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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
Brent Peterson (00:01.671)
All right, welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Ben Riggle. He is the managing director for Channable. Ben, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Ben Riggle (00:10.507)
Got it.
Ben Riggle (00:15.53)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks Brent for hosting me here. I am the managing director at Channable and what we are is a feed management platform that helps organizations grow and scale on marketplaces and across the US and also globally. So really excited to be here. I actually joined Channable about five months ago to grow out the US business, which is also one of my passions and kind of joining fast growing startups and working to grow them out as well. And kind of on a personal side though, I do enjoy
Brent Peterson (00:36.819)
Also one of my passions is kind of joining.
Brent Peterson (00:43.831)
I do enjoy a lot of science fiction, so I'm into the three-body problem now on Netflix, but also the Chinese version of Tencent did, which I recommend anybody watch as well, given kind of the full picture. And I got two great kids who are six and eight who take up the rest of the business as well, so I think you've got to be passionate about it. Yeah, no kidding. All right. So before we get into content, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Joke project.
Ben Riggle (00:45.182)
A lot of science fiction, so I'm into the three body problem now on Netflix, but also the Chinese version that Tencent did, which I recommend anybody watch as well if you want kind of the full picture. And I got two great kids who are six and eight who take up the rest of my time as well. So I think you got to be passionate there.
Brent Peterson (01:12.307)
going to do is tell you a joke. You just have to say, should this joke remain free? Or do you think somebody we should charge for it? Or as we've now decided to add a third category, should I be paying you for the joke? All right, so here we go. And I should have had, it doesn't matter. Here we go. I should have had a science fiction one. I don't know. I wouldn't know anybody. Yeah, here we go. I heard that you should always look into a mirror before making a big decision. It helps you to reflect.
Ben Riggle (01:28.913)
That's what it's like. Yeah.
Ben Riggle (01:40.554)
Got it. Okay, I think you're going to have to charge people for that one.
Brent Peterson (01:45.919)
Okay, yeah, and upon further reflection, yeah, we could go down that punt. We could go down that pun path forever. All right, so Ben, let's talk about channelable. Let's talk about, just give us the, I know you kind of gave us the 10,000 foot view, but tell us, you know, why it's important for all merchants to be looking at other than just one channel when selling their merchandise.
Ben Riggle (01:48.074)
upon further reflection. Yeah, yeah, just exactly.
Ben Riggle (02:12.382)
Yeah, it's a really good question. And in North America, it really hasn't been that way for too long just because the market's not been as fragmented. Hannibal was actually founded in Utrecht, which is in the Netherlands. It's about 30 minutes south of Amsterdam. So plug for their tourist agency. You should go there if you've never been there. Beautiful. It's like, it's like Amsterdam without all the tourists basically. But the benefits of being there for 10 years is that the European marketplace market is pretty fragmented as well. So.
If you want to be in the Netherlands, you're going to be on Bull, for example. If you want to be in fashion, you need to be on Zalando. If you're in the UK, you need to be on Amazon. And so it was really, if you want to grow in Europe, you pretty much have to go on new marketplaces and find ways to do that. In North America, it was mostly Amazon, as you know, and Google and Facebook and Instagram. But what we're seeing right now, and you were at, I think all the shows that I was, which was E-tail and Shop Talk and everything else.
What we heard over and over again was that Amazon is getting more competitive. Google has been more competitive. We've got the cookie deprecation problem as well. And so marketers are now looking for ways that they can find growth in other channels, particularly off of Amazon, where the margins were getting squeezed by a lot of sellers coming in as well.
Brent Peterson (03:34.487)
So you're saying people should be moving off of Amazon and onto other channels? Is that what you're whenever I'm hearing?
