A TikTok PM’s Top Tips For Successful Ecommerce Platform Development (with Jeff Orange)

Read The Transcript:

Hannah Clark: I think product people have to be at least a little bit obsessed with user behavior to thrive in this industry. But in the world of e-commerce, customer obsession needs to be a way of life. This is a space where your UX has to do some literal heavy lifting—as in lifting thousands of human beings off the couch to fetch their credit cards. So you can only imagine the level of strategic sophistication that a successful e-commerce platform demands, and who better to speak to that than our guest today. 

Jeff Orange is a Product Manager at TikTok on the brand's global commerce team, and has served in a host of product roles at major brands like Levi Strauss, GoPro, Gap, and Dick's Sporting Goods. In other words, you could say he knows a thing or two about e-commerce, and as you're about to hear, the present moment is a fascinating time to be focused on this space. Jeff is about to share some real golden nuggets with his do's and don'ts of developing e-commerce platforms, and towards the end, you'll hear his practical tips for overcoming barriers to purchasing and the emerging trends in forming the future of ecomm. Let's jump in. 

Welcome back to The Product Manager podcast! I am excited today to be joined by Jeff Orange. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Jeff Orange: Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited to come in and talk to you guys. 

Hannah Clark: Yeah, so we'll kick it off the way we always do. 

And I'd love if you could tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are at TikTok today.

Jeff Orange: Yeah. So, originally from Southern Indiana, that's where I spent the first 30 years of my life. And after I finished up my undergrad in Southern Indiana, I always wanted to go into graduate school. It was a tossup between law school and doing my MBA, just because I had kids at the time and MBA would have a faster ROI. I ultimately went with the MBA and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, first time moving outside of my core family base.

Lived in Pittsburgh for about six years, worked at Dick's Sporting Goods as my first e-commerce job straight out of graduate school. And then had the opportunity to move out to the Bay Area where I lived for about the past eight to ten years. And I've worked at multiple different DTC e-commerce firms such as Levi's, Gap, Fanatics, GoPro, and a couple others sprinkled in there.

Hannah Clark: Very impressive resume. 

We'll be focusing on developing e-commerce platforms today, but first let's kick it off with just something a little bit more general, a bird's eye view of the product space from your perspective. So what do you see as the state of product management today? 

Jeff Orange: Marty. I think that's probably the best way that I could say it. Everyone has an interpretation and there's always, I think, the desire for everyone that comes in product management wants to go with that Marty Cagan model to where essentially, you know, you're very much that owner of the product and you're focused on the user and everything like that. Maybe, maybe not working directly with the engineering teams, but it literally every job that I've been at, product management means something completely different. 

There's those jobs where I'm directly with multiple scrum teams working on multiple projects. Then there's the next job where it's 100% about gathering the user data to ultimately build requirements and so forth and so on and hand it off to the engineering teams. And, you know, everything in between building business cases is, you know, another kind of aspect where it's just a completely different job of this is what you do here. It's very fragmented. It's very different. I feel like product management is a title is kind of almost come like what data analysts used to be.

But, you know, hopefully there's conformity back around what that role looks like long term. 

Hannah Clark: So let's talk a little bit about the buying patterns of users in 2024. I know it's very close to you as someone working in e-commerce area of TikTok. So what do you see as the key trends and challenges for e-commerce products right now?

Jeff Orange: I would say the key trends that kind of pop off of my mind, obviously, I work at TikTok and I'm on the TikTok shop team, so social commerce. There's been a couple of really big efforts and products and processes that have been launched with other large e-commerce brands, you know, with obviously Meta and Instagram have their own shopping platform, but I don't think anyone's really nailed it.

And, you know, that's where I'm super excited to be part of TikTok, just because I feel like what we're doing is we're not necessarily just offering a new way of shopping to customers, but kind of changing the way the shopping experiences with customers. It's very much about the user with us, and I think based on that, we're going to really make a lot of headway in that area.

And I think social commerce is finally something that's starting to resonate and build here in the U.S. It's on fire everywhere in most Asian countries. So it's just a matter of how do we translate that back over into what works in the U.S. And I think that that's probably a really big one. And it's uncharted territory, too.

