What is Headless Commerce and How Can it Help Scale Your E-commerce Business?

When you dip your toe into the wide world of online sales, it can feel like a “Welcome to the World of Buzzwords” seminar. One of those buzzwords you may hear is headless commerce. What on Earth, right? How could something that sounds like literally losing your head possibly help your e-commerce business thrive?

We’ll tell you.

What is Headless Commerce?

In a nutshell, headless commerce is what happens when you decouple the front end from the backend of your e-commerce site, application, or platform. What does THAT mean? Let’s break it down.

The front end of your e-commerce solution is customer-facing. It’s the piece that houses all your branding, user experience, and content.

The backend is everything that happens behind the scenes. It’s where you process payments, inventory, restocking, shipping, order capturing, shipping details, PCI compliance, and all the other elements that make your business a business and not just a pretty website.

For many online storefronts, these two elements are interwoven completely. When they want to update something on the front end, they have to simultaneously update the backend to ensure a smooth transition, which risks breaking the site and causing no end of trouble.

By decoupling and creating a headless commerce solution, you increase your agility and adaptability, allowing two teams to operate simultaneously and independently without crossing any wires. The two communicate vita APIs so your backend remains functional and undisturbed while your front end receives updates on any schedule you choose, which is essential in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Why Make the Shift to Headless Commerce?

Now that you know what headless commerce is, you’re probably wondering what benefits it offers and why you should make the shift. There are a number of reasons why this type of solution will improve your business operations and satisfy your customers.

Flexibility and Speed

One of the biggest benefits of opting to decouple your front and backend is that it offers you a ton of flexibility, which in turn grants you speed. In a rapidly changing online marketplace, speed is of the essence when you’re trying to remain relevant and keep up with customer expectations.

Online sales continue to take a larger and larger piece of the overall sales pie every single year and those numbers show no signs of slowing, especially with 2020’s pandemic and less access to brick-and-mortar stores. The internet is oversaturated with e-commerce sites looking to earn their business, so they’ve become much more discerning. It’s not only about who can provide the best price – it’s also about who can provide the best experience.

The ability to quickly refresh your customer-facing site with a new design, updated branding, relevant content, and new product marketing is essential to keep up with customer demand. Trends shift and you have to remain on the ball. With a coupled e-commerce solution, you can’t update your front end without also ensuring the backend is right there step for step. Decoupling lets you focus on user experience first while you work steadily in the background to deliver.

Reliability

Headless commerce allows the front end and backend to operate with a level of independence that ensures reliable performance from both. You don’t have to worry about crashes and slow load speeds on the storefront due to an overworked backend.

Of course, to make this solution work, you’ll need a dedicated team and lots of testing to ensure your site can handle a high-volume load. However, headless commerce gives you the opportunity to perform plenty of tests without having to alter the backend every single time. Once you have all the data you need, you’ll be able to reliably predict how well your site will perform during busy seasons, which matters a great deal for a positive user experience, which in turn affects your sales.

Personalization

If there’s one thing customers love, it’s a personal touch. With traditional sites with integrated front and backends, an e-tailer typically has no choice but to work off a predesigned template that pairs with the backend. This leads to a generic site without much customization. That can be a killer when it comes to creating a cohesive brand.

Decoupling provides the opportunity to maintain the integrity of essential business operations like payment processing while offering personalization and UX focus on the customer-facing site. Customize and brand your site to your heart’s content without losing any critical functionality, ever.

Multichannel Capability

Is your brand accessible on multiple platforms, including social media? Have you considered customers who shop on mobile? Do you offer in-person pickup? You need to have a cohesive brand experience across all platforms and devices in order to maximize sales. Unfortunately, that can be tough to manage when you’re dealing with a storefront with a predefined template.

Harvard Business Review goes into great detail about how today’s customers are shopping. Very few people shop only online or only in stores. Instead, they use all the tools at their disposal. That includes mobile apps, in-store technology like interactive catalogs and tablets, various shipping and pickup options, price comparison tools, and more.

The linked article also details how customers who spend more are also doing more research online before making a purchase, and even looking up products online through multiple venues before ultimately making the decision of where to purchase.

