Matt Ezyk
No matter how big the company is, if you don't have a team that can maintain and continuously improve the site that you built on headless or composable, then you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot.
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.
Have you hit a wall with performance marketing on Facebook and Google? It might be time to think about where your next customers are spending their time online.
That’s where Realize comes in. Realize helps thousands of D2C brands to tap into more ad placements across hundreds of premium websites - reaching audiences you just can’t find on traditional social channels
With intent-based, contextually relevant ad placements, you can drive real conversions, not just impressions, and expand your acquisition strategy with better data, more control, and higher ROI.
Realize helps you build high-performing AI-powered ad experiences, backed by 17 years of data.
And simple to set up, no bloated dashboards or complicated onboarding so you can start scaling fast.
You can also leverage your own first-party data to retarget people already in your funnel.
So if you’re ready to go beyond Facebook and Google and start reaching new audiences, head on over to discover.taboola.com/honest and we can start the new year with a new performance channel.
That's discover.tabula.com/honest D-I-S-C-O-V-E-R-T-A-B-O-O-L-A dot C-O-M slash H-O-N-E-S-T.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming the show Matt Ezyk. Matt is the Senior Director of Engineering at Hanna Andersson where he leads Ecommerce and digital transformation initiatives that connect technology and business growth. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Ezyk
Hey, happy to be here. I'm excited to chat.
Chase Clymer
So quickly for those that are unaware, what are the types of products that you and the team are bringing to market over there at Hanna Andersson?
Matt Ezyk
Yeah. So we focus on children's apparel. We sell products generally for infants to age 12. So our core lines cover baby, toddler, kids clothing, seasonal assortments. But we also are known for our family matching pajamas, especially during the holidays. So not only do we have products for mom and dad, but also dogs, cats, matching sets like that. We have swimwear, outerwear, accessories, and school wear. So anything and everything for kids and families for apparel. We got it.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that is amazing. I've been all over the website. It is very performant. And I think that's a little bit to do with you.
Matt Ezyk
It is.
Chase Clymer
Now, I guess to let the folks know out there, we're going to get a little nerdy today and definitely talk about some fun technology stuff. But guess just listening to you explain the product offering that Hanna Andersson has, I guess your skill set is a little agnostic about the product offering, would you say?
Matt Ezyk
Yeah, absolutely. It really is no matter what you're selling in Ecommerce, you got to have the core principles of having a great experience for your customers.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Well, now take me back in time. Where did you first cut your teeth in Ecommerce? What got you into this world?
Matt Ezyk
Yeah, I worked in technology early in my career. I got a call from a recruiter that I kept in touch with and brought me into a site integrator agency that worked with an e-commerce platform called Demandware, which is now known as Salesforce Commerce Cloud. That's where I spent most of my career.
And I've done a lot of different roles in technology and product and project management and strategy across hundreds of brands, going from the 15 to 20 million dollar brands into brands that are doing billions online and in store. I got the opportunity to go brand side in 22 for a Pet retailer called Pet Supermarket where I led engineering products and really everything that had to do with our e-commerce platform and strategy.
And since then I've joined Hanna, it's been almost a year. So the leading engineering and technology team has to do with e-commerce and we're in the middle of re-platforming our new modern and a fast site that's how part of it's actually live right now. So it's exciting. We're doing a lot of fun stuff there.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I'm excited to talk more about that. I remember our initial conversation when we met. But to this, I want to talk about first, as an agency guy. The grass is always greener. What have you noticed about going brand side? What do you miss about being in the agency world? I'm sure there are listeners out there that are straddling the fence and thinking about the other right now.
Matt Ezyk
Some of the things have positives and negatives. It's nice to have one site that you work with or one brand. You really learn the brand intimately and you know the ins and outs of it. But it's also nice to have the flexibility and the dynamics of working with different brands, because you're working with different people and different products.
There's all sorts of different issues they come across or opportunities to build new technology and new digital products. So while I love being on the brand side and I plan on being here for the foreseeable future, I wouldn't rule out ever going back. And I think if I did go back, it would be with a new found appreciation and understanding of what it's like being inside of a brand.
One of those things like you think you know, you have no idea. I was actually really surprised by a lot of the things I found when I finally got inside of a brand. And I think that's just going to help me no matter where I go in my career.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. You know what? I think that I can talk to that. I feel like a lot of service providers are on... We're using agencies to describe a lot of different types of businesses that work with brands. When you're in the agency, whatever it is you're working on for them is the most important thing to you. And it is never the most important thing to the brand, unfortunately.
