Episode 6: What Can the Sex Toy Industry Teach Us About Personalization in Ecommerce?

Episode Description:

In this captivating episode of the Discovered podcast, Rachel Tonner delves deep into a dynamic conversation with e-commerce expert Matthew Medlyn. Leveraging his extensive background working with renowned brands like Wiltshire Farm Foods and Love Honey, Matt explores the unique hurdles of designing for diverse user personas, ranging from seniors to caregivers. They explore the evolution of website design elements, such as skeuomorphism, that empowered non-tech-savvy users in the early 2000s to connect with online shopping.

The discussion takes an intriguing turn as they navigate the intricate landscape of sexual wellness products, dissecting the challenges of gender-based categorization versus other methods. They also touch upon industries like fragrances that grapple with similar issues, and what ecommerce as a whole can learn from this. Together, Rachel and Matt underscore the significance of avoiding assumptions in e-commerce, pushing boundaries, and prioritizing user preferences, with a couple of massively useful tips — discount codes, and working with affiliates — you can use right now before Black Friday. Join us for an enthralling exploration of progressive e-commerce practices.

Guest BIO:

Matt Medlyn is Head of Ecommerce at Graham and Green. An industry veteran, which is a terrible word, he’s been in Ecommerce for over 20 years. Before Graham and Green, Matt spent 10 years at Lovehoney, where he saw things that you wouldn’t believe and did his best to sell them. Prior to that, he sold frozen food online to the very elderly, that was quite the career change. Matt left the tyranny of LinkedIn a decade ago, he also recently left Twitter. You can, however, find him on Mastodon if you’re persistent.

References:

• Stop Gendering Shopping Petition
• Ecommerce Pride
• Lovehoney
• Wiltshire Farm Foods
• Professor Heinz Wolff
• Graham & Brown
• GTM/Google Tag Manager
• Skeuomorphism in Ecommerce Design

Transcript:

Rachel Tonner
All right. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for coming on the Discovered podcast. Really happy to have you here. Can you just briefly introduce yourself? 

00:20
Matthew Medlyn
Hello, I’m Matt Medlyn, and I’ve been in e commerce for longer than time itself. So I started my career within e commerce at a company called Apetito, obviously a German company, but they had a presence in the UK. And what I worked on first within Ecommerce is for a brand called Wiltshire Farm Foods, which is essentially a private meals on wheel service, where the typical age of the end consumer, as it were, was 81. And I say end consumer because there are two very different user personas. Within Wiltshire Farm Foods, you have the end user purchasing for themselves, but often the case would be essentially a child of the end user, a caregiver of some sort that was ordering on their behalf. And even the caregiver themselves would be in their late 50s, early 60s. And so within Ecommerce, that presented somewhat unique challenges, not in certain terms of technology, so to speak, but also sort of user behaviors. 

01:53
Matthew Medlyn
So these are people who were who at the time, and this was very early 2000s, were not familiar with shopping on the Internet. And so we had to use essentially what’s it called skeuomorphism in our user pattern. So SKU morphism was a type of design in the early 2000s where your physical interface, or your interface, your virtual interface, would mimic a physical interface. So on early iPads, the book app would look like a book case. For example, on the Wiltshire Foods website, when you added something to your basket, the individual picture would then fly up and deposit itself into the basket, because people at the time, people didn’t realize this concept, that a basket would auto update itself. And there were two offshoots of that. So, firstly, these are people who may suffer from visual or motor impairment. And so the website had to be high contrast. 

03:10
Matthew Medlyn
And I worked with a scientist, and I now cannot remember his name, but he was quite famous in the UK, a guy called Volcan [Professor Heinz Wolff], and he developed essentially, a series of glasses you could wear that would mimic types of visual impairment. And in terms of motor impairment, weirdly, what we discovered was that most people were buying on a laptop, and the laptop had that little middle nipple in the screen rather than a touchpad. And so you couldn’t have elements too close together. You had to separate out these elements so that every movement was a distinct and purposeful one that did very well as a website. The conversion rate is something that most people would envy. But then why would you go to this website other than to order something? 

