68 Unlocking the Power of Social Commerce - Will Basta Jul 11 2024

Tim Curtis: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this edition of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm your cohost, Tim Curtis from CohereOne.

Erik Martinez: And I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine.

Tim Curtis: Today, we welcome Will Basta to the show. Will is an entrepreneur with a proven track record in E-commerce, venture capital, and digital innovation. As one of the founders of ACV, Accelerated E-commerce Ventures, Will leverages his strategic insight and leadership skills to build brands and scale online businesses. Will, welcome to the show. Glad to have you.

Will Basta: Thanks for having me, guys. I'm happy to be here.

Tim Curtis: Good. Before we start on the topic and start diving into some of the [00:01:00] questions for the dialogue today, could you give the audience maybe a little bit of a brief background on your journey up to this point and kind of how you arrived here?

Will Basta: Of course. Yeah. So, my professional career started in the tech industry. So, I was working at W2 in the tech industry, but at the same time, obviously, I had a lot of interest in the digital space when it comes down to making money through the internet and the avenues that started to expand immensely over the last 10 years, right?

And so, I started a business on Amazon early on, developed the product myself, went through all that busy work. It was a mild success. But that's where I first got ingrained and got to know the back end of what it looks like. Obviously, it looks a little bit different now that we're 10 years later. Then there was a couple of similar ventures like that. Obviously, became sort of an expert in the E-commerce world.

My business partner and I got together on a couple of projects as well. Circa 2019, we essentially saw a couple of companies in the industry that were essentially doing it as a service for people who had [00:02:00] interest in capitalizing on the initial E-commerce boom through like a profit-sharing model where someone comes in, it doesn't matter if they have E-commerce experience or even have a product or anything, they pay an upfront fee, a startup cost to the partner and the partner builds and operates out of business for them and then works on a profit split.

So, we saw that model and it looks great on the surface, but we noticed the companies that were out there doing it, were truly, really inefficient and they didn't have it set up the way that we would have done it. And so, that's where the light bulb just turned on and we said, hey, we can do this better. We can execute on this better. We can take this model that's out there and really legitimize it and then turn E-commerce into an actually an asset class that has a sustainable approach, that can give cash over month over month returns, but also can appreciate in value over time.

And so we did that, we started and we started at a small scale, saw success with it with 10 clients we had in 2020, and then really, you know, at that point we said, we know we had something. So, in early 2021, we started doing some outbound marketing and that's [00:03:00] where things evolved. You know, our initial service was providing building an Amazon business for people who had interest in making money through E-commerce. Amazon, the biggest, you know, third-party retailer in the world online, right? And so, there's that.

And then, if we fast forward to where we are now, the model has obviously evolved. We initially worked on a wholesale model where we would essentially, with our distributor network, source products at volume with clients or for clients on behalf of them, and then sell it at a margin. So, reselling other brands that you're authorized to sell. Also, a little bit of private label development, like product development only on Amazon.

Now, to this day, where we're at today is we've done over a thousand stores for different clients globally, primarily in the US, but we sell on Amazon U.S. through a wholesale and a private label model. We also do Amazon in Dubai, so the UAE, Germany, and the UK, and then we do Walmart in the US, Etsy, which is a niche platform. And then, we also, we're really bullish and we're actually a corporate partner of TikTok. So, we [00:04:00] have the ability to also build out TikTok businesses for people and ride that because that is not just a wave that's temporary. That's going to be a huge thing. That's what social commerce is. And we can dive into that later.

But ultimately what we offer these days is a pretty much-refined version of everything we've ever done, which is a multi-channel approach, giving the ability to actually sell on multiple channels, have us handle it for the client, build it from scratch, and touch and sell to every consumer market with a diverse set of products that get better on certain platforms in multiple different markets, whether it be US, EU, UK, or the UAE.

Tim Curtis: What I kind of like about the story is the incremental reach out into different areas. So, you know, starting on that Amazon, then eventually looking at taking on more of the marketing responsibilities, following where the opportunity leads you if you will. Which I think puts you in a kind of the catbird seat. One of the things that we are interested in learning a little bit more about it is, you know, you mentioned social commerce and of course, traditional E-commerce being the granddaddy, I guess you could say of all of them.

