2024 E-commerce Trends with Linda Bustos

[00:00:00] Sani: Welcome to nohacks.show, a weekly podcast in which smart guests talk to you about better online experiences. This episode is about e commerce trends you need to watch in 2024, so if you're dealing with e commerce in any way, keep listening. You know someone who needs to hear this? Share the episode with them, and while you're at it, don't forget to like and subscribe.

My guest, who will be doing most of the talking today, is an e commerce consultant and has been evangelizing all things e commerce since 2007. She's constantly e commerce trend hunting. And he's sharing all of her best finds on e comm ideas, a comprehensive free resource for e commerce, UX, and CRO professionals.

Linda Bustos, welcome to nohacks.show.

[00:00:37] Linda Bustos: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:00:39] Sani: So I checked some of your interviews as I was preparing for the episode. You did some SEO and PPC work before settling on e commerce. That must have been a while ago. you ever consider going back to the uh, acquisition side of things?

[00:00:53] Linda Bustos: Oh, it was super long ago. So, um, outside of college, I mean, I, I graduated from college having taken a couple internet marketing courses and, uh, and even an e commerce course. And, you know, like, by the time a textbook is written, everything is outdated. So, uh, you know, like I, I wanted to continue that journey cause those were my two favorite courses.

And back in that time, there was a lot of like, um, information sharing and everybody was self taught because there were no, you know, there weren't even like online courses to learn SEO. You learned about it in forums and on blogs and everybody had like an anonymous avatar and some kind of wacky handle.

And, you know, this was even before Twitter started blowing up. So yeah, I was really interested in SEO. To be perfectly transparent because I was in my 20s and I wanted to learn a skill that, you know, I could walk into a company and actually offer something of value with like, you know, a year or two experience and have something to tell people, you know, 20 years older than me.

But um, yeah, but I worked for a web design company and then I was doing the SEO and PPC stuff back with like, I don't even know if it was called AdWords there, but there was like a Yahoo search marketing, like all these old apps. Yeah, yeah. And you would do the manual bidding and all that kind of stuff.

Um, it's changed a lot since then. But, uh,

[00:02:10] Sani: the internet are

[00:02:12] Linda Bustos: early days of the Internet. And when I was working at a Drupal shop, kind of doing that work for, you know, the local businesses and that kind of thing. And then we got an eCommerce client and I was kind of like, um. What would you call it? A business analyst for them, you know, trying to organize all the different components that we were going to need to build into, um, into the product and think about the user experience.

And that was it for me. Like, I mean, I just fell in love with e commerce. Like, I liked that use case so much more than the five page brochure sites for like the local mortgage broker. So, um.

[00:02:45] Sani: that's an easy choice.

[00:02:47] Linda Bustos: yeah, and I had also picked up a couple books at that time, like Steve Krug's iconic Don't Make Me Think book, I mean, a game changer, and some of Jacob Nielsen's older work, which if anybody's looking for a fun coffee table or a walk down memory lane, pick up some of Jacob Nielsen's old UX books, because the screenshots alone are just, they're just hilarious to see how far we've come.

[00:03:14] Sani: But even don't make me think like there are some screenshots, not a lot of screenshots, but there are some in in that book and for me as well. And I just had a LinkedIn post this morning about that book. I mentioned the book just completely by accident. That was a, that was a, I don't know, a shift in how I look, how I think about website.

When I read that book, it was for the first time that I thought, okay, I'm not just seeing broken things like there are other people who are looking at it this way. There's a, there's a method to all of this. I think it was the most, uh, uh, career altering book I've had in my life because it put me on the path of optimization.

And, and like, I haven't stopped doing that. So, uh, you've been around e commerce for a while and you've seen a lot of changes in the e commerce space. So your news, new platforms popping up, new technologies, new trends, new UX, uh, I mean, any kind of trends. What's the, like, let's say in the last five years, Including the pandemic period.

What's the biggest change that you've seen?

[00:04:15] Linda Bustos: Well, in UX, I mean, one of the biggest changes is that there's so much flexibility on the front end. You know, back, you know, 10, 15 years ago when I started writing about this stuff, you get an e commerce platform and then you kind of got the template that came with it. And then there's everybody who's kind of working, coloring in between certain lines.