It’s important to develop your touchpoints or the points at which a customer “touches” your business – sales reps, advertising, product exposure, branding, and similar. Headless commerce gives you the ability to create new touchpoints without dropping big time and money investments into creating a new backend for every new site. Storefronts can link to the same decoupled backend!

Scaling for Growth

When business picks up, it’s a time for celebration, but that celebration can be marred by a storefront that can’t handle the increase in traffic. When the site is decoupled, the front end can be appropriately scaled to handle a surge of new customers without adversely affecting the backend, which is huge.

Ideally, you want to see those touchpoints and sales channels from the previous topic result in steady growth and an increase in sales. A headless commerce solution gives you plenty of opportunities to operate in real-time to keep up with customers while protecting your essential operations from getting bogged down.

Using Shopify Headless Commerce

Shopify is one of the many headless commerce platforms available to retailers today, and in our opinion, easily one of the best. When we discuss Shopify headless commerce options with our clients, it’s all about customization and flexibility.

Users who migrate to Shopify have the opportunity to access robust personalization options for their storefront while enjoying the strong selection of useful applications and backend software. There’s a great deal of support for marketing and reaching customers through newer technological touchpoints like home assistants, smart speakers, and smart appliances.

When you want to enhance your customer experience via mobile access, voice shopping, and custom apps, Shopify is the perfect all-in-one platform.

Through decoupling, Shopify users can now treat their customer content and backend logistics as separate entities, which means no waiting on one to update before the other can launch. Your teams can operate independently and operations go a lot smoother!

Are You Ready to Lose Your Head?

Not literally, of course! What we really mean is, do you think you’re ready for headless commerce? We’ve given you a lot of information to help you determine whether it’s the right choice for your business. Consider the following when making your decision.

Does my current infrastructure allow for fast updates and no downtime for the live site?
Am I ready to reach customers through new channels?
Is my site mobile-friendly?
Is my checkout experience fast and easy for my customers?
Can I build a custom storefront or am I limited to templates?
Are my load times abysmal during high-volume periods?
Could I use more apps to streamline my marketing and logistics?

Depending on your answers, headless commerce could definitely be the solution for you. It’s not for everyone. You may have an e-commerce site that works exactly the way you need it to without having to worry about decoupling. However, if you want to adjust quickly and keep customers happy, you may find it’s a great option.

Shopify offers its users a great deal when it comes to building a cohesive e-commerce business. You may not have the scope or budget to have multiple internal IT teams for each element, but there are Shopify Experts available now who can offer the support you need. At SKU, we offer our clients services including storefront customization, logo and branding updates, data migration, custom applications, and a lot more. We’re happy to help you brave this new world.

Do you have any other questions or thoughts on headless commerce and whether it’s right for your business? Please reach out anytime.

How to (Legally) Grow a Cannabis E-Commerce Business

The Cannabis Business Is Growing

Times are changing, and one industry that’s really feeling those changes right now is the cannabis business. Marijuana legalization is spreading across the nation state by state. The federal government is now regularly considering legislation that would overturn the federal cannabis ban and allow states to make their own call without interference.

For those in the cannabis industry, things are looking up.

However, as with many controlled substances, there’s no ability to sell cannabis online through an e-commerce storefront. Naturally, that puts a damper on anyone’s plans to expand into online sales. If your cannabis dispensary can’t sell the product that acts as your main source of income, then what can you sell?

We have an answer for that.

Continue reading How to (Legally) Grow a Cannabis E-Commerce Business

Top 5 Core Shopify Apps for New Merchants

New to Shopify? Welcome to the powerhouse! You’re now using one of the most diversified and effective platforms for e-commerce available today. Using it to its fullest potential, on that note, can be easier said than done for the unfamiliar. No worries, though. As seasoned Shopify users, we know the best tools for getting the most out of your new Shopify store. We know you’re probably on a shoestring budget, so we’ve kept the price point pretty low. Learn all about the Shopify apps below.

Yotpo

Before we delve into anything else, we need to talk about one of the best ways to increase traffic to your storefront: word of mouth and reviews. Any small business owner knows how challenging it is to get that ever-elusive customer content, and Yotpo helps with that. It’s a fantastic management and curation tool that encourages customers to generate content through a number of different channels (email, social, review sites, etc.) and collects them for you to use to generate more traffic. Neat! You can also take advantage of Yotpo’s expanded growth options with coupons, rich snippets, product recommendations, and more. The core app is free, with additional options available for a fee.