You've been obviously very deeply involved in that industry. You [00:05:00] have seen the evolution of where things have, we've all watched in COVID as that E-commerce, that collective umbrella of E-commerce really sort of advanced in ways that was probably still a few years off but advanced in a shortened timeline.

So, why don't you give us your perspective on last decade, how things accelerated and then really pivoting more towards that future where you see it going? I think, for context, when I'm saying E-commerce, I'm not thinking about just a particular one branded website. I'm thinking about all the larger umbrellas, social commerce, all the social platforms underneath that. So, love your perspective.

Will Basta: Of course. There's a lot of points to touch on here. I'm sure you guys buy on Amazon weekly, if not daily. That's the main platform that people think about when they think about E-commerce, in general, if you're just sort of coming from the outside of buying products online because that's the majority of purchases that are for everyday use. Throughout the years, other platforms that have emerged, and there's also other forms of driving traffic to these third-party platforms that have emerged and different trends.

Obviously, consumer trends change, [00:06:00] sourcing capability changes, manufacturing capability has evolved. I can even narrow that down to the last, I'd say about five or so years. When you have the largest retailer in the world is larger than Amazon is Walmart, if you include their actual brick-and-mortar. They dove into the E-commerce space a lot later than Amazon, but they're a big player and they're their biggest competitor.

And so, as Amazon has grown, they're still getting market share taken away from them in certain categories by other platforms. And so, you see people that they're reliant on going on to Amazon, but at the same time, there's other, for example, you've mentioned the pandemic. Walmart is within 10 miles of 90 percent of Americans, there's a Walmart, right?

And so, people were used to going to that Walmart in person. What the pandemic did is it pretty much pushed in the direction of buying online, which they may have never done that before. This is just one example, right? And so, you know, John Doe, who essentially picks the kids up from school and stops at Walmart to pick stuff up normally now is driving past Walmart, going home, and ordering it online. And once you become [00:07:00] an online purchaser, you're essentially there for life because you've broken that kind of seal.

And so, there obviously was a pandemic surge, but a lot of that has brought loyal online shoppers moving forward, and it has opened up a trend. I don't want to say a trend, but opened up sort of a habit that becomes something that sticks. Right. And so, we've seen other platforms come in and we're just brick and mortar like Walmart, and now people are buying. It's a huge platform for E-commerce, right? And you have less sellers, but a huge amount of volume.

So, those are the two big players on the third-party side for the grocery-type thing. And so, if you look at groceries, that's a lot of the stuff that we sell for our clients on those platforms. People go to Amazon, they go to Walmart with the intent to purchase, the intent to buy something. Then you have the spawn-offs of that, you have your Facebook, Instagram kind of shop. The big one here is TikTok shop. These are social media platforms, where the intent isn't to buy something, but you end up buying something. So, that's what social commerce is. It's the ability to actually purchase through something that is a social media platform.

And the growth of that has been [00:08:00] monumental. That is what this decade is all about. It's about driving purchases and purchasing trends through whether it's affiliate marketing with micro-influencers on certain specific products that are more niche or building out strategies through these platforms that can either drive traffic to Amazon through TikTok's unique algorithm on a new product, or have the purchase within TikTok itself.

So, that's what social commerce is at a very high level and that's something that is actually growing about 5x more than E-commerce is in general this decade, and obviously, E-commerce has got massive growth ahead of it. Twenty to 25 percent of all retail purchases right now, believe it or not, are E-commerce. So, there's a lot more growth ahead. The growth is still monumental in E-commerce.

And the point I'm trying to get here is that there's different avenues and that's why we focus on a multi-channel approach because you're going to have people that buy different things from different platforms and there's different purchasing trends, right?

So, there's more impulsive purchasing, which we tend to see a lot more on your TikTok kind of platform and your Instagram and your Facebook, as opposed to the intent to go in and buy your [00:09:00] detergent from an Amazon, right? That wraps into where marketing is gone. Right. You have your traditional PPC and your basic ways of driving ads to a product.

Now we have ways of organically driving traffic without actually even spending money based on an algorithm that can drive, algorithm, for example, is very, very unique. There's ways to drive traffic through hosts that will bring people to platforms to purchase without spending money on ads. And then leveraging, obviously influencers, people like to buy from people or just affiliate user-generated content. Those are the new future features of how you can market products. If you're bringing a new brand to the market, it's all driven, a lot of it's driven by that as opposed to just general paid ads.

