350 | Inspiring Trust by Perfecting the Post-Purchase Journey | with Eugene Chew
Eugene Chew is the Global Chief Operating Officer at BikesOnline.com, a leading direct-to-consumer cycling retailer in the U.S. and Australia and the exclusive distributor of Polygon and Superior bikes.
From the early days of the internet to scaling a global Ecommerce operation, Eugene has built a career at the intersection of creativity, data, and operational excellence. Before joining BikesOnline, he led digital transformation as Chief Digital Officer at J. Walter Thompson (WPP) and served as Greater China Regional Head at Lion (Kirin).
At BikesOnline, Eugene and his team are redefining what it means to sell complex, logistics-heavy products online. From solving “dirty freight” challenges to perfecting the post-purchase experience, he’s proving that operational rigor and creative problem-solving can turn friction into a competitive moat.
Beyond Ecommerce, Eugene is also an avid cyclist, gardener, and tea enthusiast — running Tea Urchin, his aged tea business that reflects his love for craftsmanship and detail.
Whether you’re scaling a DTC brand, optimizing supply chains, or navigating global expansion with a lean team, Eugene offers an inside look at how to balance creativity, data, and discipline to build a sustainable business that lasts.
This episode also mentions insights from Izzy Rosenzweig of Portless on rethinking global fulfillment, and Kyle Hency of GoodDay Software on building better systems for modern Shopify brands.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
- [00:38] Intro
- [01:36] Naming a brand that stands the test of time
- [02:09] Predicting automation in ad buying early on
- [05:01] Learning innovation from China’s all-in-one model
- [06:01] Balancing innovation with Western logistics limits
- [08:55] Recognizing the shift toward direct brand work
- [10:12] Shifting from service work to physical operations
- [11:50] Managing cash flow under market uncertainty
- [12:31] Stay updated with new episodes
- [12:41] Helping founders scale beyond day-to-day ops
- [13:27] Finding opportunity in a pandemic-era pivot
- [14:01] Designing packaging that simplifies assembly
- [15:30] Diversifying suppliers to reduce risk exposure
- [17:48] Protecting margins from tariff and fraud risks
- [19:01] Choosing Shopify for flexibility and speed
- [22:36] Hiring agencies to guide complex migrations
- [25:05] Training teams before adding new integrations
- [27:18] Episode Sponsors: Electric Eye & Heatmap
- [29:59] Partnering with experts where specialization wins
- [31:58] Gaining perspective from cross-industry learnings
- [34:27] Avoiding costly trial-and-error learning
- [36:34] Prioritizing projects with impact and simplicity
- [41:20] Managing cost challenges in global logistics
- [44:50] Preparing for tariffs with flexible strategies
Resources:
- Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
- Premium bikes at unbeatable prices, direct from manufacturers bikesonline.com/
- Follow Eugene Chew linkedin.com/in/eugenechew
- Mentioned episode with Izzy Rosenzweig of Portless: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpbeHvv3_1Q
- Mentioned episode with Kyle Hency of GoodDay Software: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQNsUfgl9E4
- Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connect
- Clear, real-time data built for ecommerce optimization heatmap.com/honest
If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!
Transcript
Chase Clymer
What I just heard you say is you guys built a $10 million plus business without a project management tool just with email and direct messages.
Eugene Chew
Well, we did have it. We just weren't using it to its full value. I'll put it that way.
Chase Clymer
Because your problems are just unique to you. And you're experiencing it once but an agency is working with dozens of clients at a time. So their learnings are coming in 12 times faster. And it is often that they know exactly what's going on as opposed to having to troubleshoot it.
Eugene Chew
That's a good point. I think that external perspective is often undervalued.
Chase Clymer
Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today I'm welcoming to the show, an amazing gentleman. Eugene Chew is the Global Chief Operating Officer at Bikesonline.com. Eugene, welcome to the show.
Eugene Chew
Thanks for having me, Chase. Glad to be here.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited. We just were talking about it in the pre-show and I always like to shout out the events that I meet the folks at. So we met at eTail West in Palm Springs this year. Did you enjoy yourself at the show?
Eugene Chew
It's a great show. I always enjoy eTail. It's a bit more intimate than Shoptalk. You get to spend more quality time with people.
Chase Clymer
That's a great way to describe it. Shoptalk isn't a way I think anyone would ever describe Shoptalk.
