Name: Holiday-proof your tech stack: Ecommerce automation for peak season
Uploaded: 2025-09-18T18:04:12.992Z
Duration: 47 min 8 s
Description: Holiday-proof your tech stack: Ecommerce automation for peak season

Transcript for "Holiday-proof your tech stack: Ecommerce automation for peak season": Welcome, everyone, to our webinar today, Holiday Proof Your Tech Stack through ecommerce automation for peak season. We've got, a a a really great group of three speakers today. We're gonna bring some some deep expertise on on ecommerce technology. And we have everything from the agency, consulting side covered, fulfillment services, as well as from the the technology and operation side from from within a brand. But before we, move forward with that and introductions, let's just, take care of a kind of few house cleaning housekeeping items here. First one is that, I'm the host today. I'm Mark Simon, VP of strategy at Soligo. Soligo, if you're not, familiar with us, we are a integration platform that is the the leading in mid market, integration in Small brands that are that are just getting started out as well. A couple things here, as we as we move forward. If you want to reach out to us after, you view the webinar, just go to the top right hand corner. There's a it's a black button in the top right corner as well as we have some assets, that are that we make available to you, in the docs tab on on the right hand side. And, excellent, we've our our speakers have joined us, and I'll go ahead and hand it off, for introductions. Let let's start with you, Daniel. You're at the top of my screen. Hi there. I'm Dan. I'm VP of operations at We. We're an for elimination company. I have everything from, fulfillment to orders to API to integration to, production as well. Excited to talk to you all today. Excellent. Lauren? Thanks, Steve. I'm the general manager for multichannel solutions, which falls within Walmart's fulfillment services. And I'm excited to speak with you all today about fulfillment. Excellent. And, finally, Matt. I'm Matt Howard. I'm the VP of Teddi for CQL. We are an enterprise ecommerce agency. Been in business about thirty years. I personally have been doing this since about '98 on half a dozen different platforms. We do a lot of Shopify these days. We also do, some SFCC and some commerce work. Excited to to get into it with everybody today. Thank you. Well, welcome to to all three of you. Really appreciate, you, Daniel, Lauren, and and Matt as part of the pan panel, and and thank you. So with that, let's go ahead and, kinda jump in with with our first question here. Matt, I'll I'll direct this, to you. From what you see out there in industry, how does black how did the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales differ from from typical selling seasons? And and with that, are there any key insights that you can you can share from last year? I mean, historically, they differ from the rest of the season on the volume. But in the age of viral marketing, become less true. I think the main thing that they differ on is the stakes. There are so many companies we encounter companies that do 80% of their entire year's revenue in that six week period wrapped around those dates. So in the past, we just spent a lot of time talking about traffic volumes, but you kinda have to be ready for that all year now. It really is around the stakes. The sort of converse side of looking at that is something we saw last year, And it was companies, even knowing how big these stakes were, being willing to make bigger bets, take bigger risks than I think they did in years past. They were willing to take a marketing plan that they had set out set out over the previous six months before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and see trends in the market in those coming weeks and make changes to that marketing plan, that promotional plan, the way they're rolling out that product within just a few days beforehand in ways partially enabled by the agility of these modern platforms, but also partially just because the comp the competitive landscape has gotten so aggressive. Excellent. That's that's very, very insightful that that you you bring up that that agility. Are you seeing, the companies that you're working with seeking out more and more agility, or is that just a a byproduct of adopting these modern tools? I think that it's among the main things that they're pushing for in moving to more SaaS offerings. The reasons why Shopify has been successful. The reason why SFCC was successful. The reason why I think Walmart is pushing the direction they are is companies that were having to do all this with custom software, that were having to do all this with their own iron, couldn't move fast enough to have that agility. And so they're looking to ecommerce platforms like that and tools like Soligo to let them have that agility as one of their top line requirements when they're looking to upgrade their stacks. Very good. Excellent. A question for you, Daniel, and I know you've been through a a number of of, Black Friday and Cyber Mondays at, at Parese. So you've definitely, had your been through the the trial by fire there for sure. And and with your experience there, you know, what what systems or or integrations have typically cracked under