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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Speaker 2 (00:00.11)
Welcome to this special eTailWest episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Oren Inditzke. Oren, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions.
First of all, it's really great to see you in person. It's our third time, but first time in 3D. So it's a great time to do it. So my name is Orin Anditsky. I lead the online store business at Wix. So Wix is very well known for a website building platform, but we also have a very robust e-commerce platform with over three million commerce sites ready to sell right now on the platform with thousands joining every week. And we basically help anyone build a store, set it up, manage the store.
and grow their business.
Yeah, that's amazing. And I guess I had no idea that you had grown that much. Three million is a great number to be at and growing quicker and chipping away at some of those other SaaS platforms that are out there. So today, in the green room, we did talk briefly about that there's a regular Wix brand that is kind of like to the consumer who wants to build a website. And then there's a studio brand now for agencies to help build more complex websites for others. Tell us a little bit about how those two things differentiate from
Yeah, definitely. So if you look at the evolution of what we've done, so if you look at the evolution of what we've done, so we have the Wix that everyone know and love, the do-it-yourself platform that helps anyone build a website quickly, efficiently, and they are famous for its ease of use. As we grew up and got mature and we got more and more merchants and more complex side on our platform, and in many cases, agencies that build sites for other, not more the do-it-yourself thing, we needed to provide more of our advanced capabilities, both for
Speaker 1 (01:40.512)
e-commerce as well as for designing and we realized that the best thing to do would be to basically generate two separate brands. So the Wix that everyone know and love where it's still super easy and fun to use but on the other hand we have Wix Studio which we launched last year. It really allows complex merchants as well as agencies to build for others and it's going really well for us. It's been one of the major growth engines for the company.
So the buzzwords around here at eTail are agetic and AI. And I know Wix is way ahead of the game now in AI. Tell us a little bit about how the e-commerce portion of Wix is employing AI to help, not just in generative, but in analytical.
For sure. So I think AI today can really make a tremendous change for merchants. And you know, when we talk about it today, I'd really like to divide it into two types of AI. I think the queen of headlines, obviously, GenAI that allows merchants to generate unique content for e-commerce is really making a lot of great things today for merchants. We're going to talk about features that we already have on our platform. On the other hand, you have machine learning.
and advanced algorithms that really work in a continuous loop. It basically analyzes buyer's interaction on the website, then analyzes it, makes adjustments to the website, gets feedback from the real world, and continuously adjusts and optimizes the website. And there are a lot of things right now that were only the territory of the giant merchants right now that are available for smaller merchants, so we can talk about that too. Now, in terms of Gen.AI, I can give a few examples of things that merchants can use tomorrow morning on our platform. So let's...
Speaker 1 (03:21.102)
stop for second? okay. So, for example, if you're looking to do something like rebranding, or even just opening a new business, so we can help you with AI find the most suitable business name for your business, giving your audience, your product, your market, it can do it for you. It can even help you find the right domain name for your business and make sure that it's available, and last but not least, it can even generate your logo. So all the rebranding stuff, we're just establishing a new business, you can do it within minutes and it's even fun.
The other thing that we see that takes a lot of time for merchants, especially those with large catalogs, is writing product descriptions. And I'm talking about product descriptions that are aimed to convert, that are optimized for search engines. And our engineers made sure that you can just answer a few questions and it generates those descriptions for you. And the good thing that this capability is also available for any other copy that you have on your site, whether it's your homepage, your FAQ.
your subtitles, it knows the context of your site, knows your target audience, and generate the best text for you that is aimed to convert, that is aimed for search engines. Talking about search engines, we saw customer acquisition costs ramping up 200 % over the past eight years. And SEO was a big topic for professionals, took a lot of time, and now we have an AI widget that just can go through your website, scan everything, and come back to you with a recommendation, what you should do, how you should change your titles.
title tags, description, everything so you can rank up higher in search results. I think another thing that I see merchants using really well on our platform is anything related to imagery. Like imagine you go into a website that you do not know the brand. We know that what would determine whether you stay in to go and shop or you bounce is whether what you see on the site make you trust that brand. And imagery has a major effect. And you used to have a lot of funds and to be a big brand to generate really good imagery.
and today you simply need to describe what you want to get and it adjusts everything for the ratio of your site to the theme, to the colors, to the design language so everything looks consistent. And by the way, same thing for pack shots. You used to need to go for like long, very expensive production days. Now you just take a photo with your phone of your product, a few clicks and you get a professional pack shot. I think we got all the friction being removed from the creation step of your site and that's really going well.