You know, I mean, again, Meta and Facebook have those options out there, but not really kind of like what I think that looks like long term. Also, a really important aspect to me is marketplaces, kind of similar to social commerce and the fact that I've spent probably the past 12 years of my career in product management, building D2C sites and they're trying to fight off against Amazon.

And that's obviously not work. I mean, it's work from the perspective of we've established a lot of value in the D2C sites, but it's a different world that we live in now. And I would say right now, it's like having a diversified strategy for how you reach your customers, not only through social markets, through marketplaces and so forth and so on, but just kind of really having the right mix of that that works for your brand. D2C sites could potentially at some point just be marketing sites, you know, that seems where it's kind of starting to head and I'm bought into the idea of marketplaces now, obviously.

I think the last thing that's really important is obviously AI. AI is contributing in every facet of our life, and it's going to continue to grow in that way. You know, what I've done in the past with AI is obviously building chatbots to have conversations with customers. I remember way back in 2015 we tried a a chat bot and it was just having a conversation that you could obviously tell wasn't meeting the needs of the customers. 

But with the improvements and transitions that have happened in the AI level, it's, you can't really tell the difference between an AI bot and an actual agent on the other end. And that's solved a huge problem for e-commerce because owning and operating a customer service center is really expensive.

And if you're able to take that whole piece of pie and chunk out at least 30-40% of that for FAQs that a bot can answer, that drastically reduces your costs and also answers the customer's questions much more fast. So I think just continued growth in that area and finding out what those new use cases are for AI is what it's going to be a lot of change in commerce over the next few years.

Hannah Clark: I'd say all that tracks. 

So let's dive into what I'm considering to be the fun part—the do's and don'ts. I love a do. I love a don't of developing e-commerce platforms. So let's start with the do's. What are the do's of developing e-commerce platforms in 2024? 

Jeff Orange: Luckily, I've had the benefit of completely rebuilding websites at three different companies. One was Dick's Sporting Goods, one was Levi's, and then, oh, some of the GoPro as well. GoPro was the one I consider my favorite just because it was like, you know, my team initiated it, saw it from beginning to end, and I had so much experience learning from previous efforts to rewrite websites or, you know, make improvements to websites.

And the number one thing that I think is really important whenever you're going through that is number one, obviously outlining and aligning with everyone in your organization that is a decision maker on what the goals of the project are. For us at GoPro, it was, you know, we had some very strategic business initiatives that we wanted to accomplish, such as being able to offer a subscription service as part of the buying process for the product and including that in sort of a bundle. And that was something that we just weren't able to do with our existing infrastructure and front end. So, with that, I think the number one thing is align on those goals. 

Because the goals that product had in mind, whenever we were doing this, it was faster website, mobile friendly, better user experience to remove those barriers to purchase for the customers. Management's goal is increased traffic, increased revenue, and include this new subscription service. So just really building that plan out at the beginning and make sure that there was alignment before you kind of dive down that path of what that development's going to look like is hugely important to the success of your product.

Secondly, anytime that I think that you're rebuilding a e-commerce site usually means that you're applying a new front end that's associated that as well. A strong UX presence is really important. And the reason I say that is UX and QA are two of my favorite teams to work with because they protect me as a product manager.

UX tells me this is how you need to do it in order to bring value to the customer and resolve these issues. Like I'll bring the issues, maybe see these data points where people are just falling off. How do we make improvements here? You know, through research and also testing lo-fi and hi-fi options. Ultimately, what you come up with is a really solid path forward if you have a really strong UX team. But that's also, you know, I'm going to kind of toss in the don't there with it. Don't let people take that away from UX. And that happens all the time. And the reason for that is it's a matter of, I am not going to say that I've not been guilty of this before in my life, but I recognize it now and I don't do it as often.

I'm the product manager and I'm like, wouldn't it be better if we just kind of made this adjustment to the user experience? That sometimes works and I'm not saying it's like, you know, never, but for the majority, just trusting your UX team, letting them build that first base experience and going, all right, I trust you guys and allowing them to kind of flourish and then learn and test and improve over time is really, really important.