And where things are going overall is it's not just about Amazon, it's global. You have a lot of other Chinese-owned companies, as well as in Latin America, you have Mercado Libre. That's essentially your Amazon of South America, they're huge and they're growing at a monstrous rate right now. There's that, but there's also Amazon going into other markets. And that's why we've [00:10:00] expanded into the Middle East and the EU and the UK. It's not just about the US and our consumerism that is spreading worldwide. As there's more internet penetration globally, there's more access to the internet, that's what that means, right? Which means there's more ability to purchase, and more people get stuck on their phone. There's more phone time, screen time, leads to more consumerism, right?

So, the trends that we're seeing and what we always track is where are these third-party platforms looking outside of the US and also how are their different ways to leverage, whether it's spending money or partnering with people or riding the wave of an algorithm to drive traffic to a store on a third-party platform, or it could be your own platform like a Shopify business, through those unique different means, than you're just traditional let's throw money at it and put an ad up.

Tim Curtis: Which has been the approach, right? So, many clients are in an unexamined rhythm where they're looking at their media spend, they're looking at their media spend, they're looking at their media spend, not recognizing, okay, you know, you gave the figure five times growth over E-commerce, social commerce growing five times over that.

You know, there was a shift a few years back. [00:11:00] It may have been around the pandemic, but it was when you really begin to see the rise of the micro-influencers, their ability to affect product movement. It was much more significant than I think anybody had really necessarily anticipated because it used to be kind of a name and likeness. You needed to get the big guns to move product. It really kind of turned E-commerce on its head.

But so many are not leaning into that. They're not examining the growth of those and really thinking about if we advanced in the affiliate and we got a little more serious, I shouldn't say serious, maybe a little bit more intentional about affiliate. I mean it goes hand in hand with social commerce. Do you have a sense of the traditional online sales, do you have a sense for how much of that as a percentage is now being driven sort of along the lines of that?

Will Basta: I wish I could pull that set-out, but I know it's growing at an immense rate. And I know the actual if you're executing it the right way, to sort of pivot off that question, without giving you a direct answer on that percentage, because I don't want to throw a number out there that could be wrong, because I know it's changing all the time, but it's going up, it's trending up.

There's a few different [00:12:00] ways to leverage it, depending on, like we have an internal in-house software that is built off machine learning, but also essentially scrapes all the data of all influencers, both globally and in the US. And what it scrapes is essentially, based on the product that you're trying to sell, does that influence or the site, how many followers they're engaging rate, all these factors based on their actual social media profile.

But then also have they done affiliate-type stuff before? What's the estimated cost that they may have charged in their contact information? That's how we do reach outs. But to get to the point I'm trying to make here is that some influencers, depending upon how established they are, they won't work with everyone. Right. But if you look at the micro-influencer level, some will charge per post, but some will really go down that affiliate route where it's per sale.

So, it's a nice way if you have less money for an entry point and to be able to drive traffic and see if it works by just doing outreach to people that may collaborate well with your brand and then see the traction that they can get. And you're not really paying anything until some sales happen. Right. You're putting a little bit less risk than the traditional I'm spending three months on ads. [00:13:00] They sort of test because that's generally what it is in traditional ad marketing. The first 90 days you're losing money. It's generally what it is.

Tim Curtis: Hand over fist.

Will Basta: Yeah. At least the first 90 days. It lowers the barrier of entry a little bit. But then if you speed past that and you catch on something, the strategy that we like to use is essentially building an ecosystem of micro-influencers because they're lower costs, but they can still have massive reach. You can have someone who's got 5,000 followers on TikTok, but really knows how to do content and they'll do a post that can get in front of a million plus people just because the algorithm is so unique.

That is only a TikTok thing. That's the beauty of TikTok and it being the Wild West and how unique their algorithm is. It's not about how many followers you have. It's really about how the content is displayed and how you get the algorithm right. And you get those reviews. You don't have to have someone who's got a million followers to partner with your brand. You can have someone just, you just know how to execute on the creative, and that creative can hit the algorithm wave. You can get it in front of hundreds of thousands of people or millions overnight.

