Host:

Pretty good elevator pitch—right on point.

So yeah, I guess, how did you get to this point in your career? What led you to join this company, and what have you done in the past that kind of got you here today?

Nicola:

Yeah, I’m a marketer by education. I finished my bachelor's in marketing a long, long, long time ago. When I was studying, it was actually called e-marketing.

Back then, I was on oDesk—now it's called Upwork—writing SEO articles for three bucks a piece. This was a long time ago, and through that process, I got introduced to marketing and the B2B side of it.

Honestly, education is completely disconnected from real marketing and what we actually do. Sooner or later, right after my master's studies, I got a job at a company coordinating digital marketing efforts. That was 11 years ago now.

I've stayed in marketing ever since—building tools, working across different industries, always leading marketing efforts. Everything I’ve done has been mainly in marketing.

Host:

Isn't that interesting? A lot of times, what you learn in school doesn’t really match what you learn in the field—actually putting your hands on it and doing the work.

If you’re out there doing the actual work, you learn about the new tools much quicker and get real hands-on experience. I always say school is like five to ten years behind. It only teaches once something is a proven fact.

When I was in school, SEO was kind of new. Everyone was using it in the real world, but it wasn’t even part of the curriculum.

Nicola:

Yeah, especially with marketing—and digital marketing specifically—it kind of boomed over the past 15 years and is still developing. There’s no way academia can easily keep up.

Just testing ad formats in academia is already a big endeavor because you need all the data points to connect, let alone discovering new channels or how people actually make purchases.

Fifteen years ago, it was unimaginable that you could buy something directly from your phone after seeing it on Instagram. That kind of instant gratification wasn’t even a concept. Academia definitely didn’t see that coming. And now, everything changes every day.

Host:

Yeah, especially with AI tools now, there's like an AI tool for everything these days. So you've got to, you've got to really stay on top of it. I guess what attracted you to marketing, and what made you kind of stick with that path?

Nicola: Uh, to be honest, I think, um, marketing is one of those disciplines that allows you to be creative but also, especially in the digital technological sense, a bit techy, on the techy side. I myself, I'm more on the techy side. I'm not as creative as I would like, even though I try to be better every day. But it is one of those disciplines that is super broad, that from a perspective gives a lot of different roles and functions you can try on. But definitely, it's a really dynamic, dynamic place. If I may, like, um, I don't know, the first time or even now, I still have the same feeling whenever I send an email out, and I see people engaging with it. It's such a kind of interesting feeling for me to see that people engage with something you write, you create. And especially if you have a part of a bigger campaign, it's always an inspiration and motivation for me. Not sure if anyone else has this feeling in them, but I always do, and it's always fun, especially now from this CMO perspective, is if we see that our marketing activities are bringing enough business to the company and the funnel looks amazing, the customers are happy, the team is happy, then yeah, it's really a thrilling and fulfilling job in my opinion.

Host:

Yeah, yeah, marketing is really like an end-to-end type thing too, right? A lot of people think it's just advertising, but now marketing starts with the product even. You know, you're, you know, you've had that experience as well too. So, you know, making a product that's very, you know, ready for the market actually, um, and then getting to the point to where you actually bring it out to market, you actually get that, the early results you see, you know, get that customer feedback, roll it out, and see the results of that feedback being implemented, and you get to see that whole journey all the way through, and it's, you know, really exciting to see that. Yeah, how did you end up in marketing? What did you do to get there?

Host:

Oh geez, uh, well, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do in college actually. So for me, um, I was going to school, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, and I'm like, you know, I was doing chemistry, and I'm like, I was good at it, but I'm like, this is really boring, you know. I get the foundational fundamentals of, you know, how, how it works, but it wasn't exciting for me. Um, so for me, you know, I was doing, uh, I got involved in doing events, uh, so I was hosting events on the weekend, and, uh, and I really realized that I just like people, and you know what I was doing there was marketing. So I was just, you know, using different marketing channels at the time, with social media just coming out, and, you know, found, found my path that way and realized that I was, you know, into marketing and changed my career path and started to focus on marketing in school. Um, got out, started a social media agency, and kind of went from there.

But, um, yeah, sometimes you don't really know unless you try something, and then you realize that that's actually something that you might actually like.