Speaker 1 (05:46.924)
Now once you already set up, think this is where machine learning comes up. So prior to Wix, I worked at Expedia. We had huge teams that were responsible for advanced algorithm to show you the right hotel room for you in the right order. So this has already been democratized as we speak. So we have an integration on our platform that allows you and a merchant to show the right products in the right order for the right users at the right time to increase conversion. And it constantly adapts based on interaction on the website.
So this is really good. Another thing that we see, we have a 24 hour seven shopping assistant built into the system. So what you can do basically, you can feed it with PDFs and manual products, within 10 minutes it will probably know better about your product than you know. And then it can proactively suggest products to users, help them with questions, and you can even define at which point they should hand it over to you or just stop telling them things.
So this is going really well. I think a few other things that I see happening these days We just recently as Wix invested in a startup that does Dynamic pricing and again democratize it for smaller merchants and they're doing a really good job and even here at the show I saw the ability to dynamically optimize inventory So we see a lot of things in machine learning that are being democratized these days
Yeah, I mean, lot of those things, just the egenic part where they're helping you to determine which of the products. And I can think even five years ago, or even today, a lot of the e-commerce platforms just sort of ordered. It was such a manual process. And a lot of times you had to go in and do the one through 10 or one through whatever for the sorting of your products. That's a great feature. My other comment is just as a content, we have a company that supports us, the content company.
They have a number of Wix clients and they love the fact that it'll suggest content that doesn't exist yet or content that you need more of and that works for both the content side and the commerce side and it's interesting to see how there is a need still, you know, like a content page needs some supporting content or needs more about it and I like how Wix will suggest that.
Speaker 2 (08:03.852)
you write a blog article about XYZ widget piece that you have. How are you employing some of those pieces and how are you learning and then adopting and I mean it seems like the rate of features that you're adding are incredible but what is like the roadmap coming up and what do you see that is the next important step?
I think we have several approaches. The one thing is just to streamline and remove the friction from store creation. I think AI gave us things that we never believed would be possible probably five years ago. So everything from designing your website. mean, already today you see that the majority of the traffic to Wix.com is being transitioned to AI creation. It used to be you choose a template and then with easy...
famous Wix drag and drop today, you can get it up and running with just talking to an AI agent and it would create it for you and then you can adjust manually from there if you'd like. The other thing that we're working on is the ongoing management of the store. So I think in just a few months, any action that you can do in terms of managing your store, you would be able to do with chat or even with voice with AI. So we see that coming as well. And if I look a little bit, you know, behind
to see what's next coming, I think once you will see machine learning merging with Gen.AI, then imagine that you won't be only able to optimize the order in which you have products appear in front of users, but also the actual content. So imagine that gradually you can optimize product description automatically to better convert for the right imagery, and it can do it for you by itself and constantly optimize and adjust.
to improve experience as well as conversion. I think this is right around the corner because you have all the pieces together. You just need to match them.
Speaker 2 (09:57.218)
Yes, I mean, just to kind of help people understand what you're talking about in the voice part and the chat part. Traditionally, you'd go to the back of your admin section of your commerce platform and you'd have to A, know what everything does, right? And then B, figure out and find where to do it. I think what you're saying is that already you can or soon you will be able to just type in, help me organize my
XYZ category and show the products that are related in that category.
You can even go without specifically saying what you're looking for. Imagine you have too much inventory of an item. You would be able to tell the chat agent, hey, I have too much inventory from those red socks, what should I do? And it would probably suggest you, hey, why don't you go and have these coupons or go on and have this Google ad and I can create it for you. Or why don't you come up with this sale and let's create a very nice algorithm or a rule for a discount and it would be able to do everything for you.
What have you seen at eTale here that is exciting for you that you could even bring back and Is there is there something here that you've seen that you could share that you that you're excited about that? Yeah, even maybe in part of Wix already. Yeah
I think that if you look at the evolution of where we've seen the investment in e-commerce, would say just a few years ago, everyone invested in marketing and bringing in more traffic. Once you pretty much were able to squeeze the juice out of it, everyone invested in how you can get more from customers that are visiting your store, whether it's conversion or retention. I would say that if we would talk just last year, we tell you that now checkout is the new frontier for innovation. So from being vanilla, generic area.