under that pressure, that those volume spikes like Matt was talking about? And and what type of IT led fixes, have have that you've seen have made the biggest difference in that? Yeah. For sure. I I think cracks wise where we saw the most challenges was, you know, about six, seven years ago, we had disruption where our inventory levels weren't balanced with what was being shown online. So customers are suddenly able to order inventory that in reality didn't exist. Right? So that was a huge problem. We had to mitigate that with a lot of customer service fixes and things like that. So in the years since, we've really shored up those, those crucial pipelines of inventory and the order flow, especially. I think from from my perspective, the biggest thing you can do is make sure that, you know, you're not pummeling your system continuously throughout the entire weekend. You know, we normally run our flow something like once an hour, so that might be just too much for the system to handle during that time of year. So you're getting into, like, the deep weeds there. Like, the concurrency that you have available to you or, like, what what systems do you have in place on the on both sides of things, on both sides of the integration to make sure you're leveraging everything effectively. Awesome. Great great perspective. And and so key takeaway there is I'm hearing make sure that you do your your your tuning. Tune your systems. Don't don't leave anything, hanging out there for, to be to go from maybe a minor irritation at lower volume that could become a major problem at much higher volume. Yeah. Absolutely. I think, you know, that time of year is everything is magnified. So things that you're leaving behind to fix later become much bigger problems when you're faced with a 10 x volume crunch all of a sudden. So yeah. Completely. Excellent. Now now that brings up Daniel, as you mentioned the, some of the inventory, concerns and problems you've had in the past and how that's that's impacted the business. That naturally makes me think of, Warren and Walmart's perspective from a from a fulfillment services aspect. And and so I'm curious, Warren, what because that that that synchronization of that inventory, obviously, that's that's critical with your any type of fulfillment service you're you're using. So, you know, what's really the most common gap that you see in in sellers' preparation for the holidays? Yeah. It all comes down to timing. So holiday just seems to be earlier and earlier every year. And speaking to Walmart fulfillment services, which we call WFS for short, our holiday cutoff to have inventory avail in time for those very first holiday events, is October 1. That's that so that planning ahead, making sure you're you're you're addressing those cut offs. You know, for those of, our audience that may be less familiar with with, WFS, could you give us a, like, a quick overview, and and how does it help support, sellers during these high volume, seasons? Yeah. So, WFS enables sellers to take advantage of one of the world's largest supply chain networks to get orders in the hands of customers quickly. So through WFS, sellers benefit from two business day shipping, which we've seen lead to 50% GMV growth on average, for items with Walmart fulfilled or two day shipping tax. There are no numbers or maximums, and we offer dedicated seller support, returns, robust data with inventory recommendations, and plenty of resources to help sellers get started. And as of September, we opened that capability to support off Walmart orders as well, when we launch multichannel solutions, which we call MCS for short. Fantastic. Sounds like sounds like a a lot of, a lot of methods that you can help help sellers, re reach their customers. Fantastic. And this kind of brings me back to to another question I was thinking about, which is, I'll direct to you, Matt. For IT leaders, what do you think which technology investments here, really you think deliver the biggest payoffs in ensuring that uptime, data accuracy during peak? I mean, where the where should they where should they focus efforts? The answer these days is analytics. It's it's front end. It's traffic volume analytics. And in the past, there was a lot of focus on the server side tools, on watching logs, on trying to see the instrumentation around the hosting and the hint instrumentation around the infrastructure. But with so much of this functionality outsourced to platform vendors, outsourced to fulfillment vendors, outsourced to your search and merge vendors, outsourced to your loyalty and UGC vendors, so much of the actual running of that infrastructure is no longer under your control, and you don't have access to that data. So the actual sales data, the the GA, the Adobe Analytics, whatever you're using to drive that, having real time visibility into that is going to be the only way that you meaningfully have to spot some of these issues in real time to get in connection with those vendors, to get these things fixed, to change your campaign. Most of these vendors do pretty well with the actual traffic spikes, but that doesn't mean that you're not going to have human error introduced into some of these systems under the the high pressure. And if you leave a campaign up for six or eight hours that was