, which goes back to my point about variance. Partially out of stock products are just as bad as fully out of stock products. And what I mean by that is if you're Core variants, right? So back to my analogy of what is the variant that's driving most of your sales? If that variant, let's say it's the dress in size two and in blue, they're moving 90, 95, maybe 98% of that entire product. And that product is stocked out, but you're running an ad against that product. If that's the most popular variant, effectively the ad that you're running is considered a stocked out product and is not going to be as effective. So you should think about, well, yeah, I'm pointing to this very popular product, but am I stocked in the right variant that accounts for 90 to 95% of my sales? And if the answer is no, I don't have that product, you may want to consider moving that ad or changing that ad or pointing it to a different product. So partially stocked out products is is something that not a lot of people think about too much, but but maybe should be.

Salena Knight: Back to your ads. I get so frustrated. You can tell I don't like shopping. For someone who's in retail, I want you you can take all my cookies, my friend. Take my cookies and just show me what I need to to see. I get so frustrated when I click on what I think is a dynamic product ad. So I think I'm going to the blue shirt and it takes me to the home page. I didn't want to see your homepage. I just wanted to see the blue shirt. That's all I wanted.

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah, sometimes that happens, yeah.

Salena Knight: And I'm probably not going to click on anything else because you're going to make me work hard. This is mic drop moment. It had never occurred to me that a partially stocked out product that we're running an ad to could actually be burning burning money and profitability. And I think this becomes quite important when, especially when we have to buy impact sizes. So sometimes we may not have a choice. We have to buy. Two, two, four, four, six, one. Like we we don't have a choice in what we get to bring in. And if we want to stock more of the size two in the blue dress, we have to buy a whole new pack. And so it is weighing up the well, is it worth me carrying this excess inventory when the one pro you know, the hero product is sold out? And there are a lot of decisions. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no. There's no right and wrong answer. But I thank you for sharing that because it's not something I'd not th I'd thought about before.

Leon Bart-Williams: And and you're right. There is no wrong the right or wrong answer. You know, everything I'm I'm giving you is not a binary yes or no. You should do this or shouldn't. All I say to to retailers, I s we say this to our customers is just have a strategy. Know what your strategy is. And no matter what it is, just execute on that. Just but but go in knowing all of the information you need to know so you can make the best decision you can.

Salena Knight: If we can just take a beat on the ads library. I mean, I I have been a fan of that for however long it's been around. I'm gonna say 10 years. But a little tip is if you and we'll put a link to it, everybody has access to it, we'll put a link to it in the show notes. But you can actually sort on your competitors' ads. You can see anybody's ads. You can see my ads, you can see your ads, you can see anybody's ads. But you can also sort on the ones who have the highest impressions. Now, obviously the ads that have the highest impressions are the ones that we're spending more money on or the ones that people are, you know, engaging with. And so what it means is we can look at our competitors and see, okay, that style of ad, because we share the same customer, is working for them. Now, maybe it works for you, like you said, maybe it doesn't, but it does give us an insight as to somebody else is spending more money than on the than me on this, and this is what's working for them. Is this something I want to try? But even better. What I love is up to a point you can actually search for inactive ads. So ads that they've run before that are no longer running. And maybe that is because the promotion's finished. Maybe that is because they didn't work. And that is my little secret strategy is if I can see that they're running ads to a particular product and these ones are switched off, something about those didn't work. Now we don't know if it's because it went to the wrong audience or it just didn't. It didn't click and it doesn't mean it won't work for us. But what it does mean to me is like I I approach that one with caution.

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah. There's so much that's available and if and it's just a matter of digging into it, right? And and understanding what the what the potential strategy was. So there's just so much information out there. So the the meta ads library is definitely a great resource for sure.

Salena Knight: Can we talk about the product page? Because you mentioned this, you and I both mentioned it in terms of if we click through to an ad, we want to see the product. So when we get to that product page, what should we be doing to make that the most profitable for us?