Product Reviews Add-On

We’re going to push these review apps quite a bit, so buckle in. They really are that important! Product Reviews is another (free!) app that offers great features to encourage customers to leave reviews. They offer a few exclusive features, like Checkout Reviews and Video Reviews, which are awesome additional methods of getting great customer-generated content. The most powerful visual social media giant, Instagram, is included, too. Any of this content can be collected and used to drive new sales to your storefront.

Privy

Using review content will get people to your site, but how do you go about email collection once they’re there? You use an app like Privy. By utilizing a number of cool features like coupons or “spin to win” games, Privy uses exit pop-ups to get potential customers to pause and take one more look at your site before they leave. It’s super customizable and mobile-friendly, allowing you to determine how and when users receive a pop-up for the best results. You can focus on number of visits, cart abandonment, referral site, and tons more. This is a high-conversion application that integrates well with most, if not all, email marketing platforms.

Omnisend

Now that you have an email list to use, you need some help with email and SMS automation. No problem! All you need is Omnisend. If composing snappy marketing emails isn’t your strong suit, you can use one of their many effective templates to get the job done. Manage your welcome emails, newsletters, campaign boosts, cart recovery reminders and more all from the same convenient app. It maintains lists, segmentation, and website tracking so you don’t have to. Make your life easier and install this app. Omnisend offers you a 14-day free trial of their Premium program, which requires a monthly fee, or you can choose to switch to their free base program.

Product Upsell

You’ve got the reviews, you’ve got the email list, you’ve got email segmentation marketing on lock… what else could you want? More sales, of course! This app manages your cross-marketing and upsells for you. You get to select relevant add-on items, bundles, or related products to show customers when they add a product to their cart, checkout, or even after a sale. If you’re not sure which products will lead to the best conversions, let the app do the work for you – it crunches the data from your Shopify store to figure out which products upsell best. If Amazon can make 35% of their revenue off of upsells and cross-sells, so can you! Plans for this app start at $9.99 a month for smaller e-shops (200 views) and can go up to $89.99/month for unlimited views.

These are our top five recommendations for new Shopify users, but there’s tons more on offer. If you have questions or need some additional guidance on how to take your e-commerce business to the next level, hit us up.

What Is A Lapse Point In E-commerce?

In the world of e-commerce, there’s always something shiny and new around the virtual corner. Keeping a customer’s attention and encouraging repeat business is one of the major challenges every retailer must overcome, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re brand new or old hat. For every business, there’s a point at which they lose a customer for good if they haven’t brought them back in for a repeat purchase. We refer to this as the “lapse point.”

Maintaining a successful online business is a complex juggling act. Not only do you have to do the work of setting up and maintaining your site, you also have to manage inventory, craft compelling copy, figure out the best marketing avenues, create advertising, build email campaigns, keep an eye on your social media profiles, work out shipping issues, and so much more. All of these moving parts make it difficult to sit down and focus on a specific issue, so doing an in-depth data analysis to determine your lapse point can often go by the wayside until it’s far too late. Where do you even start? Let us tell you.

Where To Start

If your lapse point is the number of days after which a customer is likely never to purchase from you again, your first step is to calculate that point by looking over your Repeat Customer data and the average time between purchases. For Shopify e-commerce pros, this data is easy enough to access. It’s the data crunching and analysis that can often hang people up. Every e-commerce business is unique, and your repeat customer data will vary based on what you sell and how often the average customer repurchases those products.

if a customer hasn’t returned to your site before your lapse point, then they’ve likely moved on to another retailer and you probably won’t get them back.

For example, a cosmetics e-tailer will most likely have a shorter lapse point than a business that sells clothing, and the clothing business will likely have a shorter lapse point than a company selling expensive electronics. Customers need to purchase regular refills of their personal hygiene items, but only need paper products occasionally. As you can plainly see, it takes a certain amount of finesse to tease out the details of that purchasing data. Once you do, you have some powerful knowledge at your disposal.

The reality of the situation is pretty straightforward: if a customer hasn’t returned to your site before your lapse point, then they’ve likely moved on to another retailer and you probably won’t get them back. It’s absolutely essential to plan for this inevitability and figure out how to bring past purchasers back into the fold. There are several ways to do this, including:

Retargeting Campaigns for E-commerce

Using cookies to target customers who have visited your site but didn’t make a purchase. Don’t let them forget about you and entice them to come back!