even 10% less, that can have a market impact on your above the line numbers for the entire year. So really having spending all that you can to make sure that your analytics is really, really accurate. Having server side analytics, not just browser side analytics, so that if the browsers change things on you in the last minute, you still have valuable data, is gonna be the best thing you can do to prevent, a belly flop at the last minute. Preventing the belly flop. Well put. Now and I think this is you bring up a really interesting point there with the transition to more modern SaaS products. And and I think this is something for that differs a lot. I know in the brand that that we work with at Solido and see because we see the whole spectrum. So everything from, say, there there's a lot of sort of your our modern brands that we see. Honestly, they're such such a born in the cloud. They're thinking about this innately. But maybe some of the legacy what I see often see brands coming in that have more traditional IT approaches and now are doing maybe direct to consumer selling, you know, relatively new to them. Some of these concepts are are are kinda new. I think that's important because what you're with the analytics that you talk about, sometimes they see very different expectations from companies about how they leverage their in analytics, to enhance their sales. And could you talk a little bit about what's the right expectation for the, essentially, the availability of those analytics and and and time delays. Is that is that looking is that a matter of looking at these things once a week or once a month for those sellers, or is it, it does it look much different than that? No. It looks much different than that. And to to first address one of your earlier points that and we're talking to a lot of capital e enterprise brands that are moving to the software solution almost by necessity point. Some of the TCOs and some of these models are are really compelling. And so a lot of the these very large brands that have traditionally had very DIY enterprise stacks Yep. Are I mean, some of them are going all the way to Shopify. They're going to the full ecommerce platform. But even if they're not going that far, they are doing it for search and merge. They are doing it for fulfillment. They are doing it for all of these other services, and they are losing some of the visibility into those pieces. That's not a a big thing of what an agency is is bringing to these companies in in this modern era is around the change management that you described. This is really moving from Android to Apple or from Mac to Windows for a lot of these enterprise brands. It's not that the things are that different, but none of the buttons are where you think they should be. So it's a very different shift in thinking. And if you're a brand that's in the process of going through these things, know that it just takes a little bit of time for it to sort of wash over you and for you to know where to reach for each of those things. But the pace of this has changed substantially, and you don't have a choice. Thinking monthly is is absurd at this point. It's more you're looking in the morning, you're looking at lunchtime, you're looking in the afternoon. You have some real time monitoring set up on those analytics so that you know within minutes if something is off. And the bigger your sales volume is, the more quickly you'll be able to detect even small aberrations in that data to let you act on them right away. Fantastic. That's and that that's really key key perspective because these expectations have changed a lot over the last five to ten years around analytics and the availability, but the the foundation for having those types of analytics is having your data where you need it to be. Good data, good processes, integration to support that. So that's that's definitely what we're seeing across across our 3,000 ecommerce customers as well, the the same exact thing. With that, let's, let's kinda go to our second topic here, which is the, you know, really a promotion orchestration and and risk area. I'll I'll bring a bring a question for you over to you, Daniel. Coordinating market marketing promotions often strains, IT systems. We've got API call spikes that can go up really quickly, inventory visibility gaps. You mentioned those earlier. How do you balance the the agility with system stability when all these things are are changing? You're you're in you're in the middle of all that. How do how do you how do you balance that every day? I think it just comes back to good communication. You know, I think we found that, you know, if you're very siloed in your process, especially, like, in IT, you know, there's a tendency there to silo that process a bit more away. Like, all parts of the company need to have visibility to what the marketing plan is, and they need to have it early. And then you need to not be afraid, you know, as was mentioned earlier, to move on to you may have a plan a, a plan b, but, like, don't be afraid to move on to c, d, e, and a chain. Right? Like, as your inventory depletes and as a promotion that you didn't expect does better and better than you could have ever expected, you know, be prepared to to switch gears and that that all starts back at the communication