Leon Bart-Williams: I think that depends on the retailer. You know, specifically making sure that you have the product available. I think one of the the biggest things that upset customers is not having that product. So if you're going to drive to that product detail page, making sure you're you're fully stocked in that product, having all of the details about the product fully listed. There have been many times that we've worked with customers where they don't have all of the details about the product, the product quality. The type, the style, the fit. You want to make sure all of your product listings have full details. We work with some retailers that also include video. And I know vi video capabilities are maybe a little bit easier now with with AI tools, but showing videos of of the product, having testimonials of the product. You want to just make sure that the customer has a full understanding of the product, reviews, everything that they they could possibly know and have questions about. on the product. So you want to make that experience fully rich in in every single way. So I think if you do that and you also can marry brand storytelling, I think that's that ultimately helps the customer want to purchase that product, add it to the card and and check out for a conversion.

Salena Knight: Do we need to be testing different things on product pages?

Leon Bart-Williams: I think you should be testing all the time. I think A-B testing is is very important. We have some A-B testing features that we have at Akikumo. We actually test sorting strategies. I think testing sorted sorting strategies is probably the most important because I think sorting strategies and your merchandising strategies should be tested. You know, if you're by hand merchandising a page one way. You should capture data on what the traffic was, the conversion, the average order value that your that your collections are capturing, and then try a different sort and and see how that actually performed as well. So A B testing on on products is is absolutely important. Collections is absolutely important. so you know exactly what lifts. I think the challenge comes to when you you test, how you test. How you set up the measurements for success. I think every retailer will have different metrics for success. Some just, you know, depending on the size of their store, a couple of basis points up or down could mean hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. for some retailers that are a little bit smaller, a bigger delta in in A B testing may be a little bit more truthful and robust. So it really depends. But I think every retailer should be testing all facets of their store and And trying all kinds of different things.

Salena Knight: In our pre-chat, you told me about, I think her name was Brooke and she had a boutique in Utah. Can you tell me about the things that she did? Because I thought this was amazing and you know the the results were absolutely, you know, for me, time is money. So can you tell us a little bit more about Brooke?

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah, so so Brooke Payson, she's one of our our customers. she and her general manager, Amanda, started working with a little while ago, almost almost a year ago. And she is quite honestly a a force of nature. She operates two retail locations in Utah, Desert Soul and Simply Moab. Both are amazing stores, and she also owns the accompanying e-commerce store. So she runs, operates two. separate e-commerce stores for for each of the stores. And Desert Soul does sells beauty and home decor products. And simply Moab sells souvenir Moab Utah inspired products. So both do extremely well. And Brooke does all of the things. She wears many hats as as the owner and operator of the store. So she's hiring and training staff. She's managing the inventory. She's purchasing inventory. She's doing all the books. She's she's doing all the things and Amanda assists her on many of those tasks. One of the biggest areas of time that Brooks spends is managing the inventory and actually reordering inventory. And she spends anywhere between 10 to 20 hours per week walking each of the stores and checking her online store for inventory levels of products. And honestly, it was pencil and paper. walking around thinking about products, talking to her sales assistants, asking what was selling, trying to remember specific products that may have been in stock or important to her customers, or sometimes even calling the vendor of the products that she was selling and asking which were the most popular or which sold the most. So it was vi a very manual process in order to to reorder products for her. And it was the most important. I mean that meant either her business was in the red or the black, depending on on specifically finding, sourcing, and getting the right products for reorder. So

Salena Knight: Smiling and nodding, I'm smiling and nodding, and everybody else is smiling and nodding as they listen because I think whether you have a retail or e-commerce store, we can all relate to walking up and down the warehouse and looking at the boxes or walking around the store and looking at the shelves and then literally having to remember that wasn't there last week. What was there last week that we've clearly sold out of and the team have moved something in? So I'm smiling and nodding, and I'm sure everybody else is too, because we have all been there. But I'm yeah, I hear you're about to tell us there's a better option.

Leon Bart-Williams: There there there is a better option and and I will say that there is a there is a happy a happy ending. So her reordering process took quite a bit of time, you know, to to not only identify those products, but then to go into the into the vendor's website and reorder those products. But the challenge is she didn't know again down to the variant level what to order and how quickly to order. So we worked with with her through Aki Kumo and we were actually able to identify the products that were Selling not only on her e-commerce store, but also in her on her point of sale. So Brooke migrated from Square to Shopify POS, which was very helpful. So our our product was able to analyze both her e-commerce store and her retail locations and down to the variant tell her what products were the most revenue-driving and also which ones needed to be restocked. But more importantly, We actually have an inventory timeline and we could show based on sales velocity of how quickly a product was selling the specific day that her product was going to sell out. So she could place a reorder ahead of that date and have that product restocked and backed on her shelf without losing any day of sales. And so that entire process of 10 to 20 hours, we were able to to drive all the way down to just one hour per week of just restocking a product. All because she had the data right in front of her and she could action on it in in a couple of days.