Eugene Chew
Intense.
Chase Clymer
Unless you're going to maybe one of the private dinners or something, then it's a little more intimate there.
So for those that are unaware, what are the types of products you're selling at Bikesonline.com?
Eugene Chew
It's all in the name and I guess it shows how early we were to the internet, the Ecommerce party that we managed to get this domain. But there's a good story behind, we initially started in Australia, so we had the .com.au. We were initially bicycles online, but to get bikes online.com, we actually had to offer the guys a small amount of cash, but we ended up selling for a case of beer as a differentiator.
Chase Clymer
Oh, that's amazing. So you guys, way early days, got bikes online for a little bit of cash and a case of beer.
Eugene Chew
That's it. Yeah.
Chase Clymer
I guess take me back in time. Where do we want to start this conversation? What was your first foray into the Ecommerce world?
Eugene Chew
Wow. So to go all the way back. First, I initially wanted to be a filmmaker when I was at university, but then the thought occurred to me that the defining medium of our age is going to be the internet. And this was kind of like the late nineties. So I made a decision to not do film and to kind of throw myself into the world of the internet. And at that time I joined RealPlayer, which some oldies might still remember.
Chase Clymer
Oh, I know it. I remember. know exactly what it is.
Eugene Chew
It wasn't strictly Ecommerce, but my first role was to produce the Australian and New Zealand website for RealPlayer and also the content that appeared when you opened the RealPlayer. It was more like, I guess, curating content that was going to be popular, but then it quickly became, during the dot-com boom and bust, a need to monetize that content and that platform.
So I started getting into the sales side, trying to sell media impressions. And then I decided that, you know what, these internet companies that aren't making money, they're going to struggle for a period. So I decided to go on the buy side. So I joined a media agency that was just starting up their first kind of digital department. So there were initially just three of us doing digital media planning and buying.
And at some point, I decided that this was all going to be done programmatically in the future. That's something that robots or AI would be making these investment decisions. I didn't have a crystal ball, but I kind of could see where it was going because it was quite procedural. And I thought, like with my kind of creative background coming from a film background, I thought I should really be on the creative side of the business, not the media side. So I actually ended up moving to China and joining the creative agency, TBWA. And I spent a lot of years there kind of doing both creative and media.
And Ecommerce started to emerge for me when I was in China and a lot of brands started to ask us like, “How do we sell on T-Mall, on Alibaba? How do we sell on WeChat?” So my first experience with helping brands of Ecommerce was really from an agency services side and within the Chinese ecosystem, which in some ways is a weird parallel universe to what we have here in the West. But it was an incredibly exciting time to be there. And just huge numbers both in terms of the audiences as well as the GMB that was going through those sites.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Because we still don't have a parallel to WeChat in the United States or the Western world. Could you explain what WeChat is to someone that isn't familiar?
Eugene Chew
Yeah. So it's kind of, you may have heard of it, described as a super app in the sense that it combines elements of what we would call, you know, X and Instagram with your daily feed, your social sharing with family and friends. Together we have a very strong kind of payment and commerce side. So if you imagine if Venmo or Zelle was like an integral part of Instagram or Twitter, that you could just use it to run your life.
And also becomes a platform for even streaming entire shows. So people will go in there and subscribe to channels and watch a lot of video on there as well. So in that sense, it really is one app to rule them all. And it's been incredibly popular and innovative.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Like you said, the social media aspects of like X and Instagram, then the video aspects of YouTube, the buying aspects of almost Amazon. But the Amazon of the Eastern world is Alibaba.
Eugene Chew
And I think the other thing about WeChat is it's a bit like LinkedIn. When you go to an event or you meet Chinese business partners, they always want to trade WeChat. It's not just the business cards. It's almost like a digital business card.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. So instead of emails, they're getting WeChat.
Eugene Chew
Exactly. You're scanning each other's WeChat. That's it.
Chase Clymer
That's wild. Obviously talking about WeChat is just such a big player over there. What were some of the other big differences between the Chinese Ecommerce ecosystem and experience and what you had learned or then came to learn more of the Western experience?
Eugene Chew
Yeah. So I would say two things. One is, in the West, a lot of brands would tend to have their own dot com site and invest heavily in that. But in the Chinese ecosystem, you're really investing more in platforms like Alibaba or WeChat. And the second part is the social commerce element.