And now there's so many different ways that you can even like break a template and customize it however you want. So I'm seeing a lot more, um, flexible design, innovative, um, implementations of things like product pages, the way that a gallery displays responsive design, obviously is the huge component.

Everything should be mobile first. So. So, yeah, the trends there are really around, um, visually engaging stuff and selling the brand, showing off the brand, um, and commerce is kind of a natural organic part of that rather than where before everything was like box, box, box, box, box, homepage with hero banner, a bunch of links.

[00:05:21] Sani: Absolutely. Yeah. It's good for SEO, right? You put links in, in the footer to every single page of your website. It used to be, at least that's what they said. So, um, your, your platform of choice is Shopify, right? Today.

[00:05:36] Linda Bustos: Not necessarily. I think that Shopify is a real solid choice for a lot of businesses. Um, It's evolved a lot. And it's kind of one that you don't need to like back back a few years ago. You might start on the regular Shopify before Shopify plus and the whole ecosystem and the flexibility around it. You could outgrow Shopify because then you started needing some more omni channel capabilities.

You would need, um, you know, more flexibility on like how to, um, I think still Shopify merchants still might come up against some barriers on how many variants and, you know, like here and there, there's some constraints still, but I mean, you can, you can grow and you can scale on in the Shopify ecosystem and now all the third party apps and, um, cool things that you can plug into a store, their Shopify first, because that's where the market is, right?

So there's a lot of prebuilt connectors and, you know, a lot of, a lot less, you know, Um, custom dev that you need to do. So it's a really solid ecosystem, but, um, but you know, I, I love them all. I think every e commerce platform is special in its own way.

[00:06:43] Sani: completely agree with that. So we're talking about e commerce trends to watch in 2024. So starting with Shopify, obviously, there's going to be some changes. What you mentioned is there's some checkout customization options now that people can have, and there's the deprecation of August, 2024 that I've just heard of, so what's going to happen there?

[00:07:04] Linda Bustos: Yeah. So, um, the checkout dot liquid pages are going to not be supported anymore. They're going to be sunset. And so the date that Shopify has announced is August 2024. I suspect that they're going to give a little bit more grace period, just like, you know, Magento did when they were sunsetting Magento 1.

X. Um, you know, I think a lot of merchants are going to drag their feet. Um. And maybe wait a little bit too long. But I think everybody, if you haven't done it, should be getting on it now. First priority for January 2024. Um, and yeah, and it brings a few more, uh, flexibilities and capabilities. I mean, you can start adding more of your brand into checkout.

So, you know, you'd have like this beautiful, like we just talked about these beautiful. Brand, uh, brand first experiences with all this cool customizations and stuff. And then you get to check out and everyone knows, ah, this is a Shopify checkout because it all looks generic in the same. You can start adding your own, you know, styled buttons.

Um, set your own microcopy in, uh, you know, like instructive text below a certain field, customize certain fields. And you can use the one page checkout, which I'm seeing starting to uptick. Um. Um, whether that converts better than the multi step, um, you know, haven't seen any solid data around that, but definitely at least from a perception, uh, a one page feels less cumbersome than a multi step, um, process.

And then there's also things like, you know, you can do a little bit more upsell, cross sell merchandising inside a cart, which again, It's also a little bit of a double edged sword because more flexibility doesn't mean higher conversion from Shopify's point of view They were always very, you know, the one thing that they needed to protect and hold sacred was the checkout because if they let Um, merchants mess with it too much and conversion went down.

They're getting paid a percentage of revenue, right? They made money on the transaction, so they had to protect that. But now they've got like a team of like 200 engineers, which are working on making it, you know, still very, um, very highly, uh, the word is not controlled, but highly

[00:09:21] Sani: Mm hmm.

[00:09:22] Linda Bustos: optimized. But the start give more flexibility about things like business logic.

