Questions Answered about Inventory, Shoppable TV, and More
There are no shortcuts to ecommerce success. To win, you have to experiment, challenge yourself, and even take some losses to yield long-term wins.
If there is one commonality between the majority of business leaders, it’s that they all believe that experimentation and constantly learning more is what makes a company grow and thrive. Andrew Goble, the co-founder and co-CEO of Jambys, preached that truth when discussing how he has grown the company in the early stages.
“I probably would look at the old website through my hands now, like I’d be a little ashamed,” Goble said. “But also I’m glad we did it that way because it was the things we thought were going to stick or be important were so different from customers’ [thoughts], both why they bought it, why they commented on Instagram. And ultimately, we texted all of them, ‘Tell us everything you think and why you liked it.’”
That customer feedback was critical to Goble and his co-founder, who took those ideas and created a product that people loved. But Goble knows that you can’t just take from customers and then not deliver for them. And that’s one of the other big lessons he’s learned.
“Sometimes you tell a customer, ‘Hey, this thing was on backorder for five days, but it’s actually going to be the next Monday,’” Goble said. “And a lot of times they’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t really think about it,’ because a lot of people are just saying like, ‘Hey, ships whenever.’ So, I think at first we were like, ‘Oh, we’ll just talk to the customers that reach out to us and let them know like, we can do a full refund. This is the date we think, but it’s hard to trust any delivery carrier at this point because they’re so overloaded.’ But it was like learning to over-communicate and if any order’s still out after X amount of days, depending on the time period, just to reach out and be like, ‘We can just do a full refund.’ And when that happened, a lot of those customers ended up coming back at a different time, which is the great thing. It’s like, ‘Great, we’re not going to just keep this money out of your bank account while we wait to see what happens with this next piece of cargo. Let’s just do this when it feels good.’ And sometimes that’s felt painful being so small, but I think even just a year later, you see how important that is and that customers can trust that they’re going to get what we said they would get for what they paid. Which sounds so simple, but I think a lot of brands are not fulfilling that promise right now.”
Another thing that a lot of brands aren’t doing is paying attention to traditional ad channels, such as TV. Goble, on the other hand, has been excited to experiment and innovate in that channel.
“With Instagram and Facebook, people are just scrolling past things now,” Goble said. “And with TV, it’s like, usually whether you want to watch something or not, it’s kind of like, ‘It’s there, I’ll just sit through it. I don’t even know where the remote’s at, and I’m kind of focused on it. Oh, and now it’s actually an interesting commercial? Okay. I’ll watch it and check it out.’”
To hear more about how Goble and Jambys are experimenting, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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