Nicola:

Yeah, yeah, this, I feel like there are many, many similar stories in marketing, people just discovering some aspect of it that is actually mind-blowing, and people just stick with it, and it's fine. Like, it's, uh, the more, the more different variety of people we have in the industry, the better, because we ultimately are people and selling to people, even though marketers tend to forget that all the time. They do, they like to build a product and bring it to people and say, why don't you buy my thing? It's like, well, you didn't build it for the customer, you know. Um, you know, the customer's always right, as they, as they say, for a reason, because they have the purse strings, and if you don't solve their, solve their problem with a good solution, um, you know, they're not going to give you money for it.

Host: 

Yeah, the world-famous marketing blindness. Oh, totally. Yeah, and the worst too, like the reason I got into product myself too, I have a lot of product experience, is because, you know, I was working with a lot of clients, and I would, you know, have to help them with their problems for marketing, which is we need more customers. And a lot of times, I'd come back to the fact that their product wasn't really good or had like a terrible user experience. And I'm like, well, maybe if you tweak this or here's what your customers are saying, if you did this, it would make the product a lot easier for me to market and sell. Um, so eventually, I just said, you know what, forget it, I'm going to build my own products.

Nicola:

 Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so you get that end. So, um, I guess we're here to talk about e-commerce marketing too today actually, and how AI is going to make an impact on it. Um, you know, what are some of the biggest challenges that e-commerce businesses face in 2025?

Nicola: 

Yeah, e-commerce is a tough business. Uh, like, they're not sure how well you're familiar with it, but, uh, definitely it's a low-margin business. The margins are really low, so they need to rely on a lot of transactions, like getting people to buy stuff. Of course, um, so when it comes to kind of challenges that I see for the industry, it's definitely increasing competitiveness, but not just opening e-shops per se, because opening an e-shop these days is pretty easy. If you can imagine, you just spun off a Shopify website, connect some drop-shipping inventory, and you have the web shop. But also in the sense that, um, the e-commerce also is kind of getting platformization advertising, like everyone shares this increased cost of CPMs on Google Ads and Facebook Ads. 

While B2B has some margins to spend even more, for e-commerce, it's really, really, really tough because it's a, they have like a really direct impact on the acquisition and how many people they can actually bring in. Uh, also, a big, big challenge for them is customer loyalty because of the above reasons mentioned that, indeed, there's so much competition and people are discovering different e-shops pretty easily, so they are hopping around. It's from my perspective, I see it like it's really tough to have someone being loyal to an e-shop, and to get to that stage, you need to spend a lot on brand, you need to spend a lot on good products, on price, but most importantly, you need to spend a lot on good customer care and customer engagement. And this is basically where Smartsupp comes into the place. 

So we do help e-commerce businesses to make better connections with their customers, to make them happier, to answer all these queries and automate a bunch of these things. Uh, so and one big channel challenge, of course, for them is also can be seen from a macroeconomics perspective. E-commerce is a consumption-driven industry, of course, directly so any kind of microeconomics or supply chain issues are directly reflected, um, and yeah, can impact their entire business. So e-commerce is a really tough business, uh, uh, and it's, it's not getting easier for them, let's say, given all the factors. But for my surprise, what I really was surprised is to see like how little these businesses actually kind of care about their customers. And, um, at a minimum these days, you should, you should appreciate every customer that comes in and really make sure that you have like a solid relationship with them. And this is where we come into the picture with the solutions that we are building basically.

Host:

I always say, love your customer like your product, you know. Um, yeah, so that's always a good way to go about it. But, um, yeah, it's getting very expensive to acquire customers, so that's why it's really important to engage them when they're on-site. You know, if you have, if you have a lead, somebody's, you know, shopping your site, there's a lot of great tools to engage them directly there. Uh, answer any of those, you know, big questions, get, get the big elephant out of the room right away. Like, if you can make them feel comfortable with making the purchase, they're more likely to do it. And then to your part, retention, right? So how, how do you build customer loyalty, get them to want to come back or even refer you other people? Um, because, you know, just spending a bunch of money in advertising and and then turning customers in and out is not really a good strategy anymore these days.

