Store Builders Podcast
Helping business owners start their own ecommerce store
How can I take my ecommerce store to the next level?
We answer that question every episode with a little help from industry experts and successful store owners.
Hosted by Chris Lema, The Store Builders Podcast provides actionable advice for expanding your eCommerce empire.
Ryan Cowden
Ryan Cowden is a full-time podcast host and producer based in Los Angeles, California. Prior to his work as a podcaster, Ryan worked as a therapist with autistic children and spent seven years as a public school teacher. In 2018, Ryan launched his own podcast and eventually left teaching to pursue his love of podcasting and audio production. He is a podcast fanatic and doesn’t have enough hours in a week to listen to all his favorites.
Chris Lema
Chris Lema has been building ecommerce sites since 1997, back when it would take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, and still didn’t work perfectly. He's worked with WooCommerce since it was launched and helped fast-growing stores tweak it to deliver high performance. Today he is the CEO of Motivations AI.
James Sowers
James Sowers is a marketing consultant and digital product manager based in Cleveland, Ohio. He is passionate about helping other entrepreneurs build stronger, more sustainable businesses, which made him a great fit to be a co-host for our show.
Episode 40: Chatbots: Usage and Best Practices
One of the most enduring trends in business is the trend toward user efficiency. Many shoppers prefer the ATM to the bank teller, self-checkout to the grocer, and a text message to a phone call.
Episode 39: Getting Started with Ecommerce Subscriptions
If you were offered a system that consistently brought customers back to your store, wouldn’t you take it? Most businesses would love to have a consistent block of repeat shoppers, but they don’t often take the time to set up the subscription service that would enable this behavior.
Episode 38: Dynamic Pricing
When designing an online store, the tendency is to focus on the technical aspects that will drive the functionality of your site. It can be tempting to think that the website is finished when it’s been proven to function correctly.
Episode 37: Bringing eCommerce to Headless CMS/Static Sites
If you know the history of the Internet, then you’ll know that static sites were on the cutting edge of technology back in the 1990s. Toward the end of the decade, dynamic, database driven sites started being developed, and static sites drastically fell out of favor.
Episode 36: What goes into a B2B eCommerce store?
When most people set up an eCommerce store, they’re thinking about capturing individual online shoppers. These online shoppers often search for good prices on single purchases, forcing store owners to drive lots of traffic to the website.
Episode 35: Ways to Make Your Store More Interactive
For all the benefits online shopping provides, it’s still not perfect. The online shopping experience has improved, but you don’t have the same assurance you get when you buy something at a store. At a store, you can pick something up, look at it closely, and even try it on. By contrast, clicking that “Buy” button still feels like a leap of faith sometimes.
Episode 34: Let's Talk About Conversational Commerce
Over the past ten years or so, a lot of marketing efforts have trended toward building up a presence on social media. Social media accounts made brands accessible and relatable. You could follow and interact with them in ways that were not possible before.
Episode 33: Let's talk about eCommerce Maintenance Plans
When you purchase a car, either the dealer or your mechanic will put you on a regular maintenance program. There are a lot of moving parts in that vehicle, and it’s used regularly, so there are a lot of ways for something to go wrong. Another consideration to keep in mind is that regular maintenance helps them catch small issues before they escalate into more costly repairs or replacement projects.
Episode 32: Let’s Talk About eCommerce Segmentation
If you have ever purchased something online and shared your email address with the retailer, you have probably also had the experience of being added to their email list. What soon follows is a constant stream of emails from the company with little relevance to you or your purchase. These emails often lead to nothing more than deciding to unsubscribe from the list.
Episode 31: The Magento 1 End of Life Announcement
In 2018, the popular Ecommerce platform site Magento announced that its popular version 1 would stop being updated and supported in June 2020. Since then, several web developers using Magento 1 have migrated to other platform sites or upgraded to Magento 2. However, there are still several sites hosted on Magento 1, and those sites have an important and timely decision to make.