Salena Knight: I mean that makes my heart sing that one, you can identify that so quickly. Two, those 19 hours, she can now work on growing the business or taking a holiday, whatever she wants to do. Learn to play golf. But also the fact that something as simple as that, the the flow on effect is not I get more time back. That's great. I make more money because I'm not out of stock of my product.

Leon Bart-Williams: Learn to play golf. You can do a lot.

Salena Knight: But also I think the thing that we forget there is the customer experience is you know coming into the store and seeing nobody ever I'm thinking the physical store and the e-commerce store, but no one wants to go to a store and see empty shelves. Or no one wants to go to a store and there's one left of something, the dreaded one left of something. And so being able to reduce the amount that we spend on inventory to be but still have the stuff that sells, that to me, that's like a no brainer. I don't know why. Anybody wouldn't want to do that.

Leon Bart-Williams: Well, it takes a lot of manual effort. If you didn't have a tool, all of this would have to be done manually. You'd have to manually calculate your sales velocity, which honestly, I I wouldn't even know where to begin, how to how to calculate that to understand where you're about to sell out. Most retailers are just doing this off of gut instinct or what they think or what when they think a product is going to sell out. And and they just place an order. And sometimes they're placing orders for too much stock or too little stock, and and they really don't know exactly. how much to purchase. And so I think through through Akikuma and what we're doing, we give a sense of assurance that that the data that you're looking at is accurate. And so you can make better decisions about restocking, restocking your shell.

Salena Knight: Do you have any other case studies that you can share with me? Because that one makes me that I just really love to you're not here to spruok the services, but what you're here to show us is the how different life can be. Like if we think about Brooke, I'm just thinking as a business owner, to get half of my week back and to make more money and to have a best better customer experience, that's the dream. And if we can continue to optimize things like that, then The reality is we grow exponentially so much faster. Less effort.

Leon Bart-Williams: Absolutely. But it takes a lot of effort. I think most people listening and most people operating retail businesses understand is that you have so much to do and you have so many decisions. And so all of this analysis that we're talking about, understanding how quickly you're gonna sell out of a product and doing the reordering and managing the collections and tracking to make sure your ads aren't pointing to out of stock, all takes a lot of time, but you should be doing it every day. But people don't have the time for that, right? And you have other decisions that you need to make. And that's really why I saw I saw this as a challenge and really why I wanted to help just improve the process. I think Shopify is a great platform to sell products, but it doesn't teach you how to sell. It doesn't help you sell. It doesn't make selling easier. It's just a channel for you to sell. And so I think people want to have all this information. They want to be smarter, but sometimes It's not easy to to, you know, download Excel spreadsheet from Shopify and start doing pivot tables, which is does not sound fun at all.

Salena Knight: But also even now, it's you can't even take that data and put it into Chat GPT or Claude or whatever if you don't know the questions to ask.

Leon Bart-Williams: Absolutely. And we have people. And that is the hard part. And and I and I I you know, my co-founder and Jared and I are very pro AI and using AI tools generally. But when it comes to your store, we always take the position of the information has to be correct, can't hallucinate. And I know a a number of retailers wanna do that analysis and and pull their information and put it into to Claude or Chat GPT and the numbers are are wrong sometimes, you know, and the numbers aren't accurate and there's hallucinations. Still, now these technologies are getting better and they're they're always improving and always evolving, which is great. But we take a more AI positive attitude towards it. However, we know that the information has to be accurate. And so we've built, you know, our tool to really be accurate and give you that that accuracy when it when it comes to projecting numbers because you can't be wrong.

Salena Knight: These are financial decisions. No one wants to be wasting their money.

