AirTank
Growing Sales Around E-Commerce

How consumers buy products and services is continuously changing—especially over the last eighteen months. This is par for the course for AirTank. For the past decade, the digital commerce leader has partnered with hundreds of companies to connect the dots between digital commerce strategy, marketing execution, and technology implementation. And outcomes are consistently impressive: +177 percent conversion rate, +209 percent website conversions, +142 percent advertising CTR, to name a few.

The company’s full suite of services span e-commerce strategy, digital audits and roadmaps through marketplace management, storefront design and development, online advertising, content, social media marketing, and e-commerce platform selection and implementation.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Jason Tabeling, CEO of AirTank, reveals what prompted the company to create its own cloud-based, API-first e-commerce platform, ZiftrShop, and why the future of e-commerce depends on specific technology advances.

Could you brief us on the company’s genesis?

The history of AirTank is based on an entrepreneurial backdrop. The company started as an incubator shop around blockchain and free price rewards. There was a natural expansion into e-commerce and we quickly grew our team to support the digital needs of our clients. So for over a decade, we’ve been partnering with our clients to address challenges they were having in the digital marketing and e-commerce spaces. We started with SEO, online ads and website development and expanded into social media and marketplaces. As the market expanded, so did we. And through our client engagements we had an inside view and hands-on experience with numerous e-commerce platforms. We gained a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of platforms, and our team wanted to address the gaps we noticed. So we decided to build a better option for the market using a flexible technology architecture. The entrepreneurial spirit of leveraging technology to advance applications has been the driving DNA that has propelled us forward as an organization. ZiftrShop, our API-first e-commerce platform, was born out of this passion. We now offer a full suite of e-commerce marketing services as well as our leading e-commerce platform that is built for anything the future holds.

What challenges are plaguing the industry today?

There’s a lot of attention on friction right now. Friction makes everything harder for both customers and brands.

So reducing or removing friction altogether can have a tremendously positive impact. From the customer’s point of view, reducing friction makes their e-commerce experience effortless and even enjoyable. Things like easy and intuitive payment processes, checkout flows, site navigation, relevant recommendations and fast-responding websites are good examples. From a brand’s point of view, removing friction enables innovation, speed to market, and superior experiences. The ability to add new features quickly, test landing pages, create new product listings, or add new payment methods are good examples. It’s everything that allows a brand to move and respond at a pace the customer expects. So implementing the right technology to reduce friction is critical.

What is the process of delivering solutions to your clients?

We love getting to know our clients, their unique products and services, and what their ultimate goals are. We kick things off with a digital audit that gives us a clear understanding of strengths and weaknesses from all angles. With a clear understanding of their goals, we investigate things like organic search rankings, page speed, page search, and technical checkout requirements, to name a few and work on developing some best practices to improve on the weaknesses.

What would you describe as a successful client engagement story?

For us, a success story looks different for every client depending on their goals. Some clients are looking for a better e-commerce platform. Some are looking to improve their Amazon sales and others want to improve CTRs, or Google Ad listings just to name a few.

One story that encompasses the value we bring to the table was our partnership with a client who was experiencing major roadblocks in their business because their e-commerce platform wasn’t meeting their needs. The technology they had in place was inhibiting the growth of their business with shopping cart timeouts, and the website couldn’t handle the increased traffic, which limited their ability to sell and increase their revenue. They approached us to help solve challenges in the direction of scalability, customer timeout time, and to increase their conversion rates. Identifying the problem, we steered the client to a new platform to increase their business performance. After we implemented some of these changes they saw a 40 percent decrease in average page load time and an 18 percent increase in conversion rate year over year after the migration.

What steers you ahead of the market competition?

It’s really about helping companies connect the dots between their business goals, marketing efforts, and the technology required for execution. Often new technology is implemented by a software partner and marketing initiatives are driven by a separate agency. It’s not surprising that disconnects occur and desired outcomes aren’t met. But because of AirTank’s full suite of marketing services and e-commerce platform technology chops, we understand how everything comes together for our customers. We’re better at connecting the dots.

What does the future look like for your company?

We are very excited about the future. When you’re in an industry that experiences continuous change, it provides incredible opportunity and spurs a lot of innovation. Our team is full of innovators and inventors. They get fired up when they’re working on things like artificial intelligence and machine learning. And our e-commerce platform, ZiftrShop, remains center stage. It’s a platform built for change, so we are looking forward to advancing its capabilities to help our customers provide epic commerce experiences for their customers.