Put a Ring On It: How Ring Brought Home Security into the Ecommerce World

The importance of building a community of employees and customers

The ecommerce industry has historically been dominated by some familiar verticals: apparel, footwear, home goods. In 2020, the world of ecommerce exploded to include a few more at the top of the list, including grocery and fitness. One industry, though, hasn’t necessarily emerged as a leader in the ecommerce zeitgeist: home security. But just because you don’t always think about an industry as a part of ecommerce doesn’t mean that it isn’t making waves among its digital peers.

The perfect example of this is Ring. Ring was founded in 2013 as a company called Doorbot, which failed to get the investment of any Shark Tank sharks, yet persevered to become a leader in home security before being acquired by Amazon in 2018. Today, Ring is valued at more than one billion dollars and, through its website sales, is bringing home security to customers everywhere.

Robin Choe is the Head of Ecommerce at Ring, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he explains how Ring has built a successful business through creating a community of neighbors and what it means to be driven by a shared goal. In fact, it was that community and the mission of the company that drew Choe to join Ring in 2019. As an experienced eCommerce leader, Choe knew he was stepping into an extraordinary company, but he had some goals when he first stepped through the door.

“The first thing I want to do is establish a shared mission,” Choe says of his approach when joining a company. “Why do we exist? What’s our purpose? Why are we here? Why do we get up every morning? As an ecommerce team at Ring, it’s something that is really critical, because we’re moving so fast. There’s constant updates and changes and features and functions and migrations and transitions and new product launches, you name it. So we have got to slow down and establish, ‘Why are we here? Why do we exist?’”

At Ring, Choe says his team decided that their reason was to communicate to current and future neighbors how they provide products and services that protect what is important to them, and they do that by building strong relationships with partners to deliver the best digital experiences for their neighbors, aka customers. Once you know what your mission is, the actual work of providing products and services to customers is easier to focus on, and the opportunity to innovate becomes more available.

Through the years, the wheels of innovation have not stopped, and product offerings at Ring have expanded into numerous categories. But even with so much to offer, Choe explains that it is important to keep the experience simple and easy, and to deliver what the customer needs.

“As they come to the site, we want to make it as easy and seamless,” he says. “I think this is the goal of every ecommerce company. As your portfolio grows… it [becomes about], ‘How do you help them find what they need?’ That’s the easy question to ask, but a hard question to answer. So, that’s one where we’re constantly thinking through user research and test.”

One of the things that Choe and his team has found is that people do not enjoy having products shoved in their face, especially if those products do not solve a real problem in their lives. So instead of just marketing the newest, shiniest object, Choe advocates for a more personalized approach.

“I think what’s most important is that you’re not just trying to upsell, but you’re really trying to deliver on a solution,” he says. “We’re thinking about, ‘How do we recommend the right products for you? How do we surface the right recommendations for you? How do we help you differentiate which doorbell to buy? What’s right for you based on your use case?’”

Along with personalization, Choe says that offering different buying options — including subscriptions — also helps to close the gap in building a community of loyal customers. With a number of subscription options and products that can work how you want them to, that are easy to understand and easy to connect to, Ring has made a highly-technical category of home security and turned it into a user-friendly industry. And Ring just keeps growing.

To find out more about what is to come for Ring, be sure to check out Up Next in Commerce.

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