Erik Martinez: Just kind of expanding on this concept of social commerce. [00:14:00] I was having a conversation yesterday. We were talking about doing some market research around the idea of what are consumers really expecting today. What are they looking for in their shopping journey that is different? Because, you know, we work with a lot of brands that they're still kind of stuck in the old ways of doing things. And part of it's budget, part of its niche, part of it's scale. Quite frankly, all this stuff is shifting so quickly.

When you look at these brands, what do you say to them and say, Hey, look, I've never gone into Amazon. I'm not trying any of my social commerce. I don't know if I have the tech stack or any of those other things in order to do it, I don't even know where to start.

How do you guys help them kind of sort through that myriad of things and then figure out, how do we find the customers that we're trying to find? Because one of the number one issues and pain points that I'm hearing with the clients we work with is it's getting much, much harder to find a new customer. Part of it is [00:15:00] because of the advent of these big platforms like an Amazon or Walmart, one of the many others that are out there.

Will Basta: Yeah, no, that's a good question. There's a few different ways to answer this and there's a lot of different details depending upon what the product is, what category is it in, right? The first thing and this might not, this isn't exactly what you're asking for answer-wise, but I definitely want to touch on it because to this day, me as a consumer, I still sometimes run into something that I would have bought if there was less friction in checkout.

If you have to put your credit card information in, bye-bye. You have to have an Apple Pay option, a Shop option, Amazon Pay option. You have to be synced with these third-party merchants that we know everyone's on in order to increase your sales. Because the abandoned card is going to be out of the roof if you have to manually put in your credit card. Half the time people don't have their card on them, they're on their phone. Going into the other room is going to lose the sale if they have to go do that.

So, that's just like one thing that like, when I still see that I'm like, whoever isn't handling this, is in a different era by having that. [00:16:00] That's just like to me, the first thing you got to check. If you're even on any platform, make sure you have at least one of the major merchants. Because most people have an Apple Pay set up, most people have Amazon account. They have one of these set up where they can do one click. Boom, you're in and it's sold. But there's that.

If we look at the type of products, right, and the type of platforms, there's agencies that can help, right? That's some of the things we do. We do some B2B. So, we bring on brands depending on what the product is and the assessment. Our big thing is multi-channel. Not every product is going to be good on every platform, but there's some that sell on all of them, right? But there's some that do sell on all of them, so it will vary. It'll vary, but overall, it's making sure you're touching on, you have a multi-channel approach because there's more than one platform that will do well with almost every product. It's not going to be all four of the major big ones, but making sure you're hitting every consumer market because there's loyalists on every single third-party platform.

There's a lot of people that will only shop on Walmart and they'll never go to Amazon, and vice versa. There's a high retention rate on platforms like Etsy. They just like to go back and browse randomly. Right. But that's more of a niche type of [00:17:00] product. So, it depends if you're in that arena. And then, you have the screen time on TikTok is higher than anything else. So, there's factors that play into it based on the type of product.

But the big thing, which I touched on a little bit earlier, and it doesn't have to be influencers, and it depends on the product, but UGC content and having a story with user-generated content, I think is stage one if you're going into a marketing strategy. Obviously, there's a lot more factors at play into this. We could spend five hours on how to develop a marketing strategy around all of this.

The best approaches to all of this is having sort of a marriage between a few of them. And again, I keep going back to the fact that it depends on the product that you're selling, but developing a social media strategy that has, educational stuff around the product, but also has familiar faces that keep coming back in. And then, you slip in ads with it where they're actually using the product here and there, and they're telling a story about the use of the product and people see people using it. It's not a flashy ad that's got good animation that's designed well these days that does the best. It's someone sitting in their living room using whatever product that you're trying to sell and seeing a real [00:18:00] experience.

One of the biggest things that's growing right now we don't actually do this, but live shopping, live UGC. So, people actually go on TikTok Live, Instagram Live with the actual product. This is more of an influencer base. You can do it a little bit different ways. It doesn't have to be influencer. It could be on a company page if it has a lot of followers, right?