with other departments to make sure that everybody's walking in lock step and that, you know, as the marketing plans change, you're already ready with a solution on, at least for me, on the operation side of things. Right? So I I think a lot of it comes down to communication. Good. Excellent. Excellent point. Getting getting the team all of the teams working together on the same page. And and I like that idea you mentioned of having the backup plans in place, those those additional promotions at the ready, to go. That that makes a lot of sense. Matt, what are, what are best practices that you recommend for IT teams to to manage that that the risk tolerance, the the how how do they balance and and for balancing stability with the flexibility that that leaders demand. Yeah. What what are your recommendations there? It's it's that you really need somebody with some authority in the room to to sort of be the designated contrarian, whether that's a systems integrator, whether that's somebody on the team. You sort of know what your organizational culture is. Are you going to have your 13 campaigns set up and you're gonna know them September 10. And you're gonna follow that plan, and you're gonna execute it blindly. And you're not gonna use the agility that comes from these modern tools. So do you need somebody on the team then to sit there and push us? Do we need to rethink this? This isn't working. We need to change this. And it needs to be somebody that actually has enough clout in the room to get people to question some of these things. That doesn't mean that you completely change the way that you're doing business, that you throw caution to the wind, But at least reexamine the assumptions that existed in September that might not assist in November. This market is changing by the week at this point. You can't go on plans that existed three months ago. Conversely, if you're a a web native company and that speed and agility is your native thought pattern, and you had a great idea in September and you execute it, and it's Black Friday, and it's doing well, but maybe 90% as well as you thought, the inclination might be to change it six more times that Friday. And you need the champion in the room to maybe talk you down on a little bit of stability, a little bit of let things go, a little bit of planning, a little bit of care is the right thing to do. And I don't know many companies that can't introspect and sort of know where they sit on that spectrum. But having intentionally somebody to try and get out of that group think and get you actually examining what's really going on in front of you instead of just following what's written on the paper or what you always do is gonna give you the most benefit when when things are really on the line this time of year. Great advice. I I I what what what key takeaways that I heard there were you have to know yourself as a company. Do you move too fast or do you move too slow and and work against that? And then who's that designate that contrary and make sure you've got someone in the room to to provide that opposing viewpoint. That's that's great advice. Oh, and know it even departmentally. Does your IT team wanna move at the speed of light and your marketing team is more conservative and vice versa? So are you gonna be able to meld that together? And can you get them to push on each other instead of that being a negative thing where the two are are at odds? Can you use that to get the other one thinking a little bit more and get a a better common ground? Excellent. Another question for for you, Daniel. How do you ensure IT and operations are aligned, so that some of those last minute promotional changes, for example, they they don't break fulfillment or they create inventory errors. They don't they don't create chaos elsewhere. I I know you mentioned a little bit of getting the teams talking together, but what do you do beyond that? I mean, I think it comes down to making sure that your process that your everyday process works without issue. Right? Like, if if you're, you know, into Matt's point earlier about viral moments and about, you know, volume throughout the rest of the year, we we do see other peaks. Right? So you have a bit of time to sort of stress test your process throughout the rest of the year as you get into this much bigger season. Right? So if if your process is working, then, you know, to Matt's point, perhaps don't touch it. Right? Like, make sure it's working well. But if you're finding stress points in that communication in, you know, in the system in general. Right? Like, if you're finding that you're having order flow issues now, right, those should be resolved well ahead of time so that you're not dealing with that on top of whatever new possibilities will come your way during this time of year. Things tend to break in very odd ways during that kind of excessive volume period. So it's good to make sure that the process you had is working today and not waiting until the last minute. So Excellent. Yeah. Good advice. If it's not working today, how can you expect it to work under much higher load? And and that and that simple, relative that seems simple on the surface, but that's that's a challenge for most companies regardless of size, whether they're big or small. That's