04:02
Rachel Tonner
I’m just going to interrupt you just for a second, just to talk a little bit about what you’ve just talked about. So you’ve been in ecommerce for a really long time. That particular website you were talking about, the user experience, like being skeuomorphic, so the item going into the basket and things like that. How have you managed to kind of shed with each new job change? Shed those old things? I think oftentimes in ecommerce people will go from one job to another and do the same thing that they did at their last job. So I just want touch on that briefly because they’ve been in the industry. 

05:43
Matthew Medlyn
I’m not entirely certain that, you know, in that. One thing that I learned at Walshire Farm Foods and I took on to Love Honey, and I have taken on to Graham and Green for some extent, is a love for big, chunky buttons. Big, chunky, obvious buttons, ideally with a picture or some form of iconography on it. The big thing is about simplicity. And simplicity can often be conflated with a lack of the need for brain power when using a website. And everything should be obvious and it’s difficult to instil that within a business. I’m not a big fan of these kind of mystery meat links. You can get where the user isn’t sure that when clicking on that link will take them. And if a user isn’t sure where clicking that link will take them, they ain’t going to click it. So everything needs to be super duper obvious. 

06:49
Matthew Medlyn
Someone’s having a conversation behind me. So when someone is clicking on something sorry. And so, yeah, when certainly the content team are making this content and deploying these assets, I try to instil this idea of this needs to be obvious. This needs to be super obvious, what people are clicking on. And this kind of segues nicely into Love Honey, because if the listeners don’t know love Honey is one of the world’s biggest, what we like to call sexual wellness products. But really, we’re talking sex toys. And so this is a scary thing. This is a scary thing for most people. They literally want to dip their toe in the water. And so you want to make the navigation as friendly and simple to use as possible. At the time, prior to Love Honey really expanding, these sites were generally run by kind of adult, I want to say the word porn companies because they were it had a very kind of seedy attitude to them and very stark visual layout. 

08:19
Matthew Medlyn
These are essentially scary things that we’re going to put on the home page and we did some super great research where we took essentially different demographics of users. And one of those kind of demographics of users that we had face to face, almost like panel interviews with were women over 40, which is actually the core market to some extent because these are people whose children have left home and they’re starting to be adventurous again. And we did this research and we found a few things. Firstly, that the packaging at the time most of these products came cardboard backed shell, plastic, essentially a plastic shell with a product in it and a cardboard back. That cardboard was normally bright pink in some form. It normally had bubble letters of some form. And one of the feedback we got was that they looked like children’s toys. They looked like barbie essentially. 

09:38
Matthew Medlyn
And that made us think that, well, these aren’t these sorts of toys. We should treat them like consumer electronics. And with know, you look at the concept of unboxing videos, which used to be quite the thing back in the day, and the old apple experience of a ridiculously convoluted, unboxing experience for a tiny little product. And so we aped that and we elevated all our packaging to look like consumer electronics. The other thing that we discovered was that people essentially needed permission for this stuff. So we had these focus groups. And at the end of the focus group, we would say, well, there would be all these things laid out on the table for them to look at. And we said, well, if you want to take any of this stuff home with you, please do. And they were shoving it into their bags as quickly as they could. 

10:43
Matthew Medlyn
We just had to give them permission that these things are okay. And so you then have to think, well, how do I apply that to a website where you need easy navigation? And the difficulty specifically in terms of genderization of products is that the typical men, women, couples is shorthand, essentially, is shorthand for the bits that you got, and sex toys fundamentally for anatomy, not gender. And so how do you get that across when it is such a shorthand for sex toys for women, sex toys for men, sex toys for couples, and. 

11:35
Rachel Tonner
I suppose there’s like the SEO element of it as well. Well, yeah, what are people searching for? 

12:42
Matthew Medlyn
We talk about discovery of these things, but discovery starts at the search engine, essentially. And so how do you adapt for that? And ultimately the question is, do you change your navigation from a gender based one to anatomy based one without it looking confrontational, essentially. And so what we ended up doing was anatomizing the categories, essentially. So we would say something like nipple clamps, everyone’s got nipples and it doesn’t matter what gender well, you might have nipples, you might not. It doesn’t matter what gender you are. When it comes to couples, that’s the really interesting stuff

13:57
Matthew Medlyn
Well, the d word dildos. So you get double ended dildos. You do. Many people enjoy them, but they’re not really for a gender. Essentially. Infinite genders and infinite combinations is what they are for. So how do you categorize them within the context of gender? You can’t. Similarly, let’s talk about trans people. And so often people have gone gender reassignment surgery or gender affirming surgery. There are things called packers, essentially. And packers are not prosthetic as such, but they are essentially fake penises that some people use because it gives them the feeling that they have something there and they’ll often name them and all sorts of things. 

