Mark Barnum on Mobile Performance, AI-Ready Product Data, and When to Replatform

Ian Andersen (00:01.412)

Hi, welcome to the Workshop Floor, where we talk about Shopify, Salesforce, and all things commerce technology. My name is Ian Andersen, head of marketing here at Red Van Workshop. What we want to do is bring together some very smart, very awesome people for honest conversations about the commerce industry, who can come in and tell some good stories and hopefully provide a little insight into commerce technology and where it's headed. The first guest is Mark Barnum, co-founder and partner here at The Redvan. Mark, great to have you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how Redvan got started?

Mark Barnum (00:50.03)

Sure. So I'm Mark Barnum. I've been in e commerce for a long time. I kinda cut my teeth on e commerce at Burton Snowboards. they hired me as a director of interactive technology there. I was there for like

Ian Andersen (01:05.598)

It's a a very august title. Yeah.

Mark Barnum (01:08.216)

Yeah, right. They they invented it. I I came in as a contractor actually on a two week two week thing and they had this they had this site that that was just totally broken and it was their Proform site and the Proform site was for industry professionals that wanted that they wanted to give de gear to at a discount.

And it operated separately from all of the other pieces that they had. I can't remember what it was built in. but I came in and I fixed it in in a couple of weeks. And they were like, Hey, you're pretty good and seem to be pretty smart, so why don't we we'd like to hire you for longer term? And after about three months they said, Okay, we'd like you to come on full time and we'd like to, you know, build this title for you. And so I ended up

Ian Andersen (01:44.604)

Nice.

Ian Andersen (01:56.158)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Barnum (02:03.394)

being part of a triumvirent a triumvirate of leaders there. and it was Dave Buckland was the other guy and Dan Ronner Bland. and and those guys are off doing really cool stuff. Dan's at at Converse and Dave is at his own little thing that he's got that does different website builds for people and

Brilliant, brilliant, wonderful people to work with. and they really helped me gain my footing and also just established a great group of people that did different things. Dan was in creative and Dave was in the project management side, and I was obviously in the technical side. And so we all had our different groups and we all worked well together and we rebuilt the Burton site every year. And so because of that exercise that we did.

Ian Andersen (02:51.496)

Yeah.

Mark Barnum (03:01.402)

we ended up because of the where Burton was at in their life cycle, they were not selling snowboards or product, well, some products online at the time. And their Blue Martini license at the time was which is was their old e-commerce platform, and their was their e-com site and their

Ian Andersen (03:17.726)

Okay.

Mark Barnum (03:30.455)

regular site or their their brochure site was separate. They were on two different technology stacks. And so we did a product selection to to look at all of the different ecosphere of of e-commerce platforms at the time to figure out which one was the correct one to kind of go into. and so we built this matrix and figured out hey based on what we have, based on our team that we have internally, based on our capabilities and everything, you know, what

type of tool do we want to use? And we ended up picking Demandware at the time, which was a great fit for them. You know, Burton is an international company. They have, you know, they have a lot of sales in a lot of different regions all over the world, Japan, Korea, China, you know, EU, you know, US, Canada, all of them. And so for a relatively small company that are pretty far reach.

And demandware at the time was the only real player that had that at scale. you know, as we know, demandware got picked up by

Ian Andersen (04:31.976)

Sure.

Mark Barnum (04:37.71)

Salesforce and then turned into Commerce Cloud, et cetera. But so to kind of finish my story, we ended up picking the man where we end up launching it. And then after that, I I had been at Burton for several years. We've been reinventing the wheel every every year, basically relaunched the website, and it was just time for a change. and so I actually went on my own and we did some contracting for

I I just did independent consulting. But when I did that I needed a company name and coming from Burton, I knew that branding is important, right? And so a long time ago, when I married my wife, I bought a sixty seven Volkswagen bus for her f as a wedding present. She got me a grill, but ironically we end up using the grill more than the more than the van front probably, but

Ian Andersen (05:17.438)

Sure.

Ian Andersen (05:31.078)

Ha ha ha.

Yeah, yeah, I I was gonna say.

