Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on that. What are some of the key user experience trends in mobile shopping that your customers need to pay attention to?

Kevin Eichelberger: One of the metrics that still trail behind is the conversion rate for mobile devices. Yes, it is true that more people shop over a mobile device but it is also true that more people purchase on a desktop or laptop device. You have to ask yourself the question as to what is the reason for it. If more people are naturally gravitating towards using mobile devices, why aren’t they completing the purchase at that moment? The big challenge is continuing to understand the modality of people when they’re on their mobile devices – what are they thinking, what are their motivations? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 1)

Did you know that mobile shoppers have a low conversion rate on their devices? People browse on the mobile device, but actually buy on the desktop? Read on more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Blue Acorn.

Kevin Eichelberger: I’m the Founder of an e-commerce agency called Blue Acorn. We’ve been around for eight and a half years and have worked with B2B and B2C brands helping them solve one problem in two different ways. The problem that we help them solve is how to create the best possible online shopping experience. We either do that through radically changing their online shopping experience or by incrementally improving their online shopping experience. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What I’m hearing is that your retailers are looking for two things. One is they’re looking to do more customization because the experience that they need to provide is more sophisticated. At the same time, they’re looking to cut down on implementation times. Those are the two trends that summarize this conversation. Is that accurate?

Arish Ali: Yes. In the lower end of the retailer spectrum, they’re like, “I want it all fully managed.” The upper end is the opposite. They also don’t want to continue with existing legacy platforms because they’re not good enough. They realize that if their companies are pitted against companies like Amazon, they really have to differentiate. That’s where technology and platform can make a big difference. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to synthesize what I’m hearing here. Could what you’re saying be synthesized by saying that the trend in e-commerce right now is that a lot of the retailers are trying to do omni-channel but are looking for much more custom experiences as opposed to what they can get from the off-the-shelf platforms?

Arish Ali: Yes. We are seeing two distinct trends. There is a whole category of retailers anywhere from $50 million to billions of dollars, which traditionally use these on-premise e-commerce platforms and run their businesses on them. Roughly half of them don’t want to deal with the hassle of maintaining a full IT stack >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about specific use cases where customers are leveraging this more customized, more personalized, and more tuned versions of technology.

Arish Ali: We have lots of large retailers, but we can’t talk about all of them publicly. There are many customers who are doing cool stuff with our technology, and for various reasons, we can’t talk publicly about them. One of them runs their mobile site on our platform. We have helped them power and build an optimized mobile experience. Similarly, we have other large retailers. In most cases, what they have done is create a mobile experience where it is a much faster experience than the traditional desktop site where it has a better converting experience and where it is easier to transact. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How many retailers have you worked with in this journey so far?

Arish Ali: 25 to 30.

Sramana Mitra: These are large retailers?

Arish Ali: We, almost exclusively, focus on large retailers, because they have bigger budgets. We always made sure that we were making money from each of the contracts we signed. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 1)

Can you imagine what a retailer has to go through these days in their effort to stay cutting edge? Amazon is innovating at a furious pace, and all online retailers are scrambling to keep up. This interview discusses some of their challenges.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Skava.

Arish Ali: Skava is a Silicon Valley-based startup that was founded in 2002 in San Francisco. My co-founder and I wanted to bet big on mobile. This was 2002 >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Deren Baker, CEO of Jumpshot (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the emerging trends in the space and where do you see open problems?

Deren Baker: The biggest problem that we see out there is basically the one that we’re trying to solve. Most e-commerce companies or anyone who wants to understand their consumers’ online behavior have a very myopic field. They don’t have that larger lens to take a step back and say, “It’s great that I know what my consumer is doing on my own website.”

I’ve created this very complicated customer journey map with 500 interactions that you can have. >>>