And so because those platforms have very strong built-in social commerce tools, including live streaming, you see a lot more. I think in some ways they're kind of a little bit ahead of the West in the adoption of new technologies. And certainly they're leaning into innovation and risk and just moving faster than what I've perceived in Western markets.
Chase Clymer
I think that it's. There's the newer whatnot here in America, which is like a social selling app, live streaming app. It's only been popular maybe last year. It really hit the zeitgeist for the more modern digital, consumer entrepreneur as another channel.
I know John Roman from Battlbox is all in on live streaming and whatnot. He's like, this is going to be the biggest channel for our business outside of DTC. But over in China, they've been doing this for almost 10 years.
Eugene Chew
Yeah, they have. The people who do it, they're making millions of dollars. I think probably the scale of the population and just how concentrated it is makes logistics a lot cheaper and easier. People in China are kind of spoiled. They can order things and get them the same day. Whereas in Australia and the US, the population is really distributed.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Eugene Chew
And so it can be quite costly to say move a bike from the West Coast to the East Coast.
Chase Clymer
So what year did you kind of move on from working in China? And was it a straight transition into bikes online?
Eugene Chew
No. I reached a point in my digital advertising career where I felt that I was starting to stagnate a bit. And I could also see that the platformers were starting to disintermediate the agencies. So if you think about it at that time, you know, Facebook started to hire a lot of agency creatives and started to go talk directly to brands and say, “Hey, you don't need an agency. You can just work with us and we'll create the campaign for you.”
And I just thought, wow, this is probably going to mean that the not the complete demise of the advertising agency business, it's going to go for a turbulent time. There's going to be a lot of changes. And I also was reaching a point where I think I was close to 40 at that point. I was not having a midlife crisis, but I was thinking about what's the next chapter for me. I feel like I've mastered this digital advertising thing. I need a new challenge. And I wanted to go to the brand side so I could learn more about the entire business and influence the entire business, not just the marketing communications aspect of it.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Did you reach out to Bikes Online? Did they reach out to you? How did that opportunity come to fruition?
Eugene Chew
I actually joined a beer company before joining Bikes Online. So one of Australia's biggest brewers was looking to export craft beer and wine into China and other global markets. And being from Australia and already living in China, it was a really good opportunity for me to leverage my strengths. It was a great three years of my life.
We opened a lot of brew pubs in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, as well as other cities around the world. Yeah, it really taught me a lot about the overall business. And Ecommerce was a small part of that. We were still primarily talking on-premise and supermarket distribution.
But it was a real eye-opener in terms of moving from a services industry to the movement of physical goods, especially beer, which has quite a short shelf life. We're talking about, by the time it gets to market, it's already consumed three months of its nine-month shelf life. We had to develop 12-month versions. So it was a real eye-opener for me in terms of the logistics and operational side of that business. Where I think in agency life, you really just focus on people and hours and winning awards for the work. You don't have to deal with a lot of the other issues that come when you're sitting at the top of an operation.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. For any listener out there, the biggest headache for running a service business is the people. Then on the product side of things, and then comes to the inventory concerns, like you said. And it's also just like the cash gets tied up in inventory and it's hard. At that point, the more difficult things are your cash flow and how to consistently be reinvesting without going broke.
Eugene Chew
That's it. It's really a cash management game, especially in the current environment where there's so much uncertainty around what's going to happen with tariffs or are the other things that could impact the business.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week, so don't miss out. Now back to the interview.
Now were you hired with the title Chief Operating Officer? Or how did your role come about?
Eugene Chew
Yeah. So we have two founders and they both share the CEO roles and the co-CEOs. And during COVID, the business was one of the beneficiaries of the lockdown. Everyone wanted to get a bike and go cycling because it was one of the socially permissible ways to exercise. So the business is growing really strongly and they decided to hire a CEO to help run the business day to day so they could spend more time focusing on strategy and M&A and stuff that they enjoy doing.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And so did you join the company during the pandemic, like 2020?
Eugene Chew
I did. Actually, when I went for the interview, we were the only people in the entire office. All the tests were empty. I think it was one of the first or second lockdowns that had just finished but people were still largely working from home and avoiding face-to-face contact if they could. So it was quite a first interview, but we hit it off and yeah, joined during COVID.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And then as you get your feet wet selling bikes online, first, I think that they are large products. They are expensive to ship. While the brand was a bit more mature, I think there were still some annoyances to selling bikes online.
