Ecommerce and marketing consultancy Entropy, is our exclusive partner for the new series of Ecommerce Hero on ECA.
Richard Lucas is CEO and Co-Founder of GoVox Wellbeing. We find out who the hero is that has inspired him in his ecommerce career.
Who is your ecommerce hero?
Well, I’m going to give you a slightly unconventional answer for this series and say fairly generally: our consumers.
What have they done to win hero status in your eyes?
As someone with a more traditional sales background before starting GoVox, I’m just really impressed how they’ve embraced change & been open to new ways of ‘doing business’ over lockdown. It wasn’t long ago that you wouldn’t have dreamed of purchasing anything ‘online’…..or at least there would have been a level of nervousness.
This has also enabled ecommerce to push the boundaries and has got us to a point where you have an online solution for pretty much every need. My business GoVox has adapted to consumers needs over lockdown. We’ve developed it to essentially save lives through utilising technology to improve happiness and save lives in the workplace, education, sports and clubs. You can read the founder story of how it came about below.
How has their heroism helped drive ecommerce?
By being open to new ways of interacting, moving from being nervous about engaging online to making it part of everyday life has driven innovation to a new level. As well as introducing markets to an ecommerce solution that you would never have dreamed of.
What are the biggest challenges in ecommerce we need another hero to solve?
Tough one, for me my personal challenge feels like it is the amount of ‘noise’ and ‘hype’ as a business we need to navigate in order to understand what will really add value to our business.
We are engaged by other companies in so many different ways. The challenge is how do we see a way through this to make sure that consumers get the right product, at the right time and that we don’t end up working with just the most visible?
How has your business changed its use of ecommerce over the Covid period?
So, the reason for my nomination has been that, as an online platform focused on Wellbeing, as you would have expected, we have had quite an upturn during the Covid period. As people get used to new ways of working and are now more disconnected (physically) from their teams, we have had to bridge that gap.
What’s an interesting ecommerce innovation you’ve seen as businesses have had to adapt?
Online meeting tools, hubs to connect. It wasn’t long ago that a ‘Teams’ call was confined to senior leaders in large organisations. Fast forward through the pandemic and we have experienced online family quiz nights and even (so some of my single friends tell me) online ‘first dates’.