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah, no one does. But I'll I'll tell you I'll tell you one other story specifically with with another brand that we work with, Vince, who's the head of e-commerce for a wonderful golf lifestyle brand called Bogybros. They're based in Texas. Vince, very much like Brooke, wears all of the hats. not only does he operate the e-commerce store, he's also doing QA. He's also working in the warehouse and doing warehouse ops. He's he's taken on more responsibilities around marketing and and coordinates marketing campaigns. And the one thing he does now, that he took over was was owning the sales process and and putting products on sales. Now I know putting things on sales is a little bit taboo and and and I know we shouldn't do that, but in some cases we gotta get rid of the inventory sometimes. And sometimes they're you know, when you Overbuy in a certain design and you think it's going to sell and doesn't sell, you have to do something. So Vince's process of creating a sale page was very manual, much like Brooks' process. He was going into the warehouse, he was identifying products that were overstocked. He was, you know, pulling this product and that product. Didn't really know again down to the variant level which products were selling and which ones weren't. So he was kind of just grabbing products. He was kind of guessing what discount to apply, whether it's 10% or 15% or 20%. He didn't really know. He didn't have any data to kind of back up what to to merchandise and what to offer. And then he'd build the collection page. He'd kind of just bulk discount products. He was working with an owner where the owner had kind of had to sign off on it and working with their head of marketing and he'd have to sign off on running ads and You know, his owner would ask, Well, what do we think this is gonna do in terms of sales? And there'd be a lot of looking around and shrugging of shoulders and a little bit of finger in the wind guessing, and then they'd, you know, set the sale page live. And that whole process took about a day with a lot of guessing and they didn't really know. And then when they ran the sale page, if the sales ran and they sold out of some product and didn't, they'd say, Okay, I guess job well done, but they didn't really have any data. So so working with Vince, we took that process

Leon Bart-Williams: From a day down to 20 minutes, he can actually now look at all of his data of how a product performs across different collections. He can see where he has a lot of inventory or a little bit of inventory, whether he's he's deep or shallow in that inventory. He can put a smart collection together of an assortment of products that that perform at different levels. He can put all that together. He can apply his discounts. And then when he runs the sale, he can actually track. The performance of all of those products and see how those products perform and compare them to other collections or how that product performed in different collections. And so, you know, the next time he he he builds a sale page, he can use historical data to say, this is what I project or what I think is going to happen with our sales page. And he can measure those things. And again, he can A B test the sorting collections and he can try different things. All of the things that I think retailers want to do. He can now do it at the snap of a finger and do them fairly quickly. And so, you know, stories like that where we just help save a lot of time and we can save Vince a day, or if we can save Brooke, you know, 20 hours a week and hand that time back, you can reallocate that time to so many other things. You can sell retail, you can sell wholesale, you can, you know, go play golf or read a book or do other things. And so saving time. saving money and making money are really what we want to do. And and so I'm really happy for both Brooke and and Vince.

Salena Knight: I'm happy for Brooke. I'm happy for Vince and I'm happy that you created this software. Can you please tell us? Just remind us, I know you've said the name of the the brand a few times now, but can you please tell us a little bit more about what it does, what it like where we can find it, who it's suitable for, which is not something we normally do on this podcast. I'm gonna be honest. I I don't generally have someone who who wants to sell a book or who wants to sell their software. Of course. When I see an opportunity for retailers to save time. Make money, make the customer experience better and work less. It is something that I feel I have to share.

Leon Bart-Williams: So the company's name is Akikumo, and really Akikumo is is based on everything that I've learned throughout my time and my career at Amazon, at NBC, and my co-founder who spent time at Figs and Chewy in technical roles. And essentially what we've built is a 24-7 merchandising assistant. So assume you have someone right next to you doing all of this work for you. And essentially it's for Shopify brands and really any brand that's sort of scaled past. We would say about 500 skews tend to be where things get a little bit hairy, 400 to 500 skews where you don't really know profitability or what's driving your business forward. 500 skews and up. And essentially what we do is we know that at that point, a lot of data lives in a lot of different places, whether it's your Shopify store or whether it's Slack channels or whether it's tribal knowledge in someone's head or a or a spreadsheet. Because everyone is is working on the business, they may not have all of the right information to make all the right decisions. And so what we're trying to do is bring all of that information from merchandising to operations to inventory to marketing and put it all in one place so you can make better, faster, and easier decisions. We can help you with your collection sorting. We can help you track any wasted ad spend that's going to fully out-of-stock products or partially out of stock products. We can check your variant levels of inventory. So we make sure that you know when you're stocked out a specific variant. All of this information honestly is available in Shopify, but it's all buried in Shopify and it's hard to get to. And you have to download Excel spreadsheets and do pivot tables and a lot of unfun things in spreadsheets. And so we're bringing and surfacing all of that data to you while also bringing a lot of bespoke and customized data that we've built around collections and collection performance. So, you know, you can go into your store, see exactly what you need to see and take make decisions in seconds, not in hours or not in days or or pushing it off to the side for for weeks and weeks. So we try to make the selling process a lot easier and try to give you the information you need so you can go about your day. Maybe maybe learn how to go play golf.