Eugene Chew
It's not the easiest product to sell online. It's big and bulky, like you said, I think some people in the logistics industry call it dirty freight. A lot of the carriers don't want to deal with it and their pricing structures reflect that. Yeah, the logistical challenges are pretty big, I guess, disincentive for those looking to enter into it.
But we spent a lot of time on packaging and how to get the bike into the box in a format that is still customer friendly. So when they open it up, they can still complete the build. It's not, you some of those Ikea builds, you actually have to look at the manual and spend hours putting it together. With our bikes, it's 9% ready. So when you get it out of the box, it's just put on the handlebars, put on the pedals and the front wheel and you're ready to go.
So we've tried to build a bit more of a moat around the business for how we, you know, look at that customer experience, how we try and create more operational excellence in terms of that. Getting the bike to them and supporting them through the build and any kind of issues they might face post the build.
Chase Clymer
Now, obviously, that's one way that you tried to help improve the operational efficiency of Bikes Online. What were some of the other challenges that you got to help lead up and make some progress?
Eugene Chew
So I think one of the biggest things that we've done is we looked at, you know, how do we get all our data together into a dashboard that could help the different teams understand what's the score? Like, are we winning this game or not? And so building it like a BI dashboard was one of the first priorities. And we ended up doing it ourselves rather than using, you know, an existing tool like Tableau. So one of the guys in our warehouse, actually, I found out that he was a computer science major.
I was like, “Oh, dude, you should be helping us out with building this dashboard.” And he did a great job. And we call it our power meter. And it actually brings together everything from our marketing spend to the sales to the margin we're making per product to what's happening in our warehouses, like what's waiting to be picked, and MPS. Everything kind of flows into one place.
We just keep it running all day long on our computers. We're always constantly looking at it to assess the health of the business and the state of the game. So that was a big game changer. And I think the second one was looking at where we were as a business. We have very strong supplier relationships, but we didn't have a lot of suppliers. So we were like high supply concentration.
And that's fine when things are going well, but just thinking ahead how to future-proof the business, we decided that we need to have a bit more resiliency in our supply chain. So we've been actively looking at trying to source a few more suppliers. So we have geographical distribution. So now we can get bikes from Europe or Asia.
And that just helped us a little bit in terms of what's happening now at Tariff. We have options. And lately, we've also been looking at domestic sourcing more and more because some amazing distressed inventory deals out there. And sometimes that's even more compelling than importing containers.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that the trade wars on a more expensive item such as a bicycle, you definitely get a little bit more impacted there. So if all of your source came from one of those countries affected by those tariffs, ah that could instantly eat up all your margin.
Eugene Chew
Yeah. In fact, the high value of the products also introduces some other challenges like when we have a high return rate that could really hurt us. And so, incidences of fraud when it hurts us, it's like, you know, a $1,000 or $2,000 bike. It's obviously different from losing a, you know, $30 or $40 product.
So, we try, we put a lot of focus on how we can reduce returns by improving the packaging, reducing damage and transit, helping customers pick the right size so they don't order the wrong size. And that's been a key focus for the businesses. How do we make sure that when the bikes go out, they don't come back?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. Trying to keep that return, lowering the return rate is free margin, essentially.
Eugene Chew
That's it.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, Eugene hit me up once we were done recording the first part of this and had some other ideas of topics he wanted to cover. So we wanted to dive into those today and add them to that recording. So Eugene, you recently migrated Bikes Online to Shopify.
Can you talk about what led to that decision? What were some of the issues you were trying to overcome from that previous platform? What made Shopify stand out against some of the other competitors in the market?
Eugene Chew
Sure. We were with an Ecommerce platform called Neto, N-E-T-O, which back in the day, was... It started in Australia and back in the day, it might have been a top 5 choice. But they got acquired by Maropost, which is a Canadian Ecommerce cloud. And what we found was over time, we were outgrowing it as a business.
So as we started to become kind of an eight-figure type business, a lot of the functionality that we wanted in the Ecomm platform just was not in the pipeline. every integration was requiring like a custom integration, 20 to 40 grand in agency fees each time. And so the cost of operating it was growing and we just felt that the future proof to business we needed to look at changing to a more modern Ecommerce platform.
