Meet the new Commerce Community Team

Thanks for the overwhelming interest! 🤩

A heartfelt thank you to all the passionate applicants who showed their interest in joining the Commerce Community Team. Your enthusiasm for Umbraco and commerce is truly impressive. Throughout the selection process, we were impressed by the high quality of applicants, each bringing valuable insights and compelling reasons for wanting to contribute to the team. 

In putting together the Commerce Community Team, we focused on bringing together individuals with extensive commerce experience and hands-on knowledge across diverse commerce platforms. Their shared passion for advancing Umbraco Commerce as a product is a driving force behind the team's formation.

The Commerce Community Team 

The team is a good mix of individuals representing both strategic decision-makers and technical enthusiasts from Umbraco partners and the community. The strategic decision-makers will offer valuable insights and advice on creating and maintaining a position for Umbraco Commerce in a fast-moving commerce and DX landscape. The latter will ensure we get technical feedback and viewpoints on ideas, features, and commerce initiatives, making sure Umbraco Commerce lives up to the use cases we aim to fulfill. 

And now, let's give a warm welcome to the brilliant minds that make up the Commerce Community Team! 🌟

Paul de Metter

Chief Technology Officer at 4NG|Conlusion in The Netherlands.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? Over 25 years of digital commerce, commerce platforms and commerce implementations, focus on digital strategy. Started as founder of Arlanet in 2002 and have been using Umbraco since 2005.

Most memorable commerce project: Helping one of our international clients during the pandemic from an offline business to a new digital business model in a matter of months. This while moving our own business to a work from home development center and battling the uncertainty of the early pandemic days. We tend to forget the uncertainty a lot of businesses were facing back then.

What’s your favorite feature, so far, of any commerce platform: One of my favourite features has been actually integrating Commerce propositions with Artificial Intelligence. You can build SEO friendly pages, interpret product photos to create visual analysis content and build a new shopping experience using AI generated photos. No more reasons not to provide the right experience due to missing stock photos.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first? Having a seamless and integrated Commerce section within Umbraco, that works like a charm with all basic commerce features available. From there build on a feature roadmap that focusses on transactional behaviour and not per sé a webshop experience. For that we have the Shopify’s of the world and that battle has been decided. Umbraco Commerce should run transactions of any kind as it runs Umbraco CMS for content.

 

Rachelle Epley

Director, Digital Experience & Commerce at RBA, Inc., USA.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? Our team has built multiple web commerce applications, from simple online shopping to highly integrated solutions.

Most memorable commerce project: The most notable in our portfolio is Caleres, which is the parent company of 15 shoe brands including Famous Footwear and Dr. Scholls. The Famous Footwear site launched in 2020 – the height of the pandemic when everything was online only – and it didn’t so much as skip a beat. The team is very proud of the work done to ensure that their customers experienced no delays in ordering, page loads, etc. During “Black Friday” that year, they experienced approximately 5,000 orders per hour and saw a 25% increase in conversions.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first?: I would recommend focusing a bit on the communication/marketing piece first, especially to partners, as it doesn’t seem that the fact that Umbraco now has a commerce solution in-house is a very well known offering.

Favorite commerce-related meme:

 

Richard Metcalfe

Sales Director at CTI Digital, UK.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? I have worked in digital commerce for 20 years. I started my career client side in a large corporate business and delivered my first commerce project way back in 2004. I switched to agency life back in 2008 and I have worked on a lot of digital commerce projects since then. The clients and projects have ranged from an SME selling dice online to a government project for the PPE portal 2.0.

Most memorable commerce project: The PPE portal 2.0 for the Department of Health and Social Care was a really interesting project. CTI Digital took over the reins from Ebay who very kindly created a fast-to-market solution at the start of the pandemic. We got to meet a wide range of stakeholders. The data migration for this project was key and we worked with several DHSC partners to get the solution right. We migrated 62,000 active customers to the new platform in 6 weeks.

What’s your favorite feature, so far, of any commerce platform: For me any commerce website offering personalization within the shopping experience is a big tick. I love the Spoke London website. They have a ‘find your fit’ feature that provides an interactive way to find the best fit in under 60 seconds. This then provides tailored options to purchase.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first? I think helping educate SMEs on some core commerce principles would be extremely useful. Feature-wise, I am an advocate for commerce with marketing automation so I would like to see how Umbraco Commerce can help facilitate that.

