Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do it?

Gerrit Kolb: Most traditional web content management systems typically rely on an approach where the delivery of the web page is left to the web server. This means that you basically have a static environment that you can change a little bit with a little JavaScript. Our differentiating factor is that we have a component called the content application engine (CAE). We have developed a technology where we have a very scalable infrastructure and we have our own delivery infrastructure, which is highly scalable. Whereas if you wanted to scale in an environment where you are using just a plain server to do the rendering of your web experience, you don’t have the flexibility to do the contextualization and personalization. Also, we’re not only able to generate HTML, but also any stream of data that you could envision. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 4)

Gerrit Kolb: You asked about the completeness of the e-commerce platform. How do you integrate and what is the mechanism? There are basically two ways you can integrate. It’s typically referred to as who owns the glass. Some vendors go in and they say, “We’ve got to control the glass because the experience is so important.” The shopping element of e-commerce is reduced to an API calling. You own the whole experience from an event content management and a web experience management platform. Then you’re doing the call-outs to the back end e-commerce system.

The other thing, which is actually something that is important is that whoever is big in this business, has probably been in business for more than two or three years. One of our customers is a company called Office Depot. They’re the fifth largest retailer in North America. They generate >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 3)

Gerrit Kolb: Basically, there are two outcomes. Number one is that the story that you’re telling allows you to create packages that are combined with stories that are entertaining and sticky for the customer. The customer comes back because he wants to hear the stories about specific areas of interest. Secondly, people are able to find you because the SEO optimization doesn’t have to trickle. We have real content. At the heart of it, you have to have the ability to tell stories. Stories are always combined with text copies. They’re always rich media. There’s always pictures. There’s social commenting and rating. All of these things make a story engaging and compelling. That is the key for the retailers to survive. That’s a huge development. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand the correlation with e-commerce.

Gerrit Kolb: Typically, e-commerce solutions deal with making the product catalog available through a website. You end up having a grid where you can pick which product you want, what color you want, what quality you want, and what size you want. Then you have a shopping cart that lets you check out. This is really the cash register from a brick-and-mortar store perspective. What is missing, and this is something that is key to all the e-commerce solutions today, is everything that drives your customer to your website. That actually deals with motivating people to buy from you. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 1)

You have heard me talk about a vision for Web 3.0 since 2007, when I first published my Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) equation. In this interview, we discuss how the systems behind the scene are coming along to make a full Web 3.0 user experience possible.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about your company CoreMedia. Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Gerrit Kolb: CoreMedia has been in business for about 19 years. At the very beginning of the Internet, CoreMedia started to develop software that was related to the management of structured content. That was quickly picked up by most of the media and telco companies in Central Europe. CoreMedia became, I would say, the heart and soul and the backbone of most of the media sites operating in Central Europe. As I said, our roots are media and telco, which is typically where the leading edge >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: One question on Nasty Gal and the scalability point, what are the issues? What are we trying to solve?

Darren Hill: The issue is making sure the site is up. It works for all of your customers and they’re getting the environment that they’re expecting. For us, it’s really a technology play. Our systems are built on Ruby on Rails with a MongoDB database on the back-end. That technology allows us to rapidly scale in a virtual environment so that we can add new servers very easily. We can handle insane amounts of traffic almost seamlessly.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about pricing. I know the pricing of some of these other players that are serving much larger number of customers. You seem to be serving 100 customers that are much larger. I imagine your pricing is very different from theirs. Talk to me a bit about how you charge.
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I see it.

Darren Hill: It’s quite powerful. People share them like crazy. Our site allows hearting and comments and the customer base is very active.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. When you put something up on the website, I’m sure you are seeing huge amounts of social media sharing.

Darren Hill: Absolutely. That is the key. That was almost a by-product of allowing people to upload their information. The big value was that these girls are excited that they’re on the Free People site. >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of ramp did you see based on that?

Kiyan Foroughi: I think the most interesting stats I can give you are actually how well we did in the Christmas of 2014 versus Christmas of 2013. We increased our conversion rates by 90%. It was beyond my wildest dreams to increase it by such a big percentage. I had predicted perhaps 25%. We really improved our marketing efficiency. We are actually making 30% more on revenue by spending 40% less than what we were spending previously. We also fine-tuned our marketing to make it a lot more profitable and efficient on top of the website and the product.

Sramana Mitra: What do you attribute the 90% increase in conversion to?
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