Salena Knight: I think it is so important just to highlight there that having the data to make a decision gives you so much confidence. Because when we are just relying on gut feel, when we're walking around the storeroom or the warehouse or the shopfront, we're making that gut feel decision, which means it's really easy to second guess whether we're doing it right. But having the data there and having the system say, hey, you need to buy this so you can make more money, or let's move this to make you more money. actually just becomes a am I gonna do it? Am I not? Yeah. Great. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Leon Bart-Williams: I I think that the true testament of of our product is how little people time, how little time people spend in our product. Meaning, you know, I want the retailer to come into our product and in seconds get the information they they need and leave. I don't want you spending hours in in our product and digging through reports and trying to figure things out. That's why, you know, Jared and I have tried to build a product that is truly helpful and and truly gives you what you need in seconds. not in in minutes or in hours. And you can get what you want and you can make your decisions and you can go on with your business because you have much more important decisions to make than digging for that specific data point.

Salena Knight: And honestly, every business owner needs more time, more money, more sales, more profitability. Leon, thank you for sharing all of this knowledge and thank you for sharing your software. If people would love to check it out, where can they do that?

Leon Bart-Williams: Yeah, they can go directly to our site. It's Akikumo, a K-I-K-U-M-O.com. We're also available in the Shopify app store. So feel free to check us out there. We're offering a free 30-day trial of the product. You can download the product, spin it up in your store, see how it does, see if it's helpful to your business. And if people want to reach out to me, they can reach out to me directly via email. I'm happy to answer. Any kind of questions, so they can just email me at leon at akikumo dot com. I'm available on LinkedIn as well. Feel free to connect to me there as well.

Salena Knight: I mean, the 30 day free trial is is a no-brainer. If you want to make more money, especially coming into peak season, go in, give it a try. And if it works for you, use it.

Leon Bart-Williams: There are a lot of aha moments, and I'll leave you with one. And this will be my last tip for the listeners. Unpublished products. And making sure unpublished products after you stock out are are published back to the site. So this happens quite a bit. And this always seems to happen when people first install. Whenever you stock out of a product, usually it's e-commerce person and an inventory person tend to make this mistake. You may unpublish a product and wait for it to be restocked when the restock comes in. Please remember to hit publish on that product again. I cannot tell you how many times, whether it's a big store or a small store, two weeks goes by and people start asking, wait, I thought that product came back in. Why isn't it selling? And somebody goes back into Shopify and sees, well, we did not publish that product. If you take anything, please publish the product.

Salena Knight: For me, it was the the person coming in going, I didn't see this on the website. I was I've been looking for this and it's that moment. Another awesome tip, Leon. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing your knowledge from so many different places for the listeners of bringing business to retail.

Leon Bart-Williams: Great. Thank you for having me, Sal. I appreciate it.

Salena Knight: So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode and how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena Knight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently, or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice. Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and e-commerce stores just like yours that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers.

Leon Bart-Williams is the co-founder of Akikumo, a merchandising intelligence platform that helps Shopify brands make smarter product decisions by turning catalogue data into actionable insights.

With more than 15 years of experience at the intersection of ecommerce, technology and retail, Leon has worked with some of the world's biggest commerce businesses. He was part of the founding team at Comcast NBCUniversal that launched the first social commerce shopping experience on television before joining Amazon, where he helped brands of all sizes grow their presence on the world's largest marketplace.

Today, Leon works with independent retailers and ecommerce brands, helping them uncover hidden revenue opportunities, optimise their product catalogues and make better merchandising decisions without needing a team of analysts. His mission is to give growing product businesses access to the same level of commercial intelligence used by the world's largest retailers.

In this episode, Leon shares practical strategies that retailers can implement to better understand their products, improve profitability and make more informed decisions using the data they already have.

Learn more:

• Akikumo: www.akikumo.com

• Shopify app: apps.shopify.com/akikumo