Ben Riggle (03:39.742)
I think it depends on your business. I think the diversification is going to be key for a lot of businesses and it's really going to be what category are you in. As you know, there's a lot of very, very competitive categories in Amazon. It's very hard to optimize there. A lot of challenges that we see for businesses is they do want to move off of Amazon. They want to go into Walmart. They want to, they're looking at things like TikTok shops. Some of these, our clients have moved from Amazon to also now like...
now doing D2C, so using Shopify or whatever they can on the back end to get a D2C project up and running. But the challenge is that once you start doing that, all of the different requirements in terms of how you list your products, where you list your products, and making sure that they match so they get good fill rates, if you will, in terms of when people are doing organic searches, it becomes really hard to do that across a lot of different skews and particularly in areas like fashion or jewelry.
where you have a lot of variance. It can be, your spreadsheet starts to multiply pretty quickly and the amount of time you work on it goes from a couple hours a week to tens of hours a week and measured in tens instead of single digits.
Brent Peterson (04:51.431)
Give us an idea of how Channibal can help that return on investment for any merchant that's wanting to branch out.
Ben Riggle (05:00.778)
Yeah, I think it's really about finding that growth. And so ROI is kind of a funny term in this space, because we'll see some companies that are really chasing profitability at a category level or at a product level. But more and more, we're starting to see a lot of companies who are also chasing market share on particular platforms. And so what we talk about at Channable is making sure, number one, is you've got the right marketplace match for your category and your brand if you're going on marketplaces.
or you've optimized all of your listings so that you can take advantage of things like Google PMAX campaigns or sponsored product ads on Amazon, for example, as well. One of the ways that we're seeing companies find that growth in market share, unfortunately for them is that it's kind of that pay to play side, particularly on Amazon with sponsored products, being able to take your listings and get them boosted to the right location at the right spot.
and being able to drive revenue and purchases through sponsored products that you normally wouldn't get the other way around. The challenge is there is that, again, you're managing, now you're not just managing your organic listings, but now you're managing campaigns in Amazon as well. And what we do is we help companies figure out how do they manage those campaigns and how do you execute and optimize them really well.
Brent Peterson (06:19.955)
I know you mentioned earlier the spreadsheet and the variance. Is that further complicate things as you go into different marketplaces? I'm assuming everybody has different rules in terms of how they manage their variance.
Ben Riggle (06:32.51)
Yeah, we haven't gotten, I don't think a consortium together that says, Hey, every marketplace, you should manage your variants in light exactly like this. We have the same taxonomy. Um, yeah, I don't think we'll get there. So yeah, that's the big problem is if you want to go on one marketplace or one area or another feed. Um, so if you want to go from Amazon to Google, or if you want to go to Amazon to Walmart, they all have different requirements, um, and product listing and the quality of your data, uh, is probably the number one thing. In fact, I was on a panel with somebody from Walmart.
And they were asked, what's the most important thing you can do to have success on Walmart? And they said, have your product quality and your product data up to date so we get a great match and a great fill rate as well. So it's super important to get it right. But if you don't know how to do that, you're going to get a lot of individual errors back from the platforms. They're not going to allow you to post some things. And it just causes a lot of frustration and really slows you down when you're trying to scale a business not to have something that helps you automate that.
Brent Peterson (07:29.655)
Do you think in terms of how each of the platforms or the end of the channel, how they see products, is there a competition between the platforms? And should you then limit yourself to how many channels you go to as a merchant?
Ben Riggle (07:48.002)
I think it's a million dollar question. There's definitely competition now at the platform level. So I think Amazon's starting to feel that a little bit. And I think there was some good literature out there was talking about Amazon maybe shifting their focus to Tmoo and Shien a little bit more and away from Walmart because they see that Tmoo and Shien are starting to take some share and could potentially take some share away from them.
I saw that just this morning they announced they're going to give a moratorium on some of the low inventory fees, for example, on Amazon. So you can see that they're becoming, on their side, ironically, a little bit more price conscious with the suppliers as well. And I think that has a lot to do with what you're saying is the competition between the platforms now. From a seller perspective, I do think it gives you choice. It's really going to depend on are you a marketplace only seller? Are you a D to C seller?