And I think Shopify has just improved in leaps and bounds too, like compared to five years or even 10 years ago, it's really made inroads into enterprise, into the market. And I think for businesses like ourselves, it was really attractive from the ability to kind of plug and play more different apps to gain featuwres very quickly out of the box without having to go through the painful integrations.
Also, we thought in practice, it hasn't quite been that seamless, but we can talk more about that. But yeah, we made the decision to move. For us, when we were on Neto, one of the advantages of Neto was that it's an all-in-one system. So you don't have a separate ERP. Neto is your ERP and it is also your front end.
So that was one of its strengths. And for us, shifting to Shopify meant having to select an ERP. And it was, I would say, that decision that was perhaps not as easy as moving to Shopify. And we had to look at a variety of different ERPs like NetSuite and SYN7. And eventually we settled on Brightpearl, which is part of the Sage family because we were already using Inventory Planner.
Compared to the cost of NetSuite, which you then need to pay extra for to actually get it to work the way you want. We thought Brightpearl was perhaps a bit more right-sized for our business. I think the difference between having it all in one and then having a separate ERP, it's quite a lot of work to get it to play nicely together.
So just getting data to flow between Shopify and our ERP, Brightpearl, has been probably one of the biggest challenges of the migration, one of the biggest of time sucks in terms of management effort and troubleshooting across the different departments from operations, technology, and finance.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. But once it works, the beauty of it though. And that's, like you said, right-sized. And as you're getting into that 8-figure realm, like ERPs and things that integrate with Shopify but aren't core to Shopify become a bigger piece of the puzzle and you truly need to. I'm assuming you guys didn't go on loan. Did you hire agencies to help you with some of these very specific pain points you were looking to solve and integrate?
Eugene Chew
We did. As you can imagine, we tend to run a pretty lean team and the team's always maxed out. So when you're trying to do a big project like this, it's really helpful to have an agency involved in that. They've done it many times before across different types of clients.
So they really brought that breadth of expertise, get that game of the confidence to embark on such a major project. So I think that extra resource and the expertise was really, really, really helpful. But building the front end with the agency was the easy part. It's really like getting the backend to work the way it's supposed to work after you relaunch the site. Like just simple things like doing pre-orders, which we love because it's great for cashflow.
We've bikes on that and have really long lead times with getting bikes from when we order to markets. We'd like to sell them before they're in the warehouse. But the complications of that, you're selling inventory that hasn't been received. And then the plus, if someone cancels their pre-order and you have to refund their money, making sure that the plus ones and minus ones that happened on Shopify flow through to the ERP, like that was not as straightforward as we thought to just get that to happen.
And so you get all these discrepancies at the end of the month and then it creates a lot of just really draining on finance and operations to go into every single case and try and work out where's this discrepancy coming from.
And so we have discovered there's quite a lot of hidden costs. So to get Brightpearl work with Shopify, we have to buy or subscribe, I should say, to certain connectors by other third parties such as B Solutions. So that adds to the overall cost of operating it.
But yeah, I think if you're going to go into a migration like this, you just need to be aware that it's not going to be a 3 to 6 month job and you're done. Getting it live, then there's a whole other year of getting it right.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I think that what excites people about a migration isn't necessarily like making everything work the right way and fixing all these core problems, which are usually the business case to make the move. They're excited about the design phase and making something look cool and having that be on the dot com, which isn't when the project is done.
All of that design needs to now work, which is it takes a lot of strategic planning and thought and troubleshooting and figuring out these weird edge cases that you got to work through. And it's tedious.
Eugene Chew
It is. I'll just share one other story where we recently wanted to try charging for shipping protection. And the reason for this is like many businesses, we're seeing consumer behavior is leading to a higher rate of returns and exchanges. So as people become more comfortable shopping online, I guess that they're ordering more, but they're also looking to return or exchange more.
And we've also had incidents of damage in transit because when you're shipping, bike in a cardboard box. doesn't always get handled the way you would like it to. And this creates a lot of tickets for customer service. So we thought, let's try and automate it. Let's try and turn what is a cost into something that pays for itself or potentially even a new revenue stream. And there's a lot of apps that you can turn on for Shopify to do this. But it broke our shipping calculator.
So on day one when we ran the trial, everyone was getting free shipping. We're like, “Oh, geez.” So it's always something unexpected. So I think the idea of a simple plug and play integration is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. You really have to kind of test and also make sure that the different teams are trained beforehand. And there's a lot of collaboration and consultation. What is the process? Because everything you think you add, impacts that process and that workflow. And you need to make sure that everyone's going into that with their eyes open or you run into a lot of internal conflict.
