Ralf Haberich, CEO at Shopgate, joins The eCom Ops Podcast to discuss the importance of online/digital presence for retail stores, how Shopgate is helping retailers to derive more in-store traffic, and how to reduce the operational cost.
Key Facts
- Ralf’s LinkedIn
- Shopgate website
- Ralf is CEO at Shopgate
- Shopgate empowers retailers to deliver a connected online and in-store shopping experience to their customers
- Shopgate offers modern e-commerce solutions and helps retailers to drive in-store traffic. In addition, it focuses on enhancing the online shopping experience
- Shopgate helps retailers in building Omnichannel experiences for their customer’s satisfaction
- Ralf holds a bachelors degree in Advertising and Marketing Management from Hamburg Academy.
- Ralf holds a Masters degree in Business Administration from the University of Mannheim
Key Takeaways
- [0:37-2:15] Ralf started his professional journey in 2000 at Panasonic as a Junior Marketing Manager and soon got promoted to the Marketing Communications Management role
- Ralf has been associated with the eCommerce industry for more than fifteen years. His retail and online sales and marketing experience comes from his versatile career journey with various organisations such as Comscore, Webtrekk GmbH, etc
- In April 2021, Ralf led the foundation of Shopgate, which is an easy to use software and aims to empower retailers to offer combined in-store and online shopping experiences to the customers
- Furthermore, the combined shopping experience “Omnichannel” helps retailers to drive in-store traffic life revenues to enhance customer’s shopping experience while decreasing the operational cost
- [3:45-4:35] Ralf shares that to transform their POS (point of sales) or COS (channel of sales) into “Omnichannel”, retailers need to address the sales opportunities from every channel and strategise how to cash the opportunity over different channels.
- In addition, retailers should focus on providing the 360 shopping solution for their customers and in the current era with the immense growth of online shopping, physical stores need to move on to creating a mixed strategy to leverage upon an online shopping spree
- Ralf believes that activating different channels provides retailers with expanding their outreach and brand awareness. Such as, if they have an online presence, they can leverage social media and eCommerce that will consequently provide a positive impact to their physical store as well
- [4:55-6:40]
- Ralf explains how retailers can benefit from Shopgate:
- They can use the software to enrich their services at targeted channels to maximise revenues
- They can optimise shipping expenses and duration. Such as people can place orders online and select the “click and collect” option to collect/pick up their order from any nearest retail store
- They can share more updates about promotions, new brands, activities through online mediums for their physical store as well ultimately helping in brand building
- They get multiple platforms to market their brands with an increased outreach
- [6:50-8:00] Ralf believes that even the smartest of software have people behind building it, and it takes creativity, business knowledge-based and result-oriented strategies to executive any software in the best possible manner.
- Shopgate is an initiative that first addresses business’s expansion and cross-platform marketing needs and then offers customised solutions to retailers
- [8:25-10:00] Ralf shares that eCommerce is more than just an online/digital presence of a physical retail store. It is the ultimate marketing solution that holds more power to observe customer’s needs in ZMOT (zero moment of truth – where the shopper is only browsing for products to gain more information) and create efficient and targeted campaigns based on the user needs
- 81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying any product.
- [16:30-17:35] Ralf believes that the key to eCommerce success is automation. Automation not only streamlines eCom operations, but it vividly reduces resource costs
- He further advises eCommerce owners to utilise every possible avenue to replace humans with machine operations. However, there are business units where human interaction is crucial such as customer support, etc. and we should not confuse automating the processes and humans replacement for such crucial departments
No.1 operational hack
“Automation.” Ralf believes that machines are smart and the only smart way to streamline repeated processes is through automation.
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