Mark Barnum (05:36.526)

But I got a wonderful gift from my mother in law, which was a a a wedding ring, and I had all this money in my pocket kind of saving up for that wedding ring and I was like, you know, how about a sixty seven bus? 'Cause that's a pretty easy leap to make.

Ian Andersen (05:51.262)

Yeah, ga 'cause that makes total sense, yeah.

Mark Barnum (05:56.278)

Right. And so anyway, we we picked I picked Red Band and I had all this great experience with Burton you know, doing high level complicated extensions to, you know, kind of the demandware platform at the time. And so had a great skill set. also had a lot of leadership capabilities. So, you know, kind of like going into the consulting world was pretty a pretty smooth transition for me. and I had been

Ian Andersen (06:21.118)

Sure.

Mark Barnum (06:26.187)

really networked into the demandware community at that time for a number of years just because you know Burton did such high level stuff. We were the poster child or one of the poster children at the time as brands for the demandware platform and so and it was a relatively small group of people. And so I had a really, really good cache in the business side of things. So I was able to garner that or parlay that into work.

And and so a lot of the work we got initially and and actually up until recently is word of mouth. you know, people like who we are, who understand who we are and and kinda go from there. So

Ian Andersen (07:09.522)

That's that's something I've seen kind of in the agency world in general, not just e-commerce, but it really it really is a small atmosphere in a lot of ways, right? A small world and if you can kinda do good work and make good connections, I mean that's that's like half the battle. So

Mark Barnum (07:30.698)

It is. It is. I I mean y y your reputation is so critical in this business. makes sense.

Ian Andersen (07:36.476)

Yeah. For sure. so okay, you're out at a dinner party, people you don't know, somebody asks you who what does Redvan do? What what do you tell

Mark Barnum (07:51.463)

it depends on what mood I'm in. Sometimes I just say we do websites. and so, you know, just you know, if they don't know anything anything about the yeah, or if the in you know, it's just not the vibe, you know, I I I'll just do hey, we we just do websites. but

Ian Andersen (08:01.126)

If if you don't feel like talking, yeah.

Right, right. Okay, let's let's imagine you've you've had a a a few a few beers, you know, you're a couple in, you're you're feeling a little more expansive and somebody you're you're liking asks you.

Mark Barnum (08:20.012)

Yeah, I I I usually just go in into like all the relationships that we have, right? you know, we have really long term relationships with like Patagonia, you know, New Balance, and and these people you know, know who we are and and like us, you know, as people. And that's really what it's built on. and and so I'll talk about how great these companies are and what what a wonder they are to work with.

Ian Andersen (08:37.47)

Sure.

Mark Barnum (08:50.559)

And yeah, it's it's it's a part it's a true partnership in a lot of cases. And so we'll go into that type of stuff. We'll go into like some of the complexities of of some of the things that we do, some of the interesting things that happen, which are like, you know, fraud cases where you know certain companies will just stop shipping to New Orleans because it it tends to be one of those th one of those places that

Ian Andersen (08:55.644)

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Barnum (09:16.73)

you know, if it's near the waterfront, it's probably going overseas and and that's probably not what they want to do, you know, want to want to have happen. and yeah, it's it's it's amazing.

Ian Andersen (09:21.394)

Right.

Ian Andersen (09:29.596)

Yeah. Wow, th some might never really considered.

the the e commerce side of things, it's so much more l long term, right, than than say like a traditional if we were just a a website shop, you kinda build the site and walk away where

Mark Barnum (09:50.755)

Yeah.

Ian Andersen (09:51.878)

You know, we have people who are ongoing helping clients manage product and you know, updating product information, you know, staying on top of security, all that stuff. I mean, we have kind of a your fingers are very deep in a lot of different different areas and businesses.

Mark Barnum (10:11.65)

Yeah, in a lot of cases these platforms are not you turn it on, it's not like a light switch, you know, you can't just you don't just turn it on. You have to turn it on and maintain it and keep it in good running order as part of it. And also there's just an innovation arc that has to occur. you know, as we get into different things that are that people are still catching up to, you know, just mobile, right? most companies

work on desktops, right? And so they they will look at a website and say, this is perfect because I can see it on my desk on my screen, right? And that's all that's all we need to do. Right. And and in reality, 80%, 70%, 60% of the traffic going to their website is mobile. And they don't do the correlation like,

Ian Andersen (10:42.269)

Yeah.