Do you have distribution relationships with physical retailers, et cetera? So I think what we encourage our clients to do is take all of those things into account. But the nice thing is, is you can, at least in Channable, we allow companies to look at the different marketplaces and feeds and they can see their product data and they can see how profitable specific products are, how well they're doing in those channels. And we encourage people to list.
the products and sell the products that are profitable and make sense for you on specific channels. And then you can easily pull down the ones that aren't making sense as well. And for something like Google and for Amazon in particular, we also encourage people to kind of manage their ads that way so that they can have kind of hero categories, products that aren't performing as well, however you want to categorize them. And you can use paid in much the same way to boost.
good performing products and reduce spend or even eliminate spend on products on the particular channels that aren't working out for you.
Brent Peterson (09:42.715)
You brought up Tmoo, so I now have to ask, is it an advantageous then for an American company selling in America if you want to be on Tmoo to make sure that people know your products coming from, like being shipped from America rather than I think a lot of products are getting shipped from Hong Kong or somewhere in China and all of a sudden you're waiting 30 days and now your product shows up and you forgot you ordered it?
Ben Riggle (10:06.762)
Yeah, it's a tough question because I think you have to go even further down, is can US sellers afford to compete there? And that's the big question we're getting. But I think for Tmoo in particular, their focus is to make sure that is possible. I think there are different buyers on different platforms. Tmoo seems to be focused on the discount buyers. So it remains to be seen, do they care where the product's being shipped from as long as they get the lowest price in a functional product.
And that's something I think gets back to the ethos of what the marketplace is and where you want to list your market, your items. But I think, again, the profitability is going to be the ultimate control factor for a lot of sellers originating here in America. And then Timo will have to decide how they want to manage that as well.
Brent Peterson (10:55.119)
With the kind of proliferation of these marketplaces, and I know I saw Target last year has now started increasing their marketplace share. Is there going to be sort of the Walmarts and Amazons of the world and everybody else? Or do you think the Best Buys and Targets of the world still have a chance to kind of break in? Even though they're big players, they always seem to lag behind some of the others.
Ben Riggle (11:22.974)
Yeah, it's a good question. A lot of this, I always bring back to the idea of kind of what is retail media? It's still that form of inventory. And when you think about what that inventory is, it's time and eyes on a page or on a video or whatever it is as well. And I do think that Target in particular has a, they've got a good USPU with Target Plus and the ability to kind of have a closed network there. So they're keeping some scarcity around that as well.
But I think other areas, Best Buy, etc. I think they'll struggle a little bit to compete because I don't think they're not just competing with Walmart and Amazon. They're now competing with TikTok shops. They're going to be competing with Shian, Tmoo, other marketplaces for eyeballs in particular. And the retail media, no matter how good your setup is, we don't have people there that are coming to shop and purchase. You're not going to get enough return for your advertisers to spend the time and effort you need for them to optimize.
to make your auctions and your inventory more valuable.
Brent Peterson (12:26.071)
What kind of tools does Chanable offer to help clients move across channels or see across other channels? Is there specific tools that you offer that help those?
Ben Riggle (12:37.31)
Yeah, so we have insights tools internally. So for our advertisers and our customers that use Channelable, they have the ability to see all of their, across all the different channels such as Google, Amazon, Walmart, or in Europe, Boll, Otto, Zalando, et cetera, and see exactly how their products are performing there and also see where they're ranking and the issues that they might be having on those platforms. So...
We look at it in two ways. Number one is how do you grow into those new platforms so you've never done it before? We can help you get your product set up very quickly, help you identify what errors are firing, what you need to optimize. And then we have a score, basically a score for your listings that goes up to 100%. And we're able to score every listing that you have and show you how you can improve that as well. And then once you're on the marketplace, we're continually helping to optimize.
and auto categorize using AI and other things that allow you to get your product to the right place and categorize them correctly.