Right. So let's say you have a multiple, um, you have, uh, multiple stores, multiple locations, and you want that checkout to be kind of optimized for one region for another. Like you can choose the order of your shipping options. You can, uh, you know, include more gifting capabilities, gift notes, and, um, a 2 add on for.

You know the gift wrap or anything like that. You can do a little bit more within the checkout but I would say for merchants that they should be very careful and always measure what they're doing because The checkout is not the time to start pushing banner ads or hey, you know, here's a cross sell or anything like that Yeah,

[00:10:09] Sani: from WordPress and WooCommerce background. I was a developer for years at WordPress and WooCommerce developer and seeing Shopify's checkout always like makes me smile almost because how beautiful and simple it is. And it's never messed up. It's never broken in any way.

The current version of it where it's the same for every merchant. Every Shopify store you go, you get the same experience. I'm not concerned. Based on what you said because it's not full control still it's just a bit more flexibility for the merchants But I'm sure the team of engineers know exactly what they're doing it They're not gonna let anyone just mess up.

Well, they're my money making page as well. So so that's happening That's like the big thing Happening this year. I like that. So let's talk about the second item that we have on the list here and that is personalization and of course artificial intelligence Everybody must mention AI whenever they talk about anything in 2024.

So, how's that, how's that coming into e commerce, uh, this year?

[00:11:10] Linda Bustos: well there's a lot of hype about AI right and there's two different kinds of AI Well, there's more than that. I mean, I'm oversimplifying it, but personalization and machine learning and the kind of A. I. Component of that has been around for a long time, but kind of with this new generative capabilities, I think that That puts it on steroids and we haven't fully seen that, um, the impact of that or the capabilities of that, um, gone live yet.

So I'll talk about where I think it could go and what some of the opportunities and sort of like adjacent possible is. Um, but one of the, one of the things with like personalization, for example, um, The challenge is, is that with AI, with all these kind of things, it's promising to do things at scale and to remove like a lot of human, um, human decision making and, uh, effort and operations and all that kind of stuff.

So the AI works and it's set it and forget it, I guess, for lack of a better word. But there is, um, a drawback to that is that some people can put too much. Faith in the A. I. Without going under the hood and applying their own settings. So in a merchandising, um, and personalized assortment on you, you go to, you navigate to the T shirts page and it should, you know, the promise of the tool is that it's going to personalize to that user.

Well, the rich get richer in the sense that the, that the tool is trying to show the most popular thing to like a brand new visitor who comes, you know, you don't have any personalization, intense signals or any information. It's going to show you the most popular thing and it's going to do that at scale and it's going to do that more often because that's what, that's what the algorithm is tuned to do.

But as a merchant, you might be left with, okay, now there's products. That aren't turning over because they're showing down at the bottom and there might be that one customer with that thing on page five is perfect for them. It should be in slot number one. So, um, so I think that personalization is kind of sold as more capabilities than what it really does.

So where we need to go and what we need to look at is capturing more first party data and connecting that into personalization engines. So, I'm seeing kind of a trend, well, it's not a trend yet, it's like a little bud of a trend where like some of the first mover and innovative and clever teams are doing, but they're trying to enrich, um, the, the, give incentives to people to add profile data that they can then capture and store and then push into these, um, optimization engines and even into email and, and all that kind of stuff.

Things like saving your favorite brands. So if you're a multi brand retailer, so I'm seeing this on Saks Fifth Avenue, I've also seen it on Sephora, where you're like browsing a collection page or a category page, and then you'll see that brand filter. That could be hundreds of, of values long, right? So, um, so what Saks is doing is like, save your favorite brands into the profile.

But then also it pushes back to the, um, to the filters that you can have a one check box, like just filter this collection or this search by my favorite brands or my favorite sizes or, um, what was the other one? Favorite categories is another one that I'm seeing. So that's a great like strategy, um, to be able to not only like let the customer tell you what they want and what they like.

And then adapt the site to it. Another thing that we're seeing, and a lot of people on LinkedIn are responding to this with excitement, is, um, is the ability to kind of customize the, um, the experience for the user browsing, like by size, or by skin tone, or by other things that are like contextual to the purchase thing.