that's what what we certainly see every day working with with customers at Soligo, those those same things that that sometimes, they're just not ready. They've gotta get the basics working, under under the normal circumstances, to be ready for for when things scale up. Awesome. And with this, I think we'll move on to topic, number three, which is getting around to to omnichannel, complexity in in in some multichannel solutions. And that brings us back to, Lauren here. Omnichannel selling, this this adds an yet another layer of complexity for for managing orders, for managing inventor inventory during during peak sales. So it's it's not just a little bit more complicated. It's a lot more complicated. Now you you have your you've introduced a new offering called, multichannel solutions. Can you share how customers are benefiting from that so far and how it's making this this this omnichannel problems, how it's helping to scale companies facing these omnichannel problems? Yeah. Definitely. So allocating inventory during one of the most important times of the year can be considered risky. But through multichannel solutions, which I mentioned we call MCS, we're removing that risk. So now, sellers can leverage the power of Walmart supply chain, all of their ecommerce orders. So when, you when you inbound your first inventory to WFS, it's automatically eligible for off Walmart orders. So MCS has the ability to fulfill orders from your own website, social media shops, and other marketplaces including Amazon, eBay, Shein, and Taimu. We ship orders in plain, unbranded packaging, so customers never know their orders were fulfilled by Walmart. Once you inbound your first PO to WFS, you are an MCS seller. There's no setup required to, quote, unquote, join, and other than being a marketplace seller and, being an existing WFS seller as well. Fantastic. When when customers are are onboarding with with MCS, is there anything that that, I mean, what are what are some of the challenges that they have to to face to get ready to get ready for that? What's what's what are help any helpful tips for them as far as what to think about ahead of time? Yeah. So I think scalability is definitely you know, you wanna keep that in mind. So, actually, the integrations that Soligo has prebuilt, with Walmart, are great. So they, are fully automate and in order to, let some order to cash process between Walmart and sellers ERP. Merchants can also track WFS inventory in their ERP and automatically initiate inventory replenishment through inbound shipments and get visibility into delivery status. So to start placing orders, you'll need to first check inventory and then, create order channels which tie back to the retailers that or leverage may leverage. And then all you have to do is place orders through either manual upload, which you can do in bulk or single order, direct API Mhmm. Or through channel partners, which we've outlined in our marketplace, learn article, which we can provide. And as you can imagine, manually uploading orders for fulfillment, it still introduces delays and errors into the fulfillment process. And so Folego's prebuilt application connector for Walmart, includes MCS APIs. This way, Soligo customers can easily connect their ERP to WFS and automate fulfilling of their omnichannel sales orders through their WFS inventory. The prebuilt connector enables merchants to quickly launch, manage, and expand automations with less development effort. And by leveraging fully automated fulfillment processes, merchants can scale high volume multichannel order operations during peak sales seasons, without compromising speed, accuracy, or customer experience, and most importantly, without operational overhead. Fantastic. That's that's great. And and I think that that key part that you certainly talked about the integration there, and that's important because you can't with without integration, it it has to that that's how it's gonna get in, MCS or is gonna get plugged into the operational processes of the business to make this seamless, faster, better, and take full advantage of the the the omnichannel scalability. But but without integration, you're not at you're you're actually moving backwards. You're you're less scalable than you were before, almost regardless of what you're doing. So so good point there. Question for you, Matt. Where do you see brands struggle with with omnichannel selling, and and what type of, approach from an architecture perspective have you seen work best? The biggest thing that brands can do for omnichannel for architecture is to actually have one. The especially with the the marketplaces, it seems like like, well, I'm already selling on Amazon. I'm selling on Walmart. Go add TikTok. It's exactly the same, and it's not. So then they frantically bolted on six weeks before holiday only to discover that their very custom, very specific returns process doesn't work for that, or the money doesn't flow into bank accounts at all the way they expect. Or the currency conversion is keeping all of the money repatriated in The US for one of their non US business units, and it's causing all these sudden massive accounting problems. Because they think that those things are so simple, at the enterprise scale, they tend to be and it it gets rushed. So then