Brent Peterson (13:44.741)
For merchants that are doing organic versus paid, is there an advantage in terms of going with Chanable and how you're managing those ads and you help them then to decide organic is going to be good for now or at some point you should start paying?
Ben Riggle (14:01.662)
Yeah, I think it depends on who you are. I think if you're on a lot of different marketplaces or you have a lot of different products, yeah, absolutely. And we've seen this in particular on Amazon because we made the choice to be an end-to-end solution for Amazon, meaning you can do all the organic product listings, but you can also go all the way through the sponsored products and manage everything within Channable as well. And we saw a reduction of anywhere from four to six hours.
that had been doing it manually or doing it in separate tools, four to six hours a week spent on their campaign management in particular. So we definitely saw a decrease there. And we also encourage you on Amazon in particular to think a little bit like you would traditionally have done in your Google campaigns, where you start to think of categories and products and managing both on an automatic bid and also a manual bid back and forth.
And what we encourage our clients to do is to figure out what's working on the automatic side and then use rules and AI within the platform to control it a little bit more manually to auto categorize into, like I said, hero products and other different product levels as well. And so we've seen that not just from a time saving perspective, but it's also allowed companies to dramatically boost profitability on segments of their products and reduce the wasted spend on products that just weren't performing well.
but they didn't have time to manage it out manually in spreadsheets and in the tool directly.
Brent Peterson (15:31.527)
Is there a, is there a, um, more of a push now for North American clients to use all of North America? And I include Canada and Mexico in that it does. Channable help those clients get across borders and increase their markets.
Ben Riggle (15:50.222)
I may have lost you there, Brett.
Brent Peterson (15:52.207)
Is there, looking at the North American...
Ben Riggle (15:54.328)
Sorry Brent, I lost you a little bit there.
Brent Peterson (15:58.64)
Looking at the North American market, is there a push now to move across borders and maybe just focus on Canada and Mexico, but is there a way or does it make it easier for clients now to move across borders?
Ben Riggle (16:13.514)
Yeah, there's definitely a push for that. I was at a recent GELF conference, which is the global e-commerce leaders forum that they hosted in LA. That was a conversation that came up a lot, which was both Mexico and Europe. Mexico in particular has a very fast growing e-commerce market right now as well. So a lot of companies are looking at how they can do that. Obviously, we have advantageous trade agreements with Canada and Mexico.
that you don't get in Europe as well. So yeah, we're definitely seeing companies look to expand there. And again, you face some of the same challenges that you face when you're expanding to domestic marketplaces and you've got to get the listings right. You have to be in the right place. But of course, then you have the issues of, you know, where does your, where do you locate your inventory? How do you work through the actual logistics of getting your products to clients? Obviously Amazon makes that a lot easier if you do the FDA programs, but you pay for that in margin as well.
And then in Europe, we're seeing a lot of companies that want to expand from US to Europe. And I think the interesting thing there is that once you get over the compliance and other regulations for Europe, you can expand there pretty easily. It's just a matter of where do you want to put your products and then how do you want to sort your inventory out and who's going to fulfill that for you. But the main hurdle we see is just the idea of compliance and paperwork and taxes that keeps a lot of companies from actually expanding.
Yeah, it's, I think a lot of companies are a little bit surprised at how easy it is to start expanding into the marketplaces there once you've gotten over that hurdle.
Brent Peterson (17:45.367)
Um, there was rumors or there was starts of the Shopify network trying to do sort of this Amazon style shopping marketplace. Have you seen that, uh, come to fruition for any of your clients?
Ben Riggle (18:00.27)
Not to date, but a bulk of our clients, the majority of our clients are in Europe as well right now. So anything that we see originating out of the US, we might not see as much as we would see originating out of Europe. So for Shopify, not 100% sure. I know Amazon has been focused on increasing in Europe in particular, and we have clients that are interested in how they could take advantage of that as well. But I...
I don't think we can comment much on the Shopify fulfillment network as of yet.
