eCommerce Evolution – our Q&A with Eastside Co

We caught up with Laura Doxford, COO of Eastside Co, Shopify experts and agency.

As part of our series “eCommerce Evolution”, we feature, showcase and share knowledge, expert views and wisdom on the eCommerce market and how it is evolving around us.

Aaron @ ADLIB: Could you please introduce yourself as well as your agency name?

Laura: I’m Laura, COO at Eastside Co.

Aaron @ ADLIB: How have you and your team evolved recently, with the world around us?

Laura: The last 18 months have obviously been crazy for everyone around the world. As an agency, we were completely office-based until last year. At the start of 2020 we saw what might happen with lockdown, and so had prepared to change to a ‘work from home’ model on day one of the first UK lockdown in March 2020.

Of course at first we thought it would only be for a few weeks, but nearly a year and a half later we’ve adopted a permanently flexible approach. The whole team adapted to the new model brilliantly and as we’ve become less office-centric, we’ve recruited from further afield so we have colleagues all over the UK now.

Aaron @ ADLIB: How have your client relationships and processes evolved to accommodate the shifts within eCommerce?

Laura: It was imperative that any changes at the agency didn’t negatively impact our client relationships and processes, and I think we’ve been successful with that.

If anything, it’s made processes more efficient across the business.

Aaron @ ADLIB: What technology does your agency specialise in, and how does that compare to other existing and emerging tech?

Laura: We’re a specialist Shopify and Shopify Plus agency, concentrating in new builds and migrations from other platforms. We’re a marketing agency as well so have experts in the different platforms, plus we develop Shopify apps, both in the public app store and as private apps built for clients. We’ve also been looking at doing more work within headless commerce.

Aaron @ ADLIB: Which market trends do you foresee within eCommerce?

Laura: There’s been a lot of noise around the growth of voice search for a couple of years and it’s not really taken off as expected yet, but we do think that is going to become more prominent. Similarly AR has a lot of potential and while it has become more common, we think it will grow in popularity as the tech improves. Finally, social commerce will continue to blur the line when it comes to buying online, as social platforms become more closely linked with what we would now call ‘traditional’ online shopping.