you don't end up actually integrating this. You just bolt it on, and it never really gets revisited. And suddenly, you have 19 marketplaces strewn about that all work kind of differently, and it becomes a nightmare to manage. If you can actually have a holistic plan of what you're going to do with all of these marketplaces, the same way you do for your primary ecomm channel, simply being thoughtful about it and giving enough time for these things to be done reasonably is gonna give you the biggest chance for success. And you still have to be pragmatic about it. TikTok is not Walmart, and expecting it to, it's it to work the way the Walmart marketplace does is simply not going to be that case. So no matter how large an enterprise you are, you just kind of have to roll with the punches with some of these less mature marketplaces if you wanna be able to take advantage of of the place that they have in today's ecosystem. The other side for omnichannel when we're talking about actual physical point of sale, I think the biggest struggle we see is companies trying to use a point of sale system that's very disparate from their ecom and their other marketplaces. So if you can use things like Shopify that already have their own point of sale and some of the other competitor systems out there that also have a really tightly integrated point of sale, Not having that one really complicated integration with credit cards and gift cards and store credit and multiple inventory locations being from a point of sale system that might have been designed twenty five years ago, trying to talk to this very rapidly evolving system, the more unification you can get of those core integrations so that then you're building out the next new thing instead of spending your integration efforts trying to build a a time machine to, an older legacy system can save you a lot of headache. That's, those are those are both excellent points, and I've seen that across numerous customers at Zaligo and clients in the past that, those struggles, like, can be very big. You mentioned point of sale alignment of the point of sale system and support gift cards and rewards programs. Those are relatively modern concepts, and the POS doesn't natively support that or it takes a lot of work gyrations to fit that in there, that is gonna be it it tends to be, just like you said, a tremendous amount of work, complexity, and it often is still fragile. You you can build you can build the in integrations as capable as possible, but if the process isn't solid because you're trying to shoehorn a a system that's really not meant to do what it's doing, you're you're very right. You're gonna create a lot of problems. One other question for you, Daniel. As a as a brand running across multiple channels, selling on marketplaces and on your website, what what do you see as critical to keep operations streamlined across all of those channels? Yeah. I think the key watchword for me here is just synergy across all your different you know, the channels that you're selling on. You don't you want your promotions, everything. You wanna meet the customer where they're at and you want your promotions, your inventory, everything to be able to synergize with with each other and not clash. Right? Like, you wanna have an omnichannel into Matt's point. Right? You wanna you wanna, a, have an omnichannel strategy, and, b, be executing on it in such a way that's productive to the entire business and not disruptive. Right? You don't wanna be doing something where it's pulling attention away or it's pulling inventory away. So that that piece of it, I think, really comes back to the planning. You know, don't be afraid to be nimble about it, but you definitely need to have a plan in place getting up to that time of year especially. Yeah. Definitely. That that well, you both mentioned there that that multichannel Emory plan is absolutely critical, and and I think I've seen this breakdown a lot at scale. So it it might limp along. They add it. They have a one primary selling channel, then maybe they add a marketplace. They scale up their storefronts a little bit, and it's it's a bit rough. And all of a sudden, they they ramp either ramp up volume or add continue adding, but they've they've never really figured out, okay, what is a good strategy for that multichannel inventory? And and that's, I think, you know, maybe one of the biggest takeaways for for for anybody listening is, okay, are do we feel confident in our our multichannel inventory plan? Do we have this? Because there's sometimes really simple ways to address that. That's one of the biggest things you can do to prepare for for Black Friday is is think about that and be like, okay. Do we have do we have the right safety stock levels? Are these are the is this allocated? Are we accounting for maybe some some delays from some of the the, connection points that we're working with? That's the other thing. You've gotta think about permission standpoint. You've gotta think about your your other systems involved because they may be backing up too. Even with cloud systems, things don't happen instantly. Or or you may be feeling like you have a, you know, what you don't wanna do is try a one size fits all strategy for, you know, marketplaces that are pretty different from each