15:12
Rachel Tonner
But where do you so interesting, because this is such a private part of life, isn’t it? Such a private part of life and it’s so personal. It is like the definition of personal. It’s like the core of who you are. And actually trying to categorize that for the masses is damn near possible, to be honest. 

15:35
Matthew Medlyn
Yeah, exactly. And the worst thing you can do is put them under sex toys for women. Absolutely. 

15:46
Rachel Tonner
Do you put what did you do? 

15:50
Matthew Medlyn
Well, this is the challenge. They ended up in couples. I wanted to put them into sex toys for men. That’s why I wanted to put them. But in terms of categorization, there was a massive pushback from the business saying, well, if you put them in sex toys for men, people won’t find them or people who are cisgendered will be put off by that. So, yeah, you’re literally between a rock and a hard place on this. 

16:30
Rachel Tonner
So I guess we’ve jumped right into the detail here, which is really interesting in that case. Did you put them in multiple categories? Did you do that sometimes as well? 

16:44
Matthew Medlyn
Toys? We definitely put in multiple categories. Some things, because of a common shared anatomy, there are things such as they’re not really double ended dildos, but they’re things that can be enjoyed by couples of many variations of anatomy, but they are primarily used by lesbian couples and straight couples, essentially. And something like that. It might be put into sex toys for men. It might be put into sex toys for men, but you’d definitely put it into sex toys for couples. What you really need, and I hate the concept of othering, but sex toys for everyone. 

17:42
Rachel Tonner
I just wanted to tell the audience about a petition that I’m on the board of Wcommerce Pride, and we’ve drafted this position about stop gendering shopping. And it’s really quite interesting because it’s a lot of the things you’ve just talked about, where retailers often make an assumption that if someone ticks male on, like a newsletter sign up form, they assume loads of things after. That. Or if somebody ticks female. Or hopefully you have a third option of other or more than three options. But you really shouldn’t do that. And Love Honey. And talking about sex toys is probably like the most complicated reason as to why, which is all we’ve just talked about. But things like considering behavioral segmentation rather than demographic segmentation.

18:31
Matthew Medlyn
It is largely preferences. I mean, a less extreme example of this is the fragrance industry because people put in fragrances for men, fragrances for women, and last time I checked, fragrances didn’t have genders. And it is the most basic, crude application of fragrance notes. So men like Woody and Spicy and fresh and women like Floral and all sorts. That’s absolutely not true.

19:07
Rachel Tonner
That’s just not true. 

19:11
Matthew Medlyn
There’s a fantastic fragrance I love called Portrait of a lady and it’s essentially like if a nuclear bomb was made of roses. It’s fantastic. It’s just an explosion of rose. And it is often categorized within fragrances for women. And so what is slowly happening and it’s not happening with the perfume shop or anywhere like that, but certainly the niche fragrance retailers are moving this into note based navigation. People know what their preferences are and sorting navigation by preference rather than gender, the question is, do people search for perfume for women? Probably. And so what do you build a landing page for? That for sure, but it wouldn’t be a categorization point. 

20:09
Rachel Tonner
Yeah, and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. It’s like the journey in. You might need to have those stereotypical keywords and things in your Google Shopping ads and in the landing pages that drive SEO and drive organic traffic. But then once you get into the website and they’re actually navigating your website, maybe even thinking about making search more prominent, making your search engine work really well for the words that people are using, and then considering your categories and kind of what really needs to be there, does it need to be gendered or not? 

20:44
Matthew Medlyn
The way I think of it is this is an opportunity for education. So the same way that someone types in sex toys for women. I work for Graham and Green now, which is a homewares and furniture company, and one of our core search terms is Unusual Gifts for Women. And so it is an opportunity for education. Anything can be to be a gift for a woman. You buy it and you give it to a woman. That’s what it is. And so it is an opportunity for education. Currently, our offering there is very gendered. It’s vases or penknives. And so how do we adapt that with a product offering that says to the user, I am in the right place? That’s the first thing you need to tell them. Yes, this is a page for unusual gifts for women, and then break it down into what sort of personality are you purchasing for because that’s all that matters. 