So if the little toggles in a category page. to toggle to like, show me just all on a plus size model or, um, seeing with like brilliant earth they have on their product pages, like a hand that you can slide forward and back to change the skin tone. And then the product on top of it, you know, look like colors of a ring or something will pop or look different across those contexts.

So being able to, first of all, let. Somebody change the presentation of the site, um, and once those selections are applied, then every next page that you load or category that you browse kind of responds to your last indicated preference. Think those things are really impactful. And then there are, you know, more emerging tools on the personalization side that are trying to capture some of these signals like these digital body language and other like, you know, referral sources or other signals.

that can kind of suggest, um, where somebody is at in their journey. So one of these ones that I haven't actually seen anybody talk about doing, but I think has a huge amount of potential, is how somebody sorts a category page. If they sort by newest, that tells you a little bit something about At least their their intent in the moment or maybe in more in general that they're interested in the fresher stuff if they sort by Price low to high that indicates maybe they're looking for deals if they start high to low That tells you something else about them if they do a customer rating sort that tells you a little bit something else So you can start tagging customers and attribute, you know Storing those values either in the session or pushing them into your grander profile through those little signals of intent The

[00:16:53] Sani: you know of any, uh, tools that do that? That actually use those, uh, category sorting, for example? That you can use to, to store the data and, and adjust the website based on that? Or have you seen it in practice?

[00:17:05] Linda Bustos: well, back in the day, like I blogged about this back in like the 2010s back in the day, like when you had a lot of developers and stuff, like if you had a developer that could like. Set a P code or something, you know, there were different ways to like tag and store in local storage and stuff like that and, and integrate it with other things kind of more on a custom coding basis.

I don't know which apps and AI, like I, I would, I ask whenever somebody gives me a demo, I ask them if they do this or that kind of thing. So we'll might see it like rolled into someone's roadmap, but I will, if I'm allowed to like mention just companies that I've sat on demos for, I think like are kind of doing this Cooee C O O E E.

They're really trying to, um, to do that, like, uh, serving, serving strategies across the journey based on intent. And they, I don't know what's inside their algorithm to determine the tech. I would defer to them on that. But they're looking for things like, you know, how close, how likely are they by the behaviors that they're taking on the site to be closer to a purchase and more discovery phase.

Um, they take into account like the referral source. And the campaign, um, and that kind of thing. So yeah, I think that merchants also can't rely like to the point that I made before, like, um, they can't rely entirely on the tool to do it. Sometimes you need to say like, okay, this is what we know about our customer and our catalog and the way that we want to present ourselves.

And we will adjust some settings in the backend of whatever tool we're using. We'll apply boost rules, maybe to your in house. You know, or whatever you have a higher margin, um, for, or, or you have a great relationship with certain suppliers, or if you're a brand selling direct, you kind of know what your flagship products are and the other ones that are kind of like your, your B side catalog, right?

So, you might need to tell, especially when you're just getting started with a tool like this, um, give it a little bit of hints on what it should be optimizing for. But, yeah, I think it needs to be a combination of tool and brains.

[00:19:08] Sani: But, but, absolutely. But I like how you put together personalization and first party data collection because AI and personalization and first party data collection because, like, AI especially what we have today as as widely available tools like ChatGPT and all those gen AI tools. It will not turn thin air into magic, but if you give it good enough information and something to work with, and that will be the first party data here that you would collect from users, it can do great things.

Like even chat GPT, if you give it enough information and ask about intent of the user. Maybe it's not going to be 100 percent accurate all the time, but neither will a human. So it will be good enough with good enough prompts and information and inputs. So, uh, I'm all in on first party, zero party data collection.

This is the quizzes, things like that. That those are the most amazing things that any e commerce web store should be doing because you're future proofing yourself. Once third party cookies go away and all that mess that we're going to have this year. Uh, so do you know any, uh, any, uh, Apps or tools that allow you to collect first party data in a good way, specifically for Shopify, let's say.