Social Media Targeting

We all know Facebook can be downright creepy in how much it knows about us, and other social media giants are rapidly catching up. You can target users based on everything from demographic (Fit Moms! Military Dads! Young Professionals With Dogs!) to purchasing behavior and adjust your advertising efforts accordingly. You can also create lists based on your email data to specifically target past customers and remind them that you exist.

Email Segmentation

Dividing your email list into different segments allows you to target specific groups with tailored advertising. When you reach out to your past customers, take some extra time to research what brought them to you in the first place and what’s likely to bring them back. Were they there for a sale? A first purchase discount? Samples? What did they buy and what related products might interest them?

Remember, someone who has previously purchased from your business is multitudes more likely to buy from you again than someone who’s finding you for the first time. It’s well worth your while to invest in them so you can keep them happy and coming back for more. Don’t let your lapse point go by without coming up with a plan of action.

Need help digging into that data? We might know a guy. (It’s us. We’re the guy. Call us whenever.)

What Can Shopify Do For Your Business?

If you’re here, you already know that Shopify is hands-down one of the best online store software options available on the market. You know that it’s capable of centralizing your online sales, helping you sell across multiple channels, tracking your sales, giving you a marketing boost, and personalizing the whole shebang to match your branding. It makes everyone’s job so much easier. That’s why we love it and we love working with it.

Small businesses can get a lot out of a Shopify store, but for larger businesses, it truly sings. Having a single powerful hub to manage a warehouse of products on your own site as well as multiple major marketplaces is a huge boon to a consistently growing company. There’s less room for error and loss, and that’s music to any business owner’s ears.

So you know what the base Shopify package can do, and it’s nothing to sneeze at. But it’s capable of so much more.

When you’re already winning the online retail game, the only real option is to continue winning. Right? (Cue DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” here). You’re already seeing solid returns on your process, your Shopify is running smoothly, and everything looks good. So how do you take it to the next level?

You break out the Shopify apps.

When it comes to online storefront software, the general consensus is that Shopify is easy to use but ultimately limited. This couldn’t actually be further from the truth. While the basic software can only go so far, developers are constantly working to improve the system with webhooks, API connections, Shopify apps, and a ton of other integration to beef it up even more, which expands your options more or less to infinity.

What are some examples of what Shopify can do?

Customize and control storefronts with Shopify themes bringing in $1-$500 million or more.
Yes, million. With a 126% year-over-year average growth for their merchants, Shopify’s specialized program for growing brands, Shopify Plus, boasts tons of extra bells and whistles backed by Shopify’s truly solid platform. More sophisticated than meets the eye, this software offers up a robust API so you can connect with other APIs and complex ERPs to offer your customers everything they need and more. With automated campaigns and the ability to handle high-demand sales, this program has teeth, and it uses them. You don’t need to know any code, and your IT employees will breathe a sigh of relief when they realize they don’t have to babysit the system.

Create your own sales channel.

Are you ready to be the next major sales hub for people to find? You can be! Shopify not only connects you to all the major marketplaces for easy access and management to sell your products, it also offers an SDK that lets you create your very own sales channel. Create new sales channels and connect with other Shopify merchants to offer your customers the very best of all worlds so they can find a variety of items through your shop. Best of all, Shopify manages the entire thing.

Source products that would be a great fit for your business.

Whether you sell apparel or novelty gifts, there’s a application that will help you find great products to populate your virtual shelves. Save your staff tons of time scouring the market for products and let apps do the work for you, especially if you’re looking into drop shipping or print on demand.

Boost your marketing.

Marketing can be the bane of a business’ existence. It requires time, strategy, and endless hours of design and composition, not to mention implementation. Save yourself the headache by utilizing apps that can manage your meta data, title tags, and URL handles, as well as plenty of support for email marketing and online advertising. Need stress-free search engine optimization? There’s an app for that, too.

Keep customers interested and motivate more sales.

You know when you visit those major player storefronts and they have all the nice tools that send a reminder when there’s still an item in your cart or upsell you in an appropriately subtle way? Now you’ve got those tools at your disposal, too. Flesh out your store with smart recommendations for customers buying certain products, or something that helps select product bundles.

