Agency Spotlight: An Interview With Maze

Thought Leadership

The Maze Group utilizes technical solutions and full-funnel marketing tactics to identify opportunities that fundamentally change their clients’ businesses and achieve outcomes that matter. In this month’s agency spotlight, we spoke to Maze’s Head of Shopify Practice Ahim Shan about what makes the agency unique and why subscriptions are critical in today’s eCommerce marketplace.

What specific verticals/segments does your agency have expertise in/focus on?

Maze is somewhat vertical agnostic as our experience and expertise cut horizontally across digital marketing (i.e., paid acquisition, retention, loyalty), eCommerce systems integration and migrations (Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud), and data analytics and conversion rate optimization (CRO). Our strengths lie in working with business stakeholders to understand, architect, and develop creative and innovative solutions that meet business needs and goals. That being said, Maze has significant experience in the retail, apparel, beauty, health and life science and wellness spaces, focusing exclusively on the upper-mid and enterprise market. We are also getting more involved in the media and entertainment space.

What eCommerce platforms have you built a practice around? Why?

Maze is focused on the two eCommerce platforms that are the most requested by our clients and own the largest share of the market. Since we focus on upper-mid-market and large enterprise clients, we have built our eCommerce practice around Shopify Plus and Shopify Composable Commerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), along with their headless solution, Composable Storefront. Working with Shopify and Salesforce allows us to benefit from the tremendous amount of investments the platforms have made in innovative eCommerce solutions and build and extend features for our clients that deliver real business value.

Brands/retailers are looking for cultural alignment when selecting partners. How would you describe the culture of your agency?

At Maze, we believe that clients want to work with partners that act like owners in their business. When we are engaged with a client, we focus our energy on doing great work that moves the needle in a measurable way for our clients. Maze is 100% delivery-focused, not so much sales, as we believe that on-time, on-budget, excellent service delivery establishes trust, and this leads to long-term and sustainable relationships. Maze takes pride in engineering excellence and delivering scalable and maintainable code for our clients. As a result of our work ethic, over 70% of our clients have worked with us at least once before in their careers, and our “repeat client” metric is one metric that we monitor very closely. In addition to being service delivery focused, all of our team members are full-time employees. We believe this gives us finer control over projects, including aspects like security and contextual knowledge, and ensures we keep a tight feedback loop internally and with clients. We cultivate trust with our employees just as we cultivate trust with our clients and business partners. This shows as Maze has a 90% employee retention rate.

What are your agency’s top three areas of expertise?

Maze’s top areas of investment and focus are:

• Digital marketing services that are synergistic with our system integration/engineering services with Shopify Plus and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We believe that building a new eCommerce site is only the beginning of the journey, not the end. As such, our clients need to invest continuously in acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers, and rapidly evolve with changing shopping and social media behaviors. In addition, retaining and forging loyal and trusted long-term relationships is paramount.  
• Systems integration/engineering services are also core to our service offering. We assist clients in evaluating the best platform to migrate to, building the business case to support the investment, and then migrating seamlessly to the new platform. We also offer post-launch managed/run service where we not only maintain and support the eCommerce storefront but also proactively monitor site performance from a data analytics, CRO, UI/UX, site speed, and merchandising perspective. 
• Data analytics and CRO are important for interpreting data and drawing insights and observations to guide our clients strategically. Our team dedicates effort to continuously refining and optimizing our client’s businesses.

Why are subscriptions so important in today’s eCommerce landscape?

Repeat customers and building brand trust and loyalty is critically important, especially in a world with many distractions and competing brands. We have found that subscriptions are becoming essential for an eCommerce business. They enable brands to build much deeper relationships directly with their customers, allowing for richer experiences, including personalization, curated recommendations, and unique upsell opportunities.

Why do you partner with Ordergroove today? What problems does Ordergroove help you solve in the market?  

Maze partners with Ordergroove because they are a leading subscription solution in the enterprise eCommerce space. Ordergroove’s flexibility, robust API support, and collaborative working relationship have allowed us to understand, solve for, and implement complex subscription models together.

How many products do you subscribe to? Which is your favorite?  

My family subscribes to several subscription products – pet food, magazines, online streaming services, tennis balls and equipment, facial products, etc. I have come to trust these brands and have had a long relationship, over many years, with my favorite products. I don’t know how I would manage the ordering and timing of these products without a subscription with flexible options to manage my preferences!

Each month, Ordergroove spotlights a leading eCommerce agency. If you’d like to be considered for a future post, email us at [email protected].