[00:20:15] Linda Bustos: Oh yeah. Um, I've looked into the quizzes. I'm seeing them a lot. Um, and, uh, Octane. ai seems to be like the flagship one in the Shopify Ecos post and there are some others. Um, so yeah, it's, it's great. But that's again, you know, it's that tool is the. facilitator of it, but you as a merchant need to understand exactly what the right questions are, because that's a, that's a journey that, you know, a customer can abandon if they're like, why are you asking me all these questions?

And then also you need to test and kick the tires on it after you've launched it, test it under all different kinds of potential answers to see if the recommendations that come up are actually valuable. Um, because sometimes it can be like, okay.

[00:20:59] Sani: That's a

[00:21:01] Linda Bustos: And it comes down to your product data too, right? Because product finders and these quizzes, essentially they're product finders. So you need to make sure that your catalog has the right attributions and meta tags and, and those kind of, um, attributes for keywords so that the product quiz will actually pull them.

It's really applying multiple filters.

[00:21:26] Sani: Absolutely. But all these tools are actually doing when you think about it is making it easier for the user or the customer to find a product that will be good for them. And they, that they need and they want, like, it's nothing more complicated than that. It's just modern day tools, helping, helping you find the right product.

Uh, I'm super excited about what, what, what's coming in, in this specific area, but tell me about e comm ideas. Tell me about that. What

[00:21:54] Linda Bustos: before we do that, something just sparked in my mind because we taught we, we kind of opened up talking about, like, the AI and the chat GPT and stuff like that. Now, imagine if you could take the product finder and instead of going through these pre baked. You know, because you kind of have to set up a journey on the back end, you as a merchant, what if it was more conversational and I think shop shop, um, the shop app from Shopify is trying to do this with their chatbot and stuff like that.

But imagine if, you know, it's a more GPT light thing where these were the branches and where you can go and the product recommendation is more conversational because everything we're trying to do. Is cut out all of the friction and all of the steps and all of the thinking we talked about. Don't make me think that should be a universal principle that I hope that AI and chat and recommendation kind of come together where it feels more human.

[00:22:46] Sani: I think we're there all, we have the tools already from what I, I mean, just create a custom GPT, train it well and tell it what not to do. And I think it will be able to recommend some good products or whatever you need for your e commerce stores. It's just about integration, integration and everything else.

Yeah. But, uh, it, it, it's super exciting. And again, AI is a tool. It's still just a tool. It's still not here to take us out and kill all humans and all that stuff. Ecom Ideas. Like, why did you create that? How long was it in the making? What is it about?

[00:23:21] Linda Bustos: Oh wow. Um, so I used to be a blogger,

[00:23:25] Sani: I know.

[00:23:26] Linda Bustos: about, uh, e-commerce. Um, from 20 2007 to 2017, um, I did a blog called Get Elastic with Elastic Path, and then did one on my own, um, for a year when I went off into my own consulting called E-Commerce Illustrated. Now that site doesn't exist. That's a long story why, uh.

Uh, how the domain got, uh, sniped from underneath my nose. But, uh, but yeah, during that year that I worked on eCommerce Illustrated, like, like, Get Elastic was kind of topical stuff about eCommerce, but I wanted to do, like, a homepage all the way through to check out, kind of, Project and it took me a year, but the process of that was looking at as many of the Internet Retailer top 1000 sites as I could possibly stand to look at and Shopify sites and, you know, trending sites, and I would use them on desktop and mobile, take a bunch of screenshots and that's where all the material for the actual guides and kind of compiling everything came together.

So that's why it took a year because, you know, you really have to analyze a ton of stuff and then distill it down to like, okay, here's some patterns here. These are like, you know, how you would classify approach number one, two, three, four, five, and here's when you should do approach number one under these scenarios and blah, bitty, blah, right?

But it left me with a huge Um, database or catalog of screenshots on my machine and then I, it, it was very useful to me because then when I did consulting or I wanted to propose ideas to, you know, web designers or developers on team, I had like a huge database. I would just go through my little fan deck of examples and I could show them this, this, this, this, this, this.

And I was able to use it practically in my work. So part of that process, like during that time, I was like, Oh man, I should just like white, I White label this or what do you call it open source this and publish this somehow and like let other people use it because the Work is done That was an idea that I had back in, like, 2016.