22:03
Matthew Medlyn
Unusual gifts for the adventurous. Unusual gifts for food lovers. Unusual gifts for animal lovers. And so that’s our primary categorization for gifts now. It is based on the personality and interest rather than gender. Yes, we’ll have those gender pages, but we will funnel you down into personality types. 

22:26
Rachel Tonner
Yeah, that sounds like a great strategy. And especially kind of on the lead up to peak. We’re getting into kind of Christmas and other holidays. 

22:39
Matthew Medlyn
Everyone’s starting Christmas early. We just had a talk yesterday about starting Christmas in September. 

22:45
Rachel Tonner
Yeah. What do you think it’s going to be like this year? What are your predictions? 

22:53
Matthew Medlyn
I think there will be a lot of delayed purchasing. Without a doubt, people not spending in July and August, people will start buying Christmas presents early, stretching out their budget. I mean, in terms of the Graham and Green customer, you would think they’d be quite affluent to buy a table on Graham and Green, you’re looking 1000 pounds. But even then, they aren’t insulated from the cost of living crisis. Everyone’s bills have gone up. We’re talking in a meeting yesterday and people’s mortgages have increased by 400, 500 pounds a month. And so that’s all that disposable income taken. Now, what I think will happen is, as I say, Christmas spending will be spread over several months. I think Black Friday will be crazier than ever. Absolutely. 

23:56
Rachel Tonner
Really. 

23:57
Matthew Medlyn
I think just off the basis of the number of trials or attempts to use a discount code have shot up. And I’ve looked at user sessions where they tried code after code after code trying to figure out how they can get the best discount. And that was a behavior that pretty much didn’t exist four or five years ago. 

24:24
Rachel Tonner
Do you think that’s because also of the rise in apps that do that for you on the checkout page, the. 

24:32
Matthew Medlyn
Honey style, and it’s built into edge now? Well, that’s the question because these things sort of auto apply largely for you, but you can see certainly on referral traffic, these are people who are trying multiple affiliate sites, trying to find the best codes. And one thing that we found that worked really well for us was having our own codes page, essentially, because all these affiliates do know build a page saying Graham and Green discount codes and try to rank for it. That’s all they do. So what’s stopping us from doing the same? 

25:14
Rachel Tonner
That’s brilliant. 

25:16
Matthew Medlyn
We can run PPC campaigns for that. They’re not allowed to run PPC campaigns for that. And if that’s all they are doing, do they really deserve that money? If they’re not actively sticking your brand in front of users? But this is a passive, and I use the term intentionally bottom feeding affiliates who aren’t adding value to your business. They’re just taking margin so we can do that ourselves and not pay affiliate commission for what is such a basic journey. 

25:48
Rachel Tonner
If you shift that budget over to paid spend on that page and absolutely blast it. 

25:54
Matthew Medlyn
Yeah, same amount of revenue, less margin going into the pockets of affiliates.

25:57
Rachel Tonner
More brand affinity. 

26:01
Matthew Medlyn
Absolutely. 

26:02
Rachel Tonner
More retargeting. 

26:03
Matthew Medlyn
Yeah, as I say, you got all these people trying codes, and one thing that I also found very successful is consolation prize codes. So if someone tries a code that’s invalid, either they haven’t hit the threshold or the code has expired, or anything like that. Instead of just saying, this code is invalid, you rewrite the error message to say, sorry, this code has expired. And you can say when it expired if you like, but you can still save 5% off by using this code instead. And you give them the code right there, all they need to do is type it in, which then stops them hunting around, because hunting around is you don’t want them leaving your site just in case they see a competitors, and that works really well as well. And you disallow that code from your affiliate. So they’re not allowed to promote that code. 

26:57
Matthew Medlyn
They don’t get money on that code, which means they don’t get paid for promoting old invalid codes. And I come down quite hard on affiliates and I don’t pay them massive commission depending on the affiliate type. If they’re a content affiliate, I’ll pay them a fair bit of money because you’re getting that brand engagement and you’re not taking the margin on the discount code use. But if they’re just a discount code affiliate, they don’t really do any work. 