You have to accept that. And it is kind of a weird situation to be in. Like they're paying us a decent amount of money to do this thing for them. But it doesn't seem like they're taking this seriously. And it's such an interesting internal struggle to have to, where you just have to go with the flow. And as long as you're producing, it won't harm the relationship.
Matt Ezyk
Right.
Chase Clymer
Now, you alluded to a little bit ago that you are currently migrating Hanna Andersson from should we call it a legacy platform? Is it a custom stack? I'm sure you're gonna have a lot more information to share there to something more modern. Can you talk me through that a bit more? How do you approach modernizing Ecommerce platforms while minimizing disruption? It sounds like you guys are slowly rolling it out. So it's very interesting to hear.
Running an Ecommerce business means wearing a lot of hats; founder, marketer, customer service, logistics… and let’s be honest, sometimes even therapists.
But one thing you shouldn’t have to stress about? Business insurance.
That’s where Next Insurance comes in.
Next is built specifically for small businesses, including Ecommerce brands, making it simple to get the right coverage entirely online, in just minutes.
Whether you sell handmade candles, athletic wear, or subscription boxes, Next helps protect you from the unexpected, from product liability to shipping mishaps and everything in between.
And here’s the best part: you can save up to 30% on your business insurance and get peace of mind for as low as $1 per day, knowing Next has your back.
With transparent pricing, flexible plans, and instant certificates of insurance, Next gives you the confidence to focus on what matters most - growing your store.
So if you’re ready to protect your business while scaling your brand, head over to nextinsurance.com/honest to get covered today. That’s nextinsurance.com/honest. N-E-X-T-I-N-S-U-R-A-N-C-E dot C-O-M slash H-O-N-E-S-T
Matt Ezyk
So we're on... And if you're technically savvy enough, you can actually go see all this on our site live. But we're on a very old version of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, something I started working with, literally, in my first Ecommerce job. And we're migrating into something that is a much more modern headless approach where we're basically building something that's API first.
The other interesting thing about how we're doing this is that we're taking the components when they go live or when they're done. And pushing them to live so that we get the benefits of them right away. So when I modernize a platform, I start by protecting what customers always already depend on, right? We rebuild this in layers, improving the architecture and the performance underneath while keeping the front end stable.
So each release delivers a visible win, whether it's faster load times, smoother checkout, cleaner data flow. And I really think customers should never really feel the rebuild, only the progress. Like they should be surprised at how better, or feel that improvement as they go. I may not notice it, but they know that they love to shop the brand and they check out and click buy and that's what we want.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I am definitely a Shopify fanboy and I'm definitely a Shopify front end first. And I always love talking to people that are doing things on other technologies and doing things, especially Headless. So I guess a question I'd have about Headless, if you were consulting on the side, I guess I am in a position where I don't think... I think Headless is…
Please challenge me on this. I think Headless is just another name for custom. You're stringing together APIs and you are at the end of the day, ending up with something that is a bit more custom. You can still use Shopify and build a Headless thing. Whatever.
But my question is, at what point from a size for scale, I'm talking sales, millions of dollars, where do you think it starts to make sense? Because I have a number in my head where I think it doesn't make sense at all below 10 million. But what position would you take on that conversation?
Matt Ezyk
Yeah, it's not just size. Although I think 10 million probably doesn't make sense. I would agree with you there. I think it's the maturity of your technology organization because no matter how big the company is, if you don't have a team that can maintain and continuously improve the site that you built on Headless or Composable, then you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot.
Like some big brands out there, it just makes sense for them to be on a monolith like Shopify and that's totally fine. For us, we built a great internal team and we have some partners that augment that as well. So as we're live, we have a system and a process where we're continuously delivering updates and fixes and new features as we go.
Because we’ve built the engineering team to do that. And not a lot of businesses do that. There’s definitely brands out there in the nine figures that don't have the type of team or technology discipline that we have here that can support that. And again, totally fine. But if you don't have that, you're setting yourself up for failure by going that route.
Chase Clymer
That just speaks to there's no right or wrong way to build a business in Ecommerce. Some people like having internal staff. Some people like having partners and augmenting their workforce that way. And there are pros and cons to each of them. But yeah, I think that one of the things about going headless that is appealing is the performance angle.
But what people sometimes overlook or are just not told about in the sales process is that maintenance and ongoing iterative approach that also needs to happen with that type of build. These APIs are going to be updating all the time. And it's not in a closed ecosystem like Shopify or a BigCommerce where those updates have to not corrupt things. They don't give a crap. They'll just break stuff.