And then, you know, I went back into, like, full time roles, um, and, you know, kind of abandoned my own, like, freelancing work for several years. But I always had this idea in the back of my head. And then I had another idea of, like, Oh, maybe I could take, like, I was a big fan of Animaniacs, the cartoon, as a kid.

And, you know, I felt like it would be funny to do, like, uh, A video series where there's like good idea bad idea and it was you know, like good idea for like, you know Take a topic like filters On a catalog page or you know, like how a search box works or something like good idea bad idea Good idea bad idea, whatever and I I I posted a couple of those videos already I actually tried to make them and I don't know if i'm going to continue to be honest I'm, not sure if uh, if it was such a great idea But um, but that kind of like in order to make those videos would require me to do that whole process again Right

[00:26:12] Sani: Mm hmm. Mm

[00:26:13] Linda Bustos: and like Audit a whole bunch of sites and collect the screenshots and stuff and now today because like there's really easy like no code tools Like i'm using notion It gives me a really easy back end for me to organize all my shots and then add a little bit of context around them and Create an index of all of these.

So that's what I've been working on for the last, you know, I guess like nine months now full time.

[00:26:36] Sani: Wow.

[00:26:37] Linda Bustos: I'm just like putting this together and I'm trying to get it ready to, you know, like, I need to make sure it works nicely on mobile as well as desktop and, you know, put a little wrapper around it. But yeah, that's what I've been working on.

And the intention is that, you know, for product management teams or A B testers or anybody that's like, Thinking in their mind about like, okay, what's next? What do we do next with our user experience? What's that next little feature that we might be missing? What's innovative that customers or customers, merchants like us are doing.

So I wanted to have a place where if you're working on something, um, you would be able to go and refer to something and go check, check things out. Get ideas. It's.

[00:27:20] Sani: not, it's not a website yet, right? It will be at some point.

[00:27:24] Linda Bustos: It will be a website very soon. So I've done all the content all there. I just need to put I just need to um, because I'm doing this all kind of like solo. So the next step is to figure out like, as time of recording, you know, how I'm going to wrap a super data. So wrapper, which turns it into a website

[00:27:42] Sani: Okay, cool. But it's a LinkedIn page right now, so people can follow LinkedIn, the LinkedIn page people can

[00:27:47] Linda Bustos: account. Yeah, but ecomideas. com is going to be going live soon.

[00:27:52] Sani: Oh, you got the dot com domain. That's cool.

[00:27:54] Linda Bustos: Yeah.

[00:27:55] Sani: wouldn't think that would be available. That, that is awesome. In 2024 or 23, whenever you got it, that is quite amazing. I'm looking forward to seeing that website.

And again, this is not a best practices. Just copy these and you'll, you'll be successful. This is, you know, you're struggling to solve a problem. Here are some solutions that are for that kind of problem. Just figure out which one is best for you. That's a really important distinction, right?

[00:28:18] Linda Bustos: Yeah, and you know, there are other, um, there's great resources like Baymard Institute, which will tell you guidelines and stuff like that. I didn't want to go that direction with this because I want to keep it more about ideas and, and what's innovative. Because as we all know, like it could work on site A and not on site B.

It might work great for you. It might totally flunk. So you got to be A, B testing, but at least when you're at the drawing board. And you're at the solutioning stage. You can kind of together workshop with your team, like what you like about something and what you don't and take inspiration.

[00:28:54] Sani: I know a lot of people who will find this useful as soon as you launch it and I'll share it with with with all of them basically. Uh, me too. I'm looking forward to seeing that. I just want to see. I mean, you spent nine months. Doing the catalog of ideas and just getting this ready. I want to see this live.

So, uh, that said, I want to thank you for being on the podcast today. This was a really interesting episode. Especially, especially the first party personalization combination. I just, I could talk about it all day, trust me. So thank you, Linda, for being a guest. Thank you for being a hashtag no hack or whatever you want to call it.

And to everyone listening to this episode, thank you as well, and please consider rating and reviewing the show, and share the episode with someone who will find it useful, and I will talk to you next week.