Speaker 1 (11:44.14)
Now all the platforms are open for new third party applications to come in and enhance your checkout. We now have no code customization for checkout. And when I come to this show, it sees that we even passed that and now everything is post checkout. So the thank you page is now becoming a new frontier for innovation for upsell, cross-sell, very nice things in innovation. And I would come back home and we definitely think what we can do with that.
post checkout journey is a lot of times what the ecommerce people think. They forget that there's an opportunity to market to the user after they've checked out and during the shipping process and all those other things. How about Wix itself? Do you have a roadmap that you could share with that's coming up this year and next year? What's exciting things that happen within the Wix?
In general, I can talk about several things. As I told you, think the major things that Wix is doing these days is we are establishing a very robust brand for agencies that are building for others. We realized that as opposed to merchants that potentially are on the Wix platform once in a while, they want to change something on the website, they check the orders, these guys are on our platform 24-7. That's their tool. What it really helped us, it forced us to take our quality to a very high level.
and how everyone can enjoy it. The reliability, the performance, the speed, the ease of use, the removal of friction. So quality was a very big thing for us. And I'm very proud to say that we're at very different stage these days. The product quality is very, very high. So if we're all about being innovative and features and coming up with new innovations, I would say in the past year we took quality to be the most important feature of our product. The other thing that I see is obviously AI. I told you about the plans of having every single action.
or question that you might have being integrated into AI, so you can use AI for that. The other things that I see is to take our unique value proposition of unmatched no-code design customization to the next level. And we see, I think, the requirements from being able to customize things to get to even higher results. And the imagination that people have, the type of design that they're looking for is truly endless, and we want to give it to anyone no-code and make it even fun, so you'll see a lot of new things in terms of design customization.
Speaker 2 (14:02.072)
Yeah, I do want to double down on that no code because I think that's where lot of... That's where it should go. Theoretically, we went from binary to having some coding language, then to being able to see something as a website. And I feel like that we should already be at that point in which your marketing team can do some of that heavy lifting that would traditionally would have been by a developer. And it's exciting to hear about the checkout part because I think that's the...
That's the most overlooked and there's some other platforms that don't even allow you to do anything with the checkout. They make you pay and use their own payment gateway. is there anything innovative that you see coming in checkout that maybe is ahead of what others are doing or is there anything exciting in the checkout part that you like to look at?
For sure. So I think I told you that just in the past year, we completely opened it for customization without code. You can change fields, you can add check boxes or the ability to choose something or drop down to, so completely customize it to your specific needs. It used to be a very conservative area where people say, hey, we probably don't want anyone to allow to touch it. I think merchants today know their business, they know what they need, and we allow them to make customization without code. Another thing that we've done, it's completely open.
So we have APIs and service plugins that allow many different third party providers to come in and enhance and extend our offering. And very exciting thing that I see today, happening today in terms of investment and serve new startups in the field is embedded offers. So being able to use AI and provide personalized offered within the checkout. So this is a big field today and I see a lot of startups that are attacking this area.
Yeah, I think the openness and we can kind of close out with this, but the ability to add partners in and especially your multi, multinational, so anybody in any country could run a Wix store, right? Yeah. But if your country doesn't have a payment gateway and you're closed or doesn't, you don't offer that solution for shipping that you can't go to that country, but with Wix, you'd be able to, using your APIs, build a solution that would work in virtually anywhere, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:18.2)
So definitely, we cover almost every single part of the world, and if not through us, then through partners. And again, the system is very open and we have documentation that allow anyone to create that integration, either through that specific payment provider or through a third party integrator that would come in between. Now in terms of No Code, another thing that we've done and launched in the last few months is what we call Wix Functions. The interesting things about that, it allows you to use service plugs in an API.
and usually you would need to have code to extend and manipulate the business logic. Now you can simply have an editor with flowchart that defines the different rules that you want to apply without any code. So even for those areas of APIs and service plugins that you use to know how to code in order to extend today, even you can extend it without code at all using a new map.
That's awesome. Orin, we have a few minutes left. I give everybody a chance at end of the podcast to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
So I think one thing that I see that people are not using enough is the fact that e-commerce has really no borders. So you should not really limit yourself to your local community, not even to your country or not even to your continent. And today, more than ever, it's very easy to extend to new markets in the world. We recently launched a new partnership with a company called Globally. They're pretty famous in that field for cross-border. And that basically means that you can take a pin, put it anywhere on the globe, and say, hey, I want to start selling there.
and they would sell for you tax, fulfillment, transitions and translation and even decide that you want to sell different products and different prices and everything is being handed for you. So I would really encourage anyone to really think outside the box and extend and beyond their actual geo.
Speaker 2 (18:01.442)
That's awesome. Yeah, Oren, been a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here today. It's always a the conference.
for having me.