Matt Ezyk
That's right.
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.
Getting back to your approach here, you mentioned that the customer should never notice this is happening. And you mentioned that some of the things you're pushing live are from UX, their checkout, but you also mentioned performance. So what are some of the things you notice about performance that are killing websites out there in Ecommerce? And how can brands fix them?
Matt Ezyk
Yeah, there's probably two that come to mind. One is render blocking scripts and one is third parties. So a render blocking script is a script on your site where the script will render and then the rest of the site is waiting for that script to finish before loading anything else. And then it continues.
That's pretty common unless you're really proactive about mitigating that and that just kills your performance. So what a customer sees is that just especially on mobile that your site is slow. And in 2025 and beyond, if you are under or over four seconds or three and a half seconds, you're really siphoning sales because it's just you're just losing it everywhere because other competitors are just going to be faster.
So the other thing is the bloat with third parties, right? A lot of brands, especially getting the nine figure brands, have lots of third parties. And then you have tag overload where all these like analytics and marketing scripts start to pile up. So if you don't sequence them and really be careful of what you're loading on your site, that's also going to put a drag on performance.
I've definitely seen a lot of businesses out there where they're just piling them on and then they, you know, maybe they stop working with a third party and they don't use it anymore. But that script's still loading until you take it off, right? So all of this really drags performance down and that's really a quick win that you can do is just to audit that and make those changes. And really that equates to money, right?
I think one of my vendors that I work with for performance, they said that every second that you save equates to an additional 6 % in conversion and a 12 % reduction in abandonment. Huge numbers, right? So this is why it's very important.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And there are dozens and dozens of third-party verified case studies out there that just really draw a direct correlation between speed and performance when it comes to sales. And so you can take our word for it because it's the truth. But you can also just go out. I’m sure that CXL has stuff on it. I'm sure that BayMard has stuff on it. But yeah, it is really... The faster your site, the more sales you're going to have. It's just a fact.
But it's so funny that you say people will work with partners or install scripts, etc. And the Shopify ecosystem, it's a lot of apps. I can't tell you how many times we hop in, audit a store and see like 90 apps and we're like, “Are you using all of these? Do you realize…”
Matt Ezyk
Oh yeah, I know.
Chase Clymer
I think the worst we ever saw was 117. It's like, are you using all of these? Do you realize these three things do the same thing? And it's like, each app you install in the Shopify ecosystem is another JavaScript call. A lot of these things are calling the same libraries multiple times, which is just redundant. And performance, just looking at what's loading on your page is an easy way to mark out some wins. Anything else that you've seen out there lately that drives you bonkers?
Matt Ezyk
From a performance standpoint, those are the main things. Yeah. I think the fix really is, if you're talking just overall as discipline, right? Like I've really built this in Hanna where when we're looking at adding a new partner, everyone will come to me and say, “Let's look at this and evaluate it and let's talk to them and ask them questions about how they affect performance.”
Then once we do go live, let's measure it. And if it is dragging performance, we should really just shut it off until we figure that out because you could be going with a third party to have some sort of improvement on conversion or whatever the metric is. But if you're slowing down your site, it's really... It's a wash. So it doesn't make sense. So the fix is discipline. Audit everything. Set budgets for this really and goals. And treat every millisecond like it's money.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. What we try to tell clients and when we're working with them, we will create a new Git fork and install the thing on there. Make sure it's not hurting things. And then you have that to refer back to if you want to delete them. You're like, well, this is when it's gone. So it does help you there from having a repo-type approach when you're installing new scripts on the site.
But another thing, talking about performance, it's like, are there situations? And I have a specific email automation app in mind. Are there situations where a little bit of performance degradation is worth it to have that capability managed by a third party? And this maybe even gets into a conversation about Composable.
Matt Ezyk
Yeah, absolutely. I definitely swing the other end too when it makes sense. I can think of, for example, AV testing tools. They're usually pretty heavy on sites, but that gives you so much insight on what your customers are gravitating towards. Again, we're looking at driving top line conversion, AOV, all the KPIs and Ecommerce that matter.
At the end of the day, if we can take a little bit of a hit in performance, and we can get better at those KPIs, then it's worth it.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. The A/B testing tools are very top of mind for us. We're doing a lot of CRO these days. And that's a conversation we have to have with every brand. We're like, it is worth it. Trust us.