Brent Peterson (18:31.051)
What do you think is the big thing now that's besides AI? If we can just take AI out of the picture, what's coming next for merchants that want to increase their market share in the rest of 2024?
Ben Riggle (18:46.014)
I think AI is, everybody likes to talk about AI, so we take it out of the picture, but I think the market share, increasing market share is going to be difficult right now. Everybody for the most part that I talked to at Prosper and other events that we were at on the marketplace side said how difficult it is to find that market share and that profitability. So I think this year is going to be a year of efficiency in your individual business.
And then being very selective about where you put your products, how you deploy your resources to distribution and marketing of those products, more so than we've seen in years past. And I do think there'll be a push for companies to really optimize on social sites for advertising in particular, as Google's cookies are deprecated, so they're going to find new ways to go there. I think that'll be a big push. I think Meta, in particular, with Facebook and Instagram are really well-
position to capture some of that spend. And I think if you're not doing that as a, as a seller to date, then you're probably missing a lot of the, the inventory that you'll be able to get. And the targeting, I think will just continue to be better, you know, on those sites than maybe you'd see in other places as well.
Brent Peterson (19:59.063)
I've seen more and more service businesses on Facebook now. Do you think the B2B businesses that are traditionally maybe multi-channel but mainly single channel, even just call outbound calling, they're going to be moving to some of these social media platforms and can channel will help those type of businesses?
Ben Riggle (20:22.474)
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. We're actually seeing a little bit, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that accelerate a lot. I think on the B2B side, the thing that's held them back on digital commerce in particular has been just the infrastructure on their backend that they've had and the inability to easily take what is basically a B2B facing product to a B2C type environment. But we're seeing a lot of companies start to invest in modernizing that infrastructure.
And I think with that, Enchantable can help is there's an opportunity to start to extend your reach in terms of where you distribute and how you target and which specific products you might offer. The other challenge is this, a lot of B2B companies have huge product catalogs that are difficult to manage outside of an ERP type environment. And so what we've been able to do is help them easily distill down the products they want to sell on particular channels.
and make sure they're listed the right way and updated when they make inventory changes on the backend as well. But yeah, I think that's going to be a big push and we're already seeing a lot of our clients and potential clients talk about it.
Brent Peterson (21:26.571)
I think you mentioned TikTok earlier, but from the social channels, what are the channels that North Americans should be looking at to make sure that you're on when you're selling your product or even testing? I mean, I'm assuming that testing those channels is the first thing you should be doing.
Ben Riggle (21:43.21)
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of testing that needs to happen. If you were at eTel, you also heard a lot about kind of incrementality and those types of things. So I won't go into incrementality, but there are a lot of companies who would encourage you to test on Facebook and other social sites. And if it does add revenue to you and it's incremental, then you should keep doing it. But I would encourage a lot of incrementality testing across the board as you roll that out. But definitely, you know, Facebook, Meta.
TikTok in particular, you could be on TikTok without doing shops right away. But we are seeing some good traction for shops in particular. Reason being is that the transaction seems to be pretty easy on TikTok shops, meaning you can accidentally buy things almost as well. So if you've ever been on TikTok and hit the buy button, it's probably coming your way, even if you didn't mean to do it as well. But those are the ones in North America we're really seeing. And then, you know, we hear a lot about, you know,
of snap, but don't see a lot in terms of that driving traffic. And then, depending on if you think Pinterest and Etsy or social sites or retail sites, Pinterest is another one that, if it is the right category for you can actually drive a lot of good traffic and actually yes, revenue for clients in the right space.
Brent Peterson (23:01.931)
Do you think the site X formerly known as Twitter is at some point going to make a comeback? Or do you think it's not? It's sort of the last decade.