Ian Andersen (10:49.008)

Right. 'Cause it works on my screen. Yeah.

Mark Barnum (11:07.35)

I need to spend sixty percent of my time looking at this on a mobile device and saying, This is good, you know, this works. And and we've got these big big screens that we have, everybody has on their desktop, right? and you know, it's it's just not reality for most people actually consuming the the website. And so you gotta think of that in a number of ways. And and people don't, right? And so they'll think about it like, okay, it works on mobile. It's like

Ian Andersen (11:25.448)

Right.

Wow.

Mark Barnum (11:37.022)

that's that's just the first step. Working on mobile is fine, but is it fast? You know, i is it is it fast enough that people don't leave, you know, and being able to correlate that with the analytics and basically understand that hey, there's there's things that can be done to make this optimal an optimal experience because that's just the first part of it, right? Getting people to the website is hard, you know, and we'll talk about AI later, I'm sure. But like, you know, there's there's

Ian Andersen (11:42.407)

Right.

Mark Barnum (12:05.24)

There's pieces of that that you just have to do. So it's it's interesting kind of going through that exercise and figuring out what you want to do there.

Ian Andersen (12:12.784)

Yeah, reminds me a a company I worked with God eight, nine years ago out of out of Israel, sold high-end luxury fireplaces. And so, and I mean, you know, these these are fireplaces that go into multi-million dollar homes, the just gorgeous things that I will never own in my life, but they were understandably very particular about the imagery they're putting on the website.

Right, and it made a lot of sense. And it took a while for me to convey we could have the nicest images in the world if they're not optimized for mobile. Who cares? Right. Like right. And and I mean it was a it was a long, tough conversation before before we finally got there. And yeah, so I I hear ya. The responsiveness

Mark Barnum (12:56.13)

Doesn't work, right?

Ian Andersen (13:08.282)

of your your site, especially in something like e-commerce where you're looking at kind of a list of products, right? how is that laid out? How is it responding? You know, all that's important.

Mark Barnum (13:20.152)

Yeah, we just one more anecdote. We had a we had a team one time and and the designer, awesome awesome guy, right? But like he gave us a background and it was a starry sky type background. Beautiful, like really, really amazing. But it was the heaviest thing on the page. And it it would it would take, you know, without optimization, it took minutes to load, you know, if you didn't have it cached. And I'm like, this is not we can't do this.

Ian Andersen (13:45.584)

Wow. Yeah. No. No one no one will ever look at this f yeah. Yeah.

Mark Barnum (13:50.062)

It's no nobody sees it, right? It's the background it's literally the background. And so just conveying that from a you know, yes, you have degrees of beauty when you talk about, you know, making that optim making that optimized for the web, but even on the but on a device even, you think about it, the background is like you'll never see it, likely, just because it's there's too much other stuff going on. So yeah.

Ian Andersen (14:16.582)

Yeah. And what's fun about the tech side is like fundamentally like you start running into laws of physics kind of stuff, right? Like the like your your computer can only process so much information and right, yeah. So

Mark Barnum (14:33.004)

Yeah, no, it's like you know, this gotten a lot better, but back in the day, you know, even a couple of years ago you'd get to a website on a on a device that wasn't optimized and occasionally the the page would just quit. It would just it would just die, it'd run out of memory, you know? It's like I'm out, you know, and I mean you're not getting anybody shopping into that page, right? Right. Right.

Ian Andersen (14:45.394)

Yeah. Yeah, like just throw its hands up and yeah. Yeah. You have a a five meg image on on this. Yeah, no we're done here. Yeah. I hear ya. so so you've been in in this kind of e com world for for quite a while now. What are can you think of some things that have changed that have surprised you and maybe a few things that may or may not surprise you about

How it stayed the same.