Shipping and tracking just got easier.

You don’t have to deal with the potential for human error when your shipping and tracking system is automated. Stop losing revenue on missed orders and integrate with the major shipping carriers in your area to streamline your process and make everything so much simpler.

… and so much more.

Really, we’re barely scratching the surface here. There are so many potential tools to customize and build out Shopify into something that’ll help you rule the world. Access to sales channels, help with accounting and customer service, better ways to track inventory… you name it, there’s an app for it. We keep abreast of all the most useful and innovative solutions, so the sky’s truly the limit. Bring us your ideas and we’ll Shopify a solution.

Setting Up Shopify Stores: Expectation vs Reality

You’ve got yourself some shiny new Shopify software. Congratulations! You’ve taken the first step toward creating and managing an online storefront with a precision that you’ve never had before. Feels good. Now all you have to do is get everything set up. According to all the advice you’ve read, it should be a snap. Right?

It’d be nice if things were as easy to assemble right out of the box as the nice, neat instruction say, but unfortunately, that’s rarely the reality. Setting up a Shopify online store isn’t necessarily difficult, but there’s a long list of steps to keep track of, which can be difficult for someone who isn’t familiar with the software. With so many different items to potentially troubleshoot, the setup can become a headache quicker than you’d like to imagine.

Carving out the necessary time to go through a 25-step online Shopify store setup is a big ask, and it’s one you don’t have to do alone.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty list of everything you need to know, set up a Shopify store, and take care of before your store can launch:

What Steps are Necessary to Setup a Shopify Store?

Choose whether you want to sell online or in person
Select the sales channels where you’d like to list
Consider your pricing plan options
Log in
Password protect your shop
Name your shop
Input your legal business name and address
Input your billing info
Set your default currency
Set your default weight units
Hire staff if necessary
Set up a domain online
Design your site out with an appealing and on-brand theme
Add in your product catalog
Organize products as needed
Set up shipping options
Do all that fun tax stuff
Test your transactions
Test order refunds and cancellations
Test fulfilling both partial and complete orders
Test your order archive system
Remove password protection so customers can access the store
All that social media marketing stuff
All that online advertising stuff
Don’t forget to define your homepage metadata

Yes, that’s 25 steps, you’re reading it correctly. Yikes, right? Not exact plug-and-play. Granted, some of these steps are relatively simple and straightforward, but when you get into the nitty-gritty of inputting each of the products from your catalog along with their information and descriptions or designing a functional theme, things can get unwieldy fast. Before you know it, you’ll have lost hours of time on work that you may or may not end up using.

Don’t get us wrong: Shopify is an incredibly powerful and useful tool for growing your online retail business. We wouldn’t work with it otherwise. Getting your products online and exploring all the available marketplaces is absolutely necessary to succeed in this rapidly growing industry, and a central hub like Shopify makes your job so much easier. It provides a singular dashboard where you can manage your products across channels, see all of your stats, track order history, market through Facebook, and so much more. It’s a powerhouse.

Which is why we understand how frustrating it is to make it halfway through the setup process and then lose the thread. In order to access all of these incredible tools, you have to make it through the build phase, and the build phase can be overwhelming. Whether you’re strapped for time or you’re just not that familiar with website setup, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds.

You’re hardly alone. This is exactly why SKU Agency exists: we’ve been there and we know how it goes. Our personal experience in running our own storefronts has led us to virtually every software configuration you can think of, and hands-down, Shopify has been the best for our needs. We know it’s the best for yours, too. Let our trial-and-error be your gain. With extensive experience in setting up dozens of online stores, we can get you up and running pain-free.

No matter where you are in the process, you’ve got the support you need. Our Shopify experience in selecting and customizing themes, finalizing shipping and tax information, crafting and uploading effective product descriptions, and more makes us the right choice for the job. Owning a small or mid-sized business is a constant juggling act of finding time to manage the business you have, find ways of growing, figuring out how to squeeze in a promotion, and saving time for the dozens of other things you need to worry about it. Carving out the necessary time to go through a 25-step online Shopify store setup is a big ask, and it’s one you don’t have to do alone.

Don’t get frustrated, get help. It’s okay to ask, we promise.