27:27
Rachel Tonner
Yeah, I’ve been in ecommerce for a long time too, and there’s always been this misconception about consumers. I think that you have to make it as easy as possible to check out because they just don’t want to work to do it. But actually, I think that behavior has absolutely shifted based on what you’ve just said as well, where people are searching around for these discount codes, they’re really trying to get themselves the best deal. So I think what you’ve done there is brilliant, keeping them on the page because you don’t want them to leave. They’ll get distracted, they’ll go away, they’ll find somebody else. And retailers are doing this elsewhere. So when you unsubscribe from a subscription service, the customer support, they have these codes that they are like, okay, we’ll refund you this, you can quit, but here’s a code for this. Why not try that? 

28:18
Matthew Medlyn
Do you want different ways off for the next three months? 

28:22
Rachel Tonner
Say that again? 

28:23
Matthew Medlyn
Do you want 60% off for the next three months? 

28:25
Rachel Tonner
Yes, exactly. 

28:26
Matthew Medlyn
Yes, I do. Thank you very much. And I’ll take that to discount again in another three months time. 

28:33
Rachel Tonner
That’s brilliant. I think you’ve just given people some really actionable advice here that they can implement in time for peak. It’s not hard, is it? 

28:44
Matthew Medlyn
As I say, I think people are saving now for Christmas. They’re probably saving now for Black Friday. I hate to bring it forward, but if you got to do a Black Friday promotion, do it on October payday and make it last because that October payday is going to be the big one, without a doubt. 

29:11
Rachel Tonner
Good advice. So we talked about Love Honey in quite graphic detail, which was awesome. Thank you. What is the transferable knowledge that you have from your time there at quite like a hard grasp of getting e commerce right, really at Love Hunting to then kind of the furniture industry. And what can other people take from your experience there that might be transferable to their other sectors? 

29:38
Matthew Medlyn
Sure. They are very different types of business, not just in terms of what they sell. At Love Honey, to make a stupid joke, I was very familiar with the whip. Essentially, were a hard driving business where gross was everything, revenue was everything, and moving to Graham and Green, which is a very more laid back brand, one that values brand engagement over revenue, was quite the culture shock for me. Within my first six months, I hired a category manager. As you would you get a category manager in to look at your product mix, look at your price points and measure sell through for each thing. Are there categories that are overstuffed? Are there categories where we need to buy more in? And that’s not how that business works at all. It’s based on what fits the brand. 

29:53
Matthew Medlyn
So if there’s 20 little storage boxes that fit that brand, we’re going to buy them. And so I can go to the buying people and say, please buy more bookshelves because I got a lot of traffic coming for bookshelves and we’ve only really got three of them. Sourcing doesn’t work like that because, yeah, they can buy a whole bunch of bookshelves. Will they fit the brand and will they fit the customers requirements? Probably not. The customers who buy our furniture are looking for furniture they can’t get elsewhere. They are ideally looking for handmade furniture. And so there’s a limited number of suppliers for such things. And so, yes, this was a massive culture shock to me, but what really matters in any business and certainly during a cost of living crisis is being reactive. And when I joined Graham and Green, it was know, it was like steering a cow. 

31:05
Matthew Medlyn
It doesn’t want to change direction very easily. And at Love Honey, we used to change stuff on the spin of a dime. So, for example, during Black Friday, I’m sort of a fan of jury rigging stuff, MacGyvering things for those of you who are over 40. And so for Black Friday, this is like 2018. We aped Amazon’s concept of lightning deals, so products that had a big discount, but only for an hour. And we did this, I think over four or five days, and we ended up discounting about 500 products in eight languages on eight different websites using nothing but JavaScript and Google Sheets. And it was fantastic. It was absolutely fantastic. And that’s something that I’m trying to bring to Graham and Green, this concept of rapid prototyping and deployment. Simple things, simple things, if we can. Because the problem is with development queues is that nothing gets done fast. 

31:24
Matthew Medlyn
Unfortunately, if I take a requirement to a developer has to drink their coffee and twiddle their thumbs for 2 hours thinking about it. And something simple like someone adds to cart. Nowadays there’s this weird concept of mini carts and people kind of, oh, I want to see what’s in my cart. Unless you’re, ASDA most people buy one or two things from you.