Nicola: 

What we follow here is a really simple philosophy in my, my, my take, but it's a really impactful one. So yeah, what we do is basically just allow our customers to be there for their customers 24/7. So if you can imagine the entire narrative that you are working with is basically that people buy on their own terms, on their own schedule. Like, there's no e-shop owner that has like one schedule for all customers. No, customers buy on their own schedule, and they will buy when they have a need, when they are in the mood for it, they have the money, whatever reason. And at the minimum, when the customer is ready to buy, when they come to your website, it's an expensive traffic, expensive visit. The least you can do is to help them in this purchasing process, in this customer journey, assist them any way you can. 

Uh, not being there, it has multiple consequences, but the worst, of course, is people just leaving without even purchasing. Like, there's a huge amount of traffic that comes to e-commerce, they just browse around, check a bit, and then forget about you, that they leave. Um, the tools we are building actually help you to convert some of that traffic but also help you build a kind of relationship with your customers, indeed, everything in an effort to increase your business and sales on the e-shop because no, because that's, that's, uh, from our perspective, a minimum thing that you can do. Like, even you as a consumer, when you go somewhere, if you have a question about a product, um, when I, when I have a question, you better be there when I want, when I need that answer, you know. And it's not easy for businesses, especially smaller and medium-sized businesses, to be 24/7 there. Luckily, now with technology, we can actually achieve this to a great extent.

Host: 

Yeah, and that brings me to my next point. You know, AI is obviously going to, obviously going to play a big role in that, helping, you know, kind of cover some of those hours that you can't as a business owner, especially for smaller companies, you know, you might not have the staff to have fully, you know, people running the chat channels all day long. So that's where like tools like AI can come in and be really effective. Um, you know, what are your thoughts on how AI is going to change e-commerce going forward, including, you know, how does your platform utilize AI to help these e-commerce businesses run more successfully?

Nicola:

Yeah, so the crux of the topic here is definitely AI will change e-commerce. Uh, uh, the change is going to be, it's really transformative, it's really a big change, really impactful how this AI can impact the e-commerce and how will it impact from my perspective, how I see it, of course, I can be wrong about the future, that's a caveat, but I think what we see through the history and just the aspect of these AI-powered technologies is going to be a huge change. I will just give some examples, but before that, I would just invite you and the listeners to think about how e-commerce changed for the past 10-15 years. 

So even, even before the internet or web browser applications, it was really tough to imagine that you will go somewhere and buy like from the flyer. Usually, purchases were made through a phone or going directly to the retailer and so on. Uh, purchasing online is a revolution on its own, and within this revolution, there are multiple different aspects that happened as well. Some of them would be that there's a web shop that takes, um, that takes inventory and everything from the ground up and even has like a payment gateway. 

But then you have mobile apps as well. So we'll see, we saw a trend of people shopping from online apps and mobile, mobile, mobile phones as well. This is also mind-blowing as well on its own in this, in this sense. Uh, what we see now is a, let's say, another evolution of how people behave is from what we call conversational marketing or conversational selling. Uh, this has been a topic for the past years. It's basically that indeed, people will, will feel more easy or feel at ease to purchase through conversations, through chatbots, through live chat, through recommendations. 

Effectively, this means that when a visitor comes to a website, uh, they can, or even these days, they expect to have a live chat there or something so they can reach out to the product specialist and ask, hey, does this product, does X, uh, will this product do this? And the specialist answers in the right manner. Of course, that's like almost like a given sale because you effectively, uh, help, help the person in the process and you made them comfortable in this process, and the person will, will purchase, especially if you can sweeten, sweeten up the deal with some coupon code or something like this. So, what, what, what we imagine as an e-commerce, uh, definitely and how AI plays is you also, you can imagine it as a, just imagine any brick-and-mortar store, you know. So if you, if you walk in a brick-and-mortar store, uh, having an assistant there definitely helps, you know, because, you know, you can ask someone to give, give you directions or, or give you some good sales and stuff like that. Even though you like to browse things on your own, this is the same approach we are taking more or less with the e-commerce website. So with AI, how we built our solution, it's called AI Shopping Assistant. It's basically an assistant that lives in the chat, live chat fidget, and what it does is basically.