Matt Ezyk
To a point. Sometimes you're running tests and it just will tank certain pages with site speed and then you have to back the test out and figure out why it was doing that. But overall, I think that that's one great example of usually it's worth it. But again, you still have to monitor it.
Chase Clymer
“I have been in business for nearly 20 years, and very few companies I have hired in that time have performed as well as Electric Eye. They have knowledgeable staff, and our project was delivered on time and on budget. Electric Eye has exceeded my expectations, and I look forward to working with them again.”
That is a direct quote from one of our clients at Electric Eye.
Electric Eye is a Shopify Plus partner that has helped over 100 brands migrate, redesign, and optimize their stores since 2016.
If you'd like to increase your conversion rate, average order value, and revenue per session, we are the true Shopify experts you've been looking for.
Right now, we're offering a free diagnostic to qualified brands that reach out and mention the podcast. Visit electriceye.io today to schedule a call and send us a message. Find out why we have over 50 5-star reviews in the Shopify Partner Directory. Again, that's electriceye.io. E-L-E-C-T-R-I-C-E-Y-E.io
You talked a lot about how you are building this discipline within your teams. And you're in a management position at this point. So you're working with both technical and non-technical teams, I'm assuming?
Matt Ezyk
Absolutely.
Chase Clymer
So how do those teams collaborate? Do you have any wins that are top of mind that you could share?
Matt Ezyk
Yeah. So if you go to our site now, you'll see when you go into Carton Checkout, it's our new headless site that is served up there while you're still on the old site and some of the other parts. And we rebuilt that whole experience from the ground up with marketing and UX from day one, a product, digital product, really.
So we got the conversion goals from the product and UX mapped the friction points. And then we took this on the engineering side and built out the new flow on the new stack. So we saw some pretty impressive jumps in not only conversion, but also some other things that we noticed that just because it was faster, it made it easier for the customer.
Like, for example, we have a great loyalty program called Hanna Rewards. Customers were signing up for it at a faster rate in the cart because it's just more performant. So we improved a lot of those overall page load times by over a second, sometimes more. So yeah, you absolutely have to have a shared ownership of the outcome, not just the process. And you can't work in silos. You're not going to build great experiences for your customers.
Chase Clymer
I don't think I could have a conversation with someone that is so entrenched in the technical side of things without bringing up AI. How are you guys using AI? How do you see things changing in the future? What are your thoughts on AI?
Matt Ezyk
Yeah, I've worked with predictive AI for a long time in my career, probably at least 12 years. The newest thing is generative, as we know, and now it's moving into agentics. So AI is really becoming the decision layer between or behind every customer interaction. So it's powering things like search and recommendations and pricing and so many different things and product discovery.
But what I think is interesting that we're moving towards is what I call adaptive commerce, where we're putting in systems that learn and improve with every transaction. So I can see a future where we'll have a site that is almost entirely customized to the individual person that's looking at it. And there's so many use cases like that, right?
So imagine going to a site where it's totally built for you. And every time you interact with a product, things change and they surface up different products. So you're having that discovery moment, kind of like a serendipity in your product discovery. I definitely see that becoming more mainstream nine times soon, but probably in the next five to 10 years.
So I think it's hard to do that now, right? It's hard to actually test and learn with AI, but you really need to. I mean, we all have millions of things going on and projects and external things like tariffs affecting what we're doing. But I think the advantage will really go to the teams who use AI with intent and not just curiosity. So they're looking at different AI native vendors and testing and learning and seeing how their customers react to it.
And if they react positively, they go through and implement and pilot and test more. So the next five, 10 years will be really interesting. I think the one thing I would see being the biggest change, like I mentioned, is adaptive commerce.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I already see some companies and SaaS products and apps working towards some of the solutions that you had just mentioned now, especially within discoverability and manipulating the front end of a website to be unique for that individual customer. That is absolutely coming. A good experience, first of all, is what we're waiting for. What powers that good experience is going to be it's the blue sky right there.
If you're looking for a good idea, you can make money if you can figure that out. We're going to see it hit enterprise companies first, larger corporations, and then start to trickle down into more of the 8 and 7-figure brands towards the end of the decade, I'd assume. To that point, though, I don't ever see AI replacing subject matter experts in UX or in development or in all these career paths that we interact with on a daily basis.
I still think while AI is awesome, degenerative stuff is super interesting, I don't think people are going to be able to print out performant websites within the next decade.
Matt Ezyk
I think it will replace some but the people who lean in and use AI to augment what they do are the ones that are going t o continue and build careers for themselves. Because this is just a new thing, just like new things have happened in our lifetime and before our lifetimes and after our lifetimes, right?