Going live and actually having live interaction of someone putting something to use that's been resonating really, really well. We're diving into that. We haven't as a company done that yet. But I keep reading stuff about the growth of it and I know that's a big feature of it. I think it's one of the top ways that products sell in China. I'm forgetting the name of the platform in China that also sells in the US. Temu. They gamify the experience. That's obviously very, very unique. I'm not saying that's what you have to do, but like, things like that are growing. It's a unique approach, right?

And so, we all know this, even if you're running ads to get leads, and you're not selling a product, but you're trying to bring in service, like one ad that does really, really well, it gets fatigued. [00:19:00] You need to be constantly creating. That's a huge thing. And it doesn't mean it always has to be an ad.

And so that goes back to my point about the UGC type, right? And you might not see immediate returns, but if you can tell a story with multiple posts about people leveraging a product on your page and on your pages, people will come back to that and eventually that will lead to a compound purchase rate that grows, right?

I mean, there's a lot of topics I could touch on that, but those are the first two things that came to mind in my eyes. We'd have to assess the kind of product first, right? It's hard to do it in a general aspect, but that's my initial thoughts on that.

Erik Martinez: I think that's brilliant. The challenge that a lot of these brands face, especially the smaller brands, the really super niche or family-owned, they got a small team, and the founder is either good at analytics or they're good at merchandising Being good at all these things requires a much bigger ecosystem. I think it's sometimes overwhelming. I have to add one more thing to my list of many, many, many [00:20:00] things.

You hit the nail on the head, not only for the consumer but for these businesses, how do we make it easy? Which is the pivot to the next question, which is how are the platforms making this easy? Because there are this myriad patchwork of platforms and legacy technology. I would venture to say that even the newer technologies are not quite up to speed with the development of all these third-party platforms.

So, you've got a platform like, let's say Shopify as an example, and they're probably on the forefront of trying to connect their system to all these disparate platforms. I'm not going to sit here and argue whether they're doing a good job or not a good job, but it has some inherent limitations in the process, but they are at least one company that's out there trying to do this. How do people navigate that? Part of the overwhelming this is, Hey, I'm a merchant. I'm [00:21:00] not a tech stack expert.

Will Basta: Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, the Shopify example is a good example because there's just so many apps to help you sell on that platform. How do you decide what works for you and what doesn't? And it is overwhelming, right? That's why if you're looking at that kind of piece if you're a mom-and-pop and the budget's lower, it's a little bit tough. So, you just can't go in that direction yet I don't think because you would have to hire an expert in that piece to really help facilitate all of it right on the Shopify side.

The platforms in general, this is taking a really high-level view of just like the TikTok in general. Right. So, you have TikTok that the shop feature is new in the US since September. It was around in the U.K. prior. I'm like, what is the shop feature, right? Let's just, like, peel that back.

If you're on TikTok itself, I don't even have a personal account on TikTok. I'm sort of past that generation. I can't, I can't add another app. Social thing. I don't even have enough time for Instagram. But that being said, you open up TikTok and [00:22:00] prior people were leveraging because it was integrated with Shopify, so you can still run traffic, which you can still do today, through your Shopify store. But what does that do? That goes back to the last point that I was making, that that's an extra step, which means more friction, which means more abandoned sales in carts, and the ability to be like, ah, I'm not going, leaving the page.

So, what did Shop do to make it easier? They built it into the system so you don't have to leave TikTok to buy. Which ultimately makes it easier. If you have a Shopify, your first step as a product, depending on the product, I would go to TikTok first. There's zero question about that. Most of the time, depending on the product and what it is, obviously there's a lot of factors that play into it, I would open up a TikTok Shop for the product. You can always have your Shopify there, your website that can integrate with it, right? But I would list your best-selling products on TikTok Shop and start there. Start your presence there. That's the easiest entry point.

Amazon is overwhelming in itself too. If you're not that established, it's just extremely saturated in a lot of different ways. And if you don't have capital to drive marketing to it, [00:23:00] to some extent, it could be just a zoo and really scary. You can, for a low budget, bring in a TikTok strategist that can help facilitate traffic to a TikTok Shop, like I was mentioning before, at a little to no cost. We can sort of also just see how receptive people are to the product. And again, it depends on the type of product.

But you're right. It's a tough scenario because without a certain budget, these things become very, very difficult. Very difficult. You need time, a lot of time, or you need to have a budget because you need to train yourself on all of this and have support if you really want to scale. And that's essentially what we do for people.