But starting with that base, that's kind of unadulterated by others outside is really, really important as well. And then also, I think definitely looking at headless is extremely important. Headless e-commerce, I think is going to be the future. And the reason that I say that is because, you know, like essentially what you start with there is it's just a bunch of APIs for your products and purchasing and so forth and so on.

And then you plug on whatever you want on top of there. We had a GoPro. That's what we ultimately transitioned over to was a completely headless front end outside of checkout that was phase two of the project shopping experience all the way from homepage to the cart. And that was all done with a headless CMS and APIs. And what we were able to do is deliver really fast change and easy customizations for our content team. We went from like our project to launch a new device each year with GoPro, went from a six to eight month development period, down to weeks, because it was just configuration.

If you think about that, what you have is just the APIs and you can kind of plug that in anywhere, or you can plug it in your D2C site and you can build a new front end and have a great user experience. Well, this also opens up marketplaces for you and social commerce. And as we start to do more and more experimentation, like there was at one point in time, an effort by Google to be able to run JavaScript in Gmail.

So like potentially even making a purchase in Gmail, you're like, you have to have those core APIs in order to be able to fit in that market and continue the growth that's kind of happening around you. The other thing that I would definitely think of as well is whenever you're starting fresh, it's kind of a new opportunity for you to deliver on the customer experience, not just from a user experience standpoint on the site, but end-to-end flows of what purchasing and having a relationship with your company looks like.

And you have to really, really focus on what are your short term goals versus your long term goals and understand both of those fully and make them fully adaptable. I think so many times that I've worked in product management in DTC commerce firms and it's about short term wins. And what that does is it ultimately erodes away the value of the company and, you know, just kind of takes away from the attractiveness of making a purchase.

So, you know, really understanding what that customer is looking for long term from your company, not just in 3 to 5 minutes that they're on your site trying to make a purchase is really important to ultimately continue that growth and sustainability of your company. 

Hannah Clark: Totally. 

And I think that's a great transition to the don'ts. So tell me a little bit about the don'ts of developing e-commerce platforms today.

Jeff Orange: Yeah. I mean, I probably make some people upset by saying this, but I think don't ignore Shopify. Shopify is obviously been a rocket ship in the e-commerce space for quite some time now. And they've always been pigeonholed as being a small market, mid market solution.

I have a lot of brands right now that are at that very large e-commerce level that are starting to look into Shopify because of the maintained stringency around what the core product is, but then adding flexibility of applications that kind of run around the top of that to further scale your business.

So, yeah, I guess don't sleep on Shopify and other up and coming e-commerce platforms. They are enterprise ready, I think a lot of them. WooCommerce being another one, quite a few different options that are coming out there too. I would say another thing is, don't build something to where you don't have extensibility of your platform.

And the reason I say that is because there's two things that are right on the cusp and sitting right outside of e-commerce right now. And there's been discussions about them over the past couple of years of voice interaction and AR/VR. At some point, someone's going to figure out that right device to where someone's going to be able to come to this site in a virtual environment.

And obviously, clicking something, opening up in a category, and then going to a page, that's going to be completely different. And, you know, you have to have capabilities to be able to support that if and when that ever does come up. And the same thing with voice search, there's got to be at some point, some way for you to be able to communicate audibly with an e-commerce platform to be able to make a purchase.

We're going to move to that at some point, maybe it's a combination of the two. But just being ready and prepared to make sure that you have extensibility of your platform to be able to compensate for that, whenever it does happen, I think is probably really important as well. 

Hannah Clark: I did want to call back to you mentioned removing barriers to purchase is a big initiative. What are some of the strategies that you leverage for overcoming consumer friction points?

Jeff Orange: It's crucial and it's almost silly that you have to say this anymore in today's day and age, but data first. The numbers don't lie. Opinions, everyone has one, but absolutely being able to have proper tracking and a smart team that's able to do advanced analytics on your site and build segmentation to find the actual true issue is by far one of the biggest things that you have to leverage in order to overcome those friction points.