Mark Barnum (15:18.36)

Yeah, I think, you know, some of the things that surprised me is just the the some of the concepts around like just recently, some of the concepts around AI and what it can do or what it can't do, and the blind desire to do AI, but ha the the reluctance to understand what it's actually gonna give you and potentially do.

There's a disconnect between ROI or you know what you're gonna get out of the spend for just rampantly implementing AI versus like doing something that says, okay, we're gonna we're gonna integrate to AI engines, but not necessarily just go pell melt. Like there's ways to potentially peel the onion on AI and and and not overspend, but still look at your broader roadmap and say, you know what, we're still not hitting the mark on performance.

you know, or other things, right? And so there's there's a the because it's so buzzy right now and because you know people at the top tend to be a little bit more tied into the news cycles, you know? And so they're they're not understanding the depth of what this AI thing is and and what it can give us and what it doesn't do well and how we want to kind of like

Ian Andersen (16:34.395)

Yeah, of course.

Ian Andersen (16:39.804)

Yeah.

Mark Barnum (16:45.814)

work through those different things and make a make a plan out of it. and that's been the tricky part, right? Because people just say, Hey, my boss wants AI and I'm like, okay. Yeah, tell me. Tell me what we want to do there.

Ian Andersen (16:55.41)

Yeah. To do yeah. Yeah, no, that that's a good point. I mean as somebody who's who's followed the AI kind of development pretty closely, who's worked a lot with it, I mean it's still tough to get a handle on where it's good to to use, right? It it can be it can be tricky to to

I mean you conceptually understand okay, I can speed up certain processes by by using AI, but which of those and how hands on do you need to be, can still be can still be a tough tough line to figure out, huh?

Mark Barnum (17:37.976)

Yeah, there's levels of complexity with these websites. You know, you have a lot of things going on. And so if you tell AI to concentrate on one thing and fix it, it may ruin half of the other things because it's it just won't be aware of all the other stuff, right? So you gotta be very careful on how you how to deploy it and how you wanna do it. Now, as far as integrating to it, you absolutely should be doing that. you know, allowing for surfing surfing of AI

bots and L LMs dot text files and you know, all of the things that you need to do with feeds to the different engines, just is table stakes. You just have to have it done. you know, and and if you're not then, you know, that's that would be step one.

Ian Andersen (18:24.584)

That a topic we've been kinda talking about around here a lot lately is is like UCP. as well, you know, there's the UCP, the MCP, the A to A, all the all the acronyms, but essentially the way I I think about it is just having structuring your data in a way to be easily read by E AI, right? And I mean, at the end of the day that's what it's all coming down to.

It's just

Mark Barnum (18:54.242)

Yeah, I mean if you've got a you know, if it if you're telling by the default state of the of of a product page, for instance, where it won't show you that the product is in stock until you've selected a size, you know, and that's how your data is structured, right? It's basically not configured to just show that it's actually in stock. The AI engine will just say, Hey, this product is in the stock and it'll just give up. It'll just go to the next thing.

Right. And so you've gotta make sure that the user interface doesn't necessarily mim mirror what your data structure is, right? To to you know, kind of give you a simple example. Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Ian Andersen (19:32.797)

Right.

Yeah, it's a little counterintuitive, right? We we we tend to think of AI as, you know, versions of humans and reading things the way that a human would when when it doesn't.

Mark Barnum (19:48.63)

It doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't. It it doesn't infer unless you tell it to infer. It doesn't click a button unless you tell it to click a button. And and these robots that just go read your site, they are looking at it like a search engine would. And so but but a little bit deeper because they're looking to try to get that data from the product information to do it. And so, you know, one of the things with AI that people don't realize is that if your data is not good on your product page,

Ian Andersen (20:01.448)

Sure.

Mark Barnum (20:17.342)

or isn't complete or isn't pertinent for the selling action that a person is going to do, then it won't necessarily show up well on the results for a product. For instance, if you've got a cotton t-shirt, right? But you never tell somebody that it's cotton and you just say, hey, we got this t-shirt, and somebody's looking for cotton t-shirts, you're not going to show up.