Chase Clymer
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So you mentioned earlier, you used agencies to help you with the migration. Did you use the same one to help you with the ERP stuff? Or did you have two specialists?
Eugene Chew
So the agency that we used, they recommended who we should talk to for ERP. But they left that decision up to us. I think every business is different. And I really wish Shopify offered you know, an integrated ERP solution. But every time I asked them, they said, it's so bespoke, every business wants something different that they just want to stay out of it. Although I hear there is a company called GoodDay that is trying to build specifically for Shopify merchants, looking forward to seeing what they have.
But we did use agencies for other aspects where we lack the internal expertise or we just don't have the teams that are just too stretched to research and do that job effectively. Even for things like conversion rate optimization or optimizing our email strategy, we will turn to agencies to give us that expertise and that boost. And in other areas where we used to use agencies for our campaign management, like all our meta in Google used to be outsourced. Same with SEO, but we've recently in-house that under our growth team.
So I think things that we need 365 days of the year, we're now finding it's more cost efficient for us to do that in-house. And especially as some agencies, they kind of outsource it to people in other countries, in cheaper countries anyway. So why not just hire some of those people directly? That's been working for us on the things we need every day or things that we need fraction or project-based, then I think agencies still have a really powerful role to play. And there's a particular type of expert whose worth is maximized working in an agency rather than in a business like ours. So for us to tap into that kind of expert, we have to go to agencies.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I think that at a certain point, and I would maybe even argue it is around that 10 million, maybe beyond that threshold when you're talking 8 figures, well into that mature growth stage of a business, it does make a lot more sense to hire a full-time expert to do it as opposed to having an agency. There are pros and cons to both. And there are a lot of people that like it to be lean and it's not overpaying because it's just, they generate value to offset the investment? But I definitely see that as you go up market with a business and how large that business is, a lot of things that maybe an agency would have done for a smaller business.
They have in-house paid ads, like email management. I know some businesses that have full design development teams on staff because they're doing so many iterative changes to their Shopify store. And it's just that yneed to look at the P&L. You need to look at your expenses and see, can I get similar value on staff for less money for some of these things?
Eugene Chew
Yeah. And sometimes solving the problem faster is more than pays for the agency. Sometimes it's a wiser decision to hire an agency and just get it done faster.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, because your problems are just unique to you. And you're experiencing it once but an agency is working with dozens of clients at a time. So their learnings are coming in 12 times faster. And it is often that they know exactly what's going on as opposed to having to troubleshoot it.
Eugene Chew
That's a good point. I think that external perspective is often undervalued. And when you're working in a single industry just day in, day out, and you're only looking at your own business and your competitors, it's like you get a little bit blinkered. You don't really see the parallels or learnings that you could get from adjacent or even completely different industries.
And I think agencies often bring that valuable perspective of, well, here's a methodology or best practice that comes from automotive or comes from insurance that could be helpful for your business in terms of driving better monetization of the database or ideas like that.
Chase Clymer
And then another thing is just, you kind of alluded to it earlier, just having that true expertise. So you can get something done the right way the first time and that time to value that investment in either a new application or SaaS product for the business or just a new strategy that you're executing.
Hiring someone that's done it before as opposed to having your team learn it and fail through it. You can get something live in a month that's bringing you back value as opposed to failing through it for three months and not really seeing the ROI. And that's the difference.
Eugene Chew
That's it. I think a lot of clients think, “Oh, let's use an agency for the first stage of the project. And then our internal team can learn and maybe take it on from there or get the agency to build and then internal to maintain and optimize.”
Chase Clymer
Yeah, we see a lot of people recently have been reaching out about like, we're looking to learn more about XYZ. And set us as an agency as we evolve in the market and learn about how to best position ourselves and be of value to some of these businesses. I don't think coaching is ever something we wanted to do. But does it make sense? Does it lead to more business down the line? You got to keep these things open.
Eugene Chew
AI is a great example of that. We've tried to learn everything about AI ourselves and build our own tools. And we're reaching a stage now where we're recognizing that it's perhaps better to buy instead of build because you've got entire teams of AI experts out there who are just living and breathing AI every day.