Ben Riggle (23:14.57)
Yeah, that's a, you know, I have personal opinions on that. We, and we don't, you know, from a business perspective, we don't hear a lot of people asking about it. I spent four years prior to this at a company called Talkwalker, which did social listening. So I'm really familiar with the amount of data and how that's changed for, for X in particular. Yeah. So I think it will be interesting. I think it's going to struggle to make a comeback. There's also, you know, Jack Dorsey, which I think is kind of blue skies, the one he started.
I signed up for that, but I've never used it. So I don't know how many people are in that same boat. I don't know. Have you signed up for that one yet or? Yeah. So I don't know if it's the medium, but it feels a little bit like maybe the tweet medium has kind of 10 years ago and people are moving on. I'm interested to see what Reddit does. Um, uh, they've just IPO and, um, interested to see how they, they think about taking their, both their retail media.
Brent Peterson (23:50.116)
I have not, no.
Ben Riggle (24:09.638)
or sorry, their retail and media business forward, but also just how they think about selling their data and how that data can be used for various applications at the retail level, the marketplace level. And also we're not allowed to talk about AI, but I'm assuming they're gonna use a lot of it to train AI models.
Brent Peterson (24:26.823)
Yeah, I'll kind of close my thoughts off on how I think AI is bubbling down and helping the North American market. I was just, I just had a conversation with a manufacturer who said that they've automated their production so much now that they're able to far compete with China, like the cost to get it onto a boat is more than their costs now. Manufacturer. Do you think that bubble down like I'll call it a bubble down effect by using AI plus automation and all these other tools that we have now is
Ben Riggle (24:48.034)
Wow.
Brent Peterson (24:56.611)
in our disposal, that's going to help our local market, not local, but North American market to compete against where China had the advantage of just people and making this low cost, low margin production that maybe some of that is going to come back on shore.
Ben Riggle (25:15.342)
Yeah, I could see that as well. And I think there's two parts of it is number one is, you know, we see it, you know, when you first adopt a new tool or technology in general, is you have this really initial burst of quote unquote productivity or cost savings, which then levels out. So it feels like a lot of companies are getting to this level of we're operating at a much more efficient way of what you've mentioned here as well. It allows us to compete globally. And I think that's going to be really big for North America.
But I think to your point is then, okay, well, what do we do next? Now that we've gotten to this operational efficiency that is quote unquote, the new normal, what do we do next to then take this forward? Um, and there was a good article, I think it was in the Wall Street journal yesterday that was talking about, you know, it's kind of, we've heard about peak oil for a long time to say, have we, have we maxed out the data on the internet and is there enough data on the internet to actually train more models or if we kind of max that out, is this the best we're going to get?
as well. So I think that's another conversation point. We got to all create more useful data on the internet so we can train our AI bots.
Brent Peterson (26:15.745)
Yeah. So Ben, as I close out the podcast, I gave everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Ben Riggle (26:25.17)
You know, you're always remiss to plug if you don't plug your own company, but you guys have heard enough about Shanable. But I will plug something else that's totally unrelated to that is I've become a really big fan of Knockaround Sunglasses, which are $20. What they did and that was really cool over the weekend is they did a project with the Trevor Project. And what the Trevor Project is, is a...
Brent Peterson (26:25.431)
You know, I, you're always remiss.
Ben Riggle (26:51.846)
It's a project that allows young men who are struggling with issues related to sexuality to call in and have somebody to support them. And it was actually one of the board members was a former colleague of mine as well. So kind of close to our heart. But if you get a chance to check it out, they're knock arounds. They have cool Trevor Project themed glasses that support the Trevor Project, but also some cool glasses in general as well if you like sports teams or other things. Or if you're like me and you lose your glasses.
paddle boarding as well. They're only 20 bucks to replace.
Brent Peterson (27:24.903)
That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's such a great category. And actually, I have a sunglass manufacturer, founder on the podcast coming out next week. So great, great topic. And thank you for that. I appreciate it. Ben Riggle, the North American director with Chanable. Thank you so much for being here today.
Ben Riggle (27:34.382)
There you go.
Ben Riggle (27:45.27)
Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks, Brent.