Sramana: Where did you turn to obtain subscribers for your print catalogue? Mercia Tapping: In terms of marketing the catalogue, we used our own customer database, which was substantial. Sramana: How many customers do you have? Mercia Tapping: In theory, we had over 50,000 new customers a year.
Sramana: Search engines picked up your product descriptions, and users found your site when they were using search engines to search for things like steam cleaners and air purifiers. Is that an accurate description of your customer acquisition model when you started? Mercia Tapping: That is exactly it. In January 2000, our first month’s sales
Sramana: Essentially, you positioned yourself as an expert voice over a certain class of products, and your priority was to build trust with consumers. Did you find that consumers were willing to trust you? Mercia Tapping: Consumers have always trusted our opinion and the strength of our evaluation. We actually find that other e-commerce stores
Sramana: In 1998, when you were ready to start your company, what did you do to start it? What were your strategy and offering? Mercia Tapping: What I wanted to do is not very original now, but it was in 1998. I wanted to offer people a place where they could buy a product from
Mercia Tapping is the CEO of Boston Green Goods, a multi-channel e-commerce business. Her business was named to the Internet Retailer 2007 Top 500 list, and she received the 2004 Stevie Award for Woman Entrepreneurs. Prior to founding Boston Green Goods, she worked as an independent consultant and co-founded an energy consulting business. She is
2010 is drawing to a close. Mark Zuckerberg has just been named Time’s Person of the Year. We’ve been covering various tech companies and entrepreneurs since 2005, and this year, here is a quick synthesis of what look like the major trends from where I sit:
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: What is the response from the industry? There are a large number of players on the AAIA board; what is their response to architecture such as yours, and what is their interest in getting on board?
MercadoLibre (NASDAQ:MELI), Latin America’s eCommerce leader, continues on its growth path despite the poor global economy. Recently announced Q1 revenues of $32.3 million were 12% higher than the previous year’s revenue. The company missed the Street’s expectations of $32.9 million. However, EPS of $0.12 exceeded the market’s expectations of $0.10 and represented growth of 140% over