Our clients don't have time. They pay that premium and we literally do it all. We're incentivized to grow it for them because we invoice them off that small piece, right? So, it's like you either source an agency who can assist or you piecemeal it together and you start small one brick at a time. And the first step, in my opinion, in most scenarios would be a TikTok Shop with your product.

Tim Curtis: You know, sitting here thinking about my own [00:24:00] interaction with social commerce, there's this herd mentality, a bit of a herd mentality, that's existed for a long time, and that it's, oh, we need to drive them to our site from social. You have to resist the urge to do that because where social commerce is unlocked is making a frictionless experience where they don't ever have to leave. It makes it boom, boom.

Now that's dangerous and we have a bit of a moratorium at our home that my wife has put in place on me in particular, um, because I find social commerce very frictionless. Let's just put it that way. There's boxes of crazy things I get. And sometimes it's at night and I'm in bed and whatever, and I'm tired from a long day or whatever, you know, something shows up. I'm like, I don't know what I was thinking with that, but anyway. That's sort of that urge.

And I know the times when I've looked at something, and number one was like a flashlight. It was like 100 times more powerful than the average flashlight. Right? And they showed a little video and I was like, oh, gosh, that'd be fun to have. And just, I'd put that in the glove box of the car. Right? Boom. And then you end up going to this, like sappy suck experience [00:25:00] where you're scrolling effortlessly and all these quotes and things, and you couldn't ever get to a buy button. I'm like this is not worth it to me.

But if you can have the success, you know, and I have clients who say, yeah, but what about we don't get all the insights. Listen, you get the transactional insights. You're going to get insights on it and you're going to be able to ship them. And then let's take the two audiences, those that shopped on your site and those that shopped on TikTok or on Instagram, and let's model them. Let's see what's different about them.

Yes, they have a lower propensity to repeat purchase. I get it. We can tackle that with some nurture strategies, you know, all of that kind of stuff. You mentioned the platforms themselves and you know, like on the E-commerce side and the Shop button is a great example of how you can go up against Amazon. It can be as simple and as easy and it knows you. I'm a friend with Shop. It knows me wherever I am.

Will Basta: You can look at what you shop. For me, because I don't have a TikTok, I honestly, besides the stuff that I know I have an intent to go by, all of my impulsive purchases are through Instagram and through Shop, the Shop feature. That's how I'm [00:26:00] buying things these days that are like without the intent to buy it and it just happens. And you're right. You have the history and then it reminds you when you might be out if it's a consumable.

Tim Curtis: I can track it within the app. For me, the Shop app has really changed the E-commerce experience completely. I think it is the perfect bridge or blend between the social commerce and traditional E-commerce. I'm not having to go out, sign in, try to create a new account and then automatically be dropped into, you know, an email stream and get a carpet bomb from a brand that I don't know a whole lot about.

Unfortunately, typically when we're talking about E-commerce, it puts you into situations that exhibit the worst of E-commerce. As a brand new consumer or someone has a repeat purchaser who just made their most recent purchase, a lot of times, if you're dealing with the brands, it takes the worst elements. It's those constant barrage of emails. I'm not ready for that. Right? Don't throw me in there.

Kind of where I was going here was to talk a little bit, I want to pivot and ask just a few questions or insights on the AI side.

Will Basta: Yeah.

Tim Curtis: All these iterations have algorithms behind them. There's all sorts of things [00:27:00] running behind the scenes which have got us to the point today where we're experiencing a lot of these new frictionless, basically social commerce transaction points. What's the next phase of AI in your perspective?

Beause there have clearly been far, far, far more misses on deployment of AI than any kind of hits. We know, we're both involved in AI and I'm in part of the MAICON community. We know that it's going to take iterative time to get there. It is accelerating, but with that acceleration come a tremendously amount of very poor outputs from AI devices across the spectrum.

Will Basta: All over the place. Yeah. And I can't call myself an AI expert, but I can speak to what we've implemented, what hasn't worked and what we actually use currently for our clients, and how we leverage it, where we think it might be going with it. Right. Our biggest thing and the most benefit we get right now is because we've been doing this for so long, we use AI essentially as a, I don't know the best way to sort of explain it, but essentially we've [00:28:00] tried a lot of different ways of leveraging it.