other. Right? Like, if we're finding that a product is selling especially well on, say, TikTok, right, like, you wanna lean into that. You wanna be able to have that agility to lean into whatever is doing best on each platform without sacrificing the whole. Excellent point. Definitely. Alright. You know, one of the things, here that's very topical we're gonna switch over to to to AI. We're talk talking about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but nobody can get can get away from the conversations going on around AI. And and anyone in the ecommerce space knows that it's been impacting it to a certain degree, but there's certainly expectations of potentially massive impacts in in very, very big changes on on how we can talk business in in the future in the ecommerce space. But in light of this AI and Black Friday Cyber Monday, I guess question for you, Matt, is, you know, we hear this hype. Is there anything despite that hype, is there anything that merchants can take advantage of right now to leveraging AI to better prepare or or just be come come out of this to as with a more successful selling season? I mean, there's all still a lot of in in the AI timeline, there's still a lot of time between now and Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I think I think we're all learning the lessons in real time to trying to use this for generative things around following around your promotion is it's almost an expert, but it's 5% not. And that's still that 5% is still just wrong. And with these ultra high stakes times, it doesn't seem like it's quite where you're willing to risk that much of your business on what it produces. But using it to catch errors, to catch mistakes, to help audit things, places where it can be enhanced enhancing of what you're doing without putting that much risk onto it is absolutely worthwhile. When we're talking about analytics earlier, trying to train, assuming you have the the scale to do private instances of these AIs to feed some of your analytics data into. Please don't feed those into the public versions of chat GPT. Assuming you can do this into into private instances, that's going to let you get that monitoring of aberrant data when it isn't, you know, hey, our sales are way down. It's something else that's far more subtle to pick up. Those things could easily save you millions of dollars. They can easily help you pivot a campaign. And if it doesn't catch the thing, you're not any worse off because you're still gonna have humans doing the monitoring. This is additive to what you're doing. If you haven't actually tried to do merchandising for you and the merchandising isn't working, it's a black box. You can tell it do better. It'll apologize to you, and it'll do something different. But it's still just a magic black box that you can't really rely on with the where the technology is quite for this holiday season. Now, who knows? Six weeks from now, that all changes and I look like a fool, but that's sort of the nature of predicting anything AI in in this moment. That's that's the challenge. It's it's it's moving so fast. So but, yeah, for key key part of, future proofing there is is thinking about how it's gonna impact in the future for sure. Question for for you, Daniel, around this on the other side is, how are you looking to leverage AI this holiday season? I think in doing lots of ongoing projects on that front, but as far as, you know, customer facing where we found AI to have a great lift and be additive, as as Matt was saying, is in the front of, like, for customer service, for example. Right? Like, having an AI leveraged bot that's able to respond to some quick questions, things like that can definitely take the load off of what is otherwise a very heavy load for customer service during that time of year. Right? Like, if we can even answer 15% of the inquiries that we get automatically and make that customer happy, then that's fantastic. That that's opening up our customer service team to get a lot more time with customers who have actual, you know, like a bigger issue than just where is my order or, you know, something that can be found in one of our many FAQs. So that's where we see it as being very additive as to where it can enhance someone's position and be able to, you know, support them in that way. So kind of like you're you're leaning into that set of speed deck deck co pilot model or that assistant to to not maybe necessarily replace people, just supercharge them, make them better, faster, smarter. Correct. Yeah. That's that's exactly our point of view on it right now. Excellent. And are you getting there through building are you building custom AI solutions? Are you leveraging AI in in other, like, say, pro the product enhancements to to other products you use? What's your what's been your strategy around that so far? Definitely product enhancement. I think, you know, right now, we we don't have the in house to be able to build something like that. So seeing where, you know, especially as companies offer these solutions in place, you know, that's that's where we're seeing the most value right now is in these product enhancements for sure. Fantastic. Very good. Well, that's that really takes us through, you know, through through almost all of our questions