RetailCraft 44 - ”Find a fix for time” - in conversation with Paddy Earnshaw, Customer and Digital Director at B&Q

Tony Preedy is a bit of a legend at Etail Towers and has one of the most rounded and in-depth knowledge of e-commerce performance (brand, digital marketing, CRM and business models) that we know. Having run through Tony's CV, we focus on Fruugo - its history, operation and market position. With a blend of incisive wit and deadpan humour, Tony talks about the importance of relevance and focus at scale ("We're not a marketplace, we're a very good marketing machine"), and how a combination of AI and human care can present 140 million SKUs in 40 markets - a combinatorial challenge resulting in c6billion combinations, and serving around 1800 different ads per second. An insight from Tony is the focus on ROAS (return on advertising spend). The bid model takes price, propensity and margin to determine whether or not to bid and if so at what level. This 'anticipation' and planning means that all transactions are profitable and there's no anxiety over CPC spend rising to unprofitable levels. Tony doffs a digital cap to Claude Hopkins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_C._Hopkins), author a century ago of "Scientific Advertising", who emphasised the importance of copywriting for relevance (and whose book was seen in the background of several Mad Men episodes!). Amongst many 'zingers' and insights, a further point of note was that 80+% of traffic comes to a product description page (PDP) - the lowest level of a site's hierarchy. Rather than being seen after a brand-first browsing and filtering journey, Tony's customers land straight at the 'here it is, buy it' level, and these pages have to carry the whole brand, product and service story. He mentions the importance of the on-page "carousels" of products to increase the number of products shown, fish for opportunity and how these carousels (rather than navigation or on-site search) then drive the browse journey. So many more things covered in our 40 minutes in the studio, and we'll update the InternetRetailing.net page with the full transcript. -- Run time: 47 minutes INFORMATION: [ 🖥️ ] Free digital copy of Scientific Advertising - https://scientificadvertising.blogspot.com/ Fruugo - https://www.fruugo.co.uk/ Fruugo awarded King's Award for Enterprise - https://channelx.world/2023/04/kings-award-for-enterprise-fruugo-marketplace/ Tony in conversation with Chris Dawson on international selling (video interview) - https://channelx.world/2023/09/introducing-specialist-retailers-to-the-international-stage/ [ 👨‍👧 ] Tony Preedy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonypreedy/ Georgia Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgiajones1/ Ian Jindal: www.linkedin.com/in/ianjindal/ and www.twitter.com/ianjindal [ 📷 ] (c) Ian Jindal / www.instagram.com/ianjindal