SKU Agency is a certified Shopify Expert.

Shopify Stores: Rise of Online Marketplaces & E-Commerce Software

It’s nearly 2018 and by now, you know the drill: online marketplaces are building, building, building to the sky, accounting for more and more of the United States’ total retail sales every single day. E-commerce sales are currently hovering at around 8.4% according to 2017’s third-quarter report from the Census Bureau, and every prediction shows that they’ll only continue trending upward. This isn’t peanuts — it’s billions of dollars in sales. The retail landscape is changing, which means it’s time to roll up our sleeves and learn the new ropes so we don’t get left in the dust.

Where to start?

With the third-party sellers, we know so well. These are the giants, the household names, the first sellers that spring to mind. We’re talking Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Jet, and other major players. This is where e-commerce sellers are seeing their biggest success — massive well-oiled machines sprawled across every conceivable industry and accessible by virtually every world citizen. They’ve been steadily growing and improving their holdings for decades, learning the nuances of every market so well that newer competitors can barely lay a scratch on them. There’s still room for a few niche markets who’ve found a home, though… e-sellers like Houzz and Lyst, for example, or even Etsy.

Shopify Stores give you a piece of the action.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with your boutique shop or modest online marketplace, then buckle in, because you’re about to go on a wild ride through the intricacies of online marketing channels and how to utilize them to your advantage.

First things first: let’s talk marketplace channels

A sales channel is a particular avenue you can use as a marketplace to sell your products. Virtually every major third-party seller offers an outlet for online sellers to use their existing infrastructure and customer base to sell. You know these channels as Amazon Seller Central and Vendor Express, eBay storefronts, Jet marketplace, and similar. They can be added as sales channels within Shopify stores.

Channels are predicted to rake in more than $500 billion in revenue by 2020

These marketplaces, or channels, differ from a standard online store in a few different ways. Shopify stores are owned and operated by your business alone, allowing you full control and all the room you need to do your own thing. They’re great for companies looking to build their own solid brand and control the message 100% of the time. The tradeoff, however, is that your visibility is limited by your own reach and marketing efforts. Marketplaces, on the other hand, don’t offer much in the way of strong branding or setting yourself apart from the crowd, but their existing customer base is absolutely massive, paving the way for a much bigger ready-made audience than you might be able to reach on your own. In exchange, they take a small commission on each sale, the amount of which can vary from marketplace to marketplace.

The fact that these channels are predicted to rake in more than $500 billion in revenue by 2020 (according to Forrester) means they’re well worth your consideration if you’re serious about succeeding in the online retail market.

How To Manage Your Online Marketplaces

Now the question becomes “HOW?” How do you reap the biggest possible benefit from selling through these online marketplaces, and how do you manage so many different channels at one time?

This is where a platform like Shopify comes in to simplify your life and give you the support you need.

Attempting to manage multiple shops across multiple channels gets messy fast, and Shopify has found a way to distill the process down so you’re not stretched thin. Add a product one time and you can sell it anywhere, right away. There’s no need to maintain giant spreadsheets of data in order to make sure your messaging is the same everywhere. The unified platform does it for you – do it all within one Shopify store with ease.

From one dashboard, you can access more than a dozen sales channels across the internet’s largest platforms, including Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Wish, Wanelo, Houzz, Kik, Lyst, SiBi, eBates, and more. Beyond maintaining your product listing throughout the marketplaces of your choice, you also have more marketing options to a wider audience than you’ve ever had before. Access the massive audiences perusing BuzzFeed each day, or create your own pins on Pinterest to bring browsers directly to your virtual door. This is only the tip of the versatility of Shopify Stores.

Hard as it is to believe, this is the easy part. You can compile your products and sell them across channels easily, but now you have to decide which channels are right for you and your business. Every marketplace has its own rules and regulations, which means you still need to do your due diligence or enlist help to make sure you’re staying on top of all the requirements.

Shopify stores streamline this process as well, offering a central hub where you can browse and edit your listings as necessary.

Ultimately, the best way to grow your business will be to use any avenue available to you to access customers, and selling through multiple marketplaces in addition to your own online Shopify stores is going to be the best way to do that. Through using a platform like Shopify, you can use their fantastic back-end integration with key marketplaces to amplify your long-term e-commerce strategy.