But our big thing is all the data that we have if we're doing product research essentially, for a new client for listing products, et cetera, we have all this data that's like aggregated of previous sales on client stores and products that have done well on polls from 5 different softwares for product research, some type of seasonal trends that we've seen.

All of this product research data that's like an aggregate and also trends from current clients and past stores we've managed and all of this, our AI that we leverage is really sort of an aggregator that brings out solutions and predictive analytics on what may or may not sell at a certain time, also based on it. It's essentially doing something that a human could do it, but it could take 30 days to assess the data that it does in five minutes for us.

That's been our biggest benefit as a company for our clients is on the product research side is being able to leverage all the data that we have and all the pieces of the puzzle that really lean into, even if it's costs, not even the product research, but what goes into it underneath the hood is the cost that it could be to get it somewhere, where you're [00:29:00] sourcing at, the ability of where we can source, all of these things that take a lot of time and not one software can do.

But pulling out data from multiple different sources and then plugging that into, essentially AI, which can spit out pretty much options in a predictive manner that are higher risk or lower risk in terms of products that we want to source. Because we take a lot of the risk to for clients where we're like, we have a warehouse in Orlando and a warehouse in Dallas where we house product where we can list products almost immediately when clients come on to start getting them some sales early on.

But we're taking the risk, I'm pre-buying them. We do this pretty much monthly, right? So, we're assuming that, but we're doing some of the best stuff and all of the product research done through there is essentially based on what do we have the license to sell and also what time of the year are we in right now and what is going to do the best based on all of the stuff we've done in the past and all the 10 years of data we have throughout E-commerce, right, of aggregate data.

On the other hand, if we look at AI in terms of the marketing piece. That's another thing we [00:30:00] use a lot for our clients. If we're not using a person, and this is something that could apply to some of the people you may work with that don't want to spend money on getting a UGC actor or something like that. AI-generated content of which is animated to go on TikTok to drive organic traffic to their TikTok Shop or their product has made tens of thousands of dollars for some of our clients.

Which is essentially, you know, spitting out 10 versions of different videos that can talk educationally about a product, et cetera, and it's getting better and better and better in terms of like, how it feels and how realistic it feels. And that is on a sub-account that's not part of the TikTok Shop account and drives traffic organically to that product. And that's all AI-generated. We have like a couple of different AI programs we use that do marketing content creative through AI. Which time is money?

So, our big thing here is saving time on a lot of different things with AI. But the unique piece, which is obviously getting better literally by the day on actual video creative that AI [00:31:00] can put out because that is part of social commerce, right? You don't always have to have a human behind it at this point. It's getting to that direction where it's like everything I just mentioned the first 45 minutes in this call about influencers and all, there's going to be AI, there are AI influencers now.

What I see in a year is there's going to be AI influencers with million-plus followers that literally companies own that can drive traffic to other brands' products. And that's already happening to a small extent. That's where I see it going on that piece. That's my biggest, like kind of thing in terms of, cause it touches on, it's a spawn off what everything I've been saying. It's another version of UGC, but it's AI-generated. Right.

And that goes into that kind of makes it sort of scary because some of this is really, really realistic feeling. But that leads into why it's going to do well in terms of marketing and people wanting to buy from an AI personality.

Tim Curtis: Oh, absolutely. And I think, you know, you're largely steering clear of the copyright concerns, which are the main issues, right? That's the main issue that's driving a lot of the challenges I would say with AI is concerns with it, [00:32:00] rightfully to have concerns with it within the IP community, intellectual property community, about theft of original content.

You know, you're kind of sidestepping that and using it in a way that is promotional, but in those animated videos, that sort of gives you an extra level of insulation. You've also confirmed what I've been saying for a very long time, in that I think one of the most ideal best-case scenarios for the use of AI is related to product, product, and merchandising. Because that provides that initial jumping-off point where you can really do things that would not necessarily be humanly possible.

You'd have to have a massive amount of personnel to tackle the type of insights that you can glean from AI in a relatively quick period of time. Most of the time, people aren't doing that research. It's just not happening. So, it represents a watershed moment where AI is doing something that is just not necessarily feasible for most businesses today.