And are on top of all the latest tools and what limited resources we have internally just can't do what they're able to do, right? So I think there's a strong argument to not always do everything in-house, but to look at where there are pockets of expertise externally and pockets of funding and energy, because there's a lot of funding going into AI research and prototyping at the moment. It's like for a company our size, it makes a lot of sense to partner for that and get access to it earlier.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. What else are you and the team prioritizing these days?
Eugene Chew
Well, now that we're on Shopify, it's almost like there's too many good ideas. There's so many feature requests coming from all the different teams that Imean, our standard board for things we'd like to do, it's like over 30 line items. And so we've really had to think long and hard about how we prioritize this? What's got the biggest impact on the business?
And how easy is it to execute? It might have a big impact, but it's going to take 12 months and it's super complicated and might go pear-shaped. So that perhaps is not the highest priority given something that is super easy to execute and might only have a moderate impact.
So we're developing our our system of, I would say, evaluating opportunities and prioritizing them, like building a business case for each, training our teams on how to think about the issues and the ideas and to actually put dollar value against each solution, and then to build a bit of a resource plan against each so that we can have alignment between different stakeholders on, why your idea is not in the top three, at least for this quarter.
But we've had to get quite ruthless with the prioritization. I think we try not to do any more than three initiatives per quarter to keep it manageable. But with that has come a need to really formalize how we work. We have to update our SOPs. We have to kind of embed the new tools that we're using.
So as I mentioned earlier, we're using Asana. Ssomething we've had for a long time, but it wasn't core to how we work. And now we're trying to really embed that in the business, make sure that it's what we're using for document sharing and workflow management rather than pinging each other and email with Slack and saying, “Hey, could you do this? Or can you do that?”
Chase Clymer
So I just want to put this out. What I just heard you say is you guys built a $10 million plus business without a project management tool just with email and direct messages.
Eugene Chew
Well, we did have it. We just weren't using it. To its full value, I'll put it that way.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I mean, they're all quirky. I remember when we first went down that rabbit hole for our business. ah We tried them all. We tried Asana, Monday, a more bespoke one just for agencies. And I think that what happened was we got sick of trying new ones. And we just got Basecamp works well enough. That's what we've been doing for 8 years. If it's not broken, don't fix it.
Eugene Chew
That's when you asked earlier, what are we prioritizing? That's kind of one of the themes for the last three months and the next three months, which is, let's try and minimize making changes to the tech stack. A lot of it is not perfect, but it's better just to kind of work with what we have and get better at using it than to keep adding new things. So we're trying to keep the main thing the main thing.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. We're huge fans of Kanban charts at the agency for prioritization, but also a little more nuanced than that. If we're talking about maybe more like a CRO for like, here's a bunch of ideas we have for tests. We're fans of the ICE way of thinking about stuff. So it's like impact, confidence and ease of implementing whatever this idea is. And it helps take a list of ideas or directions or whatever and try to put some science behind it, even though you are just making up some of these numbers.
Eugene Chew
Yeah, it might be a little bit back of the napkin. But CRO is a great example. Actually, that's probably another one of our major priorities at the moment. We really want to get better at product discovery. So improve the shopping experience by surfacing the right products to the customers.
We've been growing our product range and getting more into parts and accessories, not just bikes, but our product recommendation engine has fallen behind. A lot of customers aren't even aware that we sell these products. Within cycling, there's so many different disciplines, like gravel cycling is completely different from road cycling or mountain biking or riding a dirt jumper. And so each of those riders wants to see different products.
So how do I get better at identifying their needs and showing them the correct product. It goes back to during migration, we found that one of the biggest drags on the migration timeline was product data and just having to clean it up and optimize it and recategorize it so that it would work with the new website and the new menu. But now we're getting into how we actually surface those different subcategories of products to the right type of writer.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think product discovery is a bigger pain for more mature businesses than for younger businesses because they realize selling more to those people, those people being their customers. They're like, there is absolutely opportunity here. Because you just see how those powerhouses like Amazon and Walmart do it. And you're like, we aren't even close to being that good.
Eugene Chew
Yeah. I mean, when you look at the returning customer numbers and the customer lifetime value, there's clearly opportunities to improve. And it's one part driven by having the right range. You need to have the right products first. But then the second part is, how do you get them in front of the right people?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. While I'm a huge fan of Shopify's search and discovery tool, I have learned more recently that this is definitely an area where it is falling a bit behind and there are more mature solutions in the ecosystem.