Favorite commerce-related meme:

 

Tobias Høst

Head of Aarhus/consultant at twoday Co3, Denmark.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? Ran a small webagency with 14 employees in 8 years. Worked for 7 years at Dynamicweb (4 years as eCommerce product owner)

Most memorable commerce project: Worked with a client back in the day who bought and sold boar semen!

Favorite feature of any commerce platform: I have primarily worked with b2b ecommerce and therefore the most important part of an ecommerce platform, for me, is the level of customization for the developer.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first? Stated on the answer above. If Umbraco can provide af sleek platform which by the dev easily can be extended, then we as partners can elimate risk and provide a lower maintenance cost.

 

Oliver Picton

Head of Technical at Enjoy Digital, UK.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? I studied E-Commerce at University way back in the year 2000 as I wanted to do a mix of Business and Computer Science, although I ended up mostly coding 🤖 My final year project was a reverse auction system for B2B E-Commerce.I worked extensively in travel commerce for many years before joining the digital agency world with Enjoy Digital. 

We have created numerous E-Commerce solutions both bespoke .NET builds, Shopify and of course Vendr and Umbraco Commerce across various industries both B2C and B2B.

Most memorable commerce project: We were undertaking a discovery for Fortune brands website V+A baths and the pandemic/lockdown struck. V+A baths had no way of selling their products as they were reliant on physical stores.– Wanted to spin up a really quick web shop in order to sell high-end baths, sinks and accessories to a B2B and B2C consumers, but wanted the site to reflect the luxury nature of their products. – Needed something in 4 weeks!

We used Umbraco and Umbraco Commerce Checkout for V+A Baths to iterate quickly and deliver

a web shop for the client in 4 weeks that had no transaction fees and was on brand.

Favorite feature of any commerce platform: Must be the Umbraco Commerce API. It is really well designed and makes it straightforward to extend Umbraco Commerce and build custom solutions for our clients.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first? New features to compete with more established E-Commerce platforms.

Favorite commerce-related meme:

 

Matt Swain

Senior Web Application Developer at Pixelbuilders, UK.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? I have been the lead developer on multiple E-Commerce projects throughout my career. Working with large scale solutions and big name brands such as Cadbury, Green and Blacks and Direct Blinds. I have worked with multiple E-Commerce platforms including NopCommerce, Kentico E-Commerce and of course Umbraco Commerce. Several years ago I was consulted by Kentico on their E-Commerce offering and they subsequently made several changes to their E-Commerce solution based on these discussions.

Most memorable commerce project: Working with Cadbury Gifts Direct has always been a highlight of my career. A very challenging build, with complex third party integrations for order management and tracking, along with a complicated interactive front end, made this web application a really interesting project to be involved with.

Favorite feature of any commerce platform: I love focusing on the integration side of digital commerce projects and really enjoy seeing multiple systems come together automatically to provide a fantastic end to end experience to the customer. From a customer feature point of view, I enjoyed the functionality on Cadbury Gifts Direct where you could build personalised packaging for your bar of chocolate, including customising the text and imagery on the packaging.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first? I would like to see Umbraco Commerce solidify a firm direction and to create a set of requirements and goals for this product. Then to put together a plan for Umbraco and the wider community to deliver these. The Commerce solution long term needs to work for developers, product owners, agencies and most importantly the end customers for it to be a success.

Favorite commerce related meme:

 

Mads Aarup Hansen

Head of Solution Design at Novicell, Denmark.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? Going on 10 years within different aspects of digital commerce.

Most memorable commerce project: Generally, the most memorable projects are the ones  where the customer is making the largest changes to the user experience. The one that stands out is a project where the objective was to introduce configurable products with millions of different outcomes in a simple and user-friendly manner. Key takeaway, keep it simple – there is always a way to cut complexity.

Favorite feature of any commerce platform: The up-and-coming AI assistants for shop owners/editors is a cool addition to operating a commerce platform.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first? Positioning of the platform – what segment of customer, companies etc. does Umbraco Commerce want to be “best-in-class”  for.