Will Basta: True. I mean, the [00:33:00] machine learning AI piece is built a little bit under our software that I mentioned before about sourcing influencers. So, it's not just like gathering just basic data. It's also reading the data and influencers and as they partner with other brands, consuming it, and spitting out better results based on the product that you're plugging in there, that you want to find an influencer for. So, it's constantly learning and learning and learning.

And even for us, we're not trying to hide this, but we have a 24-hour support line that is ran by AI. So, it is an AI person speaking to you and it gets better. We trained it for six months before we released it. So, if someone wants to call about a concern that's a client for us at some weird hour because we have clients that are abroad right now and we don't have people working Dubai hours. It syncs into our customer management system, so it knows details of the client when they say their name.

And if it gets to an escalatory manner, it then will schedule or book a call or send an email to someone from our account management team and put that on pretty much the ticket list. Right. So, as a company, we don't have to have a 24-hour line, but that is a great feature. And that's the one thing that I think is really, really cool [00:34:00] that we're using in that piece. And it's not like, Oh, we're pretending it's people. It's actually not clearly AI. It's not. Some people don't know. They have no idea. Right.

But the point is, is that like, we're open about it. We mention that. Right. If you had a conversation with me, the only thing you'd read about it is that there might be a little bit of a delay in response. Other than that, no. Those delays are getting smaller and shorter and shorter and shorter. And it becomes smarter and smarter and smarter and it learns our business.

We spit more knowledge into it about client accounts, about general updates, about the business literally on a weekly basis, and it's a knowledge base for clients that are currently with us that can't get ahold of their account manager because it's 1:00 AM and they have a question about something on their account. You know what I mean?

Tim Curtis: Smart, smart, smart.

Erik Martinez: That's fantastic. I know my responses get slower and slower and slower. So, you know, the fact that the fact that the AI only takes a half a second to respond, I think I'm good. I think that's a brilliant strategy and you've given us a myriad of [00:35:00] practical, actionable things for the audience to take back. So, before we move the closeout, Will, are there any last thoughts that you'd like to leave with the audience today?

Will Basta: You know, your audience, all different backgrounds, right? Some have brands, some don't, some are interested, right? At the end of the day, it's a tough industry to be in, but there's a lot of opportunity. It's all about who you partner with and how you execute it. And just educate yourself on all these topics. Being left behind is where you lose money.

And then also, always put yourself in the shoes of a consumer. Because that's how we think, and that's how we do things, and how we change things for our clients' businesses that we have is we always think about what is going on, on the consumer side. Because it's very easy as a company or brand to be like, well, they need to see this. But they don't. Because you have tunnel vision a lot of the times, right? And you have passion behind your brand, which can lead to making the wrong turns or prioritizing things that shouldn't be prioritized over others. As a brand, big or small, it's always good to sort of step outside of that box for a little bit. Take sort of a picture of it as a consumer [00:36:00] and have that kind of thought process and perspective too.

And just make sure you're not falling behind on technology. That might sound overwhelming. You don't need to learn everything that we just mentioned right now. Maybe take one of these nuggets, if it's all relatable, take one of them and just do 30 days of like focusing on that one piece. It could be one step at a time. Because when you overwhelm yourself, you end up not absorbing any of it if you're trying to do it all at once, right? You don't have a team to support you.

Erik Martinez: Fantastic advice. Will, what's the best way to reach out to you?

Will Basta: Yeah, our company is, the website is www.ecomwithacv.io. Our Instagram is ecomwithacv. We post a lot of stuff on there, educational stuff about the industry. A lot of it has got an AI feel to it. Also, our YouTube is pretty substantial. You can reach out to us on any of those channels, sort of figure out a little bit more about what we do as an organization. That's pretty much it. It's been great being on this, guys. Your questions have been awesome. Great topics. I love talking about these kinds of things. They get me going. I can go for hours.

Erik Martinez: We could definitely devote a couple three episodes just one of those [00:37:00] topics. Well, awesome. Will, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you coming on and sharing so much knowledge and I got a feeling we can keep going and find some more low-hanging fruit for everybody to think about. But folks, that's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine.

Tim Curtis: And I'm Tim Curtis from CohereOne.

Erik Martinez: Have a great day.