Otherwise it just kind of becomes an opinion kind of situation. And what gets worked on is, yeah, what is it, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. That's usually the VP, CEO, CTO, somebody's dead project that's kind of sitting on top of there, but that's a huge point. I always start with data and then start to go to that next level.

So it's a matter of, you know, you have the data, you have the ideas, then it's a matter of customer interviews is another option to be able to understand, like where is it within this flow that's really kind of causing an issue for you? That isn't always necessarily scalable because, you know, let's say I can't remember the number of orders we would have at Gap, but at Gap, it was, you know, tens of thousands of order an hour.

And if you talk to 10 people, that doesn't necessarily ratio out into, like, a viable data set. So, you know, that's always one that you have, but, like, kind of don't take that as gospel. But what you can do, at least out of that, you take your data, you take the user interviews, and you can come up with some theories that you test.

And that's exactly how you get to the right place with e-commerce, user experience, and unblocking those barriers. Sometimes there are things where it's, you know, very simple and easy to fix, like, you know, oh, okay, well, we should have this field before this field, because from a user experience standpoint, it's much better.

But being able to test your opinions and your theories and then ultimately find what is true is really important. There was one project that I did at Gap, and it was one of my favorite ones that I've ever worked on where we were trying to do a much better job of adding credit card acquisition strategies on the C2C site.

It's like a matter of where is that most effective point to kind of put that in front of a customer? Is it like, Hey, here's 20% off if you buy something today, and then hopefully the customer goes and purchases and uses that card and so forth and so on. Or is it really kind of that point of where they've added everything to cart, they get into cart and they're getting ready to check out. They're like, I'm not sure, but they see this great thing that says 20% off right now, do this and we get you added in there. But adding it in the checkout flow, that's something that you don't do. You don't touch the checkout flow. You got them there.

It's a matter of like, let them convert, let them get through. But my UX team was really stringent on the fact that they said, this is the right place and this is the right acquisition point for this to when the customer is most likely to do this, we believe just based on, you know, thought processes for what we believe the customer is going through.

And we ultimately implemented that as a feature in the checkout flow, we mitigated a lot of the risk that's associated to it by understanding the data and finding those cohorts that we didn't even want to be into this segment. And ultimately, what we found out was that by exposing this option to be able to obtain a credit card in the checkout flow, it actually increased conversion and then also grew AOV because for that specific purchase, that was allowing the customer instead of, Hey, this is coming out of my checking account.

I can put it on the cart and get my 20% off. That also established extreme long term value for us as a company as well, because those people now having a Gap credit card or banana Republic or any of those ultimately are long term investors into the ecosystem. So, yeah, I think that that's just another point to kind of think through that, you know, your assumptions, you think you might know, like, hey, don't do this. Test, learn and fail fast. Fail fast is the number one thing.

Hannah Clark: I'm a big proponent of the user research, so I'm always happy to hear folks getting the XRS some credit as well. And UX teams, they are playing such a critical role. 

Jeff Orange: Oh, a hundred percent. And it's just in that specific example, the UX team was, I had a really powerful team over here that owed them a credit card brand.

The credit card program at Gap is a significant driver of revenue. So that's a very powerful team. And they're sitting here leaning on me, going, We don't like what UX is doing. You know, this is scary to us and this is going to fail. And as a, I think, a good product manager, what it is able to do is just get everybody trust the process, we can iterate, let's keep going with what we agreed to.

And it was super successful that way. Again, just tying back to that, the importance of not only hearing UX, but also trusting them, and it's really, really, really important. 

Hannah Clark: Could not agree more. 

As far as, kind of switching gears a little bit, but where have you seen the most evolution within the e-commerce space in the past year to two years and how do you believe that's informing what's coming next?

Jeff Orange: Two things that immediately come to mind, and I think this has been kind of, you know, around forever, but it's just kind of now it's part of the e-commerce space and that is affiliates. You know, it used to be a matter of you want to have presence on other sites to be able to pull that back in, or you used to want to have the best spokesperson that you possibly can for your brand to represent you on national TV ads, stars, I guess, you know, highly public celebrities.