You know, so I mean it's kind of simple, but it's like, you know, if you've got different things for different products that have different types of zippers or different types of capability from waterproofing or you know, wind protection or different things and you use words that are trademark type words or branding type words that are that mean something to someone.

Ian Andersen (20:46.974)

Right.

Mark Barnum (21:16.224)

and don't necessarily convey what it actually is, you know, you you run into a disconnect, right? And AI doesn't know what to do with it. It's not going to go do the extra effort and find out that, you know, whiz bang means, you know, great great windproofing. It won't do it, right? It it just and we ran into that a lot with Burton because in a lot of cases, you know, the branding the branding language

Ian Andersen (21:20.989)

Right.

Ian Andersen (21:33.373)

Sure.

Mark Barnum (21:43.628)

was not necessarily representative of what the product actually was doing, you know. And so it it was really great language from a branding perspective. I mean, it was it was immersive and you had to be in the know, but from a AI engine telling the AI engine what this product is good at compared to some other product, it's not conveying that. And then that's the disconnect, right? You get you run into that a lot. so yeah, everybody's data is not great. It needs to be better.

Ian Andersen (22:05.374)

Sure.

Ian Andersen (22:11.824)

Yeah. a use case I ran into recently was regarding the color of products and the way the what site would convey it was through imagery, right? And you could have a to use your cotton shirt, you could have a red

picture of a red cotton shirt. So clearly you sell red cotton shirts, but it doesn't necessarily say red in there, right? and an AI just crawling the data isn't necessarily going to connect those dots. It might see an image of a red shirt and it might read, we sell cotton shirts, but it might not necessarily connect that. So if I go type in where can I buy a good red cotton shirt, you know, it it may or may not.

connect those dots and and you might get skipped over, right?

Mark Barnum (23:04.632)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean and all the different variations of the names of colors of red, you know, and and all of that, like wine, roja, you know, it's it's it's just so many different ways that you can kind of convey the color in in words, but not necessarily convey the color from a consistency and engine perspective. It it's a hard problem.

Ian Andersen (23:09.534)

Sure.

Ian Andersen (23:29.278)

Hm. Yeah, for sure. And with the div with AI advancing so rapidly, you're kinda every time you're learning something, you know, it's now evolved to to something else, right? So

Mark Barnum (23:43.928)

Yeah, no, it's there's definitely you're you're chasing the wind a bit, which is tricky.

Ian Andersen (23:48.568)

Yeah. So that okay, so we've we've kinda started to touch on this a little bit, but something you mentioned earlier about sort of the the executive teams, you know, probably surfing LinkedIn seeing all these headlines about AI transformed my business, you know, made three times ROI in two months, you know, kind of kind of

attention grabbing headlines and and go to their team and say, okay, we need AI. what are what are some of the mistakes and it and it can be AI related, it can be something else. What what are some mistakes that you see retailers making with tech decisions? or, you know, another way to ask this is when they come to you and say, I want X, Y, and Z and you know they really need A, B, C, you know, what are

What are some of those some of those types types of things you see?

Mark Barnum (24:49.827)

You know, I I see people on antiquated tech stacks that are just eating all of their money, you know. and and they're either self-hosted or they're developing internally. And having done that at Burton, I know the overhead of keeping ahead of the Joneses as far as that goes, you know. And with AI, it's just exacerbated. you have these technical platforms like Shopify and Salesforce that

both you know integrate directly to these AI engines and you don't have to do much. You know, you just have to flip a switch or you know create a feed or do some things, right? It's not too bad versus having to build all that from scratch, you know, and that exercise becomes a problem, you know, and and you know, even just recently, just yesterday, you know, with the PHP problem, vulnerability that was you know surfaced, you know,