There's always going to be something that comes along that has this existential threat of like, “Oh my God, it's going to take my job.” If you learn to use it to augment yourself, then you're going to be so much better than people who don't. And that's going to open up so much opportunity for you. I think people look at it as a threat and then look at it as an opportunity. And I think both could exist.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And I think you're absolutely right. It's the people that are using this new tool to create better stuff. Now it almost goes to my point where, all right, if anyone can, with a few clicks, make something this base level, but then somebody with skill and creativity makes this. The thing that's better where an expert and the tool combined are making a better outcome, that's where everyone's going to be working towards.
It goes back to that. I started the podcast, Honest Ecommerce, because of all the stuff on YouTube almost a decade ago. Drop shipping, make a million dollars, now you have a Lamborghini. It's not that easy. It's never that easy. But it comes back to this idea of, if it is that easy, why am I selling you a course? Why am I not doing it for myself? You know what I mean?
And so if it gets to be that easy in the future, there's going to be other blockers in your path to create a successful business.
Matt Ezyk
Yeah. In my world, it's like vibe coding. Right? I don't know if you've heard that phrase. But people are leaning into that. And you can do some great things with it. But as you're working with enterprise commerce software, that doesn't, it doesn't hold up. So you can only go so far with it.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Matt, now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Matt Ezyk
One of the things that I think resonate pretty well with the people I've been talking to this year is the balance of finding speed to market with long-term scalability when you're building or making technology decisions. That was the one thing that I always find that we need to figure out when being on the brand side of how we're doing this, right?
Because you have, you look at the ROI of the things that you're building and you want to get them live as quickly as possible, but there's always a cost to that, right? Especially when you're building software, because then you start to build tech debt and if you don't repay the debt, then you bury yourself further and further.
I found I really try to lean into balancing something like that with speed and purpose, right? So what we've been doing is we shipped small modular components with this, just using this like a new site rebuild as an example. If we didn't do that, the old school way was just to build everything and then test it and then launch it.
Like all these things that we've been seeing benefit from this year, we wouldn't have seen at all, right? We'd have probably launched them next year. We're finished building the whole site. So I really tried to have all of the teams own both the delivery and tech debt, just keeping people honest about the trade-offs with it. If we move too fast, we're going to introduce more tech debt and that's going to cause more customer friction and that's just going to cost us more to pay off in the long term.
So the real speed is measured on how confidently you can change things later and not just how fast you launch. So that's an interesting paradigm that I've really been trying to pay attention to a lot this year as we're delivering.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And it goes back to those goals of the brand that are different from the goals of the agency. And we have conversations all the time with brands where the best next step, oftentimes, isn't actually something that can happen. The best next step is refactoring your entire codebase and doing x, y, and z. But it's Q4.
There are other things that are more important. You are dealing with tariffs. You are dealing with a new product line. So it's just because it is the best thing to do doesn't mean that it actually can happen. So then you have, I oftentimes say it's like, just because we recommend it doesn't mean it can happen. We live that's La La Land. Then there's reality. It's like, what is the thing we can do?
Matt Ezyk
Yeah. There's a lot of times where I was involved in presales a lot on the agency side. And we would have a solution for a brand that we just all knew was a home run. For what they were paying and the value they were going to get, it just made so much sense. And then we lose a deal and are sitting there scratching our heads. I think that was what you're talking about is the reason why I didn't really fully understand until I moved to the brand side.
But there's so many different things happening and priorities that even whatever your solution is, whether it's services or product, just because you know it's a home run and you believe in it so much. There's so many other things out there that the brand could be dealing with that you don't know about. That's why you really need to listen and ask questions and try to figure out how that stack ranks.
Chase Clymer
Exactly. Yeah. And it's unfortunate at times where you know it should be a bigger project. In this example, it should be that redesign, right? It should be that rebuild. It should be that migration. But the brand has such a low capacity to engage you on that to where the only thing they're actually going to be buying at the time is just some sort of iterative optimization type approach.
Where it's just like, “We know we need to do that. But we just don't have... It's not the budget really. It's the capacity. We just don't have the time to help you do that. So how can we just make it a little bit better? “
Matt Ezyk
Yeah. Or performance, right? You could be selling any kind of MarTech tool out there in the world, but your site's flow doesn't matter. You can fix your foundation before you build your house.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely, Matt. Now, for those that are listening, go check out what Matt and his team are building over at hannaandersson.com. Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Matt Ezyk
Thank you.