31:57
Rachel Tonner
People aren’t gonna maybe mini cart five sofas with a table. 

32:00
Matthew Medlyn
No, they’re not. So just take them to the goddamn basket. You don’t have to have this weird nebulous concept and possibly skeuomorphic concept of someone looking at their basket as they walk through the aisles. Just take them to the basket. And so that’s something that I’ve just deployed in GTM on add to cart event, click the link to the basket automatically for them. And that’s something that I really believe in, is having this concept of rapid deployment, understanding edge cases very quickly and then being able to then refine the ticket for it to be hard coded. And a good example of that is in terms of SEO, we’ve done a ton of SEO work purely using GTM. So in terms of product metadata, a big win for me was, you know that Google crawls your website and it has a crawl budget, a limited number of pages, it will crawl each time. 

32:06
Matthew Medlyn
How do you get the maximum amount of product information over to Google without it crawling a bunch of pages. Don’t have your product metadata on the product page, have it on the category page. So it will then suddenly detect all these products with rich metadata, shipping policy, returns policy, whatever. You can chuck at it by looking at one page. And once we did that, and we added like breadcrumb information and all sorts of fun structural stuff, google then quickly understood, right, this is a page on table lamps. They got 192 different table lamps. Again, our buying strategy is crazy without having to browse 192 pages. And that was just done in GTM. It would take largely forever to do as a hard code. And if it works, if it’s successful, then we’ll hard code it. But it just allows you to try stuff out quickly and somewhat efficiently. 

33:08
Matthew Medlyn
And I love doing that sort of stuff, and it’s something that I always bring with me. Don’t be limited by your development queue or your development budget. Just try stuff out, for crying out loud. 

33:23
Rachel Tonner
Yeah, I think the same concept could possibly also be applied to your search results landing pages. We’ve had some other clients that have indexed their search results landing pages and their organic traffic skyrocketed. 

33:37
Matthew Medlyn
What I love with site search is dynamic merchandising, because what’s a good recent example, arched mirrors. This is a good recent example. What you don’t want is a ton of work done by your merchandising team to categorize a whole bunch of things into 50 different categories. So we will sell you an arched window pane, garden mirror. Essentially, you don’t want a merchandiser having to assign that to arched mirrors, garden mirrors, window pane mirrors, because category management then gets insane. So why don’t you just build a dynamically merchandise search page for that? And you can fudge the URL structure and you can fudge the breadcrumbs. So according to Google, it lives under your mirrors page, but your merchandise is not having to assign categories to it. It’s just a search result with some filtering on. And that does suddenly your keyword focused search offering or page offering category offering is expanded tenfold because they can create these pages, 10, 20 a day if they want to, just based off what people search for. 

35:07
Matthew Medlyn
And you’ll want to do an element of filtering just to make sure that something that’s an arch mirror within a little storage box or something isn’t coming up, but it’s just so much quicker and so much more efficient. And I love these little quick wins. They’re not silver bullets, but they’re quick wins and they add up. 

54:28
Rachel Tonner
Yeah, this has been brilliant. Thank you so much for really just sharing such actionable things as well. I think from categorization to the discount codes to the lightning sales and then what you’re just talking about now with the categories and the search results, it’s been brilliant. I have a confession that sometimes it is really fun to go on to Love Honey and actually read the customer reviews. If anybody wants a laugh.

36:03
Matthew Medlyn
Little bit not safe, there is some absolute corkers and also the occasional horror show as well. 

36:11
Rachel Tonner
Absolutely. 

36:13
Matthew Medlyn
Just got to tell you one. 

36:15
Rachel Tonner
Yeah, go on. 

36:16
Matthew Medlyn
It might be a little bit blue for this podcast, but Love Honey still do essentially sell a thing called a squeal, which is a wheel of rotating tongues. And in the review, in this awful review, someone used the phrase trapped in the mechanism. 

36:41
Rachel Tonner
Oh, my God. 

36:42
Matthew Medlyn
I know. But if you’re ever a lonely Saturday night glass of wine, start reading some reviews. It’s great. 

36:51
Rachel Tonner
Cool. Well, we’re going to leave it there. I’m sure we’ll actually have you back because I just feel like you could talk about a whole load of things. So really appreciate your time. 

36:59
Matthew Medlyn
Thank you.