here. And, you know, what I wanna do is maybe set things up so we can move over to, the q and a section because we had some we had some questions that that came in here. And it looks like this first one or, Lauren, this is this is directed towards would be directed towards you. What can be shipped through MCS? So any order going to US addresses within the 50 states and Puerto Rico are all all good. And then sortable item inventory items that adhere to the WFS product requirements. Multi box and big and bulky items are currently not eligible for MCS, and MCS supports items that weigh up to a 150 pounds. So, both sort and non sort, but have to be up to a 150 pounds. Those sounds like kind of more of your traditional ecommerce shipped items. So, with with some it sound really sounds like what you described is the vast majority of what ecommerce sellers are are shipping out every day, but someone maybe in a in a less common area might be there might be some exceptions there. Yeah. Yeah. K. Awesome. And then, is there still time to leverage MCS for the upcoming, Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales? Yeah. Definitely. So if you're actually, if you're new to WFS, we can connect with you, connect you with our, WFS onboarding team to help inbound inventory as a first step. And if you're already a WFS seller, getting started with MCS is as easy as setting up your first order channel. And, we actually have this really incredible promotion right now where if you didn't place them before June 5 year, you're eligible for 30% off of multichannel, solutions fulfillment fees, through, January 31. So, definitely worth taking advantage of that if you haven't placed orders through MCS yet. K. Excellent. Thank you. Sounds like a great power. And that and that's, that's agility right there to be able to get, to to leverage something like that before Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That's that's a great example of modern system agility right there. And then our our third question here that came in, with so many systems in play during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, ecommerce platforms, ERP, three PLs, and marketplaces, what's the key to making sure orders are processed instantly across platforms without bottlenecks or or sync delays. Maybe maybe I'll take this kind of a integration, definitely an integration theory question a bit. And I certainly, I'll take that and and maybe get, Daniel, have you weigh in a little bit as well. From my perspective, you know, what's the what's the key? You know, when we we hear about things being processed instantly, we're we're really striving for as quickly as possible because that's that's the reality of any systems at scale. We have coordinate these processes and the integrations across, systems. The the really key thing is is having good automation in place, having an integration strategy so you're not, approaching this, ad hoc, so to speak, with things that have just been tacked together. Do you have a thoughtful integration strategy? Is it working when it's not under load? Are you handling your your errors in a timely manner? Because errors are natural in integration. They're gonna have you changes in in business processes elsewhere roll down and get noticed in the integration. It's a warning system. So you gotta make sure you have good processes for handling those, picking those up, and then and making sure those are resolved. And once those integrations are finely tuned, then you and you have a good architecture that will set you up for getting these these orders processed and moved where they need to be as quickly as possible to get that that timely fulfillment, get the get the orders out the door, get the shipping information back upstream so you can send that to your to your customers. But that's that's kind of that's that's my perspective on the integration side. Daniel, Matt, any anything else you'd add to add to that? No. I think I think you're pretty spot on. I mean, it it does come down to making sure that you have everything in place and that everything you know, I think the key one of the key things you said there was just it's not instantaneous. Right? It has to work effectively. Because the last thing you want is to bottleneck yourself by running your integration every five seconds. Right? Like, that will absolutely crush your system, especially if the volume increases. So, you know, making sure that things are staggered as much as possible in a way that makes sense and it gets you to the fulfillment thresholds that you wanna get, I think is super, super important. Awesome. Very good. Well, that wraps up our q and a. It wraps up our panel for today. I wanna thank everybody for, both our everybody on the panel, Daniel, Lauren, Matt, for for joining us and sharing your insights and wisdom. Really appreciate it. Thanks for everyone for for watching and attending. And finally, if if you, wish to follow-up and and have a discussion with us, just click a button in the top right corner of your screen. And then, the additional assets that we mentioned during these sessions, the ones that Lauren mentioned, we have some additional assets as well. They'll be available to you in that docs tab on the right hand side. And, again, thank you, everyone. You're welcome.