But the thing is, is it's like, okay, cool, Jennifer Lopez says I should buy this perfume. I should buy this perfume. You know what I mean? It's, it doesn't really carry the same weight, I think, as it used to years ago. And so now what we're looking for is we're looking for our peers to kind of give us that kind of feedback and go, Hey, what's working, what doesn't work, what's good, and what's bad because we have lost a lot of trust in that other system. 

And what affiliate networks bring at that point is it allows you to build relationships with individuals and those individuals, let's say in the scenario, if you see a commercial and we go back and we say, Hey, GoPro is the best camera in the world, and you see a commercial for it. And you're like, okay, yeah, looks cool. But if Jeff comes over to you and he's like, man, I got this GoPro and it's solving so many of my problems. You're like, that's where it really starts to resonate with me as a user. And I'd look at you individual, and we have a relationship now almost. And it's a matter of, I trust you.

And you've built that trust in different levels. And I feel like affiliates is something that you have to build a strong network around and have strong processes around in order to be successful on e-commerce today. 

Hannah Clark: And I have to say that I think that TikTok, the culture of TikTok as a platform is really aligned with that strategy as well. The way that this kind of like culture of lo-fi content that's just so accessible and so peer-driven, it makes it so easy for users to establish relationships with creators.

And I can see that really working at kind of creating some of those habits and forming some of those relationships and getting people kind of used to kind of connecting with some of their peers and kind of perceived peers in a commerce way as well. 

Jeff Orange: Yeah, a hundred percent. And you know, the kind of output there is the fact that it's, you went from a giant blanket to like tons of targeted shop.

I can put out an ad and hopefully it resonates with as many people as possible versus now I kind of am able to do really super targeted marketing by finding those people that resonate with that group and offering revenue, share, whatever that looks like, or if they just want to do it out of their goodness of heart, because there are people out there that do those types of things in order to promote brands and so forth and so on that they care about kind of more in a philanthropic way. But I'm a philanthropist at heart. So yeah, it's a completely different way of looking at marketing and communicating with customers for sure.

The other thing that I think is really important thing that's happened over the past couple of years, and it's a trend that I hope to see continuing moving is live commerce. It's been around for a really long time. We all know the QVC model and whether you enjoy it or don't enjoy it, it's a hugely powerful model to be able to interact with customers.

Whenever it was QVC, it was people would call in. Well, now on TikTok Shop, I run a live. I show and I demo the product and then I answer and interact with those customers directly in real time. And that is like really huge because you can put out a product page with the description and different sorts of data that's on there to help that customer be able to make a decision.

But 90% of us are like, well, does it do this? Or how does mobile or what is it made of or different things like that? Is it going to solve my problem? And being able to have that real conversation one to one with a customer, it's not a matter of I'm talking to you and I'm getting you to buy that product. But I'm engaging with you and then you're educating, not just yourself on that product, but everyone else that's listening and kind of really bring it in that value.

It's an extremely interesting space for me, and I think it's going to continue to grow and be a really positive influence in the e-commerce purchase experience. 

Hannah Clark: It's a fascinating area because I think right now, just the future of live as a feature is very interesting. It's such an interesting way of communicating between creators and users.

But to kind of put it in that kind of commerce lens, like I can see just massive potential for try-ons and some of the ways that brands are already trying to create content that's a little bit more static. And then to make that interactive is just like you're really opening up this whole other realm of being able to shop almost as if it's in person, but via the platform.

It's just really fascinating to me as well. 

Jeff Orange: It's a vulnerable process because you're putting yourself out there and you're really kind of putting your neck on the line. And I think, what the success that TikToks abroad is based on genuineness and trust and continuing that same process there. It's like, just really a better feeling purchasing process, in my opinion.

Hannah Clark: I tend to agree. I think in general, I just really admire just the culture that TikTok is built with users and creators in general. I think it's something really cool. It's really something amazing guys are doing there. 

Well, Jeff, thank you so much for chatting with me today. It's been really fascinating to hear your perspectives on everything and get a little bit of a peek behind the curtain. Where can people follow you online? 

Jeff Orange: Just connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on there, and I'm hoping to do a lot more of these in the future. 

Hannah Clark: We'll see you soon. 

Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The Product Manager wherever you get your podcasts.