Eugene Chew
I'd love to hear more about that because we're working with Algolia.
Chase Clymer
That's one of them. Yeah. There's that. I've heard some good things about Nosto. I basically heard it can do whatever you want if you tell it what to do.
Eugene Chew
Right.
Chase Clymer
And then there's a few other ones like Searchspring, I know, is another player in that space. And it's funny that these are all evolutions of more search-oriented things that have now pivoted into also discovery of product. But it all is like search, sorting, filtering. It's all just helping the customer get to the product that's going to solve their need. They always have like little quirky ways of thinking about it.
Eugene Chew
Yeah. One of the major costs of running a website is the internal search. It's very important to pick the right partner there. We didn't implement Algolia that well. So when we initially launched, our website was making far too many calls.
Like if you were typing in a word, like every letter you were typing, was initiating calls, which cost us money on the back end. So we've had to optimize how that triggers. Whether it's like waiting until you type in 3 letters or having a bit of a time delay so it's not like making call, call, call, call.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's such an interesting challenge. And that's what happens. Like you said, almost at the beginning of conversation about the migration to Shopify, it's like you were looking to move away from this more bespoke solution because everything was super expensive to integrate. Now, things are not as expensive because most things integrate with Shopify, but still it decides to get the things you want. It's still a bit more bespoke and there still is customizations with using these off-the-shelf solutions.
Eugene Chew
For sure. Yeah. But I also think about the way that they build.The whole SaaS model of having to predict your usage and commit to that upfront. It's really annoying. I wish it was more pay as you go, like genuine pay as you go.
Chase Clymer
Well, they can't do that because they can't get investment on their next round if they don't prove returning revenue.
Eugene Chew
Well, what I really hate about it is this punitive rate. If you said you're going to use 30,000 search units and you go over, like, okay, now at this point, I'm giving you more business. Why is it costing me more per search unit?
then it should actually get cheaper the more you use, right? Because you're becoming an economy of scale.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Now Eugene, we chatted about almost as much stuff as we chatted about the first time today, which is lovely. This is going to be a long fun episode. I asked you at the end of the first conversation, we're probably just going to replace it with this one. Is there anything else that you'd like to leave our listeners with today to help them in their journey in their careers here in Ecommerce? parting advice?
Eugene Chew
Sure. I think at the moment, we're all challenged with just exceptional levels of uncertainty in the operating environment. There's trade wars, there's inflation fears, we're not sure how the consumer is going to react. We have potential supply chain disruption. It's really stressful. I'm not sure if it's keeping you up at night, but it does keep me up at night.
But I think the important thing is not to panic and try not to make big bets either way, because a lot of these tariff announcements can be reversed unexpectedly and are being challenged legally. So it's really hard to predict, but it's almost like you're in a big dark room where someone's turned off the lights suddenly. It's like you can't just stand there.
You have to kind of edge your way forward with your hands out and fill your way forward, right? So I think it's about preparing for different scenarios. It is helpful to build some cash reserves in case you do have to pay more for tariffs or in case there's opportunities to acquire distressed inventory. I would look at free trade zones and bonded warehouses, perhaps help with cashflow, delay those tariff payments.
Overall, just try to do less. Focus on the main thing. Stay calm. Don't panic. And just to put into context, we all got through COVID. COVID seemed like the end of the world. It was like a zombie apocalypse by comparison. We'll get through this.
Chase Clymer
Oh, yeah. Yeah, we'll get through it. I just want to shout out two other episodes that I've recorded. had Izzy from Portless on and he talked at length about ways to navigate tariffs and he's like, “Yes, my business can be a solution, but here are other solutions that don't have anything to do with my business.” And that's useful to help you get a little bit more clarity around maybe navigating that particular subject.
And then Eugene alluded to earlier about an ERP being built for Shopify I actually interviewed. He's an ex-Chubbies gentleman and the founder of GoodDay Software. That is on the feed as well. And that's useful to go down that rabbit hole and learn. And if you're exploring your RPs, I'm sure he'd love to talk to you as well. Other than those people, Eugene, how do people get a hold of you online? And they want to follow you on LinkedIn or reach out about a bike?
Eugene Chew
Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn. And they can also just email me at eugene@bikesonline.com. Very simple.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Eugene, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Eugene Chew
Thank you, Chase. It's been a pleasure.
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