 

Nik Wahlberg

Founder / Product Owner at Scandia, USA.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? We have built many implementations from small to large scale on the Umbraco platform. Including the use of TeaCommerce, Shopify, Custom in-house, and many other platforms over the years. Some of the larger implementations process over $20 million in sales annually.

What’s your most memorable commerce project? SwipeIt.com has to be our most complex and business-critical project. They process 10s of thousands of gift card purchases every year and absolutely go crazy during the holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas in particular). We have an in-depth promotion engine, merchant group sales, physical product sales, and a host of cool integrations ranging from UPS, Stripe, SmartTransactions, Twillio, Signifyd, and more.

What’s your favorite feature of any commerce platform? We were thrilled when we launched SwipeIt when they had a goal of increasing their revenue by 50% in the first three years, and our system allowed them an incredible growth of 115% within the first 12 months of launch! They were able to see that kind of increase as a result of the underlying system that we built for them to process both electric (SMS/email) gards, as well as physical cards that they send out from their headquarters. Our custom platform, built on the Umbraco CMS, provided efficacies in how they take and handle orders, allowing them to do almost twice as much with the same staff.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first? We’d love to see more communication around the platform (micro site with example of the experience), and speak to the ability to support enterprise/large-scale given the flexibility and robustness of the Umbraco framework.

What's your favorite commerce-related meme?

 

 

Steve Temple 

Technical Director at Gibe, UK.

What’s your experience with digital commerce? I’ve been working in ecommerce for around ~25 years on anything from bespoke systems to Magento and Microsoft Commerce Server. Gibe has its own commerce platform which we use for a few large commerce sites. I’ve never actually used Vendr or Umbraco Commerce!

What’s your most memorable commerce project? My favorite project was adding an AI driven product recommendations system to a site, which for a small project increased the conversion rate of a site, the whole project paid for itself in a few weeks of trading. I managed to sell our client on this system by demonstrating it in an Umbraco Spark talk.

What’s your favorite feature of any commerce platform? I enjoy the measurable nature of commerce sites, it’s much easier to see what benefit your changes make by looking at things such as average order value and conversion rates and how changes affect those.

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first?  I think clarity on license fees and an obvious monthly license fee. I’ve seen quite a lot of confusion around that online.

Favorite commerce related meme:

 

Per Axelsson 

Systems Developer at Webmind, Sweden.

What's your experience with digital commerce? I have been working as a Systems Developer in different roles with various e-commerce solutions since 2010 and with Umbraco CMS since 2015. 

What’s your most memorable commerce project? A great challenge was a client project that had a great number of price lists (including campaign price lists). The correct price list, thus the correct price for a specific user and a specific product, needed a large matrix to be explained. 

What's your favorite feature of any commerce platform? Great documentation and example code is always good. 

What do you think the team behind Umbraco Commerce should focus on first? Make it easier to get a simple e-commerce site up and running.

Favorite commerce-related meme:

 

And from Umbraco HQ…

Joining the team from Umbraco HQ are Matt Brailsford and myself, Bolette Kern. 

Matt is  the brain and developer behind the former Vendr, now Umbraco Commerce, and he brings years of experience building commerce solutions for Umbraco. Matt knows Umbraco Commerce inside out, and with his in-depth knowledge of the product has never shied away from tackling even the most complex or creative scenarios.

As the Product Owner in the Digital Experience Platform Group (DXP Group), I have been with Umbraco HQ for a year. I’m responsible for the user experience on our DX products, product vision, roadmap, the business impact, and more (like forming a commerce community team). I’m excited to get started, meet all the new team members, and engage in valuable discussions about commerce!

Let’s get to business (or commerce 😁)

That’s it! Our cracking new Commerce Community Team is assembled and with introductions out of the way we can get to work. First order of business is the first meeting where we’ll go into more details with the team about Umbraco HQs strategic plans for positioning Umbraco Commerce. 

Over the course of 4 meetings in 2024, we will explore various topics such as commerce architecture, B2B requirements, and the emerging trends that our Commerce Community Team believe are central to the industry and essential for shaping the future of Umbraco Commerce.

If you want to read more about Umbraco Commerce you can head to the product page, and there's detailed documentation if you want to dive into the technical aspects.