It's coming for all the technology platforms and and and so you think about how to insulate yourself from the risk of of that and the way to do that is to go with a bigger player or a platform that you trust. And having had issues with some of the other some of the smaller platforms before, it's just you know, it's it's not

a good fit, especially for some of the hosted ones. Like Magento, you can host yourself, right? Which means you own you own the hardware, you own a version of the software that may or may not be current current. You may have customized that software. And to get it not only up to speed but updated to the latest version of a of a a latest version that is actually able to combat the security vulnerable vulnerability, you're talking about

potentially weeks of downtime or weeks of risk where your site is is in a state where it is vulnerable and you're you're basically behind the eight ball. There's nothing you can do. You just got to wait and you got to do the work and then you got to imply it. And then the costs are the costs and the risk are are astronomical and and difficult to swallow. And so I would recommend people to take a look, take another look and say, okay, well

Mark Barnum (27:13.986)

You know, what's the safest play here? Well, it's it's probably a Shopify or a Salesforce, you know. It's just it just is. You know, you've got a a risk profile that that is something that would be automatically taken care of with these software as a service options and versus what you've got now. And you know, on on top of the fact that it was stuff that we were talking about earlier, but AI, you know, checkbox and then also, you know, performance, you know, as you

Ian Andersen (27:18.631)

Right.

Mark Barnum (27:41.717)

as you convert over from these older tech stacks, you know, moving to a new tech stacks, you can actually tackle the performance and the and the optimization for mobile like out of the box and and that's exciting. so I I think it's prime time to take the opportunity to take a look at moving.

Ian Andersen (28:00.902)

Sure. So when is replatforming the right call? I mean, we've discussed l obviously there's some some like examples that are are pretty blatant, right? You have a older self built tech stack in-house, you know, it's it's time to move, right? It's time to get on. But but there's probably some kind of in the middle of a bit of a coin flip. When when do you make that decision?

Mark Barnum (28:26.178)

Yeah.

Mark Barnum (28:29.792)

I think you take a look at where you're at currently with all the pieces. And actually having done this at Burton, it's it's a matrix. You build you build a pros cons list, but the list has changed, you know, over time. Now it's like, okay, well, how many people do I need to make my site work? You know, and then new state, old state. I mean, because in a lot of cases, some of these some of these

sites are manageable by a much smaller team going forward because you don't have to have the IT staff to do, you know, kind of the the lift the the heavy lifting on the hardware or any of that. You don't have the security, you know, you got to build up your your matrix to include the risk stuff that we were talking about, the automatic AI pieces that we were talking about. And then you take a look at the opportunity cost for that and the potential ROI, you know, it it

is an easy case to make in most cases. If you if you're living on one of these other platforms, it's probably a good idea. And then, you know, for other companies that are maybe bigger, that are looking at things like headless and different things from an experience standpoint and or integration to kiosk or point of sale and those integrations from an enterprise standpoint.

You know, at some point it becomes a good idea to take a really good look at this because an integrated omni channel platform, which both Shopify and Salesforce has, is something you should take a look at pretty heavily if you have a retail presence at all. and or B2B presence. You know, the the Shopify B2B experience, you know, B2B platforms used to be pretty horrible.

Ian Andersen (30:13.544)

Sure.

Mark Barnum (30:23.695)

from an experience standpoint. It it was bad. But with the Shopify version that there is now, you know, it's it's the same technology and and theming that is used on the on the front end site. And so you have the ability to market to that channel, to have it work on mobile, to have it, you know, have all the capabilities of a very robust B2B system. And it's pennies on the dollar. It's pretty, pretty impressive and pretty pretty exciting.

Ian Andersen (30:52.094)

For sure.

Mark Barnum (30:56.354)

Yeah, so anyway, I I as far as answering that question, I I think it's probably a good exercise to do on a periodic basis if you're on some of these other platforms. And even if you're on a single platform, you know, when you get up to that renewal point, you should kick the tires. And and maybe it's a maybe it's just a gut check and you you spend a couple hours on it and just make sure that you're not missing anything. But in a lot of cases, that'll give you some time.

to understand what has happened on the on your platform that you're not taking advantage of, right? What that you can incorporate into next year's plan, et cetera. So yeah, I think there's some good things there.

Ian Andersen (31:38.728)

Very much.

Ian Andersen (31:46.153)

So what what's something that you're surprised when when somebody comes in and either wants to talk about potentially replatforming or updating or or even even starting in you know, starting from scratch a brand new system? what's something people are unaware of? Either they haven't been told it by other e-commerce agencies or are just

Surprised to hear about it, for the first time from you.

Mark Barnum (32:18.658)

Let me let me reframe that question a little bit. So in in certain cases, in in a lot of cases,

Ian Andersen (32:21.49)

Okay, fair enough.

Mark Barnum (32:30.254)

People want to bring over what they know from before or what they're comfortable with. And I think that's a bad idea. and and the reason is is that

Mark Barnum (32:49.313)

If you just replicate what you've done in the past, you're not moving forward. You're living in the past. And in order to get adoption with the new system that you have, you should give that system a chance so that you understand the the awesomeness of it or potential awesomeness of it. And and and also understand what the what the drawbacks are so that then you can operate from a

a situation of where you are at launch. And so I I recommend people do an iterative approach because these websites we want to we want to think about them as a big bang type of project. And in a lot of cases because of budgets and different things. But realistically it's it's it should be launch with a with an MVP, you know, only what you absolutely have to have, you know.

And and make it fast, optimized, and integrated to everything that you need to be. Those are the big pieces, right? And then start incrementally adding in phase one, phase two, phase three, or or phase two, phase three, phase, phase four, et cetera, or just ongoing to incorporate things that you want to then extend a platform on, but within the context of that platform. So we get a lot of cases where people just want to say, you know what?

But just copy what we had. And I always I always think that's a a bad approach, right? And and maybe not bad, but a miseducated, undereducated approach, I guess, you know, because they're not the same. These systems are not the same. They're they operate differently. They have different strengths and weaknesses. And unless you understand the strengths and weaknesses, you're not going to be operating at the at the

Ian Andersen (34:22.984)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Barnum (34:46.722)

greatest efficiency that you could be. And I think that's kind of the drawback of kind of doing the the copy copy direct over. and I I think you need to understand that, adhere to that, and then hold the line on that because people will want to, you know, people that are used to a certain way are like, hey, we need to copy this over. And I I always I always struggle against that thinking, that line of thinking. It's just self defeating.

Ian Andersen (35:03.836)

Mm.

Ian Andersen (35:16.786)

Yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean if you're gonna pay for the new tech, you might as well use it, right? Like

Mark Barnum (35:23.554)

And it's a cheaper implementation. You get live faster. You know, it it it it actually works for a lot of people. And I mean it kind of goes to you know, it's probably not what I should say. You know, we i i i if I want to build more, I we should build the hut build the exact site, you know. We could we can absolutely make that work for another forty hours or eighty hours, or you know what, that's two months. And you know, people be like, Okay, but that's not an educated okay, and that's not

Ian Andersen (35:25.16)

Sure. Yeah.

Ian Andersen (35:38.024)

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Barnum (35:51.309)

how we want to live, right? It doesn't make sense for us from a from an ethical standpoint. I I prefer to get people going, understand their new platform and and work through the struggles of that change. and and really understand what they're getting. So yeah, it's good.

Ian Andersen (36:06.098)

Yeah, well and and you know, as as you were talking about earlier, the the reputational benefits you get from doing not only good work but providing that honest counsel, even when it means taking taking a bit of a short term haircut, builds much longer lasting relationships, right? And

Mark Barnum (36:29.388)

It it it's never been about I mean, obviously we wanna make a living, but you know, I we wanna help people. I mean, like like and helping people in an honest way, you know, giving our now they can always say no. They can always say, Hey, this has to happen. That's fine. We're good. You know, we're just giving our counsel, but like, you know, in the end it's it's about integrity. I I just don't believe in in yeah. I I don't believe in doing things just because we can.

I believe in doing things because we should and that's really important to how we run the company. yeah.

Ian Andersen (37:07.794)

That's that's great. All right. So as we get close to to wrapping things up, I want to do just kind of a quick lightning round with you of of topics that spring to mind when you hear what's one piece of advice you'd give a retailer who's about to sign a a contract with the agency. Any agency, not just Redv.

Mark Barnum (37:32.878)

talk to the references. absolutely talk to the references. You know, I I would also say understand and and I can go forever for this one, but like understand what you're getting, you know, understand how the company works. You know, one of the things that we do that not many people do is that you get to know the people that are working for you. And and that is not to be

Ian Andersen (37:37.502)

All right.

Mark Barnum (38:02.476)

underestimated about how effective that abil that access is. In a lot of cases, you are gate kept. You have you see a project manager and maybe an architect and that is it. You don't see the people actually working on your project. You don't talk to them. and there's a a level of disconnection that I think causes issues that

are manageable, you know, the these companies do good work. They're fine. But I think one of the things the access capability for us is is really important for the continuity of the the relationships. You know, they know that their dog barks when the UPS man comes to the door, you know, and and that's annoying, but you know, it's all good. Or they know if they have a baby or a cat that walks in the background, you know.

Ian Andersen (38:47.87)

Right, right.

Mark Barnum (38:55.732)

And and that's okay also, you know, 'cause it's it's it's life, you know, the you're working with people. We're we're a smaller company, but we are people first. but we also do great work. and so the transparency really is important for us. And and you know, from that perspective, know what you're getting, you know, from from the

Ian Andersen (38:58.888)

Yeah.

Ian Andersen (39:16.582)

That makes sense. That that that brings to mind the the difference between thinking of a one off project versus a long term you know.

opportunity to to have a continuous improvement.

Mark Barnum (39:33.401)

Yeah, I mean in the end, it it's me talking to people to try to get them to work with us. But I'm not doing the work, you know. And so I trust my people. We have awesome people. all the people that have worked here over the years have been great. And and but part of that greatness is my trust to put them in front of that the client and make sure that they're able to communicate in a way that that allows us to get the work done.

in an efficient way and and that that transparency is is really part of our DNA. It's great stuff.

Ian Andersen (40:08.304)

sure. I don't know how lightning that was, but all right, let's end let's end on on well one more in two parts. what is the most overhyped thing in in commerce tech right now and the most underrated?

Mark Barnum (40:13.026)

Yeah, sorry. I'll try to be quicker.

Mark Barnum (40:28.556)

No, performance is the most underrated. you just look at your stats. I I'm a data guy. that's definitely the most underrated. overrated, I I say part of it is just the hype on A AI. It's it's coming, but man, it it hallucinates still. I mean, it it's it's amazing, amazing technology, but it is not a full on replacement for people in a lot of cases. Does it make it more efficient? Yes.

But you still have to have a brain. You still have to know what what you've gotta be directing the the chaos and and also holding things accountable. that's key.

Ian Andersen (41:12.05)

Yeah, no, I hear ya. I you know, we've we've said it a few times. It it can make things faster, but it can't necessarily replace, right? Like it it still requires the the willpower to and and thought process to to go into directing it. Yeah. No, I I feel yeah. So well Mark, I I really appreciate you doing this. I

Defin this is something I've wanted to to start up since coming on to Redvan. I've been blown away by the people that that work here. Just their skill and intelligence as well as just general friendliness is always refreshing. and definitely want to thank you for being being such a big part of that. something I would like to accomplish with this podcast is

I don't want to make it a another sales tool per se. I don't want us to sit here and tout, you know, how amazing and and basically be a constant infomercial and give out like good actionable advice to anyone who's even remotely related to the the e commerce industry or is just curious about it from enterprise organizations down to somebody wanting to

you know, start up a merch shop for whatever side business they got going on. so with that in mind, what's something you'd like to leave with a listener with for for getting into or continuing in the commerce technology world?

Mark Barnum (43:02.566)

I would say don't trust everything you hear and do your own research. it's key. And some of these platforms they're super easy to get off the ground, but not as easy to get to enterprise level. And so, you know, there's a there's a gap. And and so, you know, don't be afraid to work with somebody, but also you need to check your their bodifides.

to make sure that they're legit and actually gonna bring what you want to bring.

Ian Andersen (43:36.862)

Awesome. That makes sense. All right. Well, Mark, well thank you very much. I really appreciate your time today.

Mark Barnum (43:42.019)

Thanks Ian. We'll talk to you.