Episode: 6 Guest: John Wessel, Chief Technology Officer and VP Product & Digital at Fresh Water Systems

Join us for Ecommerce Innovators, a podcast that brings together the brightest minds in the industry to explore innovative strategies and trends in global ecommerce. We'll analyze what top brands are doing to accelerate their online success and you’ll hear from top executives who are changing the game for their organizations. Our host is John LeBaron, Chief Revenue Officer at Pattern—the premier partner for global ecommerce acceleration.

Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple   In our conversation with John Wessel, CTO and SVP of Product & Digital at Fresh Water Systems, he talks about digital transformation, innovation, and growth. Hear about the many hats John’s wears, how the company has transformed since the 90s to stay cutting edge, the pharmacy part of the business, aligning and prioritizing multiple channels, and competing with Amazon.

Ecommerce Innovators Episode Synopsis

00:42 About Fresh Water Systems 01:35 John’s many hats 03:18 The company’s digital transformations 04:38 The pharmacy angle 06:11 Aligning different channels 08:01 Own products versus others’ products 09:54 Ecommerce strengths 12:54 The evolution of content 13:58 Innovation challenges 14:52 Pricing messiness 17:14 Amazon and fulfillment 20:22 The 2-day shipping radius 21:45 Ecommerce trends 23:18 Can you beat Amazon? 26:51 Investing in customer engagement 29:53 John’s recommendations

As we interviewed John Wessel, here are some things we learned:

Content leads to search ranking. For Fresh Water Systems’ ecommerce site, around 70% of their traffic is to the blog. The secret for content is “well-researched, well-written, long form content that is informative”. John explained that they have an SEO team who writes 5000+ word posts that are researched and documented. People read these blogs and comment, which drives more traffic to the blogs.

‍Ecommerce is changing the shopping game. John shared an interesting story about a plumber who orders parts every Friday night online, from wherever he can get the best price. He doesn’t have relationships with one supplier or an auto-renew subscription for his parts. Instead, he finds the best price just for the parts he needs every week. John thinks the trend of price shopping will continue, especially as ecommerce grows.

‍Invest in customer engagement, but don’t invest a lot of time into emails. How many advertising emails do you actually read? Companies often spend a lot of time doing A/B tests and crafting the “perfect” email. However, John pointed out that almost no one reads emails anymore. Instead, invest your time into different brand touchpoints you will have with your customer. You can still send emails, but make